Jaitley hits back at Rahul, says Rafale deal under BJP 20% cheaper than UPA's

As the war of words over the Rafale deal escalated, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley said today that the fully weaponised fighter jets which his government is buying are 20 per cent cheaper than the ones offered under the previous UPA regime.

Minutes after Congress President Rahul Gandhi launched a no-holds-barred attack on Prime Minister Narendra Modi for allegedly helping only "15-20 crony capitalist friends", Jaitley took to the twitter to say any diversionary tactic will not wipe out the falsehood of the opposition leader.

"@RahulGandhi has not read my question - The fully weaponised Rafale aircraft's 2016 price is 20% cheaper than the 2007 offer. This is what the 2015 statement of the PM and the French President refers to as 'on terms better than the 2007 offers'," he wrote.

Jaitley had yesterday posed 15 questions to Gandhi, charging him with "peddling untruth" and carrying out a "false campaign" on the Rafale deal in a bid to counter the opposition's charge of it being the "biggest scam" in the defence sector.

Gandhi at a press conference has maintained that the BJP government was buying fighter jets at more than three times the Rs 520 crore price, the previous UPA government had negotiated a deal to buy 126 medium multi-role combat aircraft.

To this, Jaitley said, "Any issue diversion by @RahulGandhi on my Rafale questions, will not wipe out his falsehood on Rafale."
On Gandhi's assertion that demonetisation was done to help Modi's "crony capitalist friends", the Finance Minister said, "Little knowledge is dangerous. @RahulGandhi's fiction on 'demonetisation helping NPA holders', forgets that the Modi Government legislated and enforced the IBC where the NPA defaulters lost their companies."
"The larger purpose of demonetisation was to move India from a tax non-compliant society to a compliant society. This necessarily involved the formalisation of the economy and a blow to the black money," he wrote achieved?
"When the impact of demonetisation and other steps is analysed, the Income Tax returns have increased by 19 per cent and 25 per cent. This is a phenomenal increase," he said. "The growth of income tax collections in the pre-demonetisation two years was 6.6 per cent and 9 per cent. Post-demonetisation, the collections increased by 15 per cent and 18 per cent in the next two years. The same trend is visible in the third year."