The BJP has repeated its demand for Union Finance Minister P Chidambaram’s stepdown. Senior party leader M Venkaiah Naidu in Madurai on Saturday said the Union Finance Minister “should accept his failures and quit” instead of criticising the BJP. The former party president was referring to Chidambaram’s statement slamming the BJP’s National Executive resolution on price rise situation. “If they don’t knowhow to govern, they should get out instead of criticising the BJP,” he said.

Meanwhile, in Delhi, party spokesperson Ravi Shankar Prasad lashed out at Chidambaram’s statement that “the legacy of BJP/NDA was not only a slow growth rate but of unsound fiscal management”.

“A hostile Government like the UPA would have taken a very critical view of the performance of the NDA but the Economic Survey (presented by the UPA Government for 2003-04, when NDA was in power) praised our performance,” Prasad said. “It was the UPA Government which is under the scrutiny of the common man” because of its “repressive and grossly negligent” record of the past four years.

“By making factually incorrect allegations about the NDA Government, Chidambaram cannot escape his own responsibility,” he added.