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: Journal
CONVERGENCE TO PRAXIS
This journal tries to demolish the administrative boundaries of academic disciplinary technology by amalgamating all the so-called “subjects” by condemning the objectification, subjectification and subjection.
It strives to reach the vanishing point of theory and praxis. Thus, instead of so-called “inter-disciplinary studies”, it emphasizes on the convergence of earthian knowledges and praxiologies. The journal attempts to achieve this end by means of dialogue without manipulation in the context of a participatory, local-resource based, low-energy efficient, small-scale, self-reliant, partyless, moneyless, decentralized democracy. As this journal is against the academiocratic elitism and patron-client relationship, it maintains the Copyleft Writers’ Movement and follows the Creative Commons License.
Bhagat Singh Speaks in 2025: A Spectre Haunts the Rulers of India!
This manifesto—framed as Bhagat Singh’s return in 2025—condemns the erosion of democracy, secularism, and socialism in contemporary India. It denounces crony capitalism, authoritarian governance, and the DHFL scam as symbols of systemic exploitation. Calling for reason, scientific temper, and constitutional duty, it urges India’s oppressed citizens to resist through coordinated legal action, peaceful mass mobilization, and digital activism. The message rejects silence, warns against authoritarian decay, and invokes revolutionary solidarity to reclaim justice, dignity, and democratic rights.
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.
From Cough Syrup to Contested Survival: Piramal Pharma’s Phensedyl and OTC Citizenship
This not-an-essay traces the cultural, political, and pharmaco-poetic life of Phensedyl—manufactured by Piramal Pharma—and situates the codeine-laced syrup within a broader history of scarcity, surveillance, and self-medication in South Asia. Moving between memoir, literary analysis, public-health framing, and theoretical lenses drawn from Foucault, Derrida, and contemporary critiques of cannibal capitalism, the piece investigates how a seemingly mundane cough syrup becomes a portal into the infrastructures of regulation, desire, and dispossession. It examines how Phensedyl served, for many in the 1980s–90s, as a substitute for alcohol in restricted environments, how codeine’s codification reflects state power over pain, and how bodies transformed into sites of both rebellion and compliance. Through lyric passages, sociological insight, and critical reflection on toxicity, addiction, and governance, the article argues that Phensedyl becomes more than a pharmaceutical artifact—it becomes a mirror through which we read the politics of breath, the bureaucratization of relief, and the evolving pharmacological citizenship of late-modern South Asia.
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 Sovereign Insider: A Philosophical Indictment of Corporate Immunity in India — An Open Letter to Ajay Piramal
This open letter to Mr. Ajay Piramal is a philosophical indictment of the structural immunity enjoyed by India’s most privileged corporate actors, written from the vantage point of the outsider — the figure who stands scorched at the margins while power glides in the cool interior of impunity. Drawing on Camus, Kafka, Agamben, Śūdraka, and Brecht, the letter argues that the DHFL debacle and a string of insider-trading controversies reveal not isolated breaches but a systemic architecture in which political patronage, regulatory indulgence, and judicial hesitation combine to create a sovereign exception for the well-connected. Through satire, allegory, and critical theory, the narrative exposes how legality becomes porous, accountability becomes theatrical, and “honour” becomes a performative mask concealing a chaosophic, irrationally rational logic of sanctioned violence. The letter positions Piramal not merely as an individual accused of impropriety but as a symptom of a deeper political–economic disorder in which capital transcends consequence while ordinary depositors bear the existential weight of abandonment. Ultimately, it is a citizen’s dispatch from the perimeter of power — a call to recognise how India’s corporate–political nexus manufactures insiders and outsiders with sunlit inevitability.
Piramal Pharma’s QuikKool and the Biopolitics of Relief
This essay is a hybrid inquiry into pain, pharmacology, and structural violence, using Piramal Pharma’s QuikKool oral gel as both a clinical artefact and a political metaphor. Grounded in the lived experience of the author as a DHFL victim—one of the statistically erased bodies in India’s ongoing financial governance crisis—the text follows how stress-induced oral ulcers become sites of embodied vulnerability. These wounds, though clinically minor, reveal a deeper narrative: that the body becomes an archive where systemic injustice is recorded in mucosal scar tissue, where governance is felt not only in courts and bureaucracies but also in nerves, blood vessels, and salivary chemistry. A rupture in the narrative—a pharmacological table—interrupts the personal account, echoing what D. S. Kothari identifies as the reductionist violence of modern medicine. Clinical data intrudes into lived reality, forcing suffering to format itself into measurable toxicities, biochemical pathways, and treatable symptoms. The essay draws on Foucault, Sontag, Illich, Nandy, and Kothari to frame the ulcer as a biopolitical wound, the gel as an instrument of structural anesthesia, and the body as a ledger of financial erasure. Relief appears not as a neutral good but as a technique of governance: a way of rendering pain clinically legible while erasing its political origins. By interweaving pharmacology, political economy, narrative testimony, and philosophical critique, the essay argues that modern medicine—especially in its commercial OTC form—participates in a wider regime of numbing. Piramal’s non-pharmacological OTC products, when examined alongside QuikKool, reveal how toxic capitalism operates even through substances marketed as harmless. The essay ends by proposing a radical ethical stance: that healing must be understood as a political act, and relief must be interrogated as a form of governance.
DHFL Scam and the Piramal Empire: Chaosophies of the Share Market
This analysis examines the Piramal Group’s post-DHFL restructuring across Finance, Pharma, and Realty, situating it alongside the DHFL insolvency to reveal a systemic logic of corporate immunity in India. Through demergers, reverse mergers, and strategic rebrandings, the group consolidated promoter control, quarantined legacy risks, and leveraged regulatory timing while dispersing accountability. Piramal Finance Ltd.’s premium listing, despite DHFL-linked liabilities and opaque asset valuations, exemplifies how market narratives, algorithmic momentum, and legal finality privilege investor perception over depositor justice. Piramal Pharma’s operational stress contrasts with narrative-driven valuation, highlighting structural fragility masked by forward-looking communications. The study demonstrates that restructuring has evolved into a mechanism of reputational cleansing and social erasure, wherein financial architecture advances faster than justice, and ethical accountability is systematically sidelined. Moreover, the chaosophy of the share market—its inherent unpredictability, narrative-driven volatility, and speculative feedback loops—renders conventional risk assessment almost performative, showing how perception, hype, and algorithmic herding often dictate market outcomes more than fundamentals or depositor rights.
Once in a Blue Moon Academia 