People of India will vote my government back to power in 2014: Finance Minister P Chidambaram

Finance Minister P Chidambaram addresses a gathering at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (CEIP) in Washington



Washington: Finance Minister P Chidambaram said today that the UPA government will be voted back to power in the general election in India next year.

"Let me tell you, people of India will vote my government back to power. I thought I should tell you lest you waste too much of power," Mr Chidambaram told a Washington audience on the second day of his US trip to attend the annual plenary meetings of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

Mr Chidambaram's brief remarks at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace came in reference to the "India decided 2014" initiative, which is to track the developments related to the upcoming general election scheduled for next year.

"We have taken up numerous reforms in the last one year and we expect them to bear results in second half of the current fiscal. We need to do better to recapture the growth of the last decade," Mr Chidambaram said in his address to the gathering which included officials from the Obama Administration, think-tanks, academicians and corporate executives.

Responding to questions later, the Finance Minister dismissed the notion that the rise of regional parties is against the national interest.

"I do not think that rise of regional parties is detrimental to the national interests. They (regional parties) rise because national parties do not accommodate regional interest as much as they should," he said.

Describing India as a complex nation, he said, a national party in a sense is a federation in itself.

Narendra Modi not bigger than Vajpayee, says Chidambaram; compare with your PM candidate, counters BJP

New Delhi: The Bharatiya Janata Party today hit back at Finance Minister P Chidambaram for his remarks on Narendra Modi calling the Gujarat chief minister neither "bigger than Vajpayee in terms of image and acceptability" nor "stronger than either Vajpayee or Advani."

Mr Chidambaram, in his interview to a news agency yesterday, also dismissed the emergence of the Gujarat chief minister, claiming that the hype around the BJP's prime ministerial candidate was "largely media created." 

Atal Bihar Vajpayee, the only BJP leader to head a government at the centre so far, was considered an acceptable face of the right-wing party to its allies, as opposed to a polarising Mr Modi, accused of his government's complicity during the Gujarat violence in 2002 in which hundreds of Muslims were killed.

Responding to the remarks, the BJP leader Shahnawaz Hussain said Mr Chidambaram has given a "walkover" to Mr Modi by accepting that no Congress leader matches the calibre of the BJP prime ministerial candidate.

"If Chidambaram considers himself better than Indira Gandhi, then it is a different thing. Atalji and Advaniji are our leaders. If he wants to give an example, Chidambaram should know that Modiji is far better than Rahul Gandhi. He should compare him (Modi) with his party's prime ministerial candidate," said the BJP spokesperson.

Though Mr Chidambaram, in his interview, conceded that the BJP's prime ministerial candidate has been able to "unite the rank and file of his party" and "gained some traction among urban youths", he said his party's challenger for the 2014 elections was someone with a "very, very chequered track record."

The Finance Minister, in his interview, pointed out that Gujarat ranks 12th in the Raghuram Rajan committee report in terms of economic growth. His remarks came on the day Narendra Modi became the first chief minister of Gujarat to complete 12 continuous years in office.