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Correspondent

23 August 2024 at 4:29:04 pm

Festive Surge

India’s bazaars have glittered this Diwali with the unmistakable glow of consumer confidence. The country’s festive sales crossed a staggering Rs. 6 lakh crore with goods alone accounting for Rs. 5.4 lakh crore and services contributing Rs. 65,000 crore. More remarkable still, the bulk of this spending flowed through India’s traditional markets rather than e-commerce platforms. After years of economic caution and digital dominance, Indians are once again shopping in person and buying local....

Festive Surge

India’s bazaars have glittered this Diwali with the unmistakable glow of consumer confidence. The country’s festive sales crossed a staggering Rs. 6 lakh crore with goods alone accounting for Rs. 5.4 lakh crore and services contributing Rs. 65,000 crore. More remarkable still, the bulk of this spending flowed through India’s traditional markets rather than e-commerce platforms. After years of economic caution and digital dominance, Indians are once again shopping in person and buying local. This reversal owes much to policy. The recent rationalisation of the Goods and Services Tax (GST) which trimmed rates across categories from garments to home furnishings, has given consumption a timely push. Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman’s September rate cuts, combined with income tax relief and easing interest rates, have strengthened household budgets just as inflation softened. The middle class, long squeezed between rising costs and stagnant wages, has found reason to spend again. Retailers report that shoppers filled their bags with everything from lab-grown diamonds and casual wear to consumer durables and décor, blurring the line between necessity and indulgence. The effect has been broad-based. According to Crisil Ratings, 40 organised apparel retailers, who together generate roughly a third of the sector’s revenue, could see growth of 13–14 percent this financial year, aided by a 200-basis-point bump from GST cuts alone. Small traders too have flourished. The Confederation of All India Traders (CAIT) estimates that 85 percent of total festive trade came from non-corporate and traditional markets, a robust comeback for brick-and-mortar retail that had been under siege from online rivals. This surge signals a subtle but significant cultural shift. The “Vocal for Local” and “Swadeshi Diwali” campaigns struck a patriotic chord, with consumers reportedly preferring Indian-made products to imported ones. Demand for Chinese goods fell sharply, while sales of Indian-manufactured products rose by a quarter over last year. For the first time in years, “buying Indian” has become both an act of economic participation and of national pride. The sectoral spread of this boom underlines its breadth. Groceries and fast-moving consumer goods accounted for 12 percent of the total, gold and jewellery 10 percent, and electronics 8 percent. Even traditionally modest categories like home furnishings, décor and confectionery recorded double-digit growth. In the smaller towns that anchor India’s consumption story, traders say stable prices and improved affordability kept registers ringing late into the festive weekend. Yet, much of this buoyancy rests on a fragile equilibrium. Inflation remains contained, and interest rates have been eased, but both could tighten again. Sustaining this spurt will require continued fiscal prudence and regulatory clarity, especially as digital commerce continues to expand its reach. Yet for now, the signs are auspicious. After years of subdued demand and inflationary unease, India’s shoppers appear to have rediscovered their appetite for consumption and their faith in domestic enterprise. The result is not only a record-breaking Diwali, but a reaffirmation of the local marketplace as the heartbeat of India’s economy.

Blindfolded Justice

At a moment when Pakistan led by the sinister Asim Munir is stoking militancy in Kashmir and trying to destabilize India, the country expects a judiciary that treats ideological subversion with insouciance. A vacation bench of the Bombay High Court chose precisely a path of condescension over caution. In reserving its harshest remarks for the police while granting bail to a 19-year-old engineering student from Pune who vitriolically declared “Pakistan Zindabad” in an Instagram post (since deleted), the court bench displayed an astonishing blindness to the nature of modern asymmetric warfare.


The student was no naïve child. She was a conscious adult, fully aware of the consequences of her words. Her long post, dripping with invective, went far beyond dissent. She accused India of “fascism” and “fanatic Islamophobic terrorism.” She likened India’s measured retaliatory strikes to Israeli aggression and justified Pakistan’s position amid a national security crisis. She ended her screed with the rallying cry of a hostile nation: “Pakistan Zindabad.”


This should be seen for what it is: not protest but dangerous propaganda. Yet the Bombay HC bench reserved their harshest words not for the student, but for the Pune police, deeming her arrest “absolutely shocking” while criticising the college for rusticating her. The court went as far as to demand her reinstatement for exams, as if academic calendars should triumph over national integrity.


Is this ‘woke’ jurisprudence masquerading as compassion? The girl should have been granted corrective counselling at the very least. She should have been confronted with the ramifications of her words, taught the difference between dissent and sedition, and made to reckon with the privilege of citizenship in a liberal democracy.


Modern terror does not always arrive in the form of bombs or bullets. It spreads through memes, posts and reels that seek to delegitimize the state, radicalise the gullible and embolden the enemy. To condone such behaviour under the guise of youthful indiscretion may result in playing directly into Pakistan’s playbook.


The court’s alarming observation that the police were ‘ruining’ the girl’s life needs to be viewed in the context of the police doing their job by upholding laws crafted specifically to address threats to our sovereignty and unity. Were they heavy-handed? Perhaps. But in a nation under siege, can one truly fault them for erring on the side of vigilance?


To argue, as the bench did, that remorse, deletion, and an apology suffice as absolution is a dangerous precedent. Ideological indoctrination does not vanish with a deleted post. In 2015, Pune’s Anti-Terror Squad had uncovered a chilling case of a 16-year-old girl groomed by ISIS operatives, ready to abandon her life for jihad. The spiral begins with online flirtations with extremism. It ends in blood.


The verdict of the court can easily be misconstrued as a message to India’s enemies - foreign and domestic - that even the most inflammatory speech, if cloaked in academic youthfulness, will find sympathy in Indian courts. Worse, that young radicals have little to fear, that expression of remorse is enough, and that consequences of behaving irresponsibly and recklessly during a national crisis are optional.

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