From the Wire:

In 2013, there was a CBI raid on the Aditya Birla Group of companies, in particular Hindalco, in connection with the coalgate scam. In that raid, apart from recovering Rs 25 crores in cash, the CBI also recovered some information stored in the computer of the CEO of the Birla group – Amitabh. Several documents were recovered – some of them showed bribes being paid to some Environment Project J, which is obviously to the ministry or to the minister of environment. We know that around the same time the Birla group of companies was trying to secure environmental clearances from the ministry of environment for a large number of their projects. So those clearly represented bribes paid for getting the environmental clearances. There was another set of documents which was recovered from the computer of Shubhendu Amitabh, which said, “Gujarat CM – Rs 25 crores. 12 paid. 13?”

Unfortunately, though these documents showed payment of bribes and therefore, offences under Prevention of Corruption Act, the CBI did not register any FIR on this matter but just passed the papers on to the income tax (IT) department.

Income tax department did a somewhat detailed investigation into the matter. They questioned Amitabh many times in which he admitted that he had written, “Gujarat CM – Rs 25 crores. 12 paid. 13?” But he said that “Gujarat CM” meant Gujarat Alkalis and Chemicals. When asked what the C and M stood for he was unable to answer and the IT department concluded that he was lying.

They also found that there was a large amount of cash which was being received through Hawala by the Birla group and was apparently being paid to various people. But despite this the IT department did not refer the matter back to the CBI for investigation of these ostensible offences under the Prevention of Corruption Act and the matter was sought to be buried at that level. After that we understand that the Birla group has approached the IT settlement commission for settling the matter and the hearings have been concluded; the matter is likely to be settled after which there is this apprehension that the papers seized in the raids will be returned back to the Birla group.

The Sahara raid took place on November 22, 2014. In this raid Rs 137 crores of cash was seized from their offices in Noida, from the corporate office of the chairman, and a large number of documents, some loose sheets, computer data from his personal staff were seized, which showed details of proposed as well as actual payments made to various senior political figures. One of the documents which was seized – a printout of a detailed spreadsheet – in which the first three columns represent the cash the Sahara group received on different dates from different sources and the total comes to Rs 115 crores. Thereafter, this document also represents cash payments to different people on different dates and the places where the payment has been made, and the persons who have taken the payment are also mentioned. It is signed by the IT officer, two witnesses and one of the Sahara officials. Several such documents were recovered in this raid. There was another one which was partly overlapping with minute differences. For example, in the previous one the payments which were referred to as, “cash given at Ahmedabad, Modiji”, in other documents they are referred to as, “cash given to CM Gujarat”. There are Rs 40 crores given at Ahmedabad to Modiji, Rs 10 crores given to CM of Madhya Pradesh, Rs 4 crores to CM of Chhattisgarh, Rs 1 crore to CM of Delhi which at that time was Ms Sheila Dikshit. These are all payments made between 2013 and March 2014.

Despite recovery of such incriminating documents and in such detail which showed pay-offs made to various senior political figures, the IT department did not refer this matter to the CBI for investigation under the Prevention of Corruption Act. They apparently prepared some appraisal report which according to my understanding does not deal with these papers and the pay-offs, and these documents were buried. The person who was responsible for burying the documents of both Birla and Sahara was K. V. Chowdary, who was heading the IT investigations at the time and thereafter was appointed, apparently as a reward, as the chief of central vigilance commissioner of the Central Vigilance Commission (CVC). It was the first time a revenue officer was appointed although there were a number of complaints against him; his name appeared several times in the entry register of the infamous former CBI director, Ranjit Sinha, who was involved in interfering with the income tax assessment of Ponty Chadha. He was also involved in the stock guru scam which is apparently still under investigation. Despite that, Chowdary was still appointed. We challenged his as well as the appointment of another person in the CVC. Because of our information that he played a major role in suppressing the information, we have filed an application. When I got these documents in October, I sent a complaint to CVC, CBDT, the Enforcement Directorate, CBI and to the SIT on black money, saying that these are highly incriminating documents and according to the principles laid by the Supreme Court in the Jain Hawala case these should have been investigated – whether these payments were made, why were they were made, if these were bribes or some other kind of payments – but none of that was done. The matter was sought to be buried.

Therefore, we have eventually moved the Supreme Court, filed an application in the petition that we had filed challenging the appointment of the CVC and that application will be heard on Friday.

Sahara diaries mention a lot of names but they don’t specifically name the politicians, for example, like you said the Delhi CM and so on. Are there more? Who are the other prominent politicians mentioned in the list?

There’s Madhya Pradesh CM Shivraj Singh Chouhan, Delhi CM at the time, Sheila Dikshit, Chhattisgarh CM Raman Singh and the Gujarat CM at the time, Mr Modi. Mr Modi is also personally mentioned as Modiji. Largest payments are made to him in the Sahara diaries, more than Rs 40 crores. One other politician which is mentioned prominently is Shaina NC of the BJP and one of the documents says that she was being asked to intercede with the advocate general of Maharashtra for withdrawal of some case which was pending against Sahara. Perhaps the Sebi case (which was mentioned as the Bombay case in the papers).

The Modi government is already in the know of these papers because you have already written to various agencies. What are the kind of replies you got from the government?

Well, I only received one response from the CVC after ten days saying, “Will you please confirm whether you have sent this complaint?” I immediately confirmed that I sent this complaint and I am not aware as to what they have done, or whether they have done anything in this matter because unfortunately, it seems that the CVC himself, as the head of investigation of income tax was responsible for suppressing this.”

Rahul Gandhi has come out with the revelations he’s been promising for a few days – evidence that Modi was bribed in his Gujarat days by the now-jailed owner of the Sahara group conglomerate.

Glancing at Sahara’s resume, I was struck by this piece at Crain’s that suggests that Sahara works closely with and is beholden to the powers-that-be:

Next month’s auction for the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan was canceled after the holders of the mortgage reached a deal to give the borrowers more time to sell the property and pay back the loan, said a person with knowledge of the matter.

The hotel’s ownership has been in limbo for two years. Billionaire brothers David and Simon Reuben [Lila: Iraqi Jews born in India] hold the mortgage on the five-star hotel and had scheduled a foreclosure auction for April 26, according to the person, who asked not to be named because the deal is private. The Reubens bought the loan from Bank of China Ltd. after a default by the property’s current majority owner, Sahara India Pariwar, last year. Sahara is controlled by Subrata Roy, who was imprisoned in India in early 2014 for defrauding investors.

A spokesman for the Reuben brothers didn’t immediately respond to an e-mailed request for comment.

The chateau-like Plaza, located at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Central Park South, has changed owners many times over its 109-year history. Presidential candidate Donald Trump bought the Plaza in 1988 and married his second wife, Marla Maples, there. Trump sold it to a group including Prince Alwaleed bin-Talal of Saudi Arabia, who then sold it to Israel’s Elad Group, which converted some of the hotel rooms to condominiums. Bin-Talal retains a minority stake in the Plaza, as does an entity tied to hotelier Sant Singh Chatwal.

For sale were the Plaza’s hotel rooms, its restaurants and retail space, according to the person with knowledge of the matter. It was to be sold in a package with the Dream Downtown hotel, a trendy property in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood that is located one block from the elevated High Line park, the person said.

The two hotels serve as collateral for the Bank of China loan and are cross-collateralized with the Grosvenor House hotel in London. The Dream hotel is owned by Sahara’s Roy and Chatwal. The combined mortgages for the New York properties total about $500 million, the person with knowledge of the matter said.”

So who is Sant Singh Chatwal? The Sikhs have been working closely with the NWO elites and it is a religion with a large number of Jewish (in the modern ethnic sense)  converts.

Well, first, he is an Indian hotel magnate  who got caught skirting federal campaign finance rules between 2007 and 2011 to donate to Hillary Clinton, among others.

Chatwal’s position as a major donor to Ms. Clinton, along with Lyn Forester de Rothschild, is depicted at Muckety.com.

The Reuben brothers come from the immensely powerful Iraqi Jewish family of the Sassoons, long-term associates of the Rothschilds.

Like Rothschild-front Khodorkovsky, the Reubens got rich buying Russian public assets at auction during the shock-therapy administered in that country under Yeltsin,  until Vladimir Putin came into power:

A profile of the two in The Guardian notes that what paid off for them was the entry into Russia when other investors were wary of doing anything in the post-Soviet, “chaotic capitalist” market. Transworld bought large chunks of the privatised Russian aluminium sector but had to sell it off for 300 million pounds to oil giant Sibneft in 2000 as the business climate in the country turned hostile for them under Vladmir Putin. “Transworld enjoyed 7 percent market share in the global aluminium market.”

According to the piece from which the above is excerpted, the brothers have ties to the Russian Mafia, which, as noted elsewhere on this blog, works with the globalist elites.

All this, including the presence of Prince Alwaleed bin Talal and Donald Trump, in the mix,  makes it certain that Sahara was an agent or front for Rothschild interests in the first place.

Which means Modi, Sahara’s bribed errand boy, is nothing more than their agent too.

Which is why Rahul Gandhi made mention of the 99 percent and the 1 percent in his diatribes.

On the face of it, this was a denunciation of the ruling elites of the NWO.

But Gandhi’s language betrays him as controlled opposition.

The 99 and the 1 percent is a Kabbalistic meme used by the powers-that-be to frame the debate about globalism in terms of inequality, about the rich versus the poor.

But inequality in itself is not the problem.

It is, at its worst, a symptom.

The problem is totalitarianism, the end to which the centralization of finance tends.

The problem is central banks and the fiat money system and their corrosive effect on every aspect of  life.

Arthakranti Sansthan (Institute for Economic Revolution) is the Pune-based outfit that has claimed the authorship of Modi’s currency ban program.

Anil Bokil, the founder of the think-tank met Modi in the summer of 2016 and reportedly made a big impact on the PM with his presentation on banning high denomination notes.

Bokil’s plans have been thoroughly debunked here.

Similar to the Bokil tax is the Tobin tax (Bokil does not agree with that characterization) that Ellen Brown was promoting a while back and which was a bankster ploy, even though Brown might have advocated it innocently.  Discussion here at EPJ of the Tobin tax, Soros’ backing of it and objections on libertarian grounds.

Soros is a Rothschild front and given the figures profiting from the Modi ban, the chances are that the Bokil proposal is backed in some indirect fashion from London.

Bokil previously approached Rahul Gandhi (controlled opposition, despite his crowd-pleasing attacks on Modi) with no result.

Bokil is supposed to be an ascetic former engineer who no longer works but lives on small amounts of money given to him by his mother. That seems implausible to me so I searched for information about Arthkranti’s funding but couldn’t find it.

The outfit looks very suspicious to me, given that its main objective in banning high denomination notes is to reduce the use of cash altogether, dispense with income tax (which is hard to assess in India), and go straight to a bank-transaction tax, which has always been the wet dream of bankers and fintech giants.

Sure enough, on the Arthkranti website, I find a list of eminent people supporting the bank tax project that includes.

Dr. D R Pendse: Ex Chief Economist with Tata Group

“This proposal should definitely be helpful to solve tax related problems for businesses and industries. The complex taxation system, which is being tweaked for last 65 years but could not even work for 2 years, must be altogether changed.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xgR2yGDlG2E

Ficci president Sidharth Birla

“If the steps proposed enhance revenue by broadening and broad basing the tax payer base and help improve transparency of regulatory framework, we will tend to welcome these aspects.”

President of industry body PHDCCI Sharad Jaipuria

[Lila: Jaipuria who is regarded as a voice for “India Inc.” (the Indian corporate world) is a strong supporter for fully opening up the retail market in India to foreign direct investment (FDI). This has taken place now under the BJP, especially with the cash ban, since smaller retailers don’t have POS (point of sale) facilities like cash swipe machines.]

“The personal income tax should be reduced or abolished with alternate sources. I believe, government has the potential to generate revenue from other sources which are unexplored yet”.

Girish Vanvari, co-head of tax, KPMG in India

“…it may reduce corruption and collusion with the government agencies. It may remove the tax burden from individual as well as corporate taxpayers. The taxpayers will also not indulge into practices like falsification of accounts, money laundering and other illegal ways of tax evasion,” said Girish Vanvari, co-head of tax, KPMG in India.

Sudhir Kapadia of EY, a global tax consultancy firm

“There is indeed a case for tax reform that brings in simplification and rationalisation in the tax system by eliminating unwanted distortions and multiplicity of taxes.”

Jay Shankar is an economic adviser at the Department for International Development at the British High Commission

“the new proposed tax system would be more equitable than the existing one, without compromising on the revenue side. ”

http://profit.ndtv.com/news/opinions/article-can-india-do-away-with-income-tax-377072

Experts Global

Expert Global votes for this theory and calls for all Indians to demand implementation of this theory

http://www.expertgs.com/Corporate/Social+Responsibilities/index.aspx

Vivek Sawant, managing director MKCL

“MKCL believes that solution to complex and chronic challenges have to be fundamentally knowledge based and hence decided to support this (Arthakranti) research work”, Vivek Sawant, managing director MKCL notes

http://www.businessworld.in/news/economy/india/how-to-abolish-all-taxes-and-keep-the-economy-ticking/1220955/page-1.html#

Siddha Samadhi Yoga (SSY)

SSY Fully endorses and supports the mission of Arthakrnati Pratishtan ( see www.arthakranti.org ) and does it’s best to actively promote this awareness to all.

http://www.ssy.org/inner.php?id=219

Darshak Hathi, International Director, Art of Living Foundation (AOL)

[Lila: Art of Living is a known Rothschild-supporting guru outfit, promoting a kind of homogenized Hindu thought for global consumption]

Darshak Hathi #VBI ?@DarshakHathi Jan 23

Solution is Abolish tax,Currency compression, BTT

D S Kulkarni, a businessman:

Arthakranti would bring dream era for industries. It will reduce the tax burden in prices of commodities, which is about 40% currently, so prices and hence inflation will fall. Every person in Industry will support to make this happen!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xgR2yGDlG2E

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.  

Which companies are behind the digital companies profiting from the Modi cash ban?

Market share by issuer of the credit-card companies:

Chase Bank – 31.7%

Bank of America – 15.8%

Wells Fargo – 10.9%

US Bank – 9.9%

Citibank, Capital One, the Rest

I only began using credit cards recently, with many second-thoughts about it. From today, I will be reversing this. More I cannot blog.

Chase is now owned by JP Morgan, which recently opened its first branch in India, near Chennai.

In the US, the Rothschild interests have always preferred to operate behind the facade of  J. P. Morgan.

Paytm, an Indian digital payment portal promoted by the Modi government, is owned by One97 Conmunications, whose largest share-holder is Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba.

Alibaba is advised by N. M. Rothschild

and has merged with Yahoo’s Chinese operation.  Yahoo recently admitted that millions of its account users were “hacked” in 2014.

Alibaba is also invested in another Indian e-commerce portal, Snapdeal.

Ma is a strong supporter of Big Data’s use in state surveillance.

(To be continued)

The mainstream media is using the cash starvation of India to tom-tom digital payment platforms, ranging from Visa and Master card, Amazon, Flipkart, and Alibaba,  to Paytm, Paylatr and a host of similar ventures.

Behind them are globalist/intel-subservient multinationals like Alibaba (Paytm) and Blackrock (Paylatr).

The same goes for digital currency like Bitcoin, which, as I’ve blogged over and over, is an intelligence-operation,  with the signature of the NWO all over it.

So what does the aam admi in India do?

Here are my proposals, shorn of any detail that would allow the government to queer them in advance:

1.  Minimize or even end your use of Visa and Master card as soon as possible. Let these corporations feel the same pain felt by millions of small businesses destroyed by the stooge of the multinationals.
2.  Consider filing suit against any of the major corporations that have profited from this scheme. Research and document any ties they have to the NGOs (like Arthkranthi) that proposed the cash ban to Modi. Consider actions against such NGOs. Modi is only a useful tool. Making Modi alone the target of popular outrage (as the CIA-backed outfit Avaaz does) is a limited hang-out option.
3.  Voice your outrage openly and educate as many people as you can.
4.  Oppose all of Modi’s other digital surveillance projects, from his diabolical DNA bank and central monitoring system  to his proposal to link aadhar cards and smart phones via e-wallets.
5.  Avoid getting an Aadhar card yourself. If you have to, consider multiplying and confusing your data so as to render it useless. I will leave you  to figure out what that means. In that spirit, use every loophole you can to get out of the government’s surveillance data-base…..but don’t blog your methods, lest the authorities penalize you and end the loop-hole.

In Bengal, famine is imminent, as a result of  Modi’s murderous cash ban:

Demonetisation has hit citizens across India, but it is the lower stratas of society that are struggling the most with the currency ban. Farmers in Bengal have said that if the situation carries on for 15 days more, the state could be headed for a famine as the state stares at an impending food shortage.

Bengal as a state relies heavily on agriculture and 70% of the rural economy has been hit hard by PM Modi’s demonetisation move. The paddy planted in the last season is ready for reaping, but the farmers can’t do anything about it. They cannot sell their harvest. 50% of the total cultivation – 20 lakh hectares of paddy – are lying in their fields, untouched.

With all this produce on the verge of being wasted, farmers fear that a famine-like situation is highly possible due to food shortage.”

 

 

Rothschild puppet, former tea-wallah and current Payt-Wallah (h/t to Mamata Banerjee), Narendra Modi destroys the historic Benares silk-weaving industry

“In Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s political base of Varanasi, weaver Zainul Abedin stares at the uneven mud floor of his home. Behind him, more than a dozen handlooms lie idle.

Abedin is part of the collateral damage of Modi’s 8 November decision to ban high-value currency notes, effectively cancelling 86% of cash in circulation. The move was designed to stifle corruption and tax evasion, but many of the hardest-hit are workers in India’s vast and intricate informal economy—the small businesses, shops, drivers and countless other basic industries and services that employ more than 90% of Indian workers.

Most are poor like Abedin, who earns Rs250 a day, but collectively they account for almost half the economy. That’s some $1 trillion, or more than the GDP of Indonesia.

“Modi’s cash ban has broken our backs,” said Abedin, 39, who makes Varanasi’s famous silk fabrics, shot with gold and silver, and says he can no longer feed his children. “We weavers won’t last if this continues for even another month.”

Excellent analysis of the Modi ban’s cataclysmic impact on the aam admi (common man) in India:

Published: December 16, 2016 18:43 IST

Bengal famine 1770: “The British had removed a large fraction of the coinage, evidently, which destroyed the mechanism of the exchange of goods. It is difficult to buy food when there is no money.”

– Richard Stevenson, historian

“Money for day to day transactions became scarce. In rural Bengal, rupees alone had amounted to two-thirds of the currency. (In Modi’s India, the banned notes amounted to over 86% – my note). Money became so dear that prices of all other goods slumped; the scarcity of money was accompanied by deflation. Artisans, weavers and workers were thrown out of work due to the slump in demand. The credit market collapsed…without credit and in the absence of traders, equalizing supply and demand became difficult and had a destabilizing effect on the economy.”

– Sashi Sivaramkrishna, In Search of Stability: Economics of Money, History of the Rupee

That was in the 18th century. Ever since the midnight of 8/9 November 2016, the economy has suffered so severe a liquidity crunch that, says the CII, the decline in daily trade is of the order of 50-70%. This is just as it was in 1770 – precisely because “the removal of a large fraction of the coinage” (86% in demonetized notes, up from two-thirds in 1770) led to “money for day to day transactions becoming scarce”!”

Owing to the prevailing uncertainty, even those with ready resources in 2016 are not entering the market, as they did not in the 18th century. Sales of high-end automobiles – usually paid for by cheque or other banking instruments – are down between 20% (Hyundai) and 38% (Mahindra). Two-wheelers are hit by 35-40%; tractor purchases have collapsed by 63%; in the labour-intensive textiles and garments sector, four lakh workers have been laid off, and 60,000 in leather. These are figures for the last three weeks of November. This is not in consequence of only demonetization but the deleterious collateral damage that demonetization has inflicted on the economy as a whole.

Leaving aside apologists for the Modi regime, most independent economists are agreed that GDP for the next two and possibly three quarters has taken such a hit that GDP growth will decline by at least one percentage point or more, with Ambit Capital estimating that GDP growth will be more than halved to 3.5% for FY 2017.

Transition costs before the restoration of normalcy is brought about have been estimated by the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy to be in the region of Rs. 1.28 lakh crore, borne by ordinary households, commercial and manufacturing enterprises, banks, government and the RBI. Moreover, deposits of demonetized notes have already crossed Rs. 13 lakh crore of the Rs. 15 lakh crore earlier in circulation. Almost all these deposits are lilywhite, representing the hard-earned income and savings of ordinary folk. Black money held in cash has never exceeded 5-6% of the total stock of illegally held wealth. So it was always ridiculous to imagine that the menace of illegal money could be met by demonetizing so-called High Denomination Notes (HDN). The Government gave their game away when they informed to the Supreme Court that they hoped to garner 4 lakh crores through black money hoarders not depositing HND for fear of exposure. The BJP’s evident but unstated intention was to use this bonanza to announce populist schemes through the Union Budget on the eve of the Uttar Pradesh and Punjab elections. In the event, I am given to understand by reliable sources that internal estimates in the RBI show that the sterilized amount on the last day of December is unlikely to exceed Rs. 50,000 crore. Thus, there will be no bonanza for Modi to compensate the aam admi for the rough time he has been put through.

And times have been rough since Modi went on TV that dreadful night of 8/9 November. Just as the kisan and khet mazdoor were recovering from two successive years of drought, cash-dependent sales, transport, marketing and distribution of agricultural produce, especially of perishable fruits and vegetables, have suffered huge losses along the entire supply chain from the farm to the mandi and the rehriwallah. Non-availability of ready money has resulted in a staggering drop in labour employed in farm and farm-related activities. Plantation labour is not getting paid, not because plantation owners and management do not have the money to pay them, but because owners and management are unable to access their own money.

Similar is the situation in construction and real estate, the second-largest employers after agriculture, accounting for 34-45 million daily-wage jobs in an economy of jobless growth. Contractors are laying them off in droves because the contractors are denied access to their own money to pay their labour. Wage-earnings in construction have thus been slashed by 80%-90%. One prominent news magazine has a cover story portraying Real Estate as descending from “Boom to Doom”.

As for manufacturing, millions – literally millions – of small and medium enterprises have closed down. At least 60,000 microfinance companies are badly hit, repayment collections having dropped by 600 cores and disbursements having collapsed in similar measure. (See the parallel to 1770 when, to quote Sivaramkrishna, “Artisans, weavers and workers were thrown out of work due to the slump in demand.”) Urban unemployment has shot up from a little over 7% to well over 9%. As one financial analyst succinctly put it: “cash shortages (have) hampered growth of new work, buying activity and production”. (That is what Stevenson meant when he said of the shortage of money that aggravated the causes of the Bengal famine of 1770, that this “destroyed the mechanism of the exchange of goods”). As for the informal sector of the economy that employs 90% of the work-force, the renowned economist, Pronob Sen of the International Growth Centre, has bluntly stated that demonetization has “penalized” the entire informal sector and damaged it “permanently”.

Some quick thoughts about mass media propaganda on the Modi cash ban in India.

1. Critics in the mainstream media, especially from Western establishment mouthpieces like the London School of Economics, are repeatedly mentioning “the poor” as the primary victim of the cash ban.  Now,  daily workers are certainly suffering, because they can’t be paid in cash regularly, but they are very, very far from being the only people suffering. Indeed, the affluent, the middle-class, the lower middle-class, urban residents and rural, the whole of the country has been profoundly affected. Being rich does not exempt you from standing in line for days trying to get out a trivial part of your savings. Being rich (on paper) does not prevent your business from collapsing because you cannot order supplies or because consumer demand has collapsed with the cash crunch.
2.  Mainstream critics are breezily assuming the virtue of the alleged objective of the plan: rooting out corruption, “black money,” and crime.  But the printing of  new 2000 rupee notes belies this assumption. Larger bills are usually favored by people involved in shady cash dealings.  By contrast, the banned 500 and 1000 rupee notes were widely used in the legitimate cash-based economy. This suggests that attacking the cash-based economy was the real goal of the cash ban.
3.  Mainstream critics are repeatedly associating cashless with crimeless or “clean” money.  The cashless project has become equated with the cleanliness program. Swacch Bharat or Clean India and Digital India have become one. But in fact,  money-laundering and the financing of criminal activity and terrorism are usually done through digital payments, especially the much-touted Bitcoin, which, elsewhere on this blog, I have deconstructed as a tool of the financial elites. Bitcoin India has soared multiple times following the cash ban. Who profited? When will the media go after this story?
4.  The mainstream media has given us very sparse coverage of the broad and profound destruction of the economy underway, instead, opting for sound-bytes about a “temporary” decline in GDP that at most will take a few months to recover. But GDP itself is a spurious indicator of the economic well-being a country.  A far better indicator of the effects of the cash ban is taking a cross-section of the industries being devastated: the breadth and depth is astounding. The numbers are in the tens and hundreds of thousands. The workers involved are in the millions. From the ceramic and diamond industry in Gujarat (Modi’s home state) to the chit-fund industry, farming, and leather-working; from book sellers to vegetable sellers, from real estate to Ayurvedic medicine, there is not a business that has not been dealt a severe blow, often,  irretrievably. The closing of tens of thousands of small businesses that constitute the majority of a sector leaves the market wide open for big businesses. Thus, the diamond business in Gujarat has been ruined for the small businesses that dominate 60% of it. But the large diamond merchants have survived and will no doubt expand. Now, who are those large diamond merchants? Could they be the same merchants who dominate the global industry from Antwerp? What is their relationship to the Modi government and its foreign backers?
5.  The last lie that is being circulated about the cash ban is that it was an ill thought-out, poorly planned act.  The evidence does not support this lie. The “cashless” project is a globalist objective with hoary roots, going back, proximately, to the 1990’s, when the capital markets were financialized and centralized. However, theoretically, since the inauguration of the Internet, the potential has always existed for the economic world to be digitalized and centralized. We must assume that those behind the adoption of the ‘net knew this. So, truthfully, at least from the 1970’s, the cashless project has been in the works. Secondly,  Western fintech has been trying to get its foot into the Indian market over the last several years, without success. The Modi cash ban has now forcibly opened the market for it. Indeed, finance capital has RAPED the country. Here is a real “rape crisis” that the Western media is glossing over.
6.  My final point in this post is perhaps the most disturbing. While there is indeed a global move toward “cashless,” the notion that is being circulated in the MSM that the Indian cash ban is more-of-the-same is totally false and most likely disinformation. There is no Western country in the world in which the cashless project has intentionally and immediately inflicted the kind of damage that the Modi ban has done. The Western measures  are staid, gradualist, and leave scope for the use of cash and for privacy, since the infrastructure and policing available in the West is excellent. In India, by contrast, the cash ban is nothing less than dekulakization, and should bluntly be called economic warfare. Given that the powers-that-be behind Modi constitute the right-wing of the Anglo-Jewish oligarchy, the cash ban is an act of monumental treachery on the part of the PM; a rape of the native population and industry by a conspiracy of the state and big business; and the savage, unilateral imposition of a digital dictatorship from New York, London, and Tel Aviv, on the no-longer sovereign republic of India.