On Thursday, 13 February, Congress MP Manickam Tagore gave notice to move a motion for the adjournment of the Business of the House in the Lok Sabha to discuss the relaxation of “National Security Protocols” for the Khavda Renewable Energy Project in Gujarat along the India- Pakistan border.
In his notice, Tagore said, “The Khavda Renewable Energy Park Project, led by the Adani Group, is situated just one km from the sensitive India-Pakistan border in the Rann of Kutch, a region with a history of conflicts between the two nations.”
Tagore’s notice even claims that the Modi government neglected and went against military officers to steamroll this project.
“The government went so far as to create exceptions for this project, and potentially others, near India’s borders with Pakistan, China, Nepal, Myanmar, and Bangladesh. This is a direct assault on the integrity of military advice and national security protocols. The Modi government’s cronyism, with its clear favouritism toward the Adani Group, is a threat to the sovereignty of our nation. The decision to award such a high-risk project to Adani raises severe concerns about conflicts of interest and transparency in governance,” he said.
The claims made by Congress are indeed concerning, not because what they are claiming, because Congress has been claiming that the BJP government does not take India’s military interests seriously for years. And the entire country knows that it is not a serious claim, at least when it comes from Congress, because generations of Indians have witnessed first hand how serious Congress was about India’s military and strategic interests.
What is problematic here, is that Congress seems to be taking orders from London.
Congress party’s adjournment motion has been brought a day after British news portal The Guardian, known for its anti-India bias, published an ‘exclusive’ article full of speculations, unnamed sources and whisper-mongering about how the Khavda solar energy plant, planned to be the world’s largest renewable energy plant, is bad.
The reason that The Guardian has cited to claim the Khava energy plant is bad, is that it is ‘close to Pakistan border’. Another reason is that it is being built by Adani. They have no reason to claim Adani is bad, but they insinuate it anyway because we just have to trust them to tell us which political party and which company is good or bad because “trust me bro”. Substantiation is not needed when it is a British portal preaching sermons about good and evil to Indians.
Guardian’s exclusive article titled “Tycoon profited after India relaxed border security rules for energy park”, authored by Hannah Ellis Petersen and Ravi Nair makes a lot of claims, and insinuations. It claims that the Adani Group was ‘charged’ by a US attorney, without mentioning that the attorney’s intentions were questionable owing to his political affiliations and the case itself was flimsy, raising a number of doubts as to why a US court would want a targeted smear campaign against a energy conglomerate in India.
The article is authored by Hannah Ellis Petersen and Ravi Nair. Petersen has been known to indulge in anti-India and anti-Hindu activism through her alleged ‘journalism’. OpIndia’s detailed article on her can be read here. Ravi Nair is associated with OCCRP, a George Soros and USAID-funded Leftist organisation that has targeted Adani in the past and has a clear political bias against the Modi government and for that matter, any major infrastructure development in India that ensures strategic energy security.
Guardian claims that they have come to know that security protocols were amended for the project. But they fail to substantiate what exactly is the problem if a country amends some earlier protocols to allow a major infrastructure project in a barren desert land that is sparsely populated and is not viable for farming or other activities? It is India’s own land after all. Why can’t India benefit from a solar project on its own land?
Further in the article, it is stated that the Gujarat government talked to the central government and the ministry of defence in particular to clear this project. That is indeed surprising because governments in Indian states are known to sit on proposed infrastructure projects for years, even decades, without clearing the deal and allocating land. How can a state government be efficient and serious about developing its state? Baffling indeed. No surprise that Congress is unhappy over it.
The main problem, cited by The Guardian and the so-called ‘military experts’, is that the Khavda energy plant, spread across a vast area, is at some places just a kilometre away from the Pakistan border. As per them it must be very wrong to develop infrastructure close to the border with a hostile nation.
Should we leave it barren and undeveloped because it is border area?
Well, leaving border areas unpopulated, undeveloped and desolate has cost India dearly in all these years. Border areas need good roads, good connectivity, and a nation hoping to grow fast to meet the aspirations of 1.4 billion people needs energy projects on an urgent basis. The Khavda energy plant, when completely developed, is designed to produce 30 Gigawatts of clean energy, enough to power a small country.
Khavda renewable energy plant, an emblem of global climate action, is progressing at an unprecedented speed to become the world’s largest energy generator on the planet. Delivering affordable green electrons, Khavda will not just power millions of homes but will also make India… pic.twitter.com/NMVWJdnsIf
— Adani Green Energy Ltd. (@AdaniGreen) December 26, 2024
The project will power millions of homes. Social initiatives by Adani Group are already helping villages in the area that earlier had very limited means of livelihood and progress. They are extending support to schools and working with local communities to foster economic progress, but as per Congress and Guardian, India must not allow it, because it is near Pakistan border.
The hybrid solar and wind energy park in Khavda is expected to start operations this year and it will also supply power to Google’s cloud services and operations in India. After completion and when running in full capacity, the plant is projected to generate 81 billion units of clean energy, and power 16 million households annually, more than the number of houses in Poland and Canada. The plant is also designed to generate 15,200 ‘green’ jobs.
In today’s world, sovereign energy production is as much a military strategy as buying tanks and guns. The Rann of Kutch is mostly barren, desert land. To claim that India should just leave it barren and not push for infrastructure projects is outrageous. The people who live in these areas deserve to be a part of the growth story, and every inch of India deserves connectivity and sustainable development, not just to make the country stronger but to keep us safe from the enemy nations in the neighbourhood.
Congress left India’s border regions undeveloped and backward for decades. The villages in border areas never got proper roads, schools or opportunities to earn a decent livelihood. Be it Rann of Kutch, Jammu and Kashmir, Jaisalmer, Ladakh or North East India, developing infrastructure and connectivity is not “bad”, it is a critical strategic necessity of the modern world.
When border areas have better roads, better mobility and technological connectivity, it helps the military in times of conflict. It also sends a strong message to the enemy nation, that these areas are not desolate and neglected so that they can trespass at will. Developed border villages are a message to the enemy that “we are watching your every move”.
Common sense dictates that a sophisticated energy plant that supplies power to millions of households and companies like Google will be protected from external threats and security challenges by a state-of-the-art security system, surveillance tech and personnel. For The Guardian and Congress to try and claim that the world’s largest green energy project will be a ‘security risk’ is not juvenile, it is misleading and clearly intended to spread fear among the masses.
Congress and its old habit of ‘foreign’ hungama in Parliament
Congress has an old habit of choosing the most mundane, useless, baseless topics to create disruptions in the parliament. Despite multiple failures and repeated rejections by the Indian voter, the party is yet to grasp that the parliament is to discuss issues that are of actual concern to the Indian public, not a stage to perform theatricals to please their foreign masters in Western nations.
At the start of the budget session, PM Modi had made a jibe at Congress and the Opposition in general, saying that for the first time after 2014, a Parliament session is about to begin without a ‘foreign spark’ to trigger disruption. He was hinting at precisely this habit of the Congress Party, to get some ‘foreign-origin’ trigger and try their best to manufacture outrage.
Session after session, the party leaves all relevant, important issues at bay and chooses topics that are custom-created out of thin air by some foreign publication or Western organisation and performs a political mujra to entertain their foreign Sahebs. Be it Pegasus, Rafale, Hindenburg, and now this fresh moronery, Congress seems to be doing a never-ending course study on how to waste Parliament’s time on baseless drivel.
