Jaitley tells cadre to take party’s ideology forward, focus on winning

NEW DELHI: The Opposition can’t compete with the Bharatiya Janata Party on leadership, organsiational strength, performance or ideology and it will try to fight the BJP through alliances, Union finance minister Arun Jaitley said here on Saturday.

Speaking at the BJP’S national council meeting, the senior BJP leader asked BJP workers to the take the party’s ideology and performance of Narendra Modi government to every house and foil, using facts, Opposition’s attempt to create a false narrative.

Jaitley said political analysts were making calculations based on different arithmetic and making projections about BJP getting fewer seats that it got in the 2014 elections. All these calculations will fall flat, he said.

“We got 282 in the last parliamentary election. We will cross that figure this time,” he said, adding that the BJP has the leadership of PM Modi and the organisational machinery built by Amit Shah to make it possible.

He called the idea of grand alliance a “coalition of rivals” and said it was a tested and failed idea with a shelf life of only a few months and that an aspirational society like India would never accept such a “scary alliance”, which is characterised by policyparalysis and a clash of ambitions of individual leaders.

Jaitley said the next five months were purely election months and in every speech and every representation — in newspapers or social media — party workers should focus on how can they help BJP win the election and how to make Modi the Prime Minister again. “We have to control the narrative of the elections. We will set the agenda of the Lok Sabha polls. I urge to you proceed aggressively in that direction as there is not even a single mistake (of the government) which will force you to back down,” he said.