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.
Category Archives: Ecosophy
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 The 2016 Char Dham all-weather highway and the 2019 (later repealed) Devasthanam Management Act have sought to convert the fragile, divine Himalayan shrines of Yamunotri, Gangotri, Kedarnath, and Badrinath into a securitized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.
Nixit and the Pharmaco-Capitalist Soul: Hauntings Under Piramal Pharma
This essay interrogates Nixit—a nicotine lozenge produced by Piramal Pharma—as an artifact of contemporary bio-political control. By examining its chemical composition, rhetoric of health, and psychopolitical subtext, the paper situates Nixit within the neoliberal economy of purification, where addiction is not eliminated but reformatted for consumption. Drawing on Freud’s psychoanalysis and Foucault’s biopolitics, alongside the cinematic allegory of Anurag Kashyap’s No Smoking (2007), the article reveals how the pharmaco-industrial complex transforms rebellion into obedience, recoding the smoker’s desire into a commodified act of self-regulation. Incorporating Nietzsche’s genealogy of internalized violence and Derrida’s notion of hauntology, it further argues that the lozenge embodies the spectral persistence of repression under the guise of care. In the age of “managed freedom,” even the act of quitting becomes a performance of compliance—sweetened, packaged, and sold as virtue.
Defending Dissent, Protecting Ladakh: OBMA Stands with Climate Activist Sonam Wangchuk
The Once in a Blue Moon Academia (OBMA) stands in unwavering solidarity with Sonam Wangchuk and the Ladakh Movement, recognizing their struggle as a fight for environmental justice, climate action, cultural autonomy, and democratic dissent. Highlighting Ladakh’s vulnerability as the “Third Pole” of the world, the statement critiques the abrogation of Article 370 and the selective, contradictory application of Article 371, exposing the central government’s sidelining of local governance and ecological concerns. OBMA condemns Wangchuk’s arbitrary NSA detention and the violent suppression of peaceful protests, emphasizing that the movement’s constitutional demands for statehood, Sixth Schedule inclusion, and ecological protection are lawful, ethical, and globally aligned. The statement affirms that safeguarding communities, ecological integrity, and the right to dissent are duties of conscience, wisdom, and citizenship.
Dynastic Capitalism and Ecological “Externalities”: The Ambani–Piramal Nexus in Post-Liberalization India
This essay investigates how the marital and corporate nexus between the Ambani and Piramal families consolidates dynastic power while enabling ecological, social, and ethical impunity in India’s neoliberal economy. Operating through the Mitakshara coparcenary system, this “nepo-capitalist complex” centralizes vast wealth across Reliance Industries, Piramal Group, and affiliated ventures, while systematically externalizing environmental degradation, resource depletion, and socio-economic costs onto marginalized communities. Through an integrated critique of Ambani’s Reliance’s pollution and cronyism, Campa Cola’s water-intensive operations, Piramal Pharma’s Digwal effluents, Piramal Realty’s climate-vulnerable coastal real estate, Russian oil dealings, Z+ state protection, and the contested Vantara wildlife project, the essay traces the nexus of dynastic wealth, environmental exploitation, and geopolitical opportunism. The Mitakshara mechanism emerges not as a cultural relic but as a structural tool that facilitates intergenerational wealth consolidation, shields elites from accountability, and perpetuates ecological and social extraction in twenty-first century India.
Once in a Blue Moon Academia 