Accusing the BJP government in Odisha of being run by Adani Group chairman Gautam Adani, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi Friday alleged that the Jagannath Yatra chariots were stopped for the Indian billionaire and his family last month.
“When Jagannath Yatra is taken out in Odisha, when raths (chariots) are pulled, lakhs of people witness it and follow it. Then, a drama takes place and the raths were stopped for Adani and his family. This will make you understand everything about the Odisha government,” Gandhi said at the ‘Samvidhan Bachao’ – or ‘Save Constitution’ — rally in Bhubaneswar.
The rally, part of the Congress’s plan to revive the organisation in Odisha comes over two weeks after Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh general secretary Dattatreya Hosabale, while commemorating 50 years of the imposition of the Emergency at an event last month, called for a review of the words “socialist and secular” in the Preamble, saying that these were added later.
Adani and his family attended the Rath Yatra and offered their prayers a day after Rath Yatra on June 28. Significantly, the Congress has remained out of power in the state since 1995.
Gandhi, who attended the rally along with All India Congress Committee president Mallikarjun Kharge, said the Odisha government was for “of 5-6 billionaires like Adani” aimed at stealing “jal, jungle and zamin” (water, forests and land) from the state’s tribals, which form 22 percent of the state’s population.
Gandhi, also the Leader of Opposition in Lok Sabha, said the Constitution “is now under attack”.
“Nowhere in the Constitution has it been written that the country belongs to Adani, Ambani and billionaires. This country belongs to every citizen. The land in the country belongs to the poor and farmers and not to a single billionaire. But wherever we see, be it Odisha or Chhattisgarh, only one name is being seen—Adani,” the Congress leader said.
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He also repeated the allegations he made at a protest rally in Bihar against the Election Commission’s controversial election roll revision exercise.
In his speech Friday, the Gandhi scion accused the BJP of attempting “chunav chori’ – or trying to steal the election — “the way it did in Maharashtra”. “In this, the Election Commission (EC) is hatching a new conspiracy and working as a wing of the BJP instead of doing its own job. Over one crore new voters were added between Lok Sabha and Assembly polls in Maharashtra. To date, nobody knows who these voters were and where they came from. We asked the EC to provide the voter list and video not once but several times. The EC still hasn’t done that,” Gandhi said.
He also highlighted “growing crimes against women” in Odisha, claiming that over 40,000 women in the state had disappeared in recent years. “
“It’s not known where these women go. Every day, we see atrocities against women. At least 15 women are raped in Odisha each day. But the government here only sucks the blood of people and snatches away their land,” he said.
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In his address, the AICC president said that the BJP was trying to remove the words secular and socialism from the Constitution, and appealed to the people to “protect it”.
“The US President Doland Trump claimed 16 times that he stopped the war between India and Pakistan [after Operation Sindoor] but Modi could not counter his claims,” the Congress president said. “Modi has no guts to counter Trump’s claims. People who have no guts can’t rule the country”.
Kharge highlighted some recent incidents of attacks on Dalits in the state, saying “if people don’t fight back, they will be finished”. He also took a dig at Modi for not visiting Manipur, where an ethnic conflict has been raging since May 2023.
The prime minister had no sympathy towards the people of the country and was only interested in visiting countries that confer their highest awards on him, he said. Prime Minister Narendra Modi received the highest civilian awards in Brazil and Namibia during his visit to these countries earlier this week.
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“When the prime minister can travel to 45 countries, why can’t he go to Manipur, where people are suffering. When you have time to go and hug Pakistanis uninvited, why can’t you go to Manipur to resolve the crisis there. Neither he has the guts to visit Manipur nor is he interested,” he said.
