New Delhi, 09 June 2015: Congress president Sonia Gandhi is meeting the chief ministers of all the states where the party is in power .
The meeting is deliberating on the formulation of a political strategy to take on the NDA government at the Centre for its attitude towards Congress-ruled and other non- BJP states.
The meeting began with a one minute silence in honour of the jawans martyred in Manipur. Sonia Gandhi then addressed the leaders. "There are systematic attempts being made to dismantle the edifice of welfare state built up over the decades by successive Congress governments," she said.
"This is a new philosophy which abdicates the essential role of the central government," she said.
Sonia Gandhi pointed out that seven out of the eleven states under special category were Congress ruled. "There is unprecedented centralization of power and authority," she said.
The Congress president said the deliberate by-passing of Parliament, is a threat to civil society and warning to the judiciary.
"There is a dangerous duplicitous game that is being played out," she added.
Sonia said, "On one hand, the Prime Minister wants to project himself as the great champion of good governance and Constitutional values while on the other he allows many of his colleagues to make vile statements and foment communal polarisation.
"This has already damaged our secular fabric. An atmosphere of fear and foreboding has been deliberately created," she said in her inaugural address to a day-long conference of Congress chief ministers.
"There is another aspect of both substance and style that I should mention and this relates to a dangerous duplicitous game that is being played out," she said.
Among those attending the meeting are Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi as well as senior leaders and general secretaries of the party.
Congress is in power in nine states: Kerala, Assam, Karnataka, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Arunachal Pradesh, Meghalaya, Mizoram and Manipur; with the first two scheduled to go to polls next year.
This is the first such meeting called by the Congress after the 2014 Lok Sabha elections.