Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman's husband Parakala Prabhakar on Monday said that the government is in a denial mode over India’s economic slowdown even as data in the public domain show that many sectors have a challenge situation at hand.
In his piece published in The Hindu, Prabhakar, 60, a former communications adviser to the government of Andhra Pradesh, also criticized the ruling party for attacking the Nehruvian economic framework, saying that the party think-tank "fails to realise" that the attack remains more a political assault and can never graduate to an economic critique.
In reaction to his critique, Sitharaman said from 2014 to 2019,"we have done fundamental reforms". She further pointed out a list of measures including the Goods and Services Tax, Aadhaar and the delivery of cooking gas that the government has taken to boost the economy growth.
Prabhakar had pitched that the BJP should embrace the PV Narasimha Rao-Manmohan Singh economic architecture to steer the economy out of choppy waters.
"Constructs such as 'Integral Humanism' could not be rendered into practical policy initiatives in the modern market-driven, globalised world. The BJP could, therefore, have released itself from that limiting agenda by wholly embracing and even owning the Rao-Singh economic architecture," Prabhakar wrote in the Hindu article titled "A lodestar to steer the economy".