Gloves are off, Sonia wants aggressive Cong against BJP

Urging all the Congress members to show more aggressiveness against BJP, party president Sonia Gandhi today said, "it is our duty to counter the accusations that are blatantly baseless, unfounded... being leveled by the Opposition particularly by the BJP."

Asserting that Congress will take corruption head on, Congress President Sonia Gandhi on Monday hailed as inspiring Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s assurance that he will take forward her five-point action plan to battle the menace.

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"We will take corruption head on and demonstrate it through our actions and not through words alone. I had made specific suggestions in this regard (in the speech yesterday) and the Prime Minister, in his inspiring address this morning, assured us that he will take them forward,” she said in her remarks winding up the two-day Congress Plenary here.

Gandhi said it was the duty of Congress workers to counter all the accusations levelled by the opposition, particularly the BJP, calling them as "blatantly baseless and completely unfounded".

"It is absolutely essential that we confront our political opponents aggressively," she said, adding that the Congress-led UPA government has accomplished a "great deal" in the last six and a half years and "we have every reason to be proud of our record".

"This is a record that stands out distinctively when compared to what the NDA did during its time. Nothing can detract from our solid accomplishments. It is our duty to propagate them among the people", the Congress President said in the presence of the Prime Minister.

She asked the party activists to launch nationwide ‘Jan Jagran Abhiyan’ to "expose the BJP for its double-speak on the issue of corruption. There should be at least one public meeting in every assembly constituency".

Observing that several central flagship programmes had been co-opted by non-Congress governments ruling in different states under different names, Gandhi said these state governments were "taking credit from our programmes", which had been promised in "our manifesto".

Directing party workers to expose this, she asked PCC chiefs to appoint monitoring committees to get systematic feedback on their implementation and submit assessment report every quarter to the AICC.