Oppn says Modi’s note ban was a flop show

The Congress on Thursday dubbed demonetisation as the biggest scam of helping the wrong people legitimise their illegitimate black money and asked Prime Minister Modi to apologise to the nation as none of the benefits he promised in November have been realised.

Congress spokesman Anand Sharma, a former union minister and party’s deputy leader in the Rajya Sabha, asserted at an AICC press briefing here that Modi should take moral responsibility for the mistake in his personal decision that only inflicted “misery” on the people and dealth a “body blow” to the economy.

He said Modi had breached trust of the people by making false claims since demonetisation neither unearthed black money nor ended corruption, terror funding and counterfeit currency.

Had this happened in any other country, the PM would not be in office, Sharma said, asking to explain the claim in his Independence Day speech of unearthing Rs 3 lakh crore black money and challenging him to make public the list of companies and individuals whose undeclared money it was.

Sharma said the RBI annual report released on Wednesday showing 99% of the invalidated currency returned by the people exposed the falsehoods propagated by Modi and his government as his sensational announcement only unleashed financial anarchy and economic chaos in the country. He kept pointing out how Modi kept changing his narrative on finding failure of his demonetisation scheme instead of quickly reversing its negative fallout.

CPI(M) general secretary Sitaram Yechuri also dubbed it as “the biggest scam of independent India” in which the BJP members made bulk deposits of massive amounts just before the demonetisation and fired 13 questions at the PM at his press conference, underlining that there were no gains, short term or long term, from the demonetisation.

Who decided to demonetise and was it the PM, he asked wondering if that was the reason why RBI governor Raghuram Rajan was forced to quit.

Though the RBI data shows Rs 16,000 crore of the demonetised currency did not return to the banking system, he said was it was much more than 100 per cent of the claimed scrapped currency lying in Nepal, Bhutan and cooperative banks. He asked the government to fix accountability for this disaster and punish those responsible.