In the summer of 2020, India had no shortage of stories.
The country was emerging from what was described as the world’s harshest lockdown, one that had triggered the largest internal migration since Partition and, it later emerged, had been enforced without consultation within the government. The economy was about to record its first recession in four decades, driven not so much by the pandemic as by the lockdown itself, which contracted the economy by nearly 24 percent in that quarter. Petrol and diesel prices were hiked every single day between June 7 and June 21.
