Union finance minister and senior BJP leader Arun Jaitley, in a fresh post on his Facebook blog, has claimed that the Congress appears to be fighting the currently underway elections on the 1971 agenda.

In the post, titled “Has the Congress Thrown its Hands up?”, Jaitley, claimed that the BJP had made significant gains in the East and that Karnataka appeared to be going the BJP’s way.

He wrote, “With the regional parties dominating Andhra and Telangana, the Congress in both the States, and the TDP are staring at a washout.”

He said that the future rounds of elections would witness a direct contest between the BJP and the Congress.

“The Congress obviously is in no position to effectively take on the regional parties or the BJP. Therefore, the only issue in the future rounds is the width of the margin of victory of the BJP. Will it be a repeat of 2014 in terms of votes or will it be more? The euphoric reaction at the ground suggests a mandate larger than 2014,” Jaitley wrote.

The run up to the polls, he wrote, showed an interesting situation developing and listed some points.

Referring the the narrative around the Rafale fighter jet that the Congress had built, Jaitley wrote that the Congress president had in “the last one year, built a fake narrative on Rafale and loan waiver to business houses, which was contrary to the truth”. He said the fake issues had evaporated and that they now did not strike a chord in the electorate and the fact that Rahul Gandhi apology “to the Supreme Court for false public narrative” had significantly diminished his credibility as a political leader.

“Rahul became a victim of his own falsehood,” Jaitley wrote.

Jaitley also took potshots at the on-now-off-now discussions for alliance between the Congress and the Aam Aadmi Party.

“The desperation reached a peak when he, without realising that Arvind Kejriwal was playing games with him, offered him four seats contrary to the advice of the State unit. He displayed the desperation of a loser,” Jaitley wrote.

Saying that the Congress party and Rahul Gandhi were 48 years behind times, he said that the “New India is a positive India. It does not accept the negativism of Rahul, Arvind Kejriwal, Mamata Banerjee and TDP. The ‘New India’ wants to look up rather than be cynical and critical about their own country.”

“The Congress is contesting the 2019 election on the 1971 agenda. It is not in tune with the times,” he said.

First Published: Apr 26, 2019 17:51 IST