I was recently talking with an Indian friend of mine who pointed out that the Modi government has all but outlawed cash transactions of any sort. The other friend I was with, who is a right winger to the extreme, said, yeah that’s because they want to control you. To which the Indian friend said that no, it’s because it’s the first time in history that even poor people can prove that they made a transaction and it’s not just their word vs someone richer and more connected. He doesn’t have any illusions about Modi, but puts that forward as an unambiguous good for the country.
I had an Indian acquaintance who told me that nothing happens in Delhi without sweets boxes full of cash. That, he said, was why Indians buy so many sweets - you can't accomplish anything official without a gift of sweets (with cash in them). He was pretty incensed about it, too - clearly, his entire life was one big grifty adventure of paying bribes to dipshits. We talked about Modi changing out all the currency and he saw it as an unalloyed good. It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for the petty grifters to come clean about some of the taxes they hadn't been paying and a leveling of the playing field for all the mid-level dipshits who had been grifting their entire adult lives. Notably, my friend is not a muslim.