Congress MP Rahul Gandhi on Thursday accused Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Union home minister Amit Shah of being directly involved in stock market manipulation that resulted in a loss of ₹30 lakh crore for retail investors around the time of the election results.

Rahul demanded a joint parliamentary committee (JPC) probe into the way the markets behaved between the exit polls on June 1 and the actual results on June 4 and the “fictitious exit polls”.

The BJP fielded Union minister Piyush Goyal to trash Rahul’s claims but he did not respond to the specific question why Modi and Shah had given investment advice during the campaign period.

Rahul claimed that Modi and Shah had manipulated the markets by stating that the stock markets would break records on counting day. He listed the “chronology” of their comments and the exit polls.

“On May 13, Amit Shah said: ‘Buy shares before June 4’. On May 19, the Prime Minister said: ‘Stock markets will break records on June 4’. On June 1, the media releases the exit polls. On June 3, the stock market breaks records and reaches an all-time high. On June 4, the markets crash and investors, especially small ones, lose ₹30 lakh crore,” Rahul said.

He underlined that there was massive stock activity on May 31, more than double what was there on May 30 and the previous days.

“Look at the anomaly. Who are these people? These are those people who know some scam is on. Thousands of crores of rupees were invested and after that there is a loss of Rs 30 lakh crore for retail investors. This is the biggest scam of India’s stock market history,” he said.

Having laid out what the Congress views as a scam, Rahul asked why Modi and Shah had given specific investment advice to the five crore families investing in the stock market.

“Is it their job to give investment advice? Why both interviews — where the investment advice was given — were given to the same media house owned by the same business group which is also under the Sebi investigation for manipulating the stock market," he said.

Rahul added: “What is the connection between the BJP, the fake exit pollsters and the dubious foreign investors? Who invested one day before the exit polls were announced and made a huge profit at the cost of five crore families? We demand a JPC into this. We are absolutely convinced that this is a scam. Somebody has made thousands of crores of rupees at the cost of retail investors…. And this is a criminal act.”

Asked to elaborate on how the Congress had decided that the quantum of loss was ₹30 lakh crore, the Congress’s data analytics department-in-charge, Praveen Chakravarty, said: “This is based on the market value of all the companies the day before the results and the market value of all the companies at the end of the day the results came.”

Goyal’s response to the Congress’s allegations was to accuse it of fear-mongering. He said the market moved up and down according to its own logic, and that the Prime Minister and the home minister had only said their government would return for a third term.

Goyal claimed Rahul was trying to mislead market investors, a charge trashed by Congress media-in-charge Jairam Ramesh. “This is bakwas (rubbish) that has been decisively rebuffed by the people of India. He (Goyal) has not answered the 3 basic questions Rahul Gandhi has asked on behalf of crores of Indian retail investors,” Ramesh wrote on X.