Yashwant Sinha: A virulent critic of the Modi government

Yashwant Sinha was with BJP for 22 years

The Opposition’s Presidential candidate Yashwant Sinha. File. | Photo Credit: PTI

The Opposition parties that want to mount an ideological contest against the BJP are at pains to explain themselves for picking bureaucrat-turned-politician Yashwant Sinha who was for 22 years with the very party they seek to oppose.

The Opposition leaders quoted his record of the last four years, since he resigned from the BJP in 2018 as a virulent critic of the Narendra Modi government, as one of the reasons for his selection.

His son Jayant Sinha, who was MOS, Finance, in the first term of the Narendra Modi government, continues to be a BJP MP from Hazaribagh constituency in Jharkhand which Mr. Sinha has represented in the past.

Mr. Sinha joined Indian Administrative Service in 1960 and resigned in 1984, when he was joint secretary in the Union Ministry of Road Transport, to join active politics. He was with the former Prime Minister Chandra Shekhar’s Janata Party and also served as Finance Minister in his short-lived government between November 1990 and June 1991. He joined the BJP in the run-up to the 1996 Lok Sabha elections. He has served as Finance Minister and External Affairs Minister in the Atal Behari Vajpayee government.

Mr. Sinha fell out with the BJP leadership after he was denied the party ticket in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections. Over the next few years, he was pushed to the margins as the old guard was forced to make way for a Narendra Modi-centric BJP. After more than two decades with the BJP, he resigned from the party in 2018. After trying to form a non-political platform, Mr. Sinha joined the Trinamool Congress Party last year. He quit the party on Tuesday morning, hours before his name was announced.

Abhishek Banerjee, national general secretary of the TMC, credited Mr. Sinha for exposing the anti-people policies and autocratic rule of the Narendra Modi government. He dismissed his saffron past saying, “In West Bengal, the leader of the Opposition is a person who joined the BJP just three months before the Assembly elections. Didn’t Assam Chief Minister Hemanta Biswa Sarma spend the better part of his career in Congress? These questions therefore should be asked of the BJP”.

CPI(M) general secretary Sitaram Yechury also spoke on similar lines. “In the last few years, Mr. Sinha has taken a very consistent anti-BJP and anti-Modi position. He has been part of Opposition movements on Rafael, demonetisation, and GST. More importantly, larger unanimity among the Opposition parties appeared on his name,” he said.

The Congress general secretary Jairam Ramesh said that prior to Mr. Sinha’s association with the BJP, he was a socialist leader who had closely worked with Karpoori Thakur and also served as Finance Minister in a government supported by the Congress. “If I were to borrow the words of Vice-President Venkaiah Naidu, he has been a ‘persistent, consistent and insistent’ critic of the Modi government.