APCC Slams Union Finance Minz For Remarks on PM Nehru, Calls Her ‘Poker-Faced’ Minister
Guwahati: President of the Assam Pradesh Congress Committee (APCC) Bhupen Bora defended former Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and criticised Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman for allegedly misinterpreting Nehru’s address in the Lok Sabha on the 1962 Chinese attack.
The Congress had questioned Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s “silence” on Chinese actions on the border the day before. In response, Union Minister Sitharaman said that Jawaharlal Nehru, the nation’s first PM, had washed his hands of the region’s north-east. She claimed that in 1962, PM Nehru had washed his hands of the north-east and left the region to “meet their own fate.”
In response to her criticism of India’s first prime minister, the APCC president issued a press release in which he said that the 1962 speech made by Prime Minister Nehru in the Lok Sabha regarding an unlawful Chinese misadventure on Indian soil has since come to be recognised.
He shared two aspects of the then Prime Minister Nehru in this regard saying, “The sensitivity of the PM Nehru who getting deeply anguished over the Chinese betrayal and unprovoked grabbing of the Indian territory in 1962 had said in his speech in the parliament that his “heart and thoughts were with the people of Assam ( & Northeast)” this type of sensitivity from a leader of the country, of course, can never be expected from the likes of present PM Modi or even his poker-faced ‘wooden hearted’ colleague Sitharaman.”
Furthermore, he asserted that the then-prime minister Nehru never once tried to conceal the truth from his compatriots despite the hardship and humiliation of the Chinese onslaught in 1962.
“The then PM Nehru not only immediately agreed to convene a special Parliament session to discuss the Chinese debacle, the Nehru government then took every opposition member into confidence by allowing each of them to participate in the debate. Whereas, the present Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his entire government has been consistently in the denying mode, hiding the actual facts of Chinese aggression in last 6 years. The Modi government has throttled the democratic practice of Indian Parliament to such an extent that let alone allowing a special session to discuss the continued grabbing new Indian territories by the Chinese army in Ladakh and Arunachal Pradesh, the government in Parliament has summarily been rejecting any discussion or entertaining any question raised by members on the Chinese intrusions,” Bora added.
Earlier, responding to the media during a press conference, Sitharaman said, “We have stopped Chinese from coming into Arunachal Pradesh. Our action speaks for it. So they (Congress) can go on saying ‘Oh, Prime Minister doesn’t speak. I want him (Rahul Gandhi) to please check up on what their first Prime Minister, our first Prime Minister Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru had said. He washed his hands off (north-east).”
She further alleged that if anyone travels to Arunachal Pradesh and some parts of Assam, people themselves will say. The people of Arunachal Pradesh at the ground kept steadily with India and every Chinese had to go away,” the Union Minister added.
