NEW DELHI: As the Congress launched an orchestrated attack on the government on the second anniversary of demonetisation, the BJP posed 10 questions to the party asking why it was opposing measures taken against corruption. Finance Minister Arun Jaitley also questioned the “prophets of doom”, as he called the Congress leaders for predicting that demonetisation would have disastrous consequences while listing out the benefits of note ban.
“Why does Congress find merit in protesting against every anti-corruption measure of the government? What do they fear?” the BJP asked in a series of posers put out from its official Twitter handle.
In a reference to P Chidambaram, the BJP wondered how a former finance minister spoke on policy matters when he himself was on the radar of investigating agencies for massive corruption involving land, cash and foreign bank accounts.
Stating that the deputy leader of Opposition in the Rajya Sabha, Anand Sharma, had opposed note ban on the floor of the House, the BJP asserted that the country had in the last two years seen an increase in tax returns by over Rs 2 crore. “Is this why you (Sharma) opposed demonetisation?” the BJP asked the Congress leader.
The BJP also challenged the Congress to name one stringent measure aimed at eliminating corruption and black money taken during the UPA. “The Congress now remembers small business, but did the UPA think of this sector even once? Except tax terror, raid raj and arbitrary policies, what did the Congress do for the small businesses?” it asked.
The party also claimed that demonetisation had lead to “formalisation of the economy, which has empowered the poor and marginalised. Why is the Congress opposing that”?Separately, Jaitley in a social media post titled ‘Impact of Demonetisation’ asserted that the exercise had helped tackle tax evasion. He listed an 80 per cent jump in income tax return filers to 6.86 crore, increase in digital transactions and more resources being available for poor and for building better infrastructure as the main achievements of the move.
“An ill-informed criticism of the demonetisation is that almost the entire cash money got deposited in the banks. Confiscation of currency was not an objective of demonetisation. Getting it into the formal economy and making the holders pay tax was the broader objective of the decision of demonetisation. The system required to be shaken in order to make India move from cash to digital transactions,” the minister argued.