'Stubborn' Modi government is clueless on economy: P Chidambaram in post-bail presscon

Holding his maiden press conference after walking out of Tihar jail on bail just a day ago, Chidambaram made some strong comments saying, "Govt is wrong because it's clueless, unable to look for obvious clues as it is stubborn and mulish in defending its mistakes like demonetisation, GST, tax terrorism, regulatory overkill, protectionism and centralised control of decision-making in PMO."

The Congress veteran gave a hint right in the morning that he is back in shape after spending 106 days in jail over the INX Media case saying, "Unfortunately the government can't suppress my voice in Parliament."

Carrying on with the same tone, Chidambaram ripped apart the Modi government which he called is unable to address the problem in economy, forgetting about the solution.

"The place to start is diagnosis. If the diagnosis is wrong, the prescription will be useless, may be even fatal. Even after 7 months into the fiscal year, the BJP government believes that the problems faced by the economy are cyclical," the Rajya Sabha MP said.

"Nothing sums up state of the economy better than the following series of numbers- 8, 7, 6.6, 5.8, 5 and 4.5," he added reflecting on the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) figure of 4.5% in the second quarter of fiscal year 2019-2020.

Slamming Prime Minister Narendra Modi repeatedly over his "silence" on economy in the press conference, Chidambaram said, "PM has left it to his ministers to indulge in bluff and bluster. The net result, as The Economist put it, is that the government has turned out to be an ‘incompetent manager’ of the economy."

Reasoning out the cause of economic slowdown, the level of which the former Finance Minister considers as unprecedented, Chidambaram said, "There is less demand among the people because they have less money and less appetite to consume due to uncertainty and fear. Unless demand increases, there will not be increased production or output or increased investment."

"Government is calling the present slowdown ‘cyclical’. Thank god they have not called it seasonal. It is structural and the government has no solutions or reforms that would address the structural problems," the senior politician said taking a swipe at the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government on a day the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) slashed the GDP growth projection from 6.1% to 5 per cent.

Image Credit: Congress Twitter