Are You Celebrating? Exactly Five Years Ago, Modi Ji Inaugurated Jumla Divas- By Promising Everyone 15L Each
We expected Rs 15 lakh, but what we got was a narcissistic Prime Minister who flies around the world on our money.
Exactly 5 years ago, then Prime Ministerial candidate Narendra Modi a.k.a. Mr. 56-inches Chest, gave a fiery speech (oh so many of the fiery speeches) and said that if the BJP comes to power, all the black money will be brought back and every Indian would get Rs 15 Lakh in their accounts. Who the hell would not want to vote for this guy?
Two-and-a-half years after the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government had come to power, none of us got even Rs. 1,500 in our bank accounts but all the 1,000s and the 500s in our pockets sure got screwed over. Meenakshi, a 41-year-old woman with speech impairment, who has worked all her life as a domestic worker, lost Rs 1.5 lakh because nobody thought of her while deciding that it was completely okay in a country like India, to render people’s money completely useless overnight. She was too late to find out about Modiji’s ‘masterstroke’, and ended up throwing her lifetime’s savings in the river. Meenakshi didn’t get Rs. 15 lakh. Neither did the 100 (or more) people who died of shock or of exhaustion standing in line to get their notes exchanged.
Also Read: Not Shocking: BJP’s Claims About Its Membership Numbers Also A Jumla
From the ramparts of the Red Fort in 2017, Modiji told us that demonetisation had brought back Rs. 3 lakh crore worth of black money. Modi! Modi! Modi! How dare we think that the Prime Minister was taking us for a ride for political gains. Modiji or his party has never done that — there is a Ram Mandir in Ayodhya for evidence. The 3 lakh crore didn’t arrive either, confirmed the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), an institution that the government is now trying really hard to undermine.
But khair, we’re a gullible lot. And BJP President Amit Shah reminded us of that when he said that Modiji’s promise of Rs 15 Lakh was, ahem, a jumla. The man who filed an RTI application to find out the date when the 15 lakh would be deposited isn’t too thrilled. Nor are the millions of people who are now wondering what else was a jumla. The promise to end corruption? Rupee becoming stronger? Rise in economic growth?
We expected Rs 15 lakh, but what we got was a narcissistic Prime Minister who flies around the world on our money. We got a government that spends Rs 5,000 crores of our money on just publicity to plaster Modiji’s face on every wall, on our televisions, on our newspapers and most importantly, on our conscience. So that we never forget what we voted for.