India’s equity indices fell 13–15% in the first nine months of 2026 while official projections claimed growth above 7%, yet both figures emerge from the same statistical and political apparatus the essay refuses to treat as neutral: the growth number is an advance estimate that aggregates value-added already mixing surplus extraction, ecological drawdown and financial intermediation, while the index fall is a price of claims whose relation to any underlying surplus remains unproven. The BSE and NSE are read as a chaosophic machine (Guattari) that metabolises volatility, asymmetry and rupture as its engine of appropriation rather than suffering them as pathology; the method is tested against Indian evidence that includes the 2026 foreign-capital flight, SEBI’s finding that 91% of individual derivatives traders lost a net ₹1.06 lakh crore in FY25, the Jane Street interim order, the NSE co-location settlement of ₹1,491.21 crore weeks before its ₹22,562 crore offer-for-sale IPO, the Himalayan yogi’s documented influence on the NSE chief executive, and the longer ledger of Mehta, Parekh, Satyam and DHFL. Into this frame the essay inserts the distinction between socially necessary labour (performed for self, family, neighbours, the old and the very young) and surplus labour (performed for the capitalist), arguing that a share is a price without a value—a title to a slice of surplus, not a slice of the factory—and that every ΔM on the ticker is distributed surplus, revaluation, transfer or toll; when claims outgrow what s/v can carry, they are devalued and households pay. Money is treated as a null signifier that equates the unequal by the act of exchange. The argument concludes that the condition will not overturn itself: regulation arrives after rupture and becomes the terrain of the next extraction, the exposed class is structurally enrolled as the extractable base, and only a sustained, partyless, non-violent Seize Dalal Street movement—organised across the rails of speed, expiry design, insolvency priority, political funding and the null signifier itself—can impose the finality the exchange has so far deferred.
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.
Laughter in the Time of Saffron Fascism
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.
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.
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.
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.
Ātmadīpa: The Non-Schooling Praxeogogy
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.
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.
