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Demonetisation and its political underpinnings

What irks me in this din of charges regarding the debate on demonetisation, in which
everyone is accusing everyone else of telling some lie, the controlling chicanery at the
heart of most of their propaganda, though palpably abhorrent, remains unpunished.
That is because they are all in it together- and have been for decades: the only bond
which holds them together is their complicity in the common crime of perpetuating
the exploitative corrupt system. Each political party has its own particular version of
the lie and derides the others as baloney, each side demonizing the other. But the lie
is the same. They promise the people something- no, not just something, pretty much
everything from jobs to prosperity to good governance. And that too, it will be
delivered at their door steps at no additional cost, possibly even at a saving, may be
even free! JUST ELECT US, is their constant refrain, and see the government with a
difference. And so, of course, every time we have elected them and we have seen.
Meanwhile, to peddle the lies as authentic to the gullible, the demand for experts has
exploded, who are willing to diagnose the disease according to the medicine their
mentors want to prescribe. The expert explosion has led to some grousing that the
process has been perverted: that old erudite gentlemen-calm, well informed,
reasoned-are being displaced by loudmouths, self-promoters and con artists.
It is a painful irony the government makes choices in the name of reforms which
people have to suffer and live with. Unable to cope with the stress caused by
demonetisation, more than fifty people have been reported to have lost their lives.
We are now witnessing a famine like situation where markets are full of food items of
every sort but people are facing starvation, unable to buy their groceries because they
have been robbed of the purchasing power of their money. It is absolutely scandalous
that the car owners are free to use their demonetised money to buy gasoline, but
people cannot buy food for survival. Why this laxity to car owners who, presumably,
use plastic money, and no such relief to a common man who doesnt. The
government has now conceded, what people have known all along, that the petrol
pumps have been laundering black money. Meanwhile there is no let-up in the
harassment the public is facing. Millions of workers, country wide, have lost their
jobs due to cash crunch in the economy.
On a daily basis, out of expediency, the spin doctors of the government have been
offering band aid solutions to prevent the press vary public from being swayed by the
unfavourable coverage by the media, projecting the aftermath of demonetisation look
horrible. They are appealing to the harassed lot to bear the pain: like a homoeopath
warning their patients that the correct medicine exacerbates the symptoms before

curing them. What they need to learn is that the basic principle they espouse is that
they do not worry about curing the disease so much as about curing the person, the
system. Added to their discomfiture is the rebuff the government got from the SC,
who warned of the impending riots in the country over the issue. Demonetisation
should not be misconstrued as be all and end all of the struggle. It has to be taken to
its logical conclusion of cleansing the very system which gives rise to illicit money in
the first place. The government should come out clean and take immediate steps to
appoint the Jan-Lok-Pal and Lok- Ayukts, which so far has merely been reduced to
only attention-grabbing cosmetic. The Supreme Court has warned the government
that if they continue to drag their feet of the issue, they will appoint the Lokpal. Two
crucial steps needed to push such a reform process relate to the funding of political
parties and donations in the spiritual super market, the two major black money
spinners. Instead, the government has now joined the bandwagon of agents by a
lucrative offer: if you have failed to launder your black money into white so far, we
will do it for you, fifty: fifty sounds a good Christmas time bargain. Expediency
demands forging ties and recycle the maxim when the decisive elections are round
the corner: a friend in need is a friend indeed. Why this laxity to the tax evaders and
black marketers who are squarely responsible for prompting the government to
initiate the harsh step of surgical strike of demonetisation, causing all the suffering
and hardship to the people in the first place. In what virtually amounts to another
voluntary income disclosure scheme, it is nave to expect that the remaining part of
the undeclared income would legitimately come into the formal economy. It is
bizarre logic that leaving half the money with the black marketers, the government
will help the poor. The black money which does not come back to the banking sector
would be a net gain for the government, then why bail them out and deprive the poor
of that much expenditure on their welfare. It smacks of some design and betrays the
commitment, or lack of it, to unearth all the ill gotten money and punish the guilty by
plugging all the loopholes.