Sunday View: The Best Weekend Reads, Curated Just For You

With experts weighing in on Modi’s demonetisation move and the surprising US elections, Sunday reads look promising.

Nothing like a cup of coffee and your Sunday morning reads. (Photo: iStock)

Less Black in Cash Means More in Gold

SA Aiyar, in his weekly column ‘Swaminomics’, lends his voice to the growing wave of dissent against PM Modi’s demonetisation move. His bone of contention, interestingly, is the gold. Aiyar believes that while the move to demonetise Rs 500 and 1,000 notes has been seen by pessimists as an opportunity to eradicate black deals, pessimists claim that these will only be replaced by the Rs 2,000 notes. Indeed, gold coins too would join the race to eclipse the old currency in becoming the motif of black money. He reasons it thus:

A 5g gold coin today is worth roughly Rs 15,000, and a 10g coin roughly Rs 30,000. So, a briefcase of gold coins will hold several crores, far more than a briefcase of Rs 2,000 notes. Portability and space reduction make gold more convenient for large deals. Bribes are often a percentage of project costs, and as the economy and projects grow bigger, kickbacks will too. Large payments will be done most conveniently in gold or dollars.

Read more here.

When Netas See Votes in Clean Air, They’ll Cut Through the Smog

Narendra Modi and Delhi CM Arvind Kejriwal are juxtaposed in Gurcharan Das’ argument for his Sunday op-ed, in the context of political moves and the latter’s impact on the decision-maker. Modi, Das explains, took an incredibly risky call against the long-standing scourge of black money – while Kejriwal floundered and half-drowned in his clarion call against smog. While Modi realised his election promise to the nation, impelled by the hope that in “the 2019 election, he may even be rewarded for it”, Kejriwal failed to see the electoral possibilities in cleaning Delhi’s air (possibly choosing to focus on “priorities that had a better chance of accomplishment”).

Buchanan’s concept of Public Choice throws light on Kejriwal’s dilemma. Many of us are familiar with market failures, but few know about his systematic theory of government failure. We tend to have a romantic view of public officials, believing that they act altruistically in the public interest. Public Choice teaches that politicians and civil servants are just as self-interested as you and I, and they look out primarily for themselves. While Modi and Kejriwal may feel passionately about the common good, their driving force is their own interest — their re-election to begin with.

Read more here.

The Chattering Classes Just Don’t Get This Surgical Strike

Swapan Dasgupta, in his Sunday morning column, offers a sardonic epithet to the twitterati and the Facebook club, by calling them the “chattering class”. These are the lot, he believes, that are now taking to social media to bemoan the troubles faced by their maids and maalis. Calling them nothing short of elitist, Dasgupta argues that while many of them were probably against black money themselves, they were possibly incredulous of the fact that a government would actually do anything, considering the latter a part of the problem.

That indeed is the issue that baffles the bleeding hearts. The fact that a politician had directed a strike that is calculated (among other things) to decimate the rogue war chests of the political class as a whole seems quite inexplicable. After all, conventional wisdom had deemed that election funding was entirely a function of the underground cash economy, as indeed were lucrative businesses in property and trade.

Read more here.

Across the Aisle: Old Notes for New is Not Game-Changer

P Chidambaram, in his Sunday op-ed, outlines the many problems with the move brought to force by PM Modi. Believing that money transactions largely give rise to two kinds of money – money that is taxed and money that is not taxed, he goes on to emphasise how the money not offered for tax is unaccountable ‘black money’. This money, Chidambaram stresses, is not exactly ‘stock’ but ‘flow’.

In the old days, perhaps unaccounted money was stored as cash — the proverbial ‘under the mattress’. Nowadays, unaccounted money is mostly hidden in real estate, buildings, bullion, jewellery and shares/securities.All of the above, make it difficult to stop the generation of unaccounted money and it is also difficult to detect the flow of unaccounted money.

Chidambaram also counters the moniker ‘demonetisation’ for the decision to scrap 500 and 1,000-rupee notes.

‘Demonetisation’ has a special meaning. It means that the currency note of that denomination will, henceforth, be a scrap of paper! Nothing of that kind happened.The government’s notification of November 8, 2016, withdrew the “legal tender status” from the notes of the two denominations but made it clear that those “holding these notes can tender them at any office of the Reserve Bank or any bank branch and obtain value thereof by credit to their accounts”. So, we can be clear on one thing, there was no demonetisation, and the government’s spokespersons would be well advised to avoid that word. The correct way to describe the decision is ‘Old notes for new’!

Read more here.

Fifth Column: Lessons From America

Tavleen Singh, after having stayed “glued to CNN” the week that has gone by in terms of following the American presidential election, now offers her analysis of why the country voted the way it did. Likening it to the surprising 2014 Indian election, Singh outlines right at the beginning that in both cases, the media pundits, pollsters and folk in the social media world had gotten it horribly wrong. She then moves on to lay out that if she’d been a US citizen she’d never have voted for Trump – before going on to compare the election victory of the two leaders, Trump and Modi.

As with Narendra Modi in 2014, media pundits failed to see what was completely clear to millions of voters. This was that they wanted to vote for someone who was not offering the usual solutions to their problems. Modi did that with his slogan of ‘parivartan’ and ‘vikas’, and Trump did that with his promise to ‘make America great again’. Ordinary people saw what pundits missed.

Read more here.

Out of My Mind, At Last

Meghnad Desai, like all his other fellow Sunday morning opinion shapers, can talk of little else but demonetisation. He first goes on to explain what he sees as the most dangerous kind of black money or ‘kala dhan’. While sending money abroad illegally is criminal – and routine income tax evasion a growing menace – the real problem, Desai believes, lies in the hoarding of money in various businesses. From clandestine activities like drugs and prostitution, it has entered legitimate sectors like jewellery and real estate. Yet Desai takes care to downsize money as just a “means of payment” – one that is legitimised only by its legal acceptability. Therefore...

...the master stroke that Narendra Modi struck on the night of the American elections is that, by fiat, he made hoards of cash valueless. The government had tried amnesty and it yielded Rs 66,000 crore. The money abroad is being brought back. But the cancer is money at home. By demonetising the old currency, the value of those vast hoards of cash has been wiped out. It is the biggest redistributive policy move of the past 70 years. We will never know the full extent of the impoverishment of the cash hoarders, unless opposition parties march in support of the new poor! But we will see its impact on the slowdown in luxury consumption, jewellery and real estate sectors, where this money was being openly converted into real wealth.

Read more here.

No No Lover Point - Down by the Water

Amit Chaudhuri pens a beautiful tale for a Sunday morning, drawing on certain classic childhood motifs, fused with a contemporary India as backdrop. His story begins from the reunion of sorts of a family where he and a couple of his cousins have come to the sobering conclusion that they are newly minted ‘grand uncles’. Refusing to call themselves grandfathers, which he finds a damning epithet, Chaudhuri finds comfort in the lesser evil. He then describes how he chooses to go to the toilet, drawing on the childhood realisation that “if you wish to withdraw temporarily from life, there's no easier recourse than visiting the toilet”. On the way out, he is joined by one cousin (desirous to withdraw from life through a smoke) and another desirous of fresh air, and together the trio head towards Lake Club. It is here that they come across ‘No No Lover Point’.

We were wonderstruck by a message on the wall, announcing that this was a “No Lover Point”, and that “immoral acts” were to be refrained from. Here was the India we knew - admonitory, compensating for apathy and corruption with advice and warning. Nowhere is advice about good behaviour more readily available than in our country. It’s normally accompanied by a hostility to whatever makes one’s environment desirable. Here, someone had at least performed the rare duty of looking after the place. Could it be the same person who’d put up the sign?

Read more here.

A Vanity Project Far From Real India

Aakar Patel begins by driving home the point that Mumbai and Ahmedabad, as part of the Golden Quadrilateral highway network, is one of the best connected routes in the country. This, he explains, is in the context of Modi’s ongoing tour of Japan to finalise a deal for a bullet train with Japanese PM Shinzo Abe. This train, the design for which will begin in a few days, would run from Ahmedabad to Mumbai. The trouble with investing in this train, Patel argues, is that it would be following in the footsteps of a large number of government transport blunders in the past, where the latter seemed to have focused only on the rich.

...our investment does not seem to be made with any sort of attention to the poor and those most in need. In 2005, the BJP governments in Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh shut down the state transport bus system. The reason was that the buses did not make a profit, but how are the poor expected to travel? Of course this profitability is not expected of the bullet train and other projects because, like the giant statues of Vallabhbhai Patel and Chhatrapati Shivaji coming up in Ahmedabad and Mumbai, these are projects that will add to national pride.

Read more here.

How Media Pundits Created a Sympathy Wave for Trump

Chetan Bhagat, in his column ‘The Underage Optimist’, seeks to wax eloquent on the recent US election and why he believes the media pundits made a massacre of the scenario. Insisting that all media publications must practise fair and “balanced journalism”, Bhagat calls out reputed organisations like The New York Times for its condescension. While the latter had put out a statement saying “we believed in democratic values, but we were wrong”, The Huffington Post had ended every article on Trump with a damning indictment of him – before wiping them off after his win, calling it a “clean slate” for the president-elect. To the “elitist US (and Indian) media”, Bhagat scathingly directs this missile:

You are not as smart as you think. Yes, you watch the most esoteric documentaries on Netflix and read the most obscure books. However, consuming high culture doesn’t necessarily make you a better observer of society or give you good judgment. It does make you cooler though, and maybe that’s what it really is about for you — to look cool on your Facebook page and in front of your friends.

Read more here.

From The Quint:

Modi’s Big Cash Withdrawal: Too Much Strain With Very Little Gain

Modi’s Surgical Strike on Black Money Will Also Hit Poll Campaigns

SuperEconomy India, Look Into China’s Eyes, Not Pakistan’s Navel

Delhi Pollution: Alas, It’s Vote Bank Behind the ‘Air Emergency’!