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.
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.
ব্রাত্য বঙ্গে সনাতনী ঘুসপেটিয়া
This work is a deliberate act of counter-propaganda — a sustained, repetitive, and self-consciously plagiaristic agit-prop by two melancholy Kolkata Bandyopadhyays who describe themselves as residents of a “non-nation.” Written in a deliberately hybrid register that mixes formal Sadhu Bangla with colloquial Chalit, code-switching, Sanskrit citation, and street humour, the text performs its own central argument: that the imposition of linguistic and cultural uniformity is itself a form of violence. The book’s governing question is the political and civilisational fate of Bengali identity under Hindutva’s ascendant national project. The argument unfolds across seven chapters and proceeds on several interlocking planes. It opens by mapping the deep genealogy of anti-Bengal prejudice within Brahmanical Sanskrit literature — from the Ṛgveda and Aitareya Āraṇyaka to the Baudhāyana Dharmasūtra — showing how the term vāyaṃsi (birds, creatures of unstable motion) was deployed to mark the peoples of Bengal and the eastern territories as ritually impure, geographically ungovernable, and socially excludable. This ancient ideology of exclusion is read as the structural antecedent of contemporary Hindutva’s hostility toward Bengal. The book then interrogates the ideological apparatus of nationalism itself. The concepts of mātr̥bhūmi (motherland) and mātr̥bhāṣā (mother tongue) are traced to their origins in Christian ecclesiastical vocabulary — adopted into Bengali and Indian nationalist discourse during the colonial period — rather than to any ancient Sanskritic or “Sanatan” tradition. Through a close reading of Bankimchandra’s “Bande Mataram” and Rabindranath’s Ghare Baire — particularly the counter-nationalist voice of Nikhilesh — the authors argue that the nationalist invocation of the “mother” is a manufactured intoxication (nesha) that substitutes enchantment for genuine political freedom. The category of “Hindu” identity is subjected to rigorous historical disaggregation. Drawing on Rajataraṅgiṇī, Chola-period inscriptions, and the long record of Shaiva-Vaishnava conflict, the book demonstrates that the “one religion, one nation” claim of the Sangh Parivar has no historical foundation: what existed was a complex, internally contested plurality of sects, practices, and cosmologies — a plurality that colonial administration and contemporary Hindutva alike have violently flattened. A substantial chapter examines the political economy of language. Grierson’s own admission of the impossibility of distinguishing language from dialect is mobilised to expose the census-driven erasure of Odia, Assamese, and other eastern linguistic identities in the service of a Hindi-dominated national demography. The historical construction of Bengali geographic identity — from Pundra, Gauda, and Banga through the Mughal Suba-e-Bangla to the colonial Bengal Presidency — is traced to show that “Bengal” itself is a layered historical formation rather than an eternal essence. The chapter ends with a detailed empirical treatment of what the authors call the carabeef paradox: the coexistence of cow-vigilante violence and lynching with India’s status as the world’s largest exporter of bovine meat under Hindutva governance — complete with data on the Allana Group’s political donations and the corporate structures behind the trade. The critique of Bengali identity is turned inward as well. Drawing on Nirad C. Chaudhuri’s Ātmaghātī Bāṅālī while contesting his Eurocentric prescription, the authors indict the Bengali bhadralok’s chronic self-deception, selective memory, and hypocritical Islamophobia — the same community that produced Derozio, Vidyasagar, and Nazrul now reaches for saffron affiliation or comfortable silence. The book closes with a rereading of the Sanskrit tarpaṇa (ancestral water-offering) ritual as a philosophical statement of radical solidarity — one that extends water and recognition even to enemies, to serpents, to trees, to the dispossessed. The “I” (ayam) is asked to journey toward “we” (vayam), a movement the authors align with the Bantu concept of ubuntu. The final aspiration, voiced through Nazim Hikmet, John Lennon, Juan Ramón Jiménez, and Carl Sagan, is not for a better nation but for the dissolution of the nation-statist form itself — a trans-planetary, non-violent dwelling in the (other-than-)human species-condition, from Kolkata to the pale blue dot.
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.
The Genealogy of Intoxication in the “Sanātana” Dharma
This article interweaves devotional revival, academic appeal, poetic prayer, and radical self-reflexive critique into a polyphonic offering. It advocates the responsible, scripturally grounded revival of two historically significant sacred preparations in Sanatana Dharma — Vaidic Somarasa, the divine elixir exalted in the Rigveda (particularly Mandala IX and 8.48.3), and Maireya Mada, the refined royal wine celebrated in the Valmiki Ramayana (Uttara Kāṇḍa Sarga 42 and Ayodhya Kāṇḍa Sarga 91) — while simultaneously inhabiting the fragile, absurd third space of refusal. Structured around a formal academic letter to Pujya Acharya Shri Ramdev Ji Maharaj and the Patanjali ecosystem calling for GMP-compliant research, standardization, and production of these formulations or their safe, therapeutically calibrated analogs within Ayurvedic Sandhana Kalpana; a deeply personal devotional reflection as a follower of Drunk Balarama (Madhupriya Haladhara), exploring hāsyarasa and the līlās drawn from the Śrīmad Bhāgavatam, Harivaṃśa, and Mahābhārata; and a Vedic prayer-song to Varuṇa for the boundless flow of Vāruṇī, the work runs parallel with the voice of l’étrangère — the tremulous skin (dṛti) of Rigveda 7.89 — who refuses both the compulsory intoxication of speed capitalism and the homogenizing violence of theocratic-market fundamentalism. Drawing upon Vedic hymns, Tagore’s storm-cloud renditions, Marx’s nuanced theory of alienation and religion-as-pharmakon, Brecht’s subversive theatre, Subaltern Studies, and Kabir’s laughter, the article affirms Sanatana Dharma’s sophisticated, multi-layered grammar of madya — ritual, medicinal, ecstatic, and counter-hegemonic — while carving generous space for the sober, ridiculous, creative refusal of all compulsory cups. Ultimately, it calls for a courageous renaissance that is scholarly, devotional, and radically disobedient to the twin fundamentalisms of our 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.
An Anti-Fascist Phenomenology of Haircuts and the Corporeal in Chaplin’s “The Great Dictator”
Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (1940) performs a radical phenomenological dissection of fascism as a regime that disciplines the body — beginning with the head as command centre and extending to hair, moustache, and razor as instruments of masculine authority and ideological inscription. Yet the film’s subversive genius lies in how these very tools are turned against their masters: the razor that polices masculinity becomes an agent of rhythmic care and tender absurdity; the frying pan a weapon of domestic insurgency; the hand grenade and rogue artillery shell instruments of intimate, comedic sabotage. Through shaving sequences, foam-moustache laughter, and phallic banana-crushing, Chaplin reveals that fascist power depends on rigid assignment of function — and collapses the instant the ordinary body slips out of place. This corporeal grammar finds its brutal contemporary counterpart in India under BJP-RSS rule. The same razor that restores dignity in the barber’s chair reappears as the financial “haircut” in the DHFL scandal — a legally orchestrated dispossession that stripped lakhs of ordinary depositors of seventy to eighty percent of their savings to enrich crony capital. What was intimate care becomes fincide; what was artisanal attention becomes procedural theft. From the disciplined fascist head to the managed economic body, the article maps a single arc: authoritarian power inscribes itself upon surfaces both facial and financial, yet the body — whether individual or collective — retains the capacity for interruption, refusal, and reclamation. The interruption is always possible. The razor can still be turned toward care.
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.
Mayday… Mayday… Mayday: Dispatches from the Crashing Cockpit of Speed Capitalism
This wanna-be-palimpsest charts the anatomy and ideology of speed capitalism through India’s toxic hassle-hustle culture — from Murthy’s 70-hour sermons, Deshpande’s 18-hour decrees, and the Modi-era cult of exhaustion to the SIR regime’s accelerated erasures, the parliamentary assembly line of rushed legislation, and the gig economy’s algorithmic violence. Diagnosing a civilisation in free-fall, it unmasks the energy fetish and nuclear-speed différance, achievement society’s neuronal violence, McDonaldization fused with Coca-Cola capitalism’s engineered thirst, and the cruel automation paradox of burned-out survivors beside surplus ghosts. Against this hyperindustrial descent, it offers tortoise-time (Kurmāvasthā): deliberate deceleration, creative idleness, and joyful voluntary labour (sahasa aicchik śrama) in moneyless convivial communes — drawing on Tagore’s drowned flute and city-wall critique, Gandhi’s snail-paced wayfaring pedagogy and Bread Labour, Vietnam’s war bicycles, Illich’s convivial tools, and Marx’s emancipatory vision beyond the division of labour. The dispatches culminate in a final reflexive Mayday cry from the crashing cockpit, calling for the reclamation of time, dignity, and the living Earth before hyperindustrial Armageddon swallows all.
নির্বাচন-দিনের নির্ঘুম রাত্তিরে…
This hybrid existential-political lament fuses Sartrean angoisse and Heideggerian Verfallen (falling/ptōsis/casus) with raw grief over India’s perceived democratic collapse under BJP rule. The narrator, haunted by childhood violence in 1970s Baranagar, personal testimonies of “scientific rigging,” black-swan anomalies (ghost voters, duplicate ballots, vanished CCTV footage), and crony capitalism, confronts existential vertigo: agency eroded amid undeclared emergency, EVM-ballot manipulations, and the absurd choice of “which deity to offer one’s vote.” Blending memoir, poetry, rhapsody, philosophical dialogue, and scathing satire on power, media capture, and majoritarian hypocrisy, the work mourns a “partyless democracy” betrayed into loot, violence, and inauthenticity—condemned to freedom yet falling into despair, where hell is other people and resistance dissolves into anguished song.
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 