Ditto Mr PM: Chidambaram shares 2013 tweet of Modi on economy, jobs loss

In what could be called a rebounding piece of advice for Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Congress leader P Chidambaram on Wednesday (September) shared a seven-year-old tweet by the then Chief Minister of Gujarat, to caution him about the deteriorating state of the economy, literally “in his own words”.

“Economy is in trouble, youth want jobs. Devote more time to economics not petty politics. Chidambaram ji, please focus on the job at hand,” Modi had tweeted in 2013 when Chidambaram was the Union Finance Minister in the UPA government.

Sharing a screenshot of the same on Twitter, Chidambaram in a caption said, “I have to say the same thing to the Honourable Prime Minister.”

I have to say the same thing to the Honourable Prime Minister! pic.twitter.com/reNmp84mRu

— P. Chidambaram (@PChidambaram_IN) September 2, 2020

Chidambaram along with Congress leader Rahul Gandhi had been lambasting the Centre over the contraction of the country’s GDP by 23.0 per cent in the April-June period.

“Of the world’s major and advanced economies, India’s economy declined more than any other country’s except the economy of the United States. What does that tell us? That Mr Modi stands second only to Mr Trump in terms of incompetent economic mismanagement,” he had tweeted on August 31.

Related news: Rahul tweets Modi-made disasters in another scathing attack on govt

In a series of tweets on Tuesday (September 1), he had advised states not to allow the Centre to evade its responsibility to compensate them for the revenue shortfall incurred due to GST.

In an interview with NDTV, he had termed the government’s relief package to deal with the COVID-induced economic slump “a joke” and said Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman shouldn’t have blamed God for a man-made disaster either. Earlier Sitharaman while answering to states’ demand for compensation for losses due to GST had called the economic decline due to COVID-19 an “Act of God.”