Congress President Rahul Gandhi on Saturday said the Indian economy was growing at a decent pace, but the government was still unable to create jobs.
“It is because those who have skills don’t have access to finance and support,” he said at Maharani’s Arts, Commerce and Management College for Women in Mysuru. “The problem is that a huge amount of money goes to only 15 to 20 people.”
Gandhi has repeatedly blamed Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Finance Minister Arun Jaitley for the economic slowdown. He has criticised the government’s decision to demonetise Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes as well as the Goods and Services Tax a number of times and made no exception in his speech on Saturday.
“I think demonetisation was a mistake and should not have been done,” Gandhi said. “Demonetisation and GST caused massive damage to the Indian economy and job creation. I have a problem with the way demonetisation was carried out.”
The Congress president is in the fourth leg of his tour in Karnataka ahead of the Assembly elections this year. At the women’s college on Saturday, he also brought up the Punjab National Bank scam. He said “young women like you” could have built many businesses from the “Rs 22,000 crore” that jeweller Nirav Modi allegedly defaulted on before leaving the country.
Gandhi claimed at another rally in Chamarajnagar that the BJP was attacking India’s Constitution, and vowed to stop the party’s attempts to change the statute, PTI reported. “Hear it from here. We will not allow the BJP to change the Constitution,” he said. The Congress president added that the party would “protect the work of Babasaheb Ambedkar”.
Earlier in the day, Gandhi said on Twitter that India’s legal system was collapsing under the burden of pending cases in court. “Yet, a staggering 400 High Court and 6,000 lower court judges have not been appointed, while the law minister is preoccupied with peddling fake news,” he said.
The Congress accused Law Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad of spreading “white lies” after he claimed that the party had links with Cambridge Analytica, the British firm that allegedly used the private data of more than 40 million Facebook users to help United States President Donald Trump’s 2016 election campaign influence voters.
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