The Derivative Values of Platform Capitalism

Abstract

The recently concluded General Election in India was not only its costliest ever, the overall expense nearly doubled over the previous iteration, in 2014. While the expense has gone up six times since 1998, in about two decades, the jump between the last two iterations is alarming for a number of reasons. Indian economy has been doing rather badly, particularly since the demonetization event, in which the government excluded nearly 86% of its active currency from legal tendering. Since then, there has been a remarkable fall even in official growth numbers. Unemployment is the highest it has been in decades, and small and medium enterprises have been struggling to stay afloat, by all accounts. How do we reconcile with the two contrasting set of graphics, then? While it may have increasingly become a common sense of ‘life in capitalism’, the paradox of a struggling economy confronted with the loudest, the most self-assured and blatantly self-congratulatory government should be a moment of reckoning.