"I am grieved. how far this business of reservation has gone based on communal considerations. Even promotions based sometimes on communal or caste considerations. This way lies not only folly, but disaster. Let us help the backward groups by all means, but never at the cost of efficiency," the former PM had said
With the Congress losing out heavily in the north and surviving largely in southern states like Telangana, Karnataka and Kerala, Modi’s attack was at once an attempt to reach out to the south and to suggest to people in the north that the Congress was against their interests.
The speech in Rajya Sabha, his last in Parliament before the Lok Sabha polls, was on the motion of thanks to the President’s address, but was made with the coming elections in mind.
P Chidambaram said Prime Minister Narendra Modi's criticism that Goa's liberation was delayed due to Jawaharlal Nehru was a "desperate attempt to distort history" and asserted that Nehru intervened at the right time to free Goa.
Tackling criticism of inflation on his watch, PM Modi had gone back to Jawaharlal Nehru's address to the nation from the Red Fort as India's first Prime Minister where he had said that the war on Korea was causing inflation in India.