'Compulsive Contrarians' deflected liquidity concerns to issue of RBI autonomy, says Jaitley

Jaitley said the Compulsive Contrarians could concoct arguments even if they went against the general interest of the country.

New Delhi: Finance Minister Arun Jaitley on Thursday wrote an elaborate Facebook post, lambasting the 'new class of Compulsive Contrarians', adding that they had no qualms about manufacturing falsehood.

Jaitley said that it was the Contrarians who deflected Reserve Bank of India's (RBI's) credit and liquidity issue to the issue of autonomy.

“They could concoct arguments even if they went against the general interest of the country. They could masquerade corruption as crusade. They could adopt double standards whenever it suited them,” he added

“Steps taken against black money were described as "Tax Terrorism". The virtues of cash which was a source of black money and fuelled corruption were discovered after demonetisation. AADHAAR which became an instrument for saving money to ensure that it is fruitfully spent for the poor was questioned on the ground of violating personal liberty.

Jaitley in his post gave several specific examples to illustrate his points that ranged from the Justice Loya case, the Rafale case, the CBI issue and on the Reserve Bank of India debate.

“The RBI has served this country extremely well. It has extremely important functions to perform. There are many instances of the past where Government and RBI have had different opinions,” he wrote.

“The Government in recent months have strongly felt that certain sectors of the economy needed credit and liquidity support. Squeezing out both would eventually hurt this sector as also hurt growth. Recent data relating to some of those sectors has supported the position taken by the Government. Every stakeholder in the market was in agreement with the Government position but the Contrarians deflected the credit and liquidity issue to the issue of autonomy. After all the Government was only addressing the autonomous RBI and asking it to resolve the issues which lay in its domain,” he added.