The BJP said here on Friday that Congress leader Rahul Gandhi should be awarded the title of “liar of the year” for his claim that the National Population Register (NPR) was a “tax” on the poor.
Accusing the Congress of trying to fan instability in the country, Information and Broadcasting Minister Prakash Javadekar said the people were with the government on the new citizenship law and NPR.
“The NPR does not involve any monetary transaction and its data is used to identify the poor so that government welfare schemes could reach the targeted people,” the BJP leader said at a press conference at the party headquarters, adding that a similar exercise had been undertaken in 2010 as well. “It’s the Congress’s old game of allowing illegal immigration into the country for political profit. Their own leader Kirip Chaliha had said that former Assam Chief Minister Hiteshwar Saikia had fostered illegal immigration to build vote banks,” Mr. Javadekar said.
He called out Chief Ministers Pinarayi Vijayan of Kerala and Mamata Banerjee of West Bengal for issuing notifications to suspend work on the NPR in their States. “West Bengal and Kerala used NPR data collected in 2010 to identify the poor to pass on benefits. To not do so now reflects their anti-people politics. It’s under Prime Minister [Narendra] Modi’s government that Aadhaar-plus-NPR led to a better targeting of benefits and disbursal of nearly ₹9 lakh crore in benefits, without leakage of the scale that we saw under Congress,” he said.
“When Rahul Gandhi was Congress president, he would say anything and speak lies all the time. Now he is no longer president but continues to speak lies. If there were a category of the liar of the year, he would be its recipient,” Mr. Javadekar said.
