New Delhi: Former finance minister of India and veteran BJP leader Yashwant Sinha here on Wednesday in his reported editorial has stated that “Prime Minister (Narendra Modi) claims that he has seen poverty from close quarters. His finance minister (Arun Jaitley) is working over-time to make sure that all Indians also see it from equally close quarters.”
(L) Yashwant Sinha (R) Arun Jaitley
That is how senior Bharatiya Janata Party leader and former Finance Minister Yashwant Sinha ended the scathing op-ed column that he wrote for The Indian Express on the massive slowdown hitting the Indian economy.
Further he wrote that he would be “failing in (his) national duty” if he did not speak up right now. He also claims that his views reflect the “sentiments of a large number of people in the BJP and elsewhere” and that these people aren’t speaking up “out of fear”.
“Economy is turning out to be the main headline in Modi’s India following depressing Gross Domestic Product (GDP) figures in the last quarter, when, at 5.7 per cent, it had hit its three-year low. Earlier this week, the government reconstituted the 5-member Economic Advisory Council, which Sinha calls the “fiva Pandavas (who) are expected to win the new Mahabharata for us”, reads a quote from a report published in an English vernacular.
Yashwant Sinha further said the controversial demonetisation decision taken in November 2016 by Modi as “an unmitigated economic disaster” and says the Goods and Services Tax (GST) is a “hurriedly-conceived and poorly-implemented” policy.
It is worth mentioned here that Yashwant Sinha is an economist and former Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officer he is considered as one of the best finance ministers in recent times.
Apparently, while targeting finance minister Arun Jaitley for its faulty economic policies Yashwant Sinha in his editorial called him a “lucky finance minister, luckier than any in the post-liberalisation era”. He admits that Jaitley is believed to be the “best and the brightest” in the Narendra Modi government, and that the current finance minister’s “indispensability” was established when he was given four ministries after the BJP’s landslide victory in the 2014 Lok Sabha election.
“But Jaitley has made a “mess” of it, Sinha writes at the beginning of his piece”.
He squandered a golden opportunity when he took over the management of the Indian economy, Sinha goes on to essentially say. “Depressed global crude oil prices placed at his (Jaitley) disposal lakhs of crores of rupees,” Sinha says. “But the oil bonanza has been wasted and the legacy problems (stalled projects and bad loans) have not only been allowed to persist, they have become worse,” notes India Today.