Time to learn second painful lesson, says Singhvi over BJP’s stand on Waqf Amendment Bill, lateral entry

Congress Working Committee (CWC) member Abhishek Manu Singhvi said the time has come when the BJP realises that its extreme intersection of a sense of infallibility with arrogance must go”.

“The time has also come to learn a second painful lesson, namely collegiate decision-making. These are not easy lessons for a leadership used to unilateralism and dictatorship in decision-making. But they will have to be learnt, even if the hard way,” he said while speaking about if this was a better time to be in the Opposition. He was speaking about the Centre's recent stand on Waqf Amendment Bill and lateral recruitment to the bureaucracy.

In an interview with Indian Express, Singhvi said the BJP loves to use jumlas to paraphrase and rephrase as it has done with hundreds of schemes. He was speaking about Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Independence Day speech where stressed upon the need to move towards a “secular civil code” instead of the existing “communal civil code”. “Two more areas where the BJP will be forced to learn the painful lessons of collegiality are going to be UCC and ‘one nation, one election’. It is not possible to implement UCC without a very wide and complete consultation, which has not even begun, much less achieved. This whole exercise of state UCCs … creates limping, non-uniform codes for each state just to satisfy the vanity of the BJP. It is meaningless,” said the Congress leader.

He also said got three release orders for Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal in three months, two by the Supreme Court and one by the trial court.