MasterCard Modi

As a working professional, I want to ask our revered Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who changed your notes Modi? Did you get your “notes” changed before portentous 8 pm announcement? Or did you once again lead by example and convert all your notes beforehand? Perhaps I am social media dumb and missed your twitter photographs. But why aren’t we seeing a twitter post with you waiting for hours in an unnecessary bank queue? Maybe you are too busy, and have five PAs to change your notes, but neither have we seen any other cabinet minister or Mohan Bhagwat ji or for that matter any of India’s esteemed industrialists the Tata’s, Ambanis or Adani stand in queues anywhere.

As I write this, I remember the bank operator telling me, only people with their own identity proof can change their money. So how did you all manage? I am sure the Ambanis, both the brothers, need more than Rs 4000 a day to run their palatial apartments. Excuse my foolishness, but I forget living in Digital India that even their domestic helps, security guards, gardeners, and vegetable vendors may all have Jan Dhan accounts and their salaries are wire-transferred directly into their banks. And such is the case with all vegetable vendors from Delhi to Chennai, for most of them carry card machines, don't they?

I am against Black Money, but this policy doesn't seem to restrict it . In fact all the people with the real black money are still laughing maybe as they see little fish being caught in your net. Please don't fool us with Bollywood style imaginations of "black money mattress" and "black money pillows", your finance minister has already told us the real intention of this undemocratic, furtive move. “Demonetisation decision was a logical step in journey towards cashless society” said Mr Jaitley. “Cashless society” well why use euphemisms simply call it a ‘MasterCard’ society? Why are you allowing for the Mastercard-isation of the Indian economy. With a single stroke you have given Visa and Mastercard access into every household of India. You have sold thousands, maybe millions of hours of our hard work and labour only to profit foreign banking corporations. Why was this necessary?

Plastic money is technological racism. Think of millions of your country people who have no access to banks; forget banks they are not even literate. You can suddenly steer them to have no access to food or medicines because the money in their pockets has no value. Millions of us are in this dilemma, Why don’t we have the right to use the money we have worked hard to use? And even before you enforce this upon us, why were we given no choice to debate this? Why have you still not made donations to political parties more transparent and only possible through cheques before you took this step? Why did you introduce this at 8pm in the night after Theresa May left India? Did she have something to do with this? Arnab may have quit, some of us Indians would really want to know.

We know why you picked November 8th, is it because this is the day you lost Bihar? Maybe this is also your way of revenge and punishment to the nation. Did you know that farmers, at least all over North India, are waiting to sell their crops and but no one has the money to buy it. Were you thinking for them? How will they sell their crops? This is the last harvest of this year, how will they get money to plant again or even payback their loans? But maybe 60 percent of India is expendable.

You built your campaign on Black money, after which you started to restrict gold, further tried to get maximum number of rural people into the banking system but when nothing worked, you took this jump. I see only a handful who are the beneficiaries of this move. The banks, Mastercard, Visa, and the BJP-UP office.

This move is anti-poor, anti- farmers and undemocratic. This is not about black money, but to strengthen corporate and MNC control on India. This is the reason Walmart India CEO is congratulating you on the Front page of TOI. You have killed the small vendors and made sure India will beg for FDI in retail. Your bosses have killed the Indian vendor and currently replacing them with giant super stores through FDI in retail.

But revenge or not, we know you have rigged the foundation of economic democracy in India. Your move is a slap on your svadeshi voters and subtly heralds the final takeover of India by the new economic world order. As a patriotic citizen of India, I urge my sisters and brothers to think about this move, see beyond the black money rhetoric before it is too late and we lose our sovereignty and our money to a new “Banking Raj”

(This is an Opinion piece and hence, does not necessarily reflect the views of the publication).