Rahul Gandhi bats for martyr status to all Pulwama bravehearts

New Delhi: Having taken the government head-on over the Pulwama attack, the Congress party said, on Saturday, that if voted to power it would accord martyr status to all paramilitary personnel killed in the line of duty.

“Paramilitary jawans don’t get ‘martyr’ status. They should get it, and if we come to power they will be accorded that status,” Congress president Rahul Gandhi said while replying to a question during an interaction with university students here.

Mr Gandhi’s comment comes a little more than a week after 40 CRPF jawans were killed in the Pulwama terror attack.

“If you see, I am much in contact with paramilitary forces because of the security provided by them to me (during events). These jawans, whether from the CRPF, BSF, ITBP, or CISF, suffer more casualty but get less infrastructure support, which is not good,” he said during the ‘Shiksha: Dasha Aur Disha’ programme at the JLN Stadium here.

Congress had ratcheted up its attack on the government within a week of the terror strike in Pulwama forming a Task Force to prepare a security blueprint and questioning the government over intelligence failure.

On Saturday, the Congress president also took pot-shots at the Modi government over the job crisis staring at the country and accused the government of not wanting to accept that there was a job crisis. He said that the Prime Minister should hold discussions with the youth to address the issue.

The Congress president further claimed, “In a county of over 1.2 billion people, India is creating about 450 jobs per 24 hours while China is creating 50,000 jobs in the same 24 hours.”

“Our Prime Minister doesn’t seem to think this is a problem,” he said, adding, “We need to first acknowledge that there is a problem and then we need to galvanise support to fight it. That is what we (Congress) believe in.”

Mr Gandhi also asserted that the state must pay for a large part of education of the students.