Aditya Sinha: Father of demonetisation

Citizens protest the unavailability of cash at a bank in Hyderabad on Friday PicPTIA friend was extolling Prime Minister Narendra Modirsquos virtues saying that demonetisation was a social experiment that will be studied in future decades and whose template will determine other paradigmshifting governmental initiatives mdash if it works This friend echoes the sentiment of a chunk of Indians many settled abroad who not only believe that demonetisation is working mdash a sentiment not shared by economists or foreign governments mdash but that Modi is the superstud that India has been waiting for since Lord Krishna He has turned India into one big shakha where everyone is following a drill and standing on lineThe queues havenrsquot actually thinned in fact my bankrsquos local branch gives out 40odd tokens every morning for withdrawals and the limit is Rs 5000 So there is this sleight of hand At my house Ms P is going home for Christmas in a remote part of Jharkhand though she has an account at the Bank of India it is a manymiles trudge through the forest to the local branch which in any case has not seen much cash in the past month She is owed several monthsrsquo salary so these days when there is no bank holiday she is queuing up to cash a R5000 cheque every morning Thus the banks are engaged in a sleight of hand of slicinganddicing the queues to make things look betterYet looks can be deceiving My wife is in Guwahati for a wedding The bride is the only daughter of my wifersquos uncle and they are not an ostentatious lot The bride and her brother organised the entire thing with help from online research for decor food etc Yet the one thing that marked this marriage was the paperwork they had to wade through Of course they got the Rs 25 lakh in cash but it was a bureaucratic procedure that would frighten even Kafka with the family having to itemise each and every expense Some Modi fans cheer this they say the government should know all transactions Besides the fact that such monitoring of a middleclass marriage is intrusive almost a personal violation any sane person should be against turning the government into the Orwellian Big BrotherModi asked for 50 days to sort things out and time is running out They canrsquot print the required currency by then and rumours have been flying mdash to the extent that a British company had on Friday to deny it was printing the new currency for India Modi has assured the Supreme Court that hersquoll get the cash in time but the judges sounded sceptical His government has told the court there has been no violence or death due to demonetisation and it is technically correct as no FIRs have been filed despite a lathicharge and firing in the air on the outskirts of Gurgaon last week mdash apparently the concerned bankrsquos staff did not dare enter the branch because it had no cash and the nonopening drove the crowd to a frenzy and 90odd deaths have been due to heart illness or dehydrationWhatever Modi may have told the court the real promise he must keep is the 50day one he made to voters Come New Yearrsquos Day and people will still find UPrsquos ATMs empty or emptying UP has twice the ATMs that Delhi does but 20 times the population Many people who trusted the PM and stayed civil in queue will feel betrayed Then the panic will beginAnd yet Modirsquos diehard fans think that he has cut some kind of Gordian knot with demonetisation They have blindly put their faith in its longterm effects which even the most experienced or mathematicallyproficient economists have been loathe to do It has something to do with the Modi personaModi scares the living daylights out of every Indian male Every Indian male is also secretly jealous of Modi and not because the superstud left his wife and visits his mother The aforementioned friend ascribes bizarre yogic powers to Modi which include the imaginative use of a bucket of milk Whatever its truth it is symptomatic of the legends that Modi cheerily allows to accumulate The Indian male admires Modirsquos impulsiveness even as the Court wondered if demonetisation was done without forethought our lives are so dictated by expectations that impulse seems a luxury This along with the Indian tradition of selfsacrifice for purification mentioned last week is perhaps another reason the queues have not turned into riots Letrsquos hope it stays that way come JanuaryA friend in government once told me that Modi wants to be the greatest Indian ever greater than even Gandhiji This impulse is pushing us into a recession likely by summermonsoon In which case superstud Modi would turn out to be Indiarsquos revenge on herselfSenior journalist Aditya Sinha is a contributor to the recently published anthology House Spirit Drinking in India He tweets autumnshade Send your feedback to mailbagmiddaycom