NOTE BAN HAS BEEN LIFE BLOOD FOR A LISTLESS OPPN
At 5.30 pm on Tuesday, November 8,2016, the Reserve Bank of India approved demo net is at ion at its board meeting in Mumbai. A little later in New Delhi, Prime Minister Na rend ra Mo di informed his Cabinet colleagues of the decision. If any of them had any misgivings, they thought fit to keep those to themselves. But a senior Cabinet minister, widely recognised as one of the performers in the Mo di Cabinet and someone known to speak his mind, asked whether the PM and his team had weighed the pro sand cons of scrap ping 86 percent of the currency overnight.
The minister, who will have togo name less, got a forth right reply from Mo di .“I have done all the research. If it fails, I am to blame,” the PM said. If his ministers were gob smacked, the PM left the Opposition leadership equally nonplussed after his famous address to the nation at 8 pm.
As the evening progressed, the Congress waited for senior leader PC hi dam bar am to prepare a critique. West Ben gal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, who trusts her instinct s like few others on the Indian political scene, conveyed her assessment to the leadership of her former party. Banerjee, who had quit the Congress to form the Trinamool Congress in 1997, wanted the Congress to take the lead in slamming the “anti-people" move. According to a Trina moo ll ea der, she thought it was a defining moment in the life of the Mo di government. Impatient at the delay from the Congress, Banerjee issued a series of tweets from 9.30 pm to critic is et he move.
Exceptions like Bi h ar Chief Minister Ni tis h Kumar aside, demo net is at ion provided a lifeline to a list less Opposition. While the PM alleged that all who opposed the move were corrupt, the note ban brought a new synergy between the Opposition parties. The arch-rivals Samajwadi Party and Bahujan Sam aj Party, Trina moo land the Left parties made a common cause to flay the move. For two years, the Opposition had waited for the people to get disillusioned with Modi’s magic. Their brief moment had come in the early months of 2015, when they had put the government on them at for its land acquisition Bill. The jibe that Mo di' s was a‘ suit-boot ki sarkaar’, or a government of and for the moneybags, had hurt the government enough for it to re think its promise of delivering reforms. The PM had quickly recovered lost ground, as his government unleashed its “garib kalyan”, welfare of the poor, agenda.
In the weeks after demo net is at ion, the Centre changed the goalposts and issued nearly 150 notifications. The initial objective of the note ban was to end black money. Within weeks, the PM said the real aim was to encourage cash less transactions and digit is at ion. Businesses and traders suffered. Some shutdown. There were also reports of people dying standing in queues. If Congress Vice-President Rahul Gandhi stood in an ATM queue in New Delhi to with draw money, the PM’s 96-year-old mother was wheel-chaired to a bankin her village to withdraw money.
The PM’s personal credibility, however, remained intact. He led his party to a famous win in the Uttar Pradesh Assembly election in March. The B JP claimed the win was a referendum on demo net is at ion. The emphatic victory also gave Mo di the confidence to go ahead with the roll-out of the goods and services tax( G ST) on July 1. The Congress and the rest of the Opposition have faulted the G ST as “flawed ”. According to reports from across India’s industrial hubs, the MSME (micro, smalland medium enterprises) sector has suffered. The government has again needed to do much fine-tuning of the system, but even Sangh Par iv ar organisations working among the MS ME sector and workers are upset.
The government and Reserve Bank of India data has also made it evident that demo net is at ion has failed to meet most of its stated objectives. The Opposition believes economic slowdown and joblessness are changing the narrative on the ground. Rahul Gandhi has termed it an‘ M MD ’, or a‘ Mo di-Made Disaster ’. But the B JP leadership expects to ride out the crisis. The top BJP leadership is confident that the party will win the Him ac hal Pradesh and Gujarat Assembly polls, and will showcase the victory as a referendum on the G ST and its execution.
There are still 18 months togo for the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. Opposition parties say people are waking up to the view that the promised achhedin, or better days, is illusory. It has also collectively decided to persist with questioning the government on economic issues, and not engage one motive issues such as “nationalism ”.
The year 2018 should be interesting as the Mo di government tries to win back the confidence of the middle classes before the Lok Sabha elections. There area string of Lok Sabha by polls and assembly elections in Trip ur a, Meghalaya, Nagaland, Mizoram, Karnataka, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, and Chhattisgarh, which would indicate the mood of the people in the run-up to the 2019 Lok Sabha polls.
“I have done all the research. If it fails, I am to blame” NARENDRA MODI Prime Minister