Jaitley Quotes Nehru Speech To Attack Congress For Disrupting Parliament

New Delhi: With the winter session of Parliament headed for what he called another "wash out", Finance Minister Arun Jaitley has invoked Jawaharlal Nehru's legacy to remind the Congress leadership of the responsibility that comes with being lawmakers.

In an obvious reference to Congress president Sonia Gandhi and her son Rahul - who is the great grandson of Pandit Nehru, India's first Prime Minister - Mr Jaitley wrote in a Facebook post today, "Those who claim the legacy of Pandit ji must ask themselves the question, what kind of history are they making."

He quoted from a Nehru speech on the last day of the first Lok Sabha in 1957 and endorsed it as a must read: "Here, we have sat in this Parliament, the sovereign authority of India, responsible for the governance of India. Surely, there can be no higher responsibility or greater privilege than to be a member of this sovereign body which is responsible for the fate of the vast number of human beings who live in this country."

"All of us, if not always, at any rate from time to time, must have felt this high sense of responsibility and destiny to which we had been called. Whether we were worthy of it or not is another matter. We have functioned, therefore, during these five years not only on the edge of history but sometimes plunging into the processes of making history."

Mr Jaitley accused the Congress of looking for excuses to stall parliament saying, "The reasons for the wash out of the current Session keep changing by the hour."

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Time is running out for the key reform, the Goods and Services Tax Bill, which the government needs passed in the Rajya Sabha by next Wednesday, the last day of this session, to meet an April 1 deadline for implementing the new tax regime.

Mr Jaitley, who met Congress leader Anand Sharma over lunch today to discuss GST, wrote that the country is waiting for Parliament to "discuss public issues, to legislate and approve a historic Constitution Amendment enabling the GST."  

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"All this is being indefinitely delayed. The question we need to ask ourselves is, 'are we being fair to ourselves and this country?'" he wrote.