Close to 200 Indians died during demonetisation. Whom did you take revenge on?
The question isn’t rhetorical. It’s a demand for accountability.
In November 2016, the government of India invalidated ₹500 and ₹1,000 currency notes overnight. The announcement, broadcast with fanfare and nationalistic zeal, was presented as a surgical strike on black money, counterfeit currency, and terror funding. But as the days unfolded, it became painfully clear that the scalpel hadn’t sliced through the cancer—it had pierced the heart of the common man.
Daily wage workers lost their livelihoods. Farmers struggled to buy seeds. Small traders watched their businesses collapse. Patients died en route to hospitals that wouldn’t accept old notes. And ordinary citizens stood in endless queues under the sun, many collapsing before reaching the cash counter. Close to 200 such lives were lost—not in some freak accident of policy, but in a carefully choreographed national experiment.
Where are the results of that experiment? How many billionaires were jailed? How many corrupt politicians lost their hoarded fortunes? Where is the black money? The Reserve Bank of India later admitted that over 99% of the demonetised currency returned to the system. So again—whom did you take revenge on?
Not the powerful. Not the corrupt. The revenge, it seems, was taken on the poor, the voiceless, and the trusting—the very people who form the backbone of this nation.
Demonetisation was framed as a moral crusade. But what is morality if it leads to preventable deaths? What is governance if it refuses to grieve the lives it extinguishes? There has been no national apology. No memorial. No names read out in Parliament.
But we remember.
Every time a farmer can’t access credit, every time a small vendor is pushed further into the informal shadows, every time an old woman clutches her savings in fear of the next sudden fiat—we remember.
The wounds of demonetisation are not just economic. They are existential. They have shaken the social contract between citizen and state.
And so we ask again, not out of rage, but out of the desperate need for truth:
Close to 200 Indians died. Whom did you take revenge on?