'Barbadiyon ka jashn manata chala gaya': Cong's jibe at Modi on repo rate hike

The Congress on Thursday attacked Prime Minister Narendra Modi after the repo rate hike, saying he is busy celebrating 25 years of glory while the country was hurtling toward a "major economic crisis".

Taking a dig at the government, Congress general secretary Jairam Ramesh recalled the lyrics of a song from the 1961 Dev Anand-starrer Hum Dono -- 'Barbadiyon ka jashn manata chala gaya, har fikr ko dhuein mein udata chala gaya'.

Ramesh shared the screenshot of a media report which stated that installments on existing loans and the cost of new loans could rise, ahead of the festive season, after the RBI hiked interest rates for the first time since February 2023.

The opposition party's dig came a day after the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) raised its benchmark repo rate by 25 basis points to 5.50 per cent, its first hike in nearly four years, while signalling that rate cuts are off the table in the near term and that further hikes could follow amid rising inflation, a weak rupee and high crude oil prices.

The six-member Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) of the RBI voted unanimously to raise the repo rate, and sprang a surprise with a shift in policy stance to "calibrated tightening" from "neutral". The decision to change the policy stance was taken with a 4:2 majority.

Ramesh said the repo rate hike has increased the burden of debt on the public.

With loans becoming more expensive, spending, investment, and business will decline, he claimed.

"In the festive season, rampant inflation is breaking the back of the middle and poor classes, and amid rampant unemployment and falling incomes, people's pockets are emptying out," he said in a post in Hindi on X.

The decline in the stock market continues unabated, as it fell again today, and the foreign institutional investors have withdrawn a whopping four lakh crore rupees from the Indian stock market in just the past nine months, the Congress leader said.

"The rupee is at a historic low. All of this signals that the economy is heading into an abyss," Ramesh said.

Amid the din of fake claims about the GDP, the people of the country are being crushed, he said.

The government is, meanwhile, relentlessly wielding the hammer of plunder on the nation's people, Ramesh said.

"The country is hurtling toward a major economic crisis, but Narendra Modi ji is busy celebrating 25 years of glory, abandoning the people's worries. A government formed through stolen votes and fraud doesn't care about the public, because the Election Commission is firmly in their grip," Ramesh said.

"That evergreen song from the film 'Hum Dono' comes to mind 'Barbadiyon ka jashn manata chala gaya, har fikr ko dhuein mein udata chala gaya...'," Ramesh said.