How DeMO led to Covid tragedy

There is a sense of deacutejagrave vu about our torment as we reel under the onslaught of the second wave of the Covid19 pandemic The queues to access public facilities the calls to family and friends for assistance the desperation in the eyes of dailywagers unable to find work the befuddlement at the world changing overnight ndash we have been through all these experiences that we in our forgetfulness mistake for completely newReally when did we last experience such misfortunesAnswer In the weeks following November 8 2016 when Prime Minister Narendra Modi invalidated old currency notes worth Rs 1541 lakh crore He ordered a person could draw only R24000 a week from bank or ATM Modi knew he was subjecting the nation to untold suffering but it was he said a prerequisite to root out black money hoarders and terror financiers and eliminate fake currency ldquoLet us join this festival of integrity and credibilityrdquo Modi exhortedRemember Obviously you do nowSure the misery inflicted by Covid19 is incomparable to the experiences of the nation starved of cash A death count of 27 lakh people even though grossly underestimated makes demonetisation or DeMo seem like a train accident in which most passengers survived Watching a person die because of the unavailability of a hospital bed or a few litres of oxygen can never equal ATMs running out of cashYet in hindsight DeMo foretold the collapse of governance that we are witnessing today and gave us a foretaste of whimsical or thoughtless policies A scripted disaster DeMorsquos principal objective floundered ndash nearly the entire amount of black money in the country was exchanged for new currency notes Around 15 million jobs were lost in the first four months of 2017 the unemployment rate touched a 45year high of 61 per cent in 201718 and the economy began to flagYet we chose to award Modi instead of penalising him The Bharatiya Janata Party won twothirds of seats in the Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections held three months after November 8 Hubris was bound to come easy to Modi lulling him into believing a genius at winning elections did not have to do his homework before announcing a sweeping policy decision His attitude has turned Covid19 a natural disaster into a tragedyThink about it Suppose the government had printed and kept ready new currency notes equivalent to R1541 lakh crore before sucking out this amount from the system Neither the people nor the economy would have been as badly squeezed as they were 2016 is replaying in 2021 Instead of stocking vaccines in the interregnum of threefour months between the first and second wave of Covid19 Modi wasted time trumpeting Indiarsquos triumph over the virus holding massive election rallies and organising the Kumbh Mela And then when the second wave inundated the country it was decided to make vaccines available to all adultsWe did not have enough new currency notes to replace those invalidated in 2016 We now do not have enough vaccines to give to 70 per cent of Indiarsquos population for acquiring herd immunity India on April 16 had vaccinated 1821 crore people out of which only 404 crore had had their double shots We are months away from complete immunisation Just as we had cash shortages in 2016 we are witnessing vaccine scarcity What was the point of making vaccines available to all when there are not enough doses to pass around Is the policy of asking States to acquire on their own a large share of vaccines they need for immunisation a ploy to shift the burden and blame of the Covid19 tragedy on themThink about it When we elect and reelect leaders for reasons other than governance for their ability to stoke our base emotions of hate and suspicion we are only asking to be treated with disdain It could not have been a coincidence that the national lockdown of last year was imposed a day after Shivraj Singh Chouhan was sworn in as chief minister after the Congress government in Madhya Pradesh had been toppled That harsh lockdown imposed on just four hours of notice prompted lakhs of migrant labourers to walk hundreds of kilometres home Yet in the Bihar Assembly elections held months later the BJP and the Janata DalUnited sailed into power In the byeelections in Madhya Pradesh 18 out of the 25 MLAs who had deserted the Congress were reelected ensuring the BJP retained its majority The Congress government in Puducherry was toppled just before the second wave of Covid19 was sighted ndash the party still lost in the recent Assembly elections A nation so forgiving of chicanery can only encourage its leaders to govern in fits and starts ndash and treat the people callouslyModi refuses to suspend not cancel the Central Vista project even as Delhi gasps under lockdown This is as graceless as holding a raucous party in the house of a person struggling against a painful deathOur forgetting and forgiving is presumed DeMo led to the tragedy of Covid19 We do not know what nightmare we will allow our leaders to conceive nextThe writer is a senior journalist Send your feedback to mailbagmiddaycomThe views expressed in this column are the individualrsquos and donrsquot represent those of the paper