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The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) said that 98.96% of notes have returned to the banks after demonetisation.
The RBI estimated that the value, of Rs 500 and Rs 1000 notes returned, was Rs 15.28 trillion, against Rs 15.44 trillion in circulation before demonetisation.
Questions about demonitisation being a failure were raised, as one of the purposes of the excruciating exercise was said to be a clamp down on black money.
If all the money came back into the banks, then where did the black money go? The government had earlier claimed that there was black money (money on which tax isn’t paid) in thousands of crores, which was kept hidden and not part of the formal economy, and demonetisation would end that.
To the point raised by RBI, the Finance Minister Arun Jaitley said that money that got deposited in banks does not make it legitimate
The numbers put to rest one of the big mysteries surrounding the demonetisation exercise, which, according to some analysts, was one of the reasons behind the Bharatiya Janata Party’s landslide win in this year’s elections in Uttar Pradesh.
Barely two weeks after the demonetization, Minister of Information Technology, Ravi Shankar Prasad had claimed that it had broken the backbone of terrorists and naxals.
In the face of growing criticism of the costs Vs benefits of the massive demonetization exercise, the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) was very keen to project demonetisation as a historic success.
Soon after the RBI revelations, the social media warriors spread out to defend their favourite party against any criticism. The battle lines were drawn, and positions taken on twitter and facebook.
With the help of social media influencers, the hashtag #DemonetisationSuccess was widely trended.
#DemonetisationSuccess : Cleansing India’s financial system. pic.twitter.com/eCWR49fdwS
— BJP (@BJP4India) August 31, 2017
“No more funding to terrorists, naxalites and underworld. A great step towards eliminating all such practices” tweeted scores of handles in a coordinated effort. But soon enough the similarities of the tweets was noticed.
It seemed that most of the tweets were clones, text was being copied and pasted from a pastebin, a regular practice for twitter storms around the world.
LOL, BJP IT Cell and @malviyamit are at it again. Paid twitter trend to make a disaster look like a success. #DemonetisationSuccess pic.twitter.com/rCK0gBUIHA
— Dhruv Rathee (@dhruv_rathee) August 31, 2017
We looked at netizens (or bots) who trended #DemonetisationSuccess and to understand the line of thought, we looked at what else these profiles/bots were tweeting.
Here’s what else these profiles have been tweeting on.
Click for a detailed version