The Congress, on the other side, said the President had clearly outlined the government's priorities to fight corruption and other problems and inflation.
"President Pratibha Patil only read out para by para the problems people of India are fighting -- be it corruption, price rise, black money, anomalies in PDS or internal security. The speech was not up to our expectations. We are basically disheartened after hearing her speech," BJP leader S S Ahluwalia said.
Alleged that the government was lacking transparency, he said BJP was expecting solutions to these problems but these were not mentioned in the address. He said while the President mentioned price rise, corruption, black money and other issues, she has not told us about any solution to the problems in her speech. "She has given only one assurance that my government is committed. But committed to what we do not know," he said.
Communist Party of India-Marxist leader Brinda Karat maintained that Patil had repeated the assurances given by her government last year as these had not yet been fulfilled. "Last year, the President gave a series of assurances, including a 100-day charter. One year later, she has repeated all of them, reflecting the utter failure of the government to implement these measures," Karat said. She listed price rise, control of corruption and Women's Reservation Bill as the pertinent issues.
The Communist Party of India also criticised the address, saying the priorities listed were actually a "list of its failures" and "lacks any conviction or confidence to move forward". "The priorities of the government as listed is a list of the government's failure on all these counts," party National Secretary D Raja alleged.
Maintaining that the government was caught in "a quagmire of corruption and scams", Raja said the ruling coalition is in "deep trouble". "The government wants to frontally fight corruption and lack of probity when it has itself been frontally exposed. How can it fight corruption when it is searching for a fig leaf," Raja asked.
He wondered how the government could help the poor, tackle price rise or unemployment "if all the policies being pursued by it were driven by neo-liberalism and privatisation."
