Prime Minister Narendra Modi said on Wednesday that his government had completed 10 years at the Centre and that it would stay in power for at least 20 more years, a witty comeback to the Congress’s charge of “one-third government”.
“Some people are calling ours a one-third government. It’s true. We have completed one-third of our term and two-thirds of it remain,” PM Modi said in the Rajya Sabha, replying to the Motion of Thanks to the President’s address.
In the bitterly fought 2024 Lok Sabha polls, the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won 240 seats — 32 short of majority. But the National Democratic Alliance, of which the BJP is a part, won a comfortable majority with 293 seats, paving the way for a historic third term for PM Modi. The Congress and its allies improved their performance in comparison with their showing in the 2014 and 2019 elections.
The Congress has claimed “moral victory”, saying the people in the country did not give the BJP an overwhelming majority for the third consecutive time. The Opposition has said that PM Modi and the BJP are dependent on Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar’s Janata Dal (United), which won 12 seats in the general elections, and Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu’s Telugu Desam Party, which clinched 16 seats. Because of the importance of the two allies in the NDA, the Congress has been taunting Modi 3.0 as a “one-third government”.
In his speech, PM Modi also pointed out that after decades, it was his government that got a rare third term. “There was an attempt to black out this historic victory, but I can see that over the last couple of days, the defeat is being accepted by them,” he said. “People of this country have defeated propaganda and chose performance.”
On Tuesday, in another fiery speech in the Lok Sabha, PM Modi tore into the Congress party and its leader, Rahul Gandhi, who is also the Opposition leader in the Lower House. The PM’s message was: accept the mandate of the Lok Sabha elections and introspect, instead of claiming moral victory. To drive his point home, the Prime Minister used data, relied at times on humour, and issued sombre warnings in the same breath against what he called attempts to spread “anarchy” and misinformation by the Congress.
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