Rahul Gandhi: “Demonetisation should have been thrown in the dustbin”

Congress president Rahul Gandhi said on Saturday that demonetisation was "not a good" initiative and if he were the Prime Minister he would have thrown the proposal in the "dustbin".

Rahul Gandhi is on a five-day trip to Singapore and Malaysia. He began the Malaysia leg of his visit on Saturday and interacted with an "enthusiastic gathering" of Indian diaspora in Kuala Lumpur.

Asked how he would have rolled out demonetisation differently, Gandhi said "if I was the Prime Minister and somebody would have given me a file with demonetisation written on it, I would thrown it in the dustbin, out of the door and into the junkyard." "That is how I would have rolled it out, because that is what I think should have been done with the demonetisation which was not good at all," he said in a video shared by the Congress party on its Twitter handle.

The demonetisation initiative was rolled out by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on November 8, 2016, announcing the invalidation of high-value currency notes currency notes of ₹500 and ₹1,000.

Congress party has strongly criticised demonetisation, saying the move has led to economic slowdown.

Earlier at the University of California, Berkeley Gandhi had said that Modi had caused "tremendous damage" to India's economy with his "reckless and dangerous" decisions like demonetisation and "hastily-applied" Goods and Service Tax.

Gandhi's trip is part of the Congress party's efforts to connect with the diaspora. Later in the year, the Congress president is also expected to travel to Dubai and Canada.