New Delhi, Feb 7 : If Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s reply to Motion of Thanks to President’s address in Lok Sabha was directed at frontal attack on Congress, his address in Upper House centered around laying out NDA’s roadmap for growth while also littered with jibes at grand old party and the Gandhi family.

Doubling down on his attacks on the Congress leadership, PM Modi again cited party’s stalwart leader and India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and claimed that the latter was against reservation for the poor and marginalised class as this would have led to ‘inefficiency and incompetence in the system’. 

Taking Congress head-on over its criticism of NDA’s policies, PM Modi invoked Pt Nehru’s model of governance and explained how the party’s priorities left the country in shambles.

He said that he remembered Pt Nehru a lot, nowadays, and then went to quote a letter written to the then Chief Ministers by Jawaharlal Nehru. 

“Nehru once wrote a letter to the CMs, in which he said that he doesn’t like any kind of reservations especially in jobs and employment,” PM Modi said.  “Nehruji had written to CMs that he was against any step that promotes unskilled employment. If SCs and STs get jobs and employment, the quality of government work will degrade,” PM Modi said, quoting from Nehru’s letter to then CMs. 

He said that Congress stuck with this policy all these years and this is why the backward classes have remained on the fringes, unless the BJP government ‘brought them into mainstream’. 

During his marathon address, PM Modi also mocked the Congress and its ‘Yuvraj’ for ‘repeated misfiring and failed launches’.  Without naming Rahul Gandhi, PM Modi said that the Congress party made its Yuvraj a ‘start-up’ but the sad part is that he has remained a ‘non-starter’.