Finance Minister Mr. Jaitley has lost his marbles
Finance Minister Mr. Jaitley has lost his marbles. Pontificating in America, and knowing he was talking to seasoned capitalists, state of the art suit boot people, he said, “where the country went wrong was that the government started concentrating not on increasing productivity or generating wealth but on just distributing what the country already had”. I’m sure he must have got a lot of laughs for that statement. Maybe they passed the spittoon around and took turns spitting into it and on all the poor in India, farmers, the rural poor, urban migrants, tribals, children suffering from malnutrition, citizens with no Medicare.
Yet he never said anything about how his government has slashed the budgets of these Congress welfare ideas in his first year. He didn’t explain why some of the budgets were even increased by him. And where are the reforms? They are coming, he says. And what are they? Labor reforms, merging and professionalizing public sector banks, stopping bad loans, privatization of Air India and the railways, changes in the RBI Act, removal of subsidies? Or is he talking of Ghar Wapsi, Yoga, free copies of the Gita, religious hegemony? He doesn’t say.
He speaks patronizingly about India’s aspirations and says we are not satisfied with a 5 – 5.5% GDP growth. Naturally Mr Jaitley, with your new computing methods 7- 7.5% is the old 5 – 5.5% growth rate. To hit a real 7% you have to be at a + 9% growth rate. To further increase anger and disgust about the past government, to deflect attention, to tackle America’s dislike for “Commies”, he made the astounding statement, “In terms of political administration, within the government structure the prime minister never had the last word, authorities were outside the government structure – the kind that could happen in a communist state”.
And here we are in India, complaining the Chinese only raced ahead of us because they had the advantage of communism, that their Government policy was implemented seamlessly and labour was on a tight leash, well trained to behave. His alternative is Modi Sarkar, a government with one mouth, one brain, one ear, one stomach, and one heart. What could be more text book communistic than that?
