India, April 28 -- It is rare that an academic paper shows up in an election manifesto of a political party. The paper titled Income and Wealth Inequality in India, 1922-2023: The Rise of the Billionaire Raj, by Thomas Piketty and his co-authors Nitin Kumar Bharti, Lucas Chancel, and Anmol Somanchi, finds mention in the Congress's election manifesto. They show that not only in the context of India's own record over a century, the country's level of inequality is the highest at present, but also that India is now among the most unequal countries in the world. This upward trend in inequality has been evident since liberalisation - the number of billionaires in US dollar terms rose from one in 1991 to 52 in 2011, and to 162 in 2022....