The Hindu : New Delhi News : BJP seeks to encash financial meltdown

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Tuesday, Nov 11, 2008
ePaper | Mobile/PDA Version

New Delhi

New Delhi

BJP seeks to encash financial meltdown

Gaurav Vivek Bhatnagar

‘Neither life nor pocket is safe’ is the new slogan

‘High inflation has hit the common man’
‘Savings of people have got wiped out’

NEW DELHI: “Na jeewan surakshit, na jeb surakshit” (Neither life nor pocket is safe) is the slogan with which the Bharatiya Janata Party is now seeking to capture the imagination of the Capital’s voters who, it says, are suffering both on account of the rise in terrorist activities and the financial crisis that has gripped the economy.

Coining the slogan, the party general secretary in charge of Delhi elections, Arun Jaitley, said at the Delhi BJP headquarters on Monday that the recent financial crisis had hit the people hard and Delhiites in particular were feeling the impact. Lamenting that “the savings of people have got wiped out”, Mr. Jaitley said it was also due to bad financial management.

“While on one hand India is facing recession and through it lack of development, loss of employment, laying off of people, less job creation, and a cut-down on government revenue and infrastructure, on the other people are faced with high inflation that manifests in high prices of all commodities,” he added.

Stating that recession and high inflation at the same time were a “rarity”, Mr. Jaitley said there can be no worse situation than this when prices are up while every other economic parameter is down. “This is stagflation and Delhi is suffering because of it,” he said.

Pointing out that people were at their wits’ end as they are faced with rising costs of servicing loans, Mr. Jaitley said while under the Atal Bihari Vajpayee regime home loans had come down to 6.5 per cent level now the rate of interest had gone up twice as much.

The BJP leader also expressed concern at the rising cost of education and health care saying it was impacting people in these times of diminishing incomes.

Also, he raised the issue of people not feeling safe due to the Government’s soft policy on terror.

Delhi BJP’s Chief Ministerial candidate said that by his estimates nearly 25 lakh people in Delhi had suffered due to the tumbling stock market. He said rather than advising people correctly, the Prime Minister and the Union Finance Minister kept assuring the masses when the market was falling that there was no cause for panic and this resulted in a greater loss to the ordinary man.

“People had even withdrawn money from their insurance policies and provident fund accounts to put in the stock market and now they have lost it due to faulty economic policies,” he lamented.

Printer friendly page
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

New Delhi