Image source, Indian National Congress
India’s opposition leader Rahul Gandhi has called for an investigation into the stock market crash that hit investors at the end of the general election.
He accused Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leaders of making false predictions that stock prices would surge after the election results were announced on June 4.
Gandhi, of the Indian National Congress party, claimed Prime Minister Narendra Modi had earlier encouraged people to buy stocks, which led to losses for people when the market crashed.
Modi’s party, the Bharatiya Janata Party, denies the allegations.
Gandhi demanded that the Joint Parliamentary Committee (JPC) probe the scam allegations and the role of PM Modi and senior ministers.
He alleged that weeks before the election results, Prime Minister Modi, former Home Minister Amit Shah and former Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman had advised people to “buy stocks before June 4” and suggested that the markets would surge after predicting a BJP victory.
“The stock market crash should not be linked to the elections, but even if such rumors are spreading, I would advise buying (stocks) before June 4. Prices will skyrocket,” Shah told NDTV news channel in an interview in May.
Gandhi called it “the biggest fraud in the history of the Indian stock market” and alleged that the manipulation had benefited some “dubious foreign investors” and caused losses of trillions of rupees to the Indian people.
Modi’s outgoing trade minister, Piyush Goyal, denied the allegations and accused Gandhi of misleading investors.
Exit polls had predicted the BJP would win a comfortable majority with at least 272 seats in the 543-seat assembly, a figure that could reach 360-370 seats with its coalition partners.
However, the results were very different to these predictions, with the BJP failing to reach the halfway mark on its own and the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) winning just 293 seats.
Gandhi now claims the exit polls were “fake” and that the BJP knew “from internal party surveys and feedback from intelligence agencies” that it could not win more than 220 seats.
“Despite this, the exit polls were conducted in a way that showed the BJP winning a majority of seats,” Gandhi alleged.
This, he claimed, led to the massive share buying on June 3rd.
The next day, after the results were announced, India’s stock market suffered its worst crash in years, wiping out billions of dollars’ worth of investment.
Goyal of the BJP said it was Indians who benefited from the rise and fall of stock prices because foreign investors were selling shares bought by Indians in April and May when the market was rising.
Then, he said, it happened again on June 4 when the market crashed.
“Foreigners bought high and sold low and Indian investors sold high and bought low. So in a sense, Indian investors have profited during this period too. Nobody suffered a loss,” he said.
On Friday, Indian National Congress leader Jairam Ramesh said Goyal’s explanation was “nonsense” and did not answer the specific questions raised by Gandhi.
The BJP has not responded to Ramesh’s allegations.
