Ātmadīpa is a non-school and a praxeo-gogy: not a greener exam-machine but a commons in which a people learns to inhabit a watershed in the polycrisis — lamp and island unto itself, and in the same motion a support to others. Head, hand and heart are taught as one and never ranked; the institution is deschooled. It resists the sale of learning, the capture of the curriculum, and the credential that pretends to be knowing. Its fields are the crafts of home-as-habitat — food, water, shelter, care, dissent, grief — held free at the point of use, federated without a headquarters, open-licensed, unfinished on purpose. Kindle your own lamp. Its only use is to light the road everyone walks.
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.
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.
Maoists Without Mao: The Misnomer of Indian ‘Maoism’
India’s so-called Naxalite–CPI (Maoist) “insurgency”, declared “effectively finished” around 2026, is called “Maoist” by the state, the press, and the movement itself; this article treats that name as a misnomer that does ideological work. It reconstructs Mao’s actual method — concrete analysis in On Practice and On Contradiction, the gun-and-pen doctrine of Yan’an, sinification rather than imported catechism, self-reliant base areas, a restless Confucian–classical substratum, and the brief Hundred Flowers opening toward a plural field of standpoints later formalised, in another idiom, as overdetermination by Althusser — and shows that the Indian movement kept the words and dropped the grammar: iconolatry (“China’s Chairman is India’s Chairman”), MLM as a frozen universal system, Gutian-condemned annihilationist militarism, and a parasitic levy-and-loot economy on a mineral frontier that is not the feudal countryside the doctrine presupposes. The name was decided; the referent would not coincide with Mao. Mapping the Red Corridor onto bauxite, iron, coal, chromite and uranium, and walking Bastar, Kalinganagar, Niyamgiri and Jadugoda through Marx, Sanyal and Levien on primitive accumulation and the need economy, it argues that “Maoist” functions as a security brand affixed to Adivasi resistance to ecological dispossession, while Foucault’s warning about people’s courts is inverted in bulldozer (in)justice. What remains is a compound the doctrine cannot cover: a frontier defence of jal–jangal–zameen, a Blanquist core, the armed edge of the governed. The brand erases the dispossessed subject the conflict was about.
খাওয়া-দাওয়ার রাজনীতি আর ইয়াং বেঙ্গল
থালার ওপর রাষ্ট্র চেপে বসা-মাত্রই গেরুয়া ফ্যাসিবাদ সরাসরি রান্নাঘরে ঢুকে পড়েছে। এই লেখা সেই “ঢুকে পড়বার” খবরাখবর দেয়—গোরক্ষার নামে ব্যাপক খুনোখুনি, “সনাতন” খাদ্যবিধির জবরদস্তি, আমিষ (বিশেষত গোমাংস)-ত্যাগের জোরজুলুম, আর সেই ভয়ের রাজনীতির বিপ্রতীপে হাজির হওয়া দুশো বছর আগের ইয়াং বেঙ্গল। ডিরোজিওর ছাত্র-সহযোদ্ধারা বউবাজারের গলিতে গরুর হাড় ছুঁড়েছিলেন। প্রমাণ করে দিয়েছিলেন যে “শুদ্ধতা”-র চাপিয়ে দেওয়া নির্মাণ আদৌ কোনো যৌক্তিক নৈতিকতার মানদণ্ড নয়, স্রেফ গোঁড়াদের সীমানা আঁকার তকনিক; গরু “মা” হয়ে ওঠা আর দলিত-মুসলমানকে বাইরে ঠেলে পিষে দেওয়া সেই একই খ্যামতা-দেহের যন্তর-তন্তর-মন্তর। বাংলার রান্নাঘর (সমসত্ব বর্গ নয়) কিছুদিন আগেও ছিল বহুস্বরের পরিসর; এখন সেখানে সঙ্ঘী সেন্সরেরা উঁকি মারে ইতিউতি। লেখার পরিশিষ্টে ব্যঙ্গপত্র আর বিফ-বাফ রপ্তানির হিসেব মিলে যায়—রাতে গোমাতা, দিনে মহিষমাংসের ডলার। ডিরোজিয়ানদের সেই উঠোনে ছুঁড়ে দেওয়া গো-হাড়টা আজও তাই মাটিতে পড়েনি। ওটা প্রশ্ন। প্রশ্ন ফিরে ফিরে আসে।
The Man and the Monolith: A Dossier on Mohan Bhagwat
This dossier is a committed forensic case against Mohan Madhukar Bhagwat, sixth Sarsanghchalak of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh since 2009 and its executive from 2000 to 2009: a lifer raised in a three-generation Sangh household, produced by the organisation’s sealed ladder, and now the living editor of an ideology whose founding texts — Savarkar’s membership test, Golwalkar’s denial of minority citizenship and praise of a Nazi purge as a “lesson,” Moonje’s 1931 pilgrimage to Mussolini — he does not disown so much as copy-edit for export as “oneness.” It holds the line the Sangh most wants critics to overstep: no invented personal conviction from Gujarat 2002, no fake-doctorate smear, no claim that a USCIRF recommendation or a Canadian petition is already law; the charge that survives is custody of a majoritarian machine — unregistered at the centre, banned three times by the republic, radiating through the BJP and the Parivar — restated in Bhagwat’s own dated speech as eliminative absorption (“everyone is Hindu”), relocation of blame (2013, 2015, 2019, 2025), and centenary reputation-work. That work arrived in New York in August 2026 as “Universal Oneness” at Madison Square Garden and walked into a revolt that includes Hindus who refuse to let Hindutva speak in their name. The monolith calls itself oneness. The dossier refuses the name.
Ahimsa Before Arms: an Open Letter and Dossier to the Soldiers, Sailors, and Airmen of India
Addressed to the men and women in the uniform of the Indian Republic — not to generals, procurement officers, or politicians, but to the person with the rifle, the aircraft, the border watch, and the internal-security beat — this open letter and dossier is written from ahimsa: hard, active non-violence that refuses the destruction of truth. From parliamentary records, CAG reports, RTIs, courts, former Governors and Army Chiefs, the National War Memorial, investigative and strategic sources, SIPRI and budget data, and OBMA’s research, it maps institutional betrayal under the BJP–NDA regime(s): a suppressed Army Chief’s memoir; electoral use of Pulwama and Pahalgam martyrs; Model Code violations; Agnipath’s contract labour; disability-pension cuts after the 2016 strikes and the 2026 tax on valour; AFGIS/AGIF losses in DHFL; defective INSAS and ammunition; Chinese occupation and cartographic lies; Operation Sindoor’s fog and later war-memorial names; Siachen’s nationalism industry; Taliban engagement and the asymmetric terror label; CAPF subordination and the 2026 Act overriding the Supreme Court; veterans at Jantar Mantar; Rafale opacity; a ₹6,81,210-crore budget that still cannot issue reliable boots; and war-profiteering that turns the soldier into a line item. Linked to Prahar, Rang De Basanti, War Chhod Na Yaar, and Jai Ho, and closed by the Russell–Einstein question, it asks the citizen in uniform for viveka — not rebellion, but truth known, paid forward, and refused as the next campaign poster’s raw material.
Reading ‘Vande Mātaram’ Across Registers: Text, Myth, Ritual
This “reading” traces Vande Mātaram’s discursive transformation(s) from a specifically Bengali hymn into an unstable national emblem and, finally, a ritualised test of belonging. It begins with the demographic hinge of saptakoṭi/dvisaptakoṭi—seven crore throats and fourteen crore arms—corresponding to the Bengal Presidency, not India, and follows its mutation from Bankim’s fixed text to the 1905 inflation of thirty crore, the Republic’s excision of the number-bearing and goddess-identifying stanzas in 1937–50, and the later dissolution into unbounded koṭi-koṭi. Across page, stage, state and popular transmission, the essay asks what happens when a countable provincial people becomes an infinite, unauditable mass. It reads the hymn through the genesis of Ānandamaṭha, Tagore’s counter-discourse of neśā, the colonial genealogy of mātṛbhūmi/mātṛbhāṣā, and the “(M)Other-Tongue” mechanism that manufactures Others. The stanza-by-stanza appendix tests the hymn’s claims of water, fertility, beauty, knowledge, feminine strength and sustaining earth against ecological depletion, educational precarity, demographic violence and extractive concentration, exposing a structure in which the signifier survives while the referent is hollowed out. The blurred number, singular vande, and 2026 penalisation of disruption converge as political ritual: citizen becomes chorus, dissent filial betrayal. The argument is not that singing is illegitimate, but that compelled, unexamined singing surrenders the critical freedom citizenship requires; to decline the chant is not to refuse the country, but to refuse a mistranslation, a miscount, a manufactured Mother, and the disappearance of the historically located citizen into an infinite chorus.
মঁসিয়ে ফুকোর খ্যামতার কলাপ আর আজকের প্রলাপ
What happens when Foucault is read not as a doctrine but as a device that reads back? Beginning with the sword suspended supposedly above Damocles, this essay follows its displacement—from sovereign threat to dispositif, from visible punishment to (in)visible surveillance, from the juridico-discursive to the rhizomatic capillary, from the sovereign who commands to the subject who learns to govern itself. Rather than applying Foucault to contemporary India, the essay de-seminates him in the context of present-day India: concepts scatter across Damocles, Orestes, parrhesia, the rhizome, the Frankfurt School, algorithmic surveillance, autocratic legalism, electoral politics, guilt and self-discipline, repeatedly returning in altered forms. The rhizome becomes both possibility and trap; the network that once promised escape from sovereign centrality can become an architecture of distributed control, while the sword need no longer fall because its possibility has been internalised. Against any simple opposition between power and resistance, the essay asks how resistance itself is captured, reproduced and redirected through the very dispositifs it contests. It is thus an exercise in meta-writing: Foucault is read through Foucault, against Foucault, and beyond the stabilising authority of “Foucauldian-ism”, as the essay moves between theory, myth, political diagnosis and its own acts of reading. What emerges is not a final thesis but a deliberately unstable map of power—one in which the question is no longer merely where power resides, but how subjects, networks, institutions and affects continually participate in making, unmaking and remaking its forms.
Azadi, or Democratic Unfreedom? A Video Message from OBMA
This video asks what “Azadi” (freedom) means in India today, and whether the formal existence of democracy can coexist with a lived condition of democratic unfreedom. Tracing the period from 2014 to 2026, it examines the erosion of civil liberties, institutional accountability, democratic participation, ecological security, and economic justice, before asking what genuine freedom might require: the Right to Reject, the Right to Recall, a partyless democracy, and an ecological politics rooted in Oikos — our shared home.
