PERHAPS no other public policy debate in post-independence India has seen as much of an “inversion of reason” on the part of the government as the demonetisation debate. When critics were pointing, on the basis of government statistics themselves, to the palpable failure of the demonetisation measure to achieve its purported objective, which was to cripple the black economy, the government kept harping, in its justification, on the extraordinary“boldness” of the move.