Picture : ANI / X
Congress has termed the Modi government’s white paper on the economy a “white lie paper”, and said it should have come out with a document on issues such as unemployment, border tensions and Manipur instead.
The government’s white paper criticises the Congress-led UPA rule, saying it had turned the Indian economy into a non-performing one through indiscriminate revenue expenditure, off budget borrowings and a pile of bad debts at banks.
According to PTI report, Terming the document a “hatchet job”, senior Congress leader and former Finance minister P Chidambaram said in a statement, “It is a white-lie paper. Even the authors will not claim that it is an academic, well-researched or scholarly paper.
“It is a political exercise intended to damn the previous government and hide the present government’s broken promises, monumental failures and betrayal of the poor.” He said a fair and unbiased assessment of any period will not start arbitrarily with 2004 and end abruptly in 2014.
“The paper released today is not a white paper; it is a paper that is intended to whitewash the many sins and commissions of the NDA government in the last 10 years,” he said.
Chidambaram said the appropriate answer to the so-called white paper is the hard-hitting document titled “10 Saal, Anyay Kaal, 2014-2024”.
He slammed the jumla by the government too, saying, “No government on assuming office had made wild promises as the Narendra Modi government and broken them without an expression of regret. In fact, the government laughed them away as election jumlas. Here are some: 2 crore jobs a year, Bring back black money stashed abroad in 100 days, Rs 15 lakh to every citizen in his/her bank account, Petrol, diesel at Rs 35 a litre, Farmers’ incomes will be doubled, Achieve USD 5 trillion economy by 2023-24, House to every family by 2022, 100 smart cities by 2022”
