Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley pushed the Karnataka BJP into election mode by exhorting the state leaders and party workers to make good use of the decisive leadership at the Centre not only to come back to power in the state but also to steer the growth of the state in a focused manner.
“Karnataka should realise its full potential by achieving greater growth rate than the national average. I am sure an environment has been built in Karnataka for a change and I hope to see the BJP comes to power with a landslide victory,” said Jaitley, expressing confidence that BJP would make a comeback when the state goes to polls in 2018.
At 'Budget 2017—An Analysis', organised by Bengaluru City BJP on Monday, Jaitley said, “The Modi government's emphasis is on bold decision making and a clean economy with business-friendly environment, the returns of which can be spent on the poor. Changes were visible in the last two-and- half years after the Modi government came to power...The first change is that the prime minister should be the natural leader of the country, the ruling party and the government. Can any government sustain if the PM does get to have the last word? In UPA, the prime minister was not the natural leader and did not have the last word.”
“This model can be prevalent in a company where a hired CEO is brought in by shareholders to run it and he reports to the board, but not applicable to the world's largest democracy. This model had to be changed.”
Noting that the UPA had committed two fundamental mistakes, one in policy and the other the intention, Jaitley said, “Every politician wants the vestige of arbitrary and absolute power, but good governance does not permit that. They (UPA)were quite satisfied with the system in which contracts and natural resources were to be arbitrarily distributed...The arbitrary or the discretionary power of the government was what they relished.”
“Discretionary power can create a lot of complications and that is why corruption charges came up, some of which were proved...There was a problem of intention,” he said.
“A second mistake was when the UPA government chose to resource reallocation and re-distribution instead of concentrating on improving productivity and growth. The combined effect of both these was that certain amount of paralysis set into the government. The world was thus referring to it as a policy paralysis, said Jaitley.
“Modi government's first objective was not to have such power. It was decided to put in place a mechanism which is fair and not discretionary, where markets decide the rate and who gets what he gets is decided through auction. We distanced our government from arbitrary exercise in almost all areas of distribution of resources like minerals, coal mining and spectrum," Jaitley said.
"The first effect of it was nobody could raise fingers and therefore we started cleansing the whole system where the last government was paralysed from functioning and this helped in taking economic decisions and courageous decisions one after the other," he added.
On steps taken towards Ease of Doing Business in India, Jaitley said, “Investors no longer queue up in the North Block corridor, waiting for a clearance of their investment proposals. A deviation of what was the practice earlier. In fact, some UPA allies had a precondition that Environment portfolio be given to them, as each file cleared came at a cost.”
"We have a decisive government, a prime minister who is willing to take courageous decisions, red tapism has been eliminated...there is no charge of scandal against this government, all that is coming out is of previous government,” charged Jaitley, adding that his government believed that the first right over the government resources should go to the weakest sectors – rural and agriculture.
He also debunked the Congress opposition to demonetisation as “illiterate” argument stating that cash was a facilitator of crime and corruption of all forms and even terrorism.
Jaitley said electoral reform was possible only because the prime minister has been stressing on cleaning up political funding of the world's largest democracy, where funding was only through black money and electoral bonds was the way forward.
“GST or effective and attractive taxation can prevent tax evasion too, while less-cash economy discourages generation of shadow economy,” he added.
