We need no lessons from him: CM

Not yet ready for PM post: Rahul
Shrugs Off Salvo On Dynastic Rule
TIMES NEWS NETWORK
Kolkata: A youngster with a simple and straight approach to life, who takes his birth in the Nehru-Gandhi family as a fait accompli and would refuse to be Prime Minister if he were offered the chair in the near future. That was how 39-yearold Rahul Gandhi put himself across here on Saturday. If Friday’s whirlwind campaign in Bengal’s hinterland showed shades of a seasoned politician, the press conference here a day later only proved that Rahul had come of age. His body language said it all. Sleeves rolled up, arms on the table, he meant business. The smiles came readily. The answers were always after a few seconds’ pause, the words chosen carefully. Eye contact was constant. And about the only time he shrugged was when he was asked about the Opposition charge that Congress was trying to impose dynastic rule on India. The AICC general secretary admitted he could not do anything about it. Nor did he agree with it. “Manmohan Singh is not of the Gandhi family,” he pointed out. “I belong to that family. I can’t change that. They were my parents, she (Indira Gandhi) was my grandmother.” But he argued that his principles and feelings would remain the same whether he was a Gandhi or not. And no, he would not like to be Prime Minister, at least not immediately. “I would refuse, for two reasons,” he said, when asked whether he would accept the chair in the near future. His priority is to build Congress into a “strong, propoor and youthful organization”. Also, he did not have the experience for it. He was repeatedly asked about his perception of the state government — only a day ago he’d torn into the Left as “retrograde” and “anti-poor”. Rahul chose not to step into the thorny post-poll alliance issue, saying he was a “mere party campaigner”, and pointing out that whatever he said were his “personal feelings”. “I speak about things as I see them,” he said. “I feel the Left Front government in West Bengal has failed to deliver. I was shocked on my first visit to Purulia (on Friday). I had the perception that only Bihar and Uttar Pradesh are bad. But now I find that the level of poverty in Bengal is comparable with some of the poorest places in Orissa.”
Chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee has reacted sharply to Rahul Gandhi’s comment that Bengal was worse off than UP or Bihar. “We don’t have to learn about our farmers’ condition from him. Rather, he has to learn more about our state before commenting on us,” the CM said in Samsi, 70 km from Malda. “Being young and unaware of Bengal, he commented adversely on our state and the condition of the poor,” Bhattacharjee added. Taking the attack to Congress, he said: “During the last five years, about 1 lakh farmers committed suicide, but the Manmohan Singh government did nothing to curb it.” TNN ‘Left doesn’t have right ideas about growth’ Kolkata: Rahul Gandhi reiterated on Saturday that even if Congress took the support of the Left later it would not change the “reality of what he had seen in Bengal”. Nandigram occurred because of the Left Front’s failure to maintain a balance between growth and pro-poor policies, he remarked. “What we need is a balance between growth and people who suffer by that growth. In Nandigram that balance was mismanaged,” he said, pointing out that “the government has to hold the hand of the people suffering.” Rahul felt strongly about the need for balanced development and favoured a policy of growth “that ensured that poor people were looked after”. The Left, he felt, “did not have the right ideas of growth”. It had not been able to create a situation where economic development generated enough money to take up antipoverty programmes. “The Left doesn’t know how to generate money for this purpose.” He likened NDA with the Left, saying NDA too had focussed on liberalization and had forgotten the poor. When he came to Bengal, he knew that the Left had been slow in liberalization. “I expected something on the distribution side,” but was shocked to find nothing there either. “There is nothing on programmes like National Rural Employment Guarantee Act and Indira Awas Yojana.” Half of the funds released on IAY to the state had remained unspent. His priorities for the country, two decades from now, are to improve on the education system and ensure that money spent on development reached the poor. When asked about the alliance with Trinamool Congress, he cleverly side-stepped any tricky posers. “I have seen her (Mamata Banerjee) in my father’s house, and with my grandmother also, when I was small. I would like to meet her,” he said. “I admire her because of her simplicity and also because Mamata wants to be with common people.” Asked whether Congress was keeping its doors open for a post-poll understanding with Left, Rahul skirted the issue. “I am nobody to say. That is for the party president and Prime Minister to decide. But as a general principle, I can say that the doors of Congress are open for anyone willing to join us,” he said. Pradesh Congress president Pranab Mukherjee, who sat beside Rahul throughout the press conference, came to his rescue just once, when Rahul was asked on Congress’ role during the Babri Masjid demolition. Mukherjee said the Congress government at the Centre had been “misled by the assertion of BJP, due to then Uttar Pradesh chief minister Kalyan Singh, that the mosque would be protected. Rahul joined in, saying: “Babri Masjid was broken by the politics of BJP. It was broken by the politics of division, it was broken by dividing Indians against Indians.” When asked about free and fair elections in Bengal, he passed the question to Mukherjee, who said the Centre would ensure deployment of paramilitary forces at sensitive booths.