Sunanda K Datta-Ray: The 'generosity' of Narendra Modi

Whoever would have thought that Narendra Modi’s kindness and generosity would have struck us in the middle of the Nile with the same blinding clarity that converted Saul into Paul? For non-Bible readers, Saul was the Pharisee who made a habit of persecuting Jesus’ followers. But when light dawned on him on the road to Damascus he became a fervent Christian and the devout apostle Paul. We, too, began to see demonetisation in a benign new light after a conversation that led to Hisham Matar’s beautifully written novel In the Country of Men. The thought in all our minds was that November 8, India’s Black November, could have been much worse if we hadn’t been blest with such a kindly leader.

The biblical analogy began when someone noticed that the river banks on either side of our cruise liner were heavily covered with rushes. “That undergrowth would have been ideal to hide Moses and his basket!” remarked an elderly retired high court judge from London. The conversation turned to persecution, and other British passengers eagerly asked what demonetisation, of which they had only vaguely heard, was all about. An American architect produced the comparison. Running up to his suite he came back with Matar’s novel which is best remembered for its atmosphere of overpowering menace. The setting is Libya in 1979 when the late Muammar Mohammed Abu Minyar Gaddafi, always referred to in the book as The Guide, was at the peak of his greatness. 

The story recounts how unlike the gentle Modi, The Guide gave Libya’s entire population just three days to deposit not only selective notes but all their liquid assets in the National Bank. The queues must have been enormous, for Libya seems to have had only the one bank although it must have had branches. The confusion must also have been infinitely greater for tellers didn’t have to cope with notes of only two denominations. Poorer Libyans brought pocketfuls of loose change. The better-off lugged suitcases packed with currency notes. The rich brought truckloads. Matar doesn’t mention gold, land or funds salted away abroad. Perhaps Libya’s simpler economy didn’t run to such sophistication. Libyans were informed that thanks to The Guide’s magnanimity, they would be allowed to withdraw a thousand dinars annually. I don’t know the 1979 exchange rate but Google tells me that a Libyan dinar is worth Rs 47 today. So that would be Rs 47,000 annually. No wonder nine-year-old Sulaiman, the novel’s innocent narrator, muses that a thousand dinars was less than his parents spent in a month. 

We are lucky. Indians didn’t have to surrender all their liquid assets. True, Modi’s sudden broadcast created a sense of panic, for we were used to mature governments and orderly procedures. Mobs at once collected outside ATMs and jewellery shops while miles of cars lined up at every petrol pump. But although rules were constantly changed to keep people on their toes and it seemed that even the prime minister didn’t know whether he was coming or going, to say nothing of such babes in the wood as the finance minister and governor of the Reserve Bank of India, who were clearly not in the picture, we must admit we were allowed much longer than The Guide’s peremptory three-day ultimatum. When it came to withdrawals, the authorities were so generous one suspected they were thinking of fat cats, who offer a libation to Rama before robbing the poor and voting for Hidutva rather than us hoi polloi. Compare, for instance, The Guide’s austere thousand dinars a year with the lavish Rs 24,000 a week my wife and I could each have withdrawn every week if only we had it to withdraw.

As my half-Japanese half-Parsee editor, N J Nanporia, complained in 1975, Indians lack a sense of balance. As a British Indian subject in Japan on the eve of World War II, he experienced the rigours of a fascist dictatorship first-hand. He laughed at Indira Gandhi’s Emergency as child’s play. It was vegetarian fascism, at worst.

We continue to be lucky. A year after the surrender-liquid-assets fiat, The Guide took the truly revolutionary step of abolishing all private bank accounts. Matar says fortunes dissolved “like salt in water”. Everyone was reduced to the egalitarian bliss of bankruptcy. If India shuns such radical measures, it’s because, as Sarojini Naidu famously put it, poverty has always been an expensive proposition in this country of fastidious political attire. Our faqirs are billionaires. Their jholas are designer luggage.