Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman’s husband Parakala Prabhakar has advised the Narendra Modi-led Bharatiya Janata Party government to “embrace” the economic model put forward by former prime ministers PV Narasimha Rao and Manmohan Singh.
In a column for The Hindu, Prabhakar has argued that the current government should take a cue from the “Rao-Singh economic architecture”, referring to the liberalisation of economy ushered in by the Congress government in 1991, when Rao was the prime minister and Manmohan held the finance ministry.
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Tuesday 12 Nov. 2024
Prabhakar, in his column, opines that that the BJP, since its inception, has not been able to propose any economic framework of its own and has instead stayed occupied with critiquing Nehruvian socialism.
“The BJP’s flirting with Gandhian socialism did not last for more than a few months after its founding. In economic policy, the party mainly adopted ‘Neti Neti (Not this, Not this’), without articulating what was its own ‘Niti (policy),” he said.
Prabhakar goes on to suggest that the economic performance of the Modi government made it choose ‘a muscular political, nationalist, security platform’ to make its re-election bid.
In his column, Prabhakar also puts forth the proposition that BJP could portray Narasimha Rao on the economic front, just as it has done for Sardar Patel, on the political front.
The BJP has not challenged or rejected Rao’s 1991 architecture. A full-fledged embrace and an aggressive pursuit of it even now 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.
