Grand alliance tried, tested, failed idea: Jaitley

new delhi — Tearing into the Congress and other opposition parties, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley on Saturday called the proposed grand alliance an anarchic combination, the likes of which were “tried, tested and failed” in India.

Speaking at the Hindustan Times Leadership Summit here, the minister said the experiment of grand alliances leads to instability where policy gets killed and the longevity of the government is reduced to a few months.

He also attacked Congress president Rahul Gandhi on the nonperforming assets (NPA) issue saying he needed to “grow up” and understand the issue before indulging in a public debate.

Jaitley said there had been a lot of talk of a grand alliance in the last few months.

“Grand alliances in India are

tried, tested and failed ideas. It’s an experiment where policy gets killed and the longevity of the government is of a few months,” he said.

The senior Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader added that he was not against coalitions, but the nucleus of the alliance must be “very large” with smaller groups aligned around them, like in the case of former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee who had 183 MPs supporting him in the BJP and the incumbent Narendra Modi who had the support of 282 MPs.

“You can’t have the nucleus of a handful of people. Because that’s, per se, is an unstable nucleus. You can’t have an alliance with some political parties whose leaders are temperamentally mavericks, some whose interests are purely regional — give my state some extra money — and others who only want some criminal cases to be closed.

“So if you get together this kind of a crowd, then 2019 will be choice between a stable government with a coherent policy and a strong leader versus a completely anarchic combination,” Jaitley said. —