Finance Minister Arun Jaitely said on Thursday that the electorate, which had denied the Congress the position of being a ruling party, was now on its way to deny them the role of principal opposition.
“If the current representative of the dynasty lacks the ability to lead the party or the country, the party suffers. It becomes a crowd around a fading dynasty. This now seems obvious in the case of the Congress,” said Jaitely.
In a signed piece titled “The squeezing out of the Congress Party”, Jaitely gloated over the electoral successes that the BJP has had since May 2014
“Many in the Samajwadi Party are wondering if it was worth leaving 103 seats for the Congress in Uttar Pradesh “ he said, before commenting that the Congress had not bothered to introspect on it.
According to Jaitely, the decline of the Congress was because “once out of the power, the Congress refused to accept the reality. Its disruptive role in Parliament has projected it more as a fringe rather than a mainstream political party. It has failed to behave like a natural party of governance. It is seen as anti-reformist, anti-growth. Scandals of the 2004-2014 continue to tumble out."
The finance minister maintained that the Congress party’s stand on the scrapping of high value currency notes was costing it dearly. He went on to justify the demonetisation, saying “Tax evasion enables a small percentage of the population to unjustly enrich itself at the cost of the exchequer. Public resources get reduced and hence the expenditure on the vast section of population is reduced." He claimed that the poor had “overwhelmingly supported the demonetisation.”
Jaitely said the Congress had “lost its traditional constituency of the poor electorate to the BJP.”
“In any case, a party which has governed India for more than half a century cannot afford to take a stand which supports excessive use of cash and ridicules the new tools of technology which will enable digital transactions to be a substitute for cash. The Congress has lost its image as a responsible political organisation. From a natural party of governance, it has moved to the fringe. Its policies have alienated its constituency of the poor aam aadmi,” the BJP leader said.
According to him, parties which adopt dynastic succession as an alternative to merit-based leadership creation, suffer from a natural disadvantage. “Tall leaders do not grow in such parties. The strength of the party overlaps with the charisma of the current generation of the dynasty.
