 When I chose this topic demonetization was very much in the air and people were wondering what the effects of demonetization would be but by now that is an issue on which they can scarcely be any doubt. By now it is clear that the purported claim of demonetization which was actually to attack and cripple the black economy has been completely this it's it's it's something which has been completely and totally been proved to be wrong that you know that that it has simply been a complete failure. This is quite obvious and in fact it's obvious to the government itself. The government's argument was that if you demonetize currency notes in that case honest people who are not part of the black economy would come and either exchange or deposit those notes with the banks while those who belong to the black economy for fear of being exposed would not come to banks. As a result the notes in their position would simply get extinguished because they would not come by a certain deadline and that extinction is would be powerful enough as a blow against the black economy so that it would get substantially crippled. Now even at that time critics had argued first that the amount of notes relative to the size of the black economy which the black economy holds is really quite small that it is really as a proportion for instance the government's own estimate was that about three and a half lakh crores of notes are in the black economy which may get extinguished and if you look at the size of the black economy it varies between a World Bank estimate of about 25% of the GDP of the country to an estimate by my colleague in JNU Arun Kumar who says about 60% of the GDP in the country which means it varies between 45 lakh to 85 lakh crores in which case three and a half lakh crores of rupees getting extinguished is really no more than a pinprick as far as this economy is concerned it's certainly not going to be anything like a major blow to this economy. Critics at that time had also argued that the black operators have ways of getting around this problem so that actually even the three and a half lakh crores which was the government's estimate would not actually be extinguished as the government was thinking. As a matter of fact now we know that the critics were right that as a matter of fact the amount of notes which have come back either as deposits or as exchange for exchange against new notes which of course the government stopped after a certain date that amount of notes about 97% of the total value of demonetized currency and since the remaining 3% do not necessarily belong to the black economy they belong to all kinds of people who could not make it to the banks by the deadline it follows that the amount of extinction is negligible. Consequently the talk of this being a blow against the black economy is something which has been proved to be completely wrong. The government itself is so embarrassed by this that they have thrown doubts on the 97% they have said that we are going to come out with a final figure but December 30th was as you know the last date since then more than a month has passed and the government is still counting which only shows that as a matter of fact this figure some people say that it might even have exceeded 100% because of the fact that a certain amount of counterfeit notes might also have come into the banking system over and above that which was demonetized. Anyway so the upshot is that as a matter of fact this is not a blow at all to the black economy in any sense and therefore the question arises that why was all this done when it actually quite palpably has resulted in a blow to the informal sector it has resulted in a recession in the economy it has resulted in job losses it has resulted in a shaking of people's faith in the entire banking system it has also resulted in the Reserve Bank of India governor reneging on his promise which is written on every note that I promise to pay the bearer so much and so much and and obviously he has not kept up that promise so why was all this done it's not as if people did not know that it would be a failure I have mentioned the critics who are already anticipating this as a matter of fact virtually any known economist across the ideological spectrum had taken this position that this is no way of tackling the black economy and this is not even the first time even when the small amount of demonetization was carried out by the Muradji Desai government even at that time the governor of the Reserve Bank I.G. Patel had actually written that look demonetization is no way of attacking the black economy it's in fact a completely wrong way of attacking the black economy you're just going to inconvenience people now that discussion that note that kind of assertion was obviously available to the government so it's not as if the government had a certain perception but based on wrong assumptions or assumptions that happens to go wrong but it is something where you would say that the government embarked upon this entire scheme without adequate thought it's not as if in other words that there was a certain thought but it so happened that the thought was erected in assumptions which happened to go wrong but as a matter of fact there was very little thought that actually went into it now this actually raises a question that how can you have a government that can have this kind of a thoughtless action of such enormous magnitude now there is a view which has been put forward for instance this so reminiscent of fascism a view for instance that Umberto Eco had put forward which says that that fascism he gave 14 points which are characteristics of fascism and one of the points characteristic of fascism is that it believes in action for its own sake because it believes that thinking is emasculating the thinking is something which actually is symptomatic of a certain kind of state of emasculation and as a matter of fact therefore it is important to act now once you see that action informed by thought is something which is a symptom of a kind of weakness then it follows that the action to be a sign of weakness must be strong action it must be action which is on a scale that is large enough to produce shock and awe and as a matter of fact when you look at it that way then it turns out that 86 percent of the currency being demonetized and being demonetized at four hours notice is something which is really more a shock and awe rather than any having any economic rational of any kind when I say that it is something which is a failure has no economic rational I'm aware of the fact that this would be contested even within the left there is a view that while it may have failed in achieving its purported objective its actual objective was different from the stated objective that his actual objective was for instance to actually destroy the informal sector for the benefit of the large formal big capitalist sector there is no doubt that for quite some time now in India there has been a process of decimation of petty production including peasant agriculture which has been going on for for really quite some time and it is actually a part of the entire neoliberal economic strategy which has entailed a withdrawal of state support from that particular sector support which had sustained it during the Nehruvian era by Nehruvian era I don't mean only Nehru zone period but the entire pre neoliberal era so there is a view that this is a tendency that was taking place anyway and what is now happened is really an acceleration and an acute acceleration of that tendency and that itself is something which was the real objective no matter how much they talked about black economy and so on now I take that argument with a certain pinch of salt there may be something in it but you know I take it for this from with a certain pinch of salt for two very obvious reasons because while it is true that a decimation of petty production is something which is always in the interest of big capital which normally does it it would certainly prefer to do it in quotes through the so called operations of the market rather than through a sledgehammer attack of this kind because a sledgehammer attack of this kind is something which is even politically more difficult to sustain and consequently big capital always prefers decimation of petty production through the silent operations of the so-called free market the second reason why I take it with a pinch of salt is that the whole purpose of attacking petty production is for big capital to supplant petty production to in fact place itself in the space occupied by petty production as a matter of fact one of the consequences of demonetization has been that to the extent that there is this sledgehammer attack on petty production and therefore job losses reduction of output and so on this also has an effect on demand as far as the formal sector is concerned consequently even though the attack begins in the small petty production sector it gets generalized as a recession in the economy as a whole and it therefore also affects big capital and the idea that big capital might be interested in a mode of attack on petty production that is going to rebound upon itself is really not a proposition worth entertaining that is a second line which of course emphasizes and to an extent importantly the fact that this may be carried out in the interests of certain international financial agencies which stand to gain by the so-called move to a cashless economy I'll discuss the move to a cashless economy later on but this is this has been a proposition which has been put forward and I believe put forward not without some reason but even if one accepts it surely the scale of the attack 86% of currency getting demonetized overnight cannot be explained only as something happening at the behest of some international financial companies I think the very scale of the attack requires an explanation as well as the very fact of an attack on this particular scale and consequently I get back to the proposition which I was trying to advance namely that the rationale of this move lay in its irrationality that to the extent that you actually have shock and awe as the objective of a government that wishes to impress people that it is acting you see action based on reason is necessarily quite often incremental you know rational action economists are fond of saying consists of maximizing some kind of an objective function subject to certain constraints and therefore you make changes but these changes tend to be instrumental when you have action on an enormous scale action on an enormous scale where the scale is so big that even the criteria of distinguishing between whether is right or wrong fail you in a situation like this you obviously have to go beyond the bounds of reason therefore such action tends to be one which always tends to be irrational therefore large scale irrational action of this kind which is as I said part of a shock and or tactics which typically characterizes fascism is one which I believe to a very significant extent underlies the kind of the demonetization measure and particularly the scale on which it was done and particularly for instance the the the kind of you know fact that it was done so suddenly can perhaps be explained in this particular way otherwise there is absolutely no economic rationale it's not as if the government did not know what was happening it's not as if people had not worn the government what would happen and consequently the fact that it nonetheless went ahead with it was to show the boldness of the leader who can actually take such an action and this boldness can be established only with a scale of action that is large enough and if it is a large enough it has to go beyond the bounds of reason it has to be irrational in quotes in other words it has to be really as Umberto Eco has said action for action's sake now if that is the case then of course it actually sets up a dynamics which is quite powerful and which is quite important and which is quite disturbing and that dynamics consists in the fact that the more people suffer because of this action the more it tends to get lauded why because if a leader can take action that is so bold that it even inconveniences people then look what a bold leader he is in other words people suffering then actually becomes a testimony to the boldness of the action and if that is the case then we actually have a very remarkable inversion of perspective typically we have in a democracy and that's where I get on to this topic of democracy because I feel it's strong only about it typically what we have in a democracy is that the leaders are supposed to act political parties are supposed to act in order to improve the conditions of material life or in order to improve the conditions of life of the people that large it is the people who constitute the objective in a democracy for any particular action that they must be in a position where they they they they are better off as a result of this action so that you know the essence of democracy is that the people should get should become better off but here we have a peculiar inversion where the ability of a leader is judged not by the degree to which he has improved the conditions of the people but by the degree to which he has actually regressed the conditions of the people because the boldness is thereby established you have therefore an inversion in the relation between the people and the leaders that that instead of the leader being judged by the degree to which the people have benefited you have a situation where the leader is in the foreground it is the dynamic it is it is the boldness of the leader which is in the foreground and this boldness has to be established and even though the distress of the people may not be intentional nonetheless to the extent there's a distress among people that distress goes to establish the boldness of the leader look at this leader who I mean obviously the people are being distressed it is presumed because as I said the scale of the action is such that right or wrong cannot be established so easily then then then what happens is that because of the scale of the action the boldness of the leader is in fact established and justified as seeking some higher good destruction of the black economy that if it is the case that action on this scale can be taken then it must be for some higher good and therefore to the extent that there is distress among the people it seeks to establish that this distress has been you know thrust on the people because of this higher good so the leader must be totally committed to this higher good in order to even have the temerity to take an action that distresses people but when the action does not actually achieve the higher good then naturally in such a situation the leader does not say sorry I was wrong the leader then takes some other action and even larger scale action in order to complement the first one and therefore you have a certain dialectic of this kind of an action each of which being thoughtless each of which can bring great distress as far as the people are concerned and therefore this is not only an inversion of the typical inversion of the perspective that informs democracy but it's an inversion with the leader being in the forefront the people's role being that to applaud the leader and to be as it were impressed by the shock and awe-inspiring actions of the leader then you find that there is a tendency to move from one kind of shock and awe action to another kind of shock and action as the first fails then you move to something else and something else and something else now this of course can have extremely disastrous consequences and this is exactly what we are witnessing because once it was clear that there was not any kind of an even pinprick on the black economy the government then moved to other ways of justifying this action and one such way of justifying the action was that we are going into a cashless economy why India should go to a cashless economy is not clear the argument for cashlessness typically is that then you have transactions which are recorded but on the other hand against that argument it is also the case that it exposes the people to cyber crimes against which even our legal system has not really come up with adequate safeguards additionally it will also expose people to snooping to private snooping by all kinds of agencies including foreign agencies and this is something which has been made clear in the German article which has been which has been much in circulation that essentially therefore the even if we assume that having transactions recorded is a benefit against it you actually find that it can really expose people to fairly serious consequences if even at the end of it all it is assumed that on the whole moving to a cashless cashless economy is a good idea there are practical problems in India where you have problems of connectivity problems of digital illiteracy problems of digital unpreparedness in such a case to think in terms of the economy moving to a cashless one is obviously not only I mean it is it is yet another of those shock and awe methods shock and awe actions and the government however is persisting with it precisely because as a part of this dialectic I was talking about for instance it was mentioned by Mukul Rohatgi to the Supreme Court it has been mentioned time and again by the finance minister it has been mentioned by Modi that they are not going to print notes of an equal value to what has been demonetised they're going to have a reduction of one and a half to two lakh crores as far as new notes are concerned in order to push people towards cashlessness therefore this cashlessness is being thrust down the throats of the people irrespective of the rational of the reasonableness of the move not only is the reasonableness of the move questionable but also the ethics of it the ethics of it is very seriously questionable because cash transactions are costless transactions while cashless transactions typically involve the intermediation or one of these financial companies who are not there for the fun of it they are not there for charity they are there to make a profit and consequently cashless transactions necessarily entail a cost as far as the people are concerned while cash transactions do not therefore to push people from costless transactions to transactions that entail a cost in which there would be a shift of resources from their pockets to those to the profits of financial firms is an utterly unethical act is completely unacceptable in a democracy particularly when it is done in a coercive manner the way it is actually being done the fact that this is happening however is to my mind symptomatic of the need on the part of the government to keep coming with all kinds of shock and awe-inspiring measures on which it is currently launched there is a view which is not very applicable in the Indian context but but this view has been put forward for instance by Kenneth Rogoff who has written this book the curse of cash in which the argument is that really cashlessness is something that should be encouraged in future because in a cashless economy you can have negative interest rates in a cash economy you have a lower to the interest rate which is zero because if i put my money in a bank and the bank gives me an interest rate that is anything less than zero then i wouldn't put my money into the bank therefore holding cash implies that there has to be a non-zero zero or above interest that has to be paid to make me part with the cash i hold but on the other hand if it is the case there is a cashless economy then people really nearly would be holding bank deposits and the banks can give whatever interest rates say you know i mean they would give because of monetary policy and therefore monetary policy can drive down interest rates to negative levels the argument is that in the united states despite zero interest rates you have the recession persisting and because of that if you want to come out of the recession then you would have to have negative interest rates in many european countries you have negative interest rates in the sense that banks get loans from the central bank at negative interest rates and those kinds of resources they can therefore distribute at negative interest rates but they do not get deposits from the public at negative interest rates and the idea would be to have a generalization of negative interest rates where not only finance that is made available from the central bank but also deposits of the public that can be made available at negative interest rates if it is the case that the public is forced to hold deposits and the economy has no cash whatsoever now that's an argument which really has not been given in the indian context and besides i think that kind of negative interest rate and and think of the despotic nature of an economy that actually traps people into having negative interest rates by abolishing cash and that then is actually an argument advanced by economists as being necessary the same economist who could have instead advocated not monetary policy but fiscal policy for a revival of the economy that nobody does but on the other hand they're willing to hit people with negative interest rates as a means of inducing capitalists to make investments instead of that as i said the state had made investments through through its fiscal measures then of course the need for all this would not have a reason it's a symptom of economics as a subject at this moment the degree to which it is hegemonized by the interest of capital big capital that many economists including very well known economists are ones who actually frown upon fiscal policy but on the other hand want monetary policy with negative interest rates which hurts people as the only way of reviving the capitalist economy currently stuck in crisis so but but but that's an argument which has not been put forward in india that's an argument which is not even relevant here we are far from being at zero interest rates anyway our interest rates are are strictly positive and you know we cannot even have zero interest rates because if we had zero interest rates and the united states also had zero interest rates there'd be enormous flight of capital from india to the united states the reason why we have positive interest rates when the us has zero interest rates is to prevent such a capital flight because capitalists would rather hold their wealth in america than hold it in india so if you want to make them hold it in india then you would have to give them some inducement in the form of an interest rate higher than what prevails in the us so the us has zero interest rates we of course have positive interest rates so the question of our moving to negative interest rates simply does not arise so that argument is one which is much invoked these days in economics circles but that argument is completely relevant in our case therefore in our case the point i'm trying to make is that moving towards cashlessness is not only ethically wrong it's not only despotic enforcing people to part with a part of their resources to go as profits of financial companies it interferes with their asset preference which is fundamentally undemocratic but above all it is something which is not even in the current state of digital literacy and connectivity and so on anywhere in the cards but the fact that the government is thinking of or is planning not to print new money of an exactly equal value to the old money is really symptomatic of moving to another shock and or measure and this is something which is also going to make the recession permanent because until now you had a shortage of cash but the idea was all right in the shortage of cash is for six months maybe after six months the informal sector would bounce back but if the shortage of cash is more or less permanent then of course you'd find that it would spell the death knell of it'll sound the death knell of the informal sector so then you'll have a permanent recession in the economy with that sector really going under if it is the case that measures of this kind which as i said are symptomatic of an inversion of perspectives where you actually are much more interested in making people applaud the so called boldness of the measures than actually improving the conditions of the people the question which immediately arises is that why is it that why is it that the people are not protesting i should say that that that if you look at any spokesman of the government or of the ruling party and you ask them about the how the defending monetization they say look at the boldness of our leader in fact this is exactly what they say i mean look at the boldness of have you come across any leader in the last so many years who had the audacity to do such a big measure like like this man has done so that obviously shock and awe becomes the objective per se and likewise the justification of this is provided in terms of fact that where are the people protesting if people are not protesting then who are you to say that there's something wrong with and i think this raises the question why are people not protesting the fact that people have been distressed the fact that they have been inconvenienced is absolutely indubitable you just see it i mean we all saw it we ourselves were inconvenienced so that is not the point at issue but why is there no protest i think that's very i mean to that there is a simple answer and a deeper answer the simple answer is that the people themselves become as it were subject to this shock and awe because they they themselves internalize this inversion where then the feeling is that listen a measure like this which is so important could not have been undertaken unless it was serving some higher good and if it's serving some higher good then all right some inconvenience is all right because after all if we are being inconvenienced and then the higher good it is serving must indeed be very high so there is a certain in internalization of this inversion of perspectives but i think there is a deeper reason as well and and and just like to discuss a little bit of that to my mind the deeper reason lies with the fact that over a long period of time this does not begin with Modi doesn't begin with BJP over a very long period of time there has been a certain shift in the Indian polity and that shift is visible okay let's let's look at the example of that shift not i mean i'm old enough to have seen it many of you may not have there used to be enormous rallies on the boat club i have seen rallies of left parties with red flags stretching for kilometers in all the way for stretching all the way to india gate and so on the enormous rallies of workers enormous rallies of peasants there was a sense of empowerment as far as the people were concerned and this empowerment came from the fact that mass struggles were taking place they were trade union struggles they were kisan struggles and so on mass struggles were taking place today when you see there is hardly any mass struggle there's hardly been a strike action of the working class other than the one day two-day kind of general strike which though impressive is really a specifically token action you have three lack peasants committing suicide over the last kind of you know few few few months but on the other hand there's hardly been a peasant struggle you have even as a consequence of demonetization migrant workers going back to their villages but there's hardly been a movement on the part of migrant workers not even a demonstration outside whatever parliament or anything of that kind in other words i think the tradition of mass struggles is something which has receded in the course of the last several years i think the reason it has receded is partly to do with the weakening of the position of classes like the workers in peasants and so on and partly it has to do with the you know with with the kind of possibilities which are available in a neoliberal economy let me just explain you find for instance that in this period one of the aspects of neoliberalism is as i mentioned earlier the decimation of petty production i think i think you know one aspect which is just not sufficiently discussed is the fact that while in the pre-neoliberal period the the state supported petty production in numerous ways much of that support is now withdrawn you had for instance a situation where peasant agriculture let us say was protected from international competition it was protected through tariffs and quantitative restrictions you had subsidized inputs including credit after bank nationalization going to the agricultural sector you had assured prices not just for food grains but also for cash crops and you had all these commodity boards like tea board coffee board coir board rubber board and so on all of which had market interventions to ensure that the peasantry growing commercial crops got a certain assured remunerative price you had a research and development which was done in public institutions and the benefits of this research and development were actually disseminated through the peasantry to peasant agriculture through a mass of public extension activities you had of course public investment in irrigation and such like all these have virtually been bound up earlier the state interposed itself between the peasantry on the one hand and big business including multinational corporations on the other you did not have agribusiness entering the Indian village it is true that from within Indian village there was a tendency towards capitalism that was developing there was much debate in the 70s about development of capitalism in Indian agriculture some of the landlords were becoming capitalists some of the rich peasants were becoming capitalists but there was no big capitalists from outside the ambanis were not going to agriculture monsanto was not going to agriculture so you had a situation where the state interposed itself between big business on the one hand and petty production on the other hand and in fact defended and supported it whose beneficiaries of course were not all of them i mean obviously there was uneven development of the benefits of this state support but nonetheless there was this state support that prevented petty production from going under this was of course in contrast to what had happened in the pre-independence period whereas you know there had been a tendency towards acute distress as far as agriculture is concerned during the depression and warriors and so on which is which is a part of virtually the literature of that period creative literature novels and so on in every Indian language the the sufferings of the peasantry anyway so so so the point is that with neoliberalism all that goes the marketing function of all these commodity boards is done away with they exist the boards exist but they don't do any market intervention there is a reduction i mean withdrawal of subsidies on inputs of various kinds and of course everybody knows that as far as credit itself is concerned now there's a new class of money lenders which have come up because the banks even the nationalized banks are not particularly interested in actually giving loans to the agricultural sector anymore because they have to make profits in the new dispensation then you have obviously agriculture now being exposed to international price fluctuations because tariff protection has been brought down in most cases tariffs are below even the bounds allowed by the WTO quantitative restriction on trade has gone the extension services the the the the the entire public extension services have been completely done away with and therefore now you have Monsanto and agribusiness entering the Indian agricultural sector so you have through a variety of ways of this kind you have a situation where the petty production sector is no longer viable in fact you know when i was in kerala in the planning board we once did an exercise the exercise was the following that suppose you assume that every fisherman was actually getting the statutory minimum wage that is the law in the state what would happen to the sector and you find the sector as a whole would actually be running a deficit in other words the sector survived only because the fishermen were getting a return for labor day that was lower than the statutory minimum wage so obviously therefore petty production has become unviable and many of them therefore migrate to the cities in search of jobs and their non-existent jobs as a result you have a swelling of the reserve army of labor which takes the form of casual employment part-time employment and so on in other words the swelling of unemployment under-employment is one which is disguised in various ways as casual employment in this and that all this strikes strongly at the bargaining strength of the trade unions privatization likewise also of public sector enterprises public sector activities weakens the trade unions dramatically as a matter of fact all over the world you find that workers are more unionized in the public sector than they are in the private sector in the united states for instance about a third of the total employees in the public sector and i'm including education here are unionized while the corresponding proportion in the private sector is just about seven percent one of the reasons why the french unions are so powerful is because in france a public sector still exists which is reasonably strong so for all these reasons there has been a weakening in the strength of the trade unions with the weakening in the strength of trade unions you obviously find that their striking capacity has gone down and likewise the capacity of the other segments of petty production which have been subject to this kind of an economic threat has also gone down there is a second reason which is quite important the second reason is that that in a neoliberal economy we have a hegemony of finance in the sense that you have nation states but you have globalized finance and consequently if any nation state government in a nation state does not do what finance wants it to do in that case finance simply leaves the country so as long as you're part of this globalization syndrome you perforce willy nilly you have to do what finance wants you to do therefore unless you have a political formation that is willing to delink the country from globalization and very few of them are willing to do it you have no matter which political formation comes to power you have virtually the same set of economic policies being pursued in Greece even sireza came to power which was a left-wing formation but sireza admittedly you can see Greece the small country and all that but fundamentally sireza too had to pursue roughly the same kinds of policies which all preceding governments in Greece were following therefore you have a situation where you have a closure of politics that you know that that that politics as a way of having alternative agendas really disappears now if politics is a way of having alternative agendas disappears then it implies that no matter who the people vote for no matter how active they are really very little is achieved within the bounds of traditional politics this of course creates conditions for the emergence of all kinds of adventurers who then come and say that okay i mean we are going to put 15 000 rupees in your bank balance and so on in in other words this opens up the way when when traditional political formations more or less pursue the same set of policies then it opens the way for for all kinds of upstarts and adventurers to come and make promises to people and thereby gain a certain amount of credibility in this kind of situation which is true of trump as well because obviously there was so much of disillusionment with the traditional politics of that country that people thought that here is this man coming from outside saying something different and they listened to him and i think this is something which produces the closure of politics produces conditions for the development of all kinds of fascist and adventurers and an authoritarian and right wing forces to come up with all kinds of promises now this has the effect in in in other words this closure of politics together with a weakening of the institutions of the workers and peasants and so on has the effect of an objectification of the people you know in other words from becoming subjects when when they were in the boat club in lax asserting their rights asserting themselves one could say that they're playing the role of being subjects in a certain political process then they increasingly become objects in other words i believe that the hegemony of finance creates the conditions in which people really move from becoming subjects of the political process to becoming objects of the political process this has many implications one implication of course is a fragmentation of the people you know in other words since collective action for improving the material conditions of their lives is something which is really ruled out is is is is infructuous then you find that there is greater fragmentation the second thing it does is that it actually creates a kind of fear because after all an individual is alienated and afraid it's only when you're in a collective that you can actually overcome that kind of a fear and so you have a certain pervasive fear my friend Gopal Gandhi says that what rules India today is fear I mean so so so this pervasive fear is also something which cannot be ignored now it is it is in this kind of a context that therefore you have a situation where people's ability to assert themselves against the material conditions of their lives which are deteriorating tends to get kind of you know this ability gets subverted this is not to say that there are no struggles there are obviously struggles there were there are individual struggles as the post-co-struggle or the Kudam Kulam struggles but they're localized struggles where people are very actively involved but that is really not a mass movement for changing the conditions of life like a trade union or a peasant struggle would be they're very localized you also have you you you also have for instance the kind of thing which which the Anahazare movement represented where you have substantial support for an anti-corruption movement led by but on the other hand that is one where actually messianism takes over and the people are not the age people don't have the agency where thereby they themselves are not really engaging enforcing a chain they're simply supporting a messiah who's going on a strike in order to bring about this change so so so that does not really overcome the the objectification that actually takes place in this period you have of course the other struggle the the other kind of mobilization which is obviously the fascist mobilization who building a temple and things of that kind you have at the same time a certain kind of mobilization that may arise for instance the jarts demanding quotas you know the demanding reservations but but again that is not an action which really involves the people as a whole so so you have this fragmentation and this fragmentation on the one hand creates fear and on the other hand creates conditions for the emergence of fascism I would say that this dialectic of the people versus the leader where where the people are silent and applaud the leader who then goes from one outlandish measure to another outlandish measure each being an occasion to proclaim his boldness it's something which really comes as a consequence of a very long period during which there has been an objectification of the people during which there has been a dilution in their agency role of the sort that existed immediately after independence and existed for a very long period of time but i think neoliberalism is one that actually tends to subvert it to say this is not to say that this is inevitable I mean you know in in other words it is something which of course is what we observe it is something which actually has been happening in front of us and it is something which represents a diminution and an attenuation of democracy it is something which has to be fought against but it is not inevitable the fact that it it has the fact remain that it has to be fought against and I believe that fighting against it of course would imply that progressive opinion must not I mean the typical argument which is put forward let's say by the ruling party and the ruling government who are you to be shouting when people are not in fact we have to turn that argument around that it is extremely important for us to shout because of the fact that there has been over a period of time this kind of an attenuation of democracy where the people have become increasingly objectified so it become very important for progressive opinion to express itself on the truth irrespective of whether people themselves join you or not you know in other words the truth about the people the other thing of course is as I said a revival you know the hegemony of global finance is associated as it's opposite in my view with the objectification of the people with with a with with a with a diminution in their role as political subjects I think if that role is to be revived then of course to start with one has to prevent a slide towards a fascist state that we have to do but we also have to be clear that this this disclosure of politics has to end in other words against Donald Trump it's not enough that we all support Hillary Clinton but we also must make sure that the Hillary Clinton that we support pursues a trajectory of development which is not the typical trajectory of development that the Clintons of the world have been pursuing in other words I think to revive the subject role of the people we have to break this closure of politics which requires in my view a delinking from the process of globalization by delinking people get sometimes frightened when I say delinking I mean just the following things I mean that there has to be a control on capital flows to make sure that our policy is not dictated by the caprices and wins of finance if there's a control on capital flows there'll have to be some control on trade as well trump is is is is introducing these controls which are going to hurt us the least we can do is to defend ourselves by also introducing some degree of control instead of turning our the cheek to trump and and and certainly this of course would mean that you would have the elbow room for the state to be able to enlarge demands to be able to enlarge aggregate demand and employment to be able to enlarge welfare measures and so on in other words you would get some space where the state the nation state as nation state can still act because it has to an extent insulated itself from the caprices of global finance that kind of delinking is of course essential but of course that kind of delinking does not mean that we simply stand on top of houses and and and shout that we're going to delink from globalization that has to be a fallout of some fairly concrete agenda of of of of improving the people's lives that has to be set before them if we want to fight fascism then you have to have a certain agenda of concrete you know possibilities which are placed before the people and on these agendas I have been talking for some time for instance about the people being assured a set of economic rights a quite a part in the political rights which they have a set of economic rights right to employment right to food right to quality publicly funded education right to quality publicly funded healthcare and right to let's say disability benefits I mean you know yeah disability benefits given by the state and old age pension you you can you can enlarge this but but but fundamentally it has to be the case that there is an alternative agenda that breaks this closure of politics and I think what we are finding I mean demonetization in a sense is an allegory that many of the things which are happening in the economy and in society suddenly become clear because of the motivations behind as well as the responses to this measure of demonetization I think if we see it as an allegory and see what exactly is the direction of our movement then it is a very dangerous direction of movement and I think against this progressive opinion must assert itself and must do so in a way which actually carries credibility with the people by breaking the closure of politics thank you very much