Former Finance Minister P Chidambaram has lashed out at the Centre’s Narendra Modi government asking if it will finally concede that the economy was sinking.
Taking to Twitter, Chidambaram said, “Yashwant Sinha speaks Truth to Power. Will Power now admit the Truth that economy is sinking?”
He added, “ETERNAL TRUTH: No matter what Power does, ultimately Truth will prevail.”
Chidambaram was reacting to the explosive article, penned down by former finance minister and veteran BJP leader, Yashwant Sinha, in The Indian Express today.
Titled as ‘I need to speak up now,’ Sinha wrote that he will be failing in his ‘national duty’ if he did not ‘speak up’ now against the ‘mess the finance minister has made of economy.’
He had particularly singled out Finance Minister Arun Jaitley for the mess in the economy. Mocking his appointment into the Modi government as an important minister despite losing Lok Sabha elections from Amritsar in 2014, Sinha wrote, “Arun Jaitley is considered to be the best and the brightest in this government. It was a foregone conclusion before the 2014 elections that he would be the finance minister in the new government. His losing his Lok Sabha election from Amritsar was not allowed to come in the way of this appointment. One may recall that in similar circumstances Atal Bihari Vajpayee had refused to appoint Jaswant Singh and Pramod Mahajan, two of his closest colleagues in the party, to his cabinet in 1998.”
The GDP numbers out last month showed that it had slowed down to its three-year low at 5.74%. The reason being described for the considerable slowdown in economy was Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s demonetisation decision.
Sinha said that the actual growth in the last quarter was even lower given that the Modi government had changed the methodology to measure economic growth.
He wrote, “And please note that the methodology for calculation of the GDP was changed by the present government in 2015 as a result of which the growth rate recorded earlier increased statistically by over 200 basis points on an annual basis. So, according to the old method of calculation, the growth rate of 5.7 per cent is actually 3.7 per cent or less.”
He had also taken a potshot at the BJP President, Amit Shah, for blaming the technical reasons for the slump in Indian economy adding that even the CBI had contradicted him.
“Even the SBI, the largest public sector bank of the country, has stated with unusual frankness that the slowdown is not transient or “technical”, it is here to stay and the slowdown in demand has only aggravated the situation. It has openly contradicted what the BJP president said just a few days ago that the slowdown in the last quarter was on account of “technical” reasons and will be corrected soon. According to the SBI chairman, the telecom sector is the latest entrant to the long list of stressed sectors.”
Sinha had concluded his piece by writing, “The Prime Minister claims that he has seen poverty from close quarters. His finance minister is working over time to make sure that all Indians also see it from equally close quarters.”