Shah dismisses oppn alliance as challenge, claims BJP will retain power with bigger majority

BJP president Amit Shah today made light of the proposed alliance of opposition parties, saying they all fought his party in 2014 general elections as well and will do so in 2019, but it will still come back to power with a bigger majority.

At a press conference here, Shah noted that most of these parties have little support outside their home states and will not bring additional votes to each other.

"I want to ask you what Mamata Banerjee can do in Karnataka in the Lok Sabha polls or what Akhilesh Yadav can do in Madhya Pradesh or Rahul Gandhi in West Bengal. These people were against us in 2014 as well. In their states, they had all fought against us," he said.

Banerjee is the West Bengal chief minister and heads the Trinamool Congress while Yadav is the Samajwadi Party chief.

Shah said like 2014 these parties will fight against the BJP in 2019 as well and it will still come to power with a majority bigger than 2014 under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Flanked by Union minister Piyush Goyal, his party's general secretaries Bhupender Yadav, Kailash Vijayvargiya and Arun Singh among others, Shah also targeted Congress chief Rahul Gandhi for his allegations against the BJP and said he appeared to be unaware of his own party's history.

Flashing a piece of paper which, he said, had the details of various state governments dismissed by the Congress-ruled Centre, Shah said that the Congress had no right to talk about democratic values.

Its governments at the centre had dismissed over 50 state governments and it once formed government in Goa by engineering defection when it did not win a single seat in the assembly poll, he said.