Economist Parakala Prabhakar, husband of Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, said that the Indian government is “in denial mode” over the state of economy.
In a column in the Hindu, he wrote that the government should adopt the Rao-Singh economic model that led to liberalisation of the economy, instead of “critiquing the Nehruvian socialism”.
“While the government is still in denial mode, data flowing uninterruptedly into the public domain show that sector after sector is staring at a seriously challenging situation,” he wrote.
He put BJP’s inexplicable reluctance” as the main reason behind the slowdown.
“The rejection of Nehruvian ‘socialistic pattern of society’ was clear since the days of the Bharatiya Jana Sangh. The BJP’s advocacy of what can, at best, be loosely termed as a capitalist, free market framework remained untested in practice…In economic policy, the party mainly adopted ‘Neti Neti (Not this, Not this’), without articulating what was its own ‘Niti (policy),” Prabhakar wrote.
He pointed out that the party’s political assault on Nehruvian economy should not have graduated to an economic critique.
Prabhakar ended by saying that a full-fledged adaptation of the Rao-Singh economic model could provide the BJP and the government led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi a “lodestar to steer the economy out of the choppy waters it is in at present”.
