Jayant Bhandhari, yet another “fake libertarian” expat Indian, comfortably retails spin about the Modi ban that no doubt endears him to his corporate libertarian masters:

Bhandari bunk in green, my comments in brown:

“See if you can spot a rich person here [in the queues]. Rich and connected people, if they really needed to exchange banknotes, used the mafia (which employed millions of poor people to queue at banks), police (who used ID copies of old prisoners) or banks (who simply swapped the currency notes). It is the desperately poor people who have suffered.”

Lila: Yes, very rich, politically savvy and corrupt people might use mafias. The ordinary affluent business or technical class indeed do have to stand in queues. I know people who run businesses and rely on the ATM who simply have not been able to get enough cash to run their businesses and feed their families and have had to beg money from friends. Some of these people were very well connected,  just not corrupt. Unlike Bhandari, perched in Canada, I am right on the ground in India and my plans here are in disarray because of the cash crunch. Which world is this shill living in? Obviously, there are far more poor and lower middle-class people that well-off in the country, but I can assure you this is not only about hitting the poor. Perhaps of course all Indians appear like an amorphous mass to a certain breed of expat. Small businesses are not run by the poor – they are run by modestly wealthy people. They have taken a huge hit and are in fact the prime target of this move since they are potential tax-payers. For the record, neither I nor my immediate family runs a small business.  My parents are pensioners from a professional background who have been highly inconvenienced by the ban. My mother who routinely shops at the local street vegetable market tells me potatoes have practically disappeared. At 83, running around from pillar to post, trying to exchange notes and beg for your own money, is not inconvenience, it is serious harassment. Maybe Mr. Bhandari would like to exchange his comfortable gig with her lot.

Bhandari:

“India has no intellectual backbone, with its middle class — in what is still an entrenched caste system — unconcerned about the man-made crisis that has hit this large number of desperately poor people.”

Lila: India has plenty of intellectual back-bone. Unfortunately, indigenous critics rarely get mainstream attention, unless they massage the sensibilities of the ruling class. For example, intrepid hero Bhandari took one look at my blog posts criticizing Zionism and after first inviting me to speak at one of his capitalist conferences,  backed off at once, displaying zilch of the backbone he demands in people in far less favorable circumstance than himself.

Re caste differences, this is a red herring. I do not know many Indians who do not sympathize with the poor.  Most of the country is socialist in sympathy and highly religious in temperament, and feeding the poor and giving alms are obligatory for most. Witness the popularity of all schemes of welfare in this country, whether religious or political. In fact, this is why the poor have been trotted out as the excuse by the Western elites for all manner of social engineering from the Green Revolution onward. They constitute a readily accepted excuse.  The social engineering has had the sole consequences of hampering native industry and entrepreneurship, just as the anti-corruption drive has. Perhaps Bhandari should check that history out. It’s called Fabian Socialism and it wasn’t invented in India, but Britain.

Bhandari: Indians have mostly taken their troubles in stride. The international media have seen this as a sign of perseverance and a deep desire among the poorest to bring about positive fundamental change in society. In reality, the lack of protests is mostly indicative of Indians’ lack of moral instincts, a common problem with irrational societies.”

Lila: Apparently, Bhandari doesn’t realize that it takes money to make revolutions,  which is why behind the Russian revolution and the French revolutions,  one can spot the money of the bankers.  Of course, were Indians to riot on a large-scale (as they might in communist-dominated West Bengal), that would be portrayed in the press as a sign that brown people cannot rule themselves and are barbaric and violence-prone, which is the usual disingenuous junk trotted out by shills to conceal the results of Western black ops. 

Indians are a highly rational people. And corruption and tax evasion at the lower levels are a very rational response to corruption at the highest levels. It makes no sense to pay taxes when the government routinely loots its citizens, in cahoots with the very British imperial institutions and entities that Bhandari, a shill for the false libertarianism that proceeds from such institutions as the Simon Fraser Institute (heavily funded by Zionist entities), is so eager to impress.

As for the “British-rule-is-needed-in- India” meme with which Bhandari ends this contemptible piece, that only identifies him completely for what he has already tacitly revealed himself to be – a useful sycophant and tool whose discourse  poisons disinformation alternatives like Zerohedge. That is of course their raison d’etre. Their job is to coopt and corrupt dissent in the West. I could say more, but hey, I am too busy running for the fourth time downtown on a crowded town bus to get my weekly share of cash, if I am lucky, from my own account….which will enable me to buy from the vegetable market that depends on people like me buying to stay ahead of the Walmarts, Amazons, Visa Cards and other paymasters for whom Bhandari and the rest of his kind ultimately shill.