 "With Cong leadership laconic in recent yrs about owning up to economic reforms that Narasimha govt heralded, white paper, tabled by Sitharaman, has tried to portray Modi govt as true legatee")
With the Lok Sabha elections barely 60 days away, the white paper on the Indian economy, that Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman tabled in Parliament on Thursday, has attempted to refresh for the public the “decision stasis” and “scams” that the country suffered during the United Progress Alliance (UPA) government's ten years.
A subtext running through the white paper is that a “coalition of 26 parties” couldn’t take crucial decisions, such as rolling out the goods and services tax (GST) regime. In contrast, it contends that the current government has been “decisive” and “transformative” in its approach.
The paper has noted the “pervasive corruption” and “crisis of leadership” of the UPA years, referring to Congress leader Rahul Gandhi’s trashing of a government ordinance in September 2013. The lack of leadership, the paper stated, “came out in full public glare in the shameful public tearing up of an ordinance issued by the government”. Gandhi had termed it “complete nonsense,” an ordinance that the Manmohan Singh government brought to give convicted lawmakers a three-month reprieve from losing their membership of Parliament and legislative assemblies. However, Gandhi didn’t actually ‘tear’ the ordinance but said it should be “torn up and thrown away”.
The words “scams” and “corruption” are mentioned on 17 and 13 occasions in the white paper while “welfare” finds 11 mentions. The paper stated that “scams and corruption cases” shook the people’s confidence and listed the current status of 15 “scams”, including coal block allocation, Commonwealth Games, 2G telecom, and Saradha Chit Fund.
With the Congress leadership laconic in recent years about owning up to the economic reforms that the P V Narasimha Rao government heralded, the white paper has tried to portray the Narendra Modi government as the true legatee of the reform process. “Ironically”, the paper has noted, “the UPA leadership, which seldom fails to take credit for the 1991 reforms, abandoned them after coming to power in 2004.”
The paper has detailed that the current government implemented its predecessor’s welfare policies more efficiently. If the Modi-led NDA government renamed several UPA-era schemes but seldom admitted to it publicly, the white paper has finally acknowledged their contribution. It has, however, asserted that “our government” “substantially” improved “upon the UPA government’s programme delivery” and “undertook several policy innovations to tap India’s development potential.”
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The white paper has stated that the UPA’s “wastage of public resources sent the economy into a funk” and stressed that the UPA government capitalised on the reforms brought in by the previous government but fell short of delivering on crucial reforms promised by them”, such as the GST because it could not address the concerns of various states. It stated that Aadhar, introduced by the UPA in 2006, suffered until the current government reimagined and re-energised it.
To illustrate its efficiency, the white paper has compared the outcomes of eight “key programmes with similar objectives”. It has stated that the UPA government constructed 21.1 million affordable houses in rural areas from 2004 to 2014, while the current government built 26 million in 2014-24, and provided examples of more efficient performance in constructing toilets or expanding the coverage of the schemes from UPA’s “sporadic” with its “saturation” approach. It claimed that it inherited an economy with double-digit inflation, now brought down to a little over 5 per cent. The paper has questioned the UPA’s failure to invest in defence preparedness, including delaying the purchase of bullet proof jackets for soldiers. The paper doesn’t mention demonetisation.
The white paper ends with a line inspired by a Robert Frost poem, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, which was incidentally one of Jawaharlal Nehru's favourite poems, kept on his work table. “There are miles to go and mountains to scale before we sleep,” it states, concluding with a commitment to make India a developed nation by 2047. US President Joe Biden gifted Modi the first edition of Frost’s poems when he visited Washington in 2023.
