ABSTRACT

On 9 November 2016, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced his ‘demonetization’ policy which rendered all Rs. 500 and Rs. 1000 notes null and void. His government claimed that this policy, among other things, would curb stone-pelting in India’s restive Jammu and Kashmir by rendering valueless the copious illegal currency that, according to India, Pakistan pumped into the state to pay protestors to throw stones. Subsequently, New Delhi claimed success despite countervailing evidence for this claim. Here, we assemble a novel dataset to evaluate these assertions. After controlling for other factors that may explain variation in stone-pelting, we find that demonetization corresponded to increased stone-pelting. This finding is important for at least two reasons. First, Indian efforts to depict all protests in Jammu and Kashmir as the result of Pakistani payments both delegitimize Kashmiris’ grievances by reducing them to anti-state behaviors and diminish public appetite for addressing those grievances. Second, the current populist Indian government, which caters to Hindu nationalists, selectively curates facts to justify its actions, big and small, to the detriment of democratic accountability and governance.

摘要

2016 年 11 月 9 日，印度总理纳伦德拉·莫迪 (Narendra Modi) 宣布了他的“非货币化”政策，该政策使所有卢比成为 500 和卢比。1000张纸币无效。他的政府声称，除其他外，这项政策将通过使大量非法货币变得毫无价值来遏制印度动荡不安的查谟和克什米尔的投掷石块，据印度称，巴基斯坦注入该州以支付抗议者投掷石块的费用。随后，尽管有反补贴证据，但新德里声称取得了成功。在这里，我们组装了一个新的数据集来评估这些断言。在控制了可能解释抛石变化的其他因素后，我们发现非货币化对应于抛石的增加。这一发现很重要，至少有两个原因。第一的，印度将查谟和克什米尔的所有抗议活动描绘为巴基斯坦付款的结果的努力，通过将克什米尔人的不满减少为反国家行为并降低了公众解决这些不满的意愿，从而使克什米尔人的不满合法化。其次，当前迎合印度教民族主义者的民粹主义印度政府选择性地整理事实以证明其大大小小的行动是合理的，从而损害了民主问责制和治理。