No record of Cabinet meet on November 8 before note ban

Former Finance Minister P Chidambaram has claimed there was no record of the Cabinet meeting of November 8 last year which empowered the government to take the decision to withdraw Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes from circulation.

In his address at the ‘Jan Vedna’ conclave in New Delhi, Singh termed demonetisation as a “disaster” and said things were going from bad to worse and that the worst was yet to come. He dismissed as “hollow claim” Prime Minister Narendra “Modi’s propaganda” that things have started to look up. Chidambaram, in his address, said there was no record of the Cabinet meeting of November 8. “Where is the Cabinet note? Where is the Cabinet decision?” he asked. He said that never before in India’s history such a farce was enacted. 

The former Finance Minister also said that the reputation of RBI is at stake today. The government and the central bank generally have differences, but never before has a government treated RBI like a department of the Government of India, he added.  He said that even one per cent decline in GDP would lead to a loss of Rs 1.5 lakh crore to the country. 

Speaking at the event, Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi said that the economy had gone back 16 years under Modi and pointed to the sharp drop in automobile sales. Taking a dig at Modi’s 2014 Lok Sabha election campaign line that achhe din would come when BJP came to power, he said only Congress’ return to power in 2019 would herald good days. 

However, BJP spokesperson Shahnawaz Hussain reacted by saying the Congress leader was voicing his own and not the poor’s pain. Meanwhile, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, terming disruption caused by demonetisation as transient, said the move together with the GST rollout, would boost the Indian economy and make the “substantially” non-tax-compliant society more compliant. Members of the All India Bank Officers Confederation – Tamil Nadu State (AIBOC-TN) Unit have requested the Reserve Bank of India to allocate adequate supply of cash to the public sector banks, to deal with the demand ahead of Pongal festival.