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