Country presented with "gimmickry": Jaitley hits out at AAP

New Delhi, Jan 16: Hitting out Aam Aadmi Party,

on Thursday alleged the alternative politics promised by the outfit has "faltered" and the country is being presented with "gimmickry" and the "road to anarchy" instead.

Leader of the Opposition in Rajya Sabha Arun Jaitley said that in less than three weeks of coming to power in Delhi, a sense of idealism in AAP has been replaced by the desire for job-seeking, which, in turn, has resulted in fissures within the new party. He also cautioned the political parties that this failure should not be confused by the message of setting higher standards of probity and accountability.

"India was promised alternative politics. I had personally hoped that alternative politics promised by the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) would lead to larger footprints on the Indian society. Conventional political parties and politicians would realize the importance of probity and accountability. Instead, the country is being presented with gimmickry and the road to anarchy," Jaitley said in an article.

"My fear is that the failure of this experiment should not be confused by other parties as a failure of the good message of higher standards of probity and accountability," he added. Taking on the senior AAP leaders, Jaitley said there is an in-built danger in establishing a political party and then going out to search its members and its ideology and said a group of "disparate, self-opinionated persons" have flocked to the new outfit.

"The new party has a distinct concept of new jurisprudence, that judges now will have to report to the executive...The initial enthusiasm of mobocracy as an instrument of decision-making has somewhat died down," he said. The BJP leader also described various members of AAP from one being a former airline owner to a banker from Mumbai who appear to be protagonists of the market economy.

PTI