People With Us On Notes Ban, No Need To Be Defensive, PM Narendra Modi Tells Party

New Delhi: With the opposition plotting a united attack on the government over the shock decision to scrap Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes, Prime Minister Narendra Modi met with BJP parliamentarians on Monday evening and told them "the country is with the government".

Parliament begins its winter session on Wednesday; the opening will likely be taken over by opposition leaders like Mamata Banerjee accusing the government of punishing poor people with the decision to remove old high-denomination notes from circulation.

PM Modi was accompanied at Monday evening's meeting by BJP President Amit Shah, senior ministers Arun Jaitley and Rajnath Singh, and patriarch LK Advani.

To assuage public anger and concerns over the difficulty in accessing new notes, the government has increased the limit on cash withdrawals from bank accounts. But opposition leaders - eight met at a parallel meeting hosted by the Congress this evening - say that the abrupt move to ban the old notes has left the poor cashless and unable to buy essential commodities like groceries. The banned Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes made up more than 80 per cent of the currency in circulation. The government has countered that the ban had to be sudden in order to be effective.

Since the old notes were declared invalid, nearly 45 billion dollars have been deposited in banks as people turn in old notes for new ones.

Relaxing earlier restrictions, a bank customer can now withdraw Rs 24,000 in a week, and a daily limit of Rs 10,000 has been cancelled. The limit for swapping old notes for new currency has been raised to Rs 4,500  from Rs 4,000; at ATMs, the limit on per day per card withdrawal has moved to Rs 2,500 instead of Rs 2,000. The government has stressed that these caps will be removed quickly.

The BJP President, advising his party's members to counter the opposition aggressively, said that they must also be prepared to offer informed accounts of the surgical strikes or cross-border raids conducted by India in September in Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir and on One Rank One Pension or OROP, the scheme that seeks to equalize pension payments between army officers who held the same rank for the same amount of time but retired at different points.