NITI Aayog's 'blatantly partisan' treatment of West Bengal CM unacceptable: Congress

New Delhi: The Congress on Saturday said the treatment meted out to West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee at a NITI Aayog meeting here was "unacceptable" and alleged that the government think-tank has been "blatantly partisan" in its functioning, muzzling all divergent and dissenting viewpoints.

The opposition party's scathing criticism of the NITI Aayog came after Banerjee walked out of its 9th Governing Council meeting, claiming she was unfairly stopped midway through her speech.

The government rejected Banerjee's charge as "misleading", saying she had exhausted the time allotted for her speech. "The clock only showed that her speaking time was over. Even the bell was not rung to mark it," the PIB Factcheck said in a post on X.

The Congress also targeted NITI Aayog, saying it had functioned as a "drumbeater" of Prime Minister Narendra Modi since it was set up 10 years ago.

The meeting, chaired by PM Modi, was boycotted by Congress party chief ministers over alleged discrimination against non-NDA-ruled states in the Union Budget.

Congress general secretary, in-charge communications, Jairam Ramesh said, "Since it was established ten years ago, NITI Aayog has been an attached office of the PMO and has functioned as a drumbeater for the non-biological PM." It has not advanced the cause of cooperative federalism in any manner, he said.

"Its functioning has been blatantly partisan, and it is anything but professional and independent," Ramesh alleged. "It muzzles all divergent and dissenting viewpoints, which are the very essence of an open democracy. Its meetings are a farce to be reckoned with." Its treatment of the West Bengal CM today," although typical of the NITI Aayog, is unacceptable", Ramesh said in a post on X.

While the Congress expressed solidarity with Banerjee over the developments at the NITI Aayog meeting, on the same day, its West Bengal unit chief Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury wrote to President Droupadi Murmu, alleging that West Bengal is in an "anarchic condition" and sought her intervention to "restore law and order" in the state.

In another post on X, Ramesh said, "The non-biological PM in his address to NITI Aayog has woken up to the realisation that India needs to make policies conducive to international investments, that is FDI." "For ten long years, he has indeed encouraged FDI -- Fear, Deceit and Intimidation. And now he pontificates," Ramesh said.

Before FDI, India needs to catalyse and trigger a fresh spurt of DI - Domestic Investment -which marked the Manmohan Singh decade, he said.

"You boost DI, and FDI will follow. The fact is that DI in India has been extremely sluggish since 2014 due to a combination of erratic policymaking, evinced by the senseless demonetisation, the botched GST rollout, and the unplanned COVID-19 lockdown," Ramesh claimed.

The domestic investment is sluggish also due to "rampant cronyism" that has led to increasing oligopolisation and restricted the space for competition, the Congress leader said.

"The ED/IT/CBI Raid Raj that makes businessmen fearful of expanding investments in India," he said.

The council, the apex body of NITI Aayog, includes all state chief ministers, lieutenant governors of Union Territories, and several Union ministers. Prime Minister Modi is the chairman of NITI Aayog.

Chief ministers of the INDIA bloc, M K Stalin (DMK) of Tamil Nadu, Kerala's Pinarayi Vijayan (CPI-M), Punjab's Bhagwant Mann (Aam Aadmi Party), Siddaramaiah (Congress) of Karnataka, Sukhvinder Singh Sukhu (Congress) of Himachal Pradesh, A Revanth Reddy (Congress) of Telangana, and Jharkhand's Hemant Soren (Jharkhand Mukti Morcha), skipped the NITI Aayog meeting.

Opposition parties have alleged that the states ruled by them have been ignored in the Union Budget presented recently in the Lok Sabha.