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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | You have been warned -Pratap Bhanu Mehta

You have been warned -Pratap Bhanu Mehta

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published Published on Nov 17, 2016   modified Modified on Nov 17, 2016
-The Indian Express

Demonetisation politics unfolds as a vast morality play. Its imagination unleashes the state on you, in the name of protecting your own virtue.

The so-called demonetisation is a watershed event for India. It signifies the arrival of a new kind of politics that will redefine the relationship between citizen and state. The scale of this event is so unprecedented that we are struggling to see where all the chips will fall.

It has to be acknowledged that, in many quarters, reactions seem to be driven less by the force of reasoning, but on prior assumptions, how much we trust this government to know what it is doing. But this much can be said. A major move was required on black money. But the government itself has taken a gamble, without any reasonably rigorous reasoning on the costs and effects. Much will now depend on how quickly the economy will re-monetise. Second, the measure has failed two reasonable administrative tests. There is a shocking degree of callousness about the hardships these measures impose. But equally importantly, as Suyash Rai of NIPFP, has argued in a wonderful analysis, the policy falls short on one test: Were there more reasonable, less risky, more predictable policy measures that would have yielded as much benefit as this one? The answer is: Yes.

But it will take a moment’s reflection to recognise that demonetisation is not about the calculus of costs and benefits. In fact, that is why there is lack of clarity over objectives. Its distributional consequences are an afterthought. Nor is it about politics in an opportunistic sense.

It would be churlish not to recognise that it comes from the prime minister’s depth of conviction and sincerity. But that is exactly its danger. What it threatens to institutionalise is a new kind of politics. This is politics as a vast morality play whose three central elements are personification, puritanism and punitive imagination. A new state is emerging and it is not what you think it is.

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The Indian Express, 17 November, 2016, http://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/demonetisation-politics-cashless-economy-you-have-been-warned-4379388/


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