Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s 5 pm address on Sunday unveiled GST 2.0, trimming tax slabs and cheaper essentials, but online chatter quickly dubbed it India’s latest festive sale season, likening his “GST savings festival” to e-commerce discount bonanzas.

“Your savings will go up and you can buy your favourite items easily,” Modi said, claiming that cheaper biscuits, coffee, ghee, medicines, cars and insurance premiums would bring relief to crores of Indians.

He called the reform a “double bonanza” when paired with income tax exemptions announced earlier this year, pegging combined public savings at Rs 2.5 lakh crore.

Within minutes, X was flooded with memes recasting Modi not as the architect of tax reform but as the brand ambassador for India’s e-commerce giants.

A widely shared post spliced together ads for Amazon’s Great Indian Festival, Flipkart’s Big Billion Days and Myntra’s Big Fashion Festival with an image of Modi stamped “GST Bachat Utsav’.

“Now Modi ji has announced that the government has also started its own ‘GST Saving Festival’,” a comment read.

User @darenface chimed in with: “This time Flipkart and Amazon hired Modiji for Festival sales advertisement,” accompanied by a podium shot of the PM. Others riffed on the underwhelming scale of the touted savings.

@SuitBootkaTweet paired Amitabh Bachchan’s famous Kaun Banega Crorepati line “Kya Karenge Aap Teen Dhanrashi Ka?” with a caption mocking a Rs 2 saving on a packet of dahi.

“Kal se paise udaao saalo” (Go splurge from tomorrow, you fools!) read the text pasted onto a Modi image by @GaurangBhardwa1, who captioned it with “HADD HAI!”. The humour played on the perceived mismatch between the Prime Minister’s hype and the modest arithmetic of GST savings.

The “GST savings festival” taglines may boost consumer sentiment in official projections, but for meme-makers, it simply slotted neatly between Amazon’s Big Billion Days and Myntra’s Big Fashion Festival.