Rahul Gandhi Prepares Strategy To Raise Public Issues During Parliament Session

Congress party leaders are focusing on key economic issues such as unemployment, inflation, and economic disparity in their expectations for the upcoming budget. They anticipate that the budget will address these critical problems. If the budget falls short in these areas, the Congress party plans to raise these concerns to ensure that the government addresses them effectively.

New Delhi: Leader of the Opposition Rahul Gandhi has devised a plan to aggressively raise the issues of public interest like economic disparity, jobs and price rise, political violence in Manipur and Tripura and terror incidents in the Jammu region during the Parliament session starting from July 22.

The Union Budget 2024-25 will be presented by Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on July 23 and will be the highlight of the coming session and the main opposition Congress hopes the document will address the key issues that have been flagged by the grand old party recently.

The Congress also hopes the opposition would get a chance to raise issues of public interest and seek clarification from the NDA government in a democratic manner which will reflect the respective House's strength to ensure a smooth conduct of business.

“The numbers indicate the opposition has emerged stronger in the new Lok Sabha. Accordingly, we would like to raise public issues that Rahul Gandhi, who is the Leader of the Opposition has been flagging. We hope the budget will address problems like economic disparity, unemployment and price rise, fix minimum wages at Rs 400 per day and address the plight of farmers. We would also like the government’s answers over rail safety, political violence in Manipur and Tripura and terror incidents in the Jammu region among other issues,” Congress Whip in the Lok Sabha Mohammed Jawed told ETV Bharat.

“The opposition wishes to play a constructive role and wants the House to debate public issues democratically. For that, the opposition should get a chance to speak. We have seen in the previous Lok Sabha how the opposition’s voice was muzzled. We noted that during the first session of this House, the LoP’s mike was silenced and portions of his speech were deleted. We hope things will be better this time and the coming session will turn out to be a productive one,” he said.

According to Congress Lok Sabha MP Hibi Eden, the main opposition party wants the House to function smoothly to fulfil its mandate.

“We are keen to cooperate so the House runs and debates issues of public importance. We are supposed to do that. We hope the budget will offer solutions to the problems that our party has been highlighting. If the budget misses those issues, we would like to flag them and get the government’s response to them. But, if the opposition does not get a chance to raise public issues, we will have to rethink our strategy,” Eden told ETV Bharat.

According to Congress spokesperson Supriya Shrinate, the economic situation in the country was grim. “Just one per cent of India’s population controls 40 per cent of the country’s wealth. Food inflation has been consistently over nine per cent. The poor and the middle class have to pay more for school fees, clothes, medicines, transport and food. This has broken their back. Furthermore, note ban, GST, Covid resulted in a loss of Rs.11.3 lakh crore to India’s economy and extinguished 1.6 crore in formal sector jobs. Around 2.7 lakh Central PSU jobs were lost over the past decade. The number of people working on the contract has gone up from 19 per cent in 2013 to 43 per cent in 2022,” Shrinate added.