January 2025 Archives

Haryana: Police Detain Maruti Suzuki Protesters, Stop ‘The Wire’ Reporters From Speaking to Them

Police seized The Wire’s camera, and the mobile phones of this reporter and an intern. The two of us were detained in a police van for nearly an hour.

Manesar: Haryana police detained several workers of the Maruti Suzuki plant over a peaceful protest at Manesar on January 30, and held The Wire’s reporters for almost an hour as they were speaking to protesters near the site.

Police also seized The Wire’s interview equipment, and the mobile phones of this reporter and an intern, Rishabh Sharma. The two of us were detained in a police van for nearly an hour.

A three-month protest

For more than three months, workers have been protesting under the banner of the ‘Maruti Suzuki Asthai Mazdoor Union.’ The main demands of the protesting workers are that they be given permanent jobs, temporary workers’ wages be increased, and workers who were suspended after the violence at the Manesar plant in 2012 be reinstated.

Employees from various states, including Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Rajasthan, and Jharkhand, have joined the movement.

On January 10, a massive gathering of current and former temporary employees of Maruti was organised in front of the labour department in Gurugram, Haryana. The workers submitted a demand letter to the management and the labour department, signed by more than 4,000 employees represented by Maruti Suzuki Asthai Majdoor Sangh, listing their key demands.

Haryana Police at the protest site outside Manesar Tehsil. Photo: The Wire.

Workers say court allowed protest

The protesting workers claim that the Gurugram civil court had permitted their protest on January 29 and 30, under some conditions. They were allowed to protest at least 500 metres away from the Maruti Suzuki plant in Manesar, ensuring the demonstrations remained peaceful. The court also made it clear that the company’s daily operations should not be hindered, and no property damage should occur during the protests.

But on January 29, the Manesar police forcibly cleared the protest site of Maruti Suzuki workers who had been staging a sit-in demonstration since September 18, 2024.

At around 11 am, the Manesar police dismantled the tent set up by the workers near the Manesar Tehsil office. The protesting workers were detained and later dropped off nearly 30 kilometres away from the protest site. But the crackdown did not stop there. According to the workers, the police used force and vandalised the protest site, damaging their belongings worth around Rs 2 lakh.

Early on January 30, former and current Maruti Suzuki workers again started gathering near the Manesar tehsil to continue their protest. However, police refused to allow them to demonstrate, citing Section 163 of the Bhartiya Nyay Suraksha Sanhita (erstwhile Section 144 of the CrPC) and began detaining the workers who had come to participate.

Throughout the day, as workers assembled near the Manesar tehsil, Delhi-Manesar Road, and IMT Chowk, the police used force to detain them.

Some of the workers protesting at the Manesar site. Photo: The Wire.

Section 163

When The Wire reached the protest site outside the Manesar tehsil, it was filled with police personnel and no protesting workers were visible.

About 500 metres away, near IMT Chowk, a small group of workers had gathered. While I was interviewing the workers and capturing their responses, at around 12:30 pm, the Haryana police intervened, citing Section 163 of the BNSS. Police detained all the protesting workers, seized The Wire’s camera and recording instrument, and our mobile phones. Cops also held me and The Wire’s intern in a police van for nearly an hour, preventing us from speaking to more protesters.

After nearly an hour, the officer returned all equipment including the camera, our phones, and the microphone. However, before giving my phone back to me, a police officer deleted a video I had shot of the protest from the mobile phone.

The workers participating in the protest condemned the imposition of Section 163 and raised questions about it. They argued that if this section was truly applicable in the tehsil area, then numerous companies operating there should also be affected. Thousands of other workers were commuting on the roads, ordinary people were moving around, and other groups of more than five people were gathering. However, the police was citing Section 163 only to detain the protesting workers, they alleged.

By 9 pm on January 30, the police had released all the 76 detained protesters.

Amit Chakravarty, a trade union activist based in Manesar, Gurgaon, said, “This protest has been peaceful for more than three months, and the court had even approved the protest on January 29 and 30, 2025. Workers from different states had come together in large numbers at the protest site in Manesar. Unfortunately, the Haryana police ignored the court’s order. Police damaged property at the protest site, and detained several workers. They have resorted to using force in an attempt to break up the protest.”

The Story of an Assassination Attempt in the Supreme Court and an Unyielding Judge

Gauri Grover, in her book, ‘The Unyielding Judge-the Life and Legacy of Justice A.N. Grover’, chronicles this unforgettable episode of her grandfather’s life and more.

Ask any regular Supreme Court practitioner and they will tell you that on a final hearing day, a post-lunch session gets challenging for even the most alert in the bar and bench. The court assembles at 2 pm and, given that the Indian Supreme Court does not impose time limitations on oral hearings, the rambling arguments of certain lawyers can even put the most diligent judge to sleep.

One could assume that 2:35 pm on March 13, 1968, was one such day when a three-judge bench assembled in then Chief Justice of India (CJI) Mohammad Hidyatullah’s court. The CJI, flanked by his ‘brothers’ (as judges refer to each other) A.N. Grover and Vaidyalingam J., was engrossed in the hearing, when Manmohan Das from West Bengal’s Mushirabad – described in the next day’s report by the Hindu as a “half-mad man” – leapt onto the judge’s pedestal armed with a knife.

Gauri Grover,
The Unyielding Judge: The Life and Legacy of Justice A.N. Grover,
OakBridge (2024)

The CJI ducked and the assailant managed to stab Justice Grover on the right side of his head, until he was overpowered and “neutralised”.

What followed was no less dramatic than the recent attack on a Bollywood star. Justices Hidyatullah and Vaidyalingam drove Justice Grover to the Willingdon Hospital (now rechristened as Ram Manohar Lohia Hospital), where a team of doctors attended to him.

Gauri Grover, in her book, The Unyielding Judge-the Life and Legacy of Justice A.N. Grover, chronicles this unforgettable episode of her beloved grandfather’s life. What is commendable is that her loyalty to Justice Grover does not come in the way of her faithful narration of one of bar’s wittiest anecdotes related to the only assassination attempt on a judge inside India’s Supreme Court.

It is said that one of the visitors who rushed to look up on the injured justice was the legendary Attorney General C.K. Daphtary. Pointing to the judge’s fractured skull, Dapthary allegedly remarked with a mischievous smile, “They are most dastardly, these assassins – they always attack you on your weakest part.”

Gauri’s labour of love for her grandfather traces his early days – when fate led him to be born in Myanmar, destiny led him back to his roots in Amritsar, the need for education took him to England and the desire to make his mark as a lawyer drew him to Lahore.

It was India’s vivisection by Radcliffe’s scalpel that brought the Grovers to Shimla, and then to Chandigarh, where the Lahore high court’s Indian successor – the high court of Punjab and Haryana finally found its permanent address.

Gauri deftly intertwines the historical and political progress of the times to contextualise her dada’s journey as a lawyer to a judge of the high court, ultimately leading to his elevation to India’s top court.

The unyielding judge

A substantial part of the book – as its title suggests – is devoted to the landmark events which led to Justice Grover earning the well-deserved title of ‘the unyielding judge’. This is the story of the Kesavanada Bharati case which, also known as the Fundamental Rights case.

Gauri explains the case in detail and deftly gives a synoptic view to the lay reader, as well as the trained lawyer, of the case that ended in the dramatic supersession of Justice Grover.

Former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, at the pinnacle of her power, was jousting with the courts to push through her ambitious socialist and “pro-poor agenda”. It could be called the mother of all custody battles and the fight was over the custody of India’s basic law – the Indian Constitution.

Gandhi’s government asserted that Article 368 of the Constitution gave parliament an unfettered right to amend, alter or modify it at will. Many judges, such as Justice A.N. Ray, were sold onto this idea of parliamentary supremacy. However, there was a block of justices, led by CJI S.M. Sikri and Justices J.M. Shelat, K.S. Hegde and Grover, that was not convinced.

In Kesavananda’s case, the Supreme Court sat as a bench of 13 judges. By a slender majority, Gandhi’s view was rejected and the court came up with the theory of basic structure. This meant that while the parliament could amend any part of the Constitution, such an amendment could be struck down by a court if it violated the basic features of the Constitution such as democracy, rule of law and judicial independence. Gandhi’s most vocal supporter on the bench, Justice Ray, dissented and even refused to sign the judgment.

Justice Grover’s supersession

As news of this judgment, delivered a day before Chief Justice Sikri retired, was aired on radio, the government was ready with another announcement. It was not going to follow the custom of appointing the next senior most judge as the new CJI.

Former Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru had once tried to break this custom as well, when he wanted to pass over Justice Meher Chand Mahajan, who, as premier of Kashmir, had given him untold grief. When Nehru bounced this idea off Justice Vivian Bose, he was told that all judges would resign if he tried to do so.

Nehru’s daughter was luckier. The three senior most judges after CJI Sikri had all signed the majority view in the Kesavananda Bharati case. Justices Shelat, Hegde and Grover were all superseded and Justice Ray was anointed the next CJI.

Gauri writes about the silence in the car when the judges returned from the court – Justice Grover, shattered by his punishment, and Justice Ray, silent about his windfall.

She also mentions another witty quip from Dapthary – this time the target was not her grandfather but the judge who benefitted from his passover. Dapthary said, “The boy who wrote the best essay won the first prize.”

Gauri shares an interesting fact which I think enters the public domain for the first time through her book. It seems that Justice Grover was just collateral damage and that the government actually wanted to target Justices Shelat and Hegde. She tells us about how the government later reached out and apologized to Justice Grover.

A challenge for historians

Gauri’s book also contains a chapter on her grandfather’s landmark cases and another on his fulfilling life post retirement.

Justice Grover lived in an era before social media and WhatsApp. Today’s law student and lay reader, so accustomed to live streaming that has brought Supreme Court proceedings into people’s drawing rooms, can hardly imagine a time when judges adhered to the “ivory tower” notion.

They were of the belief that a judge must avoid publicity and public interaction, as they only speak through their judgments and not podcasts justifying the same. This is why there is very little information available about them in the public domain. India’s judges deserve more attention than we have given them.

Lawyer and writer Gobind Das, historian George H. Gadbois and, to an extent, historian Gravile Austin, have made efforts. While it is challenging to recreate and bring to life these personalities, given that the information on them is sparse, this should not be a deterrent.

In this respect, Gauri’s book leaves the reader wanting more. While anyone can look up and read the judgments from law reports, a more curious reader would want more fly-on-the-wall-level information: What was the discussion between a judge and his family on the evening he came back with news of his supersession? What were the pressures on him during the intrigues played by the government, and so on. Some of these are well documented in narratives by Austin.

Gauri has, to my glee, quoted from my article on some of the palace intrigues that this case witnessed. She mentions how the pro-government Justice Mirza Hameedullah Beg checked into a hospital mid-hearing and CJI Sikri discreetly visited AIIMS himself to cross-check from the attending doctors whether his “sickness” was simply to derail the hearing and push it beyond his retirement date.

Although the pleadings of Kesavananda could have been better positioned as an appendix at the end of her book instead of being inserted within the narrative, Gauri has successfully brought to life her grandfather as a smart, proper old school lawyer-turned-judge.

Having a more anecdotal bent of mind, I was left wanting more ‘gems’ to flesh out Justice Grover’s personality. In a conversation with Justice Rajiv Endlaw, former judge of the Delhi high court, I asked him to tell me about Justice Grover.

He gave his characteristic smile, and said “I never knew him well but I can tell you about the only time I interacted with him.” He then went on to narrate a fascinating tale from his early days as a young lawyer at Khaitan & Co. Primarily involved in drafting opinions, he was once tasked with accompanying a client to a hearing at the Press Council of India. On a hot summer day, Endlaw arrived with his client, who was facing a complaint before the press council.

To his surprise, the session was like a proper court hearing, with the chairman dressed in a full suit. That was Justice A.N. Grover – the epitome of the old-school, English-educated Indian gentleman. Justice Grover then looked disapprovingly at Endlaw and remarked, “Lawyers are now appearing in half-sleeved shirts?”

Endlaw’s embarrassment was compounded by the fact that his humiliation was witnessed by his client, none other than the legendary Khushwant Singh, who was sitting next to him. It is indeed fascinating how lawyers remember judges.

Sanjoy Ghose is a senior advocate.

The Secret Sauce Behind China’s Relentless Innovation Drive

DeepSeek’s rise has shown that China is managing to take technological leaps despite western restrictions on technology exports, particularly in the area of AI, overturning the assumption that the US has an unassailable supremacy in the area.

In the last month or so, there has been some striking technology news from China. First was the low-altitude flight of two new combat aircraft, reportedly development models of sixth generation fighters. Considering that the US first flew its sixth-generation Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) fighter in 2020, this was a substantial achievement the country.

The day after this news was flashed around the world, there was another item which did not receive that much coverage, but was also significant – the launch of a huge Type 076 amphibious assault ship that can double as a light aircraft carrier. Uniquely, the aircraft aboard could be launched using an electro-magnetic launch (EMALS) system which the US had installed in one of its large aircraft carriers in 2015 and was followed by China installing it in its newest carrier, Fujian. The system makes the launch of aircraft from ships much easier and places less stress on the air frame.

Last week an experimental nuclear fusion reactor in China triggered a great deal of comment by maintaining its operational state for over 17 minutes – a new world record. This is a significant step towards the goal of realising a fusion-based nuclear reactor in the near future. Around the same time, evidence emerged that China was building a large laser-ignited fusion research centre akin to the American National Ignition Facility which can be used to develop and test thermonuclear nuclear weapon designs.

None of these developments, however, generated the kind of surprise and shock that DeepSeek – the Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) company that develops open source large language models – did with the release of its first free chatbot app based on their DeepSeek-R1 model.

By Monday, it had surpassed ChatGPT as the most downloaded free app in the iOS App store in the US, leading to a spectacular crash of Nvidia’s share price. Nvidia is known to be the principal provider of specialized chips used for AI applications. DeepSeek developed the model that many AI experts are saying is akin to that of US OpenAI and Meta even though it used far fewer and less advanced Nvidia chips.

Also read: DeepSeek: Two Questions at the Heart of the AI Offering that Has Rattled the World

They trained their model for a reported $6 million as compared to the $100 million that OpenAI’s GPT-4 cost. Its system also uses a fraction of the computing power, and electric power, that Western AI engines consume.

DeepSeek’s rise has shown that China is managing to take technological leaps despite western restrictions on technology exports, particularly in the area of AI. It also overturns the facile assumption that the US has an unassailable supremacy in the area of AI which would be further solidified by spending billions of dollars. The big danger here is that instead of smothering China’s R&D progress, US restrictions may end up stimulating it.

There is no innate Chinese genius behind this achievement, only the long-term obsession of the Communist Party of China (CPC) to turn China in to the foremost world power. As in India, there is a desire to regain the glory of the past. But the Chinese focus is on reimagining the present and future rather than dwelling on the past.

From the very beginning of its opening up process in the 1990s, Beijing’s growth strategy has sought to create an aatmanirbhar China. Over the decades, China has bought, stolen, coerced technology from foreign companies, but equally systematically, it has set up a parallel system of laboratories and institutions to absorb or “re-innovate” this technology. A crucial tier of this project has been to obtain knowhow by sending an entire generation of Chinese young men to study abroad. Simultaneously, the country has used programmes to lure foreign technology specialists to seed Chinese institutions with knowledge and skills.

This strategy is now yielding results and has persuaded the CPC that instead of graduating from the manufacturing revolution to advance in the area of services, China is cutting out a new path of taking its manufacturing to a higher technological level to rival the West.

It is no secret that China is going through a spate of problems – its birth rate is declining, house prices are falling and some provinces are in the grip of deflation.

The future plan was outlined by Xi Jinping in 2024’s National People’s Congress session when he spoke of the need to unleash “new productive forces” to deal with the situation. In essence this means the application of higher science and technology to its manufacturing prowess. This requires a three-pronged movement: first, the replication of technologies that are likely to be restricted by the west; second, the invention of entirely new technologies—photonic computing, brain computer interfaces, nuclear fusion and telemedicine. And third, emphasizing the spending of money on scientists under the age of 35.

Last year, Bloomberg put out a special report noting that China has achieved global leadership position in five key technologies—UAVs, solar panels, graphene, high-speed rail, and electrical vehicles and batteries. It went on to add that at the same time it had achieved a “competitive” status in seven technologies like semiconductors, AI, robots, machine tools, large tractors, drugs, and LNG carriers. The only technology it was still “behind” was in commercial aircraft.

The reason for this is probably that China sought a tie-up with a US commercial aircraft manufacturing company, McDonnell Douglass, which subsequently sank. However, in 2023, Beijing introduced the Comac C919 narrow-body airliner into service domestically. Currently, though it is powered by a CFM (US-French) engine.

The writer is a Distinguished Fellow, Observer Research Foundation, New Delhi

This piece was first published on The India Cable – a premium newsletter from The Wire & Galileo Ideas – and has been updated and republished here. To subscribe to The India Cable, click here.

How Art Deco Brought Modernity to Bombay and Altered the Way it Faced the World

An updated book on the architecture of the 1930s and ‘40s and the lifestyles it engendered still retains its freshness.

At the turn of the 20th century, Bombay witnessed a major spree in construction which went on till the 1940s. It was first set off by a plague, which began in 1896, scaring the British Raj which squarely blamed the onset and spread of the disease on the congested living conditions of the natives. The authorities razed many neighbourhoods and then decided that the city would have to be opened up to accommodate the expanding population.

This meant the creation of new housing, roads and other infrastructure. Bombay expanded northwards where new houses were built, mainly for the middle-classes. In the southern part of the city, however, land would have to be created, and so the age-old solution was found – reclamation from the sea. Inevitably, a scandal followed, as happens in Bombay where land is concerned.

Sharada Dwivedi and Rahul Mehrotra,
Bombay Deco,
Pictor Publishing (November 2024).

One of the new precincts that emerged was the Kennedy Sea Face, which eventually became Marine Drive; further south was the Backbay Reclamation, where buildings would be made at Churchgate and the Oval Maidan. Plots of land were auctioned at high prices for construction of residential and commercial buildings as well as cinema houses. New buildings came up in the latest, modern style that had become popular all over the world. The same style was adopted in the new constructions in other parts of Bombay and other parts of the country. There was excitement in the air, not least because these buildings were financed, designed, constructed and styled by Indians – there was enough confidence among Indians to do it on their own and not bank on the Raj.

The flats in these buildings were like nothing the city had seen – for one thing, the rooms had toilets, an almost revolutionary concept in the city. They had the latest fittings and the most up-to-date tiling, plumbing and ventilation. The buyers were so taken up that they commissioned the most stylish furniture for the interiors. Internationally, this style came to be known as Art Deco.

In 2008, city historian Sharada Dwivedi and architect Rahul Mehrotra, wrote Bombay Deco, a book detailing the city’s Art Deco heritage. Till then, there had been no formalised publication on the subject – Bombay took its Art Deco buildings, which were visible all over, for granted.

Since then, consciousness about Bombay’s Art Deco buildings — second in number only to Miami — has become widespread. The website artdecomumbai.com has collected an impressive inventory of such structures and regularly conducts walks to showcase them.

Also read: When an Old Cinema Shuts Down, a Million Memories Die With It

Photo: Noshir Gobhai

A new, updated edition of the book has been published, with many more new images and a fresh chapter and it remains a fascinating read about the development of a city into a major metropolis. Mehrotra in his introduction points out that Art Deco came to be associated with modernity. The buildings did not just represent a new way of living, but an entirely new lifestyle — restaurants with international cuisine, often called continental, jazz bands and dancing. The cinemas with an international look and feel, where not just Hindi films but also those from Hollywood played.

The creation of Marine Drive also brought about a radical shift in the way the city faced the world and therefore itself. Till then, Bombay’s residents lived mainly in the inner parts of the city or towards the eastern side, where the harbour was, and where the British lived and worked. With Marine Drive, Bombay became a west-facing metropolis and has been, since then.

Bombay Deco is divided into several chapter that broadly focusses on various aspects of the architectural style – travel, cinema and the urban landscape, accompanied by vintage images of posters, ads, buildings and some sumptuous new photographs to accompany them. These photographs, many of them specially taken for the new edition, enhance the book’s appeal, but it is more than just a coffee table volume, with much to read about Bombay’s Art Deco legacy.

I wish a few Hindi posters had been included, because in the 1940s, artists let their imagination run loose, using the most innovative fonts to create attractive ads. Art Deco furniture could be seen in these films even in the 1950s.

Photo: Rahul Mehrotra

The new edition also has an entirely fresh chapter which details how a 14-year effort spearheaded by Dwivedi and architect Abha Narain, with backing by the Maharashtra government, finally succeeded in UNESCO declaring a cluster of buildings facing the Oval Maidan — 19th century Indo-Gothic structures on one side and 20th century Art Deco ones on the other, a quite unique juxtaposition — as a heritage precinct in 2018. The chapter makes interesting reading, because Mumbai, as the city had come to be known in 1995, was facing competition from other, more ancient sites like Nalanda, which the Union government was pushing. In the end, Mumbai’s persistence paid off and it was granted that status, which implies that the buildings cannot be demolished and replaced by shiny new skyscrapers.

Which is a wonderful thing but only if the actual Art Deco buildings – which are close to nine decades old – can be maintained and, if necessary, propped up and fortified. And that’s not as simple as it sounds. Most of the apartments are under rent control, which inhibits the landlord from spending too much on their maintenance, especially if the rent he receives is negligible.

American architect John Allf, who has been observing and studying Bombay’s Art Deco since the 1980s, writes, “despite these efforts and the subsequent recognition, Art Deco (and historic buildings of all kinds) are at greater risk than ever before,” adding that “the cost of maintaining and restoring Art Deco buildings is astronomical.”

Not surprisingly, many old low-rise Art Deco structures in neighbourhoods, which do not fall in the heritage district, are coming down and modern but soulless skyscrapers are taking their place with the latest amenities, something that buyers find more attractive. How many of these buildings, that make Bombay/Mumbai what it is, will survive in the long run, is the big question. A book like this therefore becomes a vital document that will tell future generation about the city’s modernity and heritage.

All images published with the permission of Pictor Publishing.

Where Did the Phrase ‘the People of India’ Come From?

Politics is not the only arena within which the notion of ‘the people’ originated or had significance.

Excerpted with permission from India’s First Radicals: Young Bengal and the British Empire by Rosinka Chaudhuri, published by Penguin India.

The classification of the inhabitants of the country as the ‘people of India’ was not, in 1843, predicated on the claim that the people constitute the only legitimate ground of sovereignty. Arguably, that notion was absent in India throughout the nineteenth century, manifesting as an idea with galvanizing qualities only following the arrival of Gandhi from South Africa in 1915. I make no claim that this period witnessed the actual emergence of the people themselves as the bearers of sovereignty in Indian history, any more than I attempt to outline the originary moments when a people stirred into political and historical being. It should be self-evident, although it is rarely acknowledged, that politics is not the only arena within which the notion of ‘the people’ originated or had significance—clearly, both the concept and political thought itself relied largely on cultural constructs to generate such a category. As E.P. Thompson remarked, in passing, of radicalism at the start of the nineteenth century in The Making of the English Working Class: ‘If we are to understand the extremism of Burdett and Cochrane in 1810, we need read only Byron.’12 Of the radicalism of Young Bengal in Calcutta at the time we are looking at, much the same could be said.

Rosinka Chaudhuri
India’s First Radicals: Young Bengal and the British Empire
Penguin India, 2025

The ‘people’ had obviously existed as a concept in the regional Indian languages well before this era, as well as in classical Sanskrit or Persian texts, and was in use concurrently with the English word. Leaving aside its ancient usage, every such word in the regional languages in the nineteenth century had a strict specificity and denoted a collective group that was grounded in community/class/caste/region or religion. In a general sense, the welfare of the Indian people may have been given primacy in the ancient code of Rām rājyā and may have been understood to be the dharma of every benevolent emperor, altruistic raja and generous nawab in the country preceding this moment, but it was only now, for the first time since the beginning of East India Company rule in Bengal, that the category of ‘the people’ was being used by Indians as an agent of change. The people (or the masses) themselves may not have been given or taken agency yet, but as a theoretical category, an idea of ‘the people’ was the stimulus being used—without precedent in Indian history—as a denominator for activism and action on their behalf.

What I shall trace here is the new significance this word began to acquire in Calcutta’s public arena in the 1830s and 1840s, where the newspapers, whether in Bengali or in English, repeatedly invoke a body of subjects under British rule in the context of their rights and the government’s duties towards them. I will be paying attention to language in particular, i.e., to the words themselves and the conceptual shift made possible by the use of those words. Preceding the twentieth-century notion of popular sovereignty, or of our understanding of ‘the people of India’ as the locus, politically, of sovereignty, there was an earlier moment when the category of ‘the people’ can be shown to be coming into existence in the minds of middle-class Indians. The first geography texts, for instance, written by Indians for Indians in their own language at this time in 1841 and 1848 (discussed below), described the country and its people stretched across the subcontinent called Hindustan. The people of Hindustan are enumerated, listed and categorized in tables in relation to the regions they inhabited, generating a sense of who the people of India were in relation to other peoples of the world. Importantly for this argument, the vast swathes of people in the rural areas now also began to be evoked in newspapers and other print media in terms of their rights and expectations. We should note here also that ‘the people’ as a concept in India at this time was generally predicated on the figure of the peasant as a rights-bearing subject rather than the proletariat as a new body politic. The fundamental figure in colonial modern politics in India was the peasant, and it is the peasant that Young Bengal was thinking of when speaking repeatedly of ‘the people of India’ and how to better their condition.

In investigating the process of a people being imagined into existence by a particular group of people at a particular time, I intend to try not to make the mistake of looking back at this period from the space we inhabit today, but rather, examine the construction of an idiom following the history that was inhabited until then. For the reading and writing public of 1843, the idea that ‘the people’ had rights and could demand ‘amelioration’ (a much-used word at the time) from the government for their current suffering; that ‘the people’ were subjects ‘of the soil’ whose condition needed to be bettered; that a small part of this greater sum of ‘the people’ now needed to demand those rights not as supplicants before a monarch but as activists attempting to move public opinion; that ‘the people’ on whose behalf such action should be taken stretched as a body across the subcontinent; that these ‘people’ shared a common circumstance and were equal to each other as men—such ideas were surely unthought of until then in the subcontinent.

Rosinka Chaudhuri is director and professor of cultural studies at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta.

‘Budget Should Support Dietary Diversity to Ensure Food Security in India’

Dipa Sinha talks about how rising prices have meant that families have cut back on certain food groups, and how that effects children’s health and well-being.

In this episode of ‘Budget 2025: What’s at Stake?’, development economist Dipa Sinha talks about what explains India’s rising anaemia figures and slipping rank in the Global Hunger Index, and how budgetary allocations are not adequately addressing India’s food security needs. She talks about how rising prices have meant that families have cut back on certain food groups, and how that effects children’s health and well-being. She also lays out steps the Union government could take through the Budget to address food security issues.

This series is a collaboration between the Centre for Financial Accountability and The Wire.

‘Nari Shakti Is an Empty Slogan, Budgets Have Ignored Women’s Needs’

Spending and budgetary allocations on areas that would benefit women – skilling, food security and so on – have decreased.

In this episode of ‘Budget 2025: What’s at Stake?’, renowned economist and professor Ritu Dewan talks about how the government’s claims about “empowering” women and “Nari Shakti” are in fact empty slogans, while in fact spending and budgetary allocations on areas that would benefit women – skilling, food security and so on – have decreased.

This series is a collaboration between the Centre for Financial Accountability and The Wire.

Let Us Not Overdo this ‘Triumph of Faith’

‘Faith’ in all its elaborateness is being deployed to distract the gullible Hindu from asking inconvenient questions about the emergence of an entrenched oligarchy, on the one hand, and the persistence of mass deprivations, on the other.

Thirty pilgrims were crushed to death at the Maha Kumbh on the occasion of Mauni Amavasaya.

Only two days ago the captive media regaled the nation with images of a Union home minister performing the Kumbh rites, in the assorted company of the Uttar Pradesh chief minister and the ubiquitous Baba Ramdev. The Mauni Amavasya tragedy punctured the Bharatiya Janata Party establishment’s tableau of self-congratulation and self-preening as it has sought, for weeks and months, to milk a unique milestone in the great Hindu religious calendar for its political purposes. This kind of partisanship, of course, is now a familiar sleight of hand.

It was therefore entirely understandable, if not excusable, that the Uttar Pradesh administration should have tried to downplay the tragedy. It is Kumbh and tragedies have always happened whenever so many people congregate. A judicial inquiry was immediately announced; so, please, no blame-apportioning, no finger-pointing. A clever stratagem from a regime that is becoming rather good at cleaning up its mess.

What should be a matter of disquiet is the bogus intellectual argument being made in a section of the saffron eco-system: the loss of death is regrettable, but it should not distract us from celebrating the fact of the crores of unfazed and undeterred devotes going ahead with performing their enjoined religious rites and rituals at a Kumbh. It is a reaffirmation of a triumph of faith, and that blessing by itself overwhelmingly airbrushes the stench of dead bodies at the Sangam. The Mahakumbh is too momentous an occasion to be overshadowed by the loss of few lives. One could almost hear Dick Cheney, that ruthless conceptualiser of the 2003 invasion of Iraq whispering from behind: “Shit happens”.

This is unadulterated regressive thinking; it is a return to the days of helpless fatalism that has for centuries weakened and exhausted the Hindu society and its civilisational vitality, allowing the “outsider” to overpower us. Popular narrative tells of a barbaric marauder from Ghazni desecrating the Somnath Temple 17 times and yet no resistance was offered because of the obsessive faith in the divine potency vested in the holy Shivalinga and that that divine efficacy was enough to defeat the design of any evil-merchant.

That we remain uncured of this centuries-old faith in the curative power of (Hindu) faith – the undefinable, the mysterious Aastha – was brought home to us when a few years ago the prime minister asked us to bang the thalis from balconies and house-tops to ward off the COVID-19 virus; and, very many of us did climb the roof-tops in response to a demagogue’s call. It is not even a conscious rejection of the Nehruvian scientific temper, it is a subconscious faith in the abiding power of religious agency. Faith breeds patience and that patience gives us the fortitude to take unnatural loss of life in our stride.

This vastly exaggerated exaltation of “faith” is, of course, the centre-piece of an unholy political stratagem, devised by self-assigned custodians of the Hindu samaj (society) and its religious and spiritual wealth.

“Faith” in all its elaborateness is being deployed to distract the gullible Hindu from asking inconvenient questions about the emergence of an entrenched oligarchy, on the one hand, and the persistence of mass deprivations, on the other.

“Faith” is being cynically marketed as an answer to deepening national despondency, aggravated by a self-centred regime. And, since the ruling coterie has already designated itself as the exclusive gate-keeper of all matters of “faith,” it alone gets to invoke the legitimacy of faith for its mis-governance.

Intellectual shabbiness apart, this “triumph of faith” is a dangerous argument to be made in the third decade of 21st century. To argue that more people die of cancer or Alzheimer’s than the number of devotees crushed in the stampede on Maun Amavasaya is to make a plea for the jettisoning of any notion of political accountability, a principle at the core of democratic governance.

To place the tragedy at the Maha Kumbh in the larger context of a litany of disasters, catastrophes, and calamities around the world is not only to trivialise loss of human life but is also an argument to institutionalise insensitivity as a national virtue.

Not long ago a woman called “Nirbhaya” was degraded in the most horrible manner. For weeks all of us worked ourselves into a frenzy of disapproval and indignation. We expressed our outrage at the failure of the organised arrangements of “law and order” to protect a young life. “Nirbhaya” became a cause célèbre, a collective expression of solidarity with a helpless woman; her violation was felt personally by each one of us; she became us and us became her. Delhi got branded as the “rape capital” of the world.

If the new argument of “context” was to be applied to “Nirbhaya,” then we could be ticked off for making too much of one woman’s violation when arguably lakhs and lakhs of other women were not molested. The argument of “context” can indeed be deployed to explain away any breakdown in any matter of civic and public arrangement. If “context” is accepted as the new mantra, no official will ever need be held accountable for a railway accident or a plane crash. The concept of ministerial responsibility shall cease to have any meaning.

A Maha Kumbh, occurring after 144 years, by itself, in its spiritual generosity bestows redemption on all followers of the faith, whether or not one takes a dip at the Sangam. But, let us not forget, that when all of us are done with performing the Kumbh rites, we shall still be a republic, with its own elaborate constitutional rites and rituals. And, the constitution has supremacy over all matters of “faith.”

Budget 2025: The What, Why and How of Boosting Consumption for Stimulating Growth

The Union finance minister is expected to introduce policy measures like increasing tax exemptions.

The Budget deals with allocating money towards areas where the government thinks it is essential to spend, and finding out ways such as taxes, to finance it. The government primarily requires money to spend on social infrastructure (such as schools, hospitals, water, sanitation, etc.), physical infrastructure (such as railways, roads, airports, etc.) and transferring funds to the poor and the deprived, so that distribution of income becomes more equal. But, how does one say whether a budget is good or bad? The general assumptions underlying a good budget are: it contains the fiscal deficit, carries on with the necessary reforms, and give incentives to consumers and business.

For the benefit of the reader, there are five components of demand, namely, consumption expenditure, investment expenditure, government expenditure, exports, and imports. The most important component of demand is consumption expenditure, explaining around 57% of the national income. Generating and sustaining income would therefore call for strategies that would generate income and thereby sustain consumption.

Source: Indian Economic Survey, 2024.

Until the middle of 2024, the Indian economic outlook looks quite optimistic, with predictions of continued growth at a rate of over 7%. However, when India posted a lower growth rate of GDP – 5.4% in the second quarter of 2024, the economic outlook quickly turned pessimistic. According to the government’s own estimate, GDP growth is expected to hit a four-year low at 6.4%. Other metrics of economic growth are also disappointing, with declining urban and rural consumption, single-digit growth in GST collections (7.3% year-over-year in December 2024), and core infrastructure growth (4.3% year-over-year increase during November 2024).

There has been a fall in car, two-wheeler, and cement production. In fact, the PMI (Purchasing Managers’ Index), which tracks sales, employment, inventories, and price data of manufacturing sector companies, has shown a sharp decline to 56.4 – the lowest in 12 months.

Therefore, the Union finance minister is expected to introduce policy measures aimed at boosting consumption, such as increasing tax exemptions. Additionally, efforts should be made to create a more favourable business environment by reducing the cost of doing business, for instance, through increased fund allocation for physical infrastructure and implementing necessary reforms to eliminate the long-standing inverted duty structure (IDS).

This will help to alleviate the consumption distress among the middle class (with an annual income between Rs 5 lakhs and 30 lakhs) and lower income households (with an annual income between Rs 2 lakhs and 5 lakhs) which form the backbone of India’s growth story. The majority of these groups are employed in the agricultural sector, self-owned businesses, and the MSME sector. Together, they make up 70% of India’s working population with 400 million stuck in low productive agriculture sector and around 250 million in the MSME sector.

The agriculture sector has struggled to flourish, with 82% of farmers classified as smallholders, owning less than 1.15 hectares of land. Moreover, these land parcels are often not contiguous, making the mechanisation of agriculture difficult and contributing to low agricultural income. India’s labor productivity – economic output per hour of work – is just 12% of the US levels. In purchasing parity terms, GDP per hour worked is $81,800 for the US, in comparison to India’s $10,400. This also explains lower per-capita income in India, which can only grow with more incentive for agriculture and MSME sectors.

The MSME sector which for long has suffered from the inverted duty structure (IDS). A recent study by CUTS International of 1,464 tariff lines across textiles, electronics, chemicals, and metals reveals how the IDS is hurting competitiveness, with 136 items from textiles, 179 from electronics, 64 from chemicals, and 191 from metals most affected. IDS implied the MSMEs are not competitive as their input cost is higher and therefore has difficulties in scaling up.

Also read: Balancing Reform and Reality: The GST Dilemma for MSMEs

MSMEs produce goods typically consumed by low and middle-income households, which have a higher marginal propensity to consume. These businesses are integral to daily life, offering products and services ranging from baby food and biscuits to medicines, education, healthcare, hotels, and travel.

Over the last few years, tax reforms have only benefitted the big corporate sectors. India’s success story in manufacturing has traditionally been driven by a capital-intensive mode of production, with major corporates like Reliance, TATA, Birla, and others dominating the sector. However, these corporate houses are not able to create enough employment opportunities which is needed for sustaining consumption.

Between 2016 and 2023, people in the bottom 20 quintiles has seen their income growth decline by 20% whereas those in the top 20 quintiles has seen their income grow by 20%. The growth in income for this top 20 quintiles is because of highly skilled new-age workforce (often foreign returned) like doctors, legal experts, engineers and MBAs working for the global consultancy firms and global capability centres of multinational based in India. On the other hand, a growing economy is also witnessing creation of low-paid and low-productive jobs such as housekeeping, security services, and other gig type jobs such as Zomato delivery boys, which in a way is contributing to widening income inequality.

Due to lack of adequate skills and inability to absorb labourers in capital intensive manufacturing, migration is happening from agriculture to low-skilled services sectors. Even for the middle-class population they are facing problem with higher cost of healthcare and education. At a time when public spending (Central and State governments taken together) is only 4.5% of GDP, it is not surprising that for a majority of the population, education is delivered by the private sector.

A higher allocation of funds towards education and healthcare is essential, alongside a focussed intervention in agriculture and MSME sectors. As long-term data suggests, countries like China, South Korea, Singapore, and Thailand were able to grow their per-capita income by investing in quality primary education and healthcare systems – an approach that can be replicated through sustained, increased budgetary allocation.

Nilanjan Banik is professor, Mahindra University, Hyderabad.

Bernardine Evaristo Won’t Shut Up

The Booker winner has been subjected to adulation and controversy. She can tackle them both.

Kolkata: Bernardine Evaristo is very happy that she won the Booker Prize. She really wanted it, and when she was named co-winner in 2019 for Girl, Woman, Other, she was overjoyed. She has spoken of this joy in many interviews since, and also to The Wire, on the sidelines of the Kolkata Literary Meet 2025.

“I’m very honest and upfront about this. Many people have said to me, ‘Oh, you said you really wanted it.’ I did. Why bullshit?” she asks.

Evaristo is the first Black woman to win the prize. The book she won it for is her eighth. Through the course of the eight books, Evaristo took her status as the middle child of a 10-member mixed-race family, learnt all that there is to learn about life, became a theatre person, became an activist, wrote in a grammar that eschews all stuffiness, explored women characters of colour to their depths in her work, and infused her serious premises with exquisite, irreverent humour.

Through her twenties and thirties, she travelled without a care. “I was just travelling, I was free. I was just travelling by car across Europe with friends and all that,” she says. Now, she only travels when she gets an invite to a literary festival. In the past two-and-a-half years, there have been over 35.

“I was in Brazil in November, then I was in Mexico, in Australia, New Zealand, Bangkok, Colombia…When people send me these invitations, I am like, ‘Why not?’,” she says.

Although she has been to India twice before (2006 and 2023), this is her first time in Kolkata – hallowed old British capital. The English literature of Britain that many have studied and made their own in Kolkata is some shades different from the English literature that Evaristo writes in Britain. The Britain left in Kolkata is certainly not the Britain transpiring in Britain. This change is mainly borne by the likes of Evaristo who are willing to give colonial practices very little leniency in their writing. So slapstick is the satire that she once wrote a book set in a parallel world, of a white slave in Africa. In a whimper of a reversal of colonial language, The New Yorker headlined a piece on her with the words: “How Bernardine Evaristo Conquered British Literature.”

Does she worry that she is writing a new history?

Canon

“We are raised to believe there is a single history and that is the truth of the past. But there are many histories and ways of interpreting the past, as well as many ways to create history. History is yesterday, right? So as a writer, I am rewriting history with all of my books because they all go back into the past in some way, and I am creating an understanding of our society, which will soon become history. So I do feel a huge responsibility for it,” she says.

Also read: British Literature Is Tangled With Other Cultures – So Why Is It Sold as Largely White and English?

Two or three years ago, she says, she wrote about ways in which it is possible for an author to challenge the canon – something she does in small and big ways. Her Booker-winning book has few fullstops – “about 14,” she says. Most of her writing follows a syntax of its own, flowing in line-long paragraphs or however it pleases. Evaristo has named this form “pro-poetic”. It eschews rules, and the white male canon.

“It’s something I feel passionately about. I can’t shut up. I am a spokesperson, in a way. And I am listened to. And I have to challenge what I consider to be the inequalities in our society. People growing up in the colonies had one idea of Britain. But it was not the only Britain. When my dad came from Nigeria to Britain in 1949, he was surprised to see poor English people because ‘All British people were rich,’ you know. Of course, it’s nonsense. There’s a little brainwashing that’s gone on with the colonial enterprise,” she laughs.

Evaristo has written and spoken extensively about her family. After arriving from Nigeria, Evaristo’s father married a White woman, and together they had eight children, all 10 spending their days on the receiving end of casual and intentional racism and degrees of ostracisation. In interviews and in her own writing, Evaristo has spoken of how her father was constantly afraid for his children and how he never had conversations with them but only disciplined them, out of a fear that they would not grow up as British children if they knew too much about their Nigerian heritage. But she has also spoken of how in her childhood, her parents threw the doors of their large house open for parties in which they all danced to songs by the Nigerian musician Fela Kuti.

Jokes and a lack of jokes

Evaristo’s writing is similar. There is levity wherever there is the darkness of the past. Wherever there is talk of trauma, there is also silliness. “My [White] grandmother did not embrace my dad,” she said while discussing her family on the Kolkata stage, laughing slightly as the heaviness sat with the audience.

But last year, something emerged which Evaristo is not quite ready to joke about. In February 2024, the Royal Society of Literature, of which she is president from 2022, was criticised for, among other things, changes to the way it elects fellows. The criticism came from a crop of its older fellows.

Evaristo, the first Black woman and second woman ever to head the RSL, rolls her eyes. She says she doesn’t want to go too deeply into it.

“To become an RSL fellow is a wonderful honour, but no single group or demographic within the fellowship should feel they own it,” she wrote in The Guardian last year. Evaristo is also the first person who is not from the Oxford-Cambridge-Eton circles to be president of the organisation.

The RSL was also accused of not responding to the stabbing of Salman Rushdie as emphatically as it should have. Soon after, another line of controversy opened – the RSL’s magazine, Review, was scuttled at the last minute because a piece critical of Israel, a country engaged in airstrikes in Gaza that have been called genocidal, was to appear, it was said.

The RSL and Evaristo have denied these, while referring itself for investigation to a body that regulates charities.

“Don’t believe what you read,” she says. “Seriously, do not believe what you read.”

“I don’t want to get involved in it, but when you have a system in an organisation that’s 200 years old, that has been for only certain kinds of people, and then some others are allowed in, those people feel as if they’re losing something. That’s all I’m saying,” she says.

Does it get in the way of her writing?

“I had a great year last year. They can’t touch me. But what I objected to was them saying that I was in charge, like I’m a bomber. I’m only the figurehead,” she says.

The RSL has 700 fellows. Evaristo compares the allegations that a crop of new – and diverse – fellows were destabilising the institution to the “Trump madness”.

“It’s like, let’s say, you have an election in India and one person has a vote and then everybody says, ‘You, you’re the person responsible for this election,’ but all they had was a single vote,” she says. “It’s insane.”

A cottage in Kent

This may be an example of an outside problem that she does not let inside, but Evaristo is otherwise hugely happy to share her words, warmth, advice, opportunities – and her cottage in Kent – with aspiring writers.

Does she ever feel like she is giving a lot of herself away?

“I think it energises me. I’m a bit of a conundrum in the sense that I am a writer, so I have to spend a lot of time writing, which is a solitary activity, but I’m very aware and conscious of the wider context of how we operate in this world, and I’ve been an activist all my career,” she says.

Providing spaces for writers, and setting up schemes that are going to benefit a new crop of them, are some of the things she spends a lot of time on, alongside teaching at Brunel University of London.

“I’m very good at making sure I still have the time to do the writing and I don’t have other big commitments. I don’t have to look after an elderly parent. I don’t have children. I have a lot of time at my disposal,” she says.

Amidst the mosquitoes, a very long queue of fans wait for her signature on their books.