Gujarat elections: GST campaign was fake, BJP has swept all seats hit by tax regime, claims Jaitley
Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav said the poll results showed that the Congress needed to work with regional parties to defeat the BJP.
Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley on Tuesday said that the verdict in the Gujarat Assembly elections has proved that the Goods and Services Tax regime is no longer a problem, according to ET Now.
The Congress won 77 seats in the 182-member Gujarat Assembly while the Bharatiya Janata Party retained power with 99 seats. In Himachal Pradesh, the BJP won 44 seats in the the 68-strong House to nudge out the Congress, which managed 20 seats.
“The GST campaign was a fake campaign,” Jaitley told the news channel. “I call it a fake campaign because the pre-GST taxes including the ones which were imposed during the Congress governments were extremely high rates of taxes.”
He claimed that the traders trusted that the Bharatiya Janata Party was trying to simplify procedures. “It was a misreading of the campaign,” Jaitley said, adding that the BJP has not only won but “swept by a very large margin” all the constituencies that were impacted by the new tax regime.
“If you get a 49% vote share in a state, you can’t really say it is anti-incumbency,” he told NDTV. He also blamed “certain agrarian factors” and local reasons in Gujarat’s Saurashtra region for not being able to convert votes into seats.
While many other Bharatiya Janata Party leaders congratulated themselves for the twin victories, the common message among many Congress leaders was that in its loss, the party had somehow not really lost.
Opposition reactions
Samajwadi Party chief and former Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav said that the election results showed that the Congress needed to tie up with regional parties to defeat the BJP. “The Congress has done well in terms of taking along young regional leaders like Hardik Patel, Jignesh and Alpesh,” he said. “Results of Gujarat elections have once again proved that regional parties will play an important role in the days to come and Congress being a national party, should look for a similar alignment to counter the BJP at the national level.”
His comments are being viewed as a sign that his party is ready to join an alliance for the 2019 Lok Sabha elections.
Meanwhile, former Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Omar Abdullah questioned how the Bharatiya Janata Party could “claim with a straight face that the mandate in Gujarat was for development, reform and vikas”.
While many chief ministers across the country congratulated the Bharatiya Janata Party for the wins, West Bengal’s Mamata Banerjee said that the win was only a temporary, “face-saving win” and was a “moral defeat for the BJP”.