Chidambaram Says Govt Clueless About Economy

A day after his release from Tihar jail on bail, former Union Finance Minister P. Chidambaram On Thursday tore into the Modi government’s economic policies while asserting his “record as a minister and his conscience was clear”.

Mr. Chidambaram, who spent 106 days in jail in cases of money laundering and corruption, also hinted at the hardships faced in his long incarceration by stating that his “spine and head had become stronger by sleeping on a wooden cot without a pillow”.

“The place to start is diagnosis. If the diagnosis is wrong, the prescription will be useless, may be even fatal. Even after seven months into the fiscal year, the BJP government believes that the problems faced by the economy are cyclical. The government is wrong. It is wrong because it is clueless,” he said at a press conference.

“It is unable to look for the obvious clues because it is stubborn and mulish in defending its catastrophic mistakes like demonetization, flawed GST, tax terrorism, regulatory overkill, protectionism, and centralized control of decision-making in the PMO [Prime Minister’s Office],” he stated.

voters