Singed by Sinha, BJP controls damage

Vibha Sharma and Mukesh Ranjan

Tribune News Service

New Delhi, September 27

A day after Varun Gandhi put his party and the government in a spot with his musings on the Rohingya, senior ministers in the Narendra Modi government today rushed to undo the embarrassing damage caused by veteran BJP leader Yashwant Sinha’s castigating column on the state of India’s economy.

Without naming Sinha, Railway Minister Piyush Goyal refuted the claims that Indian economy was on a downward spiral. The minister said under the saffron party’s regime, the economy had strengthened. “Each one is entitled to his own understanding of the situation. The reality is India’s economy is today a strong economy. What we inherited in 2014 was a period of near double-digit inflation.

“Very high fiscal deficit, very high current account deficit, GDP almost touching 5 per cent and in some sense there was policy paralysis due to which the entire economy was not having a clear vision where it was headed.

“We have set everything right in the past three years in combined efforts of all the regulators and the Central Government and are growing forward. I think this will become the economy’s strength,” Goyal said.

While some BJP leaders claimed “Sinha’s frustration (over being sidelined in the party) was showing”, others said most of such (anti-Modi government) renditions were coming from those with “nothing to lose” politically.

The scathing commentary by Sinha, the former Finance Minister in the Vajpayee government, on Finance Minister Arun Jaitley and the government’s economic moves has come as a shot in the arm for the Congress, even as it is indicative of churning within the BJP.

While Sinha refused to go beyond his column, Modi’s detractors in the party indicated “this is just the beginning. It is a long fight”.

However, the Modi government appears to have decided to go in for some institutional and system course correction, as recently it has brought back the PM’s Economic Advisory Council (PMEAC) and reverted to financial allocations to states for police modernisation.

This is not the first time voices from within have warned the government on prevailing situation — jobless growth, failing economy and farm distress, ideological fountainhead RSS has already warned its political arm of the lurking dangers. While BJP’s Rajya Sabha member Subramanian Swamy has also been vociferously vocal in his criticism of the state of economy, there could be many others who feel the same.

“I am also convinced that what I am going to say reflects the sentiment of a large number of people in the BJP and elsewhere who are not speaking up out of fear,” Sinha wrote, hitting out at “superman” Jaitley for making a “mess” of the economy.

Attacking the government for taking the economy into a “wrong direction”, RSS-affiliate Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh also urged the PM to “retract from the present reform process” and stop laying “excess thrust” on jobless growth that has resulted in mounting unemployment.

‘India one of fastest-growing economies’

The entire world admits that India is the fastest growing economy in the world. No one should forget this fact. In the matter of economy, in the international arena, India's credibility has been established — Rajnath Singh, Home Minister