Jaitley, Rahul cross swords on Rafale, demonetisation
New Delhi: As the war of words over the Rafale deal escalated, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley said on Thursday that the fully weaponised fighter jets which his government is buying are 20 per cent cheaper than the ones offered under the previous UPA regime.
Minutes after Congress President Rahul Gandhi launched a no-holds-barred attack on Prime Minister Narendra Modi for allegedly helping only "15-20 crony capitalist friends", Jaitley took to the twitter to say any diversionary tactic will not wipe out the falsehood of the opposition leader.
Jaitley had on Wednesday posed 15 questions to Gandhi, charging him with "peddling untruth" and carrying out a "false campaign" on the Rafale deal in a bid to counter the opposition's charge of it being the "biggest scam" in the defence sector.
Gandhi at a press conference has maintained that the BJP government was buying fighter jets at more than three times the Rs 520 crore price, the previous UPA government had negotiated a deal to buy 126 medium multi-role combat aircraft.
To this, Jaitley said, "Any issue diversion by @RahulGandhi on my Rafale questions, will not wipe out his falsehood on Rafale."
On Gandhi's assertion that demonetisation was done to help Modi's "crony capitalist friends", the Finance Minister said, "Little knowledge is dangerous. @RahulGandhi's fiction on 'demonetisation helping NPA holders', forgets that the Modi Government legislated and enforced the IBC where the NPA defaulters lost their companies."
IBC is the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code that calls for auctioning off the assets of serial loan defaulters. NPAs a non-performing assets refer to bad loans.
Earlier in the day, in a Facebook blog, Jaitley said invalidation of non-deposited currency notes was not the only object behind the November 8, 2016 decision to junk Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes.
"The larger purpose of demonetisation was to move India from a tax non-compliant society to a compliant society. This necessarily involved the formalisation of the economy and a blow to the black money," he wrote achieved?
The comment came a day after the Reserve Bank of India said that almost all of the Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes which were made illegal in November 2016 have returned to the banking system, prompting the Opposition to question the efficacy of demonetisation in curbing black money.
Jaitley said that when cash is deposited in the banks, it losses anonymity and it can be identified with its owner.
"Accordingly, post demonetisation about 1.8 million depositors have been identified for this enquiry. Many of them are being fastened with tax and penalties. Mere deposit of cash in a bank does not lead to a presumption that it is tax paid money," he said.
