New Delhi, July 30 - With only a week to go before the first parliament session of the new government ends, Congress chief Sonia Gandhi exhorted party members not to lose sight of the reason they had been elected as MPs.
In a well calibrated address at the Congress parliamentary meeting, she cajoled and chided while stressing that the time had come 'to deliver what we promised'.
Gandhi, who backed Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's declaration there was no dilution of the national consensus on countering terrorism emanating from Pakistan, reminded the MPs to not forget the decisive mandate that had voted the government back to power.
'You will be soon going back to your constituencies and states. I am sure you will keep in touch with your constituency and attend to the needs and demands of the people there,' she said.
'As I said on an earlier occasion, we have been given a decisive mandate and people expect us to fulfil their aspirations. It is for us now to deliver what we have promised.
'We now have a larger number of ministers from our own party. I am speaking from my personal experience which I know you will share, when I say that the expectations and demands from constituents are ever increasing and rightly so,' Gandhi said.
'It is no longer a matter of a hand pump here and there, or a culvert or a kutccha (unpaved) road.