Malevolent Republic

by K S Komireddi

  The BJP has acquiesced in Modi’s project to manufacture a post-secular heritage centred upon himself. In 2015, the party installed thousands of ‘selfie booths’ in Delhi. People could wander into them and have their picture taken next to a lifelike smiling face of Modi created using, the party boasted, ‘augmented reality’. (Modi seldom smiles in pictures unless he is posing with an important foreigner.) The booths didn’t catch on.48 But the prime minister more than made up for it: according to the government’s own figures, Modi has spent nearly Rs 5,000 crores of public money on publicity since taking office. The expense has been justified on the grounds that it was incurred to raise awareness of government programmes, but nobody has yet discovered a scheme, small or large, that was rolled out without first being glazed with the prime minister’s face.

  In the summer of 2018, a lavishly produced thirty-minute biopic of the prime minister’s childhood, Chalo Jeete Hain, was broadcast on television. The film gives Modi’s early years a saintly gloss: the future premier is shown as an enlightened child, a modern avatar of Siddhartha, consumed with an altruistic concern for others, relentlessly probing his family, friends, strangers, teachers with the same question: Who do you live for? So transparently propagandistic is the film that any viewer with a dispassionate vein in his body will need a high dose of anti-emetic to survive it. But then, so absolute has Modi’s grip on the BJP grown over the past five years that, in the days leading up to the film’s premiere, ministers and leaders were wrestling with each other to praise, and to be seen praising, it. To Poonam Mahajan, a member of parliament and leader of the BJP’s youth wing, Chalo Jeete Hain was a ‘must watch’ film on the ‘story of a young Narendra Modi-ji who is now selflessly heading the country to new peaks of success’.49 Suresh Prabhu, the minister for Commerce and Industry, attested on Twitter to being blown away by the ‘childhood of our beloved leader … It is a fantastic film already screened for all MPs … Motivational, inspirational! Triumph of struggle!’50 Devendra Fadnavis, the chief minister of Maharashtra, India’s richest state, said watching the film helped him fathom ‘how this amazing, humble, visionary personality might’ve taken shape’.51 The president of India, the vice-president, and the speaker of parliament—occupants of three of the republic’s highest constitutional offices—and Amit Shah and Mukesh Ambani, among others, attended special screenings of the film over several nights.

  The fact that the slavish paeans to Modi are not as lapidary as those woven by generations of Congress lackeys for the Nehru–Gandhis should not eclipse the more disturbing fact that it has taken Modi only a few years to accomplish what it took Indira nearly a decade to achieve.

  For their part, Western heads of state, desperate to make up for all those years of high-minded repudiation of Modi, grasped early on the utility of flattery when dealing with him. Britain’s David Cameron put an honour guard on for Modi even though Modi is not a head of state. France’s François Hollande organised a boat ride on the Seine. And, at a state dinner for the American president in 2015, Obama tickled Modi’s vanity by retelling the folktales about his ‘friend’, who ‘once survived an attack by a crocodile’ and who now ‘only needed three hours’ sleep’.52 Modi’s plump face condensed into an effulgent ball of delighted satisfaction. He was being canonised in real time.

  6

  Chaos

  Former times had chastised them with whips, but this chastised them with scorpions.

  —Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton

  Narendra Modi appeared on television at 8 p.m. on 8 November 2016 and announced that all 500 and 1,000-rupee notes would cease to be legal tender at midnight. The two denominations accounted for 86 per cent of all the currency in circulation. Four hours later, more than seventeen trillion rupees’ worth of money—in a country where more than 90 per cent of all transactions are conducted in cash—was rendered worthless. Modi justified his action as a bitter but necessary remedy for the affliction of ‘black money’, and assured Indians that they could exchange the voided notes for new currency until 30 December. As if to inoculate the measure from criticism, he added a national-security codicil: it would invalidate the vast amounts of counterfeit currency allegedly channelled into the Indian economy by the sponsors of terrorism in Pakistan.

  No Pakistani could have engineered the wave of distress that instantly washed over India. Demonetisation, unlike any war or calamity in recent times, exposed people in every corner of India to inexpressible hardship. The only precedent for such all-encompassing agony in India’s republican history was the ‘mass sterilisation’ campaign launched by Sanjay Gandhi. But even then, the terror was concentrated largely in parts of northern India. Modi’s madness engulfed the whole country.

  Farmers in rural India were left without buyers for their agricultural products. Patients had no cash with which 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, construction workers—could not feed themselves or send money to families they had left behind because they did not have bank accounts and could not ‘whiten’ their ‘black’ earnings. The bank account-holding urban middle classes were only marginally better off: there was one commercial bank for every 12,500 Indians.1

  The queues that formed outside India’s banks evoked the lines outside the supermarkets in Ceausescu’s Romania. Dozens of people died in the long, tense wait to redeem their money. And those who made it to the end discovered that the banks, like the shops in communist Bucharest, were understocked. It hadn’t occurred to the man acclaimed as a genius by economic commentators in 2014 to print sufficient quantities of lower-denomination notes in advance. Strained spirits collapsed when it was estimated that it would take up to six months for the presses of the Reserve Bank of India, working non-stop and at full capacity, to replace the abruptly withdrawn notes. The redesigned Rs 2,000 notes that were made available did not fit the existing cash dispensers, and the shortage of low-value notes meant that those in possession of the new currency could not put them to use.2

  The bodies began piling up.

  On 8 November, a businessman in Uttar Pradesh died of a heart attack shortly after listening to Modi’s speech.3

  On 9 November, a forty-year-old woman whose life’s savings amounted to Rs 2,000 died outside a shuttered bank in Captainganj.4

  On 10 November, a baby with life-threatening complications in Rajasthan died within hours of its birth because ambulances refused to accept Rs 1,000 notes to transport it to the hospital. The bereaved father, who squandered four hours locating Rs 100 notes, now feared losing his wife to trauma. ‘She keeps asking where our son is,’ he told the Indian Express, ‘and I keep telling her he is still at the district hospital undergoing treatment.’5

  On 11 November, an elderly man called Karavayya died alone in Srikakulam in Andhra Pradesh. His children, toiling as migrant workers in Hyderabad, could not be with their father in his final days because their savings had suddenly become worthless.6

  On 12 November, a forty-five-year-old farmer in the state of Chhattisgarh, overcome by the dread of losing his savings, hanged himself.7

  On 13 November, a cashier at the State Bank of India in Bhopal, stressed to breaking point by the surging queues of incensed customers, died of a heart attack.8

  On 14 November, an eighteen-month-old girl called Komali died because her parents did not have the legal currency to pay for her prescription. The family’s neighbours on the Coromandel coast pooled all their small-denomination notes for Komali’s treatment, but there wasn’t enough left after the tests to buy medicine. ‘Many were willing to help,’ Komali’s mother told the Times of India. ‘But none of them had the new currency.’9

  On 21 November, a three-year-old girl called Ankita died in a village in Uttar Pradesh as her father queued up to withdraw Rs 2,500 in low-denomination notes from the local bank to pay for her treatment.10

  Modi, exhibiting the same indifference he displayed when Musl
ims were butchered in Gujarat in 2002, refused to acknowledge the deaths or give an explanation to parliament. Instead, he rallied believers with a series of indignant speeches in which he portrayed himself as the true victim of the unspooling horror. Shedding tears, he told the faithful in Goa: ‘I know what kind of powers I have taken on. I am aware they will not let me live.’11 Who did he mean by ‘they’? Every person who perished in the chaos inaugurated by demonetisation was a member of the most trampled-upon layer of Indian society. The prime minister brushed aside their suffering as teething problems, cast himself as their ally despite being the source of their misery, blamed the turmoil precipitated by his own foolhardy decision on some sinister fifth column lurking within society, and asserted that stability would be restored in fifty days’ time.

  Two years later, the Reserve Bank of India was emphatic: Modi’s note ban was not just a failure. It was the ne plus ultra of failures. In the annals of disastrous ideas, demonetisation was the undisputed emperor. It took an entire department of the central bank, ‘working in two shifts under strenuous conditions’,12 almost two years to verify the returned pieces of annulled notes. At the end of the count, 99.3 per cent of all the abolished currency—amounting to just over Rs 15.31 lakh crore13—had been turned in. One per cent of Indians own 53 per cent of the nation’s wealth, and illegal assets are rarely hoarded in the form of cash. So, was the tiny portion of unreturned notes ‘black money’, or was it cash owned by the poor, a vast majority of whom had no bank accounts or even much knowledge of the banking system and, therefore, would not have been able to bank it or convert it into legal tender? And what proportion of Indians owned the cash that was returned? These are questions to which the government may never find definitive answers. What is clear is that Indians in possession of large sums of cash, whatever its origin, found ingenious ways to alchemise it. The government allowed up to Rs 4,000 of the abolished currency to be swapped without the need for paperwork, generating a vast network of ‘money mules’ who, for a fee, redeemed large quantities at the rate of one small stack a trip.

  The return of the notes meant that Modi’s promise of a windfall for the central bank never materialised. It is obliged to pay the bearers of the new promissory notes the value printed on them: collectively, almost the same amount as all the currency that was extinguished. The central bank not only gained nothing from demonetisation. It squandered money on the printing of new notes.

  Trust in the banking system has severely been impaired by demonetisation. People have come to regard banks as impersonal, incomprehensible, inaccessible extensions of a capricious state. Cash, tangible, is even more popular today than it was in pre-demonetised India.14

  As much of the banned currency was being turned in, the original ambitions of the prime minister’s policy—eliminating ‘black money’, flushing out counterfeit currency and combating terrorism—fell by the wayside. Modi and his acolytes assiduously extemporised fresh alibis. Demonetisation, ceasing to be the antidote for all the ills cited at its rollout, was touted as a trigger for the creation of a ‘cashless’ economy. Like Chairman Mao exhorting the Chinese to make the Great Leap Forward, Modi took to urging his compatriots to ‘go digital’. Without a hint of irony, an ingratiating member of his cabinet called the entire exercise India’s own ‘cultural revolution’. The upshot of this endeavour to make Indians eschew cash? According to the Reserve Bank, household savings in cash rose, post-demonetisation, to nearly 3 per cent of the national income—the highest in a decade.15

  Modi’ shock-therapy immobilised India’s economy in the intervening period. Farmers, operating in a sector maximally reliant on cash, were deprived of seeds and fertiliser as acute shortages of cash choked the demand for existing produce: potatoes, onions, tomatoes stagnated in markets despite a significant drop in prices. Unquantifiable amounts of food rotted away. Six months into demonetisation, growth in manufacturing and transport plummeted, and construction, a major source of employment, posted negative growth.16 Modi, campaigning for the premiership, had promised to create a hundred million new jobs. A million and a half jobs were lost in the first few months after demonetisation. Modi had castigated Manmohan Singh for allegedly slowing down growth at a time when India’s was still the fastest growing major economy in the world. In 2017, India ceded that position to China as its output shrank in the first quarter of the year.17

  More than a hundred Indians, by conservative estimates, lost their lives in the maelstrom provoked by demonetisation.18 There were those who rationalised the torment of Indians as, in the phrase deployed by the American economist Jagdish Bhagwati in defence of demonetisation, a ‘transition cost’.19 A few dozen deaths in the journey to a digital economy (even though digitising India’s economy was not the original reason for demonetisation) can seem like a reasonable price—if you don’t have to pay it. It was possible, therefore, for some to eulogise Modi despite all the disruption as a courageous moderniser, and argue that the benefits of his action, imperceptible in the present, would accrue to future generations of Indians.

  Of course, we can all imagine a prospective scenario in which Modi is retrospectively vindicated. But the defence of the long run is the last refuge, as George Eliot’s Felix Holt says, of those who have abdicated their duty to the ‘people who live now and will not be living when the long-run comes’. The futurists neglect, too, the fact that the present that Modi set on fire was already the future of a generation of elderly Indians who, having endured hardships in the preceding decades, had earned the right to a dignified later life.

  The last time a monetary decision produced so much tumult in India was in the fourteenth century, when Muhammad bin Tughlaq, the Sultan of Delhi, suddenly replaced gold dinars with copper and brass coins. But when his subjects minted counterfeit coins and devalued the currency, Tughlaq recognised his mistake and hastened to make amends. Tughlaq’s name has since become synonymous with stupidity; placed next to Modi, he appears Solomonic.

  The prime minister has never acknowledged his mistake. In the beginning he put on public spectacles of self-pity and proclaimed the note ban a wild success because respondents to a survey conducted exclusively on his personal smartphone app said so, while the chief of the RSS’s labour wing blamed the angry ferment precipitated by demonetisation as the handiwork of ‘those who eat beef’. The toast of Davos, reduced to a punchline, attempted to incite mass resentments by claiming to be doing battle with ‘those who come from Harvard’ on behalf of ‘the villagers and labourers working in the field’.20

  Modi’s improvised defences of demonetisation progressively ceased to bear any relation at all to reality. Campaigning in central India in November 2018, he claimed that the note ban had worked as he had intended—a ‘proper treatment’ for the pestilence of corruption (the slogan about a cashless digital economy had quietly been retired)—and had made it possible for him to pour more money into the ‘right schemes for the common man’.21 He was contradicted the same afternoon by the contents of a report by the agriculture ministry, which admitted the ruin that demonetisation had brought to the lives of ‘millions of farmers [who] were unable to get enough cash to buy seeds and fertilisers for their winter crops. Even bigger landlords faced a problem such as paying daily wages to the farmers and purchasing agriculture needs for growing crops’.22 The prime minister was shown to be peddling fables. Within a week, the ministry performed a volte-face, attributing the previously revealed findings to a ‘mistake in compilation of data’ and filing a revised note that said the exact opposite: demonetisation boosted the sale of seeds and fertilisers and hugely benefited the farmers.

  What aggravates the woefulness of all of this, even if we ascribe the purest intentions to Modi, is that none of it need have happened. As the occupant of an office that qualifies him as one of the most powerful men in the world, Modi was in a position to summon any number of experts on the planet to advise him. Deliberation, tempering ruinous impulses by subjecting them to dispassionate scrutiny, is one
of the major strengths of democracy. But rewarded throughout his career for functioning like a despot, Modi saw discussion as beneath him. The years of extravagant praise from many corners had obliterated even the residues of humility in him. He bypassed parliament, kept his already enfeebled cabinet in the dark, and delegated the minutiae of a policy with such monumental implications to a Gujarati civil servant with a doctorate in yoga and a record of personal fidelity to Modi.23