Bharatiya Janata Party leader Subramanian Swamy on Saturday said he would have been a better finance minister than Arun Jaitley, who holds the post currently. "I am an economist. He is a lawyer. How can he be better than me?" Swamy asked during a heated session at the India Today Mind Rocks Summit. His statement came as a reply to AIMIM chief Asaduddin Owaisi who asked whether the country's inflation would have been in check if Swamy headed the Finance Ministry.

Swamy said Owaisi, who was the other panelist for the session, was an anti-national, reported PTI. "If we go by modern science, the ancestors of Indian Muslims were Hindus. If a Muslim is not ready to admit it, then he may be a patriot, but he will be an anti-national… Owaisi is rashtra-birodhi [anti-national]," he said.

Among other things, Swamy said the Jammu and Kashmir government should be “dismissed” and President’s rule should be imposed in the state. According to him, the coalition government of Mehboba Mufti's People's Democratic Party and the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party has failed. Swamy said, “Initially we, the BJP government thought that since we won Jammu and Ladakh and the PDP won Kashmir, we should experiment. But many people, including I, believe that the experiment has failed… [The Mehbooba Mufti government should] not just resign, this government should be dismissed."