UPA’s economic mismanagement is legendary
While the Congress and its allies would be tempted to dismiss senior Bharatiya Janata Party leader Yashwant Sinha's scathing indictment of the UPA Government's economic mismanagement as election rhetoric, they can scarcely dispute the points he has raised. The 18 questions which Mr Sinha has posed to Union Minister for Finance P Chidambaram — who has opted out of the electoral battle since he faced the prospect of defending the indefensible — have ripped away the last fig leaf that the Government has been using to cover its inept handling of the economy. The bottom line of all that the BJP leader has said — and few in the Congress can credibly dispute it — is that the first edition of the UPA regime did well for the first few years in power by using the growth momentum which the BJP-led NDA Government had left as its legacy. Thereafter, the Government began to totter, and during the second term of the UPA, the Manmohan Singh-led regime made a complete mess of the economy. That the GDP growth rate in the last seven consecutive quarters has been five per cent and less, speaks for the collapse of the economy that the Government has brought about. Mr Chidambaram and his colleagues may well dish out statistics to contest this, but the proof of the pudding lies in the eating and not in the display of window-dressed figures. Not just GDP growth, but employment opportunities too have drastically shrunk, infrastructure development has come to a virtual standstill, the manufacturing sector is gasping for breath, inflation remains high enough for the Reserve Bank of India not to lower interest rates despite pressure from the Government, and growth in the agricultural sector has been languishing at sub-five per cent levels. But the Congress maintains that the situation is not as bad as the BJP makes it out to be. The Congress simply does not want to acknowledge the ground realities — one among them being that various international credit rating agencies have time and again over the past many months either downgraded their ratings of the country or threatened to do so if the economic performance did not perk up.
It is amusing to hear Ministers like Mr Chidambaram and Mr Anand Sharma — who has been fuming at every available forum at the “misinformation” that the BJP is spreading about the performance of the UPA regime on the economic front — that it is due to their Government's ‘deft’ handling of domestic issues in the face of a global slowdown crisis, that the economy is poised to grow well in the coming months. Perhaps realising that nobody would swallow this line, these leaders have been going overboard to ‘compare' figures of the NDA tenure with that of their rule. Such comparisons fall flat on the face, since at no point in time during the NDA regime had the economy collapsed, as it has done now. Mr Chidambaram’s counter-response on Monday carries little conviction.