In a democracy, perhaps the most difficult position to be in is to speak against one’s own party when it is in power. You may lose friends and power and get reduced to the status of a political pariah.
However, this hasn’t prevented BJP veteran and former finance minister Yashwant Sinha from showing the mirror to the Narendra Modi-led NDA government. He has said, in no uncertain terms, that the economy is in doldrums and the present finance minister Arun Jaitley is responsible for it.
Predictably, the Modi government hasn’t responded well to Sinha’s criticism. They targeted him personally, first by making his son Jayant Sinha write a counter to his father’s article and then through Jaitley’s remark that Sinha was a “job applicant at 80”.
Speaking to Catch, Sinha explained his position as a BJP member and further criticised the way current government is functioning.
In a no holds barred interview, the former finance minister of India argued that since the NDA-1 government lead by Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, the country has not seen a single new economic idea.
He considers demonetisation, which the Modi government would showcase as its big ticket measure, as a complete disaster.
As a financial journalist, his interface with the two dominant 'isms'- Marxism and Capitalism- has made him realise that an ideal economic order of the world would lie somewhere between the two. Associate Editor at Catch, Neeraj writes on everything related to business and the economy. He has been associated with Businessworld, DNA and Business Standard in the past. When not thinking about stories, he is busy playing with his pet dog, watching old Hindi movies or searching through the Vividh Bharti station on his Philips radio transistor.
