Owaisi's 'kapdo se na pehchaniye..' dig at PM Modi over Agnipath; 'soldiers not scheme'
Owaisi tweeted the video of Haryana police firing in the air at a protest against Agnipath and said, "Narendra Modi, do not identify them by their clothes. Do not use bullets or bulldozers on them either."
AIMIM chief Asaduddin Owaisi said the Agnipath scheme of recruitment in India's Army, Navy and Air Force will not solve the unemployment issue of the country but will only auger it. Amid massive protests against the scheme mostly in Bihar, Haryana, Owaisi tweeted the video of Haryana police firing in the air at a protest against the Agnipath scheme and said PM Modi should neither identify these protesters by their clothes nor should use bulldozers against them. "Withdraw your wrong decision. 66% of the country's population is the youth. Understand their point," Owaisi tweeted.
Follow live updates of the Agnipath scheme protest
"Agnipath will not reduce unemployment but will increase it. India's issues with Pakistan and China are not solved yet. Our soldiers are not your schemes. They are not the laboratory of your brain waves. Agnipath is not in the interest of the country," Owaisi said.
Protests against Agnipath snowballed into a major controversy on Thursday, two days after the scheme was announced after political parties threw their weight behind the protesters. The Congress demanded the 'penny-wise and security-foolish' scheme to be kept on hold, while political leaders like Akhilesh Yadav, Amarinder Singh, Mayawati, Arvind Kejriwal expressed their disapproval of the short-term employment in the military.
Union ministers, BJP leaders and chief ministers, on the other hand, defended the scheme and said Agnipath will open new avenues for youngsters. The government issued a clarification confirming that the future of the Agniveers will not become insecure after four years of the contract. A package of around ₹11.71 lakh is to be given to each of the recruits at the end of the four-year tenure from the 'Seva Nidhi Package' to venture into entrepreneurship.
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