BJP slams Sonia Gandhi over her article accusing Centre of bulldozing MGNREGA

NEW DELHI: A day after President Droupadi Murmu gave her assent to the VB–G–RAM–G Bill, turning it into a law, the Bharatiya Janata Party launched a sharp attack on Congress leader and Rajya Sabha MP Sonia Gandhi over her recent article criticising the changes.Gandhi had accused the Modi government of “bulldozing” MGNREGA, a charge the BJP strongly rejected. Amit Malviya, national head of the BJP’s Information and Technology wing, responded with a detailed rebuttal on X, describing Sonia Gandhi’s article as ‘a flight of political fancy’. He wrote, “Sonia Gandhi’s recent article on MGNREGA reads less like a serious engagement with law or data and more like a flight of political fancy”. According to Malviya, the article showed that she had not read the VB–G RAM-G Act, as her arguments were based on “mischaracterisations, selective memory, and outright falsehoods”. In his post, Malviya accused Gandhi of romanticising the origins of MGNREGA by claiming it emerged from widespread consultation. “This is far from the truth. MGNREGA was conceived and driven by the National Advisory Council—an unelected executive body that functioned, in effect, as a super-cabinet. So dominant was its role, that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was frequently derided as a super cabinet secretary under Sonia Gandhi’s NAC.” Contradicting her claim that demand-based employment was being dismantled, Malviya said the legal guarantee remained intact. “Sonia Gandhi claims that demand-based employment is being dismantled, thereby destroying the employment guarantee itself. The facts say otherwise. The legal right to employment remains untouched. What has changed is the budgeting framework—from an open-ended, reactive model to a norm-based system, which is how virtually all government schemes function”.



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