India's Gandhi slams government for economic 'mess'

November 21, 2000
Web posted at: 10:33 PM HKT (1433 GMT)

NEW DELHI, India (Reuters) -- Sonia Gandhi, the Italian-born leader of India's opposition Congress party, charged the coalition government on Tuesday with economic mismanagement and "wanton wastage" of national assets.

Addressing Congress lawmakers at the start of parliament's new session, the widow of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi also accused the government of tarring policy with a Hindu nationalist brush.

"The economy is in a mess. Our worst apprehensions have been proved right. Every parameter of growth is in disarray," she said.

Gandhi reeled off a catalogue of economic woes: a plunging rupee, rising inflation, a net outflow of foreign institutional investment, stagnating foreign direct investment and a decline in foreign exchange reserves for the first time in a decade.

"It is easy to blame all this on the oil price rise, but isn't (the) government's duty to anticipate crises?" she asked.

"The only answer the government has to this challenge is the indiscriminate disinvestments of national assets," she said, referring to the government's privatization programme.

"We demand an immediate stop to this wanton wastage of national wealth. We will insist on reviving the debate on disinvestment in this session," she added.

The Congress leader said the government's forecast of 7-8 percent growth in gross domestic product for fiscal 2000/01 (April-March) was too optimistic: growth now looked set to be "even more dismal" than 1999/2000, when it was 6.4 percent.

She said that halfway through the current financial year industrial production growth was stagnating at about half the 11.0 percent rate targeted in the budget, and agricultural output was unlikely to exceed last year's growth of 1.3 percent.

FOOD MOUNTAIN

Gandhi also took the government to task for allowing the Food Corporation of India's stockpile to become an "unmanageable mountain" of at least 40 million tons because prices of subsidized food for the poor had been racked up.

"...the government went ahead with doubling prices, and are today stuck with an un-sellable food stock where more than two-thirds of the people go to bed hungry," she said.

Gandhi, who was re-elected as party president last week, said Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee's recent visit to the United States had produced no tangible results.

She also said Vajpayee's comments at a New York rally, which was organized by a hardline Hindu group linked to his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), revealed the real face of his government.

Vajpayee told his audience of saffron-clad Hindu holy men and others at Staten Island that "if the electorate gives us a clear two-thirds majority we will build the India of our dreams."

He was responding to a question on the BJP's goal of building a Hindu temple at a site where a mosque was torn down by Hindu zealots in 1992. The incident sparked India's most serious communal violence for half a century and lent the BJP its enduring image as a Hindu fundamentalist party.

"We shall articulate the concerns of the minorities in both the houses (of parliament)," Gandhi said. "We shall not fail them in their hour of need."

Copyright 2000 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

For more ASIANOW news, myCNN.com will bring you news from the areas and subjects you select.

See related sites about South Asia
South Asian media sites

Note: Pages will open in a new browser window

External sites are not endorsed by CNN Interactive.