“I am fighting to make the honest empowered,”: PM

Hitting back at Rahul Gandhi’s charge of helping big corporates and the rich, Prime Minister Narendra Modi today said his government is focused on working for the poor and asserted that demonetisation has destroyed in one stroke black money, terror funding as well as human and drug trafficking.

Targeting parties who are opposing the note ban, he claimed some people are upset as his decision has struck the “ring leader of thieves”.

Addressing BJP’s ‘parivartan maharally’ in poll-bound Uttarakhand, Modi appeared to rebut Rahul’s charge when he said that while the UPA government’s move to raise the number of subsidised cylinders from 9 to 12 was projected as momentous, his government gave gas cylinders to five crore people below poverty line.