Same policies, different names.

Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman has chosen the US to attack former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and former Reserve Bank (RBI) Governor Raghuram Rajan for the dire state of the Indian economy. To that Singh riposted, "This government has now been in office for five years. It should have learnt from our mistakes and provided a credible solution for the economy." She is incensed by Rajan's speech in which he said that India's fiscal deficit 'conceals' a lot and the economy is on the brink of a 'worrisome' situation. To that Sitharaman said that public sector banks had their worst phase under Singh and Rajan, in a lecture at Columbia University. The economy was indeed in bad shape in 2014 when Narendra Modi was elected prime minister and the rupee plunged to 69 to the dollar in 2013 in, what is known as, the 'taper tantrum'. Rajan forced banks to reveal their bad loans. In reply to a question from a parliamentary panel Rajan said that most bad loans originated between 2006 and 2008 which was the first term of Manmohan Singh as prime minister. True, but, as Singh said, Modi has been prime minister for over 5 years with absolute majority in the Lok Sabha, so excuses sound lame. Moreover, Modi had a huge windfall when the price of crude oil, which had been consistently over $100 a barrel, dropped to $30, so that the government earned over Rs 11 trillion in higher taxes on petroleum products. Instead of recapitalizing banks Modi wasted the windfall to distribute handouts to win elections. This weakened the economy and, "The sequence of demonetisation and GST was essentially the straw that seems to have broken the Indian economy's back because it came at a point when the Indian economy was already relatively weak." The state of the economy is so bad that the government has been suppressing and cooking statistical data, forcing two statisticians to resign in disgust. 311 Indian citizens have just been deported from Mexico where they were apprehended for trying to sneak illegally into the US. These men paid Rs 2-3 million each to people smugglers to be taken by a circuitous route to Mexico from where they would cross the border illegally into the US. If Manmohan Singh's policies were so bad why is Modi copying them by waiving loans to farmers? Sitharaman has just forced state-run banks to throw Rs 817 billion in 'loan melas', where loans are distributed without due diligence. This is exactly what the Congress did in the 1980s, when Manmohan Singh was the RBI Governor, and which was partly responsible for the crisis in 1991. Modi has copied all Congress actions by changing their names. He is renowned as a 'name-changer'.