On November 8, 2016, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced that 500- and 1,000-rupee banknotes would cease to be legal tender as of midnight that night. The announcement was made in an unscheduled live television address, giving people only about four hours to make arrangements, if they could. The new policy was intended to shock and it has.

In a press release the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), India’s central bank justified the dramatic shift: “This is necessitated to tackle counterfeiting Indian banknotes, to effectively nullify black money hoarded in cash and curb funding of terrorism with fake notes.” This is a laudable goal, but since then the government has changed its story several times, later suggesting that moving towards a cashless society is a primary goal of the policy. The rollout has been chaotic to say the least; between November and December, the RBI and the Ministry of Finance together issued more than sixty notifications on demonetization, a sign of poor planning and a desperate desire to convince.

The emphasis on tackling counterfeiting is part of a broader anticorruption narrative in India. Corruption is omnipresent in the country, and public anger is growing. Indeed, scandals over the telecommunications spectrum and coal allocation were a major reason for the defeat of the former government — the United Progressive Alliance (a center-left coalition). The incumbent right-wing Bharatiya Jananta Party (BJP) government has made fighting corruption its calling card; it successfully uses anticorruption rhetoric to appease its supporters and expand its political reach. The demonetization announcement fit this strategy.