NEW DELHI: Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley called him a “job seeker at 80” in a veiled attack, veteran BJP leader Yashwant Sinha hit back saying the former wouldn’t have a job if that were true.
“If I were a job applicant, he (Arun Jaitley) would not be there in the first place,” Yashwant Sinha said in Mumbai late on Thursday.
Veteran BJP leader Yashwant Sinha had, in the Indian Express on Wednesday, written that he would fail in his national duty if he didn’t speak against “the mess the finance minister had made of the economy”.
Arun Jaitley broke his silence at a book function but refrained from taking Sinha’s name. He said he does not have the luxury as yet of being a former finance minister nor does he have the luxury of being a former finance minister who has turned a columnist.
Arun Jaitley reminded Sinha, a colleague of his in the BJP, that when he was finance minister in the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government in 1998-2002, non-performing assets (NPAs) of commercial banks stood at a “staggering” 15% of total advances.
“The Reserve Bank of India had to bring down interest rates radically to deal with the high level of NPAs,” Jaitley said.
Finance Minister Arun Jaitley said the Goods and Services Tax (GST) collections in the first two months have met the target and going forward the revenue will see further surge.
Former finance minister Yashwant Sinha said “raid raj” has become the order of the day and the Income Tax department is investigating cases involving millions of people.
Congress leader Shashi Tharoor on Thursday said that Yashwant Sinha had highlighted what the opposition and Congress had been saying for quite some time.
Finance Minister Arun Jaitely said that after coming to power, the Modi government had sought to clean up political funding and the administration was in final stages of reworking the rules.
The Finance Minister also countered Sinha and Chidambaram’s criticism of economic growth moderating to 5.7% during the June quarter.
