Modi and Downhill - A Masterstroke in Futility

        Over the years Modi-bhakts have been relentless to the point where they ridicule any accusation made by the opposition of Prime Minister Narendra Modi being too authoritarian in his approach. Even today as his on-going poorly executed demonetization scheme is causing millions of Indians difficulties, his call for nationalism resonates with majority of Modi-bhakts. The idea - that you will be hailed for your gallantry if you stand in a queue outside ATMs and banks doing mala-japa (name chanting) of Modi and that you will be remembered as a martyr for eons to come if you die in one. On the other hand, if you oppose the demonetization scheme, you have black money! - is a conspicuous con job. This propagation of overly-frenetic jingoism will dearly cost both Modi and India. His is another of the many cases in history where a sane right-winger, in the name of nationalism, develops authoritarian tendencies which snowballs by his own success, only to bloat to an extent where even his once-upon-a-time staunch supporters and close allies repent for not restraining him when the time was right.

        In 2.5 short years in his office, Modi took enough strides that all previous Prime Ministers could not even imagine to take, cumulatively! Given his goodwill and credibility, he had more than just three strikes before being declared out. But regarding his demonetization scheme - what for some is a 'historic masterstroke' is an 'exercise in futility' for others. Here is why - 

        Demonetization primarily seeks to purge India of two evils 1) fake currency and terror funding, and 2) black money / tax evasion.

        For the evil of fake currency and terror funding through fake currency, demonetization has successfully bought India essentially 6 months of time (kudos!) before these hostile foreign forces start producing new fake notes. Demonetization, a one-time event, neither has the ability to hunt down these external perpetrators (who print fake money and fund terrorism) and bring them to justice nor does it have the ability to enlighten the terrorists and eliminate the very school of thought. Demonetization also is not a foreign policy change which will bring about a compromise to any of the bickering issues with our hostile neighbors and some agitating insiders. This means before you go around celebrating peace in Kashmir in the last few days, realize that this is just a temporary phenomenon and demonetization cannot and will not solve the underlying issues! Let alone the important questions - how much fake currency is floating around anyway? Are we seriously saying that moving forward we intend to fight terrorism passively like this?

        For the evil of black money and tax evasion, I want to discuss a factor less discussed otherwise - the reversal of burden of proof. 

        I count with borrowed fingers the number of times Finance Minister Arun Jaitley has said that the government is not able to act against the 800 odd individuals (whose names have been acquired from disparate foreign entities and tax havens) because it takes time to build up a case and gather evidence, and that there is a procedure that governments must follow lest the foreign entities will stop cooperating. Critiques have also raised questions as to why is it that Income Tax or CBI raids can't be conducted on these 800 odd individuals (who belong to the ultra-influential super league) based on prima facie evidence? But Jaitley, being the lawyer that he is, always maintained that there are various legal complexities and challenges in taking that route. 

        What was yesterday the prerogative of the government of building a case, is today made a compulsion for all citizens. Throughout these yesterdays, the government said it was difficult for them to prove the super league black money owners guilty. But today that same government's logic is that all regular citizens should queue up to prove their innocence. Why can't this be reversed where these super leagues are forced to prove their innocence based on prima facie evidence? Do you really think putting the onus on 1.3 billion citizens, 98% of whom have no black money and of the 2% who do have black money, it is safe to assume that 80% are mere tax evaders (out of systemic loopholes) and remaining 20% have criminal intent of smuggling, corruption, etc., is the best method?

        Regardless, let us focus on how much of the 'black money' can this scheme actually recover. Black money is but a combination of all illegitimate assets both liquid and fixed. As we see in the matrix below, there are four ways how an individual can possess illegitimate assets. Non-INR (Indian National Rupee) assets include gold, property, other currencies, etc. By definition, demonetization can do nothing about the non-INR assets (red boxes). Demonetization can only invalidate INR if not exchanged for new currency notes in the given time-frame. Estimates suggest that INR - black money is only 6% of all the black money. How much will the country have to go through in terms of 1st order, 2nd order, etc. negative cascading effects in the economy and lost opportunities / reduction in national output for this? RIP ROI!

        Further, before the elections Modi made 2 promises - I will bring back black money into the mainstream economy because this money belongs to the nation and I will catch hold of all these super league thugs. As it turns out, Modi decided to take the third route - I will not target the super league, I will not even bring back the black money! Rather, I will impoverish all thugs by invalidating their black money.

        Say Mr. X has INR 1000 of black money. If Mr. X decides that he does not want to exchange his INR with new currency notes (because his INR black money is anyway close to only 6% of all his black money), this INR 1000 which Modi said belonged to the nation, just vanished! While this is a simplistic case, give it a thought. This INR 1000 was once legitimate output of some activity in our nation and this step instead of bringing it back, threatens to invalidate it. National losses anyone?

        In this piece, I have not even touched upon the poor execution strategy, government's investments into executing this whole fiasco, number of lives lost (even 1 life lost is 1 life lost too many), and the challenges that cash dependent sectors like agriculture, fisheries, transport, daily wagers, etc. have experienced. Our nation was not ready to go in this direction and sustain so much disruption. If you really were open to having such disruptions in just 2.5 years, Dr. Subramanian Swamy was a better choice any day! While Modi’s intent is right, given the timing and the execution of this scheme, it clearly was not a decision taken through due consultation and was definitely not a masterstroke! 

        Of course it is too late to repeal it! Of course Modi will showcase some histrionics on January 1st 2017 and declare victory! Of course this scheme will deter potential defaulters (any other scheme would have done that too)! Of course they will come up with all kinds statistics - 92 % of people are okay with the inconvenience! (A sample set of 5 lakh Modi-bhakts who have Narendra Modi App on their smartphones, in a nation of 1.3 billion people); thousands of crores of rupees have now entered into the banking system (as if people had an option, and let us see how much of that stays in the banks after January 1st, 2017).

        As a nation, we can either choose to ludicrously do a disservice to our PM (out of ignorance or cowardice) and go downhill in excessive nationalism, or we can choose to ask ourselves a very touching question - the soldiers stand on the border in all circumstances for years and can't we even properly execute one sane monetary decision?

Choosing our Heroes of Tomorrow

        It was one of those evenings when I called it a day at 8:20 PM. Given that so much had happened in India (the country where I am from) and United States (the country where I currently reside) in the past few hours, I needed some time to gather myself, to relax under dim lights with my phone set aside, to feel the silence on a cold evening, to take a step back, and ponder.

        I could draw numerous parallels between the Indian general elections of 2014 and the US presidential elections of 2016. The left leaning party held the highest office for 2 terms; through a leader (LLP - leader of the left party) who was a first from his race - a Sikh Dr. Manmohan Singh and a black Barack Obama. A weird case where people loved the LLP as an individual - a family man who was intelligent, highly qualified, and clean; a nice man who was merely incompetent as a premier. Yet, there was a strong vibe of anti-incumbency, because nothing seemed right about the state of the nation within and the looming threats from the outside. The left leaning party's current standard bearer was a woman (Sonia Gandhi and Hillary Clinton), whose husband was once the premier of the very same nation. This woman was looked as someone who had been in politics long enough to have known the game, the rules, and the cheats. The woman, sadly, was not destined to have her husband all by herself in her lifetime, for disparate reasons of course. The woman, sadly, was also accused to have had involvement in the biggest of the scandals in her nation.

        The right leaning party then brought a leader (LRP - leader of the right party) from nowhere, who went on to win the election. The LRP was hated by the mainstream media to begin with. The elevation of this LRP was not taken well by their own party allies - Nitish Kumar and co. for the NDA and the various Republicans for the GOP. Other party veterans too had had to be cajoled into endorsing the LRP, because that seemed to be the need of the hour. The political power centers dug as deep as they could to uncover facts and secrets about this LRP. There arose questions about the LRP's significant other. The media questioned and doubted - did the LRP really create something as awesome as he claims he did in the previous position he held? Or is he making it sound grandiose in his speeches just to gain some public eye? The media took pride in being able to obtain testimonials of individuals who claimed to have lost everything they owned and had because of the LRP's previous position and actions. As the weeks went passed, the media labelled the LRP as a human rights violator, a perpetrator and abettor of numerous ghastly crimes and as someone who managed to conceal the truth through his might!

        I realize that the parallels that I drew omit the uniqueness of all these personalities. I also realize that these individuals themselves are really really really different people. I only wish to highlight the sheer arrogance of the mainstream media and their modus operandi here. The three major world events in the last two years - Narendra Modi becoming the Indian Prime Minister, Britain's decision to vote leave, and The Donald becoming the POTUS-elect were predicted only and only contrarily to what actually eventuated (which curiously happened to be favoring the left in all three instances BTW) by the mainstream media. There are two possibilities here - either they genuinely did not know what the people felt, or they knew and were hence trying harder to condition the minds of their consumers by their own endeared delusions. Media should ideally be taking in what they saw as is, and ideally be distributing what they took in as was. If that is true, how could they have not known?

        Before I lose any of my readers here, let me put in a disclaimer - I do not wish to tangentially rant on about the insatiable desires of the media and their supposed reach that their arrogance finds genesis in. I also do not wish to discuss the dichotomy and righteousness of right and left - there are good and bad things about both. Today, I ponder upon how will we choose our heroes of tomorrow if this is what is the current state of how and what gets fed into our brains? Where will we get the realities from? What would we base and not base our decisions upon?

        Think about it. Two decades from now we will have candidates who would have had social media presence since they were fifteen or seven or soiling themselves. Imagine the kind of images, videos, and statements that we would uncover about them then, that they once had themselves willingly made public. Imagine the extent of micro-aggression that can be induced upon these candidates by ways of memes and trolls which are majority of the times half-truths and irritating manipulations. The targets of these memes and trolls are not limited to political figures. Imagine what we would discuss on public forums tomorrow about candidates if today is what is the nadir for many consumers to be able to take! The way I see it, I don't see it in any election interminably which won't make us choose that candidate which is the least of all the evils. The world moving ahead will only and only have evils as candidates / celebrities.

        Today the media, as we have now established, has leaned so far left that more than of propaganda, theirs seems to be a strategy of denial - a contagious disease so unrelenting that it obviously would take nothing but bitter to antidote, and reason alone would obviously not suffice. I look at them more as diseased and less as propagandists. And here is the catch - what will the mainstream media and the diseased, now that they are unveiled, do next to contaminate our minds and systematically condition us and preoccupy us?

         Brand managers and social media influencers, and NOT the mainstream media are our biggest threats going forward. The new challenge will come from both the troll makers supposedly leaning left and working for the left and the troll makers supposedly leaning right and working for the (pay attention here) left. There will be media persons and celebrities who will develop belated wisdom and try to keep themselves in good books with the new power centers like twitterati and the right. Beware of them! While the mainstream media and the mainstream supposed prime-time funny-men have lost relevance and have imploded in their own slander-propagation, there still are forces which will try to contaminate by their mere presence any new platform that most neutrals, truth-seekers, and rationals adopt and look up to.

        The future ain't what they said it would be!