Taking a dig at the Congress, BJP chief Amit Shah on Friday said that those who are elated over BJP losing eight bypolls recently forget that his party has wrested 14 states from its rivals and that it rules in 20 out of the 29 states in the country.

Addressing the senior Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) functionaries of the Jaipur Rural parliamentary constituency here, he said: "They (Congress) are on a high over the BJP's recent losses in the bypolls. But they don't realise that after 2014, we have wrested 14 states from them one after another. Good that we have this kind of rival."

These were Amit Shah's first comments after the BJP lost two Lok Sabha and six assembly seats in the bypolls held on May 28 in several states.

"The Congress party asks us about our achievements in the last three-four years, but we ask them what they did in the last 70 years and over three generations (of Nehru-Gandhi family)," he said, adding that in last four years, the Narendra Modi government achieved what "could not be done in the last 70 years".

"Prime Minister Modi promised to bring electricity to all the 19,000 villages of the country that were deprived of it by 2019 but that has already been achieved in four years itself. Today there is electricity in every house, vaccination for every child and every mother, several insurance schemes and pension benefits for the elderly," Mr Shah said.He added that the Modi government drastically reduced the prices of stents and other medical implants and brought them in the reach of the common man.

Claiming that during the Congress-led UPA government, neither the country's borders were safe nor were its women, while there was widespread corruption, he said the Indian people thus gave the BJP a full mandate to rule the country.

PTI