After the Prime Minister's announcement, the Reserve Bank of India Governor Urjit Patel was quick on the heels to stress the need for adopting such a drastic measure and to reassure Indians of a smooth transition. "This is necessitated to tackle counterfeiting Indian banknotes, to effectively nullify black money hoarded in cash and curb funding of terrorism with fake notes," the bank said in a statement on November 8. The government line is that the move was a tightly kept secret until the announcement and even banks did not have any clue about what was to come. Meanwhile, critics including the Congress party-led Opposition claim that some ruling party members and those close to them got a whiff of the move and benefited from the information by converting their cash into other assets such as gold and land ahead of November 8. An article on demonetization in the April issue of the journal of the nation's largest bank, the State Bank of India, also re-surfaced in December.