Cong nails Jaitley’s ‘lie’ of no waiver of big defaulters’ loans

The Congress on Thursday nailed Finance Minister Arun Jaitley’s Tuesday claim of no bank loan of big capitalist defaulters with facts and figures culled out from the public domain.

Its senior spokesman Abhishek Manu Singhvi released the data of loans worth Rs 1,88,287 crore of willful defaulters already waived in the last three years.

“We all know that top 50 corporates owe Rs 8.35 lakh crore to the banks as the nonperforming assets (NPAs) and out of those, three top Gujarat-basee companies – Reliance (Anil Ambani group), Adani and Essar – owe Rs 3 lakh crore.

“Only early this month, one of them (Reliance) publicly declared shutting their telecom business with a liability of Rs 45,000 crore due to the banks,” Singhvi said, asking Jaitley that far from declaring it as NPA, “you are trying to help the defaulter with further defence contracts like the Rafale deal.”

“Why? If these were legacies of UPA, what has prevented you to declare this liability of Rs 45,000 crore as NPA, rather than giving them an offset contract worth Rs 30,000 crore in the Rafale deal?”

Singhvi asserted that the Modi government has continuously and constantly benefitted a select band of cronies by waiving off their loans ignoring the pile-up of the banks’ NPAs, thus putting the bank deposits and the state exchequer at risk.

He said Prime Minister Modi is so busy in benefiting his capitalist friends that he has forgotten the difference between “majboor” (helpless) and “majboot” (strong), forgetting the helpless farmers, youth and the middle class while helping a handful of strong capitalists.