Editorial: Being rich about the rupee

NEW DELHI: It is a wicked commentary on the priorities of the BJP-led government at the Centre that the ever-eroding value of the Indian rupee does not seem to trouble its Finance Minister quite as much as the script used to depict its symbol. We have not heard Nirmala Sitharaman address the 48.36 per cent weakening of the INR since May 2014—except once to say, disingenuously, that the rupee did not weaken, only the dollar grew stronger.

Last Friday, however, she was all sound and fury, in a needlessly incendiary tweet, over the Tamil Nadu government’s use of the Tamil script—instead of the Devanagari script—to depict the rupee in its annual budget documents. At a time when the DMK government in Tamil Nadu has been rationally explaining its opposition to the three-language formula in the New Education Policy and the impending delimitation exercise that is detrimental to the southern states, Ms Sitharaman chose to inflame the conversation by levelling a number of gratuitous allegations.

She accused the state government of rejecting a “national” symbol that had earned India such prestige in foreign lands “including Indonesia, the Maldives, Mauritius, Nepal, Seychelles, and Sri Lanka”. Use of the Tamil script to depict the rupee, she said, “goes against (the Constitutional) oath to uphold the sovereignty and integrity of our nation”. Then, giving further rein to a fevered imagination, she conflated this episode to an assertion of regional chauvinism and a prelude to secession.

This would count as an extraordinary attack had it come from a run-of-the-mill politician from north of the Vindhyas but coming from a Tamilian herself, it can only be characterised as wanton and instigated for political purposes. Ms Sitaraman would know better than most that the rupee’s historic “prestige” in those far lands was on account of trade with peninsular India. So, the South could perhaps be spared that lecture.

Moreover, it’s not a new practice that the DMK government has instituted by using the prefix ‘ru’ to depict Indian money. All the southern states have conventionally used, and continue to use, the prefix in their respective scripts. Nirmala Sitaraman herself and her party colleague K Annamalai have regularly used it themselves in their tweets in Tamil. The BJP-led governments of Odisha and Assam have used their native scripts in their budget documents as well.

Most of all, it’s a bit rich for a senior minister in the BJP-led Union government to deplore any expression of cultural pride by a state government. The BJP is steeped in cultural nationalism, and its government since 2014 has spent all its energies on the attainment of cultural objectives rather than economic ones.

How else would you characterize the mobilization of the entire governmental machinery to build the Ram temple in Ayodhya? Mr Modi’s entire first term in office was spent enforcing cow slaughter bans across the country. The Citizenship Amendment Act, expressly legislated to deny Muslim refugees asylum, was a classic case of ethnonationalism. The BJP has promoted regional figures like Raja Suheldev and Gokul Jat to suck up to local caste identities. What purpose did the massive statues of Sardar Patel and Shivaji serve except cultural nationalism? The commissioning of execrable Bollywood propaganda films, the Sengol drama enacted in Parliament, the NCERT textbook revision, the renaming of cities, streets and railway stations, the lionisation of VD Savarkar and the sneaky normalisation of Nathuram Godse, what were they but part of a cultural strategy?

Why is anything done north of the Vindhyas ‘national’ and the merest cultural expression in the South ‘regional chauvinism’?