ATM machines became cashless and long queues formed outside banks to exchange the old notes for new ones. From this inane compliance ritual of standing in endless queues outside banks, heart wrenching stories emerged. A number of senior citizens died of exhaustion. Children and the elderly who were sick died as they were refused admission to hospitals as they could not pay with old notes. Farmers could not buy seeds for the sowing season as they did not have the new currency to pay for it. For the first time in post independent India the financial system went into a lockdown mode.
The collective punishment on India's poor and the informal sector where millions eke out a miserable livelihood was severe as close to 50 percent of them do not have bank accounts and formal identification papers to open bank accounts. However this draconian measure was justified by the NDA government of Modi as a patriotic duty to eradicate the twin evils of black money and counterfeit currency used by terrorists.
True to form the mainstream TV channels- with the exception of NDTV (Hindi) News- which largely serve as PR agencies of corporate houses spewed patriotic drivel about pain, sacrifice and stoicism as national virtues. Tall and ludicrous claims were made by the BJP ministers that terrorism was dealt a death blow by the surgical strike of knocking out 86% of the Indian currency. Critics of demonetisation were shouted down as unpatriotic with the passionate fervor of McCarthyism. Donning the mantle of a messianic prophet PM Modi exhorted the poorest of the poor to move towards a cashless society.
Cutting beneath the masochistic hysteria of pain and national sacrifice whipped up by the propaganda machine of corporate media and the Modi government, one discerns fundamental flaws in the argument that demonetization eradicates black money and counterfeit currency. It is as absurd as arguing that to prevent bank robberies one has to completely shut down the banks.
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