Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday addressed the inaugural dais of the 9th G20 Parliamentary Speakers’ Summit and made oblique reference on the ongoing deadly Israel-Hamas conflict, saying that, “whatever might be the manifestation of the reasons and in whichever form, terrorism is against humanity”. “We have to continue to fight against terrorism”, PM Modi added.
Here are the major points from the Prime Minister’s speech:
This summit, in a way, is a ‘Mahakumbh’ or massive congregation of different parliamentary practices from around the world.
All the delegates like you are experienced in the working style of different parliaments. Your visit to Bharat with such rich democratic experiences is a great pleasure for all of us.
We hosted G-20 delegates in different cities of Bharat throughout the year. Consequently, an atmosphere of festivity was created in those cities.
After this Bharat landed on the Moon. This further enhanced the celebrations across the country.
The greatest strength of any country is its people; the will power of its people.
The P20 summit is being held in Bharat, which is the mother of democracy, the largest democracy in the world.
Parliaments are important places for debate and deliberation. We have very good examples of debates and deliberations that took place here even thousands of years ago. In our scriptures that are more than 5000 years old, in our Vedas, meetings and committees have been talked about. There, collective decisions were taken in the interest of the society… this development of parliamentary traditions, is not only our heritage but the heritage of the entire world.
In Bharat, we consider General Elections as the biggest festival. Since independence in 1947, 17 general elections and more than 300 State Assembly elections have been held in Bharat.
Bharat not only conducts the world’s largest elections, but people’s participation in it is also continuously increasing.
The 2019 general election was the largest democratic exercise in human history. More than 60 crore i.e. 600 million voters participated in it. You can imagine, at that time there were 91 crore i.e. 910 million registered voters in Bharat. This is more than the total population of the entire Europe.
More than 600 political parties took part in the 2019 general elections. In these elections, more than one crore i.e. 10 million government employees contributed to election work. More than 1 million or 10 lakh polling stations were set up in the country for the elections.
Bharat has been using Electronic Voting Machines- EVMs for about 25 years. With the use of EVM, both transparency in elections and efficiency in the electoral process have increased.
You must be aware that next year there is going to be general elections in Bharat again. 100 crore voters i.e. 1 billion people are going to cast their votes in this election. I extend an advance invitation to all the delegates of the P20 Summit to come and watch the general elections to be held next year.
Bharat has decided to provide 33 percent reservation to women in its Parliament and state legislative assemblies.
Hundreds of languages are spoken in Bharat; we have hundreds of dialects. There are more than 900 TV channels in Bharat, in 28 languages working 24×7 to provide real-time information to the people. More than 33 thousand different newspapers are published here in about 200 languages.
Today the world is facing crises due to conflicts and confrontation. This world full of crises is not in anyone’s interest. A divided world cannot provide solutions to the major challenges faced by humanity.
The greater the participation in making decisions to the world, the bigger the impact will be. In this spirit, Bharat proposed to make the African Union a permanent member of G-20.
Bharat has reached here today after dealing with many such terrorist incidents. Now the world is also realizing how big a challenge terrorism is for the world. Wherever terrorism strikes, for whatever reason and in whatever form, it is against humanity. In such a scenario, we all will have to be extremely stringent all the time regarding terrorism.
I have always believed that governments are formed by majority, but the country is run by consensus. Our Parliaments, and this P20 Forum can also strengthen this sentiment. Our efforts to make this world a better place through debate and deliberations will definitely be successful.
