Well now we know. Narendra Modi, the prime minister of the world’s biggest democracy, popped the expanding balloon of the Indian economy with a mistaken policy implemented at high speed in a bungling manner. It might be expected that the office-bearer be held accountable for this monumental mistake. Not a chance. Mr Modi is determined not to concede the folly of demonetisation, which cost 100 lives, at least 1.5m jobs and left 150 million people without pay for weeks.
Mr Modi has no one else to blame. It was he who, in November 2016, when Donald Trump’s election transfixed the world, announced that all 500- and 1,000-rupee notes would be withdrawn immediately from circulation. At a stroke the Indian prime minister rendered 86% of currency worthless outside a bank branch. Old notes would have to be exchanged for limited supplies of new currency. This was a populist measure carried out in the name of the poor, who had been convinced by Mr Modi’s lurid tales of purging the country of black-economy millionaires and their piles of illicit cash.
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