Surely, someone should pay?

Why is Mr Chidambaram still shooting off his mouth when he chickened out of standing for reelection for the Lok Sabha in 2014, leaving his son, Karti to receive a hammering, coming fourth among 5 candidates and losing his deposit. Wonder if Karti thanked him? Perhaps he is unable to accept that people rejected him on his and the Congress Party's dismal record in office. He has been blaming Mr Pranab Mukherjee for the Congress getting a woeful 44 seats in the Lok Sabha and so that it cannot claim the post of the  Leader of the Opposition. " My government was punished in 2014 elections after we spent more money in 2009 as part of a stimulus package. Due to this, we had to violate fiscal consolidation norms. The inflation went up to 14% and rupee lost its value. Finally, people rejected our government and we lost the elections," said Chidambaram. Is he just being cute or does he have amnesia? He persistently refers to his second stint as Finance Minister between 2012 and 2014, perhaps hoping that we would forget that he was also in charge of the ministry between May 2004 and November 2008, which is when all the damage was done. When he took charge in May 2004 the rate if retail inflation was 2.83% and the dollar was buying around 46 rupees. The real damage was done in 2007, the year before the sub-prime crisis caused a global meltdown, when the rate of retail inflation was around 7% and it was only the strength of the rupee, which reached highs of 39 to the dollar, that was keeping inflation from jumping into double digits, by making imports, especially oil, cheaper. That was when the interest rate should have been raised, to control inflation, and the Reserve Bank should have bought dollars, to cheapen the rupee, which would have supported exports, while building up our foreign exchange reserves to provide support to the rupee in the future. But what is really amazing is that the Prime Minister, who was built up as some genius in economics because of his degrees from Cambridge and Oxford, did nothing to control the damage being done to the nation by the pretenders in his cabinet. He sat around for 10 years while assorted crooks looted trillions of rupees through various scams. With no knowledge in economics we were writing in 2009 that the NREGA scheme, the farmers loan waiver and the Sixth Pay Commission will raise the fiscal deficit and cause inflation so why did Manmohan Singh not see it? And if he did see it but kept quiet then he is even more culpable. Finally, after losing the elections the Congress surreptitiously lifted controls on import of gold, allowing import of 588.1 tonnes of the yellow metal, to increase the Current Account Deficit so that the new government had no room for stimulating growth. Surely someone should be made to pay for such criminal behavior? Yet they keep blabbing. No sharam, no izzat! This blog will return on 16 March.