What ensured the acceptance of demonetisation with little resistance, despite all the consequences? Of course there was no option for the citizens. But the fact remains that the ‘project leaders’ could whip up a sense of allegiance to a national agenda as if in a crusade for the greater common good.
Hyped as a surgical strike on black money-holders, counterfeiters and cross-border terrorists, the gullible audience in the first instance could be hooked to the idea of fighting the villains of society and the onus conveniently got shifted from the government.
But the way the demonetisation storyline Part II could slip with ease into a script for a cashless or digital economy transformation would speak of the tentativeness of the move, if not testify to a twist in the motive of the plot.
Amazingly, demonetisation came to be identified with the idea of checking corruption even in the minds of the educated and the well-informed. It makes sense in the context to revisit the perception on corruption. In the discourse on the grandiose measure of demonetisation 2016, we miss the point that after all it merely related to a narrow scheme of tax recovery management or at best a scheme with the supposed prospects of a bigger ‘catch’ for the government, if only substantial ‘dirty cash’ had not dared to enter the banking system, not to speak of weighing the cost-benefit ratio in the process.
What is important is that demonetisation, a temporal executive fiat at that, in the nature of things cannot measure up to fathoming deeper issues as that of corruption or poverty. If anything, demonetisation, or rather demonisation, of money could even sidetrack our attention for a moment from the reality and the fundamentals, which it did quite effectively.
Iron laws
The harsh reality consists of the conditions of inequality in which the iron law of the market economy as an invisible factor of power or force is self-serving and thereby intensifies inequality and impoverishment. For, the iron law ordains priorities in the use of resources consistent with the wishes and aspirations of the class worthy of command in the market.
That in turn ordains what requires to be provided for on the production front, the service sector, infrastructure and even in the agenda of education and health care, which by and large determines the use for which land, water, energy and other resources of the planet are commanded and exploited, wherein lies the element of misappropriation, the epicentre of corruption.
In the context, widening of the tax base or increase in the volume of tax revenue or the volume of CASA of the scheduled banks or recapitalisation of banks may help reinforce the existing economic power structures, but cannot help transform India, which is what the government’s think-tank NITI Aayog by its name and style professedly stands for. But their predilection for market centric neo-liberalism is overt.
As long as the issues of the downtrodden are not addressed at a fundamental equitable plane, primarily in terms of setting priorities in the use of resources, even with no black money or unaccounted money, corruption will remain in society and even proliferate.
For, corruption in its wider sense is not so much a matter of transgression of tax laws or other state laws as it is of transgression of ethics of humanity consisting in the undue laying of claims and usurpation of the valuable resources of the earth, which engenders poverty, and of course, corruption as well.
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