Finance Minister Arun Jaitley had advised the Congress party to select its leaders based on calibre and potential if it was looking to expand itself, PTI reported on Sunday. His comments came as the Delhi unit of the All India Congress Committee on Saturday passed a resolution asking Rahul Gandhi to take over as the president of the party.

“There are ideological agenda that are dictated by the ultra-left and they [the Congress] end up being the cheer leaders as far as that is concerned,” Jaitley said while addressing the Berkeley India Conference via video conference. Most stances taken by the Congress are not the conventional centrist positions of the party, he added.

The finance minister said the process of leadership creation within the Congress does not “gel with the rest of the aspirational India”. “The aspirational India is willing to impose a tough criterion on the leadership itself. It is no longer in a mood that it will accept family names or other such marks in order to decide who are the better leaders,” he said.

On being asked about the rising reports of communal tension, Jaitley said in India such “incidents were stray”, and that US had also seen incidents of societal tension. “It takes place more in the US than in India. It is just that propagandist in India has a bigger voice in trying to proclaim it all over the world,” the Bharatiya Janata Party leader added.

Jaitley also said India has to grow at a faster pace as time was running out. “I do hope that India is able to retain its growth rate once again and live up to the aspirations of its people because we must not forget that we not only have a large population to service, we have a very young population to service,” he said.