New Delhi, Delhi, India

Congress President Rahul Gandhi launched into a full-throated attack of Prime Minister Modi on Friday in the Lok Sabha during the debate on the no-confidence motion against the government. 

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To start with, Rahul reminded Modi of his pre-poll promise — the creation of 2 crore jobs. 

As Rahul has done earlier, he compared India's job creation figures with China's, telling Modi that China creates 50,000 jobs for its youth (notice the emphasis on the youth, they are expected to form a large chunk of the voting population in 2019) every 24 hours while India creates only 400. 

Jobs, new jobs, are India's single-most pressing need of the hour. And India needs a million jobs a month — that's how many people join the work force every 30-odd days. 

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So how many jobs is India creating at the moment? Nobody really knows. 

The Modi government recently told its ministries and departments to start adding up the numbers (the elections are around the corner). The official figure that emerged was 3 million jobs in the last six months but independent agencies say the figure is lower. So what we've got so far has been debate. 

Expect it to continue till the elections. 

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Rahul also attacked Modi on demonetisation, saying jobs are created by small and medium industry but Modi did untold damage to exactly those sections of the economy by removing 86% of the cash in circulation at the time from the economy. 

And he reminded Modi of his promise accruing from demonetisation — that Modi would deposit Rs 15 lakh in every Jan Dhan account. 

Rahul also attacked Modi and Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on the Rafale deal. Rahul said the defence minister had said India had a secrecy pact with France on the Rafale deal. But that he had personally met the French president who told him no such pact existed. 

"The Defence Minister has clearly spoken an untruth," Rahul said. 

Expect much more of the same in Rahul's run up to the 2019 election campaign.