Modi is an unstoppable force -- and that’s India's great modern tragedy
Kapil Komireddi
Last month, Narendra Modi, the
prime minister of India,
declared that 500- and
1000-rupee notes would cease to
be legal tender within hours.
His announcement rendered
almost 17 trillion rupees worth
of cash -- in a country where
more than 90 per cent of all
transactions involve cash --
worthless.
The prime minister justified this drastic action as a bitter
but necessary remedy for the sweeping affliction of "black
money" -- wealth amassed through illegal means -- and, as if
to inoculate the measure from criticism, added a national
security codicil: it would also invalidate the vast amounts
of counterfeit currency allegedly channelled into the Indian
economy by sponsors of terrorism operating from Pakistan.
Yet no Pakistani could have engineered the wave of
misery that has washed over India in the month
since Mr Modi's speech. Demonetisation, unlike any
war or calamity in living memory, has exposed
people in every corner of India to intense distress.
It presumes that every Indian in possession of the banned
notes is a criminal. The only precedent for such
all-encompassing agony in India's republican history is the
"mass sterilisation" drive pursued by Sanjay Gandhi, the son
of prime minister Indira Gandhi, as his mother declared a
state of internal emergency, suspended the constitution and
imposed a horrific spell of dictatorship between 1975 and
1977. Thousands of men were subjected to forced vasectomies
as part of Sanjay's fantastic bid to put an instant curb on
India's population growth; hundreds died in botched operations.
But even then, the terror was restricted to some parts of
India.
Today, the pain is distributed evenly across the
country's immense land mass. The tales of suffering
are harrowing. Farmers in rural India can't sell
their produce. Patients are unable to pay for
medicine. People who moved from the decaying
countryside to make a living in India's burgeoning
cities -- as servants, cooks, cleaners, chauffeurs
and construction workers -- cannot feed themselves
or send money to the families they've left behind
because they do not have bank accounts and cannot
"whiten" their "black" earnings. Even the bank
account-holding urban middle classes are desperate.
The deadline for depositing the banned notes
expires on December 30, and there is roughly one
commercial bank branch for every 12,500 Indians.
The queues outside the banks evoke the lines outside the
supermarkets in Ceausescu's Romania. Dozens of people have
died in the long, tense wait to renew their money. Those who
make it to the end discover that the banks, like the stores
in communist-era Bucharest, are understocked. By some
estimates, it may take the presses of the Reserve Bank of
India, working non-stop and at full capacity, more than six
months to replace the abruptly withdrawn currency. The
original ambitions of the demonetisation scheme --
eliminating black money and combating terrorism -- have
fallen by the wayside. Indians in possession of illicit cash
clearly beat the chief aim of demonetisation by finding
ingenious ways to deposit their cash; those who could not
dumped their cash in landfills, denying the central bank the
colossal receipts that Mr Modi had promised it.
Mr Modi, rather than accept the failure of his
policy and reverse course, has shifted the
goalposts. Demonetisation is no longer about
eradicating black money; it is, says Mr Modi, about
making India a "cashless" society. Emulating Mao
Zedong's exhortation to the Chinese to make the
Great Leap Forward, Mr Modi now urges his
compatriots to "go digital". Without a hint of
irony, a loyal member of Mr Modi's cabinet has
called the entire exercise India's own "cultural
revolution". It's as if the politician hailed only
two years ago as the antithesis of out-of-touch
elites has completely seceded from the real world
and taken up residence in a virtual reality of his
own making. This, lest we forget, is a man who
continues, in defiance of incontrovertible
evidence, to insist that demonetisation is a wild
success because respondents to a survey held
exclusively on his personal smart phone app said so.
The docility of Mr Modi's MPs, many of whom are said to be
livid in private, has profound implications for the health of
Indian democracy. Unlike most Indian political parties, Mr
Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party has traditionally been a
democratic institution. There is nepotism in the BJP, but the
party is not owned by a dynasty. In theory anyone, so long as
he or she subscribed to the sectarian
