Patna:
Finance Minister Arun Jaitley today said the Kerala House beef controversy and the Dalit killings in Haryana were examples of "channel-driven news as opposed to actual news". These and the row over reservation would have no impact on the ongoing Bihar election, he said.
"This election is not about arithmetic. It is about chemistry. And the chemistry in this election is certainly on our side,'' Mr Jaitley told NDTV.
"It's an aspirational election in the land of lost opportunities," he added.
Asked about the impact in Bihar of the killing of two Dalit children in BJP-ruled Haryana, Mr Jaitley said an incident that was "personal rivalry" was being converted into a state-level issue.
"In a large country like India, a dispute between two households, that is the kind of dispute in Haryana, it is condemnable but that's the kind of issue it is," said the finance minister.
Emphasizing that the BJP-led NDA coalition is fighting the polls only on development, he said that Chief Minister Nitish Kumar's claim to the development card "collapsed the day Lalu Yadav joined the alliance and brought back Jungle Raj.''
The rival coalition's strategy is based on "tweet-a-day on sundry issues", Mr Jaitley quipped, adding that it was not working, especially on the youth.
When NDTV pointed out that Lalu Yadav's sons Tejaswi and Tej Pratap Yadav were the Nitish Kumar-led grand alliance's youth card, the senior minister described them as the "young, budding political heirs of a Bihar dynasty" who were not fulfilling the needs of aspirational India.
"Aspirational means that masses throw up their own leaders like Obama or Modi. The problem with dynasty always is that the popularity of a party is coexistent with the strength of the current leader. The Congress has suffered because of that,'' he said.
When asked who the NDA's aspirational leader in Bihar was, Mr Jaitley said different leaders had different strengths. He named veterans like CP Thakur, "young ministers" like Rajiv Pratap Rudy and Ravi Shankar Prasad and even Jitan Ram Manjhi, who represented the "aspirations of a community".