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Tribune News Service
New Delhi, November 8
Congress president Sonia Gandhi today slammed the BJP government’s 2016 demonetisation move as ludicrous and said her party would ensure that the nation neither forgets nor forgives the BJP for the note ban.
On the third anniversary of demonetisation, Sonia called the move a “Tughlaki blunder” inflicted by a government hell bent upon attacking livelihoods. She said the Congress would continue to flag the blunder even though the PM and his ministers stopped speaking about it since 2017.
“The RBI has confirmed that 99.3 per cent of all devalued Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 currency notes have been re-deposited with zero windfall gain to speak of. Fake notes turned out to be a miniscule and negligible percentage of the notes in circulation. Terror and naxalite activities have actually seen an increase after demonetisation as per the government’s own published data. The currency in circulation has actually seen a 22 per cent increase over pre-demonetisation level (as per FM in the Parliament,” said Sonia.
She said the simple question being asked by every Indian was — what did the demonetisation achieve?
“What it did instead, was to wipe out over one crore jobs from the economy (and still counting), take the unemployment rate to a 45-year-high, shaved two full percentage points off GDP growth and ensured that India’s international rating moved from ‘stable’ to ‘negative’. It is now widely acknowledged as a herculean blunder by independent economists and taught, across the world, as a cautionary tale of ‘what governments should not do,” alleged Sonia.
“The Prime Minister and his colleagues never once took responsibility for - or even acknowledged – this faux pas that claimed over 120 lives and proved a death knell for India’s medium and small businesses,” she added.
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