Late last week, I wrote a piece responding to Deepinder Goyal’s tweets on how he views India’s gig economy. It went viral – and as is inevitable with anything that does, it brought with it an equal measure of bouquets and brickbats.

Since then, I have been labelled a communist, a leftist, and a Marxist, for pointing out the large holes in Goyal’s arguments. I have also been told that I don’t understand what capitalism is – or how a free market works. Of course, along with this there has been some abuse as well – words that can’t be published here.

The most amusing of these was the claim that since Deepinder Goyal – the founder of Eternal – the company behind Zomato and Blinkit – has made a lot of money in life, he necessarily knows what he is talking about. And since I haven’t, my thinking, apparently, doesn’t really count.

Interestingly, many of the people accusing me of not understanding capitalism would swear by Ayn Rand, the novelist-philosopher who turned the entrepreneur into a moral hero. Rand believed that profit was not a dirty word but a signal of value creation. In her novels and non-fiction, entrepreneurs earned rewards by solving real problems for willing customers, not by relying on hidden subsidies or a desperate labour force.

All this has led to this piece, in which I try examining whether what the likes of Zomato, Swiggy, Blinkit, Zepto, Instamart, and others are doing, can really be labelled free-market capitalism. Or is it something else being passed off as capitalism? Indeed, are we witnessing a high-speed exploitation engine merely dressed in free-market clothing?

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The Lok Sabha poll results stunned most spectators, with the BJP falling short of the majority mark despite its clarion call for over 400 seats. So what went wrong? How did the INDIA bloc parties engineer their revival?

Sanjay Singh, director of Lokniti CSDS, has been tracking and analysing Indian politics for decades. In this conversation with Newslaundry, Singh delved into the factors that led to the BJP’s decline, particularly in Uttar Pradesh.

The political analyst shared his insights on the caste dynamics at play in the elections, the Modi factor, consensus among people, and the triggers behind the BJP’s setback. “Prime Minister Modi’s magic is still intact…but there has been a decline in his ability to pull votes for the BJP.”

Singh said the “narrative of Hindutva” didn’t work and that “overconfidence has killed the BJP”, while the opposition’s rhetoric to “save the constitution” struck a chord with the people.

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On the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos, something very unusual happened.

It had nothing to do with monetary policy, recession worries, or net-zero energy technologies. Instead, after a gap of eight years, union minister Smriti Irani granted NDTV an interview.

Irani sat down with NDTV’s editorial director Sonia Singh to talk about how the “India story was setting Davos on fire”, our triumph in “gender justice”, and why the Congress was “still hurt” that she had defeated Rahul Gandhi in Amethi in 2019.

It was what one might describe as a ‘soft’ interview – except for five questions Singh asked on issues like India’s growth being hyped, “super censorship”, and Modi’s remarks on minority outreach.

Read the full article here

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