Wealth & Money Quote by Sonia Gandhi

A 7 percent growth rate is a rhetorical weapon here, not a statistic. Sonia Gandhi turns a macroeconomic brag into a moral invoice: if the country can generate that much new wealth, it forfeits the excuse of scarcity. The line “can and must” does double work. “Can” is technocratic reassurance aimed at markets and the middle class: redistribution won’t bankrupt the system. “Must” is a political dare aimed at the state itself: growth without dignity is a failure of governance, not a natural outcome.

The subtext is also a rebuke to the idea that poverty reduction is best left to trickle-down arithmetic. By tethering legitimacy to uplift, she’s claiming the language of development as Congress’s terrain, insisting that social spending isn’t charity but nation-building. It’s a move that tries to fuse two constituencies often pitched against each other in India’s reform-era debates: aspirational voters who want growth and those for whom growth has arrived as higher prices, precarious work, and uneven public services.

Context matters: the 2000s growth boom created global headlines and domestic anxiety. Rapid expansion sat alongside stubborn malnutrition, rural distress, and spectacular inequality. Gandhi’s formulation echoes the rights-based politics associated with the UPA years (NREGA, Right to Information, later food security): policy designed to make prosperity auditable at the level of the household. The sentence is crafted to sound inevitable. If India is truly rising, it has to carry people with it, or the rise is just a story told in GDP.