Jaswant Singh Gives B-Minus To Chidambaram

Former finance minister Jaswant Singh has given a B minus grade to his successor, P Chidambaram, for his performance in the last nine months.

Singh was finance minister only for 13 days in the BJP government last summer.

Responding to questions posed to him during an Internet chat show conducted by Rediff On The Net, Singh said : Given the fact that Chidambaram is not a free agent, constrained as he is by the minamalist programme of the 13-party arrangement, I would give him a B minus.

Singh quickly added that this is not a value judgement and not a comment on the abilities and intelligence of the present finance minister.

 

The former finance minister said cutting back the size of the government, its enormous waste and its expenditure would have been the first priority if he were entrusted with the task of managing the economy now.

Singh said he would have also moved away from the tendency towards over-governanance without having the ability to deliver.

I would have also addressed myself to the enormous debt that we have settled ourselves with and to mitigate this crippling disability of roughly having to pay five thousand crores per month as interest on national debt, he said.

The third area, he would have focussed on, would be the low tax base. In a country of near about 92 crore, only 1.1 crore are paying direct taxes.

We cannot have an ambitious economic reforms programme with such a low direct tax base. Something is not just simply imbalanced, it is very wrong also, he said.

Responding to a question on the widening oil pool deficit, Singh said the oil sector situation was a cause for serious concern over continuing irresponsibility in the management of the oil pool account.

There are answers and there are remedies. But they are not, I am afraid, within the capacity of this government, he said.

The former finance minister said India's oil exploration management had not been satisfactory at all and the country was paying a heavy price for this long neglect of the energy sector.

Singh also debunked the Prime Minister H D Deve Gowda's recent suggestion to meet the oil pool deficit through borrowings and said that borrowing to finance current expenditure was a sure recipe for further economic difficulties.

He parried a question on BJP's position on the controversial Tata-Singapore International Airlines project. The answer about Tata-SIA project has to be examined against the government's policy on civil aviation, he said.

Singh said without the safety net of unemployment protection or even a rudimentary welfare state, no economic reform programme can envisage an exit policy. What is needed is a reform of labour laws in the country, he added.

Singh explained the BJP's stand on Swadeshi as a movement that did not mean a total ban on foreign goods.

Swadeshi is an asssertion of India's economic sovereignty. The philosophy of Swadeshi attempts to raise the levels of pride in India and things Indian and to cultivate a sense of self-reliance.

I have a profound belief that India must modernise... India must not westernise, he said.