The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on Monday termed the charges levelled against them by the Congress as 'baseless', adding that the party should confine itself to compare the difference of quality of governance under the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) and the National Democratic Alliance (NDA).
These remarks came in response to accusations by the Congress, which claimed that Prime Minister Narendra Modi has inducted 'corrupt and tainted' ministers into the Union Cabinet. "The entire charge by the Congress party is baseless. During the UPA government, the Prime Minister never had the last word in the formation or the expansion of the cabinet. In the NDA, it's a different trend: the last word is exclusively of the Prime Minister and he checks the credentials and the facts relating to each one of them," Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley told the media.
"I think the Congress should confine itself to the quality of the poor governance that they gave and compare it to the quality of the governance that the NDA is giving rather than resort to these allegations," he added. Jaitley further stated that the cases which do exist against some of the ministers are of a political rather than criminal nature.
"The examples given by them [the Congress] are completely baseless. Dr [Ram Shankar] Katheria has been a senior leader of the BJP from Uttar Pradesh (UP) and every BJP worker in UP has a criminal case against them by the Akhilesh Yadav [state] government. But these are cases arising out of political agitations, not out of some crime or moral turpitude that they have committed," he said. "The Congress has alleged that the Telegu Desam Party (TDP) representative YS Chowdary and Giriraj Singh should be disqualified along similar lines but there are no such grounds," he added.
Earlier in the day, Congress leader Ajay Maken had questioned the need for Sunday's expansion of Union Cabinet, accusing Prime Minister Modi or reneging on his promise of 'maximum government and minimum governance'. Maken further said that the 'corrupt and tainted' ministers who had been inducted into the Cabinet should hand in their resignations immediately. In his statement, he specifically targeted Singh, Chowdary and Katheria, claiming that the number of corrupt ministers in the Cabinet had risen.
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