First: Let us go back to history! About 84 years ago. Mahatma Gandhi and several of our freedom fighters had assembled in Bombay. They had just one goal in mind: Freedom! India had been enslaved under colonial rule since 1757, and it was high time to break free! Gandhi’s call was clear, loud, determined and unequivocal. On 8 August, 1942, at the Bombay session of the All India Congress Committee, he introduced the resolution to start a ‘Quit India Movement’. The resolution was unanimously passed at that historic meeting. Later, he delivered a fiery speech at Gowalia Tank Maidan (now known as ‘August Kranti Maidan’), which marked the launch of the Quit India Movement. He said, “There is a mantra, a short one that I give you. You imprint it in your heart and let every breath of yours give an expression to it. The mantra is ‘do or die’. We shall either be free or die in the attempt.” The next day, on 9 August, the ‘kranti’ had begun; thousands were out on the streets vociferously demanding that the British should leave India immediately and unconditionally! Most of the leaders, belonging to every strata of society, were arrested. They were fearless! Their struggle, with immense sacrifices, continued till India attained her freedom on 15 August 1947! Today, however, it is freedom struggle @ 2026!

Then to that important night! India was ‘to awake to freedom’, with the clock striking the midnight hour on August 14-15, 1947. The Constituent Assembly to whom power was to be transferred began its session at 11 pm on August 14. After an address by the President, Jawaharlal Nehru, our first Prime Minister, made his now immortal ‘Tryst with Destiny’ speech. He called upon the members to take a solemn pledge to serve India and her people. “Long years ago, we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially. At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom. A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance. It is fitting that at this solemn moment we take the pledge of dedication to the service of India and her people and to the still larger cause of humanity.” Powerful, meaningful words from a visionary statesman! The reality today is freedom struggle @ 2026!

Today, Gen Z and even sections of Gen Alpha are out on the streets demanding an end to corruption (e.g., the NEET paper leaks), for greater transparency and accountability at all levels. The Cockroach Janata Party led by Abhijeet in Jantar Mantar and elsewhere took the nation by storm. It is evidently clear that the youth of our country are not going to take matters lightly any more.  Corruption has to be addressed at every level: demonetisation, electoral bonds, the PM Cares fund, and now the E20 (The E20 Janata Party is on the rise). Where did the RSS and BJP get the enormous amounts of money to put up palatial buildings everywhere?  If the RSS is not a registered body, how do they have access to a mind-boggling amount of money? What about the crony capitalist friends who profiteer at the cost of the poor and by looting the country? What about electoral malpractices: the manipulation of the EVMs and the meticulous disenfranchisement, through SIR, of thousands of legitimate citizens everywhere? Several more questions will continue to be asked. When they had their peaceful ‘March to Parliament’ on 20 July, the youth were tear-gassed, baton-charged, beaten, and pellet guns were used against them. Several were injured. Protests spontaneously erupted all over the country. In Ahmedabad and in other parts of Gujarat, groups of students/youth walked together, singing as though they were on a picnic, shouting slogans like “Modi hatao! Desh Bachao!” In Jharkhand, youth are still on a fast. There is no relenting as the youth of India arise and shout “Azadi! Azadi!”  Speak up now! We will be heard! Stand up now! No more silence. It is freedom struggle @ 2026!

The destruction of the country’s democratic ethos and constitutional framework continues with frightening regularity.  The V-Dem Institute at Sweden’s University of Gothenburg in its ‘Democracy Report 2026’ says that, “India’s autocratization is a slow but systematic dismantling of democratic institutions. The ruling anti-pluralist, Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Prime Minister Modi’s derailing of democracy include deteriorations in freedom of expression and independence of the media, harassment of journalists critical of the government, and attacks on civil society and the opposition. India is classified as an electoral autocracy since 2017.” India continues to be named in the top 10 autocratising countries in the last 10 years; it is placed 105 in the Liberal Democracy Index (LDI). What a terrible disgrace! It necessitates freedom struggle @ 2026!

Some days ago, a District court acquitted a controversial politician in a sexual harassment case filed three years ago by a group of female athletes. Six female wrestlers had accused Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh of sexually harassing them while he was the head of the Wrestling Federation of India. He had denied the allegations. Singh, a former MP from Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), wields considerable influence in Uttar Pradesh, India’s most politically crucial state. The allegations against him made global headlines in 2023, especially after police detained the wrestlers as they tried to march to India’s new parliament building in Delhi. For Vinesh Phogat and her co-wrestlers, the struggle is not yet over. Despite having to pay a heavy price, they are determined not to give up.  For our women wrestlers, it is freedom struggle @ 2026!

In the latest 2026 Environmental Performance Index, India is ranked 176 out of 177 countries! What a terrible shame. The effects of climate change have wreaked havoc on the country. At the receiving end are the poor and the marginalised who suffer very much. Government projects favour their crony capitalist friends, providing them with a license to loot, plunder and rape the environment; the continued use of fossil fuels is a case in point. The Environment is in a shambles! The destruction of precious forest lands and biodiversity, to cater to so-called ‘development’ projects, contributes immensely to the climatic changes one experiences today. Sections of the corporate sector and particularly the mining mafia have no qualms of conscience in depleting precious natural resources, with the sole desire of profiteering. The Adani-owned ‘Greater Nicobar Project’ is a terrible disaster in the making. Adani is also planning the takeover of Mumbai’s salt pans. For those who care for our common home, it is freedom struggle @ 2026!

In the Global Hunger Index (GHI) 2026, India is ranked 102 out of 123 countries, with a level of hunger classified as “serious”. Millions in our country still live below the poverty line and suffer from want, hunger, deprivation and without daily access to roti, kapda aur makaan. The country still does not have any official relevant, reliable, updated data with regard to poverty. Millions want to break away from the shackles of poverty. It is for them, the freedom struggle @ 2026!

India today yearns for freedom! For every citizen to live in dignity and equity, in harmony and in peace, in truth and in justice, in acceptance of the other and in the celebration of pluralism. To preserve, protect and promote Constitutional values, the democratic ethos, the right to dissent, freedom of speech and the secular fabric of the nation. Freedom from untruth, deceit, lies and ‘feku-isms’. Freedom from manipulated, selective and biased history. Freedom from hate and violence, from rape and killing, from extortion and corruption, from uniformity and monoculturalism, from authoritarianism and subjugation

The average citizen of India yearns for freedom from the D-Gang dada-giri of this regime (through demolition, displacement, discrimination, division, demonisation, denigration, delisting, delimitation). The cry is: freedom for all! The Adivasis, Dalits and OBCs, for the minorities and the marginalised, for women and the other Genders, for the small farmers and the indigenous coastal people, for the casual labourers and the migrant workers, for the excluded and the exploited, the human rights defenders and the truthful, objective INDIA’S media. They all demand the freedom to be fearless and transparent citizens! As India yearns for that total freedom, we pray in the words of Tagore, from his ‘Gitanjali’, “into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake. 

For all: freedom struggle @ 2026!

In 2007, Lawrence Ferlinghetti wrote this timeless and relevant poem

Pity the nation whose people are sheep

And whose shepherds mislead them

Pity the nation whose leaders are liars

Whose sages are silenced

And whose bigots haunt the airwaves

Pity the nation that raises not its voice

Except to praise conquerors

And acclaim the bully as hero

And aims to rule the world

By force and by torture

Pity the nation that knows

No other language but its own

And no other culture but its own

Pity the nation whose breath is money

And sleeps the sleep of the too well fed

Pity the nation, oh pity the people

who allow their rights to erode

and their freedoms to be washed away

My country, tears of thee! Sweet land of liberty!

How true of India today! Hope, however, never dies for we, the people of India, it is ‘freedom struggle @ 2026!’

August 10, 2026

(The author is a human rights, justice, reconciliation and peace activist/writer)

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The Revolution has begun….!

“The Emperor is Naked!”

The RSS and the Freedom Struggle

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Issued on Quit India Day, the letter gives the Sangh until August 14—a week before Independence Day—to act, warning that “silence is complicity.”

The Remarks That Sparked Outrage

Between July 24 and 26, Mohandas published a series of videos on his YouTube channel Pathrika. In the July 26 video, he described in detail how he would handle the student protests at Jantar Mantar if he were “in charge”:

“I would impose curfew over about a 4-square-kilometre area around Jantar Mantar. I would announce over loudspeakers, asking the crowd to disperse. I would make the announcement three times. Then I would open fire. People would scatter and run. Some people would die, some would survive, and some would be left permanently disabled. Within about four hours, the situation would be under control. The bodies would be collected and taken to hospitals… This is a solution. Clean.”

Of the women among the protesters, he said:

“Rapes will happen, mass rapes… there are girls who like rape… there are people who like rapes, especially, leftist, secular, democratic, proletarian class of people… When mass rapes happen there won’t be any complaints, because these are the people who like rape.”

Mohandas has not denied speaking these words, instead calling them “satire” and complaining that clips were taken out of context.

The Man and His Sangh Links

The letter notes that Mohandas served as state convener of the BJP’s Intellectual Cell in Kerala and as the party’s television spokesperson. He was General Secretary and later Vice-President of Bharatiya Vichara Kendram, the RSS-affiliated “think tank” in Kerala, and managed RSS-linked publications. The ALIFA letter states that the RSS “groomed this man, and given him numerous platforms for forty years”.

Following the controversy, the RSS distanced itself from Mohandas. Senior Sangh functionary K.B. Sreekumar said in a statement: “T.G. Mohandas’s comments on the recent protest are his personal thoughts. He is not an RSS official at any level. RSS doesn’t agree with his views and they should be condemned in every highest possible manner”.

The BJP’s Kerala unit also distanced itself, with general secretary Dr J. Pramila Devi calling Mohandas a “free thinker” while maintaining that the party does not endorse his statements.

‘The Machinery Exists’

The letter draws a sharp contrast with the BJP’s swift action against Nupur Sharma in June 2022, when the party suspended its national spokesperson within a day of diplomatic protests from Gulf nations over her remarks. “The machinery exists. It moved within hours when there was a political expediency to act,” the letter states. “The students, youth and women of this country are waiting to know whether they and their cause matter as much.”

Legal Action Underway

The Kerala Police’s Cyber Cell has registered an FIR (Crime No. 95/2026) against Mohandas following complaints by student organisations including the SFI, AIYF and AISF. The FIR invokes Sections 192 and 353(1)(b) of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS), Section 66 of the Information Technology Act, and Section 120(o) of the Kerala Police Act. Police have alleged that the videos were uploaded and circulated on July 24 and 25 with the intention of “disturbing public tranquillity”.

Four Demands, One Week

The ALIFA letter places four demands before the RSS and BJP:

1. A written and public condemnation of Mohandas’s statements by name, and immediate severance of all platforms and courtesies extended to him by Sangh Parivar organisations.
2. A statement from the Sarsanghchalak’s office affirming that women, youth and citizens who protest are entitled to dignity and constitutional rights.
3. Pro-active support for the legal process against Mohandas, with the letter noting that the Supreme Court’s directions in Tehseen Poonawalla (2018) require registration of hate speech cases without waiting for complainants.
4. Takedown of the videos in question, with certified copies preserved for investigation.

The letter concludes: “If this August 15 passes in silence, we will read the silence as an answer… Silence is complicity.”

Courtesy: CounterView

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In a statement issued on Sunday, August 9, the organisations said that the Committee has been entrusted with examining the overall ecology of the Aravalli region, its impact on people’s lives, social and economic conditions, water resources and groundwater, mining, employment, animal husbandry and other related issues.

Such an assessment is simply not possible through what amounts to a token tour of nine districts in just four days, the organisations said.

Only One Hour for the Ajmer Hearing

The organisations also questioned the decision to allot only one hour for the Ajmer public hearing. People were invited from different districts, but were asked to make their submissions within just two minutes. This, they said, clearly demonstrates that the Committee is not serious about hearing the concerns and experiences of different sections of the population.

The organisations had submitted the names of 11 representatives from Ajmer, Jaipur, Beawar, Bhim and Bhilwara to represent the people. However, only a few were actually given an opportunity to speak.

The organisations strongly condemned the systematic hijacking of today’s Ajmer public hearing by the mining lobby, with large numbers of mining operators and other stakeholders reportedly brought in from Nagaur and Makrana.

The presence of hundreds of people associated with the mining business, who repeatedly raised their hands in a show of strength during the proceedings, raises serious questions about the role of the administration and suggests possible administrative complicity, the organisations said.

No Genuine Effort to Involve the Public

There was no meaningful effort by the administration to inform or involve ordinary people in the public hearing. No public notice was issued in newspapers and no adequate publicity was undertaken. As a result, there was very little participation from rural areas.

Instead, the gathering of government officials from different departments and large numbers of business representatives appeared to be an attempt to create the appearance of a public hearing, the organisations alleged.

When representatives of people’s organisations objected to the manner in which the hearing was being conducted, attempts were made to silence them, and several sections were denied an opportunity to put forward their views.

Aravalli Cannot Be Discussed Without Those Who Live and Work There

The organisations emphasised that any meaningful discussion on the Aravallis remains incomplete without the participation of rural communities, farmers, pastoralists, environmental activists, scientists, geologists and experts on water and groundwater resources.

The Committee must travel to rural areas and mining-affected regions and directly examine the ground realities faced by local communities, they said. It must also meet and directly assess the condition of silicosis patients whose lives have been devastated by mining.

Concerns over the Composition of the High-Level Committee

The organisations also termed the composition of the High powered Committee inappropriate and demanded representation for all relevant stakeholders.

They pointed out that it is deeply problematic that the Chairperson and two members of the Committee are representatives of the very department that had earlier recommended that only hills rising more than 100 metres should be considered part of the Aravallis.

The exclusion of even a single environmental activist from the Committee is equally alarming and indicates, the organisations said, that the government continues to pursue a policy of protecting the interests responsible for the destruction of the Aravallis, rather than protecting the range itself.

“Mining Lobby Creates an Unsafe Atmosphere”

The most disturbing development, the organisations said, was the aggressive behaviour and threatening and violent language used by persons associated with the mining lobby during the public hearing.

Representatives of people’s organisations were specifically targeted. After the hearing, some of the mining lobby representatives confronted them outside the venue, engaged in heated arguments, hurled abuses and issued threats, creating an atmosphere of considerable insecurity.

The organisations said that such intimidation is completely unacceptable in a process that is supposed to provide a safe and democratic space for citizens to express their concerns.

Demands for a Genuine and Comprehensive Process were made

Representatives of the people’s organisations, including Kavita Srivastava, Bhanwar Meghwanshi, Anant Bhatnagar, Indira Pancholi, Shankar Singh, Komal Srivastava, Tarachand Verma, Dhiresh Kumar Jain, Shashi Meena, Prashant Patni, Mary Reen, Rajkumar Nahar, Suresh Mathur, Jyoti Prakash Bhati, Kuldeep Gehlot and Neelam Ahluwalia, have demanded:

(i) Extension of the tenure of the High-Level Committee

(ii) A transparent and meaningful process to ensure participation of the general public;

(iii) Adequate opportunity for all affected sections and stakeholders to present their views;

(iv) A comprehensive study covering all districts falling within the Aravalli region;

(v)Field visits to rural and mining-affected areas;

(vi) Direct assessment of the impact of mining on communities, including the condition of silicosis-affected workers and families; and

(vii) A comprehensive ecological, social, economic and hydrological assessment of the Aravalli region before any final conclusions are drawn.

The People’s Union for Civil Liberties, Save Aravalli, Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan, Bharat Gyan Vigyan Samiti, Save Dol Ka Badh Movement, Shahabad Valley Sangharsh Samiti, Climate Action for Youth, Jaldhara, People for Aravalli, and other organisations said that if the Committee fails to make the process genuinely participatory and inclusive, people’s organisations will organise their own genuine public hearings at different locations across the Aravalli region.

Related:

In North Gujarat’s Granite-Rich Idar, Locals Fearful About Aravalli Mountains’ Future

Say No to ‘Toxic Governance’: Arrest air pollution, not activists and protesters: NACEJ

Whose ‘ENVIRONMENT’ is it, anyway?

The post As mining lobby “hijacks” Ajmer public hearing, “tokenism” on Aravallis condemned appeared first on SabrangIndia.

The government may cancel the FCRA certificate if the entity violates any provision of the law or under other specified circumstances.  These include violating terms and conditions of the certificate or renewal, not engaging in any reasonable activity in its chosen field for two consecutive years, or if the government thinks it is necessary in public interest.

On the face of it, this amendment does not even seem to be aligned with the rule of law. It means the government can arbitrarily decide (without any system of accountability to fair practice) to take over the assets of an organisation which has no recourse to challenge this. Giving the growing state enabled resentment against minority religious groups and the increasing violence towards those criticising the government, this amendment looks very much like a targeted attack.

Christians who constitute 2.5% of India’s population in India receive 15% of the foreign contributions coming into the country and are major contributors to humanitarian and charitable work. It is well known that Christian institutions have provided much sought after educational and health facilities not just in cities, but have also met crucial gaps in these services in areas that are inaccessible, remote or rural. Bringing in amendments that affect these core functions will affect the poorest communities that have no other options available either for health care or education. The government facilities should have performed these roles but their outputs are abysmal. Ironically, if an entity has received foreign funds for the initial setup and then continued activities using domestic funds, it becomes liable under these new amendments to be taken over by the designated authority, which can transfer it to a ministry, a state department or sell it.

The government would surely keep track of the number of children in Christian educational institutions, or the number of patients receiving subsided care in Christian hospitals. It is astonishing that this seems to be of no consequence and seems to be more by design than chance. Cutting away lifelines of education and healthcare can produce irreparable damage, but these affected communities, invariable from the traditionally marginalised Dalit and Adivasi groups, have absolutely no say in decisions that adversely affect their lives.

A government that truly values democratic principles would understand that many of its own gaps in terms of social justice, equality and democracy are plugged by the charitable and missionary organisations. It is an enormous investment to build infrastructure, create the necessary human resources while ensuring the best standard of care. How will handing over these vital facilities to an ‘authority’ ensure the same quality? Dismantling these facilities through vindictive laws and policies is easier than building up these same institutions that have contributed to the well-being of thousands. Many of these institutions can get badly affected by the planned amendments of the Government and never fully recover. Children who are forced to dropout for want of other options will forever have to give up their dreams of even a barely decent future. Without offering a comparable or better alternative, is it justified for the government to bring in such anti-people laws?

Another important contribution of these charitable institutions and organisations is to create confident individuals who are able to demand their rights and entitlements from the government rather than being passive recipients of services that are often  undignified, inadequate and unsatisfactory. Women, adolescent, Dalit/Adivasi (tribal) grounds, communities in urban deprived areas etc. have benefited from numerous interventions including self help groups.  It is evident that the government is threatened by dissent, collective bargaining, people’s collectives, unions etc. The notion of freebie is often disconnected from being a right and rather projected as the benevolence of a political leader. It is a dependency rather than an empowerment or rights based model. It keeps people as beneficiaries to be controlled rather than tax paying citizens who are vocal about their rights.  While opening the door to the market and privatisation even for crucial social welfare policies, the space for discussion on distributive justice is narrowing and even penalised.

We need to introspect on where we are heading as a nation. The narrative that Christian institutions receive foreign funds to convert, especially poor Indians, does not have any basis. This can be ascertained by the thousands of ‘right wing’ supporters who have benefited from Christian institutions while retaining their majoritarian religion. The students’ protests have showed us that there is growing concern about the quality of education that young people in India are able to access. Does the country need laws targeting charitable institutions, particularly at a time when government schools and hospitals are being dismantled at an alarming rate?

Under these draconian amendments, it is the organisations that are critical of the government, engage with rights based work and minority groups that are being actively targeted and systematically eliminated. India is a signatory to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and UN Declaration on Human Rights Defenders. Any restriction to individual freedom is only legitimate if it is not overbroad, and is strictly necessary for national security, public safety, public order, public health o protection of rights and freedoms of others. In 2016, three United Nations Special Rapporteurs jointly urged the Indian government to repeal the FCRA, warning that it was being used to silence organizations whose priorities did not align with those of the government.

There are concerns that the amendments will be passed in the Parliament on the 12^th of August. This is inspite of multiple submissions challenging it by Christian leaders. There is no doubt that this Amendment will be selectively applied to the Christian community much like the Freedom of religion Act. The targeting of Christian educational and healthcare institutions will be a big blow to the most vulnerable communities – people living in urban deprived areas, indigenous communities, senior citizens, children with special needs, abandoned and single women, devadasi women being rehabilitated from generations of sexual exploitation, migrant workers, people with stigmatising diseases like leprosy, tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS etc. Why do these communities have no say in whether an institution or organisation ‘deserves’ to have the FCRA or not? With the sword of FCRA hanging over their heads, the base of work may shift to more ‘safe’ areas in cities and with more privileged communities which defeats the very core of the Church’s mission.

There is absolutely no requirement for the FRCA Amendments as currently being envisaged and the government should desist from using state power to criminalise and harass legitimate works of charity and nation building. The government should instead seriously examine the dismantling of government schools and healthcare infrastructure. That is a more pressing need. Those who have, and who continue to benefit from the selfless work of Christian institutions need to raise their voices and no longer just be silent observers.

(The author is national secretary, Jesuit Commission for Ecology and Justice, New Delhi)

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The post FCRA amendments: A deliberate attack on the poor of India appeared first on SabrangIndia.

According to an investigation by Newslaundry, the Uttar Pradesh government spent ₹6,811.94 crore on advertising and publicity between the financial years 2017-18 and 2024-25, averaging ₹2.32 crore every day. The publication, citing state budget documents, reported that this exceeds the Centre’s average spending on publicity under the Narendra Modi government, estimated at roughly ₹1.5 crore per day over the last 11 years.

The expenditure was made through the state’s Information and Public Relations Department. More than 83 percent of the total, around ₹5,658 crore, was spent under the head of “advertising and visual publicity”, covering advertisements in newspapers, television and digital media.

The spending increased steadily after Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath assumed office in March 2017. Publicity expenditure stood at ₹294.86 crore in 2017-18, increased to ₹330 crore in 2018-19, and ₹481.67 crore in 2019-20, before dipping to ₹392.88 crore during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020-21. It then rose sharply to ₹1,134.31 crore in 2021-22 and peaked at ₹1,420.03 crore in 2022-23, an assembly election year. Spending remained above ₹1,300 crore in both 2023-24 and 2024-25.

Besides advertising, the department spent ₹896.64 crore on publications such as booklets and pamphlets, ₹220.49 crore on field publicity, ₹20.32 crore on film production, ₹11.46 crore on community radio and television, and ₹7.73 crore on photo services.

For the current financial year, 2025-26, the Uttar Pradesh government has budgeted ₹918.83 crore for the Information and Public Relations Department, including ₹705.14 crore for advertising and visual publicity alone. If the full allocation is utilised, the department’s expenditure since 2017-18 would cross ₹7,730 crore, according to the Newslaundry analysis.

The report also highlights the government’s increasing use of digital advertising. According to documents accessed by Newslaundry, campaigns were placed on platforms including Asianet News, OneIndia, Amar Ujala and ShareChat, with individual contracts worth several lakhs of rupees. The publication further reported that repeated Right to Information applications seeking beneficiary-wise details of advertising expenditure were either rejected or remained unanswered.

The investigation notes that publicity spending is not limited to the Information Department. An RTI response cited by Newslaundry showed that the Uttar Pradesh Department of Industries and Enterprise Promotion spent around ₹60 crore on publicity between 2024-25 and 2025-26, including approximately ₹12 crore during the Prayagraj Kumbh. Documents reviewed by the publication also showed a ₹70 lakh agreement with media platform YourStory to produce promotional content on the state’s “One District, One Product” initiative.

₹550 crore spent on PM’s foreign visits since 2021

In a separate development, the Union government informed the Rajya Sabha that over ₹550 crore has been spent on Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s overseas visits since 2021. These figures were provided by Minister of State for External Affairs Pabitra Margherita in a written reply to questions raised by Rajya Sabha MPs Sanjay Singh and V. Sivadasan.

The government stated that expenditure on the Prime Minister’s foreign visits amounted to approximately ₹36 crore in 2021, ₹55 crore in 2022, ₹93 crore in 2023, ₹109 crore in 2024, and over ₹180 crore in 2025. In 2026, expenditure has already reached ₹74.58 crore, although the Ministry clarified that several figures remain provisional pending settlement of bills.

Among the visits for which expenditure has been compiled this year, the Norway leg of the Prime Minister’s five-nation tour in May 2026 accounted for the highest spending at ₹17.46 crore. The figures also include visits to countries such as Indonesia, Australia and New Zealand undertaken in July.

Responding to questions on the purpose of these visits, the Ministry of External Affairs stated that high-level visits by the Prime Minister strengthen India’s bilateral and multilateral partnerships and facilitate cooperation across sectors including trade, investment, technology, defence, energy and resilient supply chains.

The Ministry also informed Parliament that 316 Memoranda of Understanding (MoUs) have been signed during the Prime Minister’s foreign visits since July 2021. It further stated that India received USD 381.8 billion in Foreign Direct Investment between April 2021 and December 2025.

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The country they called home, the identity they had to defend

The post ₹6,812 crore on UP publicity, ₹550 crore on PM’s foreign visits: Official data reveals government spending patterns appeared first on SabrangIndia.

His life story is full of contradictions. He emerged from Delhi’s politically charged theatre culture and was associated with the Left, but later developed an intense hostility towards leftists. He has himself described his decision to play a part in the politically controversial Jahangir National University as being driven by resentment rather than conviction and subsequently apologised for it.[1]

There is a similar contradiction in the way he talks about relationships, women and responsibility. Mishra has publicly admitted to cheating on his wife and has spoken about being emotionally absent and irresponsible during the early years of his marriage. He has also spoken about making obscene calls to women while drunk and acknowledged behaviour that he himself considered deeply inappropriate.

The point isn’t that a person’s private mistakes automatically invalidate their political opinions. They don’t. People can change, grow and genuinely repent.

The problem begins when someone turns their own personal journey into a source of moral authority over society, while refusing to interrogate the power structures, prejudices and contradictions embedded in their worldview.

And yet, somewhere along the way, Piyush Mishra has become something of a sweetheart of the young, progressive podcast circuit. He is presented as the rebellious, uncompromising, revolutionary intellectual, the older, irreverent voice who supposedly says what others are afraid to say. In the process, his history of misogynistic behaviour and his increasingly right-leaning political positions often seem to disappear from the conversation. The rebel is celebrated; the contradictions are merely a side note. There is also something deeply uncomfortable about the cultural archetype he represents: the brilliant, troubled, self-confessional male artist whose excesses are romanticised as evidence of his genius, while women are expected to absorb the consequences of those excesses with patience, forgiveness and understanding.

Mishra’s artistic talent is real. His self-awareness about some of his failures may also be real. But self-confession isn’t the same thing as political introspection.

And then comes Jharkhand.

This contradiction becomes particularly visible when Piyush Mishra enters the Jharkhand student protest.

A student movement is, at its core, about young people demanding accountability, dignity, opportunity and a future that isn’t determined by the whims of those in power. It is about challenging structures, not surrendering to personalities.

So his presence in the Jharkhand protest raises an uncomfortable question: what exactly does he represent there? If the movement claims inter-sectionality, shouldn’t that lens apply to the men it celebrates too?

If the protest is about challenging patriarchy, hierarchy, privilege and the normalisation of power without accountability, then elevating a celebrity whose own public narrative is marked by admitted infidelity, misogynistic behaviour and ideological contradictions sits uneasily with the politics of the movement.

The issue isn’t whether Piyush Mishra is allowed to speak. Of course he is. The issue is what his presence symbolises.

There is an additional question worth asking here. Mishra did publicly support the Jantar Mantar student protest, condemning the violence and saying that the government should have opened a dialogue with the students earlier. But he was not physically present at Jantar Mantar, where the violence against students was severe enough to move an empathetic heart to action. In Jharkhand, by contrast, he travelled to Ranchi, joined the students in person and sang Aarambh Hai Prachand at the protest site. He has said that watching interviews with the students and seeing their pain moved him to join them.

So the question is I’d keep it as an open-ended question rather than implying an answer:

So the question is: what made his solidarity more visible in Jharkhand? Does the difference in the governments being confronted have anything to do with it?

And perhaps the sharper question is for the progressive men, at least those who celebrate his presence at the protest: can a movement that seeks to challenge hierarchy and privilege afford to simultaneously romanticise the very contradictions it claims to resist? And why are those same contradictions disqualifying when they belong to people they oppose, but fascinating, forgivable or even revolutionary when they belong to a man they admire?

Perhaps the real test of progressive politics is whether we are willing to apply the same scrutiny to ourselves and the people we admire as we do to those we oppose.

(The author, is a branding and design strategist with over 25 years of experience across leading advertising agencies. She has worked with the Congress Party for the past six years)

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are the author’s personal views, and do not necessarily represent the views of Sabrangindia.

[1] Piyush Mishra played the character of “Guru Ji” and sang the promotional track “Main Nahi Manta” for the controversial political drama film Jahangir National University (JNU), which was released on June 21, 2024. Following the film’s release, Mishra publicly offered an unconditional apology for taking on the role, admitting that signing the project without reading the complete script stemmed from his past opposition to communist ideologies

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His economic use of language and blending of Hindi and Urdu helped bridge cultural divides between the two linguistic traditions. Among his celebrated poetry collections, Cuka Bhih Hum Nahim Maim earned him the prestigious Sahitya Akademi Award in 1977.

Singh’s poem “Usa” (“Dawn”) occupies a unique position in modern Hindi poetry. It does not describe the break of day but presents the poetic process of seeing dawn. The poem opens with a series of similes: “At daybreak the sky was as blue as a conch shell.

The dawn sky like a hearth freshly plastered with ash, still damp to the touch. Like a jet-black grinding stone lightly stained with a trace of saffron, as though it had just been washed. Or like a slate over which someone had softly rubbed a stick of red chalk. Or in blue water, the fair shimmering body of someone, gently quivering. And then… The enchantment of this dawn begins to dissolve. The sun is rising.”

The poem establishes that human perception involves not just eyes but memory, sensibility, cultural experience, and imagination. The same landscape acquires different meanings for different individuals. The interval between object and perception constitutes the true domain of art.

The artist does not merely reproduce the external world but transforms the visible so that ordinary objects become part of new meaning structures. Art is not a mirror held up to the world but a distinctive mode of seeing anew. A painter creates visual worlds through colour, light, shadow, and space; a poet does so through words, rhythm, and imagery. Both arts share the objective: liberating the visible from habitual identity and transforming it into new experiential possibilities.

The poem presents not objective description but the gradual unfolding of experience within consciousness. Following Husserl, Singh approaches the sky free from preconceived knowledge, capturing the instant when dawn slowly takes shape in consciousness. The opening image announces this mode: the sky is a phenomenon as experienced, apprehended through the conch shell’s cultural resonance.

Consciousness remains constantly directed towards the changing sky, yet each moment receives it differently. One simile yields to another because experience itself continually changes. What transforms is not the object but the mode of consciousness through which it is apprehended.

Merleau-Ponty’s concept of lived perception reveals that the visible is not merely observed but lived. “Like a hearth freshly plastered with ash, still damp to the touch” evokes tactile sensation. The reader does not merely see the hearth but almost feels its moisture. The grinding stone, saffron, slate, chalk, and water bring together touch, colour, temperature, and movement, transforming vision into multisensory experience.

Heidegger’s concept of Being-in-the-World proves equally illuminating. The poet does not contemplate dawn from a lofty perspective but from the world where hearths are plastered, saffron ground, and chalk moves across slates. The experience of dawn becomes an experience of that lifeworld.

The poem embodies Anandavardhana’s theory of dhvani (suggestion). The conch shell signifies far more than a marine object—it evokes worship, auspiciousness, sacred sound, and awakening—yet none is explicitly mentioned. This is the essence of suggestion: expanding semantic potential without increasing words.

Kuntaka’s theory of vakrokti (oblique expression) illuminates the poem’s originality. Singh departs from tradition by choosing ordinary domestic objects—the hearth, grinding stone, slate—rather than lotus, gold, or moonlight. Kuntaka defines vakrokti as expression that departs from ordinary modes of statement, creating distinctive beauty. Singh’s obliqueness transforms the ordinary into the extraordinary.

Abhinavagupta’s theory of rasa (aesthetic relish) reveals how the poem creates contemplative delight. No emotion is explicitly stated, yet the reader experiences gentle wonder and intimate nearness. The rasa develops gradually through the interaction of determinants, consequences, and transitory emotional states.

Ksemendra’s theory of aucitya (propriety) explains the poem’s perfect harmony. Had saffron been replaced by blood or fire, the emotional character would have changed entirely. Saffron combines delicacy, fragrance, purity, and subdued colour perfectly suited to dawn. Every image, word, and pause occupies its indispensable place.

The poem presents time not as linear progression but as lived duration, following Bergson’s concept. Moments flow continuously into one another; the present carries the past. The reader holds several visual worlds simultaneously—the conch shell, hearth, grinding stone, slate, and water all remain present. Time appears layered rather than linear. Heidegger’s philosophy deepens this understanding.

Time constitutes the ground of human existence; significance depends not on chronological position but on how it discloses the world. Throughout almost the entire poem, the sun itself remains absent—what appears is only its gradual manifestation. Each image represents one stage in the unfolding of revelation, making this process of becoming the poem’s true subject.

The Vedic Usas hymns celebrate dawn as the power awakening the universe, simultaneously “ancient” and “born anew again and again.” Singh reinterprets this paradox within modern sensibility. The same dawn returns daily, yet each time appears fresh, refusing imprisonment within ready-made symbols.

The poem activates three interconnected dimensions of memory: personal, cultural, and sensory. Halbwachs argues that memories are constructed within social and cultural frameworks. The “hearth” belongs to the long tradition of Indian domestic life, representing shared cultural experience.

Ricoeur’s understanding of memory as reconstruction in the present proves equally relevant. Singh is not consciously remembering the hearth; he is looking at the dawn sky, yet the hearth becomes part of present experience. Memory does not travel from past to present; rather, the present gives birth to memory.

Bachelard’s reflections on intimate space illuminate how domestic objects create the emotional geography of existence. The hearth, grinding stone, and water are not merely utilitarian objects but vessels containing experiences through which cultural identity is gradually formed. Jan Assmann’s concept of cultural memory reveals that objects themselves become carriers of memory.

The hearth preserves traditions of Indian domestic culture, women’s labour, and the rhythm of early morning life. The grinding stone preserves the rhythm of hands at work and generations of inherited ways of living.

The poem presents colour as the primary experience rather than form. “Deep blue,” “plastered with ash,” “jet black,” “a trace of saffron,” “red chalk,” “blue water,” and “a fair shimmering body” create a chromatic rhythm. This is not simply movement from darkness to light but dwelling upon innumerable intermediate tones.

Goethe’s phenomenology of colour reveals that colours possess emotional temperature, psychological resonance, and experiential quality. Blue embodies profound tranquillity; ash conveys moisture and coolness; black becomes the depth from which crimson emerges. Colour becomes the medium through which experience is constituted.

Johannes Itten’s theory of colour harmony demonstrates that beauty depends not on individual colours but on relationships among them. The saffron derives meaning from the black grinding stone; the fair body gains luminosity from blue water. Colours generate effects relationally.

The poem resembles wash painting, where translucent layers apply one over another. No colour erases the previous one; each gently settles upon what came before. The visual world is born through gradual superimposition of chromatic planes, creating depth and luminosity.

Kandinsky’s concept of the Inner Effect of Colour shows that colours possess inward spiritual resonance independent of representational function. Blue evokes inward stillness; grey carries coolness and expectancy; saffron introduces the first pulse of awakening. The poem orchestrates an inner progression of consciousness through colour.

Singh’s language does not merely communicate meaning—it becomes the medium through which experience comes into existence. The poem constructs an experience that cannot be contained within any single image or meaning, inviting readers to participate in the gradual construction of experience itself.

Ricoeur’s philosophy of metaphor reveals that metaphor does not recognise existing similarity but creates new similarity. The sky becomes conch shell, hearth, grinding stone, and slate—relationships that did not exist before the poem. Language does not describe reality; it enables reality to be seen anew.

Jakobson’s theory of poetic language shows that the poem’s distinctive effect arises from formal organisation. Words are selected not merely to identify objects but to carry colour, touch, memory, and cultural experience. Goodman’s concept of worldmaking applies with remarkable precision. Singh does not present a realistic depiction of dawn but constructs an entirely new experiential world through language.

“Usa” constructs a poetics of meaning-making emerging from experience, time, memory, culture, and language. The poem demonstrates that beauty is born not within objects but within relationships established between object and consciousness. No rigid division remains between nature and culture.

Nature assumes the form of culture, and culture the form of nature. The line “The enchantment of this dawn begins to dissolve” emerges as the poem’s most richly suggestive utterance—marking not the end of beauty but the completion of the experiential process through which beauty itself comes into being.

Singh gave modern Hindi poetry an entirely new way of seeing—not a language for describing nature but a language for experiencing it. “Usa” is not merely a poem but a poetics of experience itself, in which vision, time, memory, language, and culture together restore meaning to the human world.

Through its fusion of chromatic imagination, painterly perception, and poetic language, the poem creates an extraordinary bridge between painting and poetry, allowing each art to cross conventional boundaries and revealing that great poetry transforms the very structure of experience.

*Professor and former Head (Retd.), Department of Hindi, University of Hyderabad. This is the abridged version of the author’s original paper

Courtesy: CounterView

The post The painter’s vision: Visual poetics in Shamsher Bahadur Singh’s ‘Dawn’ appeared first on SabrangIndia.

In this fifth and final installment of the series, the spotlight falls on the man Gandhi considered his own “fifth son”—Jamnalal Bajaj. Their relationship defied every conventional understanding of the bond between wealth and political leadership. Jamnalal was not content to remain a generous donor or a sympathetic admirer. He sought something far more demanding: to remake his life in accordance with Gandhi’s ideals, placing his body, his fortune, and his family at the service of a national and ethical mission.

For Gandhi, this was not a relationship founded on patronage but on transformation. Jamnalal did not merely finance constructive work or support political campaigns; he embraced the discipline of the ashram, the hardships of imprisonment, the burdens of public service, and the uncompromising ethic of trusteeship. In doing so, he dissolved the boundaries between industrialist and satyagrahi, between privilege and sacrifice, until his wealth became inseparable from his moral responsibility.

As this exclusive series reaches its conclusion, the story of Mahatma Gandhi and Jamnalal Bajaj offers its most profound insight into the Gandhian experiment. It reminds us that enduring social change is sustained not simply by ideas or institutions, but by individuals willing to transform themselves before seeking to transform the world.

Read on to discover the story of why Jamnalal Bajaj became not just Gandhi’s closest associate, but the Mahatma’s beloved “fifth son.”

When history recalls the industrial titans who fuelled the engines of twentieth-century political movements, it almost always paints them in the cold, strategic shades of pragmatism. We see men who stood safely in the shadows of power, writing massive cheques to secure their investments, purchasing political insurance while keeping their immaculate suits far away from the dust, the sweat, and the swinging batons of the police lines. History treats them as financiers, not fighters. But history breaks its own rules when it encounters Jamnalal Bajaj.

In the roaring current of the Indian freedom struggle, Jamnalal was neither a distant banker nor a cautious ally operating on the comfortable periphery of revolution. He was a man who allowed himself to be utterly dismantled and rebuilt by the moral genius of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi.

Where other wealthy patrons gave their surplus wealth, Jamnalal gave his very flesh. He traded the soft luxury of a merchant prince for the rough, abrasive embrace of coarse khadi, the backbreaking chores of the ashram latrine, and the cold concrete of colonial prison cells.

When Gandhi looked across the vast landscape of his followers in 1942, his eyes softened as he wrote a profound truth in the pages of Harijan:

“There was no work of mine in which I did not receive his fullest co-operation in body, mind and wealth.”

This is the untold epic of the merchant who did not merely fund the Mahatma, but chose to become his son, collapsing the historic distance between capital and conscience to prove that a man can conquer his wealth before his wealth conquers him.

Conscience Finds Home

To understand the moral architecture of the man who would become Gandhi’s right hand, one must travel back to the late nineteenth century, to a modest Marwari household in the dusty village of Kashi-ka-bas in Rajasthan. Born on November 4, 1889, into humble circumstances, the young Jamnalal’s destiny took a dramatic, fairy-tale turn at the tender age of five. He was chosen and adopted into the colossal, glittering merchant empire of Seth Bachhraj in Wardha.

Overnight, the peasant boy was dropped into a world of unimaginable opulence. He was surrounded by ledger books that recorded fortunes, vaults overflowing with silver coins, and a family that equated human value with material display. Yet, the opulence never quite stuck to his skin. The boy possessed a strange, innate spiritual allergy to luxury.

The defining rupture of his youth arrived over a handful of heavy gold jewellery. His adoptive grandfather, eager to showcase the family’s immense wealth at a glittering social gathering, harshly reprimanded the young Jamnalal for refusing to deck himself out in expensive ornaments. To the grandfather, a naked neck was an insult to the family firm.

The boy’s response stunned the household. Rather than bow to the tyranny of pride, Jamnalal quietly stripped away what comforts he had and walked out of the mansion into the dark night, leaving behind a letter that burned with detachment. As historian B. R. Nanda notes, this was no petulant teenage tantrum. It was an early, visceral manifestation of a spirit that viewed material possessions not as a crown, but as a cage.

When Jamnalal eventually met Gandhi decades later, it was not a conversion from scratch. It was a spectacular moment of recognition. Gandhi did not invent Jamnalal’s conscience. He simply gave it a home.

Quest For A Master

By the time the First World War was fracturing the globe, Jamnalal Bajaj was a mature, fabulously wealthy merchant, yet his soul remained deeply restless. Like many sensitive spirits of his generation, he was profoundly disillusioned by the moral vacuum of colonial modernity. He travelled across India, seeking out the great religious figures and socio-political stars of the era, sitting at the feet of Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya and wandering among local sadhus, but he returned from each encounter empty-handed. They offered dogmas, rituals, and philosophical abstractions. Jamnalal hungered for an ethical life that could be lived out in the marketplace.

Then, in 1915, a quiet lawyer returned from the battlefields of South Africa, carrying nothing but a walking stick, a spinning wheel, and an unshakeable faith in the power of Truth.

When Jamnalal met Gandhi, the effect was instantaneous. Here was a man who did not just preach the scriptures. He lived them out in the dirt. Gandhi’s radical synthesis of absolute inner discipline and explosive, non-violent political action was the exact key Jamnalal had spent a lifetime searching for.

But Jamnalal did not want to be just another wealthy patron writing cheques from a safe distance. In a move that shattered all conventional social boundaries, he approached Gandhi with an astonishing, deeply emotional request: he asked to be formally adopted as the Mahatma’s “fifth son.”

For Gandhi, who already had four biological sons with whom he shared a famously turbulent, demanding relationship, this was a moment of immense symbolic gravity. He looked into the eyes of the Marwari tycoon, saw the absolute, terrifying sincerity written there and accepted.

From that moment on, their letters shifted from the formal language of political allies to the intensely intimate, demanding, and loving dialogue of a father and a son. Jamnalal had successfully abdicated his throne of gold to inherit a kingdom of sacrifice.

Body As A Political Weapon

The world soon realised that Jamnalal’s adoption was no mere sentimental performance. In 1921, as the Non-Cooperation Movement began to convulse the country, Jamnalal walked into the public square and formally returned his title of Rai Bahadur, a highly coveted mark of distinction bestowed upon him by the British Crown. To the colonial state, this was an act of shocking class treason. A premier merchant prince was openly declaring that the King Emperor had no clothes. But the real shockwave hit when Jamnalal stepped away from his corporate boards to throw his actual physical body into the fires of mass agitation.

During the historic Nagpur Flag Satyagraha of 1923, when the British administration banned the hoisting of the Indian national flag, it was Jamnalal who took command of the peaceful volunteers. He marched directly into the forbidden zones, courting arrest with a calm smile.

When the heavy iron gates of the colonial prison slammed shut behind him, a vital boundary in Indian political history was permanently breached. Other industrialists gave money to keep the Congress alive. Jamnalal gave his liberty.

He was arrested again during the salt raids of 1930, and repeatedly thrown back into prison throughout the turbulent decade. Inside those damp, disease-ridden cells, Jamnalal steadfastly refused any special privileges, soft mattresses, or dietary exemptions that his immense wealth could easily have bought him. He ate the same coarse prison gruel, slept on the same stone floors, and endured the same humiliating searches as the poorest, most forgotten freedom fighter beside him. His wealth was completely decoupled from privilege. It had been entirely re-engineered into an instrument of voluntary suffering.

Rigours of Ashram Life

The true test of Jamnalal’s transformation, however, took place far away from the public drama of political rallies, within the quiet, uncompromising confines of Gandhi’s ashrams. The ashram was Gandhi’s moral laboratory, a place designed to systematically strip away every trace of ego, caste vanity, and class prejudice from its inhabitants.

The equaliser in this laboratory was manual sanitation work, the daily, mandatory task of cleaning the community’s dry latrines.

For a man born into the strict, orthodoxy-bound Marwari community, where notions of ritual purity were deeply entrenched and enforced by an army of domestic servants, this was a mountain of cultural resistance. Yet, biographical records by B. R. Nanda and contemporary witnesses confirm that Jamnalal did not flinch. He picked up the broom and the shovel.

The hand that signed multi-million rupee business contracts was the very same hand that regularly scoured the ashram toilets. This was the pure essence of Gandhian pedagogy at work: an ethical transformation that was not debated in abstract seminars but hammered out through the repetitive, daily rhythm of physical labour. Jamnalal did not merely read about equality. He scraped it out of the dirt.

Constructing Sevagram

In the mid-1930s, Jamnalal engineered an intervention that would permanently alter the geographic centre of the Indian freedom struggle. Desiring to anchor Gandhi’s vision deeply within the suffering heart of rural India, Jamnalal gifted the Mahatma a vast tract of land in an isolated, malaria-ridden village called Segaon, nestled near Wardha in the Central Provinces. This forgotten hamlet, entirely cut off from modern infrastructure, would be christened Sevagram, the Village of Service.

The radical austerity of this project is preserved in a remarkable, sharp letter written by Gandhi to Jamnalal on March 19, 1936. As he prepared to move into the wilderness, Gandhi gave his “fifth son” a strict, unyielding architectural mandate.

Gandhi demanded that the construction of his personal living space must not cost a single rupee over Rs.100, utilising only local mud, bamboo, and thatch. Jamnalal supervised the project meticulously, ensuring that not a single anna of industrial luxury crept into the sanctuary of rural poverty.

As the great leaders of the nation, Jawaharlal Nehru, Vallabhbhai Patel, Maulana Azad, and Rajendra Prasad, descended upon this remote village to consult the Mahatma, the logistical challenges became comical. The roads were non-existent, frequently turning into deep pools of thick mud during the monsoons.

To solve this, Jamnalal designed a brilliant, hilarious piece of folk engineering that became affectionately known as the “Oxford.” He took the chassis and body of an old, broken-down Ford motorcar, stripped away its engine, and hitched its front axle to a pair of strong, slow-moving village oxen.

Inside this bizarre hybrid vehicle, a perfect, rolling metaphor for the convergence of modern industrial design and ancient rural reality, the elegant, European-educated Nehru and the iron-willed Patel were bumped and rattled across the muddy terrain to see the Mahatma. As Madeleine Slade (Mirabehn) beautifully noted in her memoir The Spirit’s Pilgrimage, though Gandhi had officially retired from the Congress, “the Congress had not left him.” It was Jamnalal’s quiet logistical genius that transformed an isolated rural outpost into the de facto capital of the Indian nation.

Laxmi Narayan Radicalism

At the very heart of the Gandhian economic alternative lay the highly controversial concept of Trusteeship. Gandhi did not believe in the violent, bloody extermination of the wealthy class through class warfare. Instead, he made a radical moral appeal to their conscience. He argued that a rich man did not own his wealth. He merely held it in trust for the collective benefit of the starving millions.

While the intellectual elite of the era dismissed Trusteeship as a naïve, utopian fantasy designed to protect the rich, Gandhi had a devastating, living answer to his critics. He would simply point his finger at Jamnalal Bajaj. Gandhi openly remarked that whenever he sat down to write his theoretical framework on Trusteeship, he had Jamnalal “principally in mind.”

Mahatma Gandhi once remarked about Jamnalal Bajaj, “I can say with confidence that Jamnalalji did not earn a single pie through unethical means, and whatever he earned, he spent it all for the good of the people.” This observation captures the essence of Gandhi’s philosophy of Trusteeship, the belief that wealth is not a matter of absolute private ownership to be donated at one’s discretion, but a social trust held for the welfare of all. It went beyond charity or philanthropy, placing an ethical obligation upon individuals to use their resources in the service of society. Jamnalal did not merely endorse this principle; he lived it, dedicating his wealth, influence, and personal life to building a society founded on non-violence, social justice, and freedom from exploitation.

Jamnalal was deeply influenced by Gandhi and embraced his austere way of life. Jankidevi willingly walked beside her husband on this path of sacrifice. What followed was a remarkable series of personal transformations.

It began with the renunciation of gold ornaments. Gandhi’s general appeal was followed by a letter from Jamnalal to Jankidevi, who was then just twenty-four. They believed that gold was a symbol of Kali and that it bred jealousy, attachment, and the fear of loss. Jankidevi willingly gave up all her ornaments and never wore gold again for the rest of her life.

Next came purdah. At Jamnalal’s urging, Jankidevi abandoned this symbol of aristocratic respectability and encouraged other women to do the same as an act of courage and self-respect. In 1919, this single decision became a powerful statement of women’s freedom and dignity, inspiring thousands whose lives had long been confined within their homes.

Jamnalal soon extended this philosophy far beyond his personal life. He institutionalised Trusteeship on a remarkable scale, channelling his vast fortune into Gandhi’s constructive programme, funding the Gandhi Seva Sangh, serving as the tireless Treasurer of the All India Spinners’ Association, and strengthening the All India Village Industries Association.

Yet perhaps his greatest act of Trusteeship was not financial but social. On 17 July 1928, five years before Gandhi formally launched his nationwide anti-untouchability campaign, Jamnalal and Jankidevi opened the doors of their Lakshmi Narayan Temple in Wardha to everyone, irrespective of caste. For the first time in India, Dalits (then referred to as Harijans) were welcomed into a Hindu temple under the initiative of its own patrons.

In the late 1920s, this was an act of explosive social radicalism. Jamnalal was attacked by religious traditionalists, boycotted by wealthy merchants, and threatened with social excommunication. Yet he stood firm at the temple gates, insisting that if God could not welcome the poorest and most oppressed, then such a god was nothing more than stone. In doing so, he risked his business, social standing, and personal safety to ensure that his private property served the cause of human justice.

Death In The Family

The intense, burning pace of Jamnalal’s life, divided between the damp dampness of prison cells, the gruelling travels of rural mobilisation, and the immense stress of managing both a commercial empire and a national movement, eventually took its toll. On February 11, 1942, at the age of fifty-two, Jamnalal’s exhausted body finally gave way. He suffered a sudden, catastrophic cerebral hemorrhage and passed into the ages.

The news of his death struck Gandhi like a physical blow. The Mahatma, who had trained himself for decades to receive news of death with absolute, detached stoicism, was completely broken.

Mahadev Desai, writing in a raw, grief-stricken letter to C. Rajagopalachari, recorded the profound emotional devastation that filled the ashram:

“Bapu is in great need of consolation… his sorrow is as deep and profound as it was on Maganlal Gandhi’s death.”

The nation had lost its treasurer, but Gandhi had lost his son. Days after the funeral, Gandhi gathered the grieving family around him, his presence bridging the gap between public leader and family patriarch. He looked at Jamnalal’s two young sons, Kamalnayan and Ramkrishna, and distributed their inheritance not in terms of stocks and bank accounts, but in terms of moral duties. He advised the elder son, Kamalnayan, to take the reins of the family’s vast commercial enterprises, running them with strict ethical transparency. Then, turning to the younger son, Ramkrishna, he asked him to surrender his life entirely to finishing the incomplete rural service of his father.

Even in death, the Mahatma’s moral authority continued to shape the Bajaj lineage, ensuring that the legacy of the fifth son would not dissolve back into mere corporate capital.

A Historic Partnership

The epic partnership between Mahatma Gandhi and Jamnalal Bajaj challenges the cynical, simplistic assumptions that dominate our modern view of politics and money. It dismantles the rigid, old idea that leaders must always be ideological purists and that capitalists must always be exploiters.

Jamnalal’s life stands as an immortal proof that the human conscience is fully capable of staging a spectacular revolution against its own economic privileges. He redefined the very meaning of success, showing the world that true wealth is measured not by how much a man accumulates, but by how much of himself he can successfully give away.

In our current twenty-first-century landscape, an era driven by hyper-capitalism, corporate social responsibility that so often feels like corporate public relations, and a deep, toxic division between classes, the story of the Mahatma and his fifth son remains a brilliant, challenging blueprint.

Mahadev Desai’s magnificent funeral tribute in Harijan preserves the final ledger of this extraordinary life for eternity. He wrote that Jamnalal was not merely the treasurer of the nation’s wealth, but the “treasurer of the nation’s honour.”

Jamnalal Bajaj left behind a luminous, timeless lesson for the elite of every generation. The highest use of capital is its total surrender to conscience, and that the greatest title a billionaire can ever earn is to be called a servant of the poor.

To read more articles from this series, click here.

Courtesy: The AIDEM

The post Jamnalal Bajaj, The Fifth Son appeared first on SabrangIndia.

On August 4, hundreds of safai karmacharis (sanitation workers), families of those who died cleaning sewers and septic tanks, Members of Parliament, students, writers and civil society groups assembled at Jantar Mantar in New Delhi under the banner of the Safai Karmachari Andolan (SKA). Their demand was strikingly simple: that Prime Minister Narendra Modi publicly acknowledge the government’s failure to stop these deaths, apologise to the country, and end what they described as a continuing cycle of preventable killings.

The demonstration, organised under the slogan #STOPKILLINGUS, was not merely another protest against unsafe labour conditions. It was an indictment of a system that activists argue has normalised caste-based hazardous labour while simultaneously understating its human cost. As reported by Newsreel Asia, Protesters carried placards reading “Stop Killing Us! Stop Hiding Our Deaths!” and “PM Break Your Silence!” while submitting a memorandum accusing the Union government of concealing the true scale of sewer and septic tank deaths.

The missing dead

At the centre of the protest lies a stark dispute over numbers. According to documentation compiled by the Safai Karmachari Andolan, 593 people died while cleaning sewers and septic tanks between January 2021 and July 2026. However, the Union government’s response in Parliament acknowledged only 332 deaths during roughly the same period. That leaves 261 deaths unaccounted for, according to SKA.

The memorandum submitted to the Prime Minister posed a direct question:

“How did 593 deaths become 332? Where have you hidden the remaining 261 persons who were killed?”

According to the organisation’s records:

• 2021: 47 deaths
• 2022: 93 deaths
• 2023: 102 deaths
• 2024: 117 deaths
• 2025: 121 deaths
• January–July 2026: 113 deaths, including 15 in July alone

The trend demonstrates not improvement but escalation. SKA National Convenor Bezwada Wilson said that despite more than four decades of campaigning against manual scavenging, sanitation workers continue to be sent into sewers and septic tanks in violation of law, reported Newsreel Asia.

“If the government does not immediately stop these killings,” he warned, “the community will have no option but to organise a nationwide chakka jam.”

Not accidents, but illegal deaths

The language used by the movement is deliberate. The memorandum repeatedly rejects the official description of these incidents as workplace accidents. “These deaths are not accidents. They are caused by illegally employing and forcing workers to get inside septic tanks and underground sewer drains.”

The organisation argues that every such death violates Articles 14, 17 and 21 of the Constitution—equality before law, abolition of untouchability and the right to life. SKA National Leader Deepthi Sukumar argued that the persistence of these deaths reflects not only administrative negligence but the continuing reality of caste discrimination. “Because those dying are Dalits, the government does not seem to care,” she said, reported The Hindustan Gazette.

Rajya Sabha MP Manoj Kumar Jha described the deaths as “a matter of national shame“, while CPI(ML) MP Sudhama Prasad criticised the Modi government’s “Manuvadi mindset,” accused the government of attempting to hide fatalities instead of preventing them, reported The Hindustan Gazette. Congress MP Karamveer Baudh assured protesters that the issue would be raised in Parliament.

The human cost behind the statistics

Behind every disputed statistic is a family still waiting for accountability. Forty-two-year-old Satyawati travelled to Jantar Mantar carrying memories dating back to March 20, 2009. Her brother-in-law, Ashok Kumar, worked for the Municipal Corporation of Delhi collecting garbage. “He left home for work but never returned,” she recalled, reported Hindustan Times.

According to Satyawati, the family later received a phone call informing them that Ashok had been sent to clean a septic tank in Delhi’s Narela and died inside it. Seventeen years later, she says, nothing has changed. Her family’s story mirrors hundreds of others represented at the protest—families for whom compensation has often remained inadequate, prosecutions rare, and justice elusive.

The report by Hindustan Times also shared the story of another participant, Paleram, a 60-year-old daily wage worker from Rohini who migrated from Haryana, described entering septic tanks for nearly twenty-five years with almost no training or protective equipment. He began as a sweeper earning ₹50 a day before switching to septic tank cleaning because it paid marginally more.

“The only training I received was being told to climb down the slippery iron handles and clean,” he said, reported Hindustan Times. After recently fracturing his leg while slipping inside a septic tank, he continues working because there are few alternatives. “Sometimes NGOs give us gloves. Otherwise we go inside wearing almost nothing.”

These accounts expose the gap between official claims of mechanisation and the everyday realities faced by sanitation workers.

The caste system beneath the sewer

The protest repeatedly foregrounded what scholars and activists have argued for decades: manual scavenging is not merely an occupational hazard but a caste-based institution. A doctoral researcher studying caste and occupation at Ambedkar University observed that while governments celebrate cleanliness campaigns, the workers responsible for maintaining sanitation infrastructure remain among the least protected.

CPI(M) leader Brinda Karat, who joined the demonstration, remarked that sanitation workers remain invisible both in life and in death. “They are invisible when they are alive, and when they die, the government behaves as though they never existed,” reported Hindustan Times.

Manoj Kumar Jha similarly argued that the overwhelming concentration of Dalits in sanitation work reflects centuries of structural exclusion rather than individual occupational choice.

NAMASTE and the mechanisation gap

India has formally attempted to abolish manual scavenging for decades. The first national legislation prohibiting manual scavenging came in 1993. It was replaced by the Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers and their Rehabilitation Act, 2013, which criminalised the employment of manual scavengers, prohibited hazardous cleaning of sewers and septic tanks without adequate safeguards, and promised rehabilitation. Yet enforcement has remained weak.

No meaningful record of widespread prosecutions exists under the earlier legislation. The 2013 law itself has been criticised for leaving significant ambiguities, including failing to clearly define what constitutes adequate protective equipment and allowing hazardous sewer work under certain conditions. Government data has also remained contested.

The 2011 Census recorded more than 2.6 million dry latrines, while the Socio-Economic Caste Census identified over 180,000 households dependent on manual scavenging as a livelihood. The Safai Karmachari Andolan has consistently argued that the real number of manual scavengers exceeds one million. They have also repeatedly identified the Indian Railways as one of the country’s largest employers of sanitation workers engaged in manual cleaning through contractual arrangements.

Detailed report on how employement of sanitary workers in Indian Railway tracks is a problem may be read here.

In July 2023, the Union government launched the National Action for Mechanised Sanitation Ecosystem (NAMASTE), promising to eliminate hazardous manual sewer cleaning through mechanisation. According to government announcements, the programme was allocated ₹349.73 crore. Three years later, SKA argues that sanitation work remains overwhelmingly dependent on human entry into septic tanks and sewers. The organisation therefore describes the scheme as having failed to achieve its primary objective. Its memorandum asks the government to officially acknowledge this failure and fundamentally redesign the programme.

The Supreme Court’s growing frustration

On July 27, the Supreme Court sharply criticised state governments for failing to prevent sewer deaths despite repeated judicial directions. Hearing the long-pending public interest litigation filed by Dr Balram concerning manual scavenging and sewer cleaning, a Bench comprising Justices Aravind Kumar and Vipul M. Pancholi expressed serious concern over continuing fatalities.

Senior Advocate K. Parameshwar, appearing as amicus curiae, informed the Court that deaths had continued despite its landmark 2023 judgment and subsequent monitoring orders. Referring to data placed before Parliament, he submitted that 54 sewer deaths were officially recorded in 2024 and 46 deaths in 2025, with Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Rajasthan, Gujarat and Uttar Pradesh among the affected states.

Detailed reports on the judgments may be read here, here and here.

The Court responded by issuing show-cause notices to the Chief Secretaries of five states, asking why contempt proceedings should not be initiated for failing to comply with its earlier directions.

As reported by LiveLaw, Justice Aravind Kumar made the Court’s frustration unmistakably clear: “If deaths have occurred subsequent to our orders, we are going to summon your Chief Secretaries… We are making it very clear that we are going to initiate suo motu contempt… This can’t go on… We will fix the responsibility. Somewhere it has to stop.”

The Bench noted that despite repeated directions issued since October 2023, including enhanced compensation of ₹30 lakh for sewer deaths and the January 2025 ban on manual sewer cleaning in six metropolitan cities, fatalities continued “in larger numbers”, indicating that the Court’s orders had failed to translate into administrative action.

A detailed look into the jurisprudence governing manual scavenging, researched consistently by Citizens for Justice and Peace, can be accessed here.

A demand for political accountability

The memorandum submitted by SKA asks for more than compensation. It demands:

• A national apology from the Prime Minister.
• Disclosure of the actual number of sewer and septic tank deaths.
• Immediate elimination of manual entry into sewers.
• A Parliamentary Standing Committee to investigate continuing fatalities.
• A time-bound national plan to eliminate sewer and septic tank deaths.

The memorandum also notes that similar representations were submitted to the Prime Minister’s Office in March 2025 and March 2026, yet received no response.

The memorandum to the PM is attached below:

An old practice the law still has not ended

The protest at Jantar Mantar exposed more than the continuing existence of manual scavenging. It highlighted the widening gap between constitutional guarantees, legislative promises, judicial directives and everyday governance.

Every sewer death occurring after the 2013 Act, after the launch of the NAMASTE Scheme, and after repeated Supreme Court orders raises difficult questions about implementation rather than legislative intent. When governments continue to describe these fatalities as isolated workplace accidents while workers are illegally sent into toxic pits without adequate protection, accountability shifts from individual contractors to the institutions responsible for regulation and enforcement.

For families like Satyawati’s, whose wait for justice has stretched across seventeen years, the demand is no longer simply for compensation. It is for official acknowledgement that these deaths are neither inevitable nor accidental, but the foreseeable consequence of a system that continues to rely on caste-based labour despite laws enacted to abolish it. Until that acknowledgement is matched by enforcement, mechanisation and prosecution, every new sewer death will remain not only a labour rights failure but also a constitutional one.

Related:

Supreme Court bans manual scavenging in metro cities

Breaking the cruel cycle of oppression: one more judgment against manual scavenging in India

SC asks Union, state to eradicate manual scavenging completely, ensure compensation, rehabilitation and education

Manual Scavenging: Why the gov’t’s conscience is not clean about the Swachh Bharat Mission

Caste-based prison work is authoritarian, colonial said SC striking down discriminatory State Prison Manuals

Manual scavenger deaths: How effective is the law in preventing them?

Everyday Atrocity: Mapping the normalisation of violence against Dalits and Adivasis in 2025

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Justice came, but much too late. When I wrote about the CBI court’s decision in 2015 to summon the former Prime Minister as an accused, I welcomed it in an editorial for the New Indian Express. My reasoning was simple. No individual, however exalted, should be above the law. If the court found sufficient grounds to summon a former Prime Minister, he should appear before it and prove his innocence. That, I believed then, would strengthen public confidence in the rule of law.

Today I have no hesitation in saying that I was wrong in one crucial respect.

Of course, the principle that everyone is equal before the law remains inviolable. What failed was the system’s ability to distinguish between suspicion and evidence, between political accountability and criminal culpability. Eleven years of litigation have shown that there was no criminal conspiracy involving Manmohan Singh. Nor was there any corruption or quid pro quo. The Supreme Court has now made that abundantly clear.

Changing one’s opinion in the light of fresh evidence is not inconsistency; it is intellectual honesty. Mahatma Gandhi said that if any of his views conflicted with an earlier one, his latest view should be regarded as his true opinion.

The Bench headed by Chief Justice Surya Kant did something remarkable. Since Manmohan Singh had already passed away, the Court could have quietly accepted the CBI’s closure report. Nobody would have questioned such a course. Instead, the judges examined the merits of the case and concluded that the CBI court had erred in rejecting the closure report and summoning him as an accused. Allowance must also be made for the fact that coal scam was investigated closely under SC’s watch.

The verdict on July 29 restored not merely the reputation of one individual but reaffirmed an important constitutional principle: criminal law should not become an instrument for punishing people without adequate evidence.

To be fair, Manmohan Singh always maintained that the allocation of coal blocks was a policy decision approved collectively by the Cabinet. Governments may make flawed policies. Policies may subsequently be struck down. Administrative decisions may deserve criticism. But none of these automatically constitute criminal offences. That is precisely what the Supreme Court has now recognised.

Ironically, not a single tonne of coal was extracted from any of the blocks whose allocation became the centrepiece of what came to be known as Coalgate. Yet the phrase “Rs 1.86 lakh crore scam” entered public discourse as though it were an established fact. The theory of “presumptive loss” articulated by the then Comptroller ànd Accountant General (CAG) Vinod Rai acquired a life of its own. Television debates converted estimates into convictions. Political speeches transformed allegations into accepted truth.

The damage was enormous. The coal controversy became one of the principal weapons used against the UPA government in the run-up to the 2014 general election. It helped create an impression that corruption had become institutionalised. Whether that perception alone determined the electoral outcome is debatable. That it substantially influenced public opinion is beyond dispute.

Manmohan Singh bore the brunt of that campaign. He was portrayed as weak, indecisive and complicit. His famous observation that history would be kinder to him than contemporary politics was mocked at the time. Today it sounds prophetic.

Long before this judgment, I had begun revisiting my assessment of him. About a decade ago, when Sanjaya Baru published The Accidental Prime Minister, I questioned the fairness of reducing a ten-year Prime Ministership to a tale of helplessness. I argued then that Indian politics was far more complex than the simplistic narrative of a powerless Prime Minister.

A man who successfully completed two full terms, steered India through the global financial crisis, secured the Indo-US civil nuclear agreement and presided over transformative legislation could hardly be dismissed as a mere spectator. That reassessment deepened after his death.

While writing an obituary, I recalled incidents that revealed the extraordinary simplicity of the man. His daughter, Daman Singh, narrates in her biographical work Strictly Personal how, as Governor of the Reserve Bank of India, he kept a notebook beside the official residential telephone so that every personal call made by his family could be recorded and the expense reimbursed to the government. I also remembered my own interactions with him during official visits abroad. Unlike many political leaders who prefer carefully managed encounters, he willingly answered uncomfortable questions from journalists with patience and courtesy.

He carried no air of office. He travelled light in every sense of the term. He used a Reynold pen that cost Rs 10. His possessions never defined him; his scholarship did.

I have often wondered whether such personal integrity has become a political disadvantage in contemporary India. Charisma attracts crowds. Rhetoric dominates headlines. Humility is mistaken for weakness. Silence is interpreted as inability. Yet there are moments when quiet decency leaves a deeper imprint than loud triumphalism.

The Supreme Court judgment cannot restore the eleven years he spent under the shadow of criminal prosecution. It cannot compensate for the humiliation of seeing his name in a chargesheet. It cannot erase the emotional burden borne by his family.

But it does something equally important. It reminds future generations that allegations are not evidence, and that reputation deserves protection until guilt is established. Public life often rewards the loud and overlooks the gentle. Democracies celebrate orators, campaigners and political gladiators. They seldom know what to do with scholars who speak softly, avoid confrontation and believe that reason is more persuasive than rhetoric.

Manmohan Singh belonged to that increasingly rare category. His greatest political weakness, according to many critics, was that he did not shout. Ironically, that was also his greatest strength.

Ironically, the man who derided Manmohan Singh as a “Mauni Baba” is himself unwilling to face the Press, whether in India or abroad. He mocked Manmohan Singh by saying he could “stand under a shower wearing a raincoat”. History has turned that jibe on its head: the raincoat remained spotless because the man wearing it was never tainted by corruption.

I had the privilege of travelling with him on three overseas visits when he was Prime Minister. Anyone who accompanied him on those trips would remember a ritual that has almost disappeared from Indian political life.

Once the aircraft reached cruising altitude, the Prime Minister would emerge from his cabin and meet the journalists travelling with him. He would make a brief opening statement and then invite questions—any questions. They could relate to the visit, Parliament, domestic politics or any controversy of the day. There were no planted questions, no favourites and no visible irritation if someone asked an uncomfortable question. Representatives of the media houses accompanying him were chosen on a rotational basis.

He answered patiently. He listened carefully. He rarely evaded.

Those interactions were perhaps more revealing than the formal press conferences held with foreign leaders. Yet he acquired the label “Silent Prime Minister.”

The irony has become sharper with time. Some of those who criticised his silence later discovered that speaking frequently is not the same as answering questions. Public communication is measured not by the number of speeches but by the willingness to face scrutiny. Manmohan Singh never feared scrutiny.

That confidence arose from something increasingly uncommon in public life: intellectual preparation.

Born in Gah, now in Pakistan, he lost his mother early and was largely raised by his grandparents. The trauma of Partition marked his childhood, yet it never poisoned his outlook. He excelled academically wherever he studied, eventually earning distinction at Cambridge and Oxford before returning to serve India in multiple capacities — as economist, bureaucrat, central banker, Finance Minister and Prime Minister.

His life demonstrated the power of merit in a society often dominated by privilege. One of my favourite stories about him concerns his marriage.

When he first met Gursharan Kaur, he reportedly asked her what class she had secured in her B.A. examination. She replied, “Second class.” Characteristically, he verified the information before agreeing to marry her. It sounds amusing today, but it also reveals the economist’s instinct to verify facts before accepting them. Verification defined his public life as well.

His daughters never became informal centres of power. They never interfered in appointments or government functioning. The family maintained a dignified distance from political influence. In an age when public office often becomes a family enterprise, that restraint deserves recognition. That did not prevent his wife Gursharan Kaur from accompanying him on all his foreign visits. She was equally remarkable.

A relative of my wife served as her personal security officer. He often spoke about her kindness and simplicity. When he once suffered a fall while on duty, she repeatedly telephoned to inquire about his health. Such gestures never found their way into political speeches or publicity campaigns. They did not need to. They reflected character.

Much has been written about the legislative achievements of the UPA years—the Right to Information, the Right to Education, the rural employment guarantee programme, food security, forest rights, Aadhaar and the civil nuclear agreement with the United States. Critics may debate individual policies, but few governments have attempted such a broad expansion of citizens’ rights within a decade. Now most of them are under threat from the successor government.

The tragedy is that these achievements were overshadowed by corruption allegations, many of which eventually collapsed under judicial scrutiny.

The 2G spectrum case ended in acquittals. Now the coal allocation prosecution against Manmohan Singh has also come to an end. History, it appears, has begun separating political narrative from legal reality.

This does not mean that every decision of his government was flawless. No government enjoys that distinction. Democratic governance demands accountability. Policies deserve criticism. Ministers must answer for administrative failures. Whenever his ministers came under a cloud, he asked for their resignation.

However, criminal prosecution requires evidence, not assumption. That is the lesson emerging from the Supreme Court’s verdict.

The judgment is therefore larger than one individual. It should compel governments, investigating agencies and courts to ensure that prosecutions are not allowed to linger endlessly. An innocent person who spends a decade defending his reputation suffers punishment regardless of the final verdict. Justice delayed remains justice diminished.

When I wrote after Manmohan Singh’s death, I observed that he was “more sinned against than sinning.” The phrase, borrowed from Shakespeare’s King Lear, captures his public life better than any elaborate biography.

He lacked the instinct for self-promotion. He did not cultivate personality cults. He never mistook office for personal entitlement. He believed institutions mattered more than individuals.

As India debates leadership in the twenty-first century, it may be worthwhile to remember another model of leadership, not dramatic, not theatrical, not constantly in campaign mode, but grounded in scholarship, restraint and personal integrity.

The Supreme Court has cleared Dr. Manmohan Singh of criminal wrongdoing. History will decide everything else.

My own journey—from supporting his summons in court, to defending his larger legacy, to mourning his passing, and now welcoming his complete exoneration—has reinforced one enduring lesson: opinions should never become prisoners of ideology. They must remain open to facts.

The final tribute we can pay Manmohan Singh is not merely to praise his honesty but to ensure that no honourable citizen has to wait until after death for justice to acknowledge it. May his soul rest in peace!”

Courtesy: Indian Currents

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