As 2025 draws to a close, this comprehensive dossier documents not a series of discrete policy missteps, but a systemic transformation of governance in India (2014–2025): a shift from democratic accountability to political executive dominance; from evidence-based policymaking to manufactured narrative control; from social protection to structural precarity. Spanning the economy, federalism, data integrity, labour, the natural environment, digital freedoms, education, public health, cultural institutions, civil liberties, and fundamental rights, the record reveals enduring patterns of power centralization, calibrated opacity, selective enforcement, and institutional hollowing—accompanied by crony consolidation and the routinized criminalization of dissent. Democratic indicators decline as surveillance infrastructures expand, grassroots welfare erodes, and truth itself is rendered an object of administrative management. This is not a partisan ledger, but a counter-archive: an evidence-grounded indictment that affirms accountability as the necessary cost of power. In closing the year, it calls for a civic reckoning—not to foreclose debate, but to reclaim and restore it.
Category Archives: Art of Resistance
Following the dictum “Cultural revolution must precede political revolution”, we are striving to create the scope for an alternative cultural space, which can offer resistance to all forms of coercion, and can also serve as a medium for conducting non-violent, horizontal dialogical exchanges.
Remembering What “Definitions” Make Us Forget: A Statement on the Aravallis and the Politics of Ecological Erasure
The Ecotopians of Alternity (EOA) as part of the Once in a Blue Moon Academia (OBMA) Collective asserts that the current legal crisis surrounding the Aravalli mountain range is a deliberate act of “definitional erasure” that threatens the ecological survival of North India. By narrowing the definition of these ancient hills to landforms rising 100 meters or more, the state effectively excludes over 90% of the range—including critical lower ridges, scrub forests, and groundwater recharge zones—from legal protection. This is not a neutral administrative update but a strategic maneuver that renders ecologically vital terrain “invisible” to the law, thereby clearing the path for corporate mining and real-estate expansion. Drawing on the Indian philosophical concept of lakṣaṇa (defining something based on characteristic mark), the EOA argues that a definition based solely on height fails to capture the holistic reality of an ecosystem that stops desertification and sustains regional aquifers. This logic of reductionism mirrors a broader national pattern of prioritizing extractivist “developmental rationality” over indigenous lifeworlds and long-term climate resilience, as seen in projects from Great Nicobar to Hasdeo Arand. Against this regime, the EOA calls for a coordinated resistance that refuses to let life be reduced to “administrative residue,” demanding a lived ecological imagination that protects the Aravallis as an indivisible, living system rather than a collection of disposable units.
Letters of Blood and Fire: “Terrorism”, Dispossession, and the Distorted Mirrorings of Domination
This article critically dissects “terrorism” as a politically contested and asymmetrically applied category, wielded to delegitimize subaltern and non-state violence while normalizing far greater state and corporate terror through legal, discursive, and institutional mechanisms. Drawing on an anarchist methodological lens amid India’s contemporary Islamophobic conjuncture, it provisionally defines terrorism as deliberate civilian-targeted violence intended to induce widespread fear for political, ideological, or social ends, exposing how state practices—from aerial bombings to militarized dispossession—evade the label via sovereign privilege. Integrating Marx’s primitive accumulation, Harvey’s views on accumulation by dispossession, and Toussaint’s analysis of debt-driven imperialism, the analysis frames terrorism as a systemic instrument embedded in neoliberal resource extraction, where conflict in mineral-rich zones (Afghanistan’s lithium, India’s Adivasi belts, Congo’s coltan) functions as both symptom and enabler of corporate plunder, preempted by advanced technologies like remote sensing and veiled by selective narratives that hyper-amplify “Islamic terrorism” while muting Hindutva extremism, Zionist settler violence, and BJP’s hypocritical Taliban engagement amid alleged terror-funding ties. Employing Sāṃkhya’s anyonyapratibimba to reveal power’s projection of its own predation onto the “other,” and balancing economic determinism with religion’s irreducible psychological role in motivating warriors, the piece ultimately reframes terrorism not as pathological or civilizational but as an intrinsic modality of unequal global orders, calling for discriminative clarity (viveka) to dismantle its intertwined logics of capital, technology, ideology, and domination.
Agnihotri’s “The Kashmir Files” and “The Bengal Files” in Violation of the Nāṭyaśāstra: An Open Sanātanī Hindu Indictment
From the heart of Akhaṇḍ Hindutva, a Sanātanī Hindu United Family (HUF) indicts Vivek Agnihotri’s The Kashmir Files and The Bengal Files for brazenly violating Bharata Muni’s sacred Nāṭyaśāstra—turning Hindu grief into voyeuristic gore, rape imagery, and blood-spectacle. What claims to defend Sanātana Dharma abandons rasa, maryādā, and ahiṁsā, replacing ethical restraint with tāmasika exhibitionism and propaganda rage. True Hindutva demands dharma, not degeneration.
The Digital Leviathan: Inside the BJP IT Cell’s Architecture of Consent, Coercion, and Control
In December 2025, India’s digital political landscape is dominated by the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) highly professionalized IT Cell, currently led by Amit Malviya, which functions as a vast, hierarchical apparatus blending centralized strategy, AI-driven tools, paid operatives, and massive volunteer networks to orchestrate continuous propaganda, narrative control, and disinformation campaigns across platforms like WhatsApp, X, YouTube, and Facebook. Widely criticized for systematically disseminating misinformation, deepfakes, clipped videos, communal hate speech (particularly anti-Muslim), and coordinated trolling that incites offline violence and vigilantism—while rarely retracting debunked claims—the IT Cell is accused of manufacturing consent, suppressing dissent through intimidation and surveillance-linked tools, and diverting public attention from economic precarity, unemployment, and governance failures via spectacle-driven “statue-temple nationalism” and pseudoscientific Hindutva myths. Operating symbiotically with “Godi media” owned by aligned corporates (Adani, Ambani), fueled by opaque funding and asymmetric ad spends, and enabled by regulatory gaps in AI oversight, data protection exemptions, and platform passivity, this “digital Leviathan” erodes epistemic trust, polarizes society, chills free expression, and contributes to democratic backsliding, even as independent fact-checkers (e.g., Alt News), civil society, and media literacy initiatives offer resilient counter-efforts against the routinization of information warfare in India’s platform-mediated public sphere.
Emotion of Motion: Piramal Pharma’s Naturolax and the Politics of the Gut
Posted on 16th December, 2025 (GMT 06:52 hrs) Updated on 17th December, 2025 (GMT 04:50 hrs) ABSTRACT Inspired by Chekhov’s “On the Harmful Effects of Tobacco”, this self-reflexive, darkly satirical essay stages constipation as a material, political, and ecological symptom of contemporary Indian capitalism, tracing an embodied genealogy from the Green Revolution’s chemical agriculture toContinue reading “Emotion of Motion: Piramal Pharma’s Naturolax and the Politics of the Gut”
Bhagat Singh Speaks in 2025: A Spectre Haunts the Rulers of India!
This manifesto—framed as Bhagat Singh’s return in 2025—condemns the erosion of democracy, secularism, and socialism in contemporary India. It denounces crony capitalism, authoritarian governance, and the DHFL scam as symbols of systemic exploitation. Calling for reason, scientific temper, and constitutional duty, it urges India’s oppressed citizens to resist through coordinated legal action, peaceful mass mobilization, and digital activism. The message rejects silence, warns against authoritarian decay, and invokes revolutionary solidarity to reclaim justice, dignity, and democratic rights.
DHFL Victims, Are We Still Ready to Fight for It?
This article argues that the DHFL collapse is not merely a corporate failure or legal dispute but a political event symptomatic of India’s deepening cronyist order, where executive power, judicial alignment, and corporate interests appear increasingly intertwined. Through comparative analysis of recent successful pressure-group interventions—such as the farmers’ movement and the pushback against Sanchar Saathi—the article highlights how public mobilization, not institutional goodwill, remains the only effective counterweight to state-corporate consolidation. It further examines the erosion of judicial independence, shrinking civil liberties, and declining democratic indicators reported by international watchdogs, situating the DHFL case within a broader crisis of accountability and participatory rights. The central thesis asserts that without organized mass resistance—legal, physical, and digital—victims of financial injustice remain fragmented, disempowered, and structurally silenced. Ultimately, the article calls on DHFL depositors to transform from isolated individuals into a collective civic force or pressure group, arguing that justice in contemporary India must be demanded, not awaited.
ধরিত্রীনির্ভর যাপনঃ সহজ জীবনের পাঠ ও শান্ত বিপ্লব (Earth-Centric Living: The Lessons of Simple Life and the Quiet Revolution)
Pathik Basu advocates for an “Planet/Earth-Centric Living” philosophy as a crucial response to both contemporary ecological and social crises, emphasizing a shift away from money-centric existence towards interdependence with nature and community. Based on his practical experience farming in small, decentralized units (even as small as 250 sq ft), Basu proposes a living framework where families can achieve self-sufficiency in food, nutrition, and health—producing daily vegetables, fruit, fish, and eggs organically—by treating “one’s waste as another’s nutrition.” This practical application is paired with a social call to action he terms “Tree, Bird, Fifteen,” urging individuals to nurture the environment in their immediate surroundings and strengthen bonds of trust and support with their 10-15 closest kins, thereby cultivating a network of love and mutual aid that forms the foundation of a prosperous, non-violent, and aesthetically grounded society.
From Cough Syrup to Contested Survival: Piramal Pharma’s Phensedyl and OTC Citizenship
This not-an-essay traces the cultural, political, and pharmaco-poetic life of Phensedyl—manufactured by Piramal Pharma—and situates the codeine-laced syrup within a broader history of scarcity, surveillance, and self-medication in South Asia. Moving between memoir, literary analysis, public-health framing, and theoretical lenses drawn from Foucault, Derrida, and contemporary critiques of cannibal capitalism, the piece investigates how a seemingly mundane cough syrup becomes a portal into the infrastructures of regulation, desire, and dispossession. It examines how Phensedyl served, for many in the 1980s–90s, as a substitute for alcohol in restricted environments, how codeine’s codification reflects state power over pain, and how bodies transformed into sites of both rebellion and compliance. Through lyric passages, sociological insight, and critical reflection on toxicity, addiction, and governance, the article argues that Phensedyl becomes more than a pharmaceutical artifact—it becomes a mirror through which we read the politics of breath, the bureaucratization of relief, and the evolving pharmacological citizenship of late-modern South Asia.
Once in a Blue Moon Academia 