In the line of fire: Note ban has been lifeblood for a listless Opposition

'I have done all the research. If it fails, I am to blame,' PM Modi had said

At 5.30 pm on Tuesday, November 8, 2016, the Reserve Bank of India approved demonetisation at its board meeting in Mumbai. A little later in New Delhi, Prime Minister Narendra Modi 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 Modi Cabinet and someone known to speak his mind, asked whether the PM and his team had weighed the pros and cons of scrapping 86 per cent of the currency overnight.

The minister, who will have to go nameless, got a forthright reply from Modi. “I have done all the research. If it fails, I am to blame,” the PM said. If his ministers were gobsmacked, 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 P Chidambaram to prepare a critique. West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, who trusts her instincts 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 Trinamool leader, she thought it was a defining moment in the life of the Modi government. Impatient at the delay from the Congress, Banerjee issued a series of tweets from 9.30 pm to criticise the move.

Exceptions like Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar aside, demonetisation provided a lifeline to a listless 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 Samaj Party, Trinamool and 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 the mat for its land acquisition Bill. The jibe that Modi's was a ‘suit-boot ki sarkaar’, or a government of and for the moneybags, had hurt the government enough for it to rethink 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 demonetisation, 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 cashless transactions and digitisation. Businesses and traders suffered. Some shut down. 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 withdraw money, the PM’s 96-year-old mother was wheel-chaired to a bank in 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 BJP claimed the win was a referendum on demonetisation. The emphatic victory also gave Modi the confidence to go ahead with the roll-out of the goods and services tax (GST) on July 1. The Congress and the rest of the Opposition have faulted the GST as “flawed”. According to reports from across India’s industrial hubs, the MSME (micro, small and medium enterprises) sector has suffered. The government has again needed to do much fine-tuning of the system, but even Sangh Parivar organisations working among the MSME sector and workers are upset.

The government and Reserve Bank of India data has also made it evident that demonetisation 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 ‘MMD’, or a ‘Modi-Made Disaster’. But the BJP leadership expects to ride out the crisis. The top BJP leadership is confident that the party will win the Himachal Pradesh and Gujarat Assembly polls, and will showcase the victory as a referendum on the GST and its execution.

There are still 18 months to go for the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. Opposition parties say people are waking up to the view that the promised achhe din, or better days, is illusory. 

It has also collectively decided to persist with questioning the government on economic issues, and not engage on emotive issues such as “nationalism”.

The year 2018 should be interesting as the Modi government tries to win back the confidence of the middle classes before the Lok Sabha elections. There are a string of Lok Sabha bypolls and assembly elections in Tripura, 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.