This article delineates the vision and praxis of Once in a Blue Moon Academia (OBMA), a self-funded, non-profit platform established in 2021 to critically intervene in the intertwined crises of India’s financial and ecological orders. Anchored in the dual focus on the devastating financial ecosystem—exemplified by the Dewan Housing Finance Corporation Limited (DHFL) crisis—and the accelerating catastrophe of climate change and environmental degradation, OBMA advances a form of academic activism that traverses disciplinary, institutional, and epistemic boundaries. Drawing inspiration from Gandhian non-violent civil disobedience and movements such as Occupy Wall Street, it mobilizes legal challenges, digital campaigns, and critical scholarship to expose crony capitalism, regulatory complicity, and ecological neglect. At the same time, it expands into a broader intellectual–activist ecosystem that interrogates neoliberal political economy, authoritarian democratic forms, institutionalized education, proprietary regimes of knowledge, and epistemic monism, while experimenting with alternatives grounded in commons, decentralization, scepticism, and plural ways of knowing. Guided by the ethical horizon of bahujana sukhaya, bahujanahitaya ca (“for the welfare and happiness of the many”), OBMA seeks not merely reform but a reconstitution of socio-political and intellectual life through interdisciplinary praxis, prefigurative politics, and sustained critical engagement with structures of power, inequality, and ecological collapse.
THE ART OF RESISTANCE
Posted on: 18/09/2021 (IST 11: 15 hrs) Updated on: 22/09/2o23 (GMT 13.32 hrs) Posted On 19th September, 2021 DEBAPRASAD BANDYOPADHYAY AKHAR BANDYOPADHYAY “Suffering comes from three quarters: from our own body, which is destined to decay and dissolution, and cannot even dispense with anxiety and pain as danger-signals; from the outer world, which can rageContinue reading “THE ART OF RESISTANCE”
CONVERGENCE TO PRAXIS: AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL ON SUFFERINGS: OBJECTIVES AND DESCRIPTION
This journal tries to demolish the administrative boundaries of academic disciplinary technology by amalgamating all the so-called “subjects” by condemning the objectification, subjectification and subjection. It strives to reach the vanishing point of theory and praxis. Thus, instead of so-called “inter-disciplinary studies”, it emphasizes on the convergence of earthian knowledges and praxiologies. The journal attemptsContinue reading “CONVERGENCE TO PRAXIS: AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL ON SUFFERINGS: OBJECTIVES AND DESCRIPTION”
“False”(?!) allegations on the collusion among the BJP, Dawood-Mirchi and the DHFL: A Letter to the BJP President
The article refutes allegations of collusion between the BJP, Dawood Ibrahim, Iqbal Mirchi, and DHFL, claiming they are politically motivated and intended to tarnish the BJP’s image. It argues that these accusations are unfounded and part of a smear campaign. The author defends the BJP, suggesting that the party has no links to these figures or the alleged financial scandal.
Once in a Blue Moon Academia (OBMA): MOA
1. Name of the CommunityThe name of the Society shall be “Once In A Blue Moon Academia”, hereinafter referred to as “OBMA.” 2. Objects of the Society 2.1.To promote and protect human and animal rights in all parts of the world; to study and disseminate knowledge on international human rights issues and the convergences ofContinue reading “Once in a Blue Moon Academia (OBMA): MOA”
The Piramal Pratijñābhaṅga: The Itching Palm of “Conscious Capitalism”?!
This open letter to Ajay Piramal is a satirical indictment of Piramal as an agential structure of corporate power, wielding pratijñābhaṅga, dharma, and satyāgraha to expose the contradictions of “conscious capitalism,” the DHFL “resolution” (?), depositor dispossession, and the collusive architecture linking capital, State apparatus, and institutional power. Piramal is neither an isolated individual nor an aberration, but a particularly revealing node in India’s dynastic neo-capitalist order—the same oligarchic formation embodied, in their own equally consequential ways, by Adani and Ambani, the notorious twins of India’s corporate duopoly.
মঁসিয়ে ফুকোর খ্যামতার কলাপ আর আজকের প্রলাপ
What happens when Foucault is read not as a doctrine but as a device that reads back? Beginning with the sword suspended supposedly above Damocles, this essay follows its displacement—from sovereign threat to dispositif, from visible punishment to (in)visible surveillance, from the juridico-discursive to the rhizomatic capillary, from the sovereign who commands to the subject who learns to govern itself. Rather than applying Foucault to contemporary India, the essay de-seminates him in the context of present-day India: concepts scatter across Damocles, Orestes, parrhesia, the rhizome, the Frankfurt School, algorithmic surveillance, autocratic legalism, electoral politics, guilt and self-discipline, repeatedly returning in altered forms. The rhizome becomes both possibility and trap; the network that once promised escape from sovereign centrality can become an architecture of distributed control, while the sword need no longer fall because its possibility has been internalised. Against any simple opposition between power and resistance, the essay asks how resistance itself is captured, reproduced and redirected through the very dispositifs it contests. It is thus an exercise in meta-writing: Foucault is read through Foucault, against Foucault, and beyond the stabilising authority of “Foucauldian-ism”, as the essay moves between theory, myth, political diagnosis and its own acts of reading. What emerges is not a final thesis but a deliberately unstable map of power—one in which the question is no longer merely where power resides, but how subjects, networks, institutions and affects continually participate in making, unmaking and remaking its forms.
Encountering Pratijñābhaṅga: BJP’s Jumla Politics and the Hollow Piramal Promise
This article argues that the political formation presenting itself as temporal guardian of Sanātana Dharma stands convicted, by that tradition’s own oath-jurisprudence, of serial pratijñā-bhaṅga (breach of the solemn word). Classical Indian thought treats the given word as a binding bond, its rupture punished both in the seen (dṛṣṭa: curse, fine, exile, infamy) and unseen (adṛṣṭa: loss of merit, hell). Reconstructing this jurisprudence from Vedic, epic, Nyāya and Dharmaśāstra sources, the paper applies it to two cases. Focus One: the Hollow Piramal Promise in the DHFL insolvency, where Piramal Capital publicly pledged fixed-deposit holders an extra 10% over the CoC plan yet delivered only 23.08% recovery (~77% haircut on ~₹5,375 crore), while assigning ~₹45,050 crore in alleged-fraud recoveries to the acquirer for one rupee. Focus Two: BJP’s jumla politics—the serial non-coherence of promises from ₹15 lakh and two crore jobs to Acche Din, Smart Cities, Housing for All and Viksit Bharat 2047. Method is compelled juxtaposition of promise against record; pseudology is treated as a discursive property, contested claims are marked, and the Piramal material is offered as opinion and fair comment on a matter of public interest. The finding is arthānupapatti—its Vedic name anṛta, the untruth opposite to the ṛta these guardians claim to protect.
Azadi, or Democratic Unfreedom? A Video Message from OBMA
This video asks what “Azadi” (freedom) means in India today, and whether the formal existence of democracy can coexist with a lived condition of democratic unfreedom. Tracing the period from 2014 to 2026, it examines the erosion of civil liberties, institutional accountability, democratic participation, ecological security, and economic justice, before asking what genuine freedom might require: the Right to Reject, the Right to Recall, a partyless democracy, and an ecological politics rooted in Oikos — our shared home.
The Rajnath Singh Dossier: Resign, Raksha Mantri!
This citizens’ charge-sheet records Rajnath Singh’s institutional tenure as Home Minister (2014–2019) and Defence Minister (2019–present) through the state’s own certified contradictions: the intelligence and convoy-security collapse that killed forty CRPF personnel at Pulwama on his watch; the selective silence on lost patrolling access in Eastern Ladakh; the Pahalgam attack of 22 April 2025 and the retaliatory Operation Sindoor; the categorical parliamentary denial of any soldier losses on 28 July 2025, followed thirteen months later by the state’s compelled disclosure of six names chiselled onto the National War Memorial; the parallel refusal to admit aircraft attrition until the Chief of Defence Staff conceded it abroad; the conversion of the soldier into a four-year disposable contract under Agnipath; the political shielding of opacity around Rafale; and the quiet advance of dynasty inside a party that campaigns against it. Built exclusively from Hansard, the National War Memorial’s Roll of Honour, Ministry of Defence clarifications and on-record statements of constitutional functionaries, the pattern that emerges is voluntas celandi—the will to hide—operating at the very site of memory, semantic truncation that leaves dual realities permanently open, and the systematic manufacture of impunity upstream of every demand for accountability. The minimum grammar of ministerial responsibility therefore requires the holder of the chair to step down; because the institutional machine is constructed so that no minister of this regime need ever activate that grammar, the deeper structural demand remains the constitutional Right to Recall and the Right to Reject.
The Shah Dossier: Resign, Union Home Minister!
This citizens’ charge-sheet documents twenty-one instances of foreclosed accountability, institutional failure and the systematic manufacture of impunity under Amit Shah as Union Home Minister — from the Gujarat encounter cases and the tadipaar externment, through surveillance, financial opacity, the architecture of control in Kashmir, CAA–NRC and electoral machinery, to security collapses in Manipur, Pahalgam and on the China border, culminating in the use of brutal and repressive force against unarmed students at Jantar Mantar. It demands his resignation and the democratic rights of recall and reject.
The Financial Architecture of “Viksit Bharat” (2014–2026)
This activist dossier reconstructs, almost entirely from the state’s own figures, the financial architecture of crony extraction that crystallised in India between 2014 and 2026 under the BJP–NDA regime: a true aggregate (fourth-largest economy, falling NPAs, moderate inflation) is displayed while the distribution beneath it is rendered (un-)knowable through discarded surveys, a suspended census, statutory identity shields over ₹16.35 lakh crore in write-offs (or waive offs?!), one-rupee assignments of fraud claims, and a hundred-per-cent RTI evasion rate. Losses are systematically socialised onto the public and residual gains privatised to a connected few via demonetisation, GST, the IBC–DHFL laboratory, opaque political funding, and the inversion of public banking. The growth narrative of “Viksit Bharat” rests on this measured invisibility. The two chairs that operate the architecture — the Finance and Corporate Affairs Minister and the Governor of the Reserve Bank — are therefore addressed with a single demand: Resign, or answer.
FINANCE MINISTER and CORPORATE AFFAIRS MINISTER: RESIGN! SCRAP IBC!
In the shadow of nationwide student uprisings demanding the resignation of Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan and the overhaul of NEET and the NTA, this manifesto stands in unbreakable solidarity and expands the battlefield: Finance and Corporate Affairs Minister Nirmala Sitharaman must resign, and the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code 2016 must be repealed outright. Under her dual ministries the IBC has delivered its true design—nearly one lakh mostly elderly DHFL depositors stripped of 77 percent of their AAA-rated savings while ₹45,050 crore in proven fraud claims were sold to the acquirer for one rupee and wiped clean by the retrospective shield of Section 32A. A law sold as swift justice now averages 688–853 days, recovers only 31–33 percent, and has been rewritten by at least six parliamentary amendments plus 122 regulatory tweaks in nine years. Financial firms were smuggled in by executive notification, tribunal orders protecting higher offers for depositors were ignored, and the very Committee of Creditors that decided the fate of public money cannot account for its own spending. This is not failure; it is architecture working exactly as built—public risk socialised, private reward privatised. Scrap the Code. Replace it with a depositor-first resolution law passed by Parliament. Question the chair. Resign Nirmala Sitharaman. #SCRAP_IBC
Parliament Without Debate: India’s Hollowed-Out “Democracy” (2014-26)
This damning audit of India’s parliamentary law-making from 2014–2026 across the 16th to 18th Lok Sabhas exposes a relentless executive assault on democratic norms. Drawing from official Bulletins, PRS data, PIB releases, and law reports, it reveals roughly 390–410 bills rammed through both Houses, with at least seven major non-fiscal laws cynically certified as money bills—concentrated in 2016–2019 when the government lacked Rajya Sabha majority—to sideline the Upper House. Deliberation has collapsed: committee referrals plummeted from 71% to 16%, over 90% of bills passed without recorded votes, four-fifths of the Union budget guillotined, and shameful records of seven to eight bills bulldozed in a single sitting while the Opposition was suspended or boycotting. Four major legislative retreats were forced extra-parliamentarily under street and electoral pressure, while a churn regime of hasty laws—led by the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code with six frantic amendments, five via ordinance—sees statutes perpetually patched by executive fiat. This is no healthy democracy but a clear strategy of procedural fungibility: the bypass tool shifts with parliamentary numbers, yet the core preference for rubber-stamp ratification remains unchanged—findings that align with damning verdicts from V-Dem, Freedom House, EIU, RSF, and CIVICUS. Since 2024, partial corrections have come only from vigilant voters and mass protests, not from the broken institutions meant to prevent such executive aggrandizement within a hollow electoral shell. The fight to reclaim Parliament is urgent.
The Ballot You Could Not Read: SIR and DHFL CoC
In this essay, Once in a Blue Moon Academia draws a structural parallel between two opaque state-orchestrated processes — the 2020–21 RBI-appointed Committee of Creditors (CoC) resolution of DHFL, which extinguished over ₹4,100 crore of elderly depositors’ savings through an unverifiable electronic ballot they could neither download nor retain, and the 2025–26 Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls that deleted nearly 91 lakh names in West Bengal ahead of the Assembly elections. Both exemplify “managed consent”: the meticulous preservation of democratic and procedural rituals while systematically withdrawing verifiability, accessibility, and meaningful agency. Invoking Mīmāṃsā pramāṇas (anupalabdhi and arthāpatti) alongside statutory adverse inference, the essay demonstrates how the sustained withholding of records — despite official claims of transparency — itself constitutes proof of the postulated theft. Dedicated to the UN Special Rapporteurs behind Communication AL IND 8/2026, it frames these as twin installations of a singular “government of registers” that renders citizens legible while keeping the State’s decisive mechanisms illegible, urging the lawful opening of black boxes and the simple demand: show the records.
Once in a Blue Moon Academia 