Yashwant finds Congress more Left than the Left

Criticising the Budget presented by Union Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee,senior BJP leader Yashwant Sinha said the budget intended to take the country back to the era of reforms by stealth.

Criticising the Budget presented by Union Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee,senior BJP leader Yashwant Sinha said the budget intended to take the country back to the era of reforms by stealth. He was speaking at the Bharat Chamber of Commerce in Kolkata on Saturday.

The Congress is not reformist and is more Left than the Left. The party is introducing reforms by stealth and is shifting from transparency to opacity in reforms. This is not the same Congress,not the same Manmohan Singh,who introduced reforms in 1990s, he said.

Alleging that the much-talked about 144 per cent increase in the NREGA allocation is eyewash,he said: The NREGS is a bottomless pit into which thousands of crores have disappeared. The scheme should have been modeled on the Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana (PMGSY) launched by the NDA government.

Mukherjee was presenting his first budget after about 25 years. It should have been the governments vision for the next five years. But many things initiated during the first tenure of the UPA government found no mention in his speech. It was a budget designed to keep their political allies in Bengal and Tamil Nadu happy, Sinha said.

With resources falling short,Sinha said,the government should have targeted foreign direct investment (FDI). But FDI didnt find even a mention in the budget speech. The message going out to foreign investors is that this government is not serious about reforms, he added.

Claiming that Mukherjee had unnecessarily singled out public sector banks for praise,the former Union FM said: Private banks and foreign banks in India are doing well. Its surprising to hear Mukherjee praising nationalised banks for their performance.

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