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.
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.***
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.
The Aeroplane’s Gaze: Mountain, Market and Martyrs
In this climate horror narrative with a positional paper disrupting the narrative flow, the author weaves personal flights over a rapidly thawing Himalaya with a critique of the “Three Ms”—Mountaineering, Market, and Martyrs—to expose how post-1990 commercialization has transformed high-altitude climbing into a neoliberal experience economy that commodifies risk, normalizes preventable deaths, and externalizes massive ecological waste onto fragile ecosystems. Drawing on observed glacial retreat, shrinking snowlines, data from Everest expeditions (e.g., 2019’s 877 summits and 11 deaths; 2025 permit hikes and ongoing congestion), the Chhanda Gayen case study, and corporate sponsorship spectacles, the analysis reveals how market logic—sunk-cost pressures, sponsorship demands for novelty, and regulatory filters—produces economic fatalism and “regulatory martyrdom” while generating symbolic capital from sacrifice and legacy trash (tens of tons of plastic, human waste, and gear). Framed by Tagorean imagery, Kalidasa’s metaphors, and Heideggerian reflections, the work culminates in a call to dismantle these structures, positioning the author’s embodied witness—flying through turbulent “intentioned” clouds—as a reversal from being-towards-death to death-towards-being, urging emancipation through corporeal awareness amid capitalism’s atmospheric and terrestrial violence.
The “Secular” State Paradox: the Erosion of Constitutional Secularism in Contemporary India
Since 2019, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has systematically blurred India’s constitutional separation between the state and religion—a doctrine central to India’s secular democracy since 1950. This article documents seven major constitutional violations spanning religious ceremony participation (Ram Mandir consecration, January 2024; Central Vista Parliament inauguration, May 2023), executive-judicial merger (Ganesha Puja at CJI DY Chandrachud’s residence, September 2024), selective state support for Hindu rituals over Muslim prayer practices (Red Road Yoga Day vs. namaz bans, June 2024), misappropriation of state security apparatus for personal religious acts (Z+ protection for sacred baths), documented abdication of constitutional duty during a national security crisis (Bear Grylls shoot during Pulwama attack, February 2019), and ecological destruction for religious symbolism (Yamuna “beautification” project). Each violation contradicts established constitutional convention (the Rajendra Prasad precedent of 1951), invokes specific legal provisions (Articles 14, 15(1), 25, 36, 44, 48-A, 50, 51-A(h), 60, 75), and collectively demonstrates how the “impunity loop”—where executive overreach faces no judicial reckoning—has eroded India’s foundational secular guarantee. The Central Vista Parliament consecration is particularly egregious: by permanently installing a religious symbol (the Sengol, representing divine-right monarchy) in the Speaker’s chair and framing Parliament as a Hindu “temple,” Modi has transformed the highest legislative chamber itself into a site of state-sponsored Hindu nationalism. Drawing from Supreme Court jurisprudence on basic features (Kesavananda Bharati), Article 32 remedies, separation of powers doctrine, and administrative law, this article argues that these violations constitute not individual transgressions but a systematic architecture of “selective secularism” that transforms Hindu nationalism into state policy while marginalizing minority rights. The article traces the “impunity loop” mechanism—how each violation normalizes the next through institutional passivity (judicial silence), doctrinal innovation (the “24/7 duty” doctrine that abolishes answerability), and intellectual capture (reframing Hindu nationalist practices as “secular culture” while suppressing minority religious expression). The absence of Supreme Court intervention despite clear constitutional grounds, combined with parliament’s majority-government control and investigative agency capture, has created conditions where constitutional limits have become advisory. The article concludes that India’s secular Constitution remains intact on paper while its practice converges toward Hindu nationalist theocracy, raising urgent questions about whether institutional actors can recover their constitutional commitment before the basic feature of secularism is irreversibly eroded.
Bulldozer (In)Justice in India: Encountering Demolition and Dispossession
The article contends that “Bulldozer Justice”—the BJP government’s targeted demolitions of Muslim homes, businesses, and religious sites—represents not mere administrative excess or electoral tactics but the latest manifestation of a coherent seventy-five-year ethnocratic project rooted in the 1949 Babri Masjid occupation. It identifies a persistent structural impunity loop (extra-legal action, state complicity, retroactive judicial or legislative legitimation, and perpetrator reward) driving Hindu majoritarian statecraft, linking the 1949 conspiracy through the Supreme Court’s 2019 verdict to the 2025 Waqf Amendment Act. Drawing on Amnesty International’s documentation of 128 targeted demolitions, Housing and Land Rights Network data showing 738,438 displacements in 2022–23, V-Dem’s classification of India as an “electoral autocracy,” and other reports, the piece maps the phenomenon across its ideological, affective, legal, spatial, gendered, corporate, and legislative dimensions. It highlights the central bovine paradox of India as one of the world’s largest exporters of buffalo meat ($4 billion in 2025) alongside lethal cow-protection vigilantism, exemplified by major corporate donations to the BJP. Framing Bulldozer Justice within manufactured Islamophobia, Hindu victimhood narratives, creeping theocracy, and the mechanics of contemporary majoritarianism, the article characterises the process as democratic demolition — one structure, one statute, and one impunity loop at a time.
NOTA: From Symbolic Dissent to the Horizons of Radical Democracy
India’s NOTA — born from the Supreme Court’s 2013 PUCL judgment — gave voters a secret, counted way to reject all candidates. Over a decade later, even the Court admits it has “hardly made any impact” on criminalisation, dynasticism and money power. The May 2026 state elections (1.09 million NOTA votes across West Bengal, Assam, Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Puducherry) changed zero outcomes. Its impotence is structural — trapped by FPTP’s winner-takes-all logic, the absence of binding Right to Reject and Right to Recall, hollow decentralisation, and all parties’ addiction to extractive growth amid climate crisis. Globally, it lags far behind Colombia’s voto en blanco or Indonesia’s kotak kosong, which can force fresh elections with new candidates. NOTA is both symptom and seed. Its fulfilment demands proportional representation, constitutionalised Reject/Recall powers, empowered Gram Sabhas, genuine fiscal decentralisation, and a degrowth, cooperative, ecologically grounded economy — the path to a partyless, dialogue-based society of self-governing ecological communes.
“Man Na Raṅgāye”: Embodied Austerity and Leadership Praxis During the Climate Crises
On 10 May 2026, Prime Minister Narendra Modi urged Indian citizens to adopt sweeping austerity measures—restraining petroleum use, reviving work-from-home, minimising non-essential foreign travel, postponing gold purchases, reducing imports of edible oils and chemical fertilisers, promoting natural farming and Swadeshi consumption, and preferring public transport, carpooling, and EVs—amid West Asia tensions, rising oil prices, and forex pressures. This paper delivers an uncompromising critique of these imperatives, examining their genuine ecological co-benefits in the climate crisis alongside the cross-traditional philosophical demand for ācaraṇa (embodied praxis) drawn from Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, Imam Abu Hanifa, Gandhi, Kant, Marx, Tagore, and Kabir; the glaring contradictions with the Prime Minister’s opulent lifestyle, extravagant foreign travels, luxury branding, and high-carbon Z+/SPG security protocols; and the deeper theoretical foundations in A.K. Dasgupta’s Economics of Austerity (1975), the Mahābhārata’s Vana Parva, the Bhagavad Gītā’s teachings on lokasaṅgraha and rejection of karmavirati, and Swami Vivekananda’s Practical Vedanta. It argues that in the Anthropocene, genuine austerity requires visible leadership embodiment for moral legitimacy, ecological efficacy, and spiritual coherence; absent such praxis, Modi’s call stands exposed as the very hypocrisy Kabir satirised in his pad “Man nā raṅgāye raṅgāye jogī kaprā” — performative asceticism and ruling-class doublespeak that fatally undermines its own imperatives. The paper proposes a framework of ecological austerity as lokasaṅgraha, integrating economic theory, environmental analysis, South-East Asian philosophy, and uncompromising political ethics.
Revoke the IBC: India’s Biggest Crony Heist – A Call for Non-Violent Civil Disobedience
The Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code (IBC) 2016, touted as a landmark reform, has entrenched crony capitalism in India under the BJP-NDA regime by socializing enormous losses onto public banks, depositors, MSMEs, workers, and taxpayers while privatizing gains for politically connected acquirers. The DHFL episode epitomizes this plunder: a solvent housing finance company was deliberately forced into IBC, leaving over 2.5 lakh middle-class depositors with negligible recovery on ₹5,375 crore claims, as ₹31,000–45,000 crore in alleged fraud was wiped clean under retrospective Section 32A and transferred for a notional Re 1 to Mr. Ajay Piramal, while being riddled with conflicts with SARFAESI, RBI Act, NHB Act and Companies Act, endless amendments as well as tweaks exposing congenital defects, moratorium abuse, CoC supremacy shielded by judicial deference, and engineered opacity, the IBC stands as a global outlier that destroys value of natural justice, violates constitutional rights under Articles 14 and 21, and devastates MSMEs. Beyond reform, it must be fully revoked and re-made from scratch in a pro-people, pro-depositor manner. This manifesto calls for a nationwide Gandhian Satyagraha through mass dharnas, RTIs, human rights complaints, and economic resistance to scrap the Code, eliminate Section 32A, enforce Section 66 fully, and secure full restitution with compound interest to all victims. The heist must end– NOW.
Democracy for Sale: Anti-Defection Law, Horse-Trading, and the Crisis of the Electoral Mandate in India
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.
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.
Once in a Blue Moon Academia 