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.

A Solidarity Statement for Sonam Wangchuk, Satyagrahi of the Anthropocene

On the 17th day of his indefinite hunger strike at Jantar Mantar, Sonam Wangchuk continues his non-violent resistance for justice, dialogue, and ecological protection of Ladakh. Echoing Jatin Das’s 1929 martyrdom and G.D. Agarwal’s sacrifice for the Ganga, Wangchuk’s ātmaśakti exposes the Indian state’s moral deafness and hypocrisy in the face of genuine satyagraha. Invoking Tagore’s fiery Bhairava hymn — “sarva kharvatāre dahe tava krodhadāha” — this post calls for solidarity with a man who has become the moral centre of a republic that has abandoned its conscience.

Godiwood Stripped: An Exposé of BJP-Hindutva Propaganda Films (Review Series— Part I)

This review series (Part-I) examines a growing cycle of Hindi cinema—from PM Narendra Modi (2019) to Dhurandhar 2 (2026)—that have widely been characterized as aligned with BJP/Hindutva Islamophobic messaging, spanning hagiographic biopics, Partition and Kashmir “history” dramas, and jingoistic war thrillers. Drawing on MouthShut, Times of India, IMDb, and Rotten Tomatoes reviews by OBMA members alongside box office data and social media reception, each entry is read as trading historical nuance and artistic craft for majoritarian narrative-building, victimhood framing, and militarism. The pattern across titles is uneven: a handful (Uri, The Kashmir Files, Dhurandhar 2) found commercial success through polarized mobilization, while most (PM Narendra Modi, Tejas, Emergency, Udaipur Files, Operation Valentine, The Taj Story, Main Atal Hoon) underperformed financially and drew sharply negative critical notices despite inflated partisan audience scores. The series argues that this divergence between critical consensus and box office fate exposes the limits of state-aligned cinema as propaganda, with Part II promising further entries (The Kerala Story, Article 370, Swatantrya Veer Savarkar, and others).

Shyama Prasad Mukherjee: A Political Profile

Shyama Prasad Mukherjee (1901–1953) was a Bengali barrister and politician who rose rapidly through alleged paternal influence to become the youngest Vice-Chancellor of Calcutta University. Entering politics as a Congress candidate in 1929, he shifted to the Hindu Mahasabha in 1939, served as Finance Minister in Bengal’s coalition government, explicitly offered cooperation to the British Governor to suppress the 1942 Quit India Movement, and advocated the communal (in the negative sense of the term as in South-East Asia) partition of Bengal in 1947. As Nehru’s Minister of Industry and Supply (1947–1950), he resigned over the Liaquat–Nehru Pact and, with RSS backing, founded the Bharatiya Jana Sangh in 1951. He opposed the Hindu Code Bill’s reforms on women’s rights and Article 370’s special status for Jammu and Kashmir, while his Mahasabha-linked relief efforts during the 1943–44 Bengal Famine drew criticism for communal and caste bias. Detained in Kashmir in 1953 during an agitation against the permit system, he died in custody on 23 June, 1953, amid unresolved medical and inquiry controversies. His documented record reflects a consistent prioritization of upper-caste Hindu majoritarian politics over secular pluralist consensus.

Damn the Dams!

This paper critically examines the political ecology of mega dams and hydroelectric power through historical, scientific, and activist lenses, exposing the profound environmental, geological, and social costs that often eclipse their touted benefits. From Lenin’s GOELRO electrification drive and Nehru’s “temples of modern India” to the suppressed warnings of scientists Meghnad Saha and Kapil Bhattacharya, the analysis reveals how hydraulic nationalism has repeatedly silenced ecological knowledge, leading to reservoir-induced seismicity (as in Koyna), catastrophic siltation, landslides, and dam failures. Drawing on cases like the Tehri Dam, Farakka Barrage, Vaiont, and Banqiao disasters, alongside Gandhian resistance by Sundarlal Bahuguna, Baba Amte, and the Narmada Bachao Andolan, and cultural critiques in Tagore’s Muktadhara and Tarkovsky’s Stalker, the author argues for a fundamental reevaluation prioritizing river integrity, democratic consent, and geological realism over technocratic hubris. In an era of climate change, the paper calls for letting rivers flow as essential to ecological justice and human survival.