Terming the UPA’s two successive terms a “wasted opportunity” as the country was no longer seen as “a success story”, the BJP’s national council has accepted an economic resolution, seemingly influenced by the Aam Admi Party.

BJP leader Arun Jaitley, who moved the economic resolution prepared by Prakash Javadekar, said the first claim over the country’s resources would be that of the poor and not people from a particular religion.

"It was a wasted decade in which the country saw a decline in all sectors, be it education, health, economy, politics or governance. Overall, it proved to be a regime of rapid moral degradation," Leader of the Opposition in the Rajya Sabha Arun Jaitley said at the party’s national council meeting at the Ram Lila Maidan.

Building on BJP president Rajnath Singh’s earlier attack on the Congress, reminding it of the prime minister’s remark that Muslims “had the first right over the resources”, Jaitley said: “The first right over the country’s resources will not be of a person from a religion, but of the poor.” 

Though the BJP did not accept it openly, leaders privately acknowledged that the AAP was a cause of concern for them, given their identical vote base in urban centres, among the middle and educated class. The AAP’s people-centric economic policy was visible in the party’s decision to scrap FDI in retail pursued by the previous Congress government in Delhi. It was similar to the stand taken by the BJP. 

The BJP said it was ironical that global growth picked up while “India’s growth was going downwards”. “The economic slump under the UPA was less about global meltdown and more about complete absence of leadership, dual power centers, bankruptcy of ideas, lack of vision, disastrous policies and inherent corruption,” he said.

He said the country was apparently willing to give Narendra Modi “responsibility”, which would be tough to shoulder because the UPA would leave behind an ailing financial health which would hinder in creating “assets for the poor”.

Criticising Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi for accusing the BJP of marketing itself well as it could sell a comb to even a bald person, Jaitley sarcastically commented that there was a “third political force” which took commission by selling combs.