Opposition parties full of lies, their grand alliance will fail: PM Modi tells party workers
Prime Minister Narendra Modi speaks at the National Executive meeting of the Bharatiya Janata Party.
The Opposition is incapable of challenging the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections because it’s fighting on lies and not issues, said Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Sunday.

“Our problem is that those who were failures while in government are also failures in the Opposition. I don’t see a challenge anywhere (in the 2019 elections),” he said at the BJP’s national executive meeting in Delhi.
“We are ready to fight on neeti (policies) but we don’t know how to fight on lies,” he said in a closed-door speech on the second day of the meeting.
Law minister Ravi Shankar Prasad, who briefed the media on the speech, said Modi rejected the Mahagathbandhan or grand alliance being put up by Opposition parties. “Their leadership is unknown, their policy is unclear and their intention is corrupt,” Modi said about the Mahagathbandhan.
BJP president Amit Shah, on the first day of the national executive on Saturday, had said the BJP will fight the 2019 elections on the strength of its performance in the past five years, making light of the “grand alliance”.
The national executive meeting affords an opportunity for the BJP to take stock of the political situation and discuss strategy for the elections in the face of Opposition attempts to cobble together a broad-based coalition to take on the ruling National Democratic Alliance. Even arch rivals such as the Samajwadi Party and Bahujan Samaj Party in Uttar Pradesh have been in talks to contest the next parliamentary election together to stop the BJP’s juggernaut.
The opposition has focused on issues such as suspected irregularities in a deal to purchase fighter jets from Dassault Aviation of France, perceived farm distress and alleged economic mismanagement in the implementation of polices such as the demonetisation in 2016 and the goods and services tax.
