Former Finance Minister and Communist Party of India (Marxist) central committee member T.M. Thomas Isaac has said that the worst is yet to come for the Indian economy if the government is not ready to mend its ways in the policy level.
Delivering a talk on ‘Inflation and Economic Crisis of India,’ organised by the Keluettan Study and Research Centre at the NGO Hall in Kozhikode on Tuesday, Dr. Isaac said the country was paying for the “mistakes” its government committed in the past without listening to the warnings given by its critics. “By all chance the rupee will slide further down and reach at Rs.75 against the dollar by the end of this month,” he said.
Dr. Isaac, who alleged that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Finance Minister P. Chidambaram were continuing with their measures to surrender the country and its people to foreign powers, said it was high time they took the people of the country into confidence to come out of this crisis instead of shamelessly stooping down to any level to attract foreign investments, even at this stage. “It is sad that we have a Prime Minister and a Finance Minister who have more faith in foreign powers than in its people,” he said.
He said the people of the country, who had sacrificed everything to win independence from foreign powers once, would definitely come forward to salvage it from the present crisis if the government could evoke their confidence and assure them that the benefits of its development would unfailingly come to them.
“The government can inspire the country’s confidence only if it has convincing policies and programmes for the real well-being of its common man,” he said.
He stated that the government’s desperate measures to check the fall of rupee were yielding no result. This, he said, was because the government was feigning ignorance about the vicious role played by the speculators and future traders. “The Finance Minister’s statement that the instability of the Indian stock exchanges was not reflecting the state of the Indian economy was only showing the pathetic sense of grasp he has over what he is dealing with,” said Dr. Isaac.
The former Finance Minister, who forecast that the fall of the Indian Rupee would stop only with the fall of the government, said any political leader with a basic sense of economics could have foreseen this fall given the economic policies the government was pursuing all these years. Keluettan Study and Research Centre director K.T. Kunhikannan, CPI(M) district secretary T.P. Ramakrishnan, among others, spoke.
