New Delhi: Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley on Tuesday slammed Opposition parties for releasing a sting video on demonetisation which he termed as ‘fake’. “The ‘fakery caravan’ of UPA continues to move. After a fake BSY diary, a fake sting. When there are no real issues, rely on fakery,” he tweeted.
Jaitley also said that the sting video was humorous. “Every election needs a few humorous breaks. After the London EVM fiasco, the UPA provided another one today,” he said. Opposition parties on Tuesday played a video shot in Ahmedabad in January-February 2018 as proof of how the ruling BJP allegedly minted money in exchanging demonetised notes at 40% commission and invested it in housing projects in Dubai.
The video tape shot somewhere on the Ahmedabad-Gandhinagar highway by Tricolour News Network, an outfit of independent journalists with no political affiliations, and available on tnn. world, shows stacks of Rs 50 crore worth currency notes of Rs 2,000 in a farmhouse with a bearded BJP worker running the racket with live contacts with Kamalam, the state BJP headquarters.
Senior Congress leader Kapil Sibal told a press conference that demonetisation was the biggest scam in independent India and said that once contents of the tapes are verified, it would expose those who committed an act of treason of looting the treasury and the poor with “individuals at the highest echelons of the BJP allegedly involved in this enterprise.”
He said the Opposition bumped into this video while surfing the net. It happened in Gujarat. It must have happened at many other places to prove that the demonetisation was not to curb terrorism, fake currency, corruption and black money as PM Modi claimed but its real purpose was to give BJP an opportunity to rob RBI and punish the poor people of India.
The video shows the deals made in an Ahmedabad hotel and a farmhouse by BJP workers, exchanging old notes with Rs 2,000 notes at 40%. Names of many BJP leaders were mentioned in the process of the exchange.
The builder group allegedly exchanging notes of Rs 5 crore as the first exercise claimed it wanted to exchange some Rs 100-150 crore and will bring Rs 10 crore on which the bearded BJP worker insisted that they should bring Rs 25 crore at a time. When the person cited difficulty in carrying so much cash as there may be checks, the BJP worker promised pick-up and said “yes” when asked if it could be from Mumbai.
A sceptic media refused to accept authenticity of the video tape, prompting Sibal to say that it will be played in public meetings to let people decide how so much currency in Rs 2,000 denomination could be moved and from which banks. People will decide who is Chor and who is Chowkidar, who is Deshbhakt (patriot) and who is deshdrohi (traitor).
The so-called Chowkidar (PM Modi) will never probe it, he said when asked if the Opposition will demand an inquiry based on the tape. He, however, said if the government changes, there will be a probe to expose the scam involving RBI, bankers, public officials, BJP leaders and several other players.
