War on counterfeiting part of anti-terror ops

The reports of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence having copied many of the safety features of the new Rs 2,000 notes and making passable fakes, albeit on poor paper, and sending them through the porous Bangladesh border should be a wake-up call: the war on counterfeit currency can never end. One of the three main objectives of demonetisation, announced on November 8 last year, was to root out counterfeit currency circulating in the country. The speed with which India’s enemies operated — new Rs 2,000 notes reportedly crossed the LoC hours after being issued by banks — show how alert state agencies must be to counter Pakistani moves to source the same security paper and make better fakes than they churn out now. News of ISI mints near Karachi printing fake Indian currency can’t be discounted. This isn’t just the intelligence agencies’ figment of imagination — such nefarious operations are just what ISI’s dirty tricks unit can be expected to do. To debase an enemy’s currency is actually more devastating than any terror strike, and such insidious operations are par for the course for Pakistan. But there is no use railing against an enemy, saying we can expose them to the world by protesting to the UN. It is more important to protect our own interests by making our currency’s safety features harder to replicate, and to harness the best technologies possible towards this end.

Closer home, the fear that demonetisation may have to be rated as an even greater failure after the surfacing in such short time of our new currency notes of Rs 2,000 and Rs 500 is now real. The stated objective of the drive was to drive out black money, and even today we are nowhere near admitting how much has come back into the system. More than 100 days have gone by and the government has not made public the quantum of money that has come into the banks, that alone will indicate if there has been any gain in terms of unaccounted money not coming back into the system. If outing black money as well as counterfeit currency were two great objectives of demonetisation, the other was to stem the flow of terror funding.

The increasing pattern of terrorists slipping in across the border, as seen in the daily reports of encounters in the Kashmir Valley, shows how the war against terror can never end. India has lost 26 soldiers just this year while killing 22 extremists. It was not as if demonetisation was going to stem terrorism; it would probably just slow it down, as we are seeing now. The price we pay for our freedom is eternal vigilance, and protecting our currency is as important as continuing to gather intelligence and stopping terrorists from carrying out their attacks.