New Delhi: BJP Rajya Sabha MP Subramanian Swamy launched a scathing attack on his own party’s central ministers at the launch of his book Reset in the capital Wednesday.
Referring to his “good friend”, Statistics Minister D.V. Sadananda Gowda, Swamy said he knew “as much about stats as he did about Bharatnatyam”.
But Gowda wasn’t the only one to get the Swamy treatment. The outspoken leader also blamed Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s “lack of academic background” for him surrounding himself with people who have little knowledge of economics, resulting in the country’s current economic state. However, he did absolve the PM of blame, saying no one is telling him the truth.
“The problem is not supply, it is demand,” said Swamy. “But you can’t blame the Prime Minister, no one is telling him the truth.”
“Take Raghuram Rajan, he was a finance man, not an economist. Arvind Subramanian has no knowledge about the economy. Arun Jaitley didn’t know its ABC, and the problem continues,” he said, alluding to present Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman. “She has hardly been there, but clearly she does not have a macro approach.”
Asked if he had conveyed his concerns to the PM, Swamy said he couldn’t discuss such “technical” issues with Modi.
“I have written him letters and only received acknowledgements,” he said. “I can’t discuss technical subjects with him. He feels offended, but now I can send him my book.”
Swamy was speaking as part of a panel with political analyst Sanjaya Baru and chartered accountant M.R. Venkatesh at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library. His book was released by former President Pranab Mukherjee, who mentioned that Swamy was “not afraid to speak, unlike many others”.
Also read: BJP’s new rhetoric ahead of state polls — press meets, articles on ‘economic turnaround’
Demonetisation a ‘folly’
Recounting his conversation with Gowda in 2017, ahead of the launch of the Economic Survey, Swamy said: “He called for advice. I told him, isn’t releasing a survey that says demonetisation has not had any impact on the economy misleading the public?”
The survey, Swamy said, would have had to be written in December and printed in January for it to be released on 1 February, giving the government no time to actually evaluate the impact of demonetisation, which was announced by PM Modi on 8 November 2016.
“He (Gowda) told me he was required to do a job, and he had done it,” said Swamy.
Swamy, instead, proceeded to take the ratio of formal and informal sectors to calculate the approximate impact of the “folly” of demonetisation, and added that the government’s problem is not that it is fudging numbers, but actually that it isn’t “disclosing conceptual changes”.
“Take the $5 trillion economy. We are talking about doubling our economy. We need at least 14.4 per cent growth rate for that,” said Swamy. “But no one is saying it based on current, and not constant, price.”
Swamy also believes that the government’s move to slash corporate tax will not help the economy, which is in a “tailspin”. Instead, he feels the BJP should abolish income tax.
Also read: Nirmala Sitharaman’s corporate tax cut is tangential, because lack of demand ails economy