‘Billionaire Raj’ Is Pushing India Toward Autocracy https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-03-25/india-election-billionaire-raj-is-backing-modi-and-leading-to-autocracy
The super-rich have opened their wallets to Modi, and income inequality has soared over the past d https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-03-25/india-election-billionaire-raj-is-backing-modi-and-leading-to-autocracy...While inequality has grown since the 1980s, in step with a lopsided distribution of gains from globalization across the world, Modi’s reign has spawned a tiny class of super-rich. Fewer than 10,000 individuals in a population of 920 million adults earn an average 480 million rupees ($5.7 million), more than 2,000 times the average income of $2,800. Nine out of 10 Indians earn less than the average...
A handful of tycoons — such as Mukesh Ambani, Gautam Adani and Sajjan Jindal — have entered the leagues of the world’s richest people. They did so not by putting innovative products and services in global markets, but by carving up domestic industries such as transportation, telecom, power and gas, metals, retail, media and new energy. The Modi government rewarded large businesses with tax cuts and awarded them prized monopoly assets like airports. The billionaires got juicy deals when buying bankrupt firms and lobbied — often successfully — for protectionist trade policies.
The film is yet another one based on distorting the truth to strengthen Hindu nationalist politics, with an eye on the forthcoming elections.
https://thewire.in/film/films-building-up-majoritarian-narratives-swatantraveer-savarkar
by Ram Puniyani
28/03/2024
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYNJHzyPYfQ Dec 21, 2023
Subaltern Studies 2.0, edited by Milinda Banerjee and Jelle J. P. Wouters (Prickly Paradigm Press, Chicago, 2022) may be construed with some reason as an attempt to take the now defunct Sublaltern Studies project into the new, relatively uncharted territory that we know by the name of the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene is our present age, the first age when humans are no longer just biological but rather geological agents: the impress of their activity, particularly the burning of fossil fuels, is now felt in what is known to some as global warming and to others as climate change. What would a subaltern studies project for this age which is still unfolding, rather calamitously, look like? Banerjee and Wouters have together written what some will call a rather wild work and one that, in my judgment, is wondrously risk-taking and intellectual energizing. They invoke a future that would not be so dominated by humans, a future of yak democracy and fungal democracy, a future hospitable to human and non-human species alike, and one where we shall strive together to redeem ourselves from the various "falls" that have characterized the history of the last several thousand years -- the fall that led us to separate non-humans from humans, women from men (and thereby denigrate and demean them), those without speech from those with speech, and (though this is articulated in various different languages) the colonized from the colonizers