Why Atlas shrugged

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Editor's note: On the nape of the Delhi-Meerut Expressway, where India’s capital cedes to the state of Uttar Pradesh, stands the five-star Radisson Blu hotel, whose board reads “Happily ever after begins here”. Beyond this board lies the industrial belt of Sahibabad, where banquet halls named Grand Jashn and Hollywood Dreams take indifferent stock of cratered roads, open sewage and thousands of lost jobs. How quantifiable the unemployment crisis is here is a function of political alignment: up to 25,000 is the number claimed by the Centre of Indian Trade Unions, backed by the Communist Party of India (Marxist); but the deputy labour commissioner office in Ghaziabad—the district where Sahibabad lies, and where bureaucrats align with right-wing chief minister Yogi Adityanath—claims fewer than a thousand. Locals in Sahibabad, however, talk of a reality sandwiched between the two extremes of the rhetoric. They talk of a Sahibabad obsessed with banquet halls, so much so that 36 so far have been sealed for flouting zoning regulations. Some talk with pride about Mohan Meakin, Asia’s oldest brewery and the maker of Old Monk rum; others …