Ranchi, March 27 (IANS) The Congress party is the main cause of all the woes the country faces, Bharatiya Janta Party (BJP) president Nitin Gadkari said Sunday.

Gadkari, who has been on a two-day visit to the Jharkhand capital, told reporters that the wrong policies of the centre had led to the spiralling of prices of essential goods.

Corruption and the various scams during the Congress regime have crippled the country. The United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government has been the most corrupt, he charged.

Gadkari said that the scams related to the 2G spectrum allocation and the conduct of the Commonwealth Games (CWG) could have been avoided had the matters been left to the cabinet for a final decision.

Even in the case over the appointment of the chief vigilance commissioner (CVC), Prime Minister Manmohan Singh could have saved himself the embarrassment if he had acted on the objections raised by Leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha Sushma Swaraj, the BJP leader said.

Swaraj, a member of the panel that cleared the appointment of P.J. Thomas as CVC, had voiced her dissent because of his involvement in a corruption case.

Gadkari also charged the central government with not seriously taking up the issue of foodgrain storage.

Last year, production of foodgrain was at Rs.58,000 crore, but the storage was available for just Rs.16,000 crore worth of produce. The rest was for the benefit of middlemen and black marketeers, alleged Gadkari.

Referring to the huge amount of black money stashed away in foreign banks, the BJP president wondered whether the government was withholding the names of the persons involved to safeguard the interests of some Congressmen.