lok-sabha-elections

Updated: Apr 13, 2019 12:08 IST

Union finance minister and senior BJP leader Arun Jaitley on Saturday put out a fresh blog post titled “India’s Opposition is on a ‘Rent a Cause’ Campaign”.

In his blog, Jaitley wrote that there appears to be no running thread in the opposition’s campaign “which connects which is being said today or what has been said over the last several months”.

“There is no leader, no Gathbandhan, no Common Minimum Programme and no real issue. Not surprisingly there are not many takers for a “failed campaign”. It is ‘Rent a Cause’ Campaign,” Jaitley said.

Saying that in order to “oust a popular Government, an extremely popular Prime Minister, you need some real issues, not fictional issues”, Jaitley said that the Opposition had “wasted the past two years... manufacturing issues which don’t exist”.

“The false campaign on Rafale didn’t carry much weight. Loan waiver to industrialists was a lie, the EVM as an instrument of rigging was a bigger lie. Now that they are in the midst of the campaign for over a month what is the issue which they are able to focus on,” Jaitley wrote.

Saying that the Opposition appeared to be in a disarray in many states with “alliances having not worked out”, he said that a mutli-cornered contest obviously favoured the BJP.

“Verbal battles between the Left, Trinamool and the Congress and now AAP and the Congress are increasingly visible. On the leadership issue, the situation looks gloomier than what I had thought. The BSP leader Mayawati, the Trinamool leader Mamata Banerjee leave no stone unturned in running down the Congress President,” Jaitley wrote.

He said that the opposition had not built up a single issue against the government in the past five years and that its strategy now was to “pick up an issue for a daily tweet or a press-briefing”.

“This is the plight of the opposition campaign,” he wrote, adding, “One day Pulwama was questioned as self-engineered. The next day Balakot was questioned as a non-existent operation.”

He was referring to the February 14 Pulwama suicide bombing in which 40 CRPF jawans had been killed. The attack had been followed by an air strike by the Indian Air Force on a Jaish-e-Mohammed training facility at Balakot in Pakistan.

He also referred to the recent anti-satellite missile test that was conducted recently and said, “The anti-satellite missile was passed off as a Nehruvian contribution even though Panditji’s correspondence with Dr. Homi Bhabha established to the contrary. One day BJP is accused of whipping up war hysteria, the other day it is dubbed as pro Pakistan.”

Referring to the recent questions being raised by the opposition regarding Union textile minister Smriti Irani’s educational qualifications, he said that the opposition had forgotten “that a public audit of Rahul Gandhi’s academic credentials may leave a lot to be answered. After all, he got an M.Phil without a Masters degree!”