 "Hardeep Singh Puri")
The BJP will have a "very comfortable victory" in next year's parliamentary elections and will win 330 seats, party leader and Union minister Hardeep Singh Puri said on Friday.
The BJP won 303 seats out of 543 in the last Lok Sabha elections in 2019.
"I think you are not looking at just a victory but a very comfortable victory. This time I will say 330 seats (for BJP)," Puri said at the India Economic Conclave.
He said people consider serious issues while voting in the Lok Sabha elections and they will reclaim India's 7,000-year-old glory in the coming polls.
On his party's defeat in the just-concluded assembly polls in Karnataka, Puri said he is glad that the BJP loses elections, otherwise the Opposition will level charges that electronic voting machines (EVMs) are not working properly.
Replying to a quick question, he termed Congress leader Rahul Gandhi "pretender" and AAP chief Arvind Kejriwal "liar".
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He said the prospect of leaders like Gandhi, Kejriwal or Mamata Banerjee winning the Lok Sabha elections against Prime Minister Narendra Modi is just one per cent.
He said that if the Indian economy continues to grow at a rate of 7.2 per cent per annum then India would be the third largest economy in the world well before Modi completes his third term as the prime minister.
He also dismissed opposition leaders' claim that India's real economic growth in 2022-23 was five per cent and not 7.2 per cent.
On opposition leaders' comments about the GDP numbers released earlier this week, he said that there is a doctrine of common sense as a fool will always oppose but they are fools at the end of the day.
(Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
