“Modi’s Guarantee A ‘Jumla’, Youth Going To Israel For Jobs”

On January 30, hitting out at the Narendra Modi government at the Centre over people seeking jobs in Israel, Congress leader Priyanka Gandhi Vadra said that talk of our US$ 5 trillion economy and ‘Modi ka guarantee’ are just a “jumla”, with the real issue in the country being that unemployment and inflation are rife, and for this, the BJP government has no solution.

Gandhi-Vadra, the Congress general secretary shared a video on X that showed people queuing up for a recruitment drive that aimed to send workers to Israel. In a post in Hindi, she said, “If there is a war situation anywhere, then first of all we rescue our citizens from there and bring them back to our country.”

However, she continued, “…today unemployment has resulted in such a situation that the government is not even saving thousands of helpless youth from taking the risk of going to war-torn Israel.”

Gandhi-Vadra added, “This shows that talk of things like ‘USD 5 trillion economy’, ‘2 crore jobs annually’ and ‘Modi’s guarantee’ during elections are just jumla [rhetoric]”.

The Indian National Congress general secretary wondered why the youth are not getting employment in their own country. Gandhi-Vadra asked, “Are these youth standing in long queues for two days not the children of our country that we are happily ready to send them into the middle of such a terrible war?”

She added, “Notice how cleverly the government is making this out to be the ‘personal choice’ of youth citizens.” The Congress leader asked, “What is the role of government in this? On what basis has the Government of India given permission to war-torn Israel to sacrifice Indian youth? Who will take the responsibility of protecting the life and property of these youth of ours? God forbid, if an incident happens to someone, who is to be held responsible?”

She added that the real issues of India today are inflation and unemployment and the BJP government has no solution to it. Gandhi-Vadra added that the youth of the country too now understand this.

On Saturday, January 27, the Congress had slammed the government over people reportedly queuing up in Haryana and Uttar Pradesh for jobs in Israel, while pointing out that it was a reflection of the “grim unemployment situation” in the country, which makes a “mockery” of the government’s claims of a booming economy.

Congress, the opposition party, has been consistently criticising the government over its handling of the economy and raising concerns over rising prices and the increasing rates of unemployment.

On Tuesday, January 30, Indian Youth Congress national president Srinivas B.V. said that “no steps have been taken” by the ruling dispensation to fill the 9 lakh posts that are “lying vacant” in various departments of the central government. Srinivas claimed, referring to an RTI report, that a large number of posts are vacant in the home department, civil defence, ministry of external Affairs, agriculture department, railways and sports and youth affairs.

Unemployment and under-employment have been a long-standing problem in the Indian economy. According to a 2013 report by Pravin Sinha, the Indian labour force has been officially classified by the Indian government into three categories:

• Rural sector, which includes the farm labour
• Urban formal sector, which includes factory and service industry labour with periodic salaries and coverage as per Indian labor laws
• Urban informal sector, which includes self-employment and casual wage workers

The rural and informal sectors of the Indian labour market accounted for 93% of the employment in 2011, and these jobs were not covered by the then existing Indian labour laws. According to the 2010 World Bank report, “low-paying, relatively unproductive, informal sector jobs continue to dominate the [Indian] labor market.”