People tired of BJP rhetoric: Yashwant Sinha

Excerpts of Yashwant Sinha’s interview with DT Next are as follows …

The message is loud and clear. This election was held in five phases and for over five months it gave an opportunity for the entire BJP leadership including Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Home Minister Amit Shah and its Working President, Defence Minister and all other senior leaders to go on canvass for the party throughout the state.  They only raised divisive issues like Art 370, Ram Temple and Triple Talaq and in the later part the issues of Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and National Register of Citizens (NRC). They even claimed they will win 65 of the 81 seats on the back of the performance of “double engine” -- the Centre and State government. The message is loud and clear now and it shows that the people of Jharkhand have not been impressed by these divisive issues. Another reason for BJP’s debacle is ‘the economy, which is stupid’.

Yes, it is very clear. In the Lok Sabha elections, the opposition parties were not able to manage the alliance of even major parties, In the Assembly polls, the BJP broke its alliance with AJSU. Now AJSU and JVM were not part of the opposition alliance and yet if major parties JMM, Congress and RJD could come together they can take on BJP. My view is that it directly reflects on the national leadership of BJP as it left no stone unturned by raking up divisive issues. Look at what happened in Haryana and Maharashtra, where their claims fell flat.

Both are extremely ill-conceived steps.  We must understand one thing.  In 2003 the Citizenship Act was amended during the Vajpayee government’s time. It had a decision that there will be a census taken in 2011 which will collect details of the people including biometric data for a National Population Register. It did not raise any hackles. In between the Aadhaar came.  The UPA was confused between NPR and Aadhaar.  The UPA came with a flawed bill on Aadhaar which was struck down by a parliamentary standing committee.  The BJP came to power in 2014 and the initial indication was they will rather go in for NPR.  Suddenly Modi was taken in by Aadhaar.  The next step could very well be a National Register of Indian Citizens (NRIC). But instead they have gone for the CAA to supplement the NRC. The Assam Accord was to find out all aliens. But in order to preserve their vote bank (out of the 19 lakh people found to be non-citizens), they came up with this CAA to give citizenship to the Hindu population which is in complete violation of the CAA. The CAA is highly flawed and divisive because it has kept out Muslims. How did they decide only three countries. What about persecution of Muslims like Rohingyas in Myanmar and Sri Lankan Tamils? The refugees from the three countries could have been given citizenship even under the present laws.  How was Adnan Sami, Pakistan singer, given citizenship?  This is nothing but a very dirty attempt to divide society between Hindus and Muslims.

If you look at the economic performance -- where the government started and where it ended.  It is true that the BJP inherited a difficult economic situation but it was full of potential because the international oil price was down and the government had a leg up for managing fiscal deficit and other problems. It stayed there during the entire first term of five years.  But instead of tackling legacy issues like NPA of the banks and sectoral slowdown, the BJP wasted time and ventured to undertake demonetisation in 2016 and followed it up with the botched up implementation of the GST law.  Reasonable voices were ignored completely.  When I wrote an article in the Indian Express in 2017 about the crash-landing of the economy, they got personal with me.  I was still in BJP then.  Not only danger signals were ignored, they came up with dressed up GDP figures.  Even 4.5 per cent GDP growth rate now is suspect.  The real growth rate probably will be negative. The agriculture and rural sector continue to be under stress and the government is doing nothing about it.  All the talk of US$ 5 trillion economy is absolute bunkum.