The Congress on Friday termed the Modi authorities’s white paper on the economic system a “white lie paper”, and stated it ought to have come out with a doc on points reminiscent of unemployment, border tensions and Manipur as a substitute.
The federal government’s white paper criticises the Congress-led UPA rule, saying it had turned the Indian economic system right into a non-performing one by way of indiscriminate income expenditure, off finances borrowings and a pile of dangerous money owed at banks.
Terming the doc a “hatchet job”, senior Congress chief and former Finance minister P Chidambaram stated in a press release, “It is a white-lie paper. Even the authors will not claim that it is an academic, well-researched or scholarly paper.
“It’s a political train supposed to rattling the earlier authorities and conceal the current authorities’s damaged guarantees, monumental failures and betrayal of the poor.”
He said a fair and unbiased assessment of any period will not start arbitrarily with 2004 and end abruptly in 2014.
“The paper launched at the moment just isn’t a white paper; it’s a paper that’s supposed to whitewash the numerous sins and commissions of the NDA authorities within the final 10 years,” he said.
Chidambaram said the appropriate answer to the so-called white paper is the hard-hitting document titled “10 Saal, Anyay Kaal, 2014-2024”.
Congress general secretary Jairam Ramesh echoed his colleague and said the the answer to the ‘white lie paper’ lies in the “10 Saal, Anyay Kaal…” document released by Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge.
“The black paper was a surgical strike on the white paper,” he said.
“The white paper (of the federal government) makes no point out of demonetisation, unemployment, inflation, and the rising financial disparity. The problems on which they need to come out with a white paper is the border state of affairs with China, border tensions… we’ve been demanding a white paper on that, they’re silent on that,” Ramesh told reporters outside Parliament.
He said the Congress has also been demanding a white paper on Manipur but the government had been silent on the matter.
“We had earlier requested for a white paper on demonetisation however they had been silent on that additionally. There isn’t a white paper on the 45-year excessive unemployment within the nation….The white paper is one more occasion. He (Modi) is an occasion supervisor as (L Ok) Advani ji had stated,” Ramesh said.
The government is “silent” on corruption and real issues like injustice to farmers, women and youth, he alleged.
“The PSUs are being offered to at least one or two of his buddies,” Ramesh alleged.
He also said ports, airports, railway, factories, oil refineries are being privatised.
Ramesh alleged that no government had made “wild guarantees” on assuming office as the Narendra Modi government had and then broken them without an expression of regret.
“In actual fact, the federal government laughed them away as election jumlas,” he said, referring to promises, including two crore jobs a year, bringing back black money stashed abroad, Rs 15 lakh to every bank account, giving petrol, diesel at Rs 35 a litre and doubling of farmers’ incomes.
In 2004, he said the UPA government had inherited an economy that had performed at a below-average rate in the previous six years.
“But, the Vajpayee authorities known as the second ‘India Shining’. The slogan recoiled on the federal government. The BJP-government suffered an ignominious defeat. The authors of the white-lie paper might realise that historical past has a manner of repeating itself,” the former minister noted.
Fiscal deficit, he said, was 4.5 per cent during UPA and 5.8 per cent during NDA, while household saving as percentage of GDP was 23 per cent under UPA and 19 per cent under NDA.
The Congress had alleged on Thursday that the government’s white paper on the country’s economy under the UPA rule is aimed at hiding “the darkish fact” and said hunger, price rise, unemployment and abject poverty are a lived reality for a vast majority of Indians under the Modi government.