A “Hatchet Job” And “A White-Lie Paper”: Congress On Centre’s White Paper

After the BJP government released a White Paper on the performance comparison of both UPA and NDA, an official statement from Congress called it a “hatchet job” and “a white-lie paper”.

On Thursday, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman delivered a comprehensive assessment of economic governance by the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) as she presented the “White Paper” in the Lok Sabha. This document contrasts the economic decisions during the UPA tenure with the policies and achievements of the Modi government over the past decade.

Former finance minister and Congress’ Rajya Sabha MP P Chidambaram said while responding on the White Paper that “Even the authors will not claim that it is an academic, well-researched or scholarly paper. It is a political exercise intended to damn the previous government and hide the present government’s broken promises, monumental failures and betrayal of the poor”.

The finance minister, in the White Paper assessed that the UPA administration, which inherited a robust economy steered it towards non-performance over its decade-long tenure. Despite initially being credited with the reforms of 1991, the UPA leadership, as per the White Paper, veered away from this course. In the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis, the UPA government compromised macroeconomic fundamentals, the Center claimed.

To this, Mr Chidambaram has responded that a fair and unbiased assessment of any period will not start arbitrarily with 2004 and end abruptly in 2014. “It would have assessed a reasonable period before 2004 and included a reasonable period after 2014,” he said.

“The paper released today is not a white paper; it is a paper that is intended to whitewash the many sins and commissions of the NDA government in the last 10 years. The appropriate answer to the so-called white paper is the hard-hitting document titled ‘10 Saal, Anyay Kaal, 2014-2024’,” Mr Chidambaram said while referring to the document Congress party released right before the government’s White Paper.

Congress has also released a data table on the comparative performance of the UPA and the NDA “to put an end to the lie that everything during the UPA government was black and everything during the NDA government was shining white.”

Congress said never before in a period of five years had India achieved a growth rate of 8 per cent as it did in 2004-2009. “Never before in a period of 10 years had India achieved a growth rate of 7.5 per cent as it did in 2004-2014,” it added.