The Left parties panned Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s speech at the ground-breaking ceremony for the new Parliament building.
Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) general secretary Sitaram Yechury said that Mr. Modi’s speech was a case of “diabolic doublespeak”, that the PM extolled the virtues of democracy but his government was working to destroy it. “Mr. Modi is giving a moral lecture on the ‘values’ and ‘culture’ of democracy while in practice [he is] destroying democracy. Every single institution that holds up our democracy has been assaulted, his government brazenly attacks civil liberties, every dissenter is labelled as anti-national. A boy and a girl can not freely marry in this country without the government’s intervention,” Mr. Yechury said.
He pointed out that major political parties stayed away from the function on Thursday, clearly showing that there is nothing democratic about it.
CPI general secretary D. Raja said that a new Parliament should not be the beginning of a new order replacing constitutional democracy with theocracy. “Replacing the present building with a new building shouldn’t lead to replacing the present Constitution with a new one based on Manusmriti,” he said.
