Enough earthquake jokes, Modi must come clean on demonetisation in Lok Sabha
Prime Minister Narendra Modi gave a one hour-27 minute-long speech today in Parliament, but sadly enough, more time was spent in dishing out empty jibes and making inane jokes on earthquakes rather than dealing with the matter at hand. As usual, PM was high on rhetoric but low on facts, relying heavily on his oratory to evade tough questions on the rationale behind demonetisation.
According to the PM, a healthy, physiologically sound body with all organ systems intact must be in search of surgery. Hence, for him, demonetisation, which has slowed India's growth rate by a whopping one per cent and dragged the rupee down, had to be done when the economy was healthy. So, from the initial reasoning of demonetisation done to prevent black money and corruption, moving on to promoting cashless economy, to increasing the tax net, the premise now is that post-Diwali, the time was optimum for the monetary surgical strike to happen.
In other words, PM Modi just admitted that demonetisation has resulted in negatives that the Centre must now cover for. Interestingly, he also confessed, unwittingly, that he had not notified the Union Cabinet ahead of making the crucial decision. This directly contradicts Union finance minister Arun Jaitley's claim that demonetisation had been under discussion since February 2016. So whom to believe really?
PM Modi not only not address if demonetisation was good for the economy, he went on a tangent saying if he wanted to link smartphones that 40 per cent of Indians possess to the banking sector, why does the Opposition have a problem with that? Now this is an utter lie. Opposition, and indeed the criticism of demonetisation has never been about bringing mobile banking, which by the way has been existing for a while now.
The criticism has strictly on the grounds that 60 per cent Indians do not possess a smartphone to avail mobile banking which the government is now making almost compulsory with its cashless push. The criticism has also been that not adequate security features and cybersecurity infrastructure and literacy exist in India at present to embrace mobile banking at such a massive scale.
 |
| PM Narendra Modi fell short of giving us the economic rationale behind demonetisation. [Photo: Screengrab/LS TV] |
The economic shock of demonetisation has been a lab experiment of sort to test the limits of Indians taking things lying down. Hence, the PM, who until April 2014, before the general elections were conducted, was strictly against Aadhaar and its invasive data mining, is now busy recounting in Parliament how linking Aadhaar with LPG subsidy helped the government track who's misusing the subsidy. The massive Aadhaar push is not only a volte-face on the part of Modi, but also incontrovertible proof that instead of "minimum government, maximum governance", Modi sarkar, is in fact, its exact opposite.
The PM habitually made a rhetorical point about Swachh Bharat, claiming the critics even opposed a cleanliness drive. That he forgot to mention that Swachh Bharat campaign was coterminous with communally charged, BJP/RSS-engineered campaigns such as love jihad and ghar wapsi, is of course telling. Moreover, he also forgot to mention that the toilets constructed in the Swachh Bharat scheme have been left without any water supply or sewage disposal arrangement, leaving them in terrible state in the first place.
On MGNREGA, something that the PM has been lampooning even until the day before the #UnionBudget2017 was announced, Modi has now changed tack. Now he finds loopholes in UPA-era implementation, as he did in Lok Sabha today, instead targeting the scheme itself. Just like Aadhaar, the U-turn on MGNREGA shows the tag "copy-paste"/"retweet sarkar" has a reason to stick to the Narendra Modi is government.
No wonder then PM Modi falls back on juvenile cracks such as saying that earthquake must have happened because Rahul Gandhi used the word "sewa" in his version of SCAM. In fact, it's what the PM didn't address in Parliament, or barely touched, that should be highlighted in media debates, not what he said.
Items such as simultaneous elections in centre and state, the passage of the Payment of Wages (Amendment) Bill 2017 and the tabled Specified Bank Notes (Cessation of Liabilities) Bill, 2017 in Lok Sabha, whereby the RBI's liabilities against the old and demonetised notes will be brazenly struck off - deserve discussion, not inane jokes and clichéd jibes at the Gandhis.