Narendra Modi blew golden chance to transform India from poor to middle-income country: Yashwant Sinha in new book

Yashwant Sinha has criticised Prime Minister Narendra Modi for many of his policy decisions including demonetisation and unemployment in his new book.

Yashwant Sinha parted ways from the BJP in April 2018. (Image: PTI)

Former Finance Minister and former cabinet member of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) Yashwant Sinha has criticised Prime Minister Narendra Modi for many of his policy decisions including demonetisation and unemployment in his new book. Titled as ‘India Unmade: How Narendra Modi Broke the Economy’, Sinha’s new book highlights some major flaws in decision making capability of PM Modi-led Central government. “GDP numbers are misleading, RBI’s autonomy is in extreme danger and demonetisation is the biggest banking scam, claims Sinha in his book. He believes that PM Modi’s idea of self-employment is nothing but a way of distracting people from more serious issue of unemployment in the country. Sinha, on various instances, has been quite vocal in criticising PM Modi and his government on GST, demonetisation and Make in India among other policies and programmes. After decades-long association with the BJP, Sinha parted ways from the party in April 2018. According to Sinha, Modi blew a golden opportunity to send the economy soaring to new heights. “He could have fixed the UPA’s legacy issues and fundamentally raised India from a poor country to a middle-income country, but he squandered the chance,” he says, adding his book demonstrates how PM Modi unmade India. Though the book criticises the incumbent Prime Minister for disturbing the economy of the country, Sinha says he has now always been a critic of Modi. “Nor do I have a personal vendetta against him for not appointing me minister or giving me some other post, as some people incorrectly speculate… In fact, the truth is that I recognised his mettle early on and was one of the first senior BJP leaders to say he should be made the party’s prime ministerial candidate in the 2014 elections,” he claims. “The Modi government’s lasting legacy will be the catastrophe that was the demonetisation of high-denomination currency on November 8, 2016,” he argues. “The malaise of Indian industry during Modi’s tenure is typified by his most famous flagship scheme, Make in India. It is his biggest failure; it is also an unoriginal idea. It is nothing more than a revival of the National Manufacturing Competitiveness Council that the UPA set up in 2004, whose first chairman was V Krishnamurthy,” Sinha talks about Make in India in his book. The former Finance Minister further says that the jobs that the PM Modi has mentioned like ‘pakoda’ sellers, autorickshaw drivers, tea-stall boys and newspaper deliverers are all in the informal sector and are nobody’s idea of an aspirational job.