Why Bashing Billionaires Misses the Bigger Truth—Adani’s Tax Trail & Bihar’s Electricity Bid

Why Bashing Billionaires Misses the Bigger Truth — Adani’s Tax Trail & Bihar’s Electricity Bid

India’s favorite sport outside cricket may well be billionaire-bashing. Few magnates have inspired as much fervor as Gautam Adani, whose meteoric rise has made him an enduring lightning rod for opposition barbs and relentless media coverage. Yet, beneath the headlines, the facts paint a more instructive picture of business responsibility and economic impact.

Adani—Consistent Taxpayer in a Landscape of Evasion

In FY25, the Adani Group contributed ₹74,945 crore to the Indian exchequer—the equivalent of building Mumbai’s entire Metro network. Not only did this mark a 29% year-on-year surge, but it also outstripped most Indian conglomerates and dwarfed what many global tech giants remit in the US or Europe. Such numbers go beyond corporate compliance—they underscore the fiscal backbone that India’s infrastructure, welfare, and public projects now rest on.

Direct and indirect contributions from Adani span diverse sectors: infrastructure, logistics, energy, cement, and renewables. The Adani portfolio not only pays taxes robustly but also releases detailed tax transparency reports, an ESG-driven practice aligned with international standards. This signals a shift from opaque practices traditionally associated with Indian business houses.

The Global Billionaire Tax Reality: A Stark Contrast

While Adani’s tax contributions soar, global billionaires often enjoy a vastly different reality. Studies reveal billionaires and multimillionaires worldwide pay effective tax rates significantly lower than the general population—even as average citizens in countries like the US pay around 13.9% in income taxes. The so-called “Big 5” US tech companies—Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet (Google), and Meta—pay an average effective tax rate just under 15%, far below the 21% corporate statutory rate they owe (and less than many individual taxpayers). In truth, billionaire wealth has ballooned, representing a growing share of global GDP, while their effective tax footprints remain abysmally small.

The international community, including the G20, has debated a global minimum wealth tax on billionaires, proposed at a modest 2%, to address this widening gulf and generate trillions for public coffers. As debates persist, Adani’s example stands out as an Indian billionaire actively paying large taxes, contributing meaningfully to government revenue.

Bihar’s Electricity Contract: Wrath vs. Reality

Latest in the firestorm is Adani Power’s win of a long-term electricity supply contract in Bihar. Politicians and commentators swiftly attributed this to favoritism or monopoly fears, stoking public anger with misleading comparisons between thermal rates and regional averages. Yet, objective analysis reveals Adani’s bid emerged as the strongest, securing state capacity at competitive prices—well within the sustainable tariff band.

Moreover, the project promises direct employment to more than 15,000 people, a scale rarely matched by rivals in similar bids. Critics conveniently ignore that such contracts carry rigorous obligations, and that the government opted for Adani because the offering outperformed peers on price and technical merit.

Why the Narrative Needs Resetting

It is easy—perhaps too easy—to vilify large business owners, especially in a climate of growing inequality. Yet, persistent tax compliance and transparent reporting, as demonstrated by Adani, are fundamental to national fiscal health. When a conglomerate both powers economic growth and supports government revenues, opposition and media owe the public a nuanced story—not just recycled outrage.

Business titans should absolutely be scrutinized for fair competition and regulatory adherence. But facts matter. Adani’s growing tax outgo, employment commitments, and open reporting do not fit the caricature of the evasive, exploitative billionaire. If anything, they suggest a model others ought to emulate.

In Conclusion

Billionaire-bashing might provide instant catharsis, but in the long arc of nation-building, it is facts—like Adani’s ₹74,945 crore fiscal contribution, strong Bihar energy bid, and the glaringly low tax rates of global billionaires—that ultimately shape India’s prospects. The democracy we cherish should keep its critiques sharp—and its praise proportionate to performance.

The Bengal Files and the Battle for Memory: Why Suppressed History Still Burns

Cinema has always been more than entertainment. It is memory on reel, a mirror to society, a debate carried forward in images and sound. Few filmmakers in India have embraced this responsibility with the tenacity of Vivek Ranjan Agnihotri. His latest work, The Bengal Files (released September 5, 2025), continues his now unmistakable mission: to exhume histories deliberately hidden, sanitize-free, and present them with the raw urgency of truth.

Predictably, the film has sparked controversy. Vivek himself tweeted an impassioned appeal to West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee to ensure his film is allowed to be screened freely, denouncing what he describes as an “unofficial ban.” Lawsuits have been filed, intimidation of theaters reported, and critics once again charge him with propaganda. But strip away the noise and one fact remains: Agnihotri has taken Bengal’s suppressed 1946 communal carnage—Direct Action Day, the Great Calcutta Killings, the Noakhali riots—and forced us to confront them.

For decades, these events have been footnotes at best, erased at worst. By reintroducing them as cinema, Agnihotri ensures they cannot be conveniently forgotten.

The Film: Thriller, Archive, Mirror

The Bengal Files cleverly intertwines two timelines. In the present day, a CBI officer (Darshan Kumaar) investigates the disappearance of a journalist, only to stumble upon a dark continuity of violence—political killings, religiously targeted assaults, and systemic appeasement. Layered over this is the 1946 backdrop: days when Calcutta’s streets ran red with unchecked violence, estimates ranging between 4,000 and 10,000 dead.

The figures may be numbers in a history book, but Agnihotri transforms them into cinematic scars. With meticulous use of eyewitness accounts, historical records, and symbolic imagery, the violence on screen is graphic, yes—but evidence-based and necessary.

Characters embody moral dilemmas writ large:

• Gopal Patha (Saurav Das), a butcher-turned-defender, channels Kali’s wrath, urging Hindus to retaliate—“kill ten if they kill one.” His surrender attempt before Gandhi, touching the Mahatma’s feet yet rejecting submission, encapsulates the paradox of rage and reverence.
• Anupam Kher, Mithun Chakraborty, Saswata Chatterjee, and others infuse gravitas into a film that is less about individuals than about collective memory.

The result is not propaganda but a thriller-drama where fact drives story, where suppressed wounds bleed into today’s politics. Sandeshkhali’s Sheikh Shahjahan, arrested in 2024 amid allegations of land grabs and sexual violence, finds clear echoes in the film’s portrayal of a powerful MLA shielded by political impunity.

Philosophy on Trial: Ahimsa vs Dharma

The soul of The Bengal Files lies not only in its history lesson but in its philosophical provocation. The film resurrects a neglected shloka:

“अहिंसा परमो धर्मः धर्म हिंसा तथैव च”
(Non-violence is the ultimate Dharma; yet violence in defense of Dharma is equally so.)

India has clung obsessively to the first half—Gandhi’s creed of non-violence—while discarding the balancing clause. The result? A moral imbalance that left victims unprotected, Partition unhealed, and subsequent riots unresolved.

Agnihotri confronts this imbalance head-on. His Bengal is not simply a place of riots; it is a stage where collective hatred drowns individual conscience. A chilling line captures the psychology: “I got lost in the crowd. Everybody else was doing it. I felt, for the first time, freedom from responsibility.”

Violence dehumanizes both victim and perpetrator. But blind non-violence, too, risks injustice. By contrast, Kamal Haasan’s Hey Ram (2000), also rooted in Bengal riots, argued for redemption through forgiveness, climaxing in Gandhian embrace. The Bengal Files takes the opposite route: sometimes Dharma requires resistance, not surrender.

Together, these films—25 years apart—demand we wrestle with the question: Is India’s survival secured through absolute Ahimsa, or through Dharma that knows when to defend?

Why Vivek’s Cinema Resonates

Having engaged with Urban Naxals, The Tashkent Files, The Kashmir Files: Unreported, and The Vaccine War, I see a continuity in Agnihotri’s cinema. He builds thriller-like narratives from fact, never letting evidence suffocate storytelling. These works are less about party politics than about truth-telling: exposing forgotten assassinations, abandoned minorities, unsung scientists, and now, Bengal’s silenced genocide.

Critics dismiss them as “BJP projects.” I disagree. They are uncomfortable precisely because they don’t flatter any power structure—be it Congress, Left, or TMC. They force us to look at the cost of historical amnesia.

Censorship Is the Real Enemy

The fiercest tragedy of The Bengal Files is not its depiction of violence but the attempt to muzzle it. A democracy that cannot allow films—works of art, inquiry, and dissent—to be seen, is a democracy walking blindfolded. Whether one praises the film as “gut-wrenching truth” or denounces it as “manufactured anxiety,” the point is this: debate only exists when art is allowed to breathe.

Suppressing such cinema does not heal divides; it deepens them.

Final Word

India’s pluralism has survived precisely because it has room for competing truths: Gandhi and Gopal Patha, Ahimsa and Dharma, forgiveness and justice. Films like The Bengal Files and Hey Ram are not opposites but complements in a larger, unfinished dialogue.

But this dialogue collapses when political censorship dictates what we can or cannot see. If Bengal’s past was bloodied by riots, its present risks being scarred by silence.

Agnihotri may not have delivered the box office earthquake of The Kashmir Files (opening weekend ~₹6.65 crore), but he has again forced us to confront suppressed truths. That alone is victory.

Watch The Bengal Files. Debate it. Disagree if you must. But don’t look away.

Because when we look away, history repeats—and its cost is always human lives.

AI at the Crossroads—Reflection, Responsibility & Co-Intelligence

In a world fragmented by borders and identities, where nationalism wrestles with multicultural aspirations & political ideologies drift through cycles of hope and disillusionment, humanity now stands at another profound juncture: the rise of artificial intelligence. AI is more than a technological revolution; it is a mirror reflecting the best & worst of us. It is an echo of our soaring aspirations and faltering strides.

Just as the incandescent glow of the electric bulb ushered in a new age or the nuclear bomb forced humanity to reckon with the duality of creation and destruction, AI jolts us into reckoning with who we are and what we might become. Yuval Noah Harari warns of AI as a threat, an agent capable of fracturing identity, undermining agency & weaponizing misinformation. His cautionary vision recalls the fear unleashed in the aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, when the same power that illuminated cities also threatened their total annihilation.

Yet, in the shadow of that dread lies a paradoxical triumph: the atomic bomb, grim as it is, house-arrested full-scale wars through deterrence while nuclear energy powers progress in medicine, science & society. Similarly, Ethan Mollick’s frame of AI as co-intelligence invites a more harmonious partnership: AI not as an alien conqueror but a collaborator in human creativity, learning, and growth. Mollick’s vision is optimistic yet pragmatic—urging us to keep humans in the loop, to experiment thoughtfully, and to wield AI’s growing capabilities with ethical intent.

The gulf between these views—whether it is Harari’s existential warning or Mollick’s collaborative ethos—is not a divide but a dialogue. It is the tension that defines our technological age: fear balanced by hope, risk by opportunity, caution by curiosity. The choices humanity makes now—how we govern AI, how we embed it ethically in our institutions, and how we ensure opportunity flows equitably—will shape our collective future.

Our societies, fractured by religion, caste, and ambition, have transformed from harmonious collectives into transactional alliances far from their original conception. AI, wielded without humility, risks deepening these divides. But wielded with wisdom, it promises to reclaim humanness—a tryst with meaning beyond division.

Like the calculator reshaped mathematics or the internet connected the disconnected, AI takes us further. It is a tool that democratizes knowledge yet demands vigilance to ensure it remains accessible and just. It requires a societal commitment to excellence and equity, especially when governance too often succumbs to vote-bank politics or authoritarian ossification.

Ultimately, AI is a glimmer and echo of humankind, crafted in our image. It demands not blind trust or fearful rejection but reflective partnership. This partnership, this co-intelligence between human and machine, can illuminate new horizons for learning, creativity, and social harmony if we choose to seize it.

As we navigate this unprecedented terrain, one truth remains clear: the story of AI is the story of us—all our contradictions, hopes, flaws & greatness. Harari in his book Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI, concludes that the way forward is to build strong institutions that can help us distinguish reliable information & to focus on developing our own minds alongside AI. The pen of history now waits for our careful hand.