BJP is confident of significantly improving its performance of 2014 in general elections: Piyush Goyal

NEW DELHI: The BJP is confident of significantly improving its spectacular performance of 2014 in the general elections, helped by an expected sweep in the northeast and a growing support in West Bengal, Odisha and Tamil Nadu, Railways and Coal Minister Piyush Goyal said.

Recent developments had significantly improved the prospects of the party which was already expecting about 300 seats according to an independent survey it had conducted last year, Goyal told a glittering audience of Indian and international business leaders at the ET Global Business Summit on Saturday.

Responding to a question that some in his party may not be as optimistic, the minister said others were not privy to as much information as him and that the party did not want its leaders and workers to be complacent.


“I’d rather have all my candidates and leaders on edge, so that they put their best foot forward,” Goyal said.

In Uttar Pradesh, where the NDA swept 73 of the 80 Lok Sabha seats, Goyal expects the party to not only retain the seats, but add at least one to its tally, he said. To those who doubt the optimism, Goyal’s message was that nobody expected the party to sweep UP in 2014, or to win an unprecedented 80% of the assembly seats in state’s election three years later.

BJP’s confidence is based on Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s policies that combined passion with compassion and delivered results to the downtrodden sections of society that were not on the radar of decision makers and planners in the past, Goyal said.

“People are willing to move out of the traditional caste and community based voting patterns and looking at change. In Tamil Nadu, my survey results have surprised me. The impact that Mr Modi has had in a state like Tamil Nadu … We’re seeing surprising results.”

He said Modi’s policies had demonstrated that good economics makes good politics also as the NDA regime had succeeded in delivering services like electricity, cooking gas and healthcare to people while keeping inflation very low and fiscal arithmetic under prudent control.

Before this government was elected, the loan books of public-sector banks had tripled in six years. “There’s something fishy in that,” he said, adding that some borrowers had a very low capital base, in some cases the loan amount was substantially more than what the project was worth, and there was instances of multi-layered structures.

“You can’t have power plants being set up dime a dozen all over the country without a good assessment of demand. Do we really need to invest in power plants of the traditional genre. We’ve come to realise that there was a lot of padding happening,” the minister said.

He said the corrective action taken by the government may have hurt some in the private sector, but the actions were necessary in the interest of honesty in administration.

“Somebody had to bite the bullet. Change the way business works … After all this is public money. That pain point, if it has hurt some, the national will always be grateful.”