Not sure about demonetisation, but India has been demonised

Come friend, let us take a walk around India... a political entity that our forbearers birthed with limitless hope and untrammelled passion. The continuing catharsis of nearly seven decades of existence has today pitted the progeny of that misplaced hope in the undesirable classification of us and them. There is no unity in India's diversity - there is division; there is no unified national character other than that of distrust.

Never has there been such an atmosphere of pan-India viciousness with the government of the day itself instigating suspicion - telling citizens under its care to spy one against the other, to rejoice in the discomfort of nameless unknown others who are economically in a more secure position than them.

From the pulpits of his church of self-aggrandisement, the prime minister has thundered that those standing in the lines are crooks; in broadcasts of his convoluted sense of integrity have come suggestions that advise the citizenry to usurp money deposited by others in their Jan Dhan accounts; in 60 instances, and counting, his minions have redefined the rules that regulate his current pet project; across the country there are lines of desperate people bearing the brunt of India hurtling towards a state of cash-lessness.

Minister after supporter of the exalted being has criticised the citizenry of criticising the prime minister, spewing logic that this goes against the grain of democracy, that this is detrimental to growth and well-being, that dissent and debate are not the hallmarks that should define India.

One honourable minister compared the purity of the prime minister to that of the Ganga that has been acknowledged by the great man himself to be polluted to its core.

Not just consistently inconsistent but consistently bullheaded and remorseless has been the drive to demonetise the Indian economy. What it has achieved is a fair degree of demonisation of not just cash but of credulity - the mark of the simple-minded average citizen of this cash-forsaken country. Never has - I promise to pay the bearer - meant so less as under the signature of Urjit Patel and meant so little in the words of Narendra Modi and Arun Jaitley.

Amid all of this, the only proof of a true patriot... a true Indian remains the citizens desire to jump up to attention when the national anthem plays at the cinema theatre. In another of Rabindranath Tagore's oft-repeated but rarely internalised poems he writes to the India of 2016... about awakening his country:

Where The Mind Is Without Fear

• Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high
• Where knowledge is free
• Where the world has not been broken up into fragments
• By narrow domestic walls
• Where words come out from the depth of truth
• Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection
• Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way
• Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit
• Where the mind is led forward by thee
• Into ever-widening thought and action
• Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

Also read: Why demonetisation has ruined Kerala's happiness in particular

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