Communist Party of India (Marxist) general secretary Sitaram Yechury on Thursday called Prime Minister Narendra Modi-led government's demonetisation move an unmitigated monumental disaster.

On the second anniversary of demonetisation, Yechury told ANI: "The move of demonetisation was nothing more than a terrible disaster." On the government's plan to release a large portion of the Reserve Bank of India's cash reserve, he elucidated, "This move will be terrible as the fund of the central bank is the basis on which the fundamentals of the economy are based upon. Dissipating funds would even be worse than selling country's gold.

He further added, "The government is facilitating the loot and destruction of the Indian economy. The government is doing the worst vote bank politics in India by seeking to consolidate Hindutva vote by dividing social unity and facilitating the loot of people's wealth."

Speaking to ANI, Janata Dal-United (JD-U) national spokesperson Pavan Varma said, "If the Opposition believes that implementation of demonetisation was a blunder then they have full rights to take this message to the general public and the government has the right to defend it, and this is what we call the matrix of democracy."

CPI(M)'s central committee elected member Brinda Karat said: "Demonetisation was nothing more than a loot diwas. The money which actually had to come back, more than that has come back. This means that all the black money in the economy has been converted into white."

She further added, "He (Prime Minister Narendra Modi) did it in the name of the poor but what actually happened to the poor is that the people in the unorganised sector lost jobs. This move resulted in destruction of jobs, more than 35-40 per cent of jobs were lost. More than 47 per cent of the revenue of the SMEs (small and medium enterprise) were destroyed."

On November 8, 2016, the Centre had declared Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes as non-legal and introduced new Rs 500 and Rs 2,000 notes.

Since then, various opposition leaders have been severely critical of the Centre's move, while the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its allies have backed the decision.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)