This article examines post-2014 Indian political satire—stand-up comedy, digital satire, and editorial cartoons—through the classical Indian aesthetic framework of the Nāṭyaśāstra (the ancient Treatise on Dramaturgy). It draws on Abhinavagupta’s theory of sādhāraṇīkaraṇa (the universalisation of emotion) and K.C. Bhattacharyya’s elevation of bībhatsa (the odious, or disgust) as the supreme aesthetic sentiment (mahā-rasa). The argument is that under the BJP-RSS regime the negative sentiments no longer pass through an aesthetic frame: fear (bhayānaka) circulates as institutionalised dread through laws such as the UAPA, rebranded sedition provisions, raids, detentions, police repression, and digital regulations, while disgust (bībhatsa) appears as a sovereign “Will to Hide”—a pathological refusal of transparency over crony finance, electoral funding, and public accountability. Against this deadlock, satirists deploy a triad of playful wonder (kautuka), laughter (hāsya), and implied or ironic meaning (vyāṅga) as forms of subversive resistance. Tracing the work of comedians from the 2015 AIB Roast through Kunal Kamra, Munawar Faruqui, Vir Das, and others, and of cartoonists such as Rachita Taneja, Satish Acharya, Manjul, and G. Bala, the article shows that official reprisals—FIRs, venue attacks, contempt proceedings, and platform blocks—confirm rather than defeat the force of laughter. Satire universalises disgust and converts the sensitive spectator from a paralysed witness into an active resistor. The claim is not that laughter ends power, but that power which cannot contain laughter has already lost its claim to solemnity.
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.***
Rahul and Priyanka: Art of Resistance Against Sangh Parivar
This essay examines the RaGa–PriGa collective-oppositional praxis as a disciplined form of non-violent militancy against the BJP–RSS project of crony Brahmanical Hindutva. Drawing on Vipassanā (Goenka lineage), Aikido and Brazilian jiu-jitsu, Tagorean and Gandhian satyagraha, and Ambedkarite constitutional argument, it reads the decade 2015–2026 as the public application of a single grammar: the refusal to return force, the exposure of concealed holds, and the constructive rebuilding of an alternative order. The method is tracked from private discipline to embodied resistance (Hathras, Sitapur, Delhi 2026), organisational logistics (yatras), forensic disclosure (vote chori, ecological chori), and iconographic counter-politics (Naṭarāja against the sovereign Rāma). The argument is not confessional. It claims only that the record shows a sustained, non-reactive praxis whose strategic aim is the dissolution of manufactured legitimacy rather than the seizure of power for revenge.
Is it “Gen Z” Enough? The Limits of Generational Categories
Generational labels function as a historically specific technology for ordering persons; the classification itself, not the cohorts it names, requires analysis. Drawing on Foucault’s archaeological and genealogical methods, the article traces the grid’s descent through state registration, demography, journalism, marketing and consultancy, showing how it imposes discrete essences on a continuum of births, scales disciplinary seriation to the population, generates looping effects, and recodes structural antagonisms as conflicts between age cohorts. The 2026 Indian mobilisation, branded a “Gen Z” uprising, serves as the principal test case: its composition, demands and alliances exceed any single cohort, demonstrating the non-contemporaneity of the contemporaneous. The Yayati–Babur circuit names the patriarchal mechanism that sustains this reduction. Within the same mobilisation the slogans of the dominant are echoed by the street; the echoing, read through Bhabha’s mimicry and Guha’s prose of counter-insurgency, opens a Third Space in which the national cry is made to carry a demand the apparatus refuses to hear. A parallel episode during Durga Puja in West Bengal—attacks on Left bookstalls resisted by student cadres of comparable age—further shows that shared birth years explain neither the violence nor the defence. The article rejects “mental age” as an alternative scale and proposes instead the plurality of temporalities that run through every subject and every movement.
Adani and the BJP: The Crony Cakravyūha
Between 2014 and 2026 one private citizen, Gautam Adani, came to control major shares of India’s ports, airports, coal, thermal and solar power, transmission, smart meters, city gas, cement, roads, water, defence, data centres, Asia’s largest informal settlement, a national television network and a news agency, while the BJP government and BJP-ruled states cleared his path through one-rupee land at Mundra and Pirpainti, rules rewritten before tenders that delivered coal blocks and all six airports he bid for, agency raids that preceded the Mumbai airport, NDTV and Coastal Energen takeovers, the 2020 farm laws that lifted stock limits after Adani lobbying, public money that arrived when private lenders fled, and foreign contracts that followed the Prime Minister’s tours. The record assembled here — from the Hindenburg and OCCRP exposés cleared by SEBI on a technicality, to the 2024 US bribery indictment that ended in 2026 after an India–US trade deal, a $10 billion pledge and the hiring of President Trump’s lawyer, a $275 million OFAC penalty for Iranian gas, a reported $3.9 billion LIC plan, the Mundra heroin route, the destruction of Hasdeo, Godda, Bhagalpur, the Galilee Basin, the coasts of Kutch and Kerala, the proposed Great Nicobar project, and the files the same formation has kept closed — shows public land, public money, public regulators, public forests and public diplomacy systematically feeding one private balance sheet whose profits return as political power. This is not merely crony capitalism at the margin of a market economy. It is a crony cakravyūha: a closed spiral, built and defended by the BJP, in which every turn makes the next easier and escape harder for everyone caught inside it.
Dissent, Dynamics and Domination: India’s Protest Movements (2014-26)
Between May 2014 and October 2026, India’s BJP-led National Democratic Alliance confronted an almost unbroken sequence of protest and resistance—from the 2015 land-ordinance agitation and the 2020–21 farmers’ siege of Delhi to the 2026 youth-led Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) rising—under conditions of sustained political domination rather than the successful production of consent. This article maps the ecology of that dissent: the movements themselves; a counter-public of non-Godi and crowdfunded media; satirists and stand-up comedians deploying hasya and vyanga against the regime’s bhayanaka and vibhatsya; organic intellectuals of political and civil society; dissenting advocates and judges; and watchdog NGOs. It documents the repertoire of domination deployed against them—imprisonment without trial, preventive detention, financial and regulatory strangulation, blocking, SLAPP litigation, career reprisals, threats, vigilante violence, surveillance, state violence and assassination by non-state actors—and reads the CJP against this longer inheritance through Gramsci’s account of hegemony and organic intellectuals, Partha Chatterjee’s distinction between civil and political society, Habermas’s concept of legitimation crisis, Ranajit Guha’s dominance without hegemony, and Ambedkar’s warning against bhakti in politics. The CJP’s speed and visibility rest on more than a decade of prior investigation, litigation and protest. Its demand for the resignation of named officeholders addresses persons rather than the paradigm or the chair; under a regime that has already closed ordinary channels and made the power to guarantee life the underside of the power to expose marked populations to the sovereign mark, the absorption of a name is the state’s work, not the movement’s. The article treats the CJP as a genuine opening for a new constituency whose unarmed presence has already forced the repressive and ideological apparatuses into public view. The further task is to keep the energy released by that showing from being returned, through the regime’s mechanisms of absorption and attribution, to the chairs that still decide who is to be made live and who is to be marked.
The Street Army: Bajrang Dal
The official Indian record of Bajrang Dal and Sangh Parivar violence does not cohere on its own terms: it counts its dead by the dozen in cow-protection attacks while securing convictions by the handful, files named killers as anonymous mobs of thousands, convicts the gang-rapists of a pregnant woman and then releases them to garlands, and constitutes commissions only to bury their findings. This dossier reads that systematic incoherence as the evidence itself. The Bajrang Dal was manufactured by the RSS in 1984–86 as a deniable youth militia for the Ayodhya campaign; it has since operated, with BJP-supplied licence, as a cadre street-army whose repertoire—gau-raksha lynching, moral policing, anti-Christian violence, processions-as-detonators, and filmed humiliation—runs from the Babri demolition through Kandhamal, Gujarat 2002 (including Naroda Patiya and Bilkis Bano), the post-2014 lynching years (Akhlaq, Pehlu Khan, Tabrez Ansari), Nuh 2023, and Kathua. The same architecture converts authored atrocity into unprosecutable events through non-registration, reclassification, dilution, attrition, and inversion, while routing unemployed young men from shakha to Bajrang Dal, Sri Ram Sene, and Hindu Raksha Dal. In 2026 the machine applied direct state terrorism—mass preventive detention, blackouts, and site denotification—against the non-violent Cockroach Janta Party protest at Jantar Mantar, while a self-identified Hindutva affiliate’s filmed confession of assault received delayed process and restored liberty. The licence is not the absence of a finding; it is the finding. The record is the charge.
An Open Appeal to India’s Security Forces: Stand with Democratic Dissent
On 10 October 2026, as unarmed citizens, students and opposition voices gather at Jantar Mantar in peaceful civil disobedience, the State has assembled more than 40,000 Delhi Police and Central Armed Police Forces personnel, detention centres, facial-recognition cameras and metro closures against them. Once in a Blue Moon Academia appeals to those in uniform, not as adversaries but as fellow citizens, to let conscience precede command, to refuse the police state the last word, and to stand with the constitutional right to dissent.
A Glimpse into Saffron Fascism: The RSS and the Sangh
This exposé treats the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and its Sangh Parivar not as mere faith but as a political technology: a durable and unregistered apparatus for manufacturing majoritarian-theocratic consent, disciplining populations and capturing the state. Scaffolded by Althusser, Gramsci, Foucault and Durkheim, it follows the organisation from its 1925 founding and abstention from the freedom struggle through Golwalkar’s programme of subordination without citizen’s rights, the semitisation of a colonial umbrella-term, “Hinduism,” into a pasteurised monolith, and the Akhand Bharat imagi-nation in which Partition is a wound and “go to Pakistan” a confession that the map is a poster. It tracks the saturation of civil society by more than fifty affiliates, the money without a ledger, the drills and the arms, the gendered order of Durga and Sita, the caste contract Meghwanshi watched fail at his own kitchen, and the documented violence against Muslims, Christians, Dalits and women, made costless by a reproducible impunity loop and extended, on paper, through the CAA, the NRC and the voter-roll revision. As a whole, this work adds the insider record of those who left, a sourced Register of the Dead and Harmed with the legal status of every case as it stood on 2 October 2026, and the questions the Sangh has never answered. It demands that the RSS, thrice banned and never reformed, be proscribed and its enforcement wings dissolved. The centenary count, more than 83,000 daily shakhas in 2025, claimed to be rising toward 89,000 in 2026, is taken not as tribute but as a confession of scale.
Money Taken, Votes Taken, SLAPPed: A DHFL Retrospective
On 24 September 2026 we write in the light of The Indian Express report: two Election Commissioners of India objected fourteen times to roll changes, Form 6 and control of the voter database, while the Election Commission of India still called every decision unanimous. We have watched the same grammar inside the DHFL CoC. A vote is manufactured, dissent is filed away, and the person on the line is told the count is final. Depositors recovered 23 percent; Oaktree’s stronger bid was set aside; Ajay Piramal took fraud-recovery claims estimated at ₹45,000 crore for ₹1. Multiple RTIs produced no figure for CIRP costs. Then Piramal Capital sued us for ₹100 crore — a SLAPP of defamation and contempt against research and RTIs. Money taken. Votes taken. Then the summons.
The Goonda Returns: How a Category Became a Statute (Again!)
On 13 July 2026 West Bengal’s new BJP government announced that the Public Safety and Control of Anti-Social Activities Act (gunḍā-damana) and the Maintenance of Public Order (Amendment) Act were in force. The first allows twelve months’ charge-free detention of anyone a magistrate or commissioner deems a reputational “goonda,” criminalises harbouring the externed, and permits year-long district banishment. The second lets a Claims Commission attach and auction the property of alleged rioters and of protest organisers, financiers, instigators and logistical supporters, up to twice assessed damage. A High Court bench later treated the Public Safety instrument as still awaiting assent; the government had already declared midnight commencement. The article reads both statutes as Bengal’s own colonial archive reprinted — Regulation III of 1818, Rowlatt 1919, the Goondas Act 1923, the 1929 Safety Bill against which Bhagat Singh timed the Assembly bombs — and as a Foucaultian status crime. Against ICCPR Articles 9, 12, 14, 15, 19, 21–22, General Comment 35 and CCPR/C/IND/CO/4 (2024), the design fails at every limb; India’s 1979 Article 9 declaration does not shelter what Article 22 never required. The same circuit is the impunity loop mapped in OBMA’s DHFL and bulldozer work. A coda tests damana against daṇḍanīti, sets ADR affidavits inside the definition, and reads anyonya-pratibimba, Barthesian myth, and the July naming of Forward Bloc as goonda as a category that cannot close. It ends with a protocol: document the order, litigate the interior, internationalise now, count who is named, protect the harbourer. The goonda of the file is not the person. The second file is the remaining procedure.
