16 December 2016

With three years to go

Now I normally do not write about controversial things, I like to focus more along the realm of nonsense. Today however, I'm going to make an exception and write about politics and this is going to be a fairly serious post so if that isn't you're cup of tea you can stop reading here. You have been warned.

In the last many months the world has seen various tectonic changes in the political landscape and for a lot of these changes such as Brexit and Trump popular media seems to have gotten it wrong. Both these times I had expected those results. While I'm no saint or sage or seer I just think I was looking at something popular media seemed to have missed. Now I can't put a finger on what that was but since I hadn't officially predicted those results before they happened one can always argue that I was only explaining the events after the fact.

I've got a feeling about a political event that's going to occur in 2.5-3 years from now and I'd like to document it today. The 2019 general elections in India. Here's how I think it will go down.

In the next month or two the cash crunch will visible decline and there will be a fair number of notes in circulation. On the ground people will still have trouble changing Rs.2000 notes but they will get by. The larger economic impact will continue to be felt by small and medium enterprises and some may have to even close down. In the mean time there will be many reports of the Income Tax officials conducting raids and catching people will hordes of cash both in old currency and new. Most of these raids will be worth a few lakhs to a few crores but no really big fish will be caught, but the Govt. will spin these raids as being a net that no one holding black money can escape from. They will also take massive credit for each and every digital transaction done in India after 8 November 2016.

On the other political front, Mamta Banarjee and Arvind Kejriwal will lead a charge against the govt. claiming to be the only protectors of the common people. They might even form a coalition to fight the general election joined by a few other regional leaders like Nitish Kumar and they may even get a decent number of seats. My prediction however, is that the spin story and the marketing done by the BJP quite specifically Modi will continue to prevail and maybe with slightly fewer seats and maybe in a coalition of sorts, but BJP will return to power as the single largest party.

Around about the same time Delhi elections will happen and Kejriwal and his party will be thrashed out of power.

While those of you asking what about Congress and Rahul Gandhi, one of two things might happen to him, either he will go the Kejriwal way and complain about everything or he will continue to do what he's doing and continue to be irrelevant.

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