New Delhi, Aug 31: Prime minister Manmohan Singh on Friday tried to fob off agitated Rajya Sabha members over the weakening rupee with a straight-faced and bare economic fact-sheet and rounded it with a pale Manmohanomic exhortation to get reforms going. “The easy reforms of the past have been done. We have the more difficult reforms to do such as reduction of subsidies, insurance and pension reforms, eliminating bureaucratic red tape and implementing Goods and Services Tax. These are not low hanging fruit and need political consensus.”
However, leader of the Opposition Arun Jaitley, responding to the prime minister’s written statement, argued: “This country has survived many economic crises. But there is one fundamental difference this time: the ability of the government to handle the crisis. He (the prime minister) has emphasised the larger consensus. Political consensus has not been built on the economy. It is the government that fractures and breaks the consensus.”
It was provocation enough for the prime minister. When he got up to reply after opposition leaders made their points, Singh tore into Jaitley’s remarks. He said the principal opposition party has not reconciled itself to the electoral defeats in 2004 and 2009, and that it has been obstructing the functioning of parliament.
He said that in no other democracy in the world that members of the principal opposition party walk into the Well of the House and shout, “PM chor hai, PM chor hai”.
When he was heckled about the missing files from the coal ministry with regard to the coal allotment scam, a Singh shot back, “I am not the custodian of files in the coal ministry.”
About the 2G spectrum scam and the coal allotment scam, Singh said “there are institutional arrangements” to deal with questions of corruption and there is no need for parliament to be stalled.
He confessed that “No central government can say that it can control all prices” and that “onion prices rice and fall”. He said that the situation is not comparable to 1991 and that the foreign reserves are in a better shape and the cover for imports for seven months. He was confident that the GDP growth rate for 2013-14 would be around 5.5 per cent, up from the present 3 per cent. He promised high, stable growth in two to three years.
It was a not an inspiring exchange between a peeved prime minister and a sulking opposition.
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