Senior Bharatiya Janata Party leader Yashwant Sinha on Wednesday said he had waited 13 months to get an appointment with Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and he has now decided to express his views in public, PTI reported.
“I have decided that now, I will not talk to the government,” Sinha said. He accused the BJP of accepting all the policies it had opposed during the rule of the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance.
The former finance minister has been at loggerheads with the BJP since September 2017, when he wrote an article attacking the government for the economic slowdown. The article led to verbal exchanges between him and other BJP members, including Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, who called him a “job applicant at 80”. Sinha had also criticised the government for introducing five different slabs for the Goods and Services Tax.
On Wednesday, he said “today’s BJP is not like the one in the days of Atalji and Advaniji.” Sinha said that during the time of former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and BJP veteran LK Advani, a “small-time worker could go to Delhi and meet party President Advani without an appointment”.
“Now, even senior and important leaders don’t get an appointment with the party President [Amit Shah],” he said in Madhya Pradesh’s Jabalpur. “So I was not surprised when I did not get an appointment for 13 months [with Modi],” he said.
Sinha will attend a farmers’ rally in the state on Thursday.
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