For, acknowledgment of the nature of the current economic crisis is the first step that she needs to take to be able to come up with anything that will help solve the problem. As long as she refuses to admit the existence of the crisis, and sticks to her guns as an ‘economic psychopath’, there can be no meaningful cure for the country’s economic ills.

After having failed to mention ‘slowdown’ even once in her budget speech, which created a record for the maximum duration, if not for the worth of whatever it contained, she put up a pathetic show at the interactive session with the representatives of industry and commerce in Mumbai on Friday. She virtually got sick of her budget speech.

She told the post-budget Mumbai gathering, which saw a veritable who’s who of the financial capital’s industrial leadership in attendance, her budget draws on experiences of all the past instances of a slowdown in growth where the government has had to provide for a booster. Even to refer to slowdown, she is going to the past. She is so obsessed with UPA that she wants to correct the mistakes of the past rather than tackle the present.

She took great pains to explain that unlike the past instances of providing for a stimulus, the remedies prescribed in her budget are "very focussed, very clear that it is going in a well chalked out path with a clear intention of spending responsibly in building capital assets".

Then there is a lot of beating around the bush. "The remedy is a considered remedy. I'm sure discerning people will be able to see why it is so," she said. Her JNU background seems to be getting better of her common sense, stylizing and complicating issues that would otherwise be expressed in simple and straightforward terms.

"Based on the experiences that we had in the last round of government trying to provide stimulus, we've essentially made sure that we are doing it in a very discreet and considered manner.

"We kept the macroeconomic fundamentals in mind and made sure that the necessary stimulus which was the demand of the time, both for increasing consumption and also for ensuring investments in long-term asset building as a means to providing stimulus will be taken up," she postulated.

She seems to be herself unconvinced about what she says so that the expression on her face gives all that away. The tension and conflict inside are palpable.

Former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had once observed that the government was ‘obsessed with trying to fix blame on its opponents’ rather than finding solutions to the country’s economic problems.

"When I was in office what happened did happen. There were some weaknesses. But you can't claim that the fault lies with the UPA always. You have been in office for five years. Mainly passing buck to UPA is not enough," he said while responding to criticism by Sitharaman that Manmohan Singh and former Reserve Bank Governor Raghuram Rajan were responsible for the bad loan crisis in the banking sector.

Sitharaman made the observation at an event in the US, in response to the former RBI Governor’s lecture at Brown University in which he had suggested that in its first term, the Modi government had done equally bad during its first tenure as the leadership did not appear to have a consistently articulated vision on how to achieve economic growth.

Speaking at Columbia University, Sitharaman responded: “It was in Rajan’s time as governor of the Reserve Bank that loans were given just based on phone calls from crony leaders and public sector banks in India till today are depending on the government’s equity infusion to get out of that mire. “Dr Singh was the Prime Minister and I’m sure Dr Rajan will agree that Dr Singh would have had a ‘consistent articulated vision’ for India,” she added.

The Finance Minister seems to be stuck there for ever and unable to get out of that mental block. Recalling when and what went wrong during a certain period is absolutely necessary, she believes.

But in her obsession, Nirmala Sitharaman fails to recognize that everything has its own time and space. Blame game has its uses for scoring brownie points, but that cannot be a cure for any chronic ills, that require proper diagnosis and treatment. This is probably the biggest factor behind her failure as finance minister. (IPA Service)