Finance Minister Arun Jaitley savaged the BJP’s political rivals, the Congress and the Left, in a blogpost after the results of the 2016 Assembly polls came out, while promising that the NDA government at the Centre, “seeks to work in cooperation with the governments of the regional parties”.
Using rather strong language, Mr. Jaitley said the biggest takeaway of the poll results was the “significant setback to the Congress party”, and wondered whether it would “be the main challenger to the BJP-led NDA in 2019, or will it stand behind a hotchpotch combination of ideologically disparate regional groups?”
“It [Congress] lost both the States of Kerala and Assam. In Kerala, it lost because its government was mired in corruption scams. In Assam, its traditional policy of encouraging illegal immigration as a source of vote bank invited a popular wrath.
“In Tamil Nadu, it was a laggard in the DMK-Congress alliance. Its poor strike rate pulled the DMK alliance down. In West Bengal, the alliance with the Left was an ideological compromise. It proved counter-productive. Post-2014 General elections, the Congress has increasingly adopted fringe positions.
“It didn’t behave as a natural party of governance. Its obstructionism was blended with its leader’s “rent a cause” approach. The Congress is, today, threatened with being pushed increasingly to the margins,” he said. “Will the Congress evolve into a structured party with a galaxy of leaders or will it remain a dynastic party?”
‘Battle for survival’As for the Left, he said, it has “ideologically become irrelevant globally.” “The political and economic models that they espoused have been widely rejected. In India, it is their battle for an ideological survival. Their victory in Kerala is the result of an unpopular government losing an election and an opponent winning by default,” he said.
“Extreme positions espoused by a few in the Universities of Jadavpur and JNU cannot be a mainstream agenda of India,” he said.
