On September 28, 1991, Shankar Guha Niyogi put aside his copy of Lenin on Trade Unions and Revolutions, and fell asleep under a mosquito net in his room on the ground floor of an apartment in the Bhilai industrial township. In the early hours of the morning, a young man rode up to the house, looked in through the bedroom’s well-lit window and shot him dead. At the time, Niyogi stood at the helm of a movement to unionise the
thousands of contract workers employed in factories across what would become the State of Chhattisgarh. Twenty years on, as India appraises the legacy of two decades of economic reforms, Niyogi’s life and violent end offer a snapshot of the turbulence that presaged the dawn of the India’s ‘New Economy’.