By IANS,
Surajkund (Haryana) : The BJP said Friday the Congress-led UPA government had forfeited the mandate to govern, adding that the BJP could give a new direction to the country.
“The nation is at the crossroads. The Congress-led UPA has clearly forfeited its mandate to govern,” BJP leader Murli Manohar Joshi said while moving the political resolution at the party’s national council meeting in this town, bordering Delhi.
Party chief Nitin Gadkari said: “It is time to give a new direction to the country’s politics.”
Joshi targeted Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and demanded his resignation, saying he was responsible for faulty coal block allocations when he held the coal portfolio.
“The prime minister is directly responsible for these questionable allocations. He should resign,” Joshi said.
Referring to the scams related to the 2010 Commonwealth Games and 2G spectrum allocation, Joshi said, “The silence of Congress chief Sonia Gandhi on the corruption issue is astonishing.”
Joshi criticised the Congress for attacking the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG), whose report has said that private players had a windfall gain of Rs. 1.85 lakh crore in the allocation of 142 coal blocks during 2004-2009, during the first term of the UPA.
“The CAG and PAC (Public Accounts Committee) are watchdogs of public money,” he said.
The BJP resolution claimed the party would “restore the pride of the country” and “give relief to the suffering being endured by an insecure nation.”
The resolution said that the recent killings of elected village heads (sarpanches) in Jammu and Kashmir were clear signs that terrorism was raising its ugly head again, in that state.
The party expressed concern over illegal migration of Bangladesh residents into Assam, the brazen attack on Amar Jawan Jyoti in Mumbai, and the communal riots in Uttar Pradesh in the past six months.
Joshi claimed that the UPA was a “government of the corrupt, by the corrupt and for the corrupt”. He said the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance from 1998-2004 provided the “best government” under Atal Behari Vajpayee, despite three years of drought, international sanctions post the Pokharan nuclear blast in 2008 and the 1999 Kargil war.
The BJP’s political resolution also promised the carving out of a separate Telangana state from Andhra Pradesh, if the party was voted to power.