Hundreds of news reports, thousands of tweets, millions of people, and even the Reserve Bank of India gave its verdict on demonetisation. The RBI declared that 99.3 per cent of demonetised notes came back to the banks. Everyone still goes on and on about how demonetisation was a massive failure that hurt the economy. Poor Arun Jaitley had to defend demonetisation more than Rahul Dravid had to defend himself in the Rawalpindi Test Match in 2004. This negativity is so polluting that even the smog in Delhi looks at it and develops a complex.
I’m sick and tired of this nonsense peddled by the liberal media. Can we just ignore statistics and facts that reflect reality, and look at the good things demonetisation gave us?
Demonetisation had people of all castes, religions, economic, and ethnic backgrounds coming together for one grand cause – to coax hundred bucks out of the ATM machine. It united us a country, in a way that even the movie Border or India-Pakistan games haven’t been able to.
Demonetisation had young people heading to banks and finding out what the different counters are all about. Banks became the new hangout for millennials who once only queued up outside Starbucks and Apple stores. People who only knew terms like NSFW, BDSM, and MILF were now throwing shade with heavy acronyms like GDP, GST, and RBI. The economic literacy in the country shot up faster than Delhi’s air quality index. Everybody was an economist, and you didn’t need a degree for it.
People said that the timing was bad, I say, it was better than the timing on Virat Kohli’s cover drive. Demonetisation happened during the wedding season and suddenly no longer could people stuff ₹501 in an envelope and enjoy a thali worth ₹1500. They had to buy real gifts. Everyone talks about lost jobs and slow industrial growth but who will mention the exponential increase in the sale of glass cutlery and Jaipan non-stick pans?
Parents and older folks, who couldn’t get a hang of smartphones and technology now know how to Paytm, download MMS clips, and forward sexist jokes on Whatsapp. Paytm became so big that it has changed from a noun to a verb. And still people have the audacity to say that this is not a success indicator for Digital India? And what about all the jobs that were created in IT cells by the government? Where people constantly kept on defending demonetisation through hashtags and Photoshopped images?
Demonetisation gave bank employees and managers an inflated sense of self-importance, it made the ATM guard a soldier. CAs who were laughed at all their lives by their woke friends now had the last laugh. People who had spent their time and energy on printing fake ₹500 and ₹1,000 notes now made even more money by printing fake ₹2,000 notes. What about these people? Do they not count?
Some people say demonetisation didn’t stop terrorism and cross-border violations. To those people, I present classic whataboutery and deflection: Did Europe have demonetisation? No. But terror attacks keep on happening there, right? Duh! It has nothing to do with money.
Just because 99.3 per cent notes came back to the system, some people declared that demonetisation failed. Does nobody count the money that was hurriedly sent out of the country? That money never came back. What came back were only some Panama Papers and Paradise Papers. We have always attacked the black market, whether it is black money, black people, or BlackBerry phones.
I rest my case, mitron. No matter how much we try, people will keep coming back to respond to your emotional arguments with facts, statistics, and graphs. Ignore them. As the classic phrase goes, “Haters gonna hate.”
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