New Delhi: Congress leader Rahul Gandhi said Thursday that the Lok Sabha elections had dealt a “fatal blow” to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, leaving him “psychologically broken” and preoccupied with saving his government rather than focusing on the crisis arising out of irregularities in key entrance exams.
Addressing a press conference at the Congress headquarters in New Delhi, Gandhi said the situation triggered by lapses in the handling of the NEET and NET examinations could not be reversed unless the country’s educational institutions were freed from the “mediocre affiliates of the BJP and its parent organisation”.
“The prime minister is silent because he is crippled. Right now, the PM’s main agenda is the (Lok Sabha) Speaker’s post, and saving his government, not NEET. The main thing is we now have a government and PM who will find it very difficult to function. The PM, if I may say so, is psychologically broken, he has psychologically collapsed,” Gandhi said.
He was responding to a question on the Union education ministry’s insistence that there was no paper leak in NEET — the medical entrance exam — and how this contradicted the Bihar Police’s statement that an arrested accused had confessed to it.
Gandhi termed the alleged paper leaks and resultant exam cancellations “anti-national”. “It’s a profound national, economic, and institutional crisis,” he said.
On Friday, the Congress plans to hold nationwide protests on the NEET row and AICC general secretary (organisation) K.C. Venugopal has already written to state units to participate.
Gandhi said the Congress would also raise the issue in the Parliament session starting 24 June. Considering a large presence of members in the Opposition benches this time, things are going to be “interesting and fun”, the MP from Uttar Pradesh’s Raebareli said.
The Congress leader said the Lok Sabha elections witnessed Modi being taken apart by the opposition as the BJP failed to secure a majority of its own, unlike in the last two terms. “The PM will struggle to run the government,” Gandhi said, as he no longer “generated fear among people”.
“People are not scared of him. In Varanasi, someone threw a chappal at his car,” Gandhi said, adding that coalition governments under BJP’s Atal Bihari Vajpayee and the Congress’s Manmohan Singh survived because they displayed “humility, conciliation, and respect”.
“But Narendra Modi doesn’t believe in all these things. He believes in ‘my way or the highway’. Earlier, Congress people were not scared of him, now nobody is scared of him. Psychologically, it is a fatal blow to the PM and he is going to really struggle,” the former Congress president said.
Gandhi said he came across thousands of young people during his cross-country walkathons from Kanyakaumari to Srinagar, and from Manipur to Maharashtra, complaining about “non-stop paper leaks” in the country. He mocked Modi’s claims that he could influence ongoing wars in the world when “he could not even prevent paper leaks in India”.
Gandhi also said the future of students was being played with. “You put in years of hard work for these exams. In a way, it is an expansion of the idea of Vyapam scam across the country. Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat and Uttar Pradesh — their so-called laboratories — are the epicentres of these scams,” Gandhi said.
“If you let people who know how to run these things and promote people based on merit, these will not happen. But they put in charge mediocre people who lack required skills, just because they have ideological affiliation with the BJP and its parent organisation. The BJP and its parent organisation have captured all institutions. And PM Modi facilitated this capture,” he added.
After the press conference, Gandhi posted on X that he condemned the act of throwing a shoe at the Modi’s vehicle. It was a security breach, he said, adding that people should adopt Gandhian means while protesting against the government.
एक और महत्वपूर्ण बात जो प्रेस कॉन्फ्रेंस में कहनी रह गई।
नरेंद्र मोदी और उनके काफिले पर चप्पल फेंका जाना बहुत ही निंदनीय है और उनकी सुरक्षा में गंभीर चूक है।
सरकार की नीतियों पर अपना विरोध गांधीवादी तरीके से दर्ज कराया जाना चाहिए, लोकतंत्र में हिंसा और नफ़रत की कोई जगह नहीं है।
— Rahul Gandhi (@RahulGandhi) June 20, 2024
The Union education ministry’s National Testing Agency (NTA) has been under fire for paper leaks in the medical entrance test NEET-UG, and also for cancelling the UGC-NET exam on Wednesday — a day after it was held — because its “integrity” had been compromised.
Over a record 11 lakh students appeared this year for UGC-NET, which determines the eligibility for the position of assistant professor and for the Junior Research Fellowship (JRF) in Indian universities and colleges.
(Edited by Tikli Basu)
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