Left leader Sitaram Yechury believes that Prime Minister Narendra Modi is like Bollywood’s hit producer-director, Manmohan Desai.

Modi gives the people a slogan a day to keep them distracted the way the late director did not allow his audiences to think while they were watching his films, the CPI(M) general secretary claimed at a function today.

“Film director Manmohan Desai said his movies were successful as he didn’t allow spectators to think while watching them. In a similar fashion, Modi is running the country by raising a new slogan every day to engage the people so that they are not able to think about what is happening around them,” Yechury said.

The Marxist leader, speaking at the release here of a book on JD(U) rebel MP Ali Anwar, also attacked the government for delaying the winter session of Parliament.

“The BJP does not want to hold the session as they know the opposition will raise issues related to the business activities of Jay Shah and Shaurya Doval and the Rafale deal for this can cost them in the Gujarat assembly polls,” he said.

A news portal had said a company run by BJP president Amit Shah’s son Jay Shah saw a huge rise in its turnover after Modi came to power, and also alleged a “prospect of conflict of interest” in National Security Adviser Ajit Doval’s son Shaurya running a think tank with four Union ministers on its board. The opposition has accused the government of negotiating an overpriced deal for buying Rafale fighter jets.

The BJP has rejected the allegations.

Yechury accused the government of “playing with parliamentary democracy for the sake of victory in a state assembly election”.

He also questioned the state of the economy in the country, claiming that less than one per cent of the population controlled 60 per cent of the GDP.

Speaking at the same event, rebel JD(U) leader Sharad Yadav compared the country’s current scenario with the Emergency, imposed by the Congress in 1975.

“But during those days, the Emergency was visible. Now it is there, but invisible,” Yadav said, expressing concern over what he called the rising atrocities on minorities and backward sections of society.