A day after Prime Minister Narendra Modi reached out to Opposition leaders including former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Congress chief Sonia Gandhi, senior Congress leader Jairam Ramesh said Mr. Modi should have taken the initiative earlier. In an exclusive interview with The Hindu, Mr. Ramesh also said that the government will now have to completely rework the Budget numbers to deal with the aftermath of the lockdown.
The Congress Working Committee pledged ‘unstinted support’ to the government, but some of your colleagues have called Prime Minister Narendra Modi a showman and a ‘Photo-Op PM.’ Is there confusion among leaders about their approach to the government?
Absolutely not. There is neither confusion nor contradiction. The Congress’s support to the Union government, as it leads the national campaign to deal with this truly unprecedented situation, has been and will continue to be unstinting and unqualified. The Congress leadership has written to the Prime Minister giving a number of very constructive suggestions, especially to deal with the consequences of the lockdown. The Congress Chief Ministers too have done the same. The CWC resolution too is in the spirit of constructive engagement. But the fact remains that it took the Prime Minister 13 days to have a conversation with the Congress president and leaders of other political parties. He should have done this on the night of March 22 itself.
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The manner in which Parliament was allowed to continue till the Kamal Nath government fell in Bhopal was absolutely cynical. The Prime Minister has not seen it fit to respond to the suggestions made by the Congress leadership and CMs. Even so, I think this is not the time for political grandstanding and one upmanship by anyone, even though our Prime Minister has done so by needlessly undercutting the existing Prime Minister’s Relief Fund by setting up a parallel PM-CARES, as if nobody else cares, and his taali bajao, diya jalao call that subverts the very spirit of a scientific temper and is a distraction, even though it may well have a cultural resonance. And don’t forget that in the midst of the crisis, the government notified the Central Vista Redevelopment project in the nation’s capital — the Prime Minister’s dream project — which will cost over ₹20,000 crore, estimated conservatively, and which shows a sh