Nirmala Sitharaman is an Indian politician with the Bharatiya Janta Party (BJP), and has served as Minister of Finance and Minister of Corporate Affairs since 2019 (this is as of March 2024). In the first Modi government, Sitharaman served as the Minister of Defence between 2017 and 2019, thereby becoming India’s second female defence minister and the second female finance minister after Indira Gandhi, and the first full-time female minister to hold each of those portfolios.
Sitharaman first joined the BJP in 2004 and was appointed party spokesperson six years later. She was first elected to the Rajya Sabha in 2014. While presenting her first budget, she made a statement by replacing the traditional budget briefcase with a ‘bahi-khata’ with the National Emblem to carry the speech and other documents.
If memory serves me right , one of the explanations given by the congress on Rafale and not going thru with it was the proximity of elections
1. One does not know why the UPA government could not finalize the Rafale aircrafts deal. But I tend to agree with the view that the UPA government was really never against minimizing corruption in defence ministry purchases. 2. Citizens like me are not at all convinced that the Congress President Rahul Gandhi is really against corruption, whether in defence deals or elsewhere. Citizens think that (a) Rahul Gandhi wishes to make use of allegations of corruption to seize power; (b) since unaccounted money is used in elections, Rahul Gandhi has to take a stand on curbing use of black money in elections. 3. Citizens wish that Rahul Gandhi should make a public announcement about what the Congress led government would do about Rafale deal assuming that UPA govt. comes to power after 2019 Lok Sabha election. Would the Rafale deal be then renegotiated, would it be cancelled and would those who are responsible in NDA government be tried for misuse of power? These questions are in citizens’ mind and the need a straight forward answer and they need to be answered. Let us how Rahul Gandhi responds.
बेसिर पैर का वक्तव्य
Difficult to judge the accuracy of this charge. However, it is a fact that in the last two years of its tenure, UPA II lacked the nerve and the political capital to go through a deal to purchase / manufacture 126 fighter aircraft. This on top of St Antony’s reluctance to acquire anything more expensive than a pin cushion for MoD.