Yoga teacher Baba Ramdev had an unusual view on the wedding crisis after notes ban
The sudden ban on Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes has left thousands of families facing a massive cash crunch in the wedding season. Yesterday, the government allowed families planning weddings to make a one-time withdrawal of Rs 2.5 lakh.
Yoga teacher Ramdev's theory on the government's move in peak wedding season drew laughter at an event on Thursday.
"Many in the BJP are bachelors...they didn't realise it was wedding season...that was the mistake," Ramdev chuckled.
"If they (government) had done this around 15 days or one month later then there weddings wouldn't have been so badly affected. One good thing that has come out of all this...people cannot demand dowry (the illegal practice of cash, gifts given to the groom's family)," joked the Yoga teacher, who is known to be close to the ruling BJP and had campaigned for the party ahead of the 2014 national election.
The ban on the two highest denomination notes, welcomed by many as a sharp move to tighten control on black or untaxed money, has seen 85 per cent of cash in circulation suddenly withdrawn. November and December are the most popular months for weddings.
"(We) decided that for marriage ceremonies, up to 250,000 rupees will be permitted to be withdrawn from the bank account and it has to be drawn... from the father, mother or the person getting married," Economic Affairs Secretary Shaktikanta Das said on Thursday.
Families who had withdrawn cash just before the currency ban were left queueing up at banks to exchange old notes. Among them was a groom in Delhi who spent the night before his wedding outside a bank, waiting his turn for cash.
Amid the crunch, an exception was an outrageously lavish wedding hosted by Karnataka politician and mining tycoon G Janardhana Reddy for his daughter on Wednesday at a royal palace in Bengaluru, where there were replicas of monuments and a cavalry of elephants and other animals, a dining hall with a village setting and Brazilian dancers.