Looking ahead… Positively

Looking ahead… Positively

FPJ BureauUpdated: Wednesday, May 29, 2019, 07:54 PM IST
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The BJP and NDA have got a huge majority and a lot of questions are being thrown up whether the opposition was good enough, were they united, were they ready for a fight, did they put up a good fight? All these will keep coming up and fair enough people have a right to question.

Speaking of Nationalist Congress Party (NCP), we have won four seats of which two are first time Lok Sabha winners, Sunil Tatkare who was ex-legislator and the other one is a new entrant in our party, Amol Kolhe. Now, looking forward is going to be a task in terms of getting the votes of the people.

Somewhere we begin to realise, we were not able to put across the message to the people of our country, specially in Maharashtra. Our leaders went to the villages, spoke to the farmers, spoke to the people, understood what their problems were, raised the issues in Vidhan Sabha and made sure the BJP-Shiv Sena took cognisance of it.

It is a fact that there is an agrarian crisis in Maharashtra and farmers are suffering the most. The farmers’ suicides and if you go by the records in the last two years, there have been more farmer suicides than ever before in Maharashtra. The government came out with a scheme announcing loan waiver of Rs 35,000 crore. The process after this announcement was just tedious and difficult.

The fact is the government did not implement the scheme the way it should have been done. On record again, less than 50 per cent loans have been waived. While this has been going on, farmers have continued to commit suicides. Because the farmers have not been able to pay back their loans and they have left behind families who are unable to fend for themselves.

There have been situations in this state, like the drought. It has been a difficult period where people have not been able to sustain for themselves. When the Democratic Front government was there before the BJP-run government, they kept running a narrative of all kinds of scams going on in Maharashtra.

The highlighted issue of irrigation scam. They kept running the narrative that they will put behind bars some leaders and kept questioning the process. They kept harping and then nothing came up in the four and a half years. Nothing has been probed, they have not been able to prove anything and have been able to prove any irregularities or show any scam that they have alleged.

Basically what they have been doing is a canard based on conjecture, derived by the BJP themselves. They wanted to create a narrative and tell people lies, that these are are the people doing kinds of irregularities and wrong in Maharashtra and these are the people you should not be voting for.

They kept blaming the earlier government for all the problems of irrigation. If there was no water supply or there is less water, they blamed the Congress-NCP government for all their problems. Recently I heard Girish Mahajan dams are there, everything is in place but if there are no rains then how to fill the dams? This was exactly what was happening earlier too. Then they came up with Jal Yukt Shivar and we kept raising this issue, this is nothing but a sham.

BJP and their allies only created a false narrative. We are now looking forward. This situation will not deter us to work harder. We will voice the issues of the people–farm distress, water issues, farmers not getting MSPs, getting right prices for their produce.

There will be a lot of questions about our yatras and yet BJP and allies won. What we have seen that people have been asked to vote for Modi. Every vote accounts for his win. Now that is something which may not happen for the Vidhan Sabha elections. People will probably look at core issues the people are facing at local levels.

We are going to go out to the people and highlight the failures of this government. Shiv Sena and BJP has been maligning each other till the Lok Sabha elections. They forged an alliance to ensure they win they came together only for power. People needs to realise this and we will highlight it.

(Clyde Crasto  is the spokesperson of Nationalist Congress Party)

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