Columnist and journalist Mihir Sharma, who has often been caught on Twitter spreading lies, these days is busy telling the world how the demonetisation move by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and almost everything about it such as the move towards being a cashless economy, is a disaster.
However, he had to face an embarrassing situation when one of his old articles, where he proposed a move towards cashless economy, was thrown back at him. In the article published in July this year, Mihir Sharma had made an argument in favour of cashless economy.
In fact, the article starts with “Black Money”, so the need to move towards cashless economy was linked with fighting black money by the same Mihir Sharma who is now pontificating that linking cashless economy with fighting black money is being ‘too clever by half’.
And the last line of his article was:
“The best way to eliminate black money is to get rid of the money.”
Well, Modi did exactly that. He “got rid” of the money by making you deposit old notes in the banks!
But since Modi did it, virtue signalling demands that you must oppose and mock it. So Mihir Sharma has been happily doing that. He has been writing articles like ‘India’s great rupee fail’ (which was fact-checked by one of our readers) and ‘Message to Modi: Do no more harm’. But Twitter is a place where happiness of likes of Sharma gets punctured too often.
Columnist and Economist Rupa Subramanya was the first one to point out this u-turn by Sharma:
https://twitter.com/rupasubramanya/status/812508076171403264
Red faced, Mihir Sharma, who should now be comfortable with his lies and hypocrisies being exposed on Twitter, tried to justify his earlier stand:
https://twitter.com/mihirssharma/status/812509132762869760
So his problem is a policy being “forced” down. He is a great liberal who doesn’t want the state to force people to change their habits. Such a noble thought. Only that another Twitter user, Abhijit Iyer-Mitra, reminded him of another of his old articles where he had written:
“It doesn’t matter if implementing it is unfair, or difficult. Our hideously smug, stratified society cannot be allowed to endure as it is. It is a blemish on the modern world.”
That was in reference to affirmative actions like reservations. So does Mihir Sharma think that existence of corruption and black money is not a blemish on the modern world? Does black money or corruption not create an unequal society where certain sections are robbed of their rights? Why should corruption be not treated as urgently as any other social problem? Why should the society continue to endure this problem?
Answer is simple. Because Narendra Modi is trying to solve the problem. Therefore people like Mihir Sharma will not support, even if it means going back on their own suggested solutions and approach. They will rather be part of the problem.