NEW DELHI: The Congress slammed PM Modi over a sliding economy and said he should apologise for the demonetisation decision which took the lives of 150 people and wiped off millions of jobs.
“Modinomics and Jaitleynomics have destroyed India’s economic growth story. Jobs are in peril, businesses are shutting down, exports are falling, GDP is on a downward spiral, NPA’s have touched a whopping Rs 9 lakh crore and credit growth is a low of 63 years,” Congress spokespersons Randeep Surjewala and Anand Sharma said.
“The PM should apologise to the nation,” they said.
The Congress attack came shortly after the government decided to celebrate demonetisation anniversary on November 8 as anti-black money day in a counter to the Opposition’s plans to observe it as a black day.
“Instead of apologizing for the death of over 150 people and unprecedented strike on livelihood of common Indians, the BJP is so drunk with power that it wants to celebrate the ‘Demon of Demonetisation’,” said the two Congress leaders.
Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi also took pot shots at finance minister Arun Jaitley’s claims of over 7 percent growth in the past three years and termed them as farcical.
“Dear Mr Jaitley, May the farce be with you,” Rahul tweeted.
Continuing with its attack, the Congress asked the centre where had all the black money gone and whether noteban helped curb fake currency and terror funding, and pushed digital economy, as claimed by the PM.
“PM Modi and FM Jaitley say that since November 2016 up to May 2017, a total Rs 17,526 crore has been detected as ‘Undisclosed Income’. They forget to mention that 5 times more ‘Black Money’ was unearthed by Congress-led UPA in its last two years,” said Sharma.
Citing the example of China, Sharma claimed PM’s policies had created a divergence between the growth rates in India and the Asian giant.
“Whatever has been said about the economy is not true. It is wrong to say that India’s economic fundamentals are strong and the claim that India’s economy is the world’s fastest growing economy is factually incorrect,” said Sharma.
“The government has no plans to put the economy back on track,” he added.