Jaitley attacks Congress, says debate now to focus on Modi vs 'anarchist combination'

Union Minister Arun Jaitley today launched a blistering attack on Congress and "maverick and temperamental" leaders of regional parties like TMC, DMK and BSP, and said the debate in the year to 2019 general elections would be 'Modi versus an anarchist combination'.

From his hospital bed, where he is recuperating after a kidney transplant, Jaitley in a Facebook post said that the electoral prospects of the Congress are narrowing with the party is shrinking to a fringe.

He also mentioned that the fifth year of the Narendra Modi government will focus on consolidation of the policies and programmes which it has implemented.

Calling the attempts of the Congress and regional parties coming together for 2019 polls as "a fictional alternative" to the BJP, he said a group of disparate political parties are promising to come together.

A "federal front is a failed idea", Jaitley said, adding such a front with "contradictions, sooner or later, loses its balance and equilibrium".

"Some of their leaders are temperamental, the others occasionally change ideological positions," he said, adding the BJP shared powers with Mamata Banerjee's TMC, DMK of Tamil Nadu, Chandrababu Naidu's TDP, Mayawati's BSP and the JD(S) of Karnataka.

"They frequently change political positions. They have supported the BJP claiming that it is in larger national interest and then turned turtle and oppose it in the name of secularism. These are ideologically flexible political groups. Stable politics is far from their political track record," he said.

Federal front was experimented under Charan Singh, Chandra Shekhar and by the United Front Government between 1996-98 did not work.

"The aspirational India which today occupies the high table in the world shall never accept an idea which has repeatedly failed. History teaches us this lesson," he added.

Jaitley said some amongst this "disparate group" of political parties have "an extremely dubious track record of governance."