Digital robbery in Modi’s New India, says Stalin

Chennai: In the new India of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the hard earned money of the poor and the deprived classes, deposited in savings bank accounts, was being looted through digital robbery, Chief Minister M K Stalin said on Wednesday.

While Modi was shamelessly claiming that his government was for the poor, the reality was that the ultra rich were extended extraordinary tax benefits and the impoverished sections were victimized through the levying of penalty for not maintaining minimum balance, Stalin said in a message on X.

Modi, who came to power by kindling poor people’s desires through his false propaganda to deposit Rs 15 lakh in their bank accounts, went on to force the people stand in queues in front of banks by rendering their own hard earned and carefully saved money invalid, he said, reminding the people of the horrors of the demonetization saga that affected all the poor and ordinary people in 2016.

Through penalties for not maintaining minimum balance, the Modi government had siphoned off Rs 21,000 crore from the savings of the poor that was diligently deposited in banks, behaving like a robber who snatches the drawstring purses of the common people, he said.

The same government, he pointed out, had not only waived loans to the tune of several lakhs of crores of rupees, but had also reduced the rate of Corporate tax from 30 per cent to 22 per cent, enabling the rich to enjoy tax concessions running to lakhs of crores of rupees every year.

The digital robbery committed on the poor was to compensate for the loss incurred through the concessions given to the rich by way of tax reliefs and loan waivers, Stalin said and uploaded newspaper clippings of a few stories to substantiate his claim.

While one story was on banks collecting R 21,000 crore for breaching minimum balance norms, another one was titled ‘banks wrote off in 9 years, Rs 14.56 lakh cr of bad loans’ and another had the headline, ‘Corporate tax rate cut leads to Rs 1.84 L cr revenue loss in 2 years.’