Finance minister Arun Jaitley on Thursday slammed Rahul Gandhi for running a “campaign of falsehood”, possibly responding to the Congress chief’s continued attack on the Rafale deal and the allegation that the government waived the loans of big corporates.
“If the ‘Rafale concoctions’ were the first big lie, the second one stated repeatedly is that Mr. Modi waived off rupees two lakh fifty thousand crores of fifteen industrialists. Every word of that sentence repeatedly uttered by Rahul Gandhi is false,” Jaitley said in a blog titled Falsehood of a ‘Clown Prince’.
Jaitley repeated what he as well as Prime Minister Narendra Modi have said many times — that all the bad loans had been given when the UPA was in power.
“Firstly, these amounts were lent by the banks prior to 2014. Secondly, the UPA Government, in order to conceal these loans despite the default, kept rolling over the loans. These loans were ever-greened,” Jaitley wrote.
The non-performing assets (NPAs), he said, have mounted “not because more monies were lent but because interest was mounting up on the overdue amounts”.
Jaitley’s blog attack came on a day Rahul slammed the Prime Minister’s “silence” on the Rafale deal with France and the government’s “failure” to bring to book fugitive businessman Vijay Mallya, who is accused of not repaying bank loans worth Rs 9,000 crore.
The finance minister held the UPA government responsible for bank NPAs and went on to credit the Modi government for addressing the issue with the “only effective move” — the Insolvency Bankruptcy Code.
“The banks under UPA took no steps to recover these loans. They did not prosecute a single major debtor who had siphoned off money. It is the NDA Government which through IBC, changed the debtor-creditor relationship and enabled the banks to effectively pursue the recovery,” Jaitley wrote.
“The truth, Mr. Rahul Gandhi, is that your Government allowed the banks to be looted,” he added.
The Congress, in a statement issued by media department head Randeep Surjewala, responded by calling Jaitley a “Court Jester” at the “Modi Sultanate”.
“We dare you to publicly state the amount of loans given during the tenure of the Modi government in the last 52 months, along with details as to how much of those loans have become NPAs?” Surjewala said. “How much worth of loans were ‘ever-greened’ and ‘restructured’ during the tenure of the Modi government?”
The BJP also fielded a junior minister to target the main Opposition party. Gajendra Singh Shekhawat, junior minister for agriculture, alleged the Congress headquarters in Delhi had received unaccounted cash sent by Karnataka Congress leader D.K. Shivakumar through the hawala route.
The “Bangalore-Delhi hawala highway reaches SG and RG”, Shekhawat told reporters at the BJP headquarters.
Shekhawat said the “confession on oath” of a Karnataka government official had shown “corruption and Congress were synonymous”.
Shivakumar, a powerful Congress leader in Karnataka, had on Wednesday accused the BJP of misusing central agencies to harass him and cast aspersions on the Congress leadership with the larger aim of pulling down the coalition government in the state.
The BJP has been unsparing in its attack on the Congress, particularly Rahul. Insiders said BJP chief Amit Shah has directed party leaders and ministers to focus on discrediting the Congress and Rahul.
