BJP Loses All 17 Seats in Panvel Agricultural Body Polls in Maharashtra // Sushil Aaron - Demonetisation: Why India’s poor will no longer believe the news - Greatest churning of the subcontinent’s population since 1947
In the first polls
since the Narendra Modi-led NDA government decided to demonetise the
Rs 500 and Rs 1000 currency notes last week, the BJP took a major hit in
an election for a crucial local agricultural body in Maharashtra. According to a Times
of India report, the BJP lost all 17 seats in the Agricultural
Produce Market Committee (APMC) elections to members from Peasants and Workers
Party of India (PWP), Shiv Sena, Congress and the NCP alliance. The PWP swept 15 seats
while its allies, Shiv Sena and Congress took one seat each. According to GalliNews,
Congress has secured a seat in the APMC polls in Panvel after a gap of 25
years.
The victory
celebrations on Monday took a violent turn when PWP and Congress supporters
allegedly began pelting stones and hurling chairs, which according to GalliNews,
led to the injury of a BJP worker. The government’s so
called ‘surgical strike’ on black money has deeply impacted the retail and
wholesale businesses along with farmers, labourers, pensioners, petty traders
and many others across Maharashtra who are feeling the pinch of the currency
shortage.
Demonetisation Drive Violates Our Fundamental Right To Life
Demonetisation: Why India’s poor will no longer believe the news
But above all
things, [the Prince] must keep his hands off the property of others, because
men more quickly forget the death of their father than the loss of their
patrimony.”
-- Niccolo
Machiavelli, The Prince
Historians will likely
mark the current ‘cash chaos’ as a one of the defining moments in independent
India. This is the time to save up news reports and analysis pieces, besides
tweets, Facebook posts and videos to absorb the enormity of what India is going
through. Millions of Indians are making their way to banks to line up and exchange
their useless Rs 500 and Rs 1000 notes; those in cities are luckier to find
banks and ATMs within reasonable distance but they end up waiting for hours
nonetheless. In rural areas, where 833 million Indians or 69% of the population
lives, the journeys will be long and arduous. We are possibly seeing the
greatest churning of the subcontinent’s population since the Partition of 1947.
The cash chaos is also
perhaps the most economically and socially disruptive act of State the world
has seen since the Cultural Revolution in China (1966-76). If you think that’s
an exaggeration, do the math. Three in four rural households have incomes less
than Rs 5,000 per month but there is a strong likelihood that a majority of
them have a Rs 500 note that they need to change. To take a different angle,
India has around 248 million households. Even if you assume that 50 million
households (200 million people at an average of four per unit) are too poor to
have a Rs 500 note, that is still around 200 million journeys to the bank that
need to be immediately made. Members of families will be going to banks more
than once before the end of December; millions are thus setting off in India
and trudging in different directions, looking for cash just because the
government made them. This is a time when all of India is being socialised by
everyday experience to understand, interpret and, in many cases, disapprove of
the NDA’s policy of demonetisation.
The government
recognises this is a problem but it is attempting to paper it over by invoking
the spirit of voluntarism and sacrifice. We are told that a measure of
“inconvenience” is necessary for the nation; temporary pain is “for larger
gain”, as parliamentary affairs minister Venkaiah Naidu put it. Prime Minister
Narendra Modi has saluted his countrymen. “People stood in line for four hours,
six hours but accepted the decision in national interest the way people of
Japan tackled the aftermath of the 2011 disaster... I never thought I will
receive blessings for this,” the PM said while he was in Japan and subsequently
asked the people to give him 50 days.
The Modi government is
confident that it has infused this project so much of moral meaning that people
will forget their misery, come January. The assumption is that the poor and the
middle class will respond to calls for sacrifice and be delighted that the
wealth of the rich they know has suddenly come to nought – and that that
admiration for the PM will translate into support for the BJP in the coming
months.
The BJP seems to have,
however, not fully absorbed what it has unleashed. It has effectively put on
hold an entire society’s means of exchange, without which it is impossible to
procure essential goods and services like food, medicine and transport. It is
like getting back to a form of living before the division of labour was
invented. If you don’t grow your own food, you have no way of procuring it as
the means of exchange does not exist. India’s communities are not capable of
coping with such experiments, however “temporary” the period is.
The real danger for
the BJP is that its model of managing the narrative and influencing public
opinion is likely to breakdown during this crisis. The Modi government has
dominated India’s discourse through a focus on the PM, his upbeat rhetoric,
actions and travel that are unfailingly relayed by the media. The BJP has also
found a way to be constantly in the limelight through its nationalist posturing
on JNU, protests in Kashmir, Pakistan-sponsored terrorism, beef ban, triple
talaq and so on. Liberals often complain that the media is not adequately
covering issues of public interest, that sections of the vernacular press are a
lot more pro-establishment than their English counterparts and that the poor
are being misled by the optimistic official narratives.
Those critical of the
Modi government and its dominance of airwaves need no longer worry about the
impact of skewed coverage. The poor, it turns out, have their own transcript of
the news which is their lived experience since November 9. In fact the more the
government’s spin is at variance with their own misery the more authority the
PM and the NDA stand to lose. This is a possibility as the full measure of the
suffering in rural India is yet to cascade to urban audiences. Farmers are unable to buy seeds to
sow for the next season. The writer P. Sainath has said that besides farmers, landless labourers, domestic servants, pensioners, petty traders & many
other groups have taken a terrible hit.
It is indeed bewildering to get a grip
on the billions of transactions that have not happened across India in recent
days. Harish Damodaran, an authoritative voice on rural India, has said that
even if households find a way to cope, the cash crunch is bound to affect
factories and farms. He writes that hardly a tenth of India’s
workforce gets its salaries credited into bank accounts – the rest get their
wages in cash, either daily or weekly. If a substantial part of the 86%
withdrawn currency is not replaced soon and if employers are unable to pay
salaries for workers the former will have no choice but to shut down units or
lay off workers. Likewise, farmers supplying milk to cooperative societies also
get paid daily in cash, a practice that now stands disrupted.
The BJP assumes that
satisfaction over the misery of the rich will be enough to secure support. It
is betting against the depth of suffering now and the power of its recall value.
There is no guarantee that citizens will make substantive gains once the
process is complete. India will not become cash-rich like Saudi Arabia at the
end of the demonetisation to buy off all its citizens with lavish benefits.
Instead, what we are likely to see is an entire folklore emerge as to how the
rich managed to get around demonetisation, through backdated invoices etc.
Corruption and manipulation of the weak will not cease in 2017. For
schadenfreude to be politically productive, it will need to translate into
palpable suffering for the rich and indeed their naming, shaming and
incarceration. We are unlikely to see any of that. Instead instances of writing
off or adjusting the books for wilful defaulters will raise questions about the
seriousness of NDA’s drive against the corrupt.
Meanwhile, the
Opposition realises that the BJP’s monetisation scheme is politically
monopolistic in intent as it wipes out the cash reserves of other parties. This
is now a matter of their survival and that’s why they will try and present a
robust counter-narrative, even if efforts to unite may be fruitless. The
opposition will make the case that the BJP converted its own cash reserves
before November 8 – and point out (eventually) that the ruling party is
outspending all rivals in the upcoming UP elections. These lines of criticism
will resonate with those who suffer in the lines now and add to the existing
disaffection brought on by BJP’s anti-Dalit, anti-Muslim reputation that has
consolidated over the last couple of years thanks to incidents of flogging and
deaths over beef possession. This, then, is
politically a moment fraught with great risk for the BJP. It is the first time
that the people’s everyday experience is, in significant measure, in conflict
with Delhi’s self-assured narrative. That is not a situation any government
likes to be in.
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