It may have so far escaped your notice that there is an onion crisis in India, but this thing is serious. Onions are the fundament of every curry ever cooked. Before the meat or the tomatoes or the garam masala, onions sizzle in the pan of 1.2 billion hungry Indians – and when the price of onions goes up too high, governments come crashing down.

Indira Gandhi was swept to power in 1980 on a cheap onion ticket. In the last few weeks the government of Manmohan Singh has been driven to a desperate quantitative easing in the supply of the precious bulbs. They have banned exports of onions to Pakistan. They have been freighting them in – and still the price of this essential nutrient can only be described...