Merely passing the buck to UPA regime is no solution to India’s problems – Dr Manmohan Singh, Former Prime Minister

Picture : Twitter / ANI

Former Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh has said that the Narendra Modi government should stop blaming the UPA for every economic crisis, as five years was sufficient time to come up with solutions.

Addressing a press conference ahead of Maharashtra elections, he was replying to a question on Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman’s comments in the US, where she said the banking sector passed through its worst phase during the tenures of Singh and former RBI Governor Raghuram Rajan.

The NDA government should have learnt from the UPA’s “mistakes”, and provided “credible solutions”, Singh said. Had the NDA government learnt from the mistakes, fraud-accused jeweler Nirav Modi and other loan defaulters would not have fled with public money, or the banks’ situation would not have gone from “bad to worse”, Singh said.

“You cannot claim year after year that the fault lies with the UPA (United Progressive Alliance), you have been in office for five and half years and that is long enough period for a government committed to public welfare to do some credible things. Merely passing the buck to UPA regime is no solution to India’s problems,” the former PM said.

Talking about his tenure as prime minister between 2004-14, Singh said, “What happened did happen. There were some weaknesses. “But this government has been in office for five and half years, it should have learnt from our mistakes and provided credible solutions to those problems which are still affecting our economy,” he said. “You may score some brownie points, but you are not finding solutions to the problems of the suffering humanity of our country,” Singh added.