UPA gets birthday bashing from BJP

CITING the increasing trend among UPA ministers to ‘run with independent flags’, the BJP on Tuesday said the government lacked cohesion and credibility. The BJP, which singled out Dr Manmohan Singh for attack, said the government is headed by a “non-prime minister”.

Opposition leader L K Advani, who led the attack against the UPA government on a day the regime was celebrating its third anniversary, said, “for the first time in our republican history, here is a government that is headed by a non-Prime Minister, run by a person who is not accountable to Parliament, and is surviving on the life-support system provided by parties that behave more like the Opposition.”

Mr Advani, who seized upon Mani Shankar Aiyar’s assertion that the “policies of the government will not get the common man’s endorsement”, said the components of the alliance and key players in the government have no confidence in its ability to deliver. He Mr Aiyar’s statement may be a part of a deliberate attempt to distance the party’s supreme leader from the failures of Manmohan Singh’s government “so that at an opportune time, in the near future, the nominal and nominated Prime Minister can be dispensed with”. Hitting out at the Congress for a lack of “democratic content” in its functioning, Mr Advani said the party “has surrendered itself to a slavish culture in which the reigning dynasty never does wrong and is never responsible or accountable for any failure.”

The senior BJP leader said that UPA has failed on 10 major issues including containing the steep rise in the prices of essential commodities, which demonstrates UPA government’s betrayal of the common man. Charging the government with failure to attend to the needs of internal security, Mr Advani said its first action was to repeal Pota and since then, it has been adopting a soft approach to deal with the jehadi menace. “Its refusal to carry out the death sentence of Mohammad Afzal Guru is proof enough that the UPA is ready to stoop to any level to pursue its politics of minorityism,” he said.

BJP president Rajnath Singh, who released a 66-page chargesheet against the UPA government, said the aam admi has been hit hardest during its regime with prices of essential commodities shooting through the roof. “Rising prices of all essential commodities like wheat, rice, pulses, oil, vegetables, petrol, diesel and cement has adversely affected the living standards of the masses,” the BJP chargesheet said, adding the UPA converted the Indian economy “from a state of surpluses to a state of scarcity”.

In an attempt to exploit the middle-class unease, the BJP president said housing loan rates, which had come down to 6% during NDA regime, have doubled to 12% resulting in slowdown in the housing industry.