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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.

Peace Posturing

It was a spectacle only Donald Trump could conjure: a ceasefire between two nuclear-armed rivals, India and Pakistan, announced not through military commands or backchannel diplomacy, but via Truth Social, the US President’s personal megaphone on X.


On May 10, Trump declared that cross-border hostilities had ended while crediting himself for brokering peace and lauding the “strength, wisdom, and fortitude” of both countries. Hours later, gunfire echoed once again in Srinagar, laying bare the farce. New Delhi, unsurprisingly, dismissed the announcement. Trump’s intrusion into a volatile situation - India’s ongoing Operation Sindoor against terror camps in Pakistan-occupied territory - was not just premature but offensive. Washington had played no role in halting hostilities. That did not stop Trump from claiming otherwise, or from dusting off an old fantasy which is solving the Kashmir dispute.


This is not the first time the bombastic US President has fancied himself a peacemaker in South Asia. During his previous stint in the Oval Office, he offered to mediate between India and China after their violent border clash in Galwan, an offer that was rejected by New Delhi. Then as now, his grasp of regional dynamics was flimsy, his motives suspect and his execution theatrical. His latest Kashmir foray shows little has changed.


Beneath the bluster lies a familiar pattern. Trump’s foreign policy instincts are less rooted in strategy than in self-promotion. That his announcement coincided with India’s counter-terrorism operation only underscores his eagerness to hijack the narrative for personal gain.


Trump’s bombast also reflects America’s long, uneasy entanglement with Pakistan. As India launched Operation Sindoor, Pakistan’s Defence Minister Khawaja Asif, in a television interview, publicly admitted that his country had been fighting ‘America’s dirty war’ for years, yet another confession of the duplicitous role Pakistan has played as both ally and saboteur in Washington’s endless wars. This Faustian arrangement wherein American largesse has freely flowed despite Pakistan’s harbouring of extremists has bred a relationship based on mutual mistrust and reluctant dependence.


It is this fraught legacy that makes Trump’s fulsome praise for Pakistan ring hollow. His ceasefire theatrics are less about peace than about preserving a historically unreliable partner for future utility. Islamabad knows how to extract concessions; Washington, under Trump, has rarely resisted the bait. His boast of increasing trade with both India and Pakistan ‘substantially’ was unsolicited and unserious. Trump’s record as a self-declared global peacemaker is poor as evinced in the Israel-Gaza and Russia-Ukraine conflicts. India must resist this pageantry. It cannot allow Washington to dictate terms or hijack its security agenda. Trump is not a stabiliser in South Asia. He is a meddler with a megaphone. Kashmir is not a reality-TV set and diplomacy is not a stage-managed finale for applause. Any lasting silence of the guns will come through hard-won regional understanding and not through the social media outbursts of a man who still imagines he can broker global peace from a keyboard.

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