Union minister Piyush Goyal today hit out at opposition parties, alleging depths of politicking had been reached and that judicial independence in the country was being attacked for political interests.
In an unprecedented step, seven opposition parties led by the Congress today moved a notice for the impeachment of Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra, accusing him of "misbehaviour" and "misuse" of authority.
"We have reached the depth of politicking when even the Supreme Court is being attacked. The highest judicial forum of the country is being attacked. I don't know if you are looking at going back to the Emergency days when there was a talk of a committed judiciary," he said at an event here.
The minister said it was unfortunate that the judicial independence in the country was being attacked for the sake of political interests.
Taking a dig at the opposition parties, he claimed that there was an effort to have a judiciary that only gives judgements that they like.
"It's my way or the highway. If a judgement is given that is not suitable to my political interest, together we can start attacking the judiciary. It is a rather unfortunate day," he said.
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Highlighting the achievement of the central government in the last four years, Goyal said the highest number of constitutional amendments and changes in law and policy were brought between 2014-17, with unanimous consensus, including the GST.
"When we came into government we had only about 358 km of optical fibre laid out, which had crossed over 2,00,000 km about 6-8 months ago...We are working aggressively with the states to make sure they carry the electrification programme right up to every household," he said.
He said out of 18,452 villages, only 150-200 villages were left un-electrified while there were 3,80,000 villages which were open defecation-free.
"The prime minister and the finance minister had launched Jan Dhan Yojana, a financial inclusion plan, by which we were trying to make sure at the first stage that every household had one bank account. 340 million bank accounts are opened in the last 3.5 years," Goyal said.