NEW DELHI, 7 June 2008 — Blaming the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) for failing to check rising inflation, India’s main opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) yesterday demanded resignation of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. “You, the economic prime minister, cannot manage the economy, cannot manage India. Please quit!” BJP spokesman Ravishankar Prasad said at a news conference.
Claiming that inflation had reached new highs when Singh was finance minister in the P.V. Narsimha Rao government, Prasad said the situation today was similar with Singh as prime minister.
“Today inflation has reached 8.24 percent. On March 31, Finance Minister P. Chidambaram promised the country that recent measures taken by the government would show results in two weeks. It has since been eight weeks and the sufferings of the common man have grown by the day,” Prasad said. Despite Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar’s claim that a good harvest would improve the situation, there has been no relief, Prasad said. “We have had a bumper crop of 210,000 tons. This has not brought any relief. It is all due to the UPA’s mismanagement of food economy,” he said.
Inflation for the week ending May 24 rose to 8.24 percent from 8.1 percent for the week ending May 17. Nonfood articles, raw rubber, raw cotton and groundnut seeds became expensive by one to two percent in the week ending May 24. A year ago, wholesale prices-based inflation was at 5.15 percent. Inflation is expected to hit a new high two weeks from now when the full impact of the recent increase in fuel prices will be felt.
Finance Minister P. Chidambaram admitted the government had not been able to check inflation. “We have not overcome all our problems.”
But the finance minister called the BJP National Executive Committee’s economic resolution as an exercise in self-deception and “aimed at spreading disinformation.”
Lashing out at the BJP for making political capital out of people’s misery, Chidambaram said criticism not accompanied by concrete advice to ease prices was not welcome.“The government of India, like governments all over the world, is fighting inflation. We have taken fiscal, monetary and administrative measures and we are willing to take more measures,” he said. For the second day, strikes and agitations against the federal government’s fuel price hike yesterday paralyzed life in West Bengal, Andhra Pradesh, Orissa and Tripura.
