GAUTAM Adani’s calling Hindenburg’s allegations of fraud against him an attack on the Indian nation is a matter of particular significance. Just before this episode, the BBC documentary on Modi had been labelled a product of the colonial mindset by the government and hence also construed to be an attack on the Indian nation. Adani would not have dared to equate himself with the nation, exactly the way Modi had done, unless he was certain that Modi would concur with such equating. Both Modi and Adani in short see their respective selves, and each other, as the embodiments of the nation.

ECONOMIC theory makes much of “rent goods”. A “rent good” is one whose supply cannot be augmented at will, simply through investing more on its production; its supply is subject to constraints imposed by nature, because of which there is a certain maximum rate of long-run growth which is exogenously given and cannot be altered at will. If this good is used as an essential input for the production of other goods, then the long-run growth of other goods too gets tethered to this exogenously given maximum rate of growth of the rent good.

THE IMF managing director Kristalina Georgieva has now openly admitted that the year 2023 will witness the slowing down of the world economy to a point where as much as one-third of it will see an actual contraction in gross domestic product. This is because all the three major economic powers in the world, the US, the European Union, and China, will witness slowdowns, the last of these because of the renewed Covid upsurge.

THE hegemony of imperialism is invariably associated with an agrarian crisis in countries of the global south; in fact agrarian crisis is just the other side of the ascendancy of imperialism. This is evident from the case of Indian agriculture. The colonial period saw a more or less perpetual agrarian crisis, whose starkest manifestation was in the form of recurring famines. Colonial rule in India began with the East India Company acquiring the revenue-collecting rights over Bengal from the Mughal Emperor Shah Alam in 1765.

THE fact that income and wealth inequalities have increased quite dramatically under the neo-liberal regime is beyond dispute. The empirical work by Piketty’s team bears out the increase in income inequality. They use income tax data to infer about the share of the top 1 per cent of the population of a country in its national income. One may raise objections to this method of estimation, but the conclusions are so overwhelming that one can scarcely quarrel with them.