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The Prime Minister referred to past remarks by Indira Gandhi on India’s population that the ‘dimension of her problems’ had grown from 350 million to 570 million
Prime Minister Narendra Modi speaks in the Rajya Sabha on Thursday while replying to the President’s address. Image/Sansad TV
In a sharp ideological critique delivered during the Rajya Sabha session on Thursday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi utilised the historical words of former Prime Ministers Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi to suggest a fundamental disconnect between the Congress party and the Indian populace. Replying to the Motion of Thanks on the President’s Address, the Prime Minister argued that while his administration views citizens as “participants” in the nation’s progress, the previous leadership viewed them merely as “problems”.
The ‘Problem’ Perspective
The Prime Minister’s primary target was a specific philosophical outlook he attributed to the Nehru-Gandhi era. He referenced a quote from Indira Gandhi wherein she recalled a conversation with her father, Jawaharlal Nehru. According to the excerpt cited by PM Modi, Indira Gandhi said, “Nothing in India is simple or small. When asked how many problems he had, my father once replied ‘350 million’, which was our population at that time. Now the population is 570 million, so that is the dimension of my problems. My constituency has 515,000 voters and our Parliament has 520 such constituencies.”
PM Modi used this to draw a stark contrast between the “old and new” India.
“For them, 350 million people were 350 million problems,” the Prime Minister stated. “For us, 140 crore Indians are 140 crore solutions. They saw the population as a burden; we see it as a demographic dividend and a catalytic force for a Viksit Bharat.”
The Planning Commission Paradox
The Prime Minister further targeted the legacy of the Planning Commission, a body established by Nehru and replaced by the NITI Aayog under the current government in 2015. He quoted a speech delivered by Indira Gandhi in Himachal Pradesh, where she had herself expressed frustration with the rigid, top-down bureaucracy of the Commission.
PM Modi recounted how Gandhi had once noted that local workers in the hilly terrain of Himachal required mules for transport rather than jeeps. However, she lamented that due to the inflexible policy restrictions of the Planning Commission, funds were only available for vehicles, leaving the actual needs of the people unmet. The Prime Minister argued that despite Gandhi’s personal recognition of these systemic flaws, the Congress failed to reform the institution for decades.
“The Planning Commission she criticised was the creation of her own father,” Modi remarked. “She acknowledged the problem but chose to maintain the status quo. It took this government to finally dismantle that ivory tower and bring in a spirit of cooperative federalism.”
Governance by Intent vs Governance by Inertia
Throughout his speech, which was punctuated by protests from the Opposition benches, PM Modi painted a picture of a Congress party that was perpetually “trapped in its own history”. He claimed that the archival remarks of Nehru and Gandhi served as a confession of the party’s inability to see the common citizen as an empowered stakeholder.
By citing the population figures of that era—when Indira Gandhi had noted the “dimension of her problems” had grown from 350 million to 570 million—PM Modi asserted that the Congress leadership viewed the growth of India not as an achievement, but as a compounding crisis. The Prime Minister said that his administration’s focus on saturation-level implementation of welfare schemes, such as PM Kisan and Jal Jeevan Mission, was the definitive “antidote” to the old culture of viewing citizens as mere statistics of distress.
February 05, 2026, 19:03 IST
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