Rahul Gandhi says BJP government clueless on economy but ‘picks holes’ in UPA era rule too

Congress leader Rahul Gandhi has said that the economy was facing a ‘structural crisis’ but the prime minister, finance minister and their team were ‘devoid of vision’ to deal with it and hence have become ‘panicky’. Curiously, he said the effectiveness of the economic reforms that the Congress government rolled out in 1991 had run its course by 2012. He didn’t elaborate on what the Manmohan Singh-P Chidambaram team could have done about it in the last two years of the UPA regime.

“The problem is not cyclic, it is structural. The economic crisis that we faced in 1991 has resurfaced. The solutions that we brought in 1991 worked till 2012 and I believe that without a new approach we will not be able to come out of this crisis. We need a new approach. Our plan for the economy, which worked from 1991 to 2012, stopped working after that,” Gandhi said at a news conference in New Delhi on Wednesday.

“We have to change our vision. Our strategy stopped working after 2012 and we wanted a new approach. PM Modi promised that he would bring a new approach for ‘New India’. Those were empty promises.”

Gandhi said Congress had people who had the expertise to deal with the crisis and mockingly offered to loan them to the government as ‘PM Modi and finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman don’t know how to address these structural’ issues’ and thus have become panicky. However, Gandhi’s cutoff date of 2012 made some Congress leaders to privately query whether he was blaming the UPA government for the economic crisis, instead of squarely attributing it to the Modi regime.

Gandhi said the Modi regime was managing the economic crisis only through the ‘₹23 lakh crore earned by hiking prices of oil products’ despite lower global crude oil prices and by putting hardships on ordinary people.

The demonetisation policy had hit the salaried class and MSMEs and now the monetisation policy was being done to help a select few, he alleged. “In the last 7 years, we have seen a new economic paradigm. Demonetisation on one side, and monetisation on the other side.”