Supreme Court of India on Demonetization - A Farce in Three Acts

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On January 2, 2023, the Supreme Court of India pronounced its judgment on the constitutionality of the demonetization of currency in 2016 by the Modi government. In the run-up to the verdict, some editors asked me to write on the topic since I had written a few columns criticizing demonetization when the policy was announced. When I declined, saying I wasn’t confident of my expertise in the matter, one editor wrote back, “your Twitter bio says ‘constitutional economist,’ and it led me to believe this would be the perfect topic for you.” But I wasn’t talking about my understanding of demonetization or Supreme Court judgments. I lack the expertise to critique farce, even one that is in the garb of institutional authority played out within the premises of the Supreme Court and delivered in the form of a court judgment. The day before the Court delivered its verdict, I tweeted: I offered to write about why I thought the whole case was farcical, but Indian newspapers refused to publish such trivialities; because they are very, very serious and only publish important matters (not because they are scared of the contempt proceedings that will follow from criticizing the Supreme Court). In this post, I describe the farce by the Supreme Court. This is important because even a farce, as long as it is in the form of a Supreme Court judgment, has import for the future. Not as legal precedent—there is nothing precedent worthy in the 388-page opinion—but in conduct. If the highest court in India can double as a moot court, debating a policy that invalidated 86% of the currency in circulat…