Labelling the AAP government in Delhi as the “worst ever,” senior BJP leader Arun Jaitley said on Saturday that with the resignation of Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal, the “nightmare” was over.
He said the Aam Aadmi Party’s alternative politics was only about “populism, demagogue, falsehood, but no governance.”
“I have no doubt this was the worst-ever State government that Delhi has seen... Thank God, the nightmare is over,” he told journalists here on the sidelines of a book release function.
With his resignation, the bureaucrat-turned-politician “defied the hopes of many who wanted to see an alternative politics emerge,” the Leader of the Opposition in the Rajya Sabha said. Instead of concentrating on issues of development and policies that would impact the people, the AAP focussed on agitation.
Mr. Jaitley also perceived Mr. Kejriwal’s resignation as an “exit route” for the AAP that was losing its popularity. “It was a government without an agenda and without an ideology. Clever politics and no governance — this appeared to be the motto of the AAP government.”
The BJP leader said the AAP lacked the mandate, and most of its MLAs were inexperienced. “At times, they were outlandish. They had an agitational approach but were foreign to any form of governance.”
He criticised the AAP for using the Jan Lokpal Bill as a “pretext” for resignation. “The Bill was a closely guarded secret till the last day. The ‘Lokpal content’ of the Bill is not radically different from that of the Central legislation but it wanted to create a false propaganda that its Bill was revolutionary in comparison with the Central law. It decided to defy the conventional procedure for legislative approval in order to invent a pretext for resignation.”
(With additional reporting by Smriti Kak Ramachandran)
