After relinquishing the office of advisor (communications) to previous Andhra Pradesh chief minister and Telugu Desam Party president N Chandrababu Naidu, he has quietly slipped into oblivion.
Parakala has his own consultancy firm and has been occasionally writing columns in leading publications, particularly The Hindu and The Pioneer.
Except that, he has been keeping away from media glare and has not made any comment on the previous or present governments in the state.
However, Parakala’s strong views on policy issues are reflected in his articles in the reputed newspapers.
In his latest column in The Hindu, he virtually pulled up his wife Nirmala Sitaraman for lack of a clear economic policy resulting in bungling of economy in the country.
He said though the BJP government is denying the reports that there is an economic slowdown in the country, data flowing uninterruptedly into the public domain show that sector after sector is staring at a seriously challenging situation.
“Private consumption has contracted and is at an 18-quarter low of 3.1%; rural consumption is in a deep southward dive and is double the rate of the urban slowdown; credit off-take by micro and small industries remains stagnant; net exports have shown little or no growth; GDP growth is at a six-year low with the first quarter of FY20 registering just 5%; and unemployment is at a 45-year-high,” he pointed out.
He said thought the BJP has rejected the Nehruvial socialist pattern society, it does not have its own coherent set of ideas about the country’s economy.
“The BJP came to power at the Centre again on the basis of a muscular political, nationalist and security platform, rather than on the economic performance of its government,” he said.
Parakala suggested that when the BJP could own Sardar Patel as an icon of its political project, it could as well adopt and even own P V Narasimha Rao-Manmohan Singh economic architecture.
“That architecture could help the BJP remove the present infirmity in its economic thinking,” he said.
