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The Wire
30-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Wire
The Art of Grief, Violence, Death and a Genocide
Menu हिंदी తెలుగు اردو Home Politics Economy World Security Law Science Society Culture Editor's Pick Opinion Support independent journalism. Donate Now Top Stories The Art of Grief, Violence, Death and a Genocide Pariplab Chakraborty 14 minutes ago Curated by Amit Mukhopadhyay and organised by SAHMAT, 'The Body Called Palestine' is an ongoing exhibition at Jawahar Bhawan, New Delhi. It features digital prints of Palestinian artists' works along with works from artists worldwide in solidarity with the Palestinian people. Sliman Mansour's work at the exhibition 'The Body Called Palestine'. Photo: Pariplab Chakraborty. Real journalism holds power accountable Since 2015, The Wire has done just that. But we can continue only with your support. Contribute now 'Here, where the hills slope before the sunset and the chasm of time near gardens whose shades have been cast aside we do what prisoners do we do what the jobless do we sow hope…' – Mahmoud Darwish, A State of Siege, 2002 Palestinian art, by existing, challenges the very foundation of Israeli-settler colonialism. Every occupation tries to destroy the idea of the people they occupy and in order to accomplish that, it inflicts violence on the occupied bodies. It tries to obliterate memories, truths and traces of genocidal violence. But can it omit the idea of the people resisting the occupation and defending their own land? Curated by Amit Mukhopadhyay and organised by SAHMAT, 'The Body Called Palestine' is an ongoing exhibition at Jawahar Bhawan, New Delhi. It features digital prints of Palestinian artists' works along with works from artists worldwide in solidarity with the Palestinian people. Primarily, the exhibition seeks to remember. It is an attempt to challenge our 'monocular vision' of seeing and to engage with a new artistic language that stems from Palestinian artists across fields who are living under and resisting a genocidal regime. 'The Body Called Palestine' showcases works of Palestinian artists and their expressions of living under a never ending system of occupation, ethnic cleansing, everyday violence and utter dehumanisation. It witnesses alienation, loss, grief, and anger. Malak Mattar, a young Palestinian artist, grew up in the Gaza strip witnessing occupation and military siege. She had created a series of monochrome and grayscale drawings and paintings – documenting the genocide in her homeland – during a residency programme. She later combined all of those images into this monumental grayscale painting titled 'No Words… (For Gaza)'. This work explicitly tells the horrors and devastation of occupation and a vicious cycle of displacement and ethnic cleansing of the people of Palestine. While working on this painting she said 'It needs to be completely horrific,' 'otherwise it will not accurately reflect the genocide.' Malak Mattar's 'No Words…(For Gaza)'. Photo: Pariplab Chakraborty. Malak Mattar's art. Photo: Pariplab Chakraborty. Maisara Baroud is a Palestinian artist from Gaza city. As a witness, his works evoke a sense of the unfathomable and the familiar, both. It is like a never-ending blur between the blacks and whites, like a nauseating fever – akin to the experience of a relentless cycle of atrocities. 'He consistently highlights topics such as war, immigration, political prisoners, illegal arrests, and occupation. Baroud's works reflect dramatic and tragic scenes, dominated by grief, death, violence, peace, hope, and freedom. His art mirrors how life is intertwined with a fresh, continuous scent of death that never seems to fade.' the artist's statement reads. Maisara Baroud's 'The Artistic Diary of Maisara Baroud'. Photo: Pariplab Chakraborty. The artworks show resilient acts of recording, embedded in personal and political experiences, ensuring that the grand sweep of historical injustice and the records of deafening silence from those in power are not erased. Digital prints of noted Palestinian artist and art historian Vera Tamari's works are also on display in the exhibition. Vera was only three years old during the first Nakba in 1948. She grew up seeing a perpetual state of occupation, war and violence inflicted upon the Palestinian lives. Her vast body of ceramic, sculpture and installation works intensively talk about seeing the Palestinian reality up front and with its innumerable layers of memories, the undaunting resilience Palestinian identity and its cultural heritage. Vera Tamari's 'Palestinian Women at Work' (ceramic relief). Photo: Pariplab Chakraborty. The exhibition also featured an excerpt of a presentation by Vera Tamari along with the digital prints of her works. Presented originally in a conference titled 'Art and War', organised by the Goethe Institute in Ramallah, in November 2004, it goes like this: Going for a Ride? (Installation, 2002) Cars are powerful icons in our society. Other than being urban household commodities, cars have become a metaphor of daily life. These inanimate objects even carry an emotional significance for most people. Not for me; I never owned a car nor learnt to drive one, but seeing my friend Liza's Volkswagen Beetle as I peeked from behind the shutters of my window one morning made me shudder. That quaint red car in which we often rode, was visibly smashed. It was lying on its hood wheels up, almost like a dead real beetle. In Going for a Ride? those inanimate objects, symbols of well-being, status, and freedom have in an act of vindictive violence, perpetrated by the Israeli military tanks in the 2002 invasion of Ramallah, taken on a new reality. They metamorphosed from once practical objects to become subjects of vengeful voodooism. Do we hurt the Palestinians more by destroying their cherished personal belongings? My idea in making this installation was not to merely to fashion junk as an art form or an anti-gesture as advocated by Nouveau Realiste or Dada artists such as Marcel Duchamp and Cesare in their crashed car compositions. Both artists challenged the conventional notion of art as an aesthetic exercise. I simply wanted to make a statement about how a mundane logical reality becomes totally illogical through the violence of the war machine. It is hard to see my installation of smashed cars as not carrying a political meaning. Seven hundred private and public cars were smashed in the military incursion of Ramallah alone. I wanted to give those cars a voice – an ironic reflection on the unnecessary nature of violence whose authors were the Israeli occupation forces. This act of destruction became like action art disturbing the status quo of matters. The soldiers in this case have become the artist creators. The soldiers the viewers. The soldiers as re-creators. The installation piece kept changing. It had a new energy each time – more violent than the previous one. I was merely the curator. Basma Al Sharif's work. Photo: Pariplab Chakraborty. Basma Alsharif is an artist and filmmaker of Palestine heritage. A series of Basma's six photographs are on display in this exhibition. Her works explore the cyclical political histories and confront the 'legacy of colonisation with satire, doubt and hope'. SAHMAT's continued solidarity with the Palestinian people finds a vivid expression in this exhibition, where, as the curator articulates 'the response to the Palestine question across the world has become a unifying force that creates new solidarities as an antidote to the atomising effects of a military-industrial complex'. 'The Body Called Palestine' aims to remember the history and presence of Israeli settler colonialism and its genocidal military offence as it is. This is valuable at a time when the larger mediascape peddles false narratives without any accountability and often erects a smokescreen of half-truths and lies, that help those in power obfuscate historical facts and cultivate public apathy. Aban Raza, a Delhi-based artist who also co-curated an art exhibition in solidarity with Palestine last year titled 'Fida-e-Filistine' and organised by SAHMAT, says, 'This exhibition is a testament to artists' solidarity from around the world with the Palestinian struggle and our collective resistance, despite all odds and silencing.' Labani Jangi's 'Even after a genocide, the rising moon doesn't burn our eyes'. Photo: Pariplab Chakraborty. This watercolour painting by artist and scholar Labani Jangi from Nadia, West Bengal, explores the difference in her perception of the moon between her childhood and the present, where there's a full scale massacre of Palestinian lives happening in every passing day. 'The moon that once used to bring Eid, festivals or fantastic stories from Naani now stands still – in silence like a representative of those who can afford to dwell in apathy. Those who remain silent even after seeing a genocide in front of their eyes – drenched in the propagandas of fascist regimes,' says Labani. The exhibition is on view until May 31, from 9.30 am to 7 pm at Jawahar Bhawan, New Delhi. Make a contribution to Independent Journalism Related News Why Israel's New Aid Delivery System for Gaza Is Sparking Outrage Concerns Expressed Over Gaza Situation, Modi Government Accused of 'Assisting Genocide' 'This Genocide Implicates Us All': 380 Writers, Organisations Call on Israel to Cease Fire in Gaza Humanitarian Crisis in Gaza: Families Forced to the Shore Amid Escalating Conflict For Your Own Sake, Please Care for Palestine From Colonial Loot to Cultural Genocide at the British Museum What the 'Cauliflower' in BJP Karnataka's X Post Means Judge's Order Frees Indian Scholar Detained in US Over Support for Palestine 'We've Killed So Many Children – It's Hard to Argue with That': Tel Aviv Protesters in Silent Vigil About Us Contact Us Support Us © Copyright. All Rights Reserved.
The Wire
25-05-2025
- Politics
- The Wire
What Tests the Ruse of Representation?
Menu हिंदी తెలుగు اردو Home Politics Economy World Security Law Science Society Culture Editor's Pick Opinion Support independent journalism. Donate Now Top Stories What Tests the Ruse of Representation? Geeta Kapur 12 minutes ago 'I find my articulation turn into a confessional device.' Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty Real journalism holds power accountable Since 2015, The Wire has done just that. But we can continue only with your support. Contribute now The following is an excerpt from Geeta Kapur's 'Introduction' to Speech Acts, published by Tulika Books, 2025. The title Speech Acts has a ring of immediacy with a claim to performative skills. At the same time, it is an extensively theorized term with nuanced and stylized transmission of meaning. Speech acts assume affective consequence – persuading, convincing or alerting your respondent in terms of feeling, thought and action. It is my intention that such articulation comes forth as speculative. Speech acts, driven by urgency, use abbreviation to skip doubt. In this mode there is need to place utterances in different contexts and see how the repetitions mutate. 'Speech Acts', Geeta Kapur, Tulika Books, 2025. I want to be able to do some of this in the cluster of texts that I have written or spoken, revisited, reiterated and contrasted, over the last two decades. Speech acts of artists, citizens and anarchist interlocutors who create frisson as they enunciate – this is the exigent force that we may track. Speech acts ignite overexposed forms; words, images and gestures are sworn to the demand of 'subjective truth-telling' by tricks of narrativization; the ruse of representation is tested in its political deployment. … In the first decade of the twenty-first century (after my book When Was Modernism was published, in 2000), I slanted my perspective to foreground the documentary genre as a form of enquiry and with it the concept of the avant-garde, relocated in mid-twentieth-century histories of decolonization. I formulated a critique of the homogenizing and authoritarian inclination of the nation-state as well as its inverse, the disempowerment of the nation-state within an enlarging vortex of global capitalism. As cultural practitioners we must be able to recognize the focal disorders – ideological, literal or surreal – of the very lens that 'documents'. This book of essays, talks and interviews does not engage with individual artists, in whose thrall I have written saturated but also dedicatedly formalist texts, included in a forthcoming (though impossibly belated) volume titled Critic's Compass: Navigating Practice. That volume is to be a palimpsest of material worked on over years, where I navigate shifts in the represented artists' work as also my own focal intensities. But for now, I have been hooked away by a set of tracking arguments that relate to the 'documentary turn'. In this smaller book (with no images), I test, in the form of speech acts, variously used terms within my expanded sphere of criticality. I try to develop a way to shape a witness position that the documentary vision multifariously offers. … In the first section of this book… [titled essays] there are two short essays, 'Proposition Avant-Garde: A View from the South' and 'Aesthetic Bind'. 'Proposition' and 'bind' are, in a sense, contrary terms. But they suggest a contrapuntal engagement involving ambiguity and traction which enables certain recondite forms to develop. My attachment to the terms proposition and bind may indeed describe my approach to the field of art and politics. … The second section includes lectures delivered in 2013 (at Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and Iniva, London), 2016 (at Haus der Kunst, Munich) and 2017 (at Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven). The text titled 'Notes on Practice' is a shredded outcome of these different talks. I have gained the gumption to stitch and weave these into a ragged banner. As I began to improvise on the lines and paras I had frequently spoken around the term 'practice', I figured a desire to play with my text-form as well. Referring to praxis, a complex materialist concept, I was also attracted to current discourses on practice that are playful, provocative and generative. From labour to craft to art to theory to governance to political action and, further, to subtly distributed features of being, doing, thinking and making. The result is what I call a ragged banner announcing my own (forthcoming) 'practice'; it also probably says something of my willingness (now) to risk failure within the template of meaning. … The interview is a form unto itself. You are asked to respond to someone else's preoccupations, and you find yourself inventing new modes of thought and utterance. Everything you say gets an inflection; it even savours imitation of the speech-form used by the interlocutor. The entry of another voice and the imaginative rendering of intersubjectivities may produce consolidated truth-claims, or, equally, a dialogue that deflects the two speakers further apart and provides a wrenched dynamic. … The last conversation with Ravi Sundaram and Ashish Rajadhyaksha puts me in a place where everything I have said is under review. … Beginning the dialogue, Ravi Sundaram from CSDS used a contrarian vocabulary and suggested that I go to the brink and see where, in the worldwide neoliberal contemporary, the 'ruins' of modernism stand; and where migration histories and the expanded concept of 'slavery' can be deployed to dramatize capital's devastating regime of disempowerment. He invoked Okwui Enwezor several times, seeing him as a curator of ideas and artworks that changed the order of things in contemporary cultural discourse. I couldn't agree more. Ashish Rajadhyaksha … believes that if you are inclined to work with modernism – historically and in the present – your method, even as it may enumerate disjunctures, counts as conciliatory. … My responses are engaged and emphatic. I appreciate the scraping down of my ideological and aesthetic assertions even as I continue to ignite them. I am impelled to see modernism at the stake, but with some of its passion and impunity smouldering still. … The terms modern and contemporary, radical and avant-garde; decolonization, migration and diaspora; demodern and decolonial, have all become polemical features of art history in academia … We also find the subject, indeed subjectivity, (re-)entering the discourse in ingenuous ways, rendering experience through phenomenological understanding and with the quest for dialogic articulation as itself a form of praxis. In his book Dissensus, Jacques Rancière says, This means that there is a certain undecidability in the 'politics of aesthetics'. There is a meta politics of aesthetics which frames the possibilities of art. Aesthetic art promises a political accomplishment that it cannot satisfy, and thrives on that ambiguity. That is why those who want to isolate it from politics are somewhat beside the point. It is also why those who want it to fulfil its political promise are condemned to a certain melancholy. I would like to believe that melancholy is part of what I, as perhaps many others, understand to be the process of critical 'becoming': that which recognizes the stutter and wager of subjectivity, produces split vectors of doubt and claim, and places us at the precipice of choice. With increased volatility driving the contemporary – and my own advancing age – the ground trembles. And I find my articulation turn into a confessional device. Geeta Kapur is a critic and curator. Her essays are extensively anthologised; her books include Contemporary Indian Artists (1978), When Was Modernism: Essays on Contemporary Cultural Practice in India (2000), Speech Acts (2025), Critic's Compass: Navigating Practice (forthcoming 2025). Make a contribution to Independent Journalism Related News Five 'Asanas' Modi Has Perfected To Deflect and Distract From Real Issues Second Speech in 24 Hours, Modi Invokes Religious Figures But No Mention of Trump Mediation Claims Supreme Court's Bail Condition on Ashoka Professor Mahmudabad: Has Dissent Become Disorder? Watch | 39 Assaults, 19 Acts of Vandalism, 42 Incidents of Harassment Against Muslims Since Pahalgam: Report No Story Is Ever 'Small': Banu Mushtaq's International Booker Acceptance Speech Hush, Shush, Keep Your Conscience Shut The Sole Reason Behind Ali Khan Mahmudabad's Arrest Is That He Is a Muslim Free Speech on Eggshells: What the Ali Khan Mahmudabad Case Signals for All of Us The Curious Crusade of Renu Bhatia Against Ashoka Professor Mahmudabad View in Desktop Mode About Us Contact Us Support Us © Copyright. All Rights Reserved.
The Wire
25-05-2025
- Politics
- The Wire
For Your Own Sake, Please Care for Palestine
Menu हिंदी తెలుగు اردو Home Politics Economy World Security Law Science Society Culture Editor's Pick Opinion Support independent journalism. Donate Now World For Your Own Sake, Please Care for Palestine Anwesha Rana 37 minutes ago It's the human thing to do. Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty. Real journalism holds power accountable Since 2015, The Wire has done just that. But we can continue only with your support. Contribute now What do we mean when we talk about resistance? The process of colonisation is a violent one. Can resistance be non-violent? It has been proved again and again through the ages – colonised nations did not regain independence by asking their oppressors politely, and politeness is not the peak of civilisation anyhow, regardless of what regency-romanticised television might tell you. This piece does not say anything that hasn't been said – yelled, pleaded, sobbed – through the last 20 months. The words here serve only the purpose of keeping myself sane, even if it is only for the few minutes in which I am writing this. 'What are your thoughts on the question of Palestine?' Many public intellectuals have been recorded responding to this. What is the question of Palestine? Palestine has the right to exist free of oppression and colonisers have to leave. There has to be a trial for war crimes and there have to be massive reparations, although nothing will quite be enough. That is all, broadly speaking. The question is not of Palestine, but of the rest of the world, especially the world of the civilised and the great and the developed. It is a question for them to grapple with: what are you? As everybody with a conscience and access to the internet has pointed out, this atrocity is not new. What is new is technological reach that has made it possible for a genocide to be livestreamed. The genocide plays in our houses and twisted news of it plays in our office cafeterias. It is everywhere at once and somehow we are all navigating it. My Twitter (now X) feed is dead babies dead babies dead babies cute cat demolished houses. Some of us cheer at the sight of death, some of us lose our minds as we try to make sense of anything. For all of us, life goes on. Displaced Palestinians flee from Khan Younis, Gaza, amid the ongoing Israeli military offensive in the area, on Monday, May 19, 2025. Photo: AP/PTI. Life goes on until a Real Terror visits our own doorstep. In the age we are in, it feels like the terror must necessarily be at my doorstep for me to feel anything, or to care. Over the last many months as we saw Palestine reduced to rubble, many tried to explain that Palestine is a global cause. It gives us reason to worry about everything. While they struggled to get this point across, a parallel strain ran through our lives where we said that we are tired of caring, we have empathy fatigue, what can we even do for a State where international law has failed? It seems to me that what we can do is care. If it hurts us to see dead babies, we must endure it still in solidarity with those parents who have had their child die in their arms, or those who have had to piece together body parts of their babies. I am not a parent, and the state of the world doesn't inspire me to be one, but does one need to be a parent to feel the terror and horror of disease and death as they chase children? I don't think I need to be anything at all besides being human to understand suffering, to realise that the world order has collapsed, and that individualism will not save us. Palestine is a cause for everyone. If we don't care, we should. Even if we think dead babies are a hyperbole and we want things to be personal enough for us to spare a thought, there is plenty to be worried about. We should care because Palestine has exposed so many truths about global affairs and the world order that do directly impact us. Let us take a step back and look at the things that have unravelled in politics, society, and environment since the 2023 genocide of Palestine began. 'Anti-semitism' First, the concern of anti-semitism. Religion has long been the most powerful tool in the arsenal of politics. Anybody speaking up against Israel's atrocities in Palestine has been branded anti-semitic. In trying to assuage its own complicity and guilt in the Holocaust, the West has now comfortably adopted a stance that can only be read as full and unconditional support of Zionism. The Holocaust is cited as an example to serve the political needs of many, but I am certain that there are many like me who don't for a second believe that any Zionist has the interests of Holocaust survivors in their heart. As the West is quick to counter any condemnation of Israel's genocide machine, the problem they help us see is that of equating Judaism with Zionism. Those who protest Israel, its politicians, and civil society that has gleefully celebrated the annihilation of a people are protesting against the terrors unfurled by a state. That does not mean that the protest is against the Jewish. Is it not anti-semitic to draw this parallel at all? The consistent demand has been to hold Israel accountable for its crimes, and is in no way a call for boycott and harassment of all Jewish people everywhere in the world. That false equivalences serve those in power is obvious enough, evidenced in the many instances where, facing protests from Jews themselves against support of Israel, many powers of the West have been quick to threaten, harass, and even arrest those Jewish citizens. Whose interest is being safeguarded, really? Palestinians look at the damage after an Israeli army airstrike in Beit Lahia, northern Gaza Strip, Monday, April 28, 2025. Photo: AP/PTI. Whither institutions? Second, the absolute collapse of institutions. The ICJ, UN, UNICEF, and all other similar bodies don't mean anything – their significance was diminishing anyhow, but the last twenty months have very quickly exposed their weakened structures. They are no more than vestigial organs of a rapidly disappearing inheritance of the twentieth-century world order. I will not stay long on the subject of their ineffectuality. Let us look, instead, at the disintegration of the university, not only in the West but also closer home. All protests have been silenced, protestors arrested, students suspended and threatened, assaulted on campus, faculty harassed and hounded…name an injustice and it can be found having been executed by the university administration against its own people. The fact of it, that a site of education can so carelessly submit to power without a single thought spared for its people, should terrify us all. If institutions meant to nurture us are so easily capable of handing us over to be brutalised, should we not be terrified as to what other manners of injustices are possible? This isn't even an exercise in imagination. Anything that you will hypothesise has already happened. Difficult as it is for me to believe, being anti-genocide is somehow a radical position. Trickling down from this, we have seen the fate of pro-Palestine activists, students, scholars, artists, actors, poets – not just at the hands of power but, perhaps more concerningly, from their fellow citizens who have given themselves over to propaganda easily and dedicatedly. Palestine is also a feminist issue, albeit a largely unacknowledged one. The feminist world has celebrated International Women's Day (its appropriation from what was originally the International Working Women's Day is a matter for another discourse), asked to address the gender pay gap, held panels on breaking the glass ceiling, and offered discounts on the perfect pantsuits for the girlboss feminist. A curious silence, however, on Palestine. Little to no visibility of women's bodies in offering support for the people of Palestine and standing in strong solidarity with the women of the land who have starved, lost their homes and families, and been absolutely stranded as they struggle to find the most basic of necessities. My understanding of feminism says that it is a struggle against any and all oppression. What do we say, however, when the strongest institutions and powers have decided that this isn't oppression at all? From a thousand real instances, we know that institutions will not protect us, governments will easily discard us, corporations will continue to benefit from us, and there will be no corner for us to hide in or seek comfort from. Also read: Stories of Pelf and Plunder: On the DRC and Palestine Documentaries that Went to the Oscars Against knowledge Third, we should be concerned about the dangerous levels of ignorance and anti-intellectualism that have been exposed. We have arrived at a stage where anything that doesn't serve the purpose of mindless hatred is questionable and condemnable. Think of your WhatsApp groups. Lunchtime conversations at your workplace. The 'harmless' joke from your acquaintances at family gatherings. Tweets from handles of Indians who believe only in Hindu supremacy and thus float on a sea of misinformation, bigotry, deep misogyny, and, the crown jewel of Indian existence – Islamophobia. Now think of what, if anything, makes us uncomfortable in these spaces. Zionists operate with impunity. There is no consequence for actions. Social media is overflowing with those who do not engage with any literature, do not believe in facts, demand no accountability for administrative failures, and remain unbothered by their own realities of despair so long as they can celebrate the oppression of others. They are not fringe elements. We should be worried because social media use is a real reflection of who we cohabit with, and what (and who) they are willing to sacrifice in the name of undivided statehood. The troll who easily writes slurs and threatens people with rape online is a real person that lives amongst us. While it may be three users threatening somebody, check the number of likes on their tweet. The number should be a red alert for civilisation at large. What Zionism's unchecked violence has promoted is this sort of absolute lack of regard for human life. This image provided by World Press Photo and taken by Samar Abu Elouf, for The New York Times, won the World Press Photo Award of the Year and shows Mahmoud Ajjour (9), who was injured during an Israeli attack on Gaza City in March 2024, finds refuge and medical help in Doha, Qatar, 28 June 2024. Photo: AP/PTI. Whose earth? Fourth, the strange dissociation of environmental concerns from the genocide. There have been impossible levels of ecocide perpetrated by Israel through the genocide. The amount of bombs dropped on Palestine has accelerated the climate crisis. Israel has also gone about destroying olive groves and fields, and we have not cared. Greta Thunberg, once beloved by media, has been at once shunned and hounded for her support of Palestine. The refrain has been 'Isn't she a climate activist? Now she is getting into politics?' Where does one even begin to explain that the climate crisis is a political issue? Nothing is devoid of politics. Our existence is political, as are all our choices, beliefs, and actions. Likewise, at home, those questioning the harm caused to the environment because of hyper-developmental projects that benefit only mega conglomerates, are branded anti-national and declared to be enemies of the state. This, of course, links to another wide array of issues in Indian socio-political life, including consumption of meat, exploitation of farmers, the brand-image of veganism and vegetarianism, with Identity being at the centre of it all. At which point should we care? Even if we don't have the space in our minds and hearts to care for anything outside of ourselves just because we should, we can perhaps do better by ourselves by caring. The experience of Palestine is too vast and cruel for us to comprehend in its entirety. What we can conclude, however, is that states are self-serving and we are mere foot soldiers in their wars. The moment we cease to serve their purpose, we become discardable. Any state that does not respect any form of law and order, does not respect us as individuals. It will not protect us. We should care because it is the human thing to do. Delusional as it may be, I hope that our friends in occupied territories everywhere will be closer to freedom sooner than it seems possible at this moment. I hope that none of us have to personally experience anything close to fear of the kind that is unfolding in the world, but that we choose to care regardless. Anwesha Rana is a publishing professional. Make a contribution to Independent Journalism Related News Judge's Order Frees Indian Scholar Detained in US Over Support for Palestine What the 'Cauliflower' in BJP Karnataka's X Post Means TMC Silent as Anti-War Efforts Are Targeted in Bengal UP: Over Two Dozen People Arrested for 'Anti-National' and 'Misleading' Posts on Operation Sindoor Chhattisgarh: Union Govt Must Declare Ceasefire With Maoists; Affected Citizens Must Get a Voice Telangana: Three Greyhounds Commandos Killed in IED Blast Triggered by Suspected Maoists National Unity Cannot Be Celebrated Merely As a Wartime Gimmick 'We've Killed So Many Children – It's Hard to Argue with That': Tel Aviv Protesters in Silent Vigil Global Alliance to Build Societies Free From Hate- test1 View in Desktop Mode About Us Contact Us Support Us © Copyright. All Rights Reserved.
The Wire
22-05-2025
- Business
- The Wire
Is India Heading Towards License Raj Again?
Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty. Notwithstanding the Indian government's recent reiteration of the value of the Production Linked Incentive Scheme, launched in 2021, the larger question persists on the quiet return of the discretionary economic policy regime that stands akin to the days of the pre-1991 'license raj'. This policy reversal more than three decades after India's liberalisation now manifests across many areas of business activity. With India having missed major opportunities in pre-liberalisation times, the current ecosystem of controls and approvals that constrains entrepreneurship is unlikely to deliver the manufacturing growth and employment objectives envisaged by the government. The policy shift has once again led to perplexed and hapless businesspersons walking the corridors of various ministries to ask for policy relaxations, just as they did before the 1991 reforms. Small and medium enterprises are simply staying away from manufacturing with the share of manufacturing enterprises in total unincorporated sector enterprises declining from 28.9% in 2021-22 to 27.4% in 2022-23, according to the Annual Survey of Unincorporated Enterprises. Similarly, the share of manufacturing companies in the corporate sector has dropped from 21% in March 2023 to 19% in March 2025, as per the monthly report of the Union Ministry of Corporate Affairs. Let us take a look at each of the policies which reflect tighter control on the manufacturing sector. Goods and Services Tax The first is with the Goods and Services Tax (GST) introduced in 2017, with multiple returns and slabs. With each GST Council meeting, the goal of just a few rates is driven further away and complex contortions are carried out on different versions of similar products. There can be no better example than the GST applicable on popcorn, 'clarified' at the 55th GST Council meeting, which varies on how it is sold, where it is sold, who it is sold by and what its flavours are. Each meeting sees some rates being clarified, some rates being raised and some rates being reduced across the different slabs. Then there is cess that varies across products. All of this encourages businesspersons to urge for changes in the slabs applicable to them. Tariff rate structure The second is the tariff rate structure. Trade liberalisation was a key objective of the reforms and about two decades ago, one of the Union budgets promised to bring down basic peak customs duty to competitor nation rates. It came down to 10% a few years later but remains at the same level, with both government and industry reluctant to face the impact of lower rates. However, since 2017, there have been multiple tweaks to import tariffs in an attempt to promote domestic manufacturing. About 22% of all imported products were subjected to tariff increases between 2013 and 2023. Less than 10% products saw a decline in tariffs in this period. Tariffs were raised for over 2,300 items between 2017 and 2019 and the average tariff rate saw a rise from 13.5% in 2017 to 17.3% in 2018, causing consternation among foreign observers. The scope for continuous tinkering remains despite the Union Budget 2025 announcement of reducing the number of slabs from 15 to 8 and bringing down the average tariff to 10.66%. PLI Scheme The third crucial example of a discretionary manufacturing policy is the PLI scheme itself. At the outset, the scheme, announced at the peak of the pandemic and applicable for a limited period, had an inbuilt element of selectiveness. Various carefully crafted criteria for eligibility of sectors as well as applicants was incorporated in the scheme documents. The scheme applies to 14 sectors and has 'approved' 764 applications with 176 being MSME. In March 2025, a PLI was announced for electronic components as well. Predictably, the incentives offered under the scheme have also attracted a plethora of calls from other industry sectors for such provisions to be offered to their own sectors. Each year, industry has submitted to the government requests for employment linked incentives, design linked incentives, R&D linked incentives, incentives for new and emerging sectors, gendered employment, or any other factor that would bring their particular sector within the purview of the scheme. This is despite the fact that the incentive amount so far disbursed is only Rs 14,020 of the total Rs 2.04 trillion initially planned to be spent. A rumour about the PLI schemes' shelf life and them not being extended to more sectors has sent frissons among industry players. Ease of doing business is another reform area that has seen somewhat of a setback. While various online forms have been introduced, manual verifications may be required in some and the same information has to be submitted to multiple agencies. Allocation of land, approvals for construction, power connections and other requirements suffer from delays and the introduction of single window systems complicate operations further. Anusandhan National Research Foundation Fund The fifth area of discretionary decision-making is in the Anusandhan National Research Foundation Fund, meant to support R&D and provide grants for research proposals. It is well-known that most of India's meagre 0.6% gross expenditure on R&D to GDP ratio is undertaken by the public sector with private companies contributing less than half of this. A fund of Rs 1 trillion is to be raised to boost private sector investment in sunrise technologies. In Budget 2025, a deep tech fund worth Rs 20,000 crore and another for startups, worth Rs 10,000 crore, were announced. Selecting research projects for funding will likely involve a committee reviewing submitted proposals and picking winners. Similar arbitrariness can be found in the foreign direct investment (FDI) policy, remission of duties and taxes on exported products (RoDTEP) rates, power tariffs, interest rate equalisation scheme, inclusion in infrastructure sector and industry recognition, employment incentives, quality control orders, tax rates for various different asset classes, application of cess and levies and other areas. The applicability of the relevant provisions may depend from extension to extension for short periods of time, sector to sector, size of the enterprises, location of the enterprise and many other factors. States too add on to this multi-layered complex system with their own policy decisions, which appear to change with every change in leadership. No wonder then that it feels as if the country is moving backwards from its reform agenda into a domestic economic environment that is increasingly uncertain and restrictive in the backdrop of an increasingly complex and evolving global economic system. The reforms initiated in 1991, with opening up of sectors to the private sector and removal of the licensing requirement for manufacturing capacity expansion, were followed up with sequential and progressive reforms related to permission to foreign investors to enter the Indian market, lowering of tariffs, financial sector reforms, de-reserving sectors reserved for small enterprises, reducing corporate tax rates and disinvestment of state enterprises. Many sectoral policies also supported a rise in new sectors such as IT and telecom. A new wave of reform policies is now required where hurdles to ease of doing business, reducing cost of doing business, igniting the private sector through access to finance, withdrawal of the state from the markets and boosting social sectors of health and education for employment would be new priorities for the government to consider. Indirect taxes need to be rationalised, complicated approval mechanisms must be simplified, finance and land should be readily available and entrepreneurship must flourish in a competitive and sustainable manner with workers being adequately empowered to be their productive best. India's unfinished liberalisation journey must accelerate to reach its developmental goals at the earliest. Sharmila Kantha is the author of several books on business history. 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.
The Wire
22-05-2025
- Health
- The Wire
Thermal Injustice: 20,000 Indians Died in Heatwaves In 20 Years – Caste a Key Factor
Menu हिंदी తెలుగు اردو Home Politics Economy World Security Law Science Society Culture Editor's Pick Opinion Support independent journalism. Donate Now Top Stories Thermal Injustice: 20,000 Indians Died in Heatwaves In 20 Years – Caste a Key Factor Aathira Perinchery 36 minutes ago Strong associations between caste, occupation, and heat stress exposure are best described as 'thermal injustice', experts say. Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty. Real journalism holds power accountable Since 2015, The Wire has done just that. But we can continue only with your support. Contribute now New Delhi: Heatwaves killed nearly 20,000 people in India between 2001 and 2019, a recent study has found. The study found that men were more susceptible to deaths caused by heat waves in the country. Another recent study also found that heatwave deaths are divided along caste lines – more people belonging to marginalised communities died in India from exposure to heat than people from other communities. This is a kind of 'thermal injustice', researchers who work on the study say. Reports by the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) such as this one in 2021 have warned that India, along with many other parts of Asia, will likely experience more extreme weather events – including heatwaves – in the years to come. The heat is also breaking records every year. According to the India Meteorological Department, February 2025 was the hottest that India has witnessed in 125 years. Killer heat Heatwaves can adversely impact human health. And heat strokes – which can cause not only mild symptoms such as exhaustion and dizziness but also death – are common during this time. A team of scientists from the O.P. Jindal Global University in Sonipat, Haryana, studied deaths caused by extreme outdoor temperatures in India, and also looked at age and gender parities in such deaths. For this, they analysed data from several governmental sources – such as temperature data from the India Meteorological Department and mortality data from the National Crime Records Bureau. 'These strong associations between caste, occupation, and heat stress exposure are best described as 'thermal injustice', the study noted. The team found that between 2001 and 2019, India reported 19,693 deaths due to heatstroke and 15,197 deaths due to cold exposure. However, these numbers would be an underestimate due to the underreporting of deaths caused by exposure to such extreme temperatures, the study – published on April 29 in the peer-reviewed journal Temperature – noted. People in the age-group of 45-60 years were most susceptible to die both due to heatstroke and cold exposure, followed by the elderly (60 and above) and those between 30-45 years. The study also found that deaths from heatstroke are more common among men; male deaths were three to five times higher due to heatstroke when compared to deaths of women during this time. 'The higher death toll from heatstroke in working-age men may reflect the fact that men are more likely to work outdoors than women,' Pradeep Guin, professor at the O.P. Jindal Global University and co-author of the study, said in a statement. State-wise data from 2001 to 2014 also showed that the three states with the greatest number of deaths due to heatstroke were Andhra Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and Punjab. Per their study, the findings show 'an urgent need to strengthen welfare and social support systems and invest in built environment and livelihood interventions to counter the avoidable mortality from extreme temperature events'. 'With an intense heatwave forecast to hit most of the country this summer and extreme weather events becoming more frequent around the globe as the world warms, there is no time to be lost in raising awareness about the dangers of extreme temperatures and putting in place measures to reduce their impact. Support systems exist, but more needs to be done,' Guin, who studies climate change, the environment, health, politics and governance, commented in a press release. 'We believe that the government should consider offering some form of social support to outdoor workers, particularly low-income workers and those on a daily wage, who may feel they have no option but to turn up to work, whatever the temperature is,' commented Nandita Bhan, a co-author of the study and professor at the Jindal School of Public Health and Human Development at the O.P Jindal Global University, in a press release. 'Thermal injustice' Deaths due to heatwaves in India are also divided along caste lines, according to another recent study. A team from institutes including the Indian Institutes of Management (in Bangalore and Ahmedabad) used satellite data to obtain fine-scale information on heat stress exposure during the summers of 2019 and 2022 and compared this with data from the Periodic Labor Force Survey, which contained several demographic indicators to specifically look at people (a sample size of more than 1 lakh) who worked outdoors. They found that people from dominant castes spent 27-28% of their working time outdoors, whereas people belonging to the Scheduled Tribes (ST) communities spent 43-49% of their working hours doing such work. Together, people belonging to both the Scheduled Castes (SC) and ST communities spent more than 75% of their working hours outdoors in at least 65 districts across the country over the two years. But could this be because marginalised groups live in hotter areas? The team was able to ascertain that this was not the case by analysing exposure to land surface temperature at night. 'These strong associations between caste, occupation, and heat stress exposure are best described as 'thermal injustice', the study noted. 'While workers in a free market would be free to choose combinations of wages-occupational risks that optimise their preferences, our findings imply that the positions of these combinations are shifted by caste, to the detriment of marginalised groups in India,' the study said. Further, the study's 'robust evidence for the association between caste identity and exposure to heat stress shows why adaptation and mitigation plans in India must account for the hierarchical social order characterised by the 'division of labourers' along caste lines rather than the mere division of labour,' it added. Data from the NCRB – which Guin and his co-authors used in their latest study – did not provide any caste-related information, so they could not test the issue of caste-specific deaths caused by heatwaves in their study, Guin told The Wire. 'The Demography article is very interesting, and it is evident that scholars there have used data to test the association between caste and heat stress, and recommending implementation of caste-based adaptation and mitigation plans,' Guin told The Wire over email. Make a contribution to Independent Journalism Related News Can the BJP Merge Aggressive and Inclusive Hinduism? How Women Farmers in the Sundarban Are Reviving Indigenous Rice Varieties As Delhi Courses Through Another Punishing Summer, Residents Are Once Again Pushed to the Brink Climate Change May Have Played a Big Role in North India's April Heatwave Those Opposing Caste Survey in Karnataka are Among the Most Socially Advanced Communities in the State With Bihar BJP Facing Setbacks After Pahalgam, Questions Hover Over Poll-Bound State's Politics 'Dalit Converts Not Under SC/ST Act': A Colonial‑Era Logic in a 21st‑Century Courtroom How Contract Labour and Caste Inequality Undermine India's Sanitation Drive 'Saying Caste Census Will Take Place Not Enough': Opp Keeps up Pressure After BJP's U-Turn View in Desktop Mode About Us Contact Us Support Us © Copyright. All Rights Reserved.
