Backstory: 2024 and Its Words Burnt into Memory

There was a great deal about the year 2024 that appeared to be a continuation of the previous year. We thought that Israel’s genocide would end, that it would end when the International Court of Justice (ICJ) termed what was happening in Gaza as “plausible genocide”, or when the International Criminal Court (ICC) sent out arrest warrants for killer-in-chief Benjamin Netanyahu. That it would end when the whole of Gaza came to resemble a concrete morgue. That it would end when Joe Biden would at long, long last exert himself and ensure a ceasefire in the dying moments of his tenure. That it would end when thousands of thousands of students, young adults, old adults, walked the street and screamed: “Stop the genocide.” It did not. It carried on seamlessly, from one bombing to the next, stripping away layer upon layer of Palestinian flesh, just as the Russian aggression on Ukraine carried on, or the forgotten conflict in Sudan.

In 2024, it seemed, humankind, fuelled by the billions flowing into the coffers of ammunition industries and reflected in Dow Jones indices, had discovered an insatiable, unquenchable, inextinguishable appetite for massacre. Massacres fuelled capitalism in 2024. 

It was a year of elections and regime change. Two of India’s neighbouring countries, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, acquired new ruling dispensations, both born out of popular conflict. If Sheikh Hasina had to fly out in a hurry to save her life in August, so too did Syria’s Bashar al-Assad in December. As for the US, well, it got Donald Trump of MAGA fame. He won his election by claiming Haitians immigrants were chewing up pet dogs in Ohio, even as his vice presidential nominee did his bit by taking on childless cat ladies. 

For Indians, in a year that saw many a doyen pass on to the great hereafter, the relentless cycle of time was fuelled by an all-too-familiar hate, a hate that overturned the carts of poor vendors; smelt meat in carrier bags and set the pickaxe to work in pursuit of temples that supposedly lay under centuries-old mosques. Temples were big in 2024. The election year began with the grand pran pratishtha of Ramlala at the half built Ram Mandir at Ayodhya presided over by a prime minister-turned-mukhya-yajman. A month later, there he was diving in the waters off the Gujarat coast to pray at Lord Krishna’s Dwarka.

Also read: Manmohan Singh Was More Than an Architect of India’s Economic Reforms

As the general election drew closer, the expectations of divinity’s dividends only grew. A point came when the prime minister claimed that he was not biological but expressly sent by God. There were some who dismissed that statement as the ever-fevered imagination of the over-ambitious, but I don’t agree. In 2024, Elon Musk got permission to implant neuralinks in the human brain and I have come to believe that long before him, our non-biological prime minister had already implanted neuralinks in the brains of millions upon millions of Indians through his spiritual powers and with some help from the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP’s) IT Cell. 

How else can we explain the mysterious collapse of democratic institutions, each one of them seemingly neuralinked to Narendra Modi? Take the Election Commission of India (ECI). It saw Arun Goyal, an election commissioner, quit his post abruptly just before the general election, thus paving the way for a prime minister-backed rearrangement of the institution’s staff composition. Unsurprisingly, the three wise men of the re-constituted Commission did not disappoint their mentor. In a year that saw several important polls, they stoutly refused to check hate speech, including the obnoxious batenga toh katenge (we will be slaughtered if divided), and steadfastly refused to entertain any suggestion of electoral manipulation. Evidence to the contrary piled up, including the curious fact that in 140 Lok Sabha seats more EVM votes were counted than EVM votes polled, with the same magical pattern recurring in the Haryana and Maharashtra polls, but the ECI didn’t move a muscle. 

The BJP’s brilliant stratagem: One Nation, One Election, was introduced in 2023 but was presented as a fully fleshed artifact in the winter session of parliament of 2024. It claimed that to have all elections from the national to the local collapsed into one giant psephological exercise every five years would work out cheaper but the real reason possibly was that every Modi speech could thus be spread evenly across the land to rake in all the ballots at one shot. Whether the idea will take off or not is an open question given the strong opposition to it. Ravish Kumar put it well: “They are not been able to finalise one tax for popcorn, but they want to implement ‘One Election One Nation’.”

As for the Supreme Court of India, it continued to deny bail to political prisoners, including brilliant, idealistic young people left to rot in jails. Repression was just one FIR away, with the colonial-era Indian Penal Code now replaced by three sanhitas. The new nomenclature sounds pretty (please note the Sanskrit) but they are no less repressive. For G.N. Saibaba, freedom when it came, was too late. His decade long incarceration as a paraplegic and his subsequent death shortly after his release will remain a rising howl in the dark labyrinths of India’s justice delivery. 

The few concessions the top court made – a verdict outlawing election bonds and prison manual reform – were important but far too meagre when measured in the scales of Lady Justice, now demurely sari-clad and with blindfold removed. Taken as a whole, the legacy of the Supreme Court in 2024 and Chief Justice D.Y. Chandrachud who dominated it for the most part, did not inspire confidence on counts of independence, more so when the he suddenly played host to the prime minister before media cameras during a Ganapati puja at his residence. As for Nitish Kumar, once again it seems the neuralink proved effective. All of a sudden the man from Patliputra turned Palti-putra, ditching his coalition with the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) and the INDIA bloc and joining the National Democratic Alliance (NDA). He went on to help the ruling coalition secure a third term after it failed to measure up to its boast of 400 paar.

Also read: Amit Shah’s Remarks on Ambedkar Echo the Cultivated Contempt of Hindutva Forces for Him

Such curiosities apart, 2024 had some hijinks as well, thanks to our home-grown multi-billonaires. India became home to the third largest number of dollar billionaires this year, overtaking Russia. It was a year that saw the Adanis and Ambanis capture disproportionate media space by employing the ancient Roman principle, panem et circenses, or bread and circuses, to enthrall the paparazzi and pauper alike. For Adani his unceasing search for bread (with butter of course) left him battling a $2200 crore bribery charges in a US court.

The Ambanis, on their part, displayed their cornucopia of riches to the world through a wedding spectacle that stretched across a good part of the year and is said to have cost only a modest Rs 5,000 crore. Meanwhile the bridegroom snared a journalist into snacking on a laddu meant for the elephants in his private animal farm, Vantara. The journo reportedly didn’t gag at the experience – can’t say the same for the rest of us. Speaking of wild life, it was a year when indignant Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP) members moved the Calcutta high court against a perfidious case of love jihad: apparently a lioness named Sita was being housed with a lion called Akbar in the Siliguri Safari Park. 

But it was that kind of year when rationality was deemed anti-nationalism. The year saw a food delivery firm launch a pure vegetarian fleet (later hurriedly withdrawn); a BJP ad campaign that wooed voters over Modi having stopped the war in Ukraine: “War rukwa di, papa”; and police personnel guarding the Kashi-Vishwanath complex to don saffron instead of the customary khaki. 

If the US and Canada witnessed a total solar eclipse this year, India seemed to have experienced a total sanity eclipse. Politicians across the country demanded women produce more babies (the southern ones in order to fight the impending prospect of reduced parliamentary seats; the northern ones to ensure that Hindu numbers will never, ever, be overtaken by Muslim numbers in a billion years). Everything was grist to the political mill, whether it was the samosas and jungle murghi that saw the Himachal Pradesh chief minister turn red in the face; or the Tirupathi laddus accused of being defiled by a highly suspicious but unidentified oleaginous substance, a charge the Andhra chief minister deployed against his predecessor. 

But wait, Vikshit Bharat (Golden Bharat) will arrive in 2047, or so we were informed. But here’s the thing – our chess prodigies decided not to wait that long. They won the team gold at the Chess Olympiad in September and finessed that feat with D. Gukesh being crowned the youngest World Chess Champion in December. 

Sometimes All We Imagine as Light comes from unexpected sources!

Have a great 2025!

Readers write in…

Ferro Scrap Nigam

Hyderabad-based Sushil Prasad has this response to the Wire article, ‘The Puzzling Divestment of Ferro Scrap Nigam’ (December 23): “I am unable to appreciate the contention that, ‘Had FSNL not paid high dividends to its shareholders including MSTC – Rs 11.2 crore in 2022, Rs 9 crore in 2023 and Rs 12.80 crore in 2024 – these profit numbers would have been higher yet’. Dividends are paid out of PAT (Perform Achieve and Trade, a regulatory instrument), so how would the amount of dividends affect PAT?

“Moreover, Ferro Scrap Nigam’s operations seem essentially oriented to be symbiotic with PSU steel manufacturers — it gets its raw materials from them, leases space for its operations from them, and sells its main end product back to them. As such, it would be pretty difficult to move out of that relationship, for both parties, notwithstanding the fact that assured supplies of slag would get reduced to two years.

“One also needs to factor in the inefficiencies in price discovery under existing arrangements, both for purchase of slag and sale of steel scrap.

“The valuation can be questioned but, prima facie, that is also not quite clear. It is mentioned that against Rs 400 crore of hard assets, the company had liabilities of only Rs. 184 crore, ie, a very rough valuation of only Rs.216 crore vis-a-vis a selling price of Rs 320 crore. The hard assets include trade receivables of Rs.202 crore (more than 50 per cent). What is the quality of these receivables? Its recoverability? 

“Beyond such quibbling is the bigger question whether Ferro Scrap Nigam and its assets (P&M as well as expertise) would add more value to the economy and society under PSU management or as a privatised entity. After all, what is the rationale for such an enterprise to function as a PSU?”

The writer of the piece, M. Rajshekhar, responds: “Thanks for your detailed email. Your first point is valid. We have used the word profits loosely. We should have said ‘retained earnings’ or ‘cash position’. We are fixing that.

“On the question of valuation, the question is whether Rs 320 crore fully captures the value of this firm. This question also hinges on the existing order book + potential diversifications once under private management. That is the question we ask.

“There is a larger question here. In recent years, India’s efforts at divestment have been murky. Central Electronics was sought to be sold to a firm with political links. Pawan Hans almost went to an obscure Middle East fund which had a NCLT case against it — and appeared to be a proxy for unknown backers. For this reason, I am wary of seeing privatisation as an uncomplicated panacea. You know cronyism runs deep in this country. And so, when a foreign firm without steel operations in India decides to buy a steel PSU which will lose all its sale and supply arrangements in two years, it’s worth wondering why. (In this case, incidentally, sources say that former management personnel of FSNL got Konoike to bid. At this time, that claim is impossible to verify and so, we have not mentioned it. We might know once the management structure is announced).

“Those are my questions. Is the government correct in classifying steel as a non-strategic sector? Second, even if the firm has to be sold, has the country maximised its gains from the exercise? How do the sale proceeds compare with, say, the likely drop in MSTC’s market cap, profits, topline, etc? Is India better off as a result? Cheers…”

Write to ombudsperson@thewire.in.