New Delhi, April 27
Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee today hit back at Congress President Sonia Gandhi, asserting that his government would last its full term, and dismissed her observation that “winds of change” were sweeping the country.

Allaying fears that his government was on the verge of collapse, Mr Vajpayee was categoric that “our government cannot be derailed. It is stable and is here to stay its full term.”

The Prime Minister today sought to respond point-by-point the strong remarks made by Ms Gandhi to the same audience at the annual session of the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) yesterday.

Mr Vajpayee said: “It does not make business sense to count one’s chickens before they are hatched”. Ms Gandhi had remarked that when the Leader of Opposition had been invited to inaugurate the annual meeting of a leading industry association, it was reflective of changing winds in the political firmament.

Mr Vajpayee’s categoric and forthright rejoinder to this was: “If invitations to inaugurate or conclude conferences can make them speculate about an impending change in the direction of the political winds, then I must say that such people seem to think that chambers of commerce and industry have more powers to make and unmake governments than the people of India”.

Reminding the audience that the mandate of the people was the primary canon of democracy, he said, “Those who have been mandated by the people to sit in the Opposition are similarly expected to play their role”.

Without naming Ms Gandhi, who had said yesterday that India’s secular moorings and foundations were being systematically destroyed, he ridiculed that those who proclaimed to hold such views “only displayed their ignorance of India’s history and of its cultural wellsprings”.

“They forget that India secularism has withstood even the catastrophe of Partition, which was effected on communal lines”, he pointed out.

The forum of captains of industry brought to the fore the surcharged and heated political atmosphere because of the continuing communal tension in Gujarat.

On Gujarat, the focal point of Ms Gandhi’s criticism yesterday, Mr Vajpayee did term it as a tragedy and assured that the inquiry would be fair and the guilty would not go unpunished, irrespective of the community or the organisation that they belonged to.

At the same time, he said it was uncalled for to make sweeping generalisations on the basis of this one tragedy.

“It does not help the interests of business if we forget that the violence in Gujarat is but a temporary aberration, and not a fundamental fissure in our society”, he said.

He refrained from making any major policy announcements.

The Prime Minister, however, did tell the top corporates that the government was serious about correcting the major bottleneck hindering industrial growth — implementation. “I can tell you that we have embarked on a major review of the system of implementation of all policies and programmes of our government”, he assured.

The Centre, he said, was also contemplating to pump in major investment in the judicial system to declog the machinery. Civil service reforms was another area identified by the government to bring about a change in attitude, knowledge-base and work culture.