'Liar of the year': BJP slams Rahul Gandhi over his remarks on NPR and CAA

New Delhi, Dec 27: The ruling BJP hit back at Congress leader Rahul Gandhi for his 'tax for poor' remark by dubbing him the "biggest liar of 2019" for comments that it said had "embarrassed his party and family".

Union minister Prakash Javadekar accused the Congress of trying to fan instability by misleading people over issues related to citizenship, which have triggered protests in different parts of the country, but asserted that people were with the government on the new citizenship law and NPR.

Noting that these exercises did not involve any monetary transaction and the NPR data was used to identify targeted beneficiaries of welfare schemes, Javadekar hit back at the Congress, saying collecting tax was the "culture" of the opposition party, be it the "Jayanthi" tax, the "coal tax" or the "2G tax", a reference to the monikers used by the saffron party to describe several alleged scams under the UPA government.

The NPR exercise was undertaken in 2010 as well, the minister said.

"When Rahul Gandhi was the Congress president, he would say anything and lie all the time. Now he is no longer the president, but continues to lie. If there was a category of the liar of the year, he would be in it. His comments used to embarrass his family. His lies now embarrass his party and the entire country," Javadekar told reporters.

Highlighting the benefits of the NPR data and also that of the Aadhaar, he said the Modi government had directly transferred Rs 9 lakh crore to tens of crores of beneficiaries of welfare schemes and saved Rs 2 lakh crore of leakage.

Former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi used to say only Rs 15 reached the beneficiaries of his government's schemes of the Rs 100 meant for them, the BJP leader said, adding that all the money was reaching the poor now under the Modi government.

He said the BJP had two demands from the Congress -- first it should stop lying and that people should not be misled by its comments.

Gandhi should also visit the hospital in Rajasthan's Kota, where the Congress is in power, as 77 children died there in a month, Javadekar said.

The Congress should also stop making loan waiver promises as it had never honoured those, he added.