Art of Resistance – Once in a Blue Moon Academia

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.

The Shah Dossier: Resign, Union Home Minister!

This citizens’ charge-sheet documents twenty-one instances of foreclosed accountability, institutional failure and the systematic manufacture of impunity under Amit Shah as Union Home Minister — from the Gujarat encounter cases and the tadipaar externment, through surveillance, financial opacity, the architecture of control in Kashmir, CAA–NRC and electoral machinery, to security collapses in Manipur, Pahalgam and on the China border, culminating in the use of brutal and repressive force against unarmed students at Jantar Mantar. It demands his resignation and the democratic rights of recall and reject.

FINANCE MINISTER and CORPORATE AFFAIRS MINISTER: RESIGN! SCRAP IBC!

In the shadow of nationwide student uprisings demanding the resignation of Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan and the overhaul of NEET and the NTA, this manifesto stands in unbreakable solidarity and expands the battlefield: Finance and Corporate Affairs Minister Nirmala Sitharaman must resign, and the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code 2016 must be repealed outright. Under her dual ministries the IBC has delivered its true design—nearly one lakh mostly elderly DHFL depositors stripped of 77 percent of their AAA-rated savings while ₹45,050 crore in proven fraud claims were sold to the acquirer for one rupee and wiped clean by the retrospective shield of Section 32A. A law sold as swift justice now averages 688–853 days, recovers only 31–33 percent, and has been rewritten by at least six parliamentary amendments plus 122 regulatory tweaks in nine years. Financial firms were smuggled in by executive notification, tribunal orders protecting higher offers for depositors were ignored, and the very Committee of Creditors that decided the fate of public money cannot account for its own spending. This is not failure; it is architecture working exactly as built—public risk socialised, private reward privatised. Scrap the Code. Replace it with a depositor-first resolution law passed by Parliament. Question the chair. Resign Nirmala Sitharaman. #SCRAP_IBC

A Solidarity Statement for Sonam Wangchuk, Satyagrahi of the Anthropocene

On the 17th day of his indefinite hunger strike at Jantar Mantar, Sonam Wangchuk continues his non-violent resistance for justice, dialogue, and ecological protection of Ladakh. Echoing Jatin Das’s 1929 martyrdom and G.D. Agarwal’s sacrifice for the Ganga, Wangchuk’s ātmaśakti exposes the Indian state’s moral deafness and hypocrisy in the face of genuine satyagraha. Invoking Tagore’s fiery Bhairava hymn — “sarva kharvatāre dahe tava krodhadāha” — this post calls for solidarity with a man who has become the moral centre of a republic that has abandoned its conscience.

Godiwood Stripped: An Exposé of BJP-Hindutva Propaganda Films (Review Series— Part I)

This review series (Part-I) examines a growing cycle of Hindi cinema—from PM Narendra Modi (2019) to Dhurandhar 2 (2026)—that have widely been characterized as aligned with BJP/Hindutva Islamophobic messaging, spanning hagiographic biopics, Partition and Kashmir “history” dramas, and jingoistic war thrillers. Drawing on MouthShut, Times of India, IMDb, and Rotten Tomatoes reviews by OBMA members alongside box office data and social media reception, each entry is read as trading historical nuance and artistic craft for majoritarian narrative-building, victimhood framing, and militarism. The pattern across titles is uneven: a handful (Uri, The Kashmir Files, Dhurandhar 2) found commercial success through polarized mobilization, while most (PM Narendra Modi, Tejas, Emergency, Udaipur Files, Operation Valentine, The Taj Story, Main Atal Hoon) underperformed financially and drew sharply negative critical notices despite inflated partisan audience scores. The series argues that this divergence between critical consensus and box office fate exposes the limits of state-aligned cinema as propaganda, with Part II promising further entries (The Kerala Story, Article 370, Swatantrya Veer Savarkar, and others).