‘Government obsessed with putting blame on others’ says Dr Manmohan Singh
Former Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh has retaliated after Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman blamed him for the bad situation of banks. Dr. Manmohan Singh said that the government is obsessed with putting the blame on someone’s head. With this, he said that due to economic slowdown, apathy of the government, the future and aspirations of Indians are being affected. Besides crisis on the farmers due to low inflation, problems are also arising due to the import-export policy of the government. He also said that the business sentiment was very weak across Maharashtra, many units were closed. The BJP government is only trying to blame the opposition and failed to find a solution.
Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman had blamed the times of former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and former RBI Governor Raghuram Rajan for the condition of public sector banks. She had said that the tenure of Manmohan Singh and Rajan was the ‘worst phase’ for public sector banks. Sitharaman said in a lecture at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs on Tuesday that it is my first duty today to give ‘new life’ to all public banks. The Finance Minister said, ‘I respect Raghuram Rajan as a great scholar. He was taken to the central bank at a time when the Indian economy was in a boom phase.’
On former RBI Governor Rajan’s comment on Modi government, Sitharaman said that there were many problems related to bank loans during Rajan’s time. Rajan had recently targeted the Modi government in a lecture at Brown University, saying that in the first term, the Narendra Modi government did not do well on the economy front. The reason for this was the excessive reliance on leadership for any decision. Also, the leadership did not have a consistent, logical view of how to achieve economic growth.
“It was Rajan’s tenure as Governor of the Reserve Bank,” the Finance Minister said, “when loans were given through phone calls from conniving leaders. Banks have been dependent on government capital to get out of this difficulty.” He said, ‘Dr. Singh was the Prime Minister and I am sure that Dr. Rajan will agree that he had a consistently clear view of India’s economy ‘.
