Let demonetisation not be the the pie in the sky when you die
I am amused by the religious patterns in the demonetisation drama unfolding at present. Here is, truly, political economy played out as religion.
One of the dishonest tricks that priests like me play on the poor and the underprivileged is to tell them that they should endure short-term pain for long-term gain. But I am yet to come across a priest who preaches this long-term gain, who actually believes in it. It is only for the consumption of the rank and file. Poor, gullible folks!
If you live crushed under the injustice and inhumanity of the present scheme of things, cheer up; for there is a Christian heaven where your present suffering will be converted into unending bliss. But do make sure that you do not grumble or protest. Hold on to your hope. Your faith will save you.
If you are perishing in poverty now, don't worry, you will have a better birth next time around. All you have to do is to endure this misery cheerfully.
Go and die for what I tell you to be religion and you will attain martyrdom and go straight to heaven, where you will be entitled to extraordinary perks.
The preachers and peddlers of this opium - this pie-in-the-sky-when-you-die - would not buy it for themselves. They will not endure short-term pain to attain long-term gain in the world to come.
Why did Sadananda Gowda, one of Modi's ministers, get so upset in Mangalore when he got into a little inconvenience at a hospital? He is the only political elite who has been niggled by demonetisation. Why did he forget the long-term gain? It was a brilliant opportunity for a minister to be at least as patriotic as a poor, daily wager worker who sacrifices his day's income and stands cheerfully in a queue and refuses to give into vexation.
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| If you are perishing in poverty now, don't worry, you will have a better birth next time around. |
Politicians may be tempted to borrow a trick or two from religion. But it would be fatally unwise for them to overlook a major difference. Religious fibs and fables cannot be tested and disproved in this world. The merchants of religion are pretty safe because the wares they sell pertain to life after death. Only when you die will you know if the credit cards you bought from your priest, pandit or mullah really work in the malls and ATMs of afterlife.
Not so in the case of politics. The wait is not long. Modi has asked for fifty days. It will end soon and the time for reckoning will come. Not even the cleverness of a thousand oily tongues will succeed in anaesthetising the pain of the common man.
Come January 1, 2017, hope will turn into bitterness and patience will give way to anger.
The second religious pattern in the demonetisation script is insistence on blind faith. Blind faith is faith that makes you blind to the reality of your own experiences. It is faith without a rational foundation. It is imposed, contrived faith; faith swallowed, which remains undigested. What is the basis, for example, for the projected faith that this exercise will contribute to the long-term good of the country?
Already the GDP has taken a two per cent hit, which is massive. Some 4,00,000 jobs have been lost. The rupee is reeling. It will take years to recover from this. How long is this long-term? No one asks. All you are told is that a new heaven awaits you and that it is impious to doubt it.
Countering this hypothesis with rational interrogation is heresy; that too in a digital age of scientific temper! The contemporary heretic is dressed up as "anti-national". He will not be burned at stake, but roundly ridiculed and verbally mauled.
It is as if we are back in the Middle Ages, when the people were simply told. Modernity began with individuals claiming the right to think for themselves and to decide what is good for them. The hallmark of Renaissance was "man becoming the measure of all things".
It is not the system, but the individual that matters. Translated into democratic terms, the citizen, not structures, is supreme. Today he is no more than a shuttlecock, knocked back and forth between ATMs and banks.
I remember driving past the palace of a ruler in one of the Middle Eastern Emirates. Hundreds of people, looking poor and jaded, were waiting patiently at the outer wall. On inquiring why they were congregated there, my host told me that the Emir was in the practice of making random, unscheduled appearances.
On such occasions he would through a large sum of money in currency towards them. How much he throws, when he throws, who gets what, are all a big lottery.
This is, more or less, the predicament to which demonetisation has reduced the common man. Unlike the ruler in the Emirate, the PM does not come out and throw notes at those who are camped at banks and in front of ATMs.
Announcements are made, instead, as to where you may stand with respect to your own money. The Emir plays arbitrarywith his money. In our case, somebody is playing with our money. It is to get a small part of our own hard-earned money that we have to wait, days on end, outside the gate. But you must not question this, for it is anti-national to do so.
The third religious feature of demonetisation is the eruption of irrationality. "The strength of my people," a religious reader told me a few years ago, "is that when it comes to religion, they do not think."
Only religion allows you to assert stupidity with extreme smugness and look impregnably wise. Does Manmohan Singh have the right to say what he thinks about the "monumental mismanagement" of this exercise? No. Why? Because there were scams during his tenure.
This is downright irrational. No one doubts, or appreciates, the scams that UPA-II choked us with. We have punished them for it. But does that confer a perpetual license on the BJP to be irrational and irresponsible in playing with our destiny?
Consider this. Your neighbour, let us say, is a drunkard. You are slowly developing an immoderate fondness for the bottle. Your neighbour warns you of the pit into which you are about to fall.
Would you ask him to shut up because he is a drunkard, or would you take his words seriously as it comes stamped with the authenticity of his personal tragedy?
Or, look at it this way. Manmohan Singh is an economist. Let us assume that he was an utter flop as PM, which he was not. (Oh, how we miss now, in retrospect, the quiet dignity he lent to his office! Even we, who voted him out.)
Does the fact that he failed as PM disqualify him from thinking as an economist? He was speaking in the Rajya Sabha not only as a former PM, but also as a brilliant economist.
It is obvious that his words hurt deep. So, the BJP went clumsily into a tailspin. If what he said was fanciful and fictitious, why panic so palpably?
The exasperation that Arun Jaitly and the BJP spokespersons showed immediately after Mr Singh uttered his few, measured words, is apalpable give-away. Politics as religion allows you, nonetheless, to damn him on the basis of his previous avatar as PM in UPA-II.
We have had too much of this religion. Can we now, for a change, afford ourselves a bit of rational thinking and plain speaking? Can we emerge from the Dark Ages to Modernity? Especially, given our eagerness to leapfrog into the digital age!