The Anti-Defection Law (Tenth Schedule, introduced by the 52nd Amendment 1985 and strengthened by the 91st Amendment 2003) was designed to curb opportunistic defections and safeguard the electoral mandate in India’s parliamentary democracy. Yet its critical loopholes—the two-thirds merger exception (Paragraph 4), unpenalised mass resignations, partisan Speakers, and ambiguities between organisational and legislature parties—have institutionalised sophisticated horse-trading. This article offers a doctrinal and empirical critique, centering on the Shiv Sena crisis (2022–23) and the Supreme Court’s Subhash Desai judgment (2023), which exposed how rebellion, strategic resignations, resort politics, and institutional delays enabled the toppling of a democratically elected government. Examining defection patterns from 2014 to 2026—including the April 2026 merger of seven AAP Rajya Sabha MPs with the BJP—it reveals the BJP’s “Operation Lotus” and “washing machine” machinery, sustained by opaque political funding, crony corporate networks, and quid-pro-quo clean chits, that betray the electorate’s verdict, erode ideological conviction, and accelerate democratic backsliding under the centralising “double engine sarkar” model. These practices undermine India’s federal structure as a Union of States and necessitate radical reforms: independent adjudication, strict timelines, tighter merger rules, bars on defectors, and full transparency in political finance—before the Tenth Schedule becomes a constitutional tool for authoritarian consolidation rather than democratic safeguard.
Category Archives: Activities
Our current activities concentrate on the case of Dewan Housing Finance Corporation Limited (DHFL), India. While exploring and investigating this particular case, we have found that India’s crony ruling party, gangsters, banksters as well as religious gurus and institutions are involved in the same. Therefore, to break such collusion, we have decided to deploy an “all out attack” on the existing paradigm of neoliberal market economy as well as market fundamentalism. ***DISCLAIMER: We have collected all the data from available sources on the internet as given on the official portals of media houses, websites and institutions and organizations. We are not first-hand reporters and hence, we are not liable for any inadvertent error or value-loaded statements made on those portals. All propositions have to be viewed as descriptive assertions on the given point of concern.***
নোটাঃ নির্বাচনী প্রহসনের “বাইরে” নাকি !?
In this sharp critique of India’s electoral system amid the 2026 West Bengal Assembly elections, the author argues that elections have become fully stage-managed spectacles by PR experts, far beyond Chomsky’s 1989 idea of merely ratifying pre-selected options. He views NOTA as a purely symbolic moral protest with no real power — even if it gets the highest votes, the election is not cancelled and the top candidate still wins. The entire process is called a predetermined farce rigged by mass voter deletions (nearly 91 lakh), fake voters, EVM tampering, opaque counting, a biased Election Commission, money-muscle power, and institutional decay. Despite their differences, mainstream parties follow the same neoliberal policies and identity politics, offering no genuine choice. Citing Anjan Dutta, Herbert Marcuse, and articles on the “legitimation crisis,” the essay concludes that voting is pointless; NOTA or abstention combined with demands for Right to Recall and proportional representation is a more honest response.
Exi(s)ting Without Exit in Contemporary India: “Hum Hain Ki Hum Nahin?”
In the shadowed corridors of April 2026, a lone whistleblower’s fevered consciousness spirals endlessly around the single, shattering question — “Hum hain ki hum nahin?” (to be or not to be?)— existence or erasure. Trapped inside a shrinking Mumbai flat that has become both sanctuary and prison, he navigates the razor’s edge between the flickering glow of his laptop screen and the perpetual terror of the doorbell, suspended in the velvet noose of an undeclared emergency where words are crossed out before they can breathe, hate speech cruises freely along golden highways of power, while dissent drowns on isolated atolls of silence. Obsessively rewinding the traffic-island monologue from Haider, he mouths existential defiance as Rabindrasangeet clashes with raw paranoia, Tagore’s ancient frog — merely surviving (without “living”) three thousand years sealed inside a stone — merges with Foucault’s biopolitics and Derrida’s haunting spectres, while the ghosts of DHFL financial annihilation, electoral bond plunder, UAPA’s slow-motion cages, and Piramal’s crushing ₹100 crore SLAPP suit press relentlessly against the walls of his cell. Here, survival has been reduced to mere petrified existence, sanity stands accused of sedition, and compulsive repetition is no longer madness but the final desperate ritual of a fractured society replaying its own nightmare, praying that this time the ending might finally break differently — even as the doorbell continues to ring, the screen keeps flickering, and the question echoes unanswered into the void.
Black Swans vs. the Machine: A Dialogue with Grok (AI)
This dialogue traces a charged encounter between a citizen’s lived “black swan” experiences and an AI’s data-driven reasoning, revealing how anomalies, RTI evasions, and opaque institutional practices converge into a deeper crisis of trust in electoral processes in the contemporary Indian political landscape. Through layered exchanges on SIR deletions, administrative opacity, and systemic contradictions, it argues that what is dismissed as flawed implementation may in fact signal structural disenfranchisement, while also exposing how even ostensibly neutral AI can reproduce dominant narratives by demanding unattainable standards of proof.
Sex, Lies, and the Criminal State: The Politics of Impunity in the Sangh Parivar
This article offers a sharp critique of the RSS-BJP-Sangh Parivar under Narendra Modi and Amit Shah as a self-reinforcing criminal-political machine that operates through a stark double standard: resistance from rivals, whistleblowers, judges or citizens invites persecution, elimination or institutional violence, while alignment yields protection and the “laundry of deceit” that converts legal vulnerability into political utility. Drawing on Foucault’s biopower and carceral continuum, Marcuse’s surplus repression, and Chomsky’s critique of the reward-punishment model, it traces the apparatus from its Gujarat laboratory — marked by the 2002 pogrom’s sexual violence, Snoopgate surveillance, staged encounters, Haren Pandya’s assassination, Justice Loya’s death, and Sanjiv Bhatt’s imprisonment — to its national expansion through Operation Lotus horse-trading, systemic sexual impunity, godmen paroles, cow vigilantism, Pegasus and digital surveillance, UAPA detentions, bulldozer justice, the Delhi 2020 pogrom, Article 370 revocation, CAA-NRC-SIR protests, the Adani-Hindenburg corporate-state nexus, judicial complicity in cases ranging from the Zakia Jafri clean chit and Ram Mandir verdict to reluctance over the SIR’s mass deletions (including 91 lakh names in Bengal), and the 2026 Epstein Files fallout. NCRB and NFHS-5 data expose pervasive gendered violence and under-reporting, while pseudology — unfulfilled jumlas on jobs, farmers’ income, Acche Din and Viksit Bharat — manufactures consent. The Sangh Parivar thus emerges as an integrated system in which sex, crime, and narrative are weaponised as technologies of biopower to entrench majoritarian authoritarian consolidation.
Gated Arks in Sacrifice Zones: Vantara and the Political Economy of “Conservation”
Vantara, the 3,500-acre private wildlife sanctuary run by the Reliance Foundation in Jamnagar and inaugurated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on 4th March 2025, is promoted as the world’s largest rescue centre. Through a radical ecological-regenerative lens grounded in animal liberation ethics and multispecies justice, this analysis reveals it as a gated corporate biopolitical enclosure that converts ecological refugees—produced by Reliance’s polluting refinery and global extractivism—into spectacles for dynastic branding and moral capital. Integrating controversies over dubious sourcing, transport trauma, CITES due-diligence failures, media suppression, and climatic hypocrisy with a comparison of ex-situ Humboldt penguin facilities (Vantara and Byculla) against proven in-situ efforts in Peru, South Africa, and Argentina, the essay critiques how crony-dynastic capitalism, including the Ambani–Piramal nexus and Campa Cola operations, externalises ecological harm while staging compassion. It calls for abolishing commodified captivity and embracing decolonized, liberatory restoration that restores more-than-human autonomy in living ecosystems rather than managing bare life in fortified corporate arks.
The IBC (Amendment) Act, 2026: Cosmetic Speed or Deepening the Crony Heist?
This report by Once in a Blue Moon Academia indicts the IBC (Amendment) Act, 2026 as a high-speed polish on a structurally flawed regime. While promising faster resolutions and marginal creditor safeguards, it leaves untouched the core contradictions — especially the tension between Section 66 (fraud recovery for creditors) and Section 32A (clean-slate immunity) — that enabled the DHFL heist, where retail depositors lost 75–80% while fraud upside flowed to Piramal. The amendment accelerates crony capture rather than correcting it, turning bankruptcy into a profitable tool for the superrich at the expense of the common people.
Bankruptcy as Profitable “Bijness”: India’s Grand IBC Heist!
India’s insolvency regime, culminating in the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code (IBC, 2016), represents not a rupture but a refinement of a long-standing political economy that protects and reproduces elite accumulation. While the pre-2014 framework (BIFR/SICA/DRT/SARFAESI) enabled overt promoter impunity through delay and fragmentation, the post-2016 IBC has professionalised and sanitised this asymmetry into a time-bound, creditor-driven architecture that systematically socialises losses and privatises gains. Empirical trends—~8,800+ CIRP admissions, ~31–33% recovery rates, ~67% average haircuts, ₹4+ lakh crore realised against far larger claims, and a surge in wilful defaulters to ₹3.83 lakh crore by 2025—reveal a system where public-sector banks, workers, SMEs, and retail investors absorb the bulk of distress while politically connected acquirers consolidate assets at deep discounts, often through phoenixing and procedural arbitrage. Landmark cases like Dewan Housing Finance Corporation Ltd illustrate how legal doctrines (e.g., Section 32A clean slate vs. Section 66 fraud recovery) enable the transfer of both assets and upside from fraud to new owners under the doctrine of CoC “commercial wisdom.” Far from disciplining capital, the IBC normalises strategic default as a rational, even aspirational pathway within India’s crony-capitalist order—an evolution from chaotic promoter protection to a streamlined mechanism of wealth transfer, embedded within a broader regime of opaque political funding, selective enforcement, and taxpayer-backed recapitalisation.
Savage Cannibal Capitalism’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde — The Piramal Scenario
This article offers a structural critique of contemporary capitalism through Deleuze and Guattari’s Capitalism and Schizophrenia, exposing the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde split between the ethical philosophy of conscious capitalism — inclusive growth, Gandhian trusteeship, Karuṇā–Sevā–Samṛddhi, philanthro-capitalism, and animal spirits — and the savage cannibal logic of surplus labour extraction. The luminous Dr. Jekyll face presents capitalism as purposeful and compassionate, with profit as mere “oxygen” and Shubh Labh as guiding intent, yet this high-definition screen conceals the relentless Mr. Hyde reality of appropriating unpaid labour, life savings, and ecological commons for capital accumulation. Marxist, anarcho-syndicalist, and Orwellian lenses reveal how ethical language merely re-describes extraction without changing its arithmetic, unmasking doublespeak and Memory Hole mechanisms in restructuring and philanthropic reterritorialization. The 2021 DHFL resolution, upheld by the Supreme Court on 1 April 2025 and culminating in the 2025 reverse merger into Piramal Finance, exemplifies the paradox: celebrated as bold value unlocking, it delivered steep haircuts for retail depositors while allowing the acquirer to retain avoidance recoveries — losses socialised downward, gains capitalised upward. Conscious-ethical-inclusive capitalism thus emerges as a Chimera, generating a Glitch Art aesthetic of smooth philanthropic visions atop crashing realities for the vulnerable, as capitalism deterritorializes ethical flows only to reterritorialize them as legitimacy capital, sustaining its schizophrenic reproduction. True change demands confronting the foundational mechanics of accumulation beyond moral rebranding.
Speed, Violence and Exclusion: the Legitimation Crisis of India’s Electoral System
This article critically examines the 2025–26 Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls conducted by the Election Commission of India, arguing that it marks a decisive shift from deliberative enumeration to accelerated exclusion. In contrast to the time-intensive, de novo 2002–03 revision, the current exercise compresses verification into a high-velocity, deadline-driven regime that relies on legacy databases while shifting the burden of proof onto citizens. Drawing on emerging empirical patterns—including mass deletions (over 90 lakh in West Bengal, more than 2 crore in Uttar Pradesh, and over 65 lakh in Bihar), documented worker deaths and distress, and disproportionate impacts on migrants, minorities, and economically vulnerable populations—the article contends that the SIR functions less as administrative “cleanup” than as a system of structured electoral filtration. It further interrogates the role of the Supreme Court of India, whose limited, non-disruptive interventions have allowed the process to proceed within its compressed temporal architecture, thereby reinforcing rather than restraining its effects. Situating the SIR within broader dynamics of accelerationist governance and “speed capitalism,” the analysis demonstrates how administrative velocity, when detached from deliberation, accountability, and human-scale verification, risks transforming electoral governance into an apparatus of systemic disenfranchisement—eroding the epistemic integrity, ethical grounding, and participatory foundations of Indian democracy.
Once in a Blue Moon Academia 