In this sharp critique of India’s electoral system amid the 2026 West Bengal Assembly elections, the author argues that elections have become fully stage-managed spectacles by PR experts, far beyond Chomsky’s 1989 idea of merely ratifying pre-selected options. He views NOTA as a purely symbolic moral protest with no real power — even if it gets the highest votes, the election is not cancelled and the top candidate still wins. The entire process is called a predetermined farce rigged by mass voter deletions (nearly 91 lakh), fake voters, EVM tampering, opaque counting, a biased Election Commission, money-muscle power, and institutional decay. Despite their differences, mainstream parties follow the same neoliberal policies and identity politics, offering no genuine choice. Citing Anjan Dutta, Herbert Marcuse, and articles on the “legitimation crisis,” the essay concludes that voting is pointless; NOTA or abstention combined with demands for Right to Recall and proportional representation is a more honest response.
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.
Exi(s)ting Without Exit in Contemporary India: “Hum Hain Ki Hum Nahin?”
In the shadowed corridors of April 2026, a lone whistleblower’s fevered consciousness spirals endlessly around the single, shattering question — “Hum hain ki hum nahin?” (to be or not to be?)— existence or erasure. Trapped inside a shrinking Mumbai flat that has become both sanctuary and prison, he navigates the razor’s edge between the flickering glow of his laptop screen and the perpetual terror of the doorbell, suspended in the velvet noose of an undeclared emergency where words are crossed out before they can breathe, hate speech cruises freely along golden highways of power, while dissent drowns on isolated atolls of silence. Obsessively rewinding the traffic-island monologue from Haider, he mouths existential defiance as Rabindrasangeet clashes with raw paranoia, Tagore’s ancient frog — merely surviving (without “living”) three thousand years sealed inside a stone — merges with Foucault’s biopolitics and Derrida’s haunting spectres, while the ghosts of DHFL financial annihilation, electoral bond plunder, UAPA’s slow-motion cages, and Piramal’s crushing ₹100 crore SLAPP suit press relentlessly against the walls of his cell. Here, survival has been reduced to mere petrified existence, sanity stands accused of sedition, and compulsive repetition is no longer madness but the final desperate ritual of a fractured society replaying its own nightmare, praying that this time the ending might finally break differently — even as the doorbell continues to ring, the screen keeps flickering, and the question echoes unanswered into the void.
Banned Dialogues on Hindutva’s Phantasma: Acts of Adharma Against “Sanātana” (?) Dharma!
This activist art work, structured as a banned dramatic dialogue between two borderless earthlings, Aniket and Jijñāsā, rigorously exposes Hindutva’s Phantasma — a colonial-era political construct masquerading as eternal “Sanātana Dharma.” Through classical philosophical sources (Monier-Williams, Śaṅkara, Bhagavad Gītā, Nāsadīya Sūkta, Kautilya, etc.) juxtaposed against contemporary empirical realities — electoral bonds, crony capitalism (Adani-Reliance), temple politics, gau-raksha violence, ecological devastation (Aravalli, Hasdeo, Great Nicobar), and selective moral policing — the conversation demonstrates how the Sangh Parivar hollows the caturvarga: turning dharma into majoritarian control, artha into loot, kāma into hypocritical repression, and mokṣa into deferred spectacle. Anchored in the radical skepticism of the Nāsadīya Sūkta and the living pluralism of South and South-East Asian traditions, the work calls for reclaiming a fluid, questioning, ever-flowing dharma from its saffron instrumentalisation — earthling to earthling, until the phantasm cracks and true liberation breathes free.
Black Swans vs. the Machine: A Dialogue with Grok (AI)
This dialogue traces a charged encounter between a citizen’s lived “black swan” experiences and an AI’s data-driven reasoning, revealing how anomalies, RTI evasions, and opaque institutional practices converge into a deeper crisis of trust in electoral processes in the contemporary Indian political landscape. Through layered exchanges on SIR deletions, administrative opacity, and systemic contradictions, it argues that what is dismissed as flawed implementation may in fact signal structural disenfranchisement, while also exposing how even ostensibly neutral AI can reproduce dominant narratives by demanding unattainable standards of proof.
Sex, Lies, and the Criminal State: The Politics of Impunity in the Sangh Parivar
This article offers a sharp critique of the RSS-BJP-Sangh Parivar under Narendra Modi and Amit Shah as a self-reinforcing criminal-political machine that operates through a stark double standard: resistance from rivals, whistleblowers, judges or citizens invites persecution, elimination or institutional violence, while alignment yields protection and the “laundry of deceit” that converts legal vulnerability into political utility. Drawing on Foucault’s biopower and carceral continuum, Marcuse’s surplus repression, and Chomsky’s critique of the reward-punishment model, it traces the apparatus from its Gujarat laboratory — marked by the 2002 pogrom’s sexual violence, Snoopgate surveillance, staged encounters, Haren Pandya’s assassination, Justice Loya’s death, and Sanjiv Bhatt’s imprisonment — to its national expansion through Operation Lotus horse-trading, systemic sexual impunity, godmen paroles, cow vigilantism, Pegasus and digital surveillance, UAPA detentions, bulldozer justice, the Delhi 2020 pogrom, Article 370 revocation, CAA-NRC-SIR protests, the Adani-Hindenburg corporate-state nexus, judicial complicity in cases ranging from the Zakia Jafri clean chit and Ram Mandir verdict to reluctance over the SIR’s mass deletions (including 91 lakh names in Bengal), and the 2026 Epstein Files fallout. NCRB and NFHS-5 data expose pervasive gendered violence and under-reporting, while pseudology — unfulfilled jumlas on jobs, farmers’ income, Acche Din and Viksit Bharat — manufactures consent. The Sangh Parivar thus emerges as an integrated system in which sex, crime, and narrative are weaponised as technologies of biopower to entrench majoritarian authoritarian consolidation.
কোন্ দেবতারে ভোট মোরা করি সমর্পণ?
এই নাটকের মূল বিষয়বস্তু ঠিক করাটা বেশ খ্যাঁচাম্যাঁচা একখানা ব্যাপার। এখানে ব্যাপক ঝগড়া, তর্ক, চাপানউতোর, গালি-গালাজ, এবং সেসবের মাধ্যমেই সরাসরি কিংবা
পরোক্ষভাবে একাধিক সূত্রনির্দেশ ঘটে চলে জবানির অন্দরে-বাহিরে। আজকের ভারত তথা পশ্চিমবঙ্গের ভোটাভুটির রাজনীতিকালে এই নাটক একটা ফুলকি থেকে আগুন ধরানো agit-prop হিসেবে নিজেকে পেশ করে তাত্ত্বিক মননের উপস্থিতির পাশাপাশিই। এই নাটকের উদ্দেশ্য চিন্তার দৈন্যকে পেরোনো। পড়ে নেওয়া যাক তবে!
“To Which God Shall We Offer Our Vote?” (Kon Devotare Vote Mora Kari Samarpan?) is a bold, agit-prop Bengali political satire that fuses Vedic philosophy, Sufi syncretism, and sharp contemporary critique.
Set against the backdrop of electoral frenzy and rising majoritarianism, the play opens with the ancient Rigvedic question — “To which god shall we offer our oblation?” — and relentlessly interrogates modern democracy: To which “god” (leader, ideology, or system) do we surrender our vote?
Through a chaotic, interactive performance blending Vedic chants, Odissi dance, folk songs, revolutionary anthems, and raw audience confrontation, the central figure “I” grapples with spectators who defend “Sanatan” traditions while the bold dancer (Nati) asserts women’s agency and challenges patriarchal and caste hierarchies. The narrative explodes into a ritualistic feast involving beef and rum — reclaiming Vedic practices — even as it skewers Hindutva nationalism, voter list manipulations, algorithmic governance, and the deification of political leaders.
Drawing from the Nasadiya Sukta’s cosmic doubt, the Hiranyagarbha hymn, Tagore’s universalism, and Bulleshah’s call to break temples and mosques but never the heart filled with love, the play dismantles blind faith, communal polarization, and electoral farce. It urges the audience to choose critical inquiry (pariprashna) over blind surrender and syncretic humanity over division.
Provocative, multilingual, and deeply theatrical, this piece is both a Vedic question and a urgent political provocation — asking whether democracy itself has become just another god demanding blind oblation.
A powerful meditation on faith, power, and the right to doubt in an age of manufactured certainty.
Gated Arks in Sacrifice Zones: Vantara and the Political Economy of “Conservation”
Vantara, the 3,500-acre private wildlife sanctuary run by the Reliance Foundation in Jamnagar and inaugurated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on 4th March 2025, is promoted as the world’s largest rescue centre. Through a radical ecological-regenerative lens grounded in animal liberation ethics and multispecies justice, this analysis reveals it as a gated corporate biopolitical enclosure that converts ecological refugees—produced by Reliance’s polluting refinery and global extractivism—into spectacles for dynastic branding and moral capital. Integrating controversies over dubious sourcing, transport trauma, CITES due-diligence failures, media suppression, and climatic hypocrisy with a comparison of ex-situ Humboldt penguin facilities (Vantara and Byculla) against proven in-situ efforts in Peru, South Africa, and Argentina, the essay critiques how crony-dynastic capitalism, including the Ambani–Piramal nexus and Campa Cola operations, externalises ecological harm while staging compassion. It calls for abolishing commodified captivity and embracing decolonized, liberatory restoration that restores more-than-human autonomy in living ecosystems rather than managing bare life in fortified corporate arks.
The Bad, the Ugly, and the Defiant: Bhayānaka, Bībhatsa, and Satire in Contemporary India
This article offers a philosophically rigorous and politically charged re-reading of the “negative” rasas — bībhatsa (disgust) and bhayānaka (fear) — from Bharata Muni’s Nāṭyaśāstra. Drawing on Abhinavagupta’s doctrine of sādhāraṇīkaraṇa and Krishna Chandra Bhattacharyya’s elevation of bībhatsa as mahā-rasa, it argues that these affects, when properly aestheticised, become vehicles of contemplative bliss (ānanda) and ethical purification (śuddhi). In their non-aestheticised, lived forms under late-capitalist authoritarian regimes, however, they degenerate into pathological modalities: sovereign “Will to Hide” (jugupsā as opacity) and pervasive climates of dread (bhaya as governance). Through a synthesis of dramaturgy, philosophy, and political theory, the paper diagnoses the contemporary global and Indian conjuncture — marked by neo-imperial violence, ecological collapse, inequality, and democratic erosion (especially post-2014 India) — as a theatre in which these rasas circulate without universalisation, producing a deadlock of terror and revulsion. In response, it proposes kautuka–hāsya–vyaṅga (wonder, laughter, and satire) as śilpita pratirodha (art of resistance), tracing a hauntological lineage from Husserl, Benjamin, Camus, and Tagore to Charlie Chaplin and contemporary Indian political comedians and cartoonists, thereby reclaiming rasa as both a diagnostic tool and a horizon of emancipatory resistance against neo-fascist tyranny.
Bankruptcy as Profitable “Bijness”: India’s Grand IBC Heist!
India’s insolvency regime, culminating in the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code (IBC, 2016), represents not a rupture but a refinement of a long-standing political economy that protects and reproduces elite accumulation. While the pre-2014 framework (BIFR/SICA/DRT/SARFAESI) enabled overt promoter impunity through delay and fragmentation, the post-2016 IBC has professionalised and sanitised this asymmetry into a time-bound, creditor-driven architecture that systematically socialises losses and privatises gains. Empirical trends—~8,800+ CIRP admissions, ~31–33% recovery rates, ~67% average haircuts, ₹4+ lakh crore realised against far larger claims, and a surge in wilful defaulters to ₹3.83 lakh crore by 2025—reveal a system where public-sector banks, workers, SMEs, and retail investors absorb the bulk of distress while politically connected acquirers consolidate assets at deep discounts, often through phoenixing and procedural arbitrage. Landmark cases like Dewan Housing Finance Corporation Ltd illustrate how legal doctrines (e.g., Section 32A clean slate vs. Section 66 fraud recovery) enable the transfer of both assets and upside from fraud to new owners under the doctrine of CoC “commercial wisdom.” Far from disciplining capital, the IBC normalises strategic default as a rational, even aspirational pathway within India’s crony-capitalist order—an evolution from chaotic promoter protection to a streamlined mechanism of wealth transfer, embedded within a broader regime of opaque political funding, selective enforcement, and taxpayer-backed recapitalisation.
The Crocodile’s Jaw: Piramal’s Architecture of Vocabulary Theft and Semantic Re-Stipulation
This article interrogates the neoliberal appropriation of language as a commodity under conditions of electronic capitalism and philanthro-capitalism in contemporary India. Drawing on Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism, Foucault’s analytics of discourse-power, and Debaprasad Bandyopadhyay’s concept of linguistic cyber-colonization, it argues that radical and emancipatory lexemes — such as “university,” “changemaker”, “sewa bhaav” (selfless service), “sustainability,” “regeneration,” and “biophilic living” — are systematically subjected to vocabular theft. Stripped of their historical, ethical, and subversive genealogies, these terms are re-stipulated within corporate and state discursive regimes to serve capital accumulation, ideological normalization, and regulatory impunity. By examining the Piramal Group as a paradigmatic case, the article traces the mechanisms of semantic re-stipulation, epistemic laundering, and hermeneutic enclosure. It reveals a shared Wor(l)d order in which meaning is engineered to obscure exploitation while performing virtue. In an era of discursive capture, the article concludes that genuine resistance requires not mere reclamation but radical de-subsumption of stolen vocabularies — reopening language as a contested site for emancipatory praxis against neoliberal semantic tyranny.
Once in a Blue Moon Academia 