Shashi Tharoor and other Congress leaders being detained by police in Thiruvananthapuram (ANI photo) Shashi Tharoor and other Congress leaders being detained by police in Thiruvananthapuram (ANI photo)

Congress MP Shashi Tharoor and other party leaders were detained by the police in Thiruvananthapuram for protesting against demonetisation outside the RBI office in the state capital, news agency ANI reported. The Congress in Kerala has been staging protests against the manner in which the Centre has implemented the note ban in the country.

Tharoor, the local MP, had said earlier that the demonetisation exercise 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 per cent of your currency would become illegal in three-and-a-quarter hours. That’s astonishing. Nobody in the world has done this. 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,” Tharoor had earlier said at the Idea Exchange session in New Delhi.

He had also criticised the government for changing goalposts 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,” Tharoor had said.

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