Whenever the Congress party’s supremo, Rahul Gandhi speaks, the song which immediately strikes your mind is a song by Mike Jagger from the 2004 movie Alfie: “old habits die hard”. The path Rahul followed throughout the recently concluded election season was that of lies and falsities. Rahul Gandhi had turned lying almost into an art form and a force of habit.

Now, almost after two-month-long solitary confinement, Rahul, today, gave his first speech in the 17th Lok Sabha. This time again, Rahul was seen slipping back into his familiar pattern.

During his first speech in the 17th Lok Sabha, the Wayanad MP once again chose to speak about the loan waiver for farmers. A topic, which the grand old party has been advocating like the one-stop solution for all problems in the agriculture sector.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mFCX0mEQcmw]

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This time again Rahul Gandhi spread lies and slammed the Modi government by reiterating that Modi has waived lakhs of crore of loans of few big industrialists, while refused to waive loans of farmers. In his speech, he mentions that in the last 5 years the BJP government gave 4.3 lakh crore tax concessions and waived off 5.5 lakh crore tax for rich businessmen. He called out Modi government’s “shameful double standards”.

He asks, “why does the government act as if our farmers our inferior to the rich?” However, Rahul once again chooses to forget that most of the bad debt owed by the corporate sector are from the UPA era. In fact, the Modi government has brought in revolutionary reforms in resolving NPAs. The government had introduced the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code (IBC) to resolve the issue, and it had already recovered Rs 3 lakh crores in just two years.

Firstly, Rahul Gandhi still doesn’t seem to understand the different between ‘waive off’ and ‘write off’. A ‘write off’ doesn’t mean a loan has been ‘waived’ and is liable to be recovered by the banks. It is a purely accounting term.

Read also: Don’t fall for propaganda: ‘Write off’ of loans is not ‘Loan waiver’

Secondly, many times in the past, Rahul Gandhi has repeated his lies, but interestingly, it has always been with a twist. Every time Rahul reiterates his lies, he keeps changing the amount. According to the Congress president, Modi government has waived loans of 5.50 lakh crore / 3.50 lakh crore / 3.00 lakh crore / 2.50 lakh crore / 1.50 lakh crore / 1.40 lakh crore / 1.30 lakh crore / 1.10 lakh crore owed by richest industrialists.

In November 2016, Rahul Gandhi spread lies and claimed that the Modi government had then waived off loans worth Rs 1.1 lakh crores of big industrialists. During campaigning for Gujarat assembly polls in 2017, Rahul Gandhi repeated the same trite, He inexplicably increased this figure by 20,000 Crores to Rs 1.3 lakh crores. In Karnataka, he went a step ahead and conjured up another grand figure- Rs 2.5 Lakh crores that were waived off.

After that, there has been no restriction on the amount that has been waived off for industrialists according to Rahul Gandhi, although the number of beneficiaries of this ‘waiver’ remains mostly the same, 15 richest industrialists in the country.

Meanwhile, as Gandhi scion drums into the same myth over and over again, it will be pertinent to note here that, that Anil Ambani’s Reliance Telecommunication was not given any leniency by the government in settling its dues. On the contrary, the government opposed the asset sale of Reliance Telecommunication to Jio, which would have helped the company in settling the dues. Moreover, Ambani was about to go to jail for failing to pay dues, and he was saved at the last moment by his elder brother Mukesh Ambani, who had endorsed the Congress party in these elections.

Moreover, fugitive Vijaya Mallya keeps whining that the Modi government has confiscated more assets than what is due to banks by him, which shows the extent of efforts put by the current government in recovering the corporate debt.