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Congress leader Rahul Gandhi found a new voice in Parliament on Wednesday: sharp, witty and loaded with barbs. Accusing Prime Minister Narendra Modi of not even consulting his ministers on key decisions, he said that the PM should not run the country on his own opinions alone, sidestepping and disregarding everyone else.

Gandhi began by attacking Modi on the promises he made in his campaigns – of getting black money back and of putting its owners in jail. Referring to the one time compliance window announced in the Budget 2016, he called it the "Fair and Lovely yojana", under which people can turn their black money into white.

"Finance Minister announced a fair and lovely scheme which would covert black money into white. In 2014, Modi had said I will finish black money, I will win the fight against black money, I will jail anybody who has black money. But under the fair and lovely scheme, nobody will go to jail, nobody will be arrested, nobody will be asked anything. Go to Arun Jaitelyji, pay tax and turn black money into white," Gandhi thundered.

But he proved a bit forgetful too, such as when he inadvertently referred to the sycophantic statement about his grandmother – "India is Indira and Indira is India" – while declaring, "The prime minister is not India, and India is not the prime minister".

On Modi's surprise visit to Pakistan in 2015, Gandhi said that he had "single-handedly" destroyed six years of the Congress's work of putting Pakistan in a"small cage" following the Mumbai 26/11 terror attack.

The Congress policy post 26/11 was to isolate Pakistan for being a country that supported terrorism, which, claimed Gandhi, had been successful. "What does the Prime Minister do? He decides to have a cup of tea with Nawaz Sharif... Without any thought, without any vision, he decides to take a detour to Pakistan and have chai pe charcha."

Other snide asides included this one: "There's a marked difference between you (BJP government) and us. You claim to know everything and do nothing wrong. We learn from mistakes. We don't claim to know everything. There's Gandhi on one side, and Savarkar on the other. One is for violence, and the other non-violence."

To be sure, Gandhi needed some prompting himself to cover for gaffes like addressing the Speaker as "madam". Still, he was wide-ranging in his criticism of the NDA government and its leadership, covering the JNU fracas, Rohith Vemula's suicide, and, of course, sedition. "Mr Prime Minister, why haven’t you uttered a single word?"

Perhaps his strongest words: "You cannot defend the Indian flag by destroying the relationships between our people. You are not defending the flag when you frighten your own people into silence."