Mumbai: The Agarwal community on Monday heavily criticized the Prime Minister Narendra Modi led government at the centre over the issue of Ganga river exploitation for political gains and not completing its promise to clean up the holy river in the past over four years.
The Akhil Bharatiya Agrawal Sammelan (ABAS) National Secretary Summan R. Agrawal wrote a letter to the Prime Minister Modi over their protest and said that engineer-turned-environmentalist GD Agrawal died on Octboer 9 after a total of 111-day long protest to fulfill the cause of Ganga.
During his fast, he wrote a total of three letters to PM Modi, “but the government didn’t feel (they were) important to respond” to them. And if was only after Mr. Agrawal’s death, PM Modi, ministers and the government tweeted praising his great contribution to nature and environment.
“If the government is so anguished about GD Agarwal’s death, why didn’t the PM meet him at least once and accept his genuine demands, or at least, respond to any of his letters? Why does the Modi government show such hypocrisy and double standards,” Ms Agrawal asked.
According to Ms. Agrawal, the late Agrawal wrote letters to the Prime Minister, he expressed confidence that soon after Prime Minister Modi took power in 2014, many steps would be taken up to clean the water of Ganga, but later on nothing was realized in the later four-and-a-half years.
Such expectations came to the mind of these people only when Prime Minister Modi made the cleaning of the Ganga, one of the main election agenda in 2014 and called it ‘Maa Ganga’ and used to say ‘Na main aaya hoo, Na hi bheja gaya hoon; Mujhe to Maa Ganga ne bulaya haia’.
“Why ‘Maa Ganga’ didn’t call this self-proclaimed son Narendra Modi after his rise to the throne as PM in 2014? Modi again realized he has a ‘Maa Ganga only during Assembly elections of Uttar Pradesh in 2017,” Ms Agrawal said in her letter.
Quite opposite to that, the late Agrawal’s letters addressed to the former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, were given importance after several of his fast and the latter decided to stop or quit all activities in a major project for the sake of Ganga river.
“I would like to ask the Modi government, why the Agrawal community is constantly being ignored over the years… What happened to your favourite election war-cry – ‘Sabka Sath, Sabka Vikas’? We, the Agrawal community, were expecting at least full state honours to (the late) Agarwal, the proud son of the community, but he was denied that too,” said Ms Agrawal.
After the death of this great leader, she said, that the Agrawal community was “feeling orphaned due to his death” and issued a stern warning that they will remember and express all their sentiments in the coming 2019 elections.
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