Submitted by activists, whistleblowers, and citizens associated with Once in a Blue Moon Academia (OBMA), this appeal documents a systematic regression in transparency, accountability, civic space, and human-rights protections in India from 2014 to 2025 under successive BJP-led governments. Key manifestations include: declining global rankings on corruption (CPI 96/180 in 2024), press freedom (151/180 in 2025), and rule-of-law indices; erosion of the RTI Act through 2019 amendments, administrative obstruction, and violence against over 100 RTI activists; the impending GANHRI downgrade of the NHRC from “A” to “B” due to executive capture and neglect of systemic violations, exemplified by its handling of the opaque DHFL insolvency harming lakhs of small depositors; electoral-finance opacity via Electoral Bonds and post-2024 anonymous channels; credible allegations of large-scale voter deletions and manipulations (2024–2025); shrinking civic space through UAPA, sedition, PMLA, FCRA, and SLAPP suits; pervasive surveillance (Pegasus, Aadhaar profiling, Sanchar Saathi) with weak data-protection safeguards; and deepening crony-capitalist capture of media, regulators, and public assets. Petitioners urge OHCHR, Amnesty International, HRW, Transparency International, and allied bodies to monitor, investigate, report, provide technical support, protect defenders, and press for urgent reforms to halt India’s slide toward electoral autocracy and restore constitutional guarantees of transparency, accountability, and human rights.
Category Archives: Ecosophy
Mukesh Ambani and the Reliance Empire: A Chronicle of Controversies
This December 2025 dossier by OBMA chronicles Mukesh Ambani and Reliance Industries as the distilled essence of India’s crony-capitalist oligarchy: a $108-billion empire built not on innovation but on systematic resource plunder (KG-D6 gas “migration” worth billions still sub judice), predatory telecom consolidation (Jio’s zero-pricing massacre followed by tariff hikes and 40%+ market monopoly), regulatory capture via massive BJP electoral-bond funding, environmental devastation masked by greenwashed spectacles like the refinery-adjacent Vantara menagerie, and dynastic consolidation through the Ambani–Piramal marriage alliance, offshore tax havens (Stoke Park’s “charitable” conversion), and the spiritual whitewashing provided by the controversy-shadowed Radhanath Swami. From insider-trading settlements and GST wrist-slaps to the deliberate silencing of critics via Network18 ownership and legal intimidation, every scandal—from Antilia’s disputed Waqf land to Nita Ambani’s conspicuous silence during Vinesh Phogat’s Olympic heartbreak—reveals the same pattern: profit privatized, risk and ecological burden socialized, accountability deferred indefinitely by a captured state and judiciary that moves at lightning speed for the powerful and glacial pace for everyone else. In Modi’s “Viksit Bharat,” Ambani is not an outlier but the archetype: the apex predator of a political economy where billionaires do not merely influence the rules—they write them, enforce them, and, when necessary, transcend them with impunity.
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.
The Weaponization of Intimacy: How “Love Jihad” Became Hindutva’s Battle Cry
This article critically examines the socio-political, legal, and cultural dimensions of the “Love Jihad” narrative in contemporary India, tracing its roots in colonial fear-mongering, patriarchal control, and Hindutva ideology. It highlights how Muslim men are cast as predatory and Hindu women as endangered, while Muslim women and Hindu men are systematically erased, reflecting a deeply gendered and majoritarian logic. The narrative has been instrumentalized politically and legally—through anti-conversion laws, surveillance, and policing—transforming private interfaith or inter-religious love into a public, criminalized, and highly regulated act. Documented cases reveal lethal consequences, social ostracism, and impunity, illustrating the human cost of communalized suspicion. The article situates these dynamics in cinema, showing how films from Bombay to Kedarnath and PK reflect, challenge, or subvert stereotypes, with narratives ranging from tragic social constraints to satirical critiques of prejudice. Interweaving environmental catastrophe, labour hierarchies, and ideological indoctrination, the study underscores how intimacy, autonomy, and desire are policed by intersecting forces of religion, gender, and state power, emphasizing that “Love Jihad” is less a phenomenon of romance than a tool of surveillance, communal control, and patriarchal-nationalist assertion.
Himalayan Saints and the Defence of Sacred Ecology: Resisting Developmental Hindutva Across the Char Dham Corridor
The Char Dham conflict in Uttarakhand exposes a deep contradiction within contemporary Hindutva: a BJP-led “developmental Hinduism” that fuses neoliberal infrastructure, militarized nationalism, and centralized temple governance is destroying the sacred-ecological fabric it claims to protect. The 2016 Char Dham all-weather highway and the 2019 (later repealed) Devasthanam Management Act have sought to convert the fragile, divine Himalayan shrines of Yamunotri, Gangotri, Kedarnath, and Badrinath into a securitized tourism-military corridor. In response, hereditary priests, ascetics, and local communities have mobilised a powerful resistance, framing the mountains and rivers as the living body of Shiva rather than exploitable resources. Drawing on Guattari’s three ecologies, their protests defend an embodied, relational sacred ecology against the state’s homogenizing, extractive logic. Far from a mere environmental dispute, this struggle reveals Hindutva’s betrayal of plural, place-based Hinduism and challenges the secular-pluralist foundations of the Indian republic.
The Fallen Sceptre(s) Of Your Justice: Dirty My-Self and Piramal Pharma’s Tri-Activ
“The Fallen Sceptre(s) of Your Justice: A Pseudo/Quasi-Pharmaco-Philosophical Reflection on Piramal Pharma’s Tri-Activ — and Other Things Otherwise” is an ecosophical and deconstructive meditation on the spectral transformation of power—from gods to kings to states to corporations—through the pharmaco-industrial complex. Anchored in the case of Piramal Pharma’s Tri-Activ disinfectant products, the piece entwines lyrical confession, ecological critique, and self-reflexive philosophical inquiry to expose how the rhetoric of purity and hygiene conceals necropolitical violence and ecological toxicity. Blurring boundaries between body and world, sickness and system, the text stages the body as a site of contamination, resistance, and remembrance, where care becomes commodified and justice spectral. Through interlacing idioms of Tagore, Derrida, and anarchist refusal, it calls for reclaiming the fallen sceptre of justice from algorithmic kings and chemical prophets—toward an ethics of vulnerability, ecological interdependence, and collective redemption.
The Fragile Himalayas: Climate, Hindutva Developmentalism, and the Collapsing Ecology of the Third Pole
The Himalayas—often called the “Third Pole”—are collapsing under the dual weight of climate change and a reckless developmental paradigm driven by Hindutva nationalism. This article examines how the BJP’s infrastructural expansion, exemplified by the Char Dham project and many other recent instances, embodies an extractive model that desecrates the sacred mountain ecology in the name of “spiritual connectivity” and national pride. By exposing the contradictions between ecological fragility and politico-economic hubris, it argues that the Himalayan crisis is not a natural disaster but a moral and civilizational collapse—where faith has been mechanized, rivers commodified, and glaciers sacrificed for profit and propaganda. Drawing on ecological ethics, political ecology, and environmental sociology, the piece calls for an epistemic and ethical reorientation—from GDP-centrism to earth-centric governance that recognizes the Himalayas as living systems rather than geological resources. Ultimately, saving the Himalayas demands confronting not only climate change but also the ideological machinery that normalizes ecocide under the rhetoric of development.
Why Indian Political Parties Are Ecologically Indifferent
This article examines the deep-rooted ecological indifference of Indian political parties across the ideological spectrum. Despite unprecedented environmental degradation—from the destruction of forests in Hasdeo and Nicobar to toxic urban air and vanishing rivers—ecology remains absent from India’s political grammar. The essay argues that this neglect is not accidental but structural: born of a development myth that equates progress with extraction and nationalism with industrial expansion. In a corporatized democracy, parties serve capital before climate, leaving the earth unrepresented in the republic’s moral imagination.
Why India Needs a No Kings Movement: From Fascist Corporatocracy to Partyless Democracy
This essay traces the global and Indian convergences of authoritarian populism, corporate capture, and digital surveillance through the metaphor of kingship. Beginning with the “No Kings” movement in the U.S., it reinterprets democracy as an anti-monarchical ethic — a practice of shared sovereignty rather than submission to personality cults. Through Modi’s curated spectacle of power, the text exposes India’s descent into corporatocracy, pseudology, and ecological tyranny. It ultimately envisions a “partyless democracy” rooted in decentralization, mutual care, and invisible leadership — a republic without kings, parties, or masters.
The Skin Remembers Capital: Piramal Pharma, Dermatological Capitalism, and the Pharmakon of Neoliberal Care
This essay interlaces embodied testimony, regulatory critique, and philosophical reflection to examine the moral and epistemological crises surrounding Piramal Pharma’s Lacto Calamine and Tetmosol. Framed as a confession of corporeal and existential disillusionment, it argues that these consumer products—marketed as instruments of care—operate as pharmakon in Derrida’s sense: both remedy and poison, soothing and subjugating. Drawing on psychodermatology, Foucault’s biopolitics, Derrida’s deconstruction, Nancy’s ontology of exposure, Levinas’s ethics of touch, and Kleinman’s illness narratives, the essay situates dermatological suffering as both symptom and allegory of late-capitalist pathology. Through this fusion of narrative and critique, it proposes the concept of dermatological capitalism—a regime that commodifies distress, aestheticizes anxiety, and monetizes the epidermis as both site and symbol of neoliberal discipline. Engaging theoretical lenses such as moral contagion, the theology of touch, and economic penance, it exposes how regulatory loopholes, celebrity endorsements, and psychosomatic commodification sustain a moral economy of the skin. Ultimately, it reclaims the epidermis as a moral archive of neoliberal harm, urging re-sensitization of ethics, regulation, and embodied care in an age where wellness itself has been corporatized. This essay forms the third part of an ongoing inquiry into the ethics of exposure within India’s pharmaceutical-industrial landscape.
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