JOIN USNeighbourhood, meltdown immediate challenges: PM
He told a Congress Working Committee (CWC) meet on Sunday that the clear mandate in favour of the party would help it deal with the immediate challenges ‘effectively’.
Singh is set to begin his second term in the Prime Minister’s Office at a time when the Sri Lankan Army is engaged in a military offensive against the LTTE. The plight of civilian Tamils trapped in the conflict zone of the island nation has been a major issue during the run-up to the Lok Sabha (LS) polls in Tamil Nadu. The ruling DMK – an ally of the Congress – had sought Indian intervention to end the conflict in Sri Lanka.
In Nepal, Maoist leader Pushpa Kamal Dahal recently resigned as the Prime Minister after his strained relationship with President Ram Baran Yadav over the sacking of the country’s military chief General R Katawal. The Maoists have blamed India for the crisis.
And, in Pakistan, Taliban’s growing clout is a cause of concern for India, which has been repeatedly accusing the neighbouring country of exporting terror to India.
“The new Government is assuming office in the backdrop of a deep global recession and serious troubles in the immediate neighbourhood,” the PM said on Sunday, after thanking the Congress president Sonia Gandhi and general secretary Rahul Gandhi for extensively campaigning and leading the party to victory. The Congress has already stated that reviving the economy and bringing it back on the path of 6.0 to 6.5 pc growth is its priority.
Rahul doctrine
Meanwhile, Sonia Gandhi set for the grand old party the target of getting back to its long-lost role of an indomitable ruler.
“The election is now behind us and hard work must begin,” she told the CWC meet. “We can now start to restore the Congress to its former historical role as the party of natural governance in India,” she added.
The Congress having won 206 of the 543 LS seats on its own in the elections, several party leaders came up with the suggestion that it should try to go alone in the states where it had to concede political space to its allies due to compulsions of coalitions.Congress General Secretary Digvijay Singh said that a section of the party was of the view that it could go alone across the country and contest all the LS seats in the 2014 polls.
The AICC functionaries have even started terming the go-alone policy as ‘Rahul Doctrine’, because it was at Rahul’s behest that the party had contested a large number of seats in UP without any tie-up with the SP.
DH News Service