NEW DELHI: Prime Minister Narendra Modi, on Wednesday, thanked the people of India for supporting demonetisation while Union ministers fanned out across the country and reeled out statistics to claim that the move had proved to be a masterstroke.
To counter the Opposition onslaught against the government on the first anniversary of the exercise, the BJP stuck to its strategy to project those against demonetisation as supporting corruption and black money.
In a series of tweets which included slides and videos, Modi called demonetisation “a historic and multi-dimensional success”, and a “decisive blow to terrorism and Naxalism”. “I bow to the people of India for steadfastly supporting the several measures taken by the Government to eradicate corruption and black money,” he tweeted.
Lashing out at Congress vice-President Rahul Gandhi for terming demonetisation as a tragedy, BJP chief Amit Shah called him a “tragedy manufacturer”.
The BJP social media team also lampooned Rahul saying that Nand lal, the ex-serviceman whose photo he shared to paint demonetization as anti-people, had actually praised the move. A media photograph taken during the demonetization exercise last year showed 80-year-old Nand Lal breaking down for not being able to withdraw his pension after waiting for hours at an SBI branch. A year later, however, he has reportedly said that note ban benefitted the public.
The BJP had prepared a number of videos and charts to suggest that the exercise was a runaway success. They claimed that demonetisation had choked terror funding, besides substantially bringing down incidents of stone pelting in Kashmir. Union law minister Ravi Shankar Prasad even claimed that it had cubed prostitution, as flesh trade was hit.
In a slide that he posted on Twitter, Modi claimed that stone-pelting incidents in Kashmir had come down by 75 per cent, incidents of Left-wing extremism were down by 20 per cent, and 7.62 lakh counterfeit notes were detected.
