Bharatiya Janata Party leader Yashwant Sinha on Friday said that Finance Minister Arun Jaitley was “making personal attacks” against him. In response to Jaitley’s comments on Thursday describing him as a “job applicant@80”, Sinha said he did not need a job at this age.
“He delivered a well-researched speech but overlooked [Lal Krishna] Advaniji’s advice to refrain from personal attacks,” Sinha said. “If I was a job applicant, he would not be there in the first place,” Sinha had told The Indian Express on Thursday.
Sinha also asked how much black money Jaitley himself had brought back to India, as the Bharatiya Janata Party had promised before the 2014 Lok Sabha elections. On Thursday, Jaitley had said that with the demonetisation exercise in November 2016, the government had intended to expose the black money market and track down those operating in it.
Sinha added that it was a “cheap trick” if the government had asked his son, Union minister Jayant Sinha, to write an opinion piece to counter the claims he had made in a column on Wednesday. Yashwant Sinha had criticised the government for the decline in India’s Gross Domestic Product growth rate and described the Centre’s demonetisation drive as “an unmitigated economic disaster”. The former finance minister had said that despite low global oil prices, Jaitley had failed to use the extra finances to revive the economy.
But his son, Minister of State for Civil Aviation Jayant Sinha, on Thursday dismissed articles “drawing sweeping conclusions” on the Centre’s economic decisions.
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