Arun Shourie supports diesel price hike, calls it 'need of the hour'

NEW DELHI: At a time when BJP has stepped up its offensive against the government over FDI in multi-brand retail and hike in diesel prices, former party leader Arun Shourie said Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had "for the first time shown his strength".

He justified the Centre's decision to increase the price of diesel by Rs 5 per litre. "Increasing diesel prices was the need of the hour," Shourie told reporters in Bhopal on Saturday night. On FDI in multi-brand retail, the former Union minister said a lot of hue and cry was being raised "unnecessarily" on the issue and that this would neither lead to profit nor losses.

However, BJP continued to castigate the UPA government on allowing FDI in multi-brand retail. Reminding Congress that it had opposed FDI in multi-brand retail when NDA was in power, senior BJP leader LK Advani recalled when Priya Ranjan Dasmunshi had raised the issue in 2002, Shourie, who was then commerce and industry minister, had said that as per the policy since 1997, FDI in retail trade was not permitted.

"Dasmunshi had said that through bureaucrats multi-national retailers are continuously putting pressure on the government to take this anti-national decision of allowing foreign direct investment in retail trade," Advani said in his blog on Sunday. He wrote that Dasmunshi had said that bureaucrats were being pressurised by multi-national retailers even when a group of ministers and a task force of the Planning Commission on employment had rejected FDI in retail.

Advani also referred to the "unrest brewing" against America's largest retailer Walmart in various US cities at a time when the Indian government here was "rolling out the red carpet" for it.