The whimsical decision of one man to suddenly demonetise 86 per cent of the currency in circulation in the country a year ago not only hurt the livelihoods of the weakest sections of Indian society: women, senior citizens, daily-wage labourers, farmers, vendors, traders and small shopkeepers, this disruptive decision, unprecedented in the world because of the sheer scale of its impact, also had a particularly pernicious side. The lies and half-truths that have been peddled about the so-called positive benefits of demonetisation have not stopped. In fact, they continue unabated.

The Narendra Modi government’s cheerleaders still claim that the decision did not harm the interests of the poor. On the contrary, they argue that the poor actually welcomed the move and cite as evidence the outcome of the Uttar Pradesh (UP) elections when the Bharatiya Janata Party won over 80 per cent of the seats in the legislative assembly. The elections in UP took place between February 11 and March 8 this year, soon after demonetisation was announced on November 8, 2016, and after the period for exchanging specified bank notes ended on the last day of the calendar year.

Did large sections of the electorate of India’s most populous state buy into Modi’s narrative that demonetisation was aimed at hurting the rich and the corrupt? Did these voters rejoice in the belief that the Samajwadi Party headed by the then Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav and the Bahujan Samaj Party led by Mayawati would be severely handicapped because demonetisation rendered their stashes of black money useless? Did they seriously believe Uma Bharti when she claimed that Modi was more Marxist than Karl Marx? The answer to all these questions could well be a resounding “yes”.

But there are two more important questions. Do many among the poor in UP still believe that demonetisation has had little or no impact on their already-miserable lives? Do Indians elsewhere in the country believe that demonetisation not only slowed down the economy but resulted in widespread destruction of employment opportunities?

These questions must be addressed too. At the same time, it is worth listing the blatant falsehoods that have been – and continue to be – propagated about the “beneficial” impact that demonetisation is supposed to have had on the Indian economy. Finance Minister Arun Jaitley has repeatedly asserted that the decision to demonetise was “well-planned”. Nothing could be further from the truth.

From the recalibration of automated teller machines (ATMs) to dispense the new Rs 2,000 notes to the acute shortage of Rs 100 notes and notes of lower denomination (especially between November 8 and December 31, 2016) and the dozens of notifications issued by the Reserve Bank of India in the span of these seven weeks, there was absolutely nothing that was even remotely well-planned. This was no Prime Minister who believes in “minimum government, maximum governance.”

If indeed the “secret” decision to demonetise was justified as a necessary means to curb the use of black money, how indeed could demonetisation have been well-planned and prepared for? Is that not inherently contradictory? Is Jaitley then claiming that the decision was a well-planned disruption of economic life in the country? Who is he trying to fool?

It is well-known that Modi first claimed that demonetisation was meant to dent the black economy and prevent terrorists from using fake currency notes. He then changed the discourse to argue that his decision would help usher in a “cashless” or “less-cash” economy. The then Attorney General of India Mukul Rohatgi told the Supreme Court on November 23: “We expect people to deposit Rs 10-11 lakh crore in banks. The rest, Rs 4-5 lakh crore, were being used in northeast and Jammu and Kashmir to fuel trouble in India. That will be neutralised.”

That these were all downright lies is now known to all and sundry. On the evening Modi announced his decision to demonetise, he insisted that “secrecy was essential for this action…the five hundred and thousand rupee notes hoarded by anti-national and anti-social elements will become just worthless pieces of paper.” A few weeks later, at a book launch, the Prime Minister reiterated the importance of the “surprise” decision by bragging: “The criticism is that the government was not prepared. Their pain is that they were given no time to prepare.”

The idea was clearly to catch off-guard those hoarding black money. Government officials had, in fact, been privately discussing what to do with the “lakhs of crores” of rupees that would accrue to the exchequer by way of “windfall” gains. On the very last day that the Reserve Bank of India had to statutorily submit its annual report, it became known that almost 99 per cent of the demonetised notes had been returned. The Ministry of Finance brazenly claimed that “the government had expected all the SBNs (specified bank notes) to come back to the banking system to become effectively usable currency”. Who was being fooled?

The ministry says the number of income tax returns filed in 2016-17 was nearly 25 per cent higher than in the previous year. Correct. But what was not said was that in 2011-12, this figure had jumped by a whopping 80 per cent and again by more than 30 per cent the following year. Simply put, it was indeed possible and feasible to increase the number of people filing income tax returns without the accompanying “shock and awe” of demonetisation – in a country where even today barely five per cent of the population pays income tax.

Further, the progress of digitisation of financial transactions was also a temporary one. After a spike in November-December 2016, when people simply did not have any cash, the volume of electronic transactions has stagnated or come down steadily. Forget the fact that one of the biggest beneficiaries of demonetisation was Paytm which is linked to Jack Ma’s Alibaba group based in China.

Moreover, there is just not enough evidence to indicate that terrorism, especially in the Kashmir Valley, has come down over the last year. The proportion of fake currency notes at 0.008 per cent of the total currency in circulation has hardly changed. Reports indicate that very high-quality fake Rs 2,000 notes have been recently found and seized.

Former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, who chose to ignore large-scale corruption when he headed the Union government between 2004 and 2014, describes the demonetisation decision as “organised loot and legalised plunder” and his prognostication that the rate of growth of India’s gross domestic product (GDP) would decelerate by around two per cent has apparently been borne out by official statistics.

The key issue is simple. Demonetisation not only paralysed India, even if for less than two months. Its impact is being felt long after millions of people have forgotten the many hours they spent in queues outside bank branches and ATMs. We can continue to debate about the approximate number of Indians who lost their jobs in recent months based on sketchy and anecdotal evidence. We may not believe the “disgruntled” former BJP minister Arun Shourie who has alleged that demonetisation was the “world’s biggest money laundering scheme”.

What is two per cent of India’s GDP that we have lost on account of demonetisation? The country’s GDP is currently in the region of Rs 140 lakh crore. Two per cent of this figure is almost Rs 3 lakh crore. That’s more than what the central government spends on public health in a year. Even if one goes by the conservative estimate made in the government’s Economic Survey, that claims that GDP came down by between 0.25 per cent and 0.75 per cent, the numbers stack up to between Rs 38,000 crore and Rs 1.1 lakh crore. Not exactly peanuts. The budget for the health and family welfare department for the current year is Rs 47,353 crore and for the school education and literacy and higher education departments put together is Rs 79,686 crore. So the total for these three departments is Rs 1,27,039 crore, which is less than 1 per cent of the GDP.

The supporters of notebandi point out that public resentment against the move has been muted and that there haven’t been protests on the streets. More than four decades earlier, there were no public agitations against “nasbandi” or forced sterilisation imposed by Indira Gandhi during the Emergency.