Staff Reporter / NEW DELHI
Communist Party of India and Communist Party of India Marxist have reacted over Supreme Court Verdict on Demonetization
Saying the “Supreme Court majority judgment merely upholds the right of the government to take such a decision and in no way endorses the consequences of such a decision”.
The CPM in a statement said that the verdict of the five member Constitution bench on the 2016 demonetization cannot be interpreted as upholding this move.
“This majority verdict while upholding the government’s legal right to take such a decision says nothing about the impact of such a decision. Demonetization resulted in the destruction of India’s informal economy that employs crores of people. It paralyzed the small-scale industrial sector, the MSMEs, destroying crores of livelihoods. Reports noted that in one month since the decision in 2016, 82 people lost their lives”.
Further, none of the objectives justifying this disastrous decision of unearthing black money and bringing this back from foreign banks; ending counterfeit currency; ending terror funding, corruption and reducing cash flows in the economy have been achieved. On the contrary, according to RBI, currency with public has gone up from Rs. 17.7 lakh crores, on the eve of demonetization to Rs. 30.88 lakh crore now, i.e., an increase of 71.84 per cent.
Communist Party of India has also expressed its concern about the adverse impact of demonetization and points out that the Supreme Court judgement is a split judgement of 4 vs 1 which does not take into consideration about false claims made by the government during demonetization. It only touches upon the legal aspect of the decision making. It does not touch upon the adverse impact of demonetization on the people.
After four years of the decision people need to know the facts about claims made by the government have been proved to be false. Money in circulation has increased, black money component has not come down and adverse impact of the decision on MSME not recorded and terrorism has not come down. Hence a detailed white paper is needed on this issue.
“The Supreme Court majority judgement merely upholds the right of the government to take such a decision and in no way endorses the consequences of such a decision” it said.
In the majority judgment the Supreme Court has exclusively dealt with the legal right of the Central government to take such a decision and that it does not violate Section 26(2) of RBI Act 1934. The dissenting opinion of one of the honorable judges maintained that this Section of the RBI Act says that the RBI must recommend to the government to initiate demonetization. In this case the decision was taken by the Central government which sought the opinion of the RBI. Hence, the approval of the Parliament should have been taken before this decision was executed.
The majority judgement noted that demonetization had “reasonable nexus” with the objectives it sought to achieve and that it is “not relevant whether the objective was achieved or not”.