Why is PM Modi misleading the poor to steal black money?
Demonetisation brought smiles to the faces of the people standing in queues on Friday. They smiled for the first time after November 8.
A woman awaiting her turn in a queue delivered a baby boy at a Punjab National Bank branch in Kanpur Dehat district of Uttar Pradesh.
Many have died waiting for their turn during demonetisation blues. A 52-year-old man died on Saturday in Chandigarh.
One doesn’t know how many have died but reports put the number at around 50 or more. There is no way to determine the figure as the government refuses to acknowledge the demonetisation deaths.
The government acknowledges birth pangs though, and has been encouraging people to go through the pain for ultimate happiness.
Barring times of wars, no government has ever exhorted people to bear the burden of sorrow for an imaginary happiness.
Mahatma Gandhi asked people to bear pain during the Quit India Movement in 1942. He called on the people to fight a do-or-die battle in return for independence of the country. People were rewarded with freedom.
And barring Narendra Modi, no Prime Minister, no government has ever incited people to steal and loot the money of others.
In a bizarre statement for a PM to make, he asked Jan Dhan account holders at his Moradabad meeting not to return money to those who have used their accounts to park their black money.
Having promised to deposit Rs 15 lakhs in bank accounts of all Indians and having failed, the PM is now asking Jan Dhan account holders to criminally usurp illegal, unaccounted for black money.
A criminal act against another criminal act now becomes the new normal. Black money hoarders had deposited their money to wash it to white. Now Modi is showing the way to convert the black into white.
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| Narendra Modi is arousing the animal spirits of the poor. He is promising them the moon. (Photo: AP) |
Poor Jan Dhan account holders may or may not steal the money of their benefactors, friends or someone known to them. But Modiji has played his part in dividing them and sowing enmity among them.
On what moral ground can the PM oppose the Maoists who advocate seizure of landed property? Will the government withdraw the police and paramilitary forces from the hinterland of Jharkhand, Bihar, Chhattisgarh and Andhra Pradesh who are fighting the Maoists?
The birth of a baby boy and deaths of many in queues symbolise the demonetisation woes of hundreds of millions of people. The woes are not quantifiable. They are untold and overwhelming.
Modi has now sought to make long, snaky queues the metaphor of a dream he has been selling to the people. He told a meeting in Moradabad on Saturday that he had started a queue to end all queues.
“We had to stand in queue to buy sugar. We had to stand in queue to buy kerosene. We had to stand in queue to buy wheat. Thanks to those who ruled for 60 years, this country was wasting away in queues,” he said in a scathing attack on the Congress.
His punchline was: "What I have done is to start a queue to end all queues."
One was surprised at the falsehoods of the PM. He knows the government that had started the queues had ended it too.
The queues were legacies of a time when the country was forced into a begging bowl during two centuries of British rule. During the Mughal rule, India’s GDP was estimated to be 25 per cent of the world economy. During British rule, from 1857 to 1947, India stagnated at 1 per cent.
Indira Gandhi began rationing sugar and kerosene in the 1970s. Her son’s successor PV Narasimha Rao and Manmohan Singh ended the queues in 1991 and after.
The BJP had no role to play in either beginning the queues or ending them. Nor had it any role to play in dismantling colonial rule, which had enslaved the country and created conditions for beginning of queues. BJP didn’t participate in the freedom struggle.
Modi has started the queues afresh. He should have remembered that Indira Gandhi had begun the queues on similar promises that Modi is offering to the people now. She too had promised to inconvenience the wealthy and end poverty.
There was a difference though. She began with seizing the wealth of the wealthy under a nationalisation programme. She seized their banks and insurances businesses, their special privy purses, their coalmines and their lands in excess of ceiling.
Congress governments, however, failed to attack the people who hoarded that stuff, under-rationing and usurped poor people’s shares.
The hoarders mostly supported and funded the Jan Sangh, the erstwhile avatar of the BJP. They also funded the Congress for carrying out their business under licence-permit raj but they voted majorly for the Jan Sangh and now they vote for the BJP.
One Congress government of Indira Gandhi controlled the ambitions of industrialists and crushed their animal spirit. The other Congress government of Rao-Manmohan Singh awakened the economy’s animal spirit to put the country on a growth path.
Modi is arousing the animal spirits of the poor. He is promising them the moon.
Many of his statements are resonating with the public. People lapped up his call to usurp black money from Jan Dhan accounts.
As Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar said after demonetisation, Modi is riding a tiger. The question Modi should worry about is when and how will he dismount the tiger?
The ongoing life and death experiences of people in queues will have a denouement that is difficult to predict. It may end in tragi-comedy or tragedy.