Congress MP Shashi Tharoor and some other leaders of the party were detained by Kerala Police when they were protesting against the Narendra Modi government's demonetisation drive outside the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) in Thiruvananthapuram on Friday, January 6. They were released after a brief detention.
We were sitting on a peaceful dharna outside RBI office but we were arrested by Police and were later released: Shashi Tharoor,Congress pic.twitter.com/9oakvpZmdq
— ANI (@ANI_news) January 6, 2017
The party has been protesting against the Centre's method of rolling out demonetisation in the country. Tharoor, a Lok Sabha MP from the state capital, said that it was implemented badly and in an 'astonishingly incompetent manner.'
"The problem goes to such basic elements of planning such as not having enough currency before you spring this on the nation, when 86 percent of your currency would become illegal in three-and-a-quarter hours. That's astonishing. Nobody in the world has done this," Tharoor had earlier said in New Delhi.
"Secondly, even the lack of planning in something as basic as making the new notes the same size as the old so that they can fit in the ATM is mindboggling. Then you scramble to find 55,000 engineers to recalibrate 2.5 lakh ATMs. This makes the government look amateurish," he added.
Tharoor also criticised the Modi government and the RBI for changing demonetisation rules frequently.
"You announce an intention and then four days later you backtrack. It's as if they just don't know what they are doing. There has been a complete disavowal of responsibility and culpability in these failures, which is also troubling," the 60-year-old had said.
