New Delhi
Congress president Rahul Gandhi on Friday fired a fresh salvo at Prime Minister Narendra Modi, accusing him of betraying his 2014 Lok Sabha election promises to people and “cheating them”.

The party too stepped up its offensive on the government over the two-year-old demonetisation drive, with former Finance Minister slamming his successor Arun Jaitley for defending an “ill conceived move”. While Gandhi attacked the PM during his election tour in Chhattisgarh, top Congress brass marched in protest against note ban in the Capital and later courted arrest after the Delhi Police rounded up several leaders.

Among those arrested were party general secretary organisation Ashok Gehlot, former Haryana CM Bhupinder Singh Hooda, senior leaders Anand Sharma, Mukul Wasnik, Mahila Congress chief Sushmita Dev and Youth Congress president Keshav Yadav.

The sharpest attack of the day, however, came from Gandhi who took to Twitter to accuse the PM of mastering the “art of conning and misleading”. His tweet in Hindi read: “2014 thag vidya 1: Muje pradhan mantri banao, main 2 crore rozgar dilaunga (Make me PM, I will give you two crore jobs); 2016 thag vidya 2: note bandi mein mera sath do, main kala dhan wapis launga (Support demonetisation, I will retrieve black money); 2018 asliyat: suit boot wale doston ko Rafale mein uraunga, naujawano ke sapne mitti mein milaunga (Reality: I will fly my friends in Rafale and crush the dreams of youth).”

Almost parallel to Gandhi’s jibes came a series of P Chidambaram tweets that questioned the RBI for failing to stand up to demonetisation. “RBI Board, with many members absent, met at 5.30 pm on November 8, 2016, and disagreed with the key reasons given by government, yet obediently endorsed demonetisation. That was a black day in RBI’s history,” Chidambaram said, referring to reports that the RBI did not buy government’s logic that demonetisation would help purge the economy of black money and fake currency.

Chidambaram said: “Shockingly, the government paper calculated GDP growth in real terms and growth in money circulation in nominal terms and yet compared the two and reached absurd conclusions. So much for the competence of the government.”