Demonetisation - A Year Later. We serve the nation, Cong serves the family, says Jaitley

A bitter face-off between the Congress and the BJP ensued on a year’s completion of demonetisation with Finance Minister Arun Jaitley heralding note ban as a “watershed” pronouncement with an ethical and moral rationale as he took on former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh who repeated his famous characterisation of note-ban as “organised loot and legalised plunder”.

Referring to Manmohan Singh, Jaitley said it is natural for the Congress to not comprehend the moral rationale of an economic exercise such as demonetisation because the primary objective of the principal opposition party has “always been to serve the family whereas the primary aim of the BJP is to serve the Nation”.

Responding to former Prime Minister’s remark in poll-bound Gujarat that demonetisation “was organised loot and legalised plunder”, Jaitley said “Loot is what happened in 2G, CWG and allocation of coal blocks. Therefore, I feel, over ethics, our perspectives are very different. They serve the family and we serve the Nation. So, even in these basics and preliminaries, we do not agree.”

Jaitley contextualised demonetisation in the light of a “series of measures to counter black money and corruption” which, he said, are aimed at India’s transition from an informal to formal economy with a wider tax base and squeezing cash to GDP ratio.

Demonetisation, he said, was a “historic and watershed” policy decision geared towards the ongoing transition of Indian economy and the Congress’s critique is not just ill-informed, it is morally compromised.

He said the Congress’s reign was characterised by policy paralysis with the Indian economy losing global credibility to the extent that ‘I’ was sought to be dropped from the BRICS framework.

The Finance Minister quipped that before characterising note ban as “loot” and making references to the loss in RBI’s institutional credibility, the former economist PM should ponder over what the Congress had reduced Indian economy to.

“All that Dr Singh has to do is to compare the relative credibility of Indian economy pre- and post-2014. Before the BJP assumed power, Indian economy was widely perceived as having been struck by policy paralysis. We had disappeared from the global radar. ‘I’ was sought to be knocked out of BRICS. I suggest Dr Singh reflects on those aspects,” said the Finance Minister.

He said the distinction between the BJP-led NDA and the Congress-led UPA is that the former signifies structural reforms and historic decisions such as demonetisation on the economic front while the latter symbolises policy paralysis and corruption.

“For ten years, policy paralysis and corruption characterised Indian economy and governance. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has taken bold structural reforms aimed at transforming the Indian economy from informal to formal, widening our tax base, increasing cashless transactions and squeezing cash out of the system because it leads to corruption and black money,” said Jaitley.

“It is surprising that an economic exercise which has an ethical and moral rationale is being called ‘loot’. An anti-black money drive is an ethical and moral step. What is morally and ethically sound is also political correct. And that is what we believe in. The Congress obviously believes otherwise,” the Finance Minister added.