IMF Expects Turbulent Time for Indian Economy; POCSO Summons for BJP's Yediyurappa; Tharoor Takes on Express
Sheikh Hasina’s land minister amassed a global property empire, what drives Punjab's migrants? Revisiting 'Nayak', Satyajit Ray and Uttam Kumar’s film on the frailties of stardom
A newsletter from The Wire | Founded by Tanweer Alam, Sidharth Bhatia, Pratik Kanjilal, Seema Chishti, Sushant Singh, MK Venu, and Siddharth Varadarajan | Contributing writer: Kalrav Joshi, with additional inputs by Anirudh SK
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Snapshot of the day
February 28, 2025
Siddharth Varadarajan
India’s much-hyped economy is facing serious turbulence, with the International Monetary Fund flagging rising risks from geopolitical fragmentation, slowing domestic demand and policy inertia, reports Bloomberg. In its latest report, the IMF paints a grim picture – regional conflicts, volatile commodity prices and cyberthreats threaten to derail growth, while weak income recovery and extreme weather could hammer private consumption and investment. Despite boasting world-beating GDP growth, India’s economic outlook is riddled with uncertainties, with risks “tilted to the downside.” The government’s lofty dream of becoming a developed nation remains just that – a dream – unless long-pending structural reforms are implemented.
India’s economy expanded 6.2% in the October-December quarter, roughly in line with expectations, as increased government spending offset a stubborn weakness in consumption and rural consumption, reports Reuters, but there are risks looming.
India’s benchmark indices Nifty50 and Sensex faced a sharp decline today, weighed down by the impact of Donald Trump’s tariffs, continued Foreign Institutional Investor (FII) selling, and weak global cues. The Sensex plunged 1.97%, or 1,471 points, to an intraday low of 73,141. Meanwhile, the Nifty50 slipped 1.95%, or 440 points, to an intraday low of 22,105. The Sensex eventually ended with a loss of 1,414 points at 73,198, and the Nifty 420 points lower at 22,2125 on Friday. Among the top losers on the NSE and BSE were IndusInd Bank (down 6.18%), Tech Mahindra (5.83%), M&M (4.27%), and HCLTech (3.69%). Notably, stocks like Infosys, M&M, Bharti Airtel, TCS, and HCLTech were the top contributors to the downward pressure on the indices.
As the markets bled red, social media erupted with a flurry of memes — as investors once again found succour in gallows humour.
India’s meteoric rise in wealth has birthed a staggering 868,000 millionaires and 185 billionaires, but beneath the glitz lies a murky world of dubious wealth management, reports Advait Palepu for Bloomberg. With restrictions on offshore investments, the rich are pouring billions into risky alternative investment funds (AIFs), high-yield bonds, and direct lending—often with little oversight.
The Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) is now scrambling to rein in rampant mis-selling, as unscrupulous advisors push volatile assets onto investors chasing ever-higher returns. AIFs alone have ballooned to nearly $60 billion, more than doubling since 2020, fueled by reckless speculation. Industry insiders warn that if left unchecked, this frenzy could destabilise India’s wealth management sector and stifle corporate fundraising. Yet, SEBI remains tight-lipped.
But then.
The India division of the Technicolor Group, a French Visual effects and animation graphics company, has shut down its Bengaluru and Mumbai operations, reports The Hindu with over 3,000 jobs affected in the country.
India and the European Union have finally set a year-end deadline for their long-stalled free trade pact, driven more by fear of US tariff hikes than any real breakthrough in negotiations. For years, India’s sky-high tariffs on European cars, whiskey, and wine have stalled progress, while the EU refuses to ease visa restrictions for Indian professionals. Now, with Trump’s protectionist policies looming, both sides are desperate to strike a deal. India wants lower duties on its textiles and pharmaceuticals, while the EU eyes tariff cuts before its carbon tax hits Indian steel and cement.
Manipur governor Ajay Kumar Bhalla has extended the deadline to surrender looted and illegal weapons to 4pm on March 6. The order was issued on Friday after the end of the seven-day ultimatum on February 20 for voluntarily surrendering the weapons which were looted in the ongoing ethnic conflict in Manipur. Prior to the extension of the deadline, 246 weapons were surrendered on Thursday by the Meitei group Arambai Tenggol at the 1st Manipur Rifles campus, reports Hindustan Times.
After the Arambai Tenggol surrendered weapons, Manipur-based Kuki-Zo organisations - Indigenous Tribal Leaders Forum (ITLF) and the Committee on Tribal Unity (COTU) dismissed the governor’s move as a “mere gesture” and a “strategic attempt to improve public image” and gain “sympathy and legitimacy.” In a joint statement, the two organisations asserted that the surrender of 246 looted arms by Arambai Tenggol is merely symbolic, accounting for only 5% of the 6,000 weapons looted from Imphal Valley. “This move is a calculated effort to enhance their public image, particularly in the wake of their meeting with Manipur governor Ajay Kumar Bhalla. It is a tactical ploy to garner sympathy and legitimacy. Accusing Arambai Tenggol of being responsible for the deaths of more than 230 Kuki-Zo community members, the two organisations reiterated their demand for a separate administration for their people.
Former BJP Chief Minister of Karnataka BS Yeddyurappa has been summoned by a special court that tries cases involving legislators to answer charges framed under the provisions of the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act. Deccan Herald reports: “The chargesheet filed by the CID stated that former chief minister Yediyurappa had sexually harassed the 17-year-old daughter of the complainant woman on February 2, 2024. The incident had happened at Yediyurappa’s house when the complainant and her daughter had gone to seek help in another case. The CID police had filed the chargesheet against Yediyurappa under IPC sections 354A, 204, 214 and section 8 of the POCSO Act.”
A WIRED investigation finds Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite internet system “is keeping modern slavery Compounds online” in Myanmar.
Those community events that have become a fixture of Narendra Modi’s engagements abroad are not the product of spontaneous goodwill by Indian origin folks living there but carefully curated and well-funded programmes organised by the Indian goverrnment and paid for by Modi’s PMO. The recent Moscow community event cost Rs 1.87 crore, the PMO revealed in response to an RTI query.
An avalanche in Chamoli in the Uttarakhand Himalaya has trapped several labourers working for the Border Roads Organisation. Ten workers have been rescued, the army’s Surya Command said, and Kishor Rawat reports that 25 others are yet to be saved. Uttarakhand’s director general of police said that inclement weather has caused the roads to be “completely blocked”, and Chamoli’s district magistrate said that the poor weather has precluded the use of helicopters. Meanwhile, in the underground irrigation tunnel of the Srisailam Left Bank Canal in Telangana, rescue efforts as of late this morning – six days after eight workers were trapped there by a roof failure – were in the final 50-metre stretch, reports The Hindu.
An expert committee of the University Grants Commission has drafted new regulations to prevent caste discrimination in higher education institutes and the UGC will solicit the public’s comments on it, it told the Supreme Court yesterday in a petition by the mothers of students Rohith Vemula and Payal Tadvi – both of whom died by suicide and had alleged caste discrimination at their universities – alleging “rampant” discrimination in higher education.
The Gujarat government has told the state assembly that as of December 2024, 1,18,071 bicycles meant for socially and educationally backward class (SEBC) and scheduled caste (SC) students under the Saraswati Sadhana Yojana remain undelivered to the beneficiaries. The scheme, which was started by the BJP government with the objective of providing bicycles to class 9 girls for commuting to school, aims to boost the attendance of students from marginalised communities, reports The New Indian Express. While the government demanded 13,300 bicycles for SC students and 98,212 for SEBC, the Gujarat Rural Industries Marketing Corporation Ltd. (GRIMC) delivered only 6,829 bicycles to SC students and 77,607 to SEBC students, resulting in a shortfall of 6,871 and 20,605 bicycles. Thereafter, in 2024, the government sought 12,800 bicycles for SC students and 1,05,271 bicycles for SEBC students from the GRIMC, but not a single cycle has been provided.
Speaking of which, more than 5,000 Gujaratis have been allegedly involved in a nationwide Gain Bitcoin scam worth Rs 6,606 crore.
‘We are like this only’, but this has caused issues for some international clients of the world’s largest call centre operator Teleperformance in understanding us. That’s why the company is enlisting the help of an AI service that will ‘smoothen’ out the accents of Indian customer service agents so that, as per the firm’s deputy CEO, there is more “intimacy”, increased “customer satisfaction” and reduced “average handling time”. The company that made the ‘accent-softening’ technology – which will also smooth over Filipino accents – claims it did so to mitigate “accent-based discrimination”.
Archaeologists in Tamil Nadu have unearthed what could be the earliest evidence of iron-making, dating back to 3345 BCE, shaking up the established civilisational timeline. For over two decades, excavations in the region have revealed early scripts, advanced urban settlements and maritime trade links, reinforcing its role as a hub of ancient civilisation and commerce. Now, this groundbreaking discovery suggests that Tamil Nadu may have pioneered iron metallurgy long before previously thought. If confirmed, it could rewrite global history. Read this piece from the BBC to understand how this find challenges conventional narratives on early human progress.
Express group pushed fake narratives about Tharoor
In a thread on X, Congress leader Shashi Tharoor has called out the Indian Express for doing “two somewhat shameless things”. For context, Tharoor was already in the eye of a storm after he wrote an opinion piece for The New Indian Express (a masthead that is unrelated to the Indian Express) that praised Kerala’s industrial growth. His party criticised him in the state. Days later, Tharoor appeared on a Malayalam podcast for the Indian Express, which swiftly reported in English that the Congress leader had said that he has “other options” if his party no longer needs him. In the podcast itself, Tharoor indicated that he wasn’t talking about political options. However, media houses leapt onto the angle that Tharoor was exploring other “political options”, in turn prompting attacks on him.
Breaking his silence on X, Tharoor criticised the Indian Express, saying it “took an innocuous statement…and made a headline out of it in English” and left him “dealing with the mess”. He also accused the newspaper of running a “fake news story claiming I had decried the absence of a leader” in the Kerala Congress. Tharoor wrote that multiple news organisations ran with the story and when he “challenged this claim”, he was “provided an English ‘translation’ of my Malayalam interview” even though he asked for the original video clip. The Indian Express later published a correction saying it had inaccurately translated Tharoor’s remarks on there being an absence of leaders in the Kerala Congress. Tharoor said the episode “has merely added to my profound scepticism about Indian journalism altogether, which has again maintained its usual standards of utter unreliability”.
Sheikh Hasina’s land minister amassed a global property empire
Former Bangladesh land minister Saifuzzaman Chowdhury and his close relatives have owned a far greater number of properties than was previously reported, finds the Financial Times; their perusal of leaked and official sources indicates that the tycoon’s family came to own 315 properties across England, 142 in Dubai, six in Florida and three in New Jersey. The total of 482 properties they acquired between 1992 and 2024 – when Sheikh Hasina was deposed – cost at least $295 million. Chowdhury happens to be one of the targets the interim government of Muhammad Yunus is pursuing as part of its attempts to recover money it says was siphoned off by elites during Hasina’s rule.
What drives migrants to leave Punjab?
Alisha Dutta reports from rural Punjab on the motivations of locals both young and old in trying to travel abroad – often without legal documentation – and the feelings of those who were deported back to India. One young man said people like himself ‘have no choice’ but to travel abroad because there is only so much they can earn given their education and only so much that agriculture yields as income. The parents of some youth have urged them to travel abroad out of fear that they will be consumed by the state’s drug abuse problem. More than one person Dutta spoke to said they or their relatives had sold parts of their land to finance their dunki journeys.
The Long Cable
Revisiting Nayak, Satyajit Ray and Uttam Kumar’s Film on the Frailties of Stardom
Sayandeb Chowdhury
In 1951, a cartoon called ‘Bengal’s Hero’ appeared in the satirical Bengali periodical Achalpotro (roughly, ‘Useless Papers’), showing a waddling baby with the face of a struggling actor, who, holding within his embrace the neck of his much-older beloved, was uttering, ‘Dear, do you love me?’ The baby’s face was that of a rookie actor called Uttam Kumar Chattopadhyay, about 25 at that time.
A clerk at the office of Calcutta Port Commissioner, Uttam was moonlighting as a straggler in cinema, and was found generally wanting in credentials of both natural rearing and institutional training. His films came a cropper, and if anything came his way, they were rebuffs, sneers and snubs, like the cartoon, which infantilised him.
Cut to just six years later. The romantic melodrama Harano Sur (‘The Lost Tune’, based partly on Mervin LeRoy-directed Random Harvest) had a phenomenal box office response, and also won a Certificate of Merit from the Indian government. So the lead actor of the film, who was also the co-producer, had to travel to Delhi to collect the award. The fact is that on the day of his travel, the local police chief showed up and requested that the trip be cancelled, because Howrah Station was choked to its last inch, the crowds having gone wild in expectation of his arrival.
After much deliberation, it was decided that the star’s car was to be ushered in through the station’s exit gate, from which a couple of policemen, wrestling with the crowd, managed to huddle him into the train as waves of cheer in his name echoed through the portals of the humongous station. The name of this actor? Uttam Kumar. He was by then Bengali cinema’s top movie star, on his way to becoming the biggest ever.
Such dazzling, epochal success from a state of nameless toil is not very rare in cinema, even if it is not de rigueur. Most of them shape into memoirs, biographies, remembrances, urban legends at best. Some are all of these, and then also become the basis of an arthouse movie. Satyajit Ray’s Nayak (The Hero, 1966) is among the last. It chronicles a screen rags-to-riches theme, broadly based on the real life of a cine heartthrob. And Ray invited none other than that very star, Uttam Kumar, to enact a phenomenal story of stardom that was tantalisingly close to his very own life
The Hero has had a re-release this week across the country, thanks to the film’s original producer RD Bansal’s family, who have restored the 35mm print to a pristine 2k digitised version. The release is in anticipation of the film completing 60 years next year, which is to coincide with the centenary of Uttam Kumar.
Nayak is about the suave and charming matinee idol Arindam Mukherjee, who is headed for New Delhi on a train from Calcutta to accept a prestigious award. The enclosed space of the first-class journey muzzles and liberates him in equal measure, till, accosted by the probing of a woman journalist named Aditi, Arindam begins to open up about his deepest fears. In a span of a night’s journey, escaping his usual routine, and yet caught within the confines of the train, the always-on-the-verge-of-being mobbed screen icon battles gossip, entrenched loneliness, and severe self-doubt to be able to emerge into a state of better contemplation of his frailties. As the train arrives in Delhi, Aditi disembarks and walks away stoically, while the hero vanishes into the ecstatic cry of assembled adulation.
Foregrounded by a real-life star at the peak of his popularity, Ray turned the script into a film-length deconstruction of the idea of the celluloid hero, his script digging deeper and deeper into the grey zone of the unconscious where the man and the persona, the actor and star, the real life and the reel image were in a state of perpetual encounter with each other. In almost every frame and through each gaze of his camera, Ray teases, torments, cajoles, pampers and provokes the not-so-fictional star. Uttam, beckoned by an author-backed role and Ray’s witty, polished script, played along, layers his flawless enactment with pitch-perfect sophistication.
In that sense, the film barely remains a general story of any heartthrob who must conquer self-doubt and the seductions of solicitous attention. In fact, in the course of the film it becomes evident that a couple of minor differences aside, Arindam Mukherjee is Uttam. We certainly know that whether in his public poise or in his private agony, whether in his charismatic finesse or in his alcoholic stupor, Uttam’s Arindam is matchless and marvellous. And at each such point Arindam is none other than Uttam Kumar. Effectively, what Ray’s script was doing was daring the actor in Uttam to deconstruct the star. This meant that the better Uttam played the troubled hero, the more the fictional star (and in extension, the real star) would find himself diminished.
And Uttam, the real-life star, manages to wade through all this with astonishing confidence. It must have been very daring for Uttam to perform a clinical surgery on his own stardom, unperturbed by the possibility of perforating the carefully-constructed mythos that surround a star figure. No less weighty a presence is Sharmila Tagore’s Aditi, and the host of cameos that populate the script, each of them with varying degrees of interest in, or disregard for, the star.
Federico Fellini’s 8 &1/2 and Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries were long considered to be references for Ray in this film, but it must be noted that the leads in them - Marcello Mastroianni and Victor Sjöström - were playing themselves. Uttam’s Arindam Mukherjee gave Nayak very atypical tensions, which were not only limited to the diegetic world of the film but spilled over into a refined contest between a celebrated auteur of art-house realism, and the Hollywood-like hero of a popular, crowd-pleasing industry. Both Uttam and Ray were conscious of this contest, making Nayak repository of tensions that stalk both cinema-making and cinema-stardom. That it involved two titans of Bengali cinema from two purported ‘schools’ of filmmaking cemented the film’s overall reputation as an homage to cinema itself. Apart from the sensational performances, this is precisely why the re-released film should appeal to anyone who is interested in both the craft and philosophy of cinema in the 20th century.
Nayak is also notable for being the last Ray film with his original and much-feted cinematographer Subrata Mitra. It remains one of the latter’s most accomplished works, especially the way the train sequences could make astonishing use of ‘back projection’, other scenes making use of bounced light, and the ‘Iris In’ for cutting between long shots and close ups.
There are detailed notes by Ray in various articles about ways in which the measured effect of a moving train was to be mimicked, say in the shaking of a glass of water on the table, or mirror pinned to the bathroom wall. And then came the tight, formidable close ups. Editing wise, Ray has revealed about the use of ‘cuts’ instead of dissolve, for he and his editor Dulal Dutta wanted to keep abreast ‘with the changing vocabulary of filmmaking’. No less praise was reserved for Banshi Chandragupta, Ray’s art and production designer, who had been able to make an exact replica of a vestibule coach in the studio with actual parts, inviting technicians from the Railway Coach Factory close to Calcutta.
The set itself became a cause celebre during the shoot of the film, and among others Uttam recounted how his jaw fell when he first encountered the exact interiors of a train that seem to have been conjured magically inside the dank empty space of a familiarly drab studio. Many of the train sounds were recorded as sync sound separately by Ray and Mitra, which Ray used along with what he calls the overall ‘jazz idiom’ of the soundtrack. Much of these technical finesse could not be enjoyed in the various other formats Nayak had so far been seen in its afterlife - television and DVD. The restored version released on the big screen, which I saw, made one realize and revel anew at the film’s consummate technical artistry.
Realising how the film bored into Uttam’s own life, Ray dedicated a substantive homage to Uttam Kumar after his very untimely death at 53, in 1980. Among other encomiums, he wrote in an article in Sunday magazine, “some days ago I saw my film Nayak after a gap of ten or maybe twelve years. Many of you must have seen it too. I saw the film with rapt attention and have detected a few issues with my direction... But did you see Uttam Kumar? In a two-hour film that centres around him, he is perfect from every angle, in every scene. The story, the script, the making is mine. But Uttam made it his own with the charisma and effortlessness that only an actor of his calibre could do. Discerning viewers of cinema can identify the difference between good performance extolled by the filmmaker, and performance that is endowed with the gifts intrinsic to the performer. And I can vouch for the fact that Uttam excelled in the second. I find no fault with him as an actor… There is none like him and there will be no one to ever replace him. He was and is unparalleled in Bengali, even Indian cinema”. And Nayak remains the best testimonial of a top actor in top form.
(Sayandeb Chowdhury teaches literature and cinema at Krea University, AP. He is the author of Uttam Kumar, A Life in Cinema (Bloomsbury, 2021))
Reportedly
The Madhya Pradesh authorities have said the crowds seen on video fighting over free food at the Global Investors Summit in Bhopal were not actually global investors but students and commoners allowed in on the second day.
Deep dive
Right wingers use Bollywood blockbuster Chhava for anti-Muslim politics on national level. But in Maharashtra, the story is different, weaved in a complex layers of identities. Amey Tirodkar on how “Chhaava was meant to fan Hindu rage against Muslims but new claims that Sambhaji’s whereabouts were leaked by a Brahmin clerk has reignited the Brahmin vs Maratha debate, underlining the complex intersection of caste, history and nationalist politics.”
Prime number: All of 7
Since Uttarakhand implemented its uniform civil code a month ago, a total of seven couples have chosen to register their live-in relationships as required by the state UCC, Narendra Sethi reports.Opeds you don’t want to miss
Following the Maha Kumbh, it is apparent that Yogi Adityanath is better poised than Amit Shah to succeed Modi, argues Harish Khare. While the home minister “has not endeared himself to the BJP constituency”, Adityanath “has acquired a certain mass appeal, way beyond Uttar Pradesh”.
South India is ahead of the Hindi belt economically, more literate and able to control its population. Why should it allow Hindiwallas to impose Hindi on it and, importantly, why should it support delimitation which ensures that the Hindi belt rules India forever, asks Vir Sanghvi.
The Vedas don’t mention Hindu pilgrimages, says Anirudh Kanisetti, so when did they become mainstream?
Former RBI governor Shaktikanta Das’s appointment as principal secretary to the prime minister is reminiscent of the career trajectories of GC Murmu and Gyanesh Kumar, former comptroller and auditor general and currently chief election commissioner respectively, writes Ajoy Ashirwad Mahaprashasta. The optics around all their appointments are potentially poor, but that’s probably not something Modi will care about, he says.
A quiet saffron march is underway in Kerala and other parts of South India. It may not have yielded electoral results yet but the BJP’s vote share has increased. In some parts, upper caste Hindus are solidly behind the BJP. Ziya Us Salam reviews Nissim Mannathukkaren’s edited book which “examines the rise of Hindutva in relation to the State’s history, caste, culture, post-truth, ideology, gender, politics and the Indian national space”.
PDT Achary explains why he thinks the current law on selecting Union election commissioners will result in free and fair elections becoming a casualty. The Supreme Court “will have to take a hard look at this law,” he says.
Listen up
Even as Trump plans a reset of the world order, India has a positive role to play in it, says former diplomat Sanjay Bhattacharyya. Speaking to Sidharth Bhatia in The Wire Talks he argues that India’s “voice for liberal values is recognised” around the globe, but that this will not amount to much if we do not “improve the condition of our own citizens”. Bhattacharyya is also critical of the hit India’s exchequer would take were it to buy America’s F-35 fighter jets.
Watch out
The Supreme Court has refused to interfere with a Madras High Court order quashing a show cause notice issued to preacher Jaggi Vasudev’s Isha Foundation for carrying out construction work at its Coimbatore campus without obtaining environmental clearance, reports Live Law. Dismissing the Tamil Nadu Pollution Control Board’s challenge to the judgement, a bench of Justices Surya Kant and NK Singh directed that no coercive steps be taken in regards to the construction of the Isha Yoga and Meditation Centre. The bench, however, clarified that the order should not be considered a precedent for regularising illegal constructions.
Meanwhile, journalist Shyam Meera Singh says he has uncovered evidence of mass sexual harassment at Sadhguru’s ashram, citing official emails of Sadhguru’s closest aide, Bharathi Vardaraj, and Isha Foundation’s Maa Pradyuta which reveal that Sadhguru gives diksha (initiations) by having minor girls remove their upper garments. Watch below:
Over and out
Do you know why Shah Jahan picked white marble in particular to build the Taj Mahal with, or that its manicured garden was once lush and more like an orchard? Those are but two of the very interesting details about the monument that Morgan Goldberg discusses with Islamic art professor Kishwar Rizvi and tour guide BK Jain.
That’s it for today. We’ll be back with you on Monday, on a device near you. If The India Cable was forwarded to you by a friend (perhaps a common friend!) book your own copy by SUBSCRIBING HERE.