Month: November 2016

Narendra Modi’s decision to strike at black money and corruption by wiping out 86% of the currency notes in circulation has hit women vendors the hardest. These are women who are not part of the banking system, survive on one income (their own), which is entirely in cash earned daily and must negotiate petty bribes and hafta just to survive

Grocers have seen a steep decline in their sales, since the government decided to demonetise ₹500 and ₹1000 currency notes(Prabhakar Sharma)

At 10 am, it’s peak business time. A time when the delivery boy from the big grocery shop nearby and the Uber driver about to start his day, stop by for a quick breakfast at Savita Ketarkar’s vada-pav stall under a sprawling banyan tree in Mumbai.

Stuffing the freshly fried vadas into bread laced with green chutney and red chilli powder, Ketarkar has no time or patience for reporters who want to know how women are facing life post demonetisation. “How does speaking to you help me?” asks the 40-something single mother of two. I mumble something incoherent, special problems of women etc. She’s unimpressed: “When the cops and the municipal people come to take their bribes, are you going to come to fight for me?”

Read | Why Prime Minister Narendra Modi has already won the demonetisation gambit

I can understand why Ketarkar might be on edge. Since November 9, business is down by more than half, she says. There’s simply not enough cash to buy the Rs 12 vada-pavs. Things are so bad that she is now subsidising the many customers who turn up without exact change; she’d rather sell at a discounted price of Rs 10 than risk losing even further business. No, she doesn’t have a bank account. “I earn, I eat. There are no savings. Of what use is a bank account to me?”

On the footpath where she lives just outside the HDFC Bank into which she has never stepped, another single mother Ammachi (she gives me just one name) struggles to cope. Ammachi sells flower garlands — and there are absolutely no takers. “Each garland costs Rs 10 and people would rather keep scarce notes for essentials,” she says.

Ammachi says she has lived on the footpath for years. When there’s a raid, her possessions get taken away and to get them back she must pay a bribe. Once, says her son, Mahesh, who studies in Class 5, they even took away his books. “We had to buy new ones,” he says.

Read | Imphal newspapers feel demonetisation heat, to stop publication

Because Mahesh is Ammachi’s investment in the future, she readily pays ₹500 a month for private tuition. “If he studies and gets a good job, we won’t have to live on the footpath,” she says.

Narendra Modi’s decision to strike at black money and corruption by wiping out 86% of the currency notes in circulation has hit women like Savita and Ammachi — single mothers already struggling to survive — the hardest. These are women who are not part of the banking system, survive on one income (their own), which is entirely in cash earned daily and must negotiate petty bribes and hafta just to survive.

About 482 million people in the informal sector and agriculture earn cash incomes. Demonetisation will disrupt consumption patterns for at least the next quarter and affect these incomes the most, reports data journalism site, IndiaSpend.

Read | Mamata, Kejriwal hurt by Modi’s attack on black money, says BJP

Many like Savita and Ammachi have zero savings and zero access to the Internet and online payments. There are no Rs 1,000 or even Rs 500 notes to change. If they suffer, it’s not because they have to stand in line outside a bank. It’s because the shortage of currency notes is hitting their business hard.

I have refrained from complaining about the mere inconvenience of tiding over a few days of being cashless because I am acutely aware of my privilege. I have a credit card, documented ID, and am even a “preferred customer” at my bank. For me, therefore, to crib about long queues or a temporary cash crunch would be hypocritical.

People in positions of privilege, like myself, talk about the greater good in cleansing the system of black money. What’s a little inconvenience, we tell ourselves with moral primness.

Read | AAI allows currency exchange counters at its airports

Savita and Ammachi, collateral damage on the edges of this morality tale, do not know what’s a loan write-off or a wilful defaulter. They don’t know how elections are funded or financed by black money.

They do, however, know this: They have a vote, and they cast it once every five years. The BJP can only hope that women like these have a short, generous and forgiving memory.

namita.bhandare@gmail.com

Twitter:@namitabhandare

The views expressed are personal

If we are to talk about apologies with any degree of honesty, then there’s plenty to be remorseful about in post Independent India. It’s not a foreign colonial power, but our own governments that also owe us a range of apologies. Nobody is owed an apology more than the Dalits and the women of this country. But who would issue this apology, when all of society has colluded — and still does — in their systemic deprivation?

Ahmedabad: File photo of Bikers passing near a burning vehicle during the 2002 Gujarat riots, Ahmedabad.(PTI)

Shashi Tharoor would like the British to apologise for 200 years of colonial rule. He believes that British Prime Minister Theresa May must visit Jallianwala Bagh and go down on her knees and express remorse for the colonial exploitation of India.

Tharoor’s demand for an apology and reparations, first made in the course of an Oxford Union debate a year ago, won him thunderous applause. A YouTube video went viral and even Prime Minister Narendra Modi congratulated the Congress MP on his return home.

Nobody disagrees with Tharoor; the British have much to be sorry for — from the economic ruin of indigenous weavers to the death of four million people in the Bengal famine. But, if we are to talk about apologies with any degree of honesty, then there’s plenty to be remorseful about in post-Independent India. It’s not a foreign colonial power, but our own governments that also owe us a range of apologies.

Read | Court did injustice to me, will approach HC: Zakia Jafri on Gulberg verdict

Nobody is owed an apology more than the Dalits and the women of this country. But who would issue this apology, when all of society has colluded — and still does — in their systemic deprivation?

So, leaving that #1 apology aside, what do our own governments have to be sorry about?

The first is every communal riot from Nellie to Mumbai and Gujarat to Delhi. It doesn’t matter which government was in power where the riot occurred. If there was a breach in law and order, then it is incumbent upon the government in charge to beg for forgiveness from not only every family that lost a loved one, but every citizen who lived through it.

The second would be the Emergency. Has the Congress ever apologised? To my mind, the suspension of democracy, along with such human rights violations as forcible sterilisations, deserves a public mea culpa.

Photos | Tears and sorrow: Aftermath of Gulberg massacre sentencing

Every state government that mutely witnesses farmer suicide caused by agrarian distress needs to apologise for a failure of policy and vision that has allowed this tragedy to continue year after year.

Add to this list, fake encounters and “disappearances” that strike against democracy and the idea of the civilised world, “innocent till proven guilty”. It doesn’t matter if these encounters by and large are bolstered by public support, any government that believes in rule of law must act against them.

Read | 1984 the darkest chapter, time for Punjab to move forward: Amarinder

An apology is also the crucial first step towards healing and reconciliation. You cannot move forward unless there is an expression of regret. In South Africa, FW de Klerk apologised for apartheid. Successive German heads of state have expressed remorse for the Holocaust. Perhaps the most moving was the sight of the then chancellor Willy Brandt falling, wordlessly, to his knees on a state visit to Poland in 1970.

In India, part of the problem with any discussion on communal riots is the inevitable follow up question: “But what about”. Whether it is Narendra Modi under whose watch the 2002 riots took place in Gujarat or the Gandhi-led Congress for the 1984 anti-Sikh riots, there has never been a heart-felt expression of regret.

Governments are appointed by us and are, as a consequence, accountable to us. The term public servant has gone out of vogue but it’s always useful to remember that the people elected by us are answerable to us; they are not the “ruling class”. If our governments should fail either through policy or through action then we as the citizens who put them in charge, are owed an apology.

An apology for a wrong committed is simply the right thing to do. When Justin Trudeau apologised before his Parliament for the Komagatu Maru incident of 1914 when a ship carrying mostly Sikh passengers was denied entry into Canada and forced to return to British India where many met with a violent end, we in India applauded the gesture.

Read | SAD activists in Phagwara burn effigies of Cong leaders over anti-Sikh riots

“People who are not responsible today for the wrongs done by their forbearers in the past era apologise nonetheless to people who are not the ones to whom wrong was done,” Tharoor told the PTI. A good place to start would be at home.

namita.bhandare@gmail.com

Twitter:@namitabhandare

The views expressed are personal