New Delhi: Branding demonetisation as a “super emergency”, the Trinamul Congress on Wednesday met President Pranab Mukherjee for the third time since November 8 when Rs 1,000 and Rs 500 notes were scrapped. The party also apprised the President of the arrest of its top leaders in the chit fund scam and said that it was “vendetta politics” being carried out by the Modi government.
“After outlining the grim situation, we first had called this (demonetisation) a financial emergency. Today, we believe, as we share (concern) with the President, this is now a super emergency,” TMC’s Rajya Sabha member Derek O’Brien said after meeting the President.
He said that the TMC, led by West Bengal CM Mamata Banerjee, has opposed the demonetisation exercise and hence the timing of what is happening reeks of political vendetta. “This is low life, the kind of political vendetta this country has never seen,” he said referring to the arrest of two TMC MPs Sudip Bandyopadhyay and Tapas Pal in the Rose Valley chit fund scam case.
Mr O’Brien said that contrary to the Prime Minister’s claims that the situation would ease within the next few days, the situation had instead “worsened”, hitting 25 crore daily wage earners.
He claimed the micro and small scale industries have reported 35 per cent job losses and listed fishermen, farmers, plantation workers, housewives, students, retailers and traders were among those worst affected.
The TMC MPs also held Mr Modi responsible for the death of 120 people, caused allegedly by the move and sought President Pranab Mukherjee’s intervention as the situation had turned “grim”.
The 30-member delegation, comprising MPs Sukhendu Shekhar Roy, Dola Sen, Mukul Roy, Dinesh Trivedi, Arpita Ghosh, Kakoli Ghosh Dastidar, Sisir Adhikari among others, also submitted a memorandum to Mukherjee.
The TMC memorandum accused the Modi government of engaging in “politics of vendetta” to conceal its own “incompetence and inefficiency” by arresting two of the party MPs.
