Flogging a dead horse serves no purpose. It’s a waste of one’s precious time and effort. This was so with the set of 58 petitions that challenged the November 8, 2016 decision to ban high-value currency notes. The deed was done and the nation passed through a period of misery. The dust having settled down, a serious question could arise why a judicial post mortem now, six years after the epic late-night decision announced out of the blue by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. A constitution bench of the apex court has finally ruled, hopefully once and for all, that the decision of the Union Government was valid. In a dissenting note, one judge took the stand that the decision was “vitiated and unlawful” though she admitted that it could not be rescinded now. The apex court, on its part, was duty-bound to go through the decision and pass a verdict. Yet, a question could arise why it took so many years for it to arrive at a conclusion and ring the curtains down.
The stand that the government took in support of the note ban at that time itself was that this was a strong step against the problem of counterfeit currency flow from Pakistan, loads of them, as also to curb the menace of black money, terror financing and tax evasion. The note ban was done without sufficient preparations and the government justified it by saying secrecy was of utmost importance. A huge sum of Rs 10 lakh crore was believed to have been wiped out of the nation’s financial system. It took months to replenish the currency stocks in banks for normal transactions. A grim result was that the national economy went into a tailspin. The situation was worsened by the difference in sizes of the new notes and the banned ones. ATM machines could not reconcile with the size difference. Worse, the government resorted to a strange step – printing and releasing huge sums of newly introduced, highest value Rs 2000 notes. These helped more in the reverse manner – that it became easier for people to hoard money. That situation continues even today and expectations that the government would eventually ban this currency were belied. It’s small comfort, though, that its printing has been stopped. It would have been better if the Supreme Court had gone into such aspects while considering the batch of petitions and issued necessary advisory to the government. It’s natural that governments too err – but the apex court rightly said that it was in no position to “supplant the wisdom of the executive with its own wisdom.”
