Modi ‘unmade’ India: Yaswant Sinha in no-holds-barred book

New Delhi: Former Union finance minister Yashwant Sinha has claimed that the GDP numbers are misleading, RBI’s autonomy is in extreme danger and demonetisation is the biggest banking scam. In his new book, the former BJP leader said that Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s idea of self-employment is a “distraction from the more serious issue of unemployment and underemployment”.

Mr Sinha, who has been quite vocal about the government’s policies since the past couple of years, quit the BJP in April. Party leaders have been dismissing his allegations on several issues with BJP chief Amit Shah once asking if people should believe the ministers or those “who did not get jobs”.

According to Mr Sinha, the Prime Minister blew a golden opportunity to send the economy soaring to new heights. Though the book India Unmade: How the Modi Government Broke the Economy is a critique of the NDA government’s economic management, Mr Sinha says he has not always been a critic of Modi.

Mr Sinha said that the Prime Minister “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,” and added that his book demonstrates how “Modi unmade India”.

“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 Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leaders to say he should be made the party’s prime ministerial candidate in the 2014 elections,” he claims.

He has been severely critical of Mr Modi on demonetisation, jobs, GDP figures and Make in India among others policies and programmes.

“The Modi government’s lasting legacy will be the catastrophe that was the demonetisation of high-denomination currency on November 8, 2016,” he argues.

“Demonetisation was a whimsical decision that served no purpose of governance. It did, however, provide Modi with a populist campaign plank of having taken tough decisions to nab the corrupt rich. His decision paid a rich electoral dividend in Uttar Pradesh in 2017.

But as far as the constantly shifting governance objectives of demonetisation went, it was a big zero,” he says.