Congress leader Rahul Gandhi on Monday released the first part of his video series attacking the Modi government for the “economic tragedy that the country is facing for the first time in 40 years.”

He launched an attack on the Centre saying “asatyagrahi” (someone who doesn’t have interest in seeking truth) are blaming God for the fallout. His tweet was an apparent counter to finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman’s statement last week where she referred to the coronavirus pandemic as an ‘Act of God’ that may result in contraction of the economy this fiscal.

In a video series titled ‘Arthavyavastha ki baat Rahul Gandhi ke saath’ or ‘State of the Economy with Rahul Gandhi’, the Congress leader claimed that the BJP government has attacked the informal structure of the economy and has attempted to turn people into slaves.

“In 2008, the world was hit by an economic storm. It affected the entire world including the United States, China, Europe and Japan. Many banks and firms in the US and Europe shut down but India remained unaffected under the leadership of the UPA government,” Gandhi claimed.

He said he asked former prime minister Dr Manmohan Singh as to how India did not suffer losses like the rest of the world due to the recession and was told that there were two types of economies within the country: organised and unorganised.

Gandhi says Singh explained to him that as long as the nation’s unorganised sector, which includes farmers, small and medium size businesses and labourers, stands strong no economic storm can take down India.

“For the past six years, the BJP government has been attacking the informal sector,” he said and stated that demonetisation, “wrong” Goods and Services Tax (GST) and the Covid-19 lockdown were the biggest examples of the same.

“The lockdown wasn’t planned last minute, instead the aim of these three moves (demonetisation, GST, and lockdown) was to destroy the informal sector.

As many as 40 crore people working in the informal sector may face extreme poverty, he said citing an International Labour Organization report. At least two crore people have lost their jobs in the last four months, he added.

He claimed that the informal sector has a lot of money that the government can’t touch and so they’re trying to break the sector to extort the money. “The result will be that India will not be able to produce jobs as the informal sector generates over 90% of the jobs. Unemployment will be the highest in 45 years,” he said.

He asserted that the government is cheating people and so the country needs to stand united to fight this.