Address common man's concern, Sushma tells govt

The Opposition in the Lok Sabha on Tuesday tore into the UPA government’s failure to contain the prices of essential commodities and accused it of becoming insensitive towards the “aam aadmi” after winning a second term in office.

While the government tried to deflect the wave of attacks by giving statistics about price rise during the previous NDA regime, Opposition leaders forcefully articulated the common man’s woes because of rising prices.

Initiating a debate on a motion on “the inflationary pressure on the economy and its adverse impact on the common man,” Leader of Opposition Sushma Swaraj referred to facts and figures to paint a grim picture of the government’s failure in containing prices, even as Prime Minister Manmohan Singh looked on.

Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee, seemingly perturbed over Swaraj’s use of statistics to paint the government in a negative light as far as price was concerned, at one point mildly admonished her, advising her to avoid “jugglery” of figures.

With price rise being a hard fact that cannot be hidden, Swaraj even took the luxury of saying at one point during her speech that even though many in the Treasury benches shared the concern over rising prices, they could not say it openly because of political constraints.

This was later countered by Congress’s Sandeep Dikshit who defended the government in an equally-articulate speech, but before that Swaraj had set the mood for the day by asking the government to wake up from “deep slumber” and take steps to rein in runaway prices that were “killing” the common man.

“To have unanimity over the framing of the debate’s topic, we agreed on the phrase inflationary pressure, but the common man only knows this as ‘mehengayi’ (price rise), and the fact of the day is that ‘mehengayi’ is killing,” she said referring to the compromise reached between the ruling and Opposition after Parliament was stalled for the whole week.

Expressing doubts over the government’s seriousness about the issue, she said the country had hoped that the UPA regime would take some corrective steps on price rise in Parliament on February 25. “But the very next day, the finance minister raised petrol and diesel prices. We even brought a cut motion, and though the government won the vote, it lost morally as if one deducts the BSP’s 21 votes that it got, it got only 268 votes,” she said, referring to BSP’s current siding with Opposition on the price rise issue.

Ministers’ absence irks Opposition
New Delhi, DHNS: The Lok Sabha again witnessed an uproar on Tuesday over the absence of some senior UPA members. Sushma Swaraj launched a scathing attack on the government and pointed out that almost all the cabinet ministers were absent even as the House was discussing a serious issue like price rise.