BP is an unusual academic by Indian standards. He is one of the few academics who has dared to step outside disciplinary boundaries and comforts, and has made a serious attempt to engage with the public, on issues that so far nobody has discussed in this way either in academia or in public discourse - at least not for a very long time. In other words, BP is a public intellectual who has already made a huge impression with his previous work Body on the Barricades: Life, Art and Resistance in India by Leftword Books released only three years ago. And before that his first book, based on his doctoral research, was an excellent academic contribution to the study of folk culture from oppressed communities in India, titled Cultural Labour: Conceptualising the Folk Performance in India published by Oxford University Press in 2019.

As you can see from his earlier publications, BP has a track record of focusing on the political aspects of culture in India. This is super useful and important scholarship because cultural work is firstly not seen as work, and secondly cultural work (especially folk) has been relegated to Tradition - which in turn functions like a sieve retaining only Brahminical forms and discarding/degrading folk forms, especially those produced by oppressed castes. By establishing that cultural practices are always already practices of labour and political practices (including resistance), he has done a world of good for the necessary politicisation of culture in India.

With his latest book, he has inverted his gaze and focused on the cultural aspects of politics in India, specifically the politics of BJP and RSS vis-a-vis and beyond the Indian state which has been under BJP control since 2014. This work is equally important because inversely, politics has largely been framed as a domain of rational interests and culture rarely gets discussed as politics. It is seen instrumentally, as a filler, i.e. to fill the space between political discourse that takes a moral hierarchy and precedence over culture.

BP’s argument in Spectacle State is that politics in India seems to have spilled well beyond the rational level of governmentality (the control of institutions, the control over procedural democracy etc.) and seeped into the domain of everyday life - specifically daily life’s cultural and aesthetic aspects. Now the point that the state governs subjects beyond its own governmental apparatus is not new. Take for example Althusser’s 1977 famous essay Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses or ISA for short. In this essay, Althusser argues that the state uses repressive apparatuses for coercion (police, army etc.) but control in capitalist society is also achieved through hegemony of ideological state apparatuses: “Indeed we have listed a relatively large number of Ideological State Apparatuses in contemporary capitalist social formations: the educational apparatus, the religious apparatus, the family apparatus, the political apparatus, the trade-union apparatus, the communications apparatus, the ‘cultural’ apparatus, etc.” The ISA became famous for its innovative use of Marx and Gramsci with Lacan but because of its fame, it has also been severely critiqued in subsequent years. Whether we agree or disagree with Althusser’s arguments, the point I want to make here is that for Althusser, it is clear that cultural apparatus is part of the state’s ideological apparatus through which it governs and obtains consent, a social reproduction of the status quo.

What is BP doing different in Spectacle State? Rather than framing ‘cultural apparatus’ as part of state’s ‘ideological apparatus’, BP frames ‘spectacle’ which is a part of culture but a really specific part of it (which is important), and rather than frame it within a capitalist mode of production, BP frames the emergence of spectacle within fascism. Both these changes are significant. Even though the kinds of spectacles that BP focuses on in the book (Bulldozer, Hindutva-Pop, Kumbh Mela, Angry Hanuman stickers etc.) can be called as culture, the choice of using ‘spectacle’ forces us to become attentive to something more than merely belonging to the domain of culture. It is something large, something that can create and channel energy which people feel fascinated by and attracted to (was really reminded of Elias Canetti’s perceptive work on crowds here) - even those groups whose interests are being crushed by those orchestrating the spectacles. Rather than the labour that goes behind cultural production (c.f. Cultural Labour) BP here is more interested in the feelings and emotions that circulate amongst people when spectacle is involved in politics (BP here makes excellent use of Sara Ahmed’s 2004 work on cultural politics of emotion).

In the initial part of the book, before focusing on the various spectacles, BP has a really fascinating discussion about the spectacle from two ends - one as orchestrated by the state (as part of the larger bouquet of political, economic and cultural practices of fascism), and the other as experienced by the participants in the spectacle. The latter is obviously more speculative since he is speaking about how others experience affect - always a difficult thing to write about precisely because affect is so powerful operating outside the domains of discourse and language. Affect hits you straight in the gut before language learns how to interpret it. Or as Massumi once put it, affect is pre-social not a-social. While all this is undoubtedly an advance for a social science that was by the mid-90s, already exhausted by the so-called discursive turn, it is still a neutral and descriptive way of writing about affect, and any discussion of power is absent here. Massumi is more concerned about affect as a zone of liminality - of something becoming, of mediating between structure and event.

On more than one occasion, state orchestrated spectacle (that also involves non-state actors and institutions) is framed as structures of feeling in this book. This of course is a wonderful phrase coined by Raymond Williams, one of the founding fathers of British Culture Studies (although his successor Stuart Hall is better known today). One could argue that Williams was forced to come up with this phrase in trying to reconcile his disciplinary training in English Literature with his lived experiences of coming from the Welsh working class, fighting in the second world war, and as an adult educator, all of which made him a Marxist in spirit and ideology. If you want to know more about Williams and his work, I wrote a bit about him in a piece about Cultural Marxism

Anyway, coming back to structures of feeling, for Williams, these were living experiences of everyday people that somehow cannot be captured by the official and dominant ideology or discourse. These are ‘in solution’ (meaning fluid and mobile) rather than fixed distinct entities, and often anticipate what is to come before it appears formally as an Ideology or Discourse several years later. When BP uses structures of feeling for state spectacles, my immediate reaction was whether this was a misuse of Williams. But the more I read and the more I thought about it, I think BP has provided a much needed update for the concept.

BP writes powerfully about how spectacles are experienced by the oppressed castes, at the bodily level before ideological interpretation creeps in. For example, large rallies and marches provide the sense of inclusion and flattening of our hierarchical social space for the time that one is in the march. A temporal suspension of harsh reality. Or BP’s own childhood fascination for Hitler or rather the ways in which Hitler was evoked in small town Bihar. Hitler was evoked as a masculine symbol of strength and bravery at all costs regardless of the content of what he was fighting for. The seductive appeal of a hyper masculine figure preceded the ideological content of Hitler. What do we do with such experiences? Such things are rarely acknowledged or given any importance in discussions about the presence of Dalits and Adivasis in Hindutva politics. Usually the complexity of the matter is sacrificed at one of two altars - either the Dalit and Adivasi communities are ‘foot soldiers’ of Hindutva where they apparently act without agency or intelligence. They are Althusser’s already interpellated subjects, haplessly caught up in the ideological apparatuses of the state. Alternatively they are supposedly practicing pragmatic politics in redistributing the spoils of power for their own communities without getting ideologically appropriated by the Hindutva project. We are all familiar with such debates that have played out countlessly over the last few decades, especially in post-election analyses, but sometimes also in the aftermath of communal violence or riots.

BP complicates this rather simplistic politics of calculative rationality by locating the encounter with the spectacle as the mise-en-scene. The ‘stickiness’ of the angry Hanuman sticker or to find one’s hearbeat resonating with the loud bass of H-pop is not merely to say one is already seduced but also thinking about how seduction can occur in that space before one can decide about whether to be seduced or not. This is the official dominant discourse that is doing the seducing but it is not appearing as the dominant, it is appearing as something more, or something else entirely - something that is fascinating us, doubly fascinating because we didn’t know that we would be fascinated by it in the first place. Also doubly fascinating because the fascination is for, at some level, fascination itself. It would be extinguished if the fascination would be realised. To me, all of this definitely belongs to structures of feeling but in invoking them this way, he has transformed how we think of the concept.

BP while acknowledging the seductive power of these spectacles and I think insightfully capturing their essence, or rather aura or fascination, is himself decidedly not seduced by them. He is in fact worried about India’s original contribution to fascism - divinity through ritual. We are a subcontinent still stubbornly wedded to rituals from another time, and the rituals of modernity often come a poor second. We don’t bat an eyelid at a minister breaking a coconut to inaugurate a scientific enterprise. Everyone knows it, feels it in their bones but strangely, this has never been really given serious attention in the scholarly literature about Indian politics. In fact, modern political rituals often wed themselves to older rituals in a desperate attempt to borrow from the latter’s legitimacy (and dare I say sacrality?). The anthropologist Marshall Sahlins has this wonderful quote from 1991:

For BP, the ritual has this dangerous power to transpose registers in unhealthy ways, a regression from all the work that Dr. Ambedkar has done to promote education, constitutional values drawn from the French Revolution and Buddhism. ‘Ancient memory’ is precisely what needs to be avoided. These fears are absolutely valid and as far as the subcontinent is concerned, the memory of the last 2000-3000 years is definitely something that needs to be overcome rather than returned to through ritual and event. However, the question does arise, what about memory more ancient than that - about Harappa? About older civilizations that emerged from our out-of-Africa ancestors who lived here for nearly 50,000 years before Harappa came to the scene. Have those memories been completely lost and irretrievable today, or do some of our rituals perhaps subconsciously carry a trace of those times? Even if we set aside the questions of temporality aside, we come to the even more difficult question of divinity itself. Is divinity a quality that belongs or has been monopolised by fascists or can it be harnessed by others towards more emancipatory ends? Or to ask a related question, is there no place for politics in divinity or vice versa? Sacralization has somehow been theoretically always separated from the domain of politics although historical evidence at least from this part of the world seems to indicate that the two are rarely if ever apart for very long.

Just to clarify I’m not saying that these questions should have been addressed in Spectacle State or that he has addressed them in some way, whether rightly or wrongly. Whatever the case may be (only readers can decide), I first want to acknowledge that this book has created space for such questions to be asked at all. This space has not been easy to create in academic discussions or in public discourse, but if this book is to have a wide readership (and I fervently hope it does), then it will pave the way for an entirely new set of questions to be asked, new ‘ways of seeing’ our state and our society.

So far this review has been about this book’s theoretical contributions that should be relevant and urgent to a wide range of disciplines in both humanities and social sciences. However this review would be incomplete without the real pleasure of discussing the spectacles themselves that are covered in the book. Whether it is a sticker, or a sword, or music or a festival or a bulldozer - these objects and events give a vivid sense of how the spectacle state works in contemporary India. My next post, the part two of this review will focus on the spectacles and how BP has analysed them in his unique, incisive and often deeply personal style.

The physical crowd and its online double feed each other continuously, each reinforcing each other’s ‘real-ness’ and ‘here-ness’, both contributing to experience of being part of history being made. This kind of affective overload produces a sense that the old order hasn’t given way yet but that everyone present can feel it might give way any time. Witnessing all this itself assumes a sort of historical significance. While we are being seduced by the liveness of the revolutionary moment, I would like to ask: what if it actually succeeds? Let us for a moment assume that the movement succeeds beyond its wildest dreams. The education minister has just resigned as I am writing this. Let us take it one step further and assume that the whole government itself gives way to a new regime? What would fixing the ‘rotten education system’ actually look like beyond resignations and accountability - accountable to what exactly?

Most stories of this protest start with abstraction (in the Hegelian sense), i.e. what appears in front of us, robbed of any context that produced the appearance. This abstract version goes something like this: in May 2026, more than two million students sat the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) across over 5,000 centres nationwide; the exam was scrapped after it emerged that questions had been leaked, and in the weeks surrounding that scandal at least twenty students died by suicide. A youth movement calling itself the Cockroach Janta Party, its name lifted from a quote by Chief Justice of India comparing unemployed youth to cockroaches, began around the same time, as online satire before hardening into six weeks of sit-ins and hunger strikes in central Delhi. The famous educator Sonam Wangchuk joined and went on hunger strike, increasing the visibility. On July 20, police used tear gas and batons against a student march toward Parliament, injuring more than a hundred people. Today, the protests have spread to dozens of cities. Prime Minister Modi has broken weeks of silence to promise accountability for the leaks, the minister has even resigned now, the first in 12 years of this NDA government! But it has not slowed down the protest. A matter of too little too late it seems.

Now be that as it may, let us go from the abstract to the concrete situation. How did the conditions form for such a protest to emerge? or another way to ask the question: why should a mere paper leak or several paper leaks become such a big deal for youth all across India? Paper leak is a story about corruption, say a principal who let a stolen question paper into a control room, a gang of solvers hired to crack an exam for a fee, and so on. Complicity in the corruption may even involve politicians at top levels. In this version, all it takes is to fix the security, prosecute the guilty, hold a clean re-exam, and voila, the rotten system is fixed. But are we so sure that if this protest succeeds beyond its wildest dreams and corruption is fixed and exams are held cleanly, will all be happy for ever after?

Take a look at Tunisia’s 2010–11 uprising which began like this one in the register of blocked youth aspiration rather than ideology. Mohamed Bouazizi’s self-immolation was a response to unemployment and bureaucratic humiliation. The revolution succeeded and Tunisia held genuine multiparty elections under a new 2014 constitution, becoming the one country the world called the Arab Spring’s real democratic success. But the economic structures behind Bouazizi’s despair was never resolved, and a decade later those problems have come back to haunt the country. Public trust in government, which stood at 62 percent immediately after the revolution, had collapsed to 20 percent by the time Kais Saied was elected president in 2019. Saied then used emergency powers invoked in 2021 to dismiss parliament and the courts; by January 2026 that state of emergency had been renewed for ten consecutive years, and independent monitors now rank Tunisia among the fastest-declining democracies in the world. A revolution that changed the regime without changing the material conditions is a recipe for disaster. At least this is how I understand Walter Benjamin’s lament, ‘behind every fascism, there is a failed revolution’.

It becomes terribly important then to peel back the layers beyond the abstract story of this protest and ensure that this is not yet another failed revolution. Let us start with foundational literacy. The 2024 Annual Status of Education Report, a nationwide survey of nearly 650,000 rural children conducted by the Pratham-affiliated ASER Centre, found that only 23.4 percent of Class 3 children in government schools could read a Class 2-level text, which is itself the highest figure recorded since ASER began in 2005, and still meaning that more than three-quarters of eight- and nine-year-olds in government schools could not read at grade level. Class 5 reading skills were somewhat better, with 44.8 to 48.8 percent of students able to read a Class 2-level text, but that number describes a ten-year-old reading at a seven-year-old’s level as the good outcome. Arithmetic told a similar story: only 45.8 percent of Class 8 students could perform basic subtraction-level operations in 2024, barely moved from 44.1 percent in 2018.

This foundational shortfall compounds into attrition at every subsequent stage. The government’s own UDISE+ 2024–25 data put secondary-level retention (the share of children who actually stay in school through the secondary stage) at just 47.2 percent nationally, improving only to 51.9 percent in the 2025–26 cycle, with a secondary dropout rate still running at 7 to 8 percent per year even after several years of improvement. By the time this cohort reaches the age at which higher education becomes possible, the Gross Enrolment Ratio for the 18–23 age group stood at just 28.4 percent as of 2021–22, up from 23.7 percent in 2014–15 but still meaning fewer than three in ten young Indians of college age are enrolled in higher education of any kind.

This means that of every hundred children who enter a government primary school, a large majority will struggle with basic reading by Class 3; roughly half will not make it through secondary school; and fewer than three in ten of the age cohort will ever reach a college classroom, let alone sit for NEET or the civil services exam. The population competing in India’s most visible meritocratic contests is heavily filtered by primary and secondary education system whose foundational failures are denying access to millions. This is where caste become a ‘structuring structure’, to borrow Bourdieu’s rather awkward yet apt phrase. It is mostly SC and ST families who cannot afford to send their children to private schools and it is their children who fall out of the primary and secondary education system.

Even for the remaining few who do reach a competitive exam, the ratio of applicants to available seats or posts is now so extreme across nearly every sector of secure Indian employment that a perfectly administered, leak-free exam would still reject the overwhelming majority of qualified candidates. Let us take the case of medicine since this is the one field that is at the centre of the current protests. In the 2025 counselling cycle, 12,36,531 candidates qualified NEET-UG for roughly 1,15,900 MBBS seats nationally, meaning only about one in ten qualified candidates secures a seat. Competition for the cheaper and more prized government seats runs closer to forty applicants per seat in many categories. It is a similar situation in other domains as well. For India’s most prestigious administrative posts, the 2024 Civil Services Examination saw 9,92,599 candidates apply and 5,83,213 actually appear for the preliminary exam, against roughly 1,056 vacancies, which means a ratio above 500 to 1 against those who appeared, and closer to 1,000 to 1 against all who applied. Let us take another example: India’s most populous state, Uttar Pradesh’s 2023–24 police constable recruitment drew around 48 lakh (4.8 million) registered candidates for 60,244 vacancies, roughly 80 applicants per post. India’s railways show the most extreme ratios of all: the Railway Recruitment Board’s Group D cycle, for entry-level track-maintenance and pointsman posts requiring only a Class 10 pass, drew around 1.08 crore candidates, nearly eleven million people for 32,438 vacancies, a ratio above 330 to 1. The Staff Selection Commission’s Combined Graduate Level exam, feeding central government clerical posts, drew 34,83,411 registered candidates against 18,236 vacancies in 2024, near 100 to 1.

The consistency across these numbers indicates the scarcity is a property of the mismatch between the number of Indians seeking secure, salaried, pensioned work and the number of such positions the state and formal economy actually create in a given year. No amount of cleanly run exams will solve this fundamental gap between the hunger for education and jobs versus the available supply. Sociologist Satish Deshpande’s 2006 framework, laid out in an essay “Exclusive Inequalities,” argues that merit as certified by a competitive examination requires three distinct prior resources: economic capital (prior education, training, freedom from wage labour during preparation), cultural capital, and social capital which is of course distributed unevenly by caste and class long before any exam begins. An exam scored identically for every candidate on test day is nothing but the terminal output of years of differential access to those resources, and it looks neutral only because the differential accumulation happened earlier and off-screen. Economist Sukhdeo Thorat, who chaired the University Grants Commission and later a committee investigating caste discrimination at AIIMS Delhi, has put the same point more bluntly: the argument of merit, he has said, is often used as an alibi for continuing caste based exclusion.

Tamil Nadu’s own investigation into NEET supplies the empirical backbone for this claim. The state’s Justice A.K. Rajan Committee, convened in 2021, found that NEET-linked coaching had produced a sharp decline in medical-college enrolment among students from rural, Tamil-medium, and lower-income backgrounds; it documented roughly 400 coaching centres that had sprung up in the state since 2017, building an industry the committee valued at ₹5,750 crore, and out of some 87,000 submissions to the Rajan Committee, 65000 were opposing NEET. Only 19,000 supported it.

Structural scarcity of seats and jobs compounds this unequal distribution (caste as structuring structure) prior to exams. An extra year of coaching, English-medium schooling, freedom from part-time work and other advantages matter more steeply as competition tightens. At three applicants per seat, a coaching advantage matters only marginally. At forty applicants per seat, or eighty, or three hundred, even a small edge becomes decisive, because so many otherwise-similar candidates are being sorted by fractions of a percentile.

Even as far back as 1966, the Kothari Commission recommended a Common School System for India, a public school of genuinely comparable quality in every neighbourhood, eliminating the private-versus-government stratification that later fed directly into the coaching economy. It was never implemented because the people in charge of implementing were already benefiting from an unequal education system.

Now let us assume that even if we rebuild the school system from scratch, produce a generation of equitably educated graduates, we would still have a massive problem on our hands. Manufacturing’s share of India’s GDP has hovered around 16 percent for years despite a National Manufacturing Policy introduced fifteen years ago. The sector employs only 12.1 percent of the workforce as of the government’s 2025 labour force data, while agriculture still absorbs the largest employment share at 43 percent. The informal economy accounts for roughly 82 percent of India’s workforce, and the trend within it is worsening rather than improving: the share of manufacturing establishments employing any hired labour at all fell from 27.3 to 23 percent in a single quarter between mid-and late 2025, with the share of “working owners”, effectively self-employment dressed as enterprise, rising correspondingly. In short, a highly educated and poorly educated graduate are no different when both are unemployed.

A few decades ago, our neighbour China faced a similar problem to ours. But they took a different direction. China’s township and village enterprises absorbed tens of millions of surplus rural workers into light manufacturing in a single decade. From 1.65 million enterprises in 1984 to 18.88 million by 1988, with employment rising by nearly 57 million over that period to reach 95.45 million workers, continuing to 135 million by 1996. That is the scale of transformation India’s own agriculture-to-non-agriculture shift would need to achieve.

But China depended on state capacities that a democratic government should be wary of acquiring even if it could. Township governments could allocate collectively-owned land to industry without the compensation litigation that stalls Indian projects for years; the hukou household-registration system gave the state fine-grained control over rural-to-urban labour migration; wages were held down by the absence of independent trade unions under one-party rule; and the whole experiment rode a specific, unrepeatable global moment of manufacturing capital searching for the world’s cheapest labour, culminating in China’s WTO accession in 2001. None of these conditions are applicable to India today in the form China had them four decades ago, and automation has since compressed the labour-intensity of precisely the assembly-line work that once absorbed China’s rural surplus.

There’s a version of the state-led jobs argument that doesn’t require authoritarian capacity: have the state itself build and staff productive enterprise, under transparent, consent-based land acquisition, rather than handing land to private industrialists who may or may not deliver the jobs they promise. India ran this model of state-led industrialisation through public sector undertakings, offering permanent, pensioned employment as the core social contract from 1950 until 1991. Growth over the 1970s and 1980s averaged what economists mockingly called the “Hindu rate of growth,” roughly 3 to 3.5 percent annually, barely outpacing population growth, while state enterprises ran chronic, budget-draining losses; the gross fiscal deficit rose from 9 percent of GDP in 1980–81 to 12.7 percent by 1990–91, and internal government debt climbed from 35 to 53 percent of GDP in just six years. The 1990 Gulf War, which spiked oil prices and simultaneously cut remittances from Gulf-based Indian workers, widened the current account deficit at the exact moment the state had no fiscal slack left. Forex reserves fell to a few weeks of import cover, and the government had to pledge 67 tonnes of gold to secure emergency IMF loans. That crisis collapsed the pension-guaranteeing PSU model and any revival of it today would be attempted with a fiscal deficit already near 5.9 percent centrally (9 percent combined with states), under a live 2026 oil shock of structurally similar type, driven by the ongoing US-Israel-Iran conflict that has pushed Brent crude above $100 a barrel.

Sardar Sarovar Dam was a public infrastructure project with no private profit motive at stake but still produced one of independent India’s longest-running resistance movements, because displaced communities were not adequately rehabilitated, the same failure that drove resistance to unambiguously private projects. Singur, Nandigram, the POSCO project and many other examples serve as cautionary reminders of what could happen when the State starts grabbing land. What these cases share is resistance to unenforceable promises: land taken, jobs undelivered, no penalty attached either to the private company or, in Narmada’s case, to the state itself. Public ownership needs to be embedded in strong accountability mechanisms for example binding employment quotas, enforceable timelines, equity stakes for affected communities etc.

Some people would call this a form of socialism, but regardless of whatever you want to call it, it would be remarkably difficult to pull off even if there is popular and political will behind such policies. India is, right now, facing the music from the US for a far narrower assertion of economic autonomy, namely its continued purchase of discounted Russian crude oil. In August 2025 the US imposed a cumulative 50 percent tariff on Indian goods specifically over the Russian oil purchases; in October it sanctioned Rosneft and Lukoil, the producers supplying roughly 60 percent of India’s Russian imports; by November, a bipartisan US Senate bill threatened tariffs as high as 500 percent on countries continuing the trade. India did not fully capitulate but it did not hold the line either. By November 2025, five of India’s largest refiners had stopped placing new orders for Russian crude, and Modi reportedly assured Trump the purchases would wind down, even as Indian negotiators worked to soften the terms. If India of the future actually decides to provide mass employment backed directly by state industry, then we will surely suffer the consequences from the West. We would not get access to credit from international institutions, tariffs may be placed on us for ‘anti-market’ behaviour and so on. Sample the track record of others who have tried to take their countries in this direction. Cuba after 1959, Iran after 1979, Venezuela’s oil nationalisation under Chávez - all these show a consistent pattern of prolonged currency instability, chronic shortages, and significant skilled-labour emigration following comprehensive breaks with the dominant capital order. Against that, China’s retention of party control over land and credit while still courting foreign manufacturing capital after 1978, or Vietnam’s Đổi Mới reforms from 1986 suggest partial reclamation of state direction without full autarky is possible, though both ran under one-party systems with a command over labour and capital that would be difficult if not impossible to achieve in India.

Whatever decisions the future leaders of this country are to take, my humble submission is that this goes far far deeper than a minister’s resignation or doing an exam cleanly. It goes back to caste as a structuring structure that creates the rot right at the root. It has to be rooted out and only a public education system rebuilt from scratch without any possibility for profit or differentiation, can provide a more hopeful and lasting future. The Education Minister’s resignation is a significant first step, now onwards!

Two recent reads converged by a coincidence, making the same broad point from two different contexts - activism as discourse, but structurally divorced from action on the ground. Perry Anderson in his enquiry into Western Marxism (first published in 1976, making this the 50th year anniversary) and the second piece was a short read by Dr. Rahul Sonpimple published in the Ambedkarian Chronicle. In the former, Anderson argues that Western Marxism (he has scholars like Marcuse, Adorno, Sartre etc. in mind) divorced itself from mass politics and social movements, and became firmly embedded in discourse and theory, from the ivory towers of the university. Earlier Marxists were all members of Communist parties, were public intellectuals and involved in praxis (Gramsci or Lukacs for example). In the latter piece, Sonpimple makes a similar point but about contemporary liberals in India who discursively perform resistance as ‘weapons of the weak’ but are divorced from any real resistance from the ground. In both arguments, the common point is about the adoption of discourse as the primary and only mode of resistance to authoritarianism.

It would appear that these criticisms (of other groups and contexts) would naturally extend to the CJP too. After all, instead of cynicism, we have satire, but the battle here is almost entirely discursive. There is talk of a mass rally in Delhi on the 6th of June, but it remains to be seen to what extent this online movement translates to offline action on the 6th and in the coming days. Let me make it clear, in general, I agree to a large extent with the basic thesis of both Anderson and Sonpimple. However, the timing of the CJP and the current context makes it interesting.

Let us consider the basic character of BJP rule from 2014 onwards. Even before coming to power, the campaign was centred on the man himself rather than the party or ideology. Whatever else the BJP was selling to the voters, it was supposed to be embodied in the leader. First two terms the government won massive victories and others merely joined the bandwagon of opportunism or were coerced through blackmail etc. The 2024 election was a setback and indicated that on-ground support was in decline along with decay of charismatic populism. Even today, the prime minister is popular (compared to other leaders in other countries) but there is no doubt about the direction- it is in decline. From 2014 to 2024, the hallmarks became clear, it was all about centralization, hare brained or shortcut ideas to long term structural problems (demonetization and GST for example), renaming old schemes and passing them off as new reforms, cutting down on welfare and protections for the most vulnerable, facilitating ever increasing concentration of wealth, pro corporate pro privatization, pro religious majority, pro dominant caste (although lot of noise about OBC empowerment) and so on. But since 2024, there is a perceptible sense of desperation to hold on to power. Earlier it was hegemony combined with effective and strategic use of coercion as and when applied to wherever it was deemed to be required (against Muslims, Adivasis, Dalits, women, Leftists, Congress, farmers, youth etc.). After 2024, the hegemony has vanished and coercion has become institutionalised - SIR and delimitation are policy level attempts to disenfranchise dissenters. Capture of judiciary and constitutional bodies through political appointments imply that power and control is designed to be taken from the top rather than secured through popular support from below.

In such a situation, there are two contradictory movements taking place simultaneously. The incompetence combined with the ill-intentions of the BJP ensure that material conditions on the ground have continuously deteriorated for the majority of this country who come from a Bahujan background, are working class struggling to find jobs or those who are already working are struggling to survive. Real incomes have stagnated or worse regressed as inflation is steadily climbing. Those who have invested in financial capital (mutual funds, stocks, shares etc.) are discovering that flight of foreign capital (FDI and FII) is exposing the fragility and artificiality of this supposedly strong market. On the other hand, the BJP is shutting down all democratic avenues of protest - courts, administration and bureaucracy, police, elections, media, public spaces, public universities and other constitutional institutions (Election Commission, investigative agencies, welfare commissions etc), religion and faith - you name it, they’ve captured it. As the forces of dissent gather steam, there is no escape vent. Pressure builds up but it has nowhere to go - it just keeps building up. The rapid rise of the CJP is an indication that given the right discursive framing, the CJP has become a site of collective investment and release by a large section of the discontented, an avenue for those who feel frustrated by the status quo but could find no viable platform to express it until the CJP came along.

The CJP is more cheeky than political in the conventional sense. Their manifesto clearly shows a naivety about political reform that is totally divorced from the urgent and deep-rooted priorities that Dr. Ambedkar called “social reform”. Their framing is receptive to the anger and perhaps a sense of victimhood that many young people feel in this country - they got a country that they feel is not what they expected or wanted, and the sense that they got a bad deal for no fault of theirs, but also a realisation that nothing can be done about it in the usual ways and methods that have been used for political dissent in India until today. Now under ordinary conditions, this ‘movement’ would have captured the news cycle and faded when the next big thing came along. Maybe this is exactly what will happen with CJP too, a temporary media created sensation in every sense of the word and like other media created objects, the CJP too will fade away leaving little if any trace on the political terrain of this country.

However, the timing of the CJPs emergence could drastically alter their destiny, causing them to deviate from the script that such online movements usually follow. I’m referring to the series of events that have unfolded since Trump started his second presidency. Determined to bring down the fiscal deficit and on-shore manufacturing jobs in the so-called rust belt for his MAGA base, Trump has reversed American trade policies in place since the Nixon shock in the 70s. This has meant increase in import duties for Indian goods entering the US, and it has meant slashing of import duties for American goods entering India. Both ways, Indian manufactures, businesses and workers will suffer. With currency depreciation, all Indians will suffer. Another thing unfolding with the Trump second term is a wave of imperial expansion, especially the war against Iran in the Persian Gulf, and proxy support by EU and US for Ukraine against Russia. The former especially, has caused massive disruptions in energy supply chains and inputs for crucial sectors such as fertilisers.

The combined result of the tariff wars, the war on Iran and the ongoing war against Russia means that India as a peripheral country in the global economy will face further destruction of its economy and open itself to more exploitation than it has done so in the past. It is likely that the agricultural economy along with small and medium businesses in a variety of sectors such as textile and seafood etc. will all suffer a tremendous destruction of demand. Unemployment levels will increase, general inflation due to hikes in fuel prices will mean that in effect, people’s incomes will be worth less. And to cap it all, inadequate supply of fertilisers just when the Kharif season is beginning, may well lead to massive crop failure and food shortages. In short, the situation may well be a disastrous one before 2026 ends. The fertiliser shortages and resulting inflation+crop failure in Sri Lanka played a major role in the overthrow of the government. In comparison, there is that plus many other things going wrong in India. Don’t be surprised if the conditions are ripe for mass unrest and revolution by the end of this year. I don’t know who will use these conditions but if the CJP has the capacity for change, they certainly do or shortly will have a conducive environment in a few months. It is unlikely given the lack of political infrastructure, cadres, on-ground institutions at the local level etc. These things take time and planning to build, it cannot be done overnight no matter how many million followers one has on Instagram etc. Paradoxically however, as the formal political opposition crumbles under manipulations and coercion (TMC) or as the public decides it is done with status quo and wants a new kind of choice (TVK), it may just be the opening for something new to emerge. Will the new emergence be the cockroach, or will it pave the way for the Congress or other existing parties to make a comeback under a new vision, new face or will it be someone else, only time will tell.

Disclaimer 2: When I say higher education, I mostly mean social sciences and humanities rather than hard sciences. I think a separate article would be needed on AI and hard sciences!

I missed the AI induced crisis in higher education by a whisker, when I finished my PhD at the LSE in 2020, just as the world was entering lockdown. Today, I feel like those older people who used to chide us gently about how much people like me use the internet to do our literature review and organise our research. In their time, they had to actually read physical books in a painstakingly slow process, spending hours in the library, often taking notes by hand. Assessment was through exams written by hand in a room with an invigilator present. I am often tempted to reminisce similarly with students doing their masters or PhDs today, how long we had to labour over long texts without an option to summarise a journal article in seconds, nor with any option to generate texts that look suspiciously like a student essay - or better even! History repeating itself as farce I suppose. In 2015, when I finished my Masters (also at LSE), I wrote a few exams by hand with an invigilator present in the room but I suspect my cohort was one of the last to do so. In the coming years, written exams gave way to typed answers which the student was expected to upload on the Moodle website.

After ChatGPT came out in late 2022, written exams are now coming back with a moral gusto few would have foreseen even a decade ago. I don’t need to list out examples of the AI-induced crisis, for much ink has already been spilt on this topic with alarming regularity and I’m sure that if you are reading this, then you have already come across several such articles lamenting the decline in higher education because of AI. It’s the usual litany of complaints that can be classified into some broad categories - decline of comprehension, shorter attention spans, inability to synthesise and analyse long/complex texts and most serious of all - a major crisis in assessment. The former set of complaints can be seen as a long-term trend attributed to digitalisation of information flows, pervasive mobile phone culture , social media and so on but these complaints have reached a crescendo after AI systems became easily accessible and widely available for everyday use. The latter complaint about assessment is more AI specific since students can easily use AI to generate their essays and no one the wiser. Without doing any actual analytical labour, a student could rock up a couple of days before the deadline and submit a reasonable essay with AI that could even get them a distinction! Now its not my intention to go into the merits of these complaints or concerns but rather focus on the political and philosophical issues that underscore most of these complaints, and subsequently, what kind of solutions could be proposed from this perspective.

Who broke the university?

Let me begin with something that seems fairly innocuous but I would argue it’s actually quite important. Higher education (more than primary education) from the perspective of students and nowadays, also from the perspective of universities, can be divided into two parts - functional education and critical education. Functional education is all about students who come to university to get a degree and enter the job market, or they want to pick up specific skills (say research methods) that can be directly applied to earn them their livelihood. Critical education on the other hand is all about getting students to grapple with concepts and ideas which in turn equips them to handle anything the world throws at them in a creative and ethical way. In a broad sense, universities began their existence with trying to impart critical education but since several decades now (in the UK since the late 90s) shifted their focus steadily to providing functional education. If you want to blame the crisis in higher education, then instead of blaming AI, blame this shift instead. Why? Because before the mid-1990s, higher education in the UK was essentially free of cost. Since there was no tuition fees anyway, most people enrolled in higher studies because they wanted to learn something for themselves, not because it would get them a better job or improve their status in the job market etc. For the rest, enrolment in universities would mean that they would place themselves out of the economy without a salary.

New Labour won the election in May 1997, and the Teaching and Higher Education Act was passed in 1998, introducing fees of £1,000/year. The really transformative moment came when the 2004 Higher Education Act (still under Blair) raised the cap to £3,000, and then the coalition government tripled it to £9,000 in 2012 under the Browne Review. Average student debt in England now exceeds £40,000 upon graduation. These changes were taking place in conjunction with several other developments (in India the shorthand for these ‘other developments’ is LPG - Liberalisation, Privatisation, Globalisation) and in the 21st century, it soon became clear that earning well in the job market meant specialised white collar jobs that require Masters Degrees. Gradually, more and more people realised that without a Masters, you won’t get a job. So they had to enrol in university not because they wanted to learn something but because they needed that degree to qualify for this new kind of job market. I don’t want to imply that the higher education scene in the UK was some kind of ideal scenario. British universities before the 1990s were also deeply class-stratified, exclusionary, and in many ways narrowly vocational in their own right ("redbrick" universities were founded explicitly for industrial and professional training in the 19th century). Free tuition before 1997 coexisted with severe exclusion by class, race, and gender. UK university participation rates went from around 5-6% in the early 1960s (Robbins Report era) to about 15% in the early 1990s to roughly 50% today.

Today, even Masters degree is not very competitive, you need a PhD plus a bunch of extra-curricular skills and what not. There are two aspects to this shift: one is that LPG meant a necessary loosening of the job market in order to drive down wages and reduce the bargaining power of labour, and secondly, LPG also meant a shift from manufacturing to services across the world (except China and few other countries). It became ‘efficient’ to outsource the material aspects of the economy to those parts of the world where wages were low, and the ‘developed’ world focused on services instead. With the latter, surplus value was higher and flowed directly to the elite without necessarily cultivating a proletariat at home. Jobs like law, finance, trade, computer engineering, electronics etc took over the economy. It is no coincidence today that most governments, including the UK, focus on rewarding STEM rather than social sciences and humanities.

The university against itself

For about three decades, the university system has been in slow but steady decline brought about by these underlying dynamics. In this context of institutional rot, universities started making things worse for themselves. Let me give a few examples to illustrate. In any university in the UK, take a look at the structure of the academic labour market. Most of the teaching is done by PhDs and Fellows while permanent faculty get time to do research, write books and travel. UCU (University and College Union) has reported that a large proportion of teaching in UK universities is delivered on insecure contracts. Around 67-70% of academic staff are cited to be on some form of precarious employment. Needless to say, non-teaching staff are mostly on zero hour contracts, and therefore zero dignity of labour. Bureaucrats with background in corporate management started taking control over management of universities rather than faculty and non-teaching staff who have staked their careers and lives in the universities. UK vice-chancellor salaries have climbed significantly, with many earning over £300,000-£500,000 annually. International students who are charged double the tuition fee compared to domestic students became the main cash cows for universities but that went against increasing anti-immigrant sentiment and created anxieties about job losses for Britishers at the expense of outsiders. In such a polarised environment, the political system is disincentivising international students to cut down immigration numbers and universities are losing their cash cows with no alternative in sight. Assessment systems became more focused on grades that in turn became important for employers (students with distinction get jobs and opportunities more easily than those with merit or below). Teacher to student ratios were diluted to expand the classroom strength so that with the same amount of faculty, more students could be taught, leading to more income and more profits. Profits were then invested in the global market making these universities even more powerful. As one speaker put it, elite universities are in fact real estate agencies who also do education on the side. I’m sure my academic colleagues in the UK (both teachers and students) can say much much more about these and many other issues. I won’t go much more into these things, but I hope you get the general idea.

Within this ‘functional education’ context, lively debate and discussion dried up gradually although of course, many honourable exceptions exist even today, thanks mainly to the passion of some faculty and students. What took its place was increasing disciplinary specialisation. Each department tried to build its walls higher and stronger around itself in order to increase its status, privilege, ranking etc. This was exactly the opposite direction of where the world was going in terms of tightly integrated global supply chains, the increasing integration of economics with geopolitics with planetary climate change and so on. At a time when we needed determined eclecticism, universities delivered the opposite - territory building. It is but a natural consequence that students quickly picked up what was needed to at least survive if not flourish in such conditions.

Social science and humanities departments have a fixed but unspoken set of theories, scholars and politics that shape its outlook and outputs. Whether it is to hire faculty or admit PhDs, it is safe to say that both groups need to learn about whom to cite, how to write and not to write, what to critique and what to champion if they are to do well in their exams and essays, if they are to get permanent faculty jobs etc. Admittedly I’m simplifying a lot here but I nonetheless do think that each department (at least in social sciences and humanities) is driven as much or more by unspoken political-aesthetic rules rather than be guided by empirical or theoretical research. For example, most PhDs in social science or humanities departments would not do well if they explicitly used say historical materialism as a method of analysis. On the other hand, their chances would significantly improve if they worked with discursive modes of analysis. Now I’m not advocating for one over the other or saying that one is right and the other is wrong. I’m just pointing out that most departments have this implicit preference one way or the other, and if students fail to pick this up (for no one will actually ever say this part out loud), then they do so at their own risk. As these patterns stabilise over the years, it becomes a subconscious force that drives the scholarly work amongst students. Over time, the output becomes fairly predictable and most papers/essays start looking like thinly disguised variations of more or less the same story, because the questions for essays/exams are designed to elicit expected answers. Just to be clear, I’m NOT saying that critical discourse analysis for example is easier for AI than say historical materialism. I’m just saying any set preferences naturally lead to predictability and inference. In other words, scholarly output in a functional education setting will inevitably resemble probabilistic logic long before AI even enters the scene.

University and Universe

Now that AI functions on the same logic (but different process of course), it is entirely predictable that these systems can perform abductive probability as well as students or in some cases even better. This is because the entire corpus of academic texts - millions of books, journal articles, databases, research information etc, have all been fed into AI systems as training data. Many years ago Aaron Swartz was targeted by the American government because he downloaded academic articles from JSTOR database (exact number of articles downloaded remains unclear but number could be anywhere between 1.7 to 4.8 million articles). Potentially facing 35 years in prison and 1 million US dollars in fines for 13 felony counts, he committed suicide, or we can call it institutional murder of a scholar who wanted to break the gates to knowledge. But today, most AI systems have gone way beyond that. Meta employees downloaded more than 82 TB of pirated content from shadow libraries (like Libgen) and removed copyright information to obscure the origins, all the while trying to defend its action as ‘fair use’. Anthropic settled a similar case by paying 1.5 billion USD. Nvidia collaborated with Anna’s Archive to download more than 500 TB, and trying to get their court case dismissed, citing fair use. Apple, Adobe, Salesforce and many other companies are doing the same. Today, there are more than 70 copyright infringement lawsuits filed against AI firms. While the courts will take their own sweet time deciding on these issues, the users of AI are able to access systems that have been fed these massive databases. Which student can possibly compete against such concentration of knowledge?

If we are to rescue higher education from this crisis, we need to remove tuition fees for all higher education. But that alone will not be enough because we have to address the ‘LPG’ factors that produced the shift from critical to functional education in universities. And while it may not be possible to undo LPG that easily, employers should stop looking at degrees and grades when looking to hire and instead look at the person as a whole when deciding. As a culture, we need to stop obsessing about pedigree and focus more on the human being before us. This requires a fundamental shift in how labour markets function. I would argue that the disruptions caused by AI in the labour market actually present an opportune window for the labour market to rethink some of its fundamental assumptions about what kind of people they should be looking for and how they could go about it. Let us make it clear that universities are not places to get jobs or degrees but spaces to build critical education rather than functional education.

Another thing we need to do is change our model of assessment entirely. Let us not be guided by anxieties about whether students can successfully regurgitate the unspoken political-aesthetic preferences and rules of their universities and departments. Instead, let us assume that teachers and students are equals, and the classroom is a space where both can teach each other and both can learn from each other in an environment of radical equality (I highly recommend Jacques Rancière’s The Ignorant Schoolmaster for more on this). If the answers are all already available in the AI systems, then let us teach ourselves how to ask better questions rather than focusing on answers. After all, we know that any answer is only as good as the question before it. Let us approach the world differently rather than from disciplinary lens. We can look at the world in relational terms, experiential terms, emotional terms and so on. The probabilistic logics driving AI are still not able to grapple with these other kinds of logics - yet. Even though AI systems are getting better all the time on these other logics, there is still time for us to push back and discover aspects of ourselves that cannot be captured by machine learning. Let us discover that we have knowledge of these other systems and logics within us, and universities should be focusing on those parts within us. Let us leave the world of probabilistic inference to AI and use it as and when we need it, we have other things to discuss. The university can prepare us for the universe, but we have to stop the university as it exists today and remake it from scratch if we have any chance of succeeding.

Marx’s views on culture

Let me begin with Marx, since clearly the threatening part of Cultural Marxism is the Marxism part rather than the Cultural part. Over his long career, Marx took pains to argue that culture is determined by material conditions. Already by 1845-46, Marx and Engels were writing in the German Ideology that “life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life”. It was from this general formulation that they were able to argue that “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas.” And more explicitly, in 1859, in the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx wrote: “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.” At work here is an understanding of what has come to be (in)famously known as ‘base and superstructure’. The relations that tie society together in terms of economic activities is the base, while domains such as law, education, media etc. is the superstructure. The former determines the latter.

But the base-superstructure formula, while central to how Marxism has been received and debated, doesn’t capture everything Marx himself had to say about how capitalism gets inside people’s heads. Subjectivity is not culture exactly, but the connections are hard to miss, and I take two concepts in particular from Marx that deserve attention because they became foundational for nearly every later Marxist thinker who took culture seriously.

The first concept is alienation, developed in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, the work of a young Marx still deeply shaped by Hegel and Feuerbach. Marx’s argument was that under capitalism, the worker is estranged not just from the product of their labour, which belongs to someone else, but from the activity of labouring itself, from other human beings, and ultimately from what Marx called species-being: the distinctly human capacity for free, conscious, creative activity. Work under capitalism is not experienced as an expression of the worker’s powers but as their negation, something endured rather than inhabited. What matters for our purposes is that this is already a claim about subjectivity, about what it feels like to live and work under particular economic arrangements. Capitalism not only takes surplus value from workers but also deforms their relationship to their own activity, their creativity, and their sense of themselves as agents. If culture has anything to do with how people experience and make sense of their lives, then alienation is already a cultural problem even though Marx didn’t frame it that way.

The second concept is commodity fetishism, from the famous opening chapter of Capital, Volume 1 (1867), the work of a much older, more rigorously economic Marx. Here the argument operates at a different level. In a society organised around commodity exchange, social relations between people systematically appear as relations between things. Lets say I have some money with me and I buy a commodity with it, say a pen from a shop. I would think of it as simply: My money for the pen. But this conceals that it is my labour is in social relation with those who laboured to make the pen. Money mediated that social relation. But I forget the social relation and instead think of it as money in return for pen. The value of a commodity seems to be an intrinsic property of the object itself rather than a crystallisation of human labour and social relationships. Marx called this fetishism not as a metaphor for delusion but to describe a real structural appearance: the commodity form genuinely does present itself this way in the ordinary experience of buying and selling. It is not that people are stupid or deceived by propaganda. The mystification is generated by the economic structure itself, by the very way production and exchange are organised.

This is a subtler and more far-reaching claim than the ‘base-determines-superstructure’ thesis. It suggests that capitalism produces its own characteristic forms of perception and mis-recognition at the most basic level of everyday experience, not through ideas imposed from above but through the very (ordinary) activity of participating in a market society. The implications for thinking about culture are significant, even though Marx himself didn’t develop them in that direction. If the commodity form shapes how people perceive the social world, then the relationship between economics and consciousness is not simply one of determination but something more intimate, more structural, and harder to escape through sheer force of will or counter-argument. It was precisely this thread that Lukács would pick up and weave into a full-blown theory of reification three decades later.

There are those among us today who still stick to the base-superstructure thesis in its crude form, and I would call this a Marxist view on culture (rather than Cultural Marxism). As to where I stand on this, I think it would be a mistake to say ‘determine’ and better to use words such as likelihood, tendency, pressure etc (I owe this perspective to Raymond Williams, more on him later). While we can see how the rich and powerful do tend to influence our ideas, there are plenty of instances where the rich and powerful are not able to push through their influence. Obviously the Russian revolution itself is a great historical example, when a group of political exiles and radicalised workers blasted through the regressive ideas floating around in Tsarist Russia at the beginning of the 20th century.

Lukács and the Problem of Consciousness

An important figure whose work is by now largely forgotten in the mainstream is Georg Lukács, whose History and Class Consciousness (1923) is arguably the crucial bridge between orthodox Marxism and everything that followed. Lukács took Marx’s analysis of the commodity form and pushed it into the domain of consciousness itself. His central concept was reification, i.e., the process by which social relations between people come to appear as fixed, natural properties of things. Under capitalism, Lukács argued, this isn’t a simple error or a trick played on the working class. It is built into the very structure of experience. The commodity form penetrates perception, thought, and understanding so deeply that the world genuinely appears as a collection of things governed by impersonal laws rather than as a set of social relationships that could be otherwise.

What made this so consequential was that it turned the question of culture and consciousness from a secondary matter into a central one. If capitalism doesn’t just exploit workers but reshapes how everyone, including workers themselves, perceives reality, then any serious challenge to capitalism has to involve a transformation of consciousness, not merely an adjustment of economic arrangements. Lukács still believed that the proletariat occupied a privileged epistemological position, that the experience of being treated as a commodity could, under the right conditions, generate insight into the system as a whole. But his account of how thoroughly reification colonises everyday experience opened the door for far more pessimistic conclusions, conclusions that the Frankfurt School would later walk through.

Lukács’s influence was enormous, though often indirect. Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse all absorbed his framework even as they departed from his political conclusions. But History and Class Consciousness was also politically controversial from the start. It was condemned by the Communist International, and Lukács himself was pressured into a partial self-criticism. The book went out of print for decades. Yet its core argument, that capitalism shapes consciousness at a structural level and that this shaping is itself a political problem, became one of the defining preoccupations of twentieth-century Marxist thought.

Gramsci and Hegemony

By the 1930s it was all going wrong. There was no internationalist communist revolution spreading around the globe. Instead, there was already a world war and to make matters worse, another one on the horizon. Meanwhile, fascism had taken root in Europe and only gaining strength. Unsurprisingly, the direction of the world in the first half of the 20th century gave pause to some Marxists who felt that something was off. Why would millions of people believe in fascism, why would so many working class people believe in things that were against their own interest?

To understand why Gramsci’s answer to this question took the shape it did, it helps to know something about where he came from. Gramsci grew up poor in Sardinia in Italy, physically disabled from childhood, and acutely aware of the cultural distance between the rural, dialect-speaking south and the industrialised north. When he moved to Turin to study at the university, he enrolled in linguistics and literature, not economics or philosophy. This is indicative of how his intellectual formation was rooted in language, in how people actually speak and think and make sense of their world, and that orientation never left him. Even at his most politically strategic, Gramsci thought in terms of language, folklore, popular religion, the texture of everyday belief rather than in the abstract categories that dominated much Marxist theory.

In Turin, Gramsci threw himself into political journalism. He wrote for the socialist paper Avanti! and in 1919 co-founded L’Ordine Nuovo, a weekly that became the intellectual organ of the Turin factory council movement. This was a period of intense working-class militancy in northern Italy, and Gramsci was writing for and with workers, trying to articulate their experience in ways that connected factory struggles to broader questions of culture, education, and political consciousness. The factory councils themselves were experiments in workers’ self-organisation, and Gramsci saw in them not just an economic challenge to capital but a cultural one: workers developing their own capacity to think, organise, and govern. His years as a journalist and organiser gave him a feel for how ideas circulate in practice, through newspapers, theatre, churches, schools, and conversations in the street, that would shape all his later theorising.

Gramsci was one of the earliest Marxists to rescue culture from the ‘superstructure’ and ‘determined’ status and argue that the battle for culture should not be seen as secondary to economics. Instead, Gramsci argued that working people need to unpack what so far seemed ‘common sense’ and instead move towards ‘good sense’. And the media, community-based intellectuals, cultural activities were all important arenas of battle over mobilising the working classes. His answer was that ruling classes don’t maintain power through coercion alone but they also secure consent through cultural and institutional life, through what he called hegemony. So culture entered his thinking as a political problem: how does domination reproduce itself in people’s ordinary understanding of the world, and how might counter-hegemonic movements contest that? It’s a practical, strategic orientation even when it’s theoretically sophisticated.

But the circumstances under which Gramsci developed these ideas are themselves part of the story. In 1926, Mussolini’s fascist government arrested him. The prosecutor at his trial reportedly declared that they had to stop this brain from functioning for twenty years. Gramsci spent the remaining years of his life in prison, his health deteriorating steadily, and he died in 1937 shortly after his release. It was in prison that he produced the work for which he is now remembered: the Prison Notebooks, over thirty notebooks filled with fragmentary, dense, allusive writing on an extraordinary range of subjects, from philosophy and political theory to literature, folklore, linguistics, education, and the history of Italian intellectuals.

The fragmentary character of the notebooks is not incidental since Gramsci was writing under censorship. Prison authorities inspected what he wrote, and he knew it. This forced him into a distinctive idiom: he avoided direct Marxist terminology where possible, referring to Marxism as ‘the philosophy of praxis,’ to Lenin obliquely, and developing his own vocabulary, hegemony, war of position, organic intellectual, historical bloc etc. that allowed him to conduct a sophisticated theoretical argument while appearing, to a censor’s eye, to be engaged in something more innocuously academic. The result is writing that is rich, suggestive, and often genuinely difficult to pin down, which is partly why Gramsci has been claimed by such a wide range of intellectual traditions since. His concepts are portable in ways that more systematically presented theory is not, in part because the prison conditions that produced them required a certain productive ambiguity.

Due to various circumstances Gramsci’s work got translated and reached the English-speaking world nearly three decades later, in the 1960s. But before we get to the 60s we must consider another important group of scholars who wrote about culture from a Marxist position in the 40s and 50s - the so-called Frankfurt School.

Pessimism of the Frankfurt School

The Frankfurt School came to culture through a different crisis, though a related one. The Institute for Social Research was founded in Frankfurt in 1923, attached to the Goethe University, and from the start it occupied an unusual position: an independently funded Marxist research institute inside a German university. Under the directorship of Max Horkheimer from 1930 onwards, it developed a distinctive intellectual programme that came to be known as Critical Theory. Horkheimer’s founding ambition was to bring together philosophy, social science, psychoanalysis, and aesthetics into an integrated analysis of modern capitalist society, one that could explain not just its economic dynamics but its capacity to produce and reproduce consent. The Institute drew together a remarkable group of thinkers: Adorno, Marcuse, Benjamin, Fromm, Lowenthal, Pollock, among others.

What gave this programme its urgency was the catastrophe unfolding around them. These were German Jewish intellectuals, most of whom fled the Nazis in the early 1930s. The Institute itself relocated, first to Geneva, then to New York, where it was affiliated with Columbia University through the late 1930s and 1940s. That experience of exile, of watching the most philosophically sophisticated culture in Europe produce fascism, shaped their work profoundly. The question wasn’t just “why does capitalism persist?” but “what has Enlightenment rationality itself become, and how has the culture of modernity produced its own negation?” Thinkers like Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, and Benjamin were trying to understand not just why revolution hadn’t happened but why something far worse, fascism and specifically the capacity of modern capitalist societies to produce mass consent for barbarism, had taken hold.

Their route to culture ran through a much more philosophical terrain than Gramsci’s. They drew heavily on Hegel, on the early Marx of alienation and commodity fetishism, on Freud and psychoanalysis, and on Weber’s account of rationalisation. Where Gramsci was asking how cultural institutions secure political consent, the Frankfurt School was asking a more totalising question: how the entire structure of modern experience, perception, and desire had been colonised by the logic of commodity production. This is what Adorno and Horkheimer were getting at with the concept of the culture industry in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944). Their argument wasn’t simply that Hollywood and popular music serve ideological functions, though they thought that too. It was that mass cultural production had industrialised consciousness itself, standardising experience and foreclosing the capacity for critical thought at a deep psychological level.

The encounter with American mass culture during their years of exile was formative here. Adorno in particular was struck and appalled by what he found: a culture of standardisation, repetition, and pseudo-individuality on a scale that European capitalism had never achieved. American popular music, Hollywood cinema, the advertising industry, network radio, all of it seemed to confirm and radicalise the thesis that capitalism was not just exploiting people but colonising their inner lives, producing desires and satisfactions that locked them more tightly into the system. The Dialectic of Enlightenment was written in Los Angeles, and it shows a horrified fascination in Adorno and Horkheimer’s writing about the culture industry that comes from encountering the American entertainment machine as outsiders, intellectuals formed in the tradition of Beethoven and Hegel suddenly confronted with the relentless cheerfulness of commercial culture.

This gave their cultural analysis a character very different from Gramsci’s. Where Gramsci saw culture as a terrain of struggle with genuine openings for counter-hegemonic work, Adorno in particular tended toward a much bleaker assessment. The culture industry restructured subjectivity itself so thoroughly that resistance became almost unthinkable from within. The only refuge Adorno could consistently identify was in high modernist art, in Beckett or Schoenberg, works whose formal difficulty and refusal of easy consumption preserved a kind of negative critical space. This gave the Frankfurt School’s cultural criticism an unmistakably elitist dimension, though it was an elitism arriving from the left.

Benjamin is a partial exception here and an important one. His work on mechanical reproduction, on the arcades, on storytelling, was more genuinely interested in the emancipatory possibilities within mass culture and modern technology. But Benjamin died in 1940, fleeing the Nazis at the French-Spanish border, and the dominant Frankfurt School legacy through the 40s and 50s was shaped more by Adorno and Horkheimer’s pessimism.

The postwar years split the group. Adorno and Horkheimer returned to Frankfurt in 1949 and rebuilt the Institute, becoming major figures in West German intellectual life. Marcuse stayed in the United States, and through the 1950s and into the 1960s, developed the Frankfurt School’s analysis in a more politically engaged direction. His One-Dimensional Man (1964) argued that advanced industrial society had developed new and more effective forms of social control, not through overt repression but through the satisfaction of manufactured needs, through a comfortable unfreedom that absorbed opposition before it could articulate itself. Where Adorno retreated into aesthetic theory, Marcuse was willing to ask who, if anyone, might still carry the potential for resistance. His answer, controversially, was not the traditional working class, which he saw as largely integrated into the system, but marginalised groups, students, racial minorities, and the peoples of the Third World. This made Marcuse the Frankfurt School thinker most directly embraced by the New Left of the 1960s, and, not coincidentally, the figure most frequently invoked by the American right when they trace what they call Cultural Marxism back to its supposed origins.

Raymond Williams’s Cultural Materialism

Raymond Williams, a Marxist literary scholar in the UK active in the 60s was deeply dissatisfied with what he encountered in the British Communist intellectual tradition of the 1930s and 40s. The dominant framework treated culture as superstructure, a reflection or epiphenomenon of the economic base, something essentially secondary. Art and literature were understood through their class content or their ideological function, and the analysis tended to be reductive. You’d get readings that boiled a novel down to its expression of bourgeois consciousness and left it at that. Williams found this not just theoretically wrong but experientially false. It didn’t match what actually happened when you read a book or participated in a community’s cultural life. Something was being lost.

On the literary criticism side, Williams was trained in the Cambridge English tradition shaped by F.R. Leavis and the Scrutiny circle. That tradition took literature with enormous seriousness as a form of lived moral intelligence, close reading as a discipline, and the idea that literary culture carried values that industrial civilisation was destroying. Williams absorbed a great deal from this, the insistence that culture matters in its own right, that you have to attend to the texture and specificity of particular works, that there’s something in the experience of engaging with literature that can’t be reduced to abstractions. But the Leavisite framework was also deeply conservative in its assumptions. It was elitist, it treated ‘culture’ as the property of a minority tradition, and it had no structural analysis of why industrial society was the way it was. It could diagnose cultural decline but couldn’t explain it historically or materially because it refused to think in those terms.

Williams was caught between a Marxism that could explain social structures but flattened culture, and a literary criticism that honoured cultural experience but mystified its social conditions. Cultural Materialism was his attempt to refuse that choice. The key move was to insist that culture is itself material. Not material only in the crude sense that a book is a physical object, but also in the sense that cultural practices such as writing, reading, performing, broadcasting, educating are forms of production with their own means, relations, and institutions. They aren’t ‘mere’ reflections of something more ‘real’ happening elsewhere in the economy. They’re part of the same social process. When Williams writes about culture as ‘a whole way of life’ in Culture and Society, he’s trying to dissolve the boundary that kept Marxists from taking culture seriously and kept literary critics from thinking structurally.

His background in adult education was also crucial here, and often underestimated. Before Cambridge took him back as an academic, Williams spent years teaching working-class adults. That experience gave him something neither orthodox Marxism nor Leavisite criticism could provide on its own, which is direct knowledge that working-class people had rich, complex cultural lives that didn’t fit either the Marxist category of false consciousness or the Leavisite category of cultural deprivation. The border country he grew up in, working-class Welsh and then transplanted to Cambridge was the lived contradiction that his theoretical work was always trying to articulate. Cultural Materialism emerges from that specific intellectual and social position: someone committed to Marxist analysis who refuses its cultural reductionism, trained in close literary attention who refuses its social blindness, and grounded in a class experience that made both refusals feel necessary rather than merely academic. His peers such as Richard Hoggart and more so, his successor, Stuart Hall through the Birmingham Open School popularised Cultural Materialism as part of the cultural studies curriculum in the UK, although the current UK cultural studies curriculum has reduced Williams and Hall to ‘discourse’, emptied of any Marxist elements of analysis.

By the late 60s, we have a fascinating three-cornered development: Gramsci approaching culture as political strategy, the Frankfurt School approaching it as philosophical disaster, and Williams approaching it as lived experience. The decades of the 60s and 70s produced tremendous tumult which was both geopolitical and cultural in nature. But perhaps that is a story for another time! I hope by now, you have a basic sense of the fractures and distinctions that the phrase Cultural Marxism contains but manages to conceal. Next time someone throws around this phrase, I hope it provokes you into thinking more deeply about what is at stake and how should one respond to it.

Is it all over?

Five states (West Bengal, Assam, Tamil Nadu, Keralam and Puducherry) in India had elections in the month of April 2026. Results were declared in early May. The most crucial results were in West Bengal where incumbent Mamata Banerjee of the TMC (Trinamool) lost to the BJP, in Keralam where the incumbent Pinari Vijayan of the CPM lost to the UDF (Congress led coalition) and in Tamil Nadu where incumbent Stalin of the DMK lost to debutant Vijay of the TVK. The BJP won in Assam by a comfortable margin and its ally AINRC won Puducherry. These elections signify where the country stands at present - it is a delicate conjuncture.

The last general elections were held in mid-2024 and the next general elections will be in mid-2029. After getting more than absolute majority (272+) for two consecutive terms (2014-2019 and 2019-2024), Modi and his party, the BJP failed to get absolute majority in 2024, it won only 240 seats. BJP had to depend on allies to procure the necessary seats to form the government. Since then, the opposition party, Indian National Congress has alleged multiple and serious irregularities in election-related matters, further casting doubt on whether even those 240 seats were won fair and square. The 2026 state elections therefore are widely seen as an informal temperature test of whether BJP will bounce back from its weak 2024 verdict and set to decisively win 2029, or whether BJP’s decline will continue in the same vein as 2024.

On the surface, it appears that the 2024 election results were a blip on the radar, that the BJP has successfully bounced back with a series of victories in state elections - first in 2025 (Maharashtra, Haryana, Bihar being notable successes) and now in 2026 (West Bengal, Assam and Puducherry). It also appears that the opposition alliance INDIA is on the back foot with Congress performing poorly in Assam, TMC losing in West Bengal, and DMK losing in Tamil Nadu. There are two additional perspectives that I have heard (since the results were declared) which at first glance seem further cause for despair. First, Mamata Banerjee of TMC has been in power continuously 2011 and at least in the recent past, many had seen her and her party the TMC as the only serious alternative to BJP or even RSS/Hindutva ideology in the long term (given that Mamata had defeated BJP comprehensively in earlier state and general elections in West Bengal). In the southern part of the country, DMK’s situation mirrors that of TMC. There are many who had hoped that DMK’s ‘Dravidian’ ideology was the real answer to the BJP and ultimately it would be Stalin and co. who would rescue the country. Although there are crucial differences between W.B and T.N, it is clear that both those hopes lie shattered now. Another perspective was that the Left is not in power in a single state in India for the first time in more than 50 years. Of course there are even more people (than TMC supporters) who see the Left as the only real opposition to the BJP/RSS brand of politics and for those people, this is an alarming sign of Left decline. To sum up the story so far then, three themes seem to emerge: 1) An ascendant BJP; 2) Weakening of opposition strength (especially TMC and DMK) and; 3) Given poor electoral performance of Congress, likelihood of BJP winning 2029 (TINA factor). The rest of this piece will try to push back against these common sense conclusions.

Is there a difference in General Vs State elections?

My first counter argument is to test whether state elections are good predictors of national elections? I seem to remember a particular data insight from Pranoy Roy’s team during the 2024 election coverage. If I remember correctly, it went something like this: In the last 40 years, state elections are reasonably good predictors of general elections if and only if said state elections occur 12-18 months before a general election. Any gap longer than that and the causal association starts to weaken considerably or becomes irrelevant. As of now, we are almost exactly three years away from a general election and therefore from a historical empirical perspective, these state election results are not indicative of which way 2029 will go. I’m not saying BJP will lose or INDIA can still win. I’m just saying its too early to tell, and there’s plenty of time left for how 2029 will be shaped and framed.

Data aside, anyone who has traversed the country beyond its cities will know without a doubt that India’s citizens are election-savvy regardless of what else they know or don’t know. At the very least, almost all citizens are keenly aware of the difference between Panchayat, municipal, Zilla, District, state and general elections, in terms of how change at a particular level of power and authority will change their lives. In many places in India, often citizens find themselves voting for two different elections (e.g. state and general) on the same day and yet they vote quite differently for each of them. Just because a person has voted for BJP in the state elections does not by any means guarantee or even indicate that the same person will vote for BJP in general elections as well.

Electoral Manipulation

The Special Intensive Revision (SIR) deleted more than 9 million (91 lakh) voters ahead of the West Bengal elections, and at the time of going to polls, the fates of more than 2.7 million voters fates were still being heard in the Supreme Court. Overall, 12 per cent of West Bengal’s electorate was eliminated, prevented from voting. It will take months if not years before we get a realistic and accurate picture about how many of those were fair deletions and how many were not. News reportage reveals that in more than half of BJP’s seats (approximately in 105 seats), the deletions of votes by SIR were more than BJP’s victory margin. In words, BJP’s tally would have halved if those deleted by SIR were able to vote and assuming that all votes deleted by SIR were anti-BJP votes.

In any case, the SIR is only one example of the wider problem in assessing electoral results and their significance for the political future. The wider problem can be framed in this way: elections assume underlying conditions - that both sides are on a level playing field; the institutional atmosphere/ecosystem is enabling a free and fair election. However, to anyone who is alert to shifts in Indian politics at various levels, it should be clear that these assumptions are absolutely untenable. The field is highly uneven and skewed heavily towards the BJP. All the supposedly independent institutions like the Election Commission, judiciary, media, administration and bureaucracy are all controlled by the BJP through political appointments at the top. Once the leadership is captured and the institutions effectively managed by proxy, the whole system becomes blind to the transgressions of the ruling party and hyper-sensitive or creative in targeting the opposition. This is the opposite of a level playing field. The whole political ecosystem is rigged to make the ruling party win at any cost but maintain the facade of public support and legitimacy.

In such a context, elections are less about indications of the political health or leanings of a society and more about providing a veil of legitimacy for illegal power grab. In such a situation, it would be unwise to take these results at face value. It might be better to study them as empirical proof of manipulation. The SIR data for example, or the judgments and political appointment mechanisms are all valuable materials for researchers and historians, proof of what will go down in history as plunder of liberal democracy in broad daylight.

Specificity of Context

It is a tricky exercise in general to interpret social action in a given society and extrapolate that to a generality applicable to that country or even globally. Societies that share similarities on many aspects (religion, language, class composition, literacy etc.) still find a way to diverge on other things (political preference for example). India on the other hand is already drastically and dramatically different in its internal composition. In terms of ‘social ontology’ Indianness (for the most part) is fundamentally fractured in hundreds of thousands of jati (sub-caste) identities that practically shape how daily lives are governed - either explicitly or implicitly. And caste identity is of course intimately and indissociably linked with gender (endogamy) and class identity (permanent occupation) whether one lives in urban or rural India. To add to that, India is remarkably diverse in terms of its landscape, which means diversity in weather, flora and fauna, food, faith and culture. It is always a risky enterprise to interpret something from one part of India or a few parts of India and extrapolate that to national significance. When extrapolating, it becomes convenient to either ignore or put into the background any local context that hampers comparisons, extrapolations etc. On the other hand, you may think how specific should one be in terms of setting the context? Why state, why not district or taluk or panchayat etc.? Well, the response is that we should let the question itself guide the boundaries of context-setting. For example, this piece is about state elections, so the unit for context-setting is the state. In the context of discussing national elections, the unit is country and so on. In other words, context-setting is indexed to the nature and object of enquiry rather than determined in advance.

Didi’s decline

Let us take West Bengal. For a regime in power since 2011, is it surprising that Mamata and TMC faced significant anti-incumbency in 2026? Or did TMC assume that like the Left, it could rule without challenge for another three decades? The Left ruled for more than three decades because of institution and cadre building in the framework of democratic centralism. Power is centralised but remains democratic and tiered. This model is not possible to replicate in parties that are controlled by one individual or one family. Mamata could defeat the Left with her willingness to take the fight to the street, and fight dirty, but these tactics are of no use against the BJP or at least not for very long. Such tactics helped TMC remain in power for ten years but ultimately, these tactics outlived their utility. This is because the BJP also is willing to fight on the street and fight dirty but just has more money to do it. In such a framework, the smaller fighter would always lose to the bigger fighter. It was only a matter of time.

TMC should have a taken a leaf out of the Iranian playbook in the latest wars taking place in the Persian Gulf. Iran surrounded by American power used the principles of asymmetric warfare and leveraged the Strait of Hormuz to defeat or at least stalemate the US. TMC did not engage in asymmetric warfare. It played within the rules dictated by the BJP and lost the war. Further, consider the role played by voters formerly affiliated to the Left. From their perspective, many may have decided to strategically vote for the BJP, i.e., they would rather see Mamata exit even at the cost of admitting BJP. They might have thought that it would be better to have the BJP in power (as a debutant in W.B) and they would be easier to remove in the next elections than fight a powerful TMC as it keeps consolidating its power with every term in office. Ironically, for those in despair at the results in Keralam, don’t be surprised if in the next five years we see a resurgence of the Left in West Bengal! But it is also possible that the Left fails to take advantage and both TMC and Left pale as BJP consolidates its grip over W.B. Time will tell.

Demolition of Dravidian Model

Let us now take Tamil Nadu. Two successive terms in office for the DMK helped create a mythology of the ‘Dravidian’ model of politics centred on social justice, assertion of backward castes and classes, a bold and loudly asserted anti-Brahminism, and an economics modeled on rational principles- statistical evidence-based policy making, mobilising private investment and industrialization, increasing rate of women’s participation in labour force and so on. While all of this no doubt has a kernel of truth in terms of how the DMK perceives its own utopia, on the ground this Dravidian model has not been as impressive as it looks on paper. There is a lot of violence and discrimination towards Dalits that continues in Tamil Nadu, often taking the form of communal sanctions - boundary walls, denial of burial/cemetery access that are much more serious than instances where two individuals are implicated. Unions have held long labour strikes over terrible working conditions and exploitative wages. Millions of ordinary people, especially women, are drowning in debt with criminally high interest rates. While the results were certainly surprising with a film star leading a barely two-three year old party grabbing near full majority in their debut, in hindsight it seems as if the people of T.N were waiting for a genuine alternative to the pair of DMK-AIDMK that the public was resigned to rotating every five years. The moment a third alternative emerged, most people chose to give them a chance rather than rotate between the usual two choices. It is also a narrative of hope (cinematic as it is in its essence) that has sustained the political choices of people, the desire to cut across quotidian identity politics and instead invest in a more secular politics - of youth, of equality, of a better future. In many ways, Vijay and TVK’s rise is reminiscent of the political aesthetics awakened in urban North India during the 2011 anti-corruption protests that eventually led to the emergence of AAP and Arvind Kejriwal.

Those who followed the Bihar elections in 2025 would remember that Prashant Kishore and Jan Suraj party offered a similar narrative ahead of the elections. His claim was that for nearly 35 years or so, RJD and JDU had a comfortable power sharing agreement between themselves, keeping both Congress and BJP out of power but not genuinely transforming Bihari society. At best, some improvements in civic infrastructure but no radical programme to lift millions out of poverty or mass employment to resolve the looseness of the labour market and so on. Prashant Kishore thought that the mere presence of a third alternative with seemingly genuine politically different program would be enough to sway voters. As it turns out, the Bihar voters were utterly unimpressed and chose to go with status quo. In Tamil Nadu however, it seems that there was an undercurrent of political fatigue with available choices, or in other words, an undercurrent of yearning for a new choice, a fresh slate to start with. In all the state elections that took place in April, I would wager that the results in TN are the most serious ones, in terms of implications for the INDIA alliance. It is an effective demolition of the hope that Dravidian politics signified for a long time both in T.N but also in South India at large.

What of the TVK itself? Their signaling is not clear, their discourse largely symbolic and vague. Again reminiscent of the early years of AAP. The Christian background of Vijay and secular history of Tamil Nadu will make it difficult for the TVK to serve as BJP’s B-team, but structurally whatever TVK’s fate will be (depending on what it does over the next five years), it is clear that DMK is weakened as a result of a new entrant. It has become a three-way fight instead of a two-way fight. Congress will no doubt keep its options open but ultimately it will have to choose between DMK and TVK. The next two years should be interesting to watch these dynamics and in any case, the track record of the TVK in their first two years should give enough indications for the Congress to take a decision on whom it will support in TN, and take on as an ally for 2029 general elections.

Decline of the Left?

Finally, let us come to Keralam. Even before the elections, the state level context was an interesting one. After nearly 50 years or longer, it was the first time that the Left-led LDF coalition enjoyed two successive terms (i.e., 10 years) in power. It was quite unusual for a state that has been used to regularly rotating two parties - LDF and the Congress-led UDF. Keralam like Bihar has no patience or yearning for other options. The 10 years that LDF ruled was led by Pinari Vijayan, a strongman of the Left in Kerala but also now quite old. Over the last ten years, many in Keralam had grown critical of the authoritarian rule of Vijayan and there were many rumours of corruption, favouritism and hooliganism. It should come as no surprise that this almost unprecedented run that Vijayan had has now come to an end, and Keralam has gone back to business as usual. Now UDF will rule for five years and it will most likely lead to a LDF government next. By a co-incidence, it is true that the Left is not in power in a single state today, but it does not mean that the Left is finished. It just means that the Left will have to wait its turn to rule by 2031. However, it seems that Vijayan’s rule has come to an end, and whatever be the fate of the Left in the next election, it will be led by someone else. The Left’s fortunes in Bihar is completely de-linked from what is happening in Keralam, and the situation in West Bengal and Tripura is completely different from Bihar and Keralam. It would be a strategic mistake to take Keralam as the reference and extrapolate the future of the entire Left from that.

Further, consider that socio-economic indicators of development are highest in Keralam compared to other states. Given the relatively high standard of living conditions and the political culture in Keralam, it is very unlikely that its voters will create space for any (third) party that wants to centre religious majoritarianism, hatred for immigrants, anti-modernism, acceptance and even celebration of inequality and so on. If the BJP wants a future in Keralam, it will have to echo the politics of UDF and LDF with minor modifications. Just like the BJP accepts beef-eating in the North East. But, at the same time it should be noted that BJP and allies took three seats this time. Their main strategy seems to try and create divisions between (Syrian) Christians and Muslims in the state, while mobilising Hindu identity (Sabrimala etc.). This has led to limited growth and BJP will keep chipping away at these issues hoping for continued growth. I don’t expect UDF to take any drastic counteraction, but it remains to be seen what the Left does against these strategies while it is in opposition.

What lies ahead?

Given all of this, how should we think about the political future of India, mediated by the question of who will capture the state in 2029? It is no longer about democracy or any of its institutions, but rather about capturing the state. If the power of the state is to remain with the BJP, then it will continue to implement its top down agenda: a mix of culture, economics and political aesthetics that will change and set the tone of our societies for generations to come before we can think of fundamental change.

As I see it, there are four pillars to the INDIA alliance. The largest two at the front are Congress and Samajwadi Party. The rear flank is DMK in the South and TMC in the East. The rear flank has considerably weakened and both DMK and TMC will have a two-pronged domestic agenda that might overwhelm national priorities. Both these parties will first try to hamper effective governance by the new governments in their respective states. Both governments are by debutants in their respective states and the losing parties will do everything in their power not to have these upstarts settle down and consolidate their power. Their second agenda is to preserve and increase the strengthening of their parties for future elections, and not fade away in the face of these unexpected defeats. Either way, their claims (whether stated or not) on leading INDIA have taken a decisive blow.

For 2029 at least, the primary opposition will be Congress plus Samajwadi Party, along with other weakened regional parties out of power (DMK, TMC, RJD etc.). Both Congress and SP have a test coming up for them before 2029. Congress will be fighting BJP in Gujarat and SP will be fighting BJP in UP - both in 2027. It is clear that both parties need to take urgent steps on a war footing in terms of organisational structure, campaign, research, communications, mobilization, internal processes etc if either of they are to have any chance at all of defeating their opponents. Congress is currently in power in four states at present - Keralam, Karnataka, Telangana and Himachal. SP meanwhile, cannot work out a partnership with BSP and until that happens the advantage is firmly with BJP and smaller parties of UP. At present, there is no doubt that anyone who wishes to see a successful opposition to BJP, has to rally behind the Congress as the flagship opposition party. These results should serve to quieten competing claims of leading the INDIA alliance. Every opposition party if it is serious about defeating the BJP, must submit to Rahul Gandhi’s leadership.

For Congress, as the only opposition party left standing, the road ahead is arduous and treacherous. Assam is a good example, weeks before the elections the top leadership defected to the BJP. While the leadership at the top seems to be clear about its agenda and its ideology, the party at the state level seems to be out of touch with the high command. Whether for 2029 or 2034, unless Congress has solid people in leadership positions at state and district levels, the party will not be able to translate its ideological opposition into electoral results. This is easier said than done when the party has no financial resources to control or leverage its cadre. Driving the cadre through ideology alone takes a long time as the Left and the RSS will readily attest. Congress does not have the luxury of time, since the party will not survive it is out of power for much longer.

Rather than despair at the results, I would urge the Congress to use 2026-2029 as a time to repair and rebuild Congress through innovative low cost ways. Both online and offline, the party should do more to listen to its publics than talk to them. Building a manifesto from the ground up (consolidating core interests of OBC, SC and ST across religious lines); making sure that local party workers who have successfully mobilised or articulated/fought for core ideological interests get promoted to district and state level leadership positions; dedicated infrastructure for electioneering; activating all the various wings of the party (student wing, minority wing, OBC wing etc.) will all go a long way in strengthening the opposition.

The manipulation of elections shows that the opposition cannot afford closely fought elections. If there is any chance of winning against the BJP, it has to be a landslide victory so that small manipulations at booth level through techniques like SIR will be rendered irrelevant and overwhelmed in a wave of public support. That should be the goal for 2029. It can be done.

Over the last decade, there have been two crises that have prepared Indians to navigate economic crisis – demonetisation in 2016 and then COVID in 2020-21. Like today, both of these were externally imposed shocks. Both came without warning leaving us very little time to prepare for the consequences. However, today’s crisis is different in crucial aspects – we have time to prepare and mitigate consequences especially for the most vulnerable sections of our population. Further, there are no restrictions on currency supply or social distancing, meaning social cooperation and exchange are not only possible but indispensable if we are to deal with the coming crisis.

Over the next few months, due to impact on production and transportation of a range of inputs (sulphur, urea, ammonia, copper and its synthetic products, LNG, crude oil etc.) food shortages and inflation are likely to hit India in a bad way in the coming months. Given the likelihood of ground invasion of Iran by US troops, the war could easily stretch on for months, a timeline that India simply cannot afford. As India adapts to supply shocks and its consequences at the union government level, there are various measures that we can undertake to soften the blow for our own cities. To do so effectively, it will require coordinated action by various stakeholders – state governments, private firms, citizen groups working in unison towards common objectives. Here are 5 broad steps that we could take.

1. Work from Home for all those who can

Karnataka employs several lakh people across Bengaluru alone. Mandating three work-from-home days a week for all eligible state employees would cut commuter fuel consumption immediately. The state and city governments should activate and mainstream the city’s and state’s e-office infrastructure to pivot to a WFH model immediately with minimum disruption. Many of the major IT firms transitioned to WFH during COVID, but now most employees are back in office. Going back to WFH implemented during COVID would remove tens of thousands of cars and buses from Bangalore’s roads every day. These companies already have the infrastructure and systems to do what they did during COVID and they must do it again, immediately. Finally, as many schools, colleges and universities should switch to online learning as they did during COVID.

2. Enabling localised crisis response and management

With the new Greater Bengaluru Governance Act, the city has 369 wards governed across five zones of BBMP (West – 112 wards, North and South – 72 wards each, Central – 63 wards and East – 50 wards). Each zone is supposed to have an elected councillor along with ward level committees. However, since the municipal elections have not taken place yet, what we have on the ground are appointed ward-level commissioners, along with a Joint Commissioner responsible for governing each zone. The city also employs sanitation workers (Pourakarmikas) who have last mile knowledge about their respective wards. Each ward also has many civic associations that are religious/cultural/voluntary in nature and have the capacity to organise local and last mile relief operations –Dalit Sangharsh Samiti associations, church, mosque, temple groups, Rotary Club groups, Resident Welfare Associations and so on. The first task would be to create a Relief Group (led by respective ward commissioner) that maps needs of vulnerable populations and create communication mechanism (e.g. WhatsApp groups) at the ward level. Each ward needs to identify vulnerable households, those dependent on LPG cylinders, daily wage income, migrant workers etc and track how they are being affected on a weekly basis. Relief operations can be led by the Joint Commissioner and Ward level commissioner but accountable and transparent (digital public dashboards with daily or weekly updates for example) in order to reduce leakages and distortion in relief provision. In each ward, officials should ensure that Indira Canteens have sufficient LPG/PNG and foodgrains for providing affordable meals three times a day, since one industrial kitchen feeding 300-400 people burns far less LPG than those households cooking separately. Excess food by restaurants and supermarkets in a given ward can be collected and distributed to those who need it on a daily level through public community kitchens at designated locations. Each ward can also have its own emergency helpline that is managed by local volunteers and resources that the Ward level commission has at his or her disposal.

3. Protecting the unregistered

Bangalore’s migrant worker population is vast and estimates of the total, including intra-state migrants, run over 40 lakh workers. Almost all of them are outside formal welfare systems. That means no local ration card, no proof of residence, no entry in any state database. When construction slows, small businesses shut, and informal labour demand dries up in an energy crunch, these workers are the first to lose income and the last to receive help. Through the ward-level intelligence network and with the help of civil society groups who have a track record of supporting migrant workers, a database of key locations and ration needs can be mapped out in a couple of weeks if it is a city-wide initiative is undertaken urgently. Similarly, there are hundreds of thousands of other vulnerable groups whose livelihood will get severely affected – autorickshaw drivers, gig workers, domestic workers, garment workers etc. The state government needs to reach out to unions and civil society groups who have been working with these sectors to urgently map their numbers and locations as accurately as possible. At the very least, through the ward level mechanisms, basic ration-kits can be prepared with essentials in a worse case scenario. Finally, affordable electric hot plates can be made available by ward commissioners for Below Poverty Line households and other vulnerable groups.

4. Energy management

Bangalore has lakhs of small businesses registered with BBMP, including darshinis, small workshops, tailors, printers. etc. These businesses cannot afford to stockpile fuel, have no reserves to absorb cost shocks, and will simply close if energy costs spike without warning. Many of them are already shutting down or have shut down already. A subsidised energy ration, disbursed through the existing BBMP trade licence database, would be administratively feasible and would go a long way to protect the informal commercial ecosystem that the city’s daily life depends on. Karnataka’s rooftop solar approval process, which on paper should take days, and for systems under 10 kW is now supposed to be automatic, routinely takes months in practice. The state issued guidelines in 2024 specifically to fix this, which is itself an admission that the rules weren’t being followed. In an energy crisis, the state’s energy department should declare a 30-day fast-track window: any residential or commercial rooftop solar application filed during this period should get processed within 72 hours, with BESCOM officers personally accountable for delays. During recent years, plenty of neighbourhood level electricity infrastructure could not cope with spike in demand during summers (due to increased AC usage). This time, along with air-conditioning, more people working from home etc, there could be additional demand due to induction and electric cookers etc. Electricity supply has to be managed sensitively otherwise we could face shortages. Some mapping of ward level electricity usage if made available publicly, could help each ward to plan their consumption in more equitable ways.

5. Mental health and well-being

Unlike COVID, there are no restrictions on social contact and cooperation. With many people (students, IT workers etc.) forced to go online or stop their pattern of daily work, we will see further alienation, rise in domestic abuse, and many other such social ills as were witnessed during COVID. To avoid or at least mitigate such issues, the people in each ward needs to make extensive use of their public spaces and social infrastructure. Group walking in parks, public meetings, collective meals, community kitchens etc. could go a long way in helping people realise a sense of community that plays a crucial role in reorganisation of social and civic life. In a society divided by caste, gender, class, religion, language and so many other markers, it will be a huge challenge to overcome discriminatory attitudes. However, every crisis is also an opportunity for groups of people to rethink and potentially reorganise their lives and given the scale of this crisis, there is no better time to work together.

This as a two part article from a broader geopolitical and macro-economic perspective along with some predictions about what could happen if the war continued in this vein for another six months (if not longer). In trying to grapple with the geopolitical situation, my objective is to understand whether this war can expand from a regional war to a world war. I’m mapping the geopolitics in concentric circles, the inner most circle has the most involved countries, second circle is involved secondarily, third circle tertiary involvement and so on.

The innermost circle: Iran, Israel, USA (will come to this group at the end). The second circle: Bahrain, UAE, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Kuwait and Lebanon. The Gulf states have staked their commitments to the US and are stuck due to an unfortunate problem. Iran will continue attacking as long as GCC (colloquially called as ‘Gulf countries’ in India) lends itself to the US military, while the US will be only too happy to have GCC more directly involved in the war. This means, both Iran and the US have no interest in their security. So far the situation is that people support Iran but the regimes of the GCC are with the US. If Iran attacks water and food infrastructure, then this situation may change drastically, but the Iranians are unlikely to do that given their propensity for long term strategy. Over the next few weeks, it is more likely that Iran will continue targeting economic and technological infrastructure of the GCC that is directly tied to the US. This alone will devastate the regimes of the GCC without harming the domestic population. It would not surprise me if Bahrain’s government falls or if Kuwait is taken back by Iraq if this war carries on like this for a few more months and if the GCC continues to face sustained attack leading to capital flight and infrastructural destruction.

With Lebanon the situation is complicated internally with division of power between Maronite Christians, Sunni Muslims and a minority Shia population. The government of Lebanon is caught between a rock and a hard place. Favour the Israelis and you have trouble brewing in the South and the impression that you are controlled by Israelis; favour the Hezbollah and you have Israel targeting you. For now the Lebanese government has chosen Israel, but as the war goes on, the government may choose to side with Hezbollah instead. After all better to negotiate with the party that is inside one’s country than with the party that is outside and has been bombing one’s country. Time will tell where Lebanon goes, but if they are pragmatic/realist about this, we can soon expect a shift in their loyalties.

Things start getting even more complicated with the third circle countries: Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Azerbaijan, Cyprus, Greece, Yemen, UK, Russia, France; and fourth circle countries: Afghanistan, Pakistan, Sudan, Egypt, India and Ukraine. How is this war expanding or threatening to expand to these circles? Turkey is considering joining the nuclear umbrella of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. Meanwhile, the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC), a 1000 mile pipeline that starts from Azerbaijan, via Georgia and terminating in Turkey, is responsible for nearly 47% of Israel’s crude oil import (interestingly South Africa is Israel’s top coal supplier!). Also, given that Iran has taken out many radar systems in GCC and Israel, an older radar system (since 2012) stationed in Turkey is supplying information about Iranian strikes to NATO and that intelligence subsequently finds its way to Israel as well. Patriot air defence systems are also said to have been stationed at the same radar base in Turkey. From an Iranian perspective then, Azerbaijan and Turkey are aligned with the US and Israel for the time being. It is a serious threat to Iran’s northwestern region and a lot will depend on whether Iraq will help Iran to mitigate this threat. More on Iraq later.

Cyprus has been used as a British airbase, and has security alliance with Greece and Israel. While the Cypriot population may not wish to be pulled into this war, the government of Cyprus will have no choice but to play along. If they allow too much militarisation in the future, they may face shelling from Iran and from Hezbollah in Lebanon. UK and France are not yet fully committed but it is clear that they will never stand with Iran, and are ideologically committed to the US and Israel, so it is only a matter of time. Skyrocketing energy costs and sunk military spending in Russia-Ukraine war, plus the public opinion against war is keeping UK and France out for the time being. No doubt they are figuring out that if they get pulled into the war, the government will lose the next elections in their respective countries and may face social unrest at home, not to mention economic recession. Also note that Russia-EU gas trade has come to a halt, and EU will lose face when Ukraine eventually is forced to concede. From a Ukrainian perspective, this is a golden chance to present itself as a saviour of the US by offering technological assistance in a moment of need. Zelensky will be hoping that the favour will be returned with more money and arms flowing from the US and from the EU to sustain war efforts at home. Also, from his perspective, it would be useful to have a powerful country like Israel in its debt. However, with sanctions now lifted off Russia, Ukraine must be feeling somewhat cheated, but I don’t see what other choice it has except to continue offering the hand of friendship to Israel, US and EU countries.

Russia and Yemen will lean towards Iran. Russia has an interest in a protracted war because its own sanctions will be removed permanently if West Asian oil stops or is greatly reduced in the global supply of oil. Further, as the war goes on, the US will be further weakened and will not be able to support Ukraine with money or arms as much as before. However, it is also true that Russia is on good terms with Israel and has some agreements with Israel on sharing territorial control in southern Syria after the ouster of Assad. Israel lobbied to have continued Russian presence in Syria as a bulwark against Turkish interests, while Russia also made sure that Iranian attacks defending Assad government in Syria had limited impact. I would argue that Russia will not be able to walk this tightrope for much longer if the balance of power tilts towards Iran as the war goes on. They would have to choose a side and if push comes to shove, I would guess that the Russians will chose to go with Iran rather than Israel. There is already some talk of Russia sharing intelligence with Iran about American strikes, but there is no news or intelligence about what Russia may be sharing with Israel about Iranian strikes. Now that Ukraine is offering limited support to US and Israel on military technology, it remains to be seen how Russia decides to go ahead.

In Yemen, the Houthis are waiting to get involved but it is premature at this stage. In a few more weeks, when the Americans realise that they can’t force open the Strait of Hormuz, they will try to bypass it and move oil through the strait of Bab-el-Mandeb, the gateway to Suez. It is then that the Houthis will close down this strait, further shutting down the flow of GCC oil. This part is relatively straightforward and there is really nothing much that anyone can do to offset the Houthis. They have been effective in the past and they will be so in the future. While we are on the topic of the Red Sea, it should be noted that in Sudan, Al-Burhan’s Sudan Armed Forces or SAF (government forces) has been successful with support from Iran in fighting against the Dagalo’s Rapid Support Forces or RSF (rebel forces). Egypt too favours the SAF, and it should come as no surprise that the RSF has UAE as a supporter. With Iran intensifying its attacks against the UAE, they may not be able to continue supporting RSF but Iran might still find a way to continue providing minimal technological support (like drones) to SAF which in the Sudanese context, should be decisive. That would strengthen Iran’s position to close down the Red Sea-Horn of Africa oil and shipping traffic - another deadly blow to the global economy.

The Syrian government is for the time being with US and Israel. Al-Sharaa the head of Syria and the now supposedly disbanded HTS, has been denouncing Iranian attacks and has been trying to engage with Israel instead for its security. This is not surprising since Al-Sharaa could not have succeeded Assad without American and Israeli approval. However there are two problems with Syria - if the war goes on much longer, bulk of the Syrian people may wish their government to support Iran on theological lines rather than sectarian lines (Sunni vs Shia), and if that happens, Al-Sharaa may find himself politically forced to lean towards Iran. Alternatively, if Syria is used as a strategic location by either Israel or the US, then Iran will attack Syrian sites, just as it has with the GCC states, and there is no Iron Dome nor American defensive systems to protect Syria from these attacks. Second problem is to do with the Kurds in the northeast of Syria. The Syrian forces have incorporated Turkish forces and together, they have attacked Kurdish forces violently as recently as January this year. Last year too there was significant violence against the Kurds, and now the Syrian Democratic Force or SDF (the Kurdish army) has effectively lost control over north east Syria, when just a few months ago, there was discussion of increasing autonomy for SDF. The Kurds are spread across Syria, Turkey, Iraq and Iran. The US has tried to get the Iranian Kurds involved in the war but they have declined to do so for now. However, if the war goes on for longer, and if Iraq and Turkey get involved closely, then the Kurds are involved by default, since the Kurds are primarily spread across Iran, Iraq, Syria and of course Turkey. If I had to guess, even with Trump inviting them to get involved so soon after this betrayal, the Kurds will not fall for this deceit again, but rather take whatever resources they can, mobilise patiently and wait to see where the chips may fall as the war goes on. As of now, if the Iranian Kurds do get involved, then Iran will attack their bases both in Iran and in Iraq (with support from Shia allies in Iraq), and with the Syrian state against them, it looks very bleak overall. It would be suicidal for the Kurds to get involved at this point. I would argue this will be the case for the next few months at least unless the balance of power changes drastically.

This brings me to Iraq, which like Lebanon is internally split. The population is majority Shia and the Iraqi prime minister is Shia as well, although it should be noted that there are multiple Shia factions in Iraq and not all of them are unequivocally allied with Iran. In the late 80s, there was a long and cruel war between Iran and Iraq (when Iraq was controlled by Sunni dominated Saddam’s Ba’ath party), and that war devastated both countries. Many in Iraq do not want a repeat of that kind of devastation nor do they wish to invite American occupation again as it happened after the fall of Saddam. The Kurds who are concentrated in the north east of Iraq are against Iran and much closer to the West. As of now their armed force Peshmerga has kept quiet, and surely recent events in Syria and Al-Sharaa’s betrayal of SDF must have forced them to reassess their trust in the West. Just as with Syria, it would be in the strategic interests of the Iraqi Kurds to patiently wait this out and reassess the situation in a few months. For now in Iraq, the Sunnis and Kurds will wait, while the Shia factions will bat for Iran as and when required but at the same time try to keep Iraq out of the war for the time being. On the 12th of March, a refuelling aircraft was crashed killing all six crew (American), and although the Americans attributed it to an accident, it should be noted that the an Iraqi group sympathetic to Iran has claimed responsibility. This is a typical case of Iraqi Shias getting involved strategically, while the Iraq government officially stays out of it. If Turkey signs up with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan for a new security alliance, then Iraq (and Afghanistan) will become important allies for Iran.

Finally, let us come to the outermost circle countries: Afghanistan, Pakistan, Sudan, Egypt, India and Ukraine. The Taliban is in power in Afghanistan and Trump since last year has been making noises about wanting the Bagram airbase back - its supposedly one hour away from where the Chinese are engaged in nuclear production (not clear if its to do with weapons or energy). Whatever the reason may be, the Taliban have flatly refused to concede any territory to the US while they are in power and that position is unlikely to change in the near future. Another problem is that Afghanistan is engaged in serious conflict with Pakistan over border issues (the Durand line, a border that runs for approx 2600 kilometres and a border that Afghanistan rejects as a colonial device to separate the Pashtuns), increasing in intensity ever since the Americans left in 2021. Last year in October the Qataris helped broker a ceasefire between them but now again, in early March the conflict has broken out into the open; the Pakistanis going so far as to say it is an open war. Airstrikes have begun against Afghanistan. The Pakistani government has built good relations with Saudi Arabia, US and China, but the Pakistani people support Palestine and Iran, and are very much against the Americans. Afghanistan on the other hand has built relationships with India who are of course happy to make friends with anyone fighting Pakistan on the other border. It would not come as a surprise to learn that the Indians are also ‘friends’ with the Balochs who are also engaged in insurgency movement within Pakistan for many years. During the 12 day war in June 2025, there were unconfirmed reports that a unit of Balochs had crossed the border into Iran to fight against the regime but someone (apparently Turkey?) had shared intelligence about them to the Iranians and all the Balochs were killed. It seems to me that the Pakistanis and Turks are looking to be with Saudi and therefore indirectly with the US. India has made it obvious in the last decade where it stands, so no ambiguity there.

The only opening for Iran on the eastern front is Afghanistan. It is a tricky relationship no doubt given the Sunni leadership of Taliban and Shia leadership of Iran. However, given that both have a common enemy (ISIS-Khoarasan) that is both anti-Shia and competing with Taliban for ruling Afghanistan, it should be easy to work out security arrangements related to Pakistan and India. This could also be an opportunity to work out water sharing issues with Helmand and Harirud rivers that flow downstream from Afghanistan to Iran and can help with irrigation in the arid Sistan region of Iran. It should be noted that one of the reasons Iranian Balochs (in the Sistan region) protest so much is the staggering inequality within Iran. Better irrigation and development in the Sistan region may help placate the Iranian Balochs and isolate the Pakistani Balochs - something that both Iran and Afghanistan would want. Obviously it would also be good for Iran if Bagram airbase remained firmly under Taliban control.

As you can see from this snapshot, its clear that this war threatens to expand on two sides - northwest and east of Iran. The only peaceful front is with Turkmenistan on the northeast with which Iran has extensive gas-related trade. On the northwest, the war could expand either through Saudi-Turkish alliance backed by the US or through Kurdish involvement that pulls in Iraq. On the eastern front, Pakistan-Afghanistan conflict could escalate and the Balochs could get sucked into the war. A lot will depend on two major players and how they fare through the war - Saudi Arabia and Turkey. Other GCC states are smaller and have no way to resist beyond a point. When American backing crumbles or moves out, they will fold. Saudi Arabia has a lot more to lose both symbolically and politically. It has been competing with Iran to be the symbolic leader of the Muslim world while benefiting from the petrodollar system, but it cannot have it both ways especially since the events on and post October 7th, 2023. Turkey too as a NATO member has to choose who it wants to ally with - Europe to its west or with Iran to its east.

I want to conclude this piece now with a few brief reflections on countries I have not mentioned so far - the innermost countries and China. From Iran’s perspective, this war is existential, and more crucially, they have unprecedented support from the international community post-October 7th. It is in their interest to keep the global economy choked off for as long as possible, until the whole world feels the pain and public opinion goes even more against the US and Israel, until the GCC states are completely weakened and bow to Iranian dominance of the region. I doubt if there will ever be a better time to conduct a existential war with Israel and the US. From Israel’s perspective, this has been the culmination of a long standing plan to destroy the Islamic states and it has been successful so far in getting Syria, Libya, Sudan, Yemen, Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan all go to war with US/NATO involvement. Iran was the last country standing and now it too is in war. But Israel seems to have miscalculated Iran’s preparedness (along with overestimating its own defences) and is likely to suffer heavy damage to its population and residential areas, to its energy infrastructure and of course to its military capabilities. Faced with an existential threat from a stronger-than-expected Iran, Israel has only two options - use tactical nuclear weapons or push America to escalate on behalf of Israel. I would argue that Israel would first try for American escalation and only resort to nuclear as the absolutely last resort. From the American perspective, this was an unwise war to get into in the first place but now that it has, it would be difficult to get out without losing face before the mid-term elections in November, and at the same time the US has to avoid inflation at home and amongst its friendly countries. This looks like a very tall task indeed and it is unlikely that the US can dodge all these issues. One or the other issue will push through and America will get into a lot of trouble domestically. Time will tell which problem will push through and which problems American will manage to dodge. Either way, unless there is some clever publicity stunt or a mega-escalation to nuclear, the US has humiliation waiting for it in a protracted war. It will be interesting to watch if this results in a major reshaping in US-Israel relations.

China has surrounded Taiwan with 26 military aircraft and seven naval ships on March 15th according to some news reports. On one hand, China could see this as a historic window of opportunity to seize control of Taiwan at a moment when America is involved heavily in the Russia-Ukraine war and in the war with Iran. But on the other hand, this could also just be a symbolic warning for the US - not to take away key military equipment away from South Korea and towards Iran. This could be China’s way of indirectly helping Iran by putting pressure on US in East Asia. Again time will tell, but either way, its clear where China stands with respect to this war. Its main priority will be to seize the opportunity to de-dollarize international trade, especially buying and selling of oil. This alone would significantly weaken American hegemony, and given the structural advantages China has in other areas of economy (AI, manufacturing, infrastructure etc.), the natural tendency of growth will ensure Chinese hegemony in the coming decades. The Chinese seem to be in no hurry to assert their dominance, just putting the foundational pieces in place will be their primary objective as and when the window of opportunity presents itself. In the next article, I will comment on the macro-economic perspective.

Naturally, influencers on social media and mainstream media love this kind of discourse, its precisely the kind of crisis/utopia talk that drives media circulation. A good example of this is the viral post on X that got more than 80 million views, promising drastic and wide ranging changes in the economy because of AI. This quote just about sums up the whole AI discourse in terms of its oscillation between extremes:

The people building this technology are simultaneously more excited and more frightened than anyone else on the planet. They believe it's too powerful to stop and too important to abandon. Whether that's wisdom or rationalization, I don't know.

Most of the discussion has focused on these people and how they’re leading this discourse. But if you set aside these people for a moment, we can take a look at the political economy that fuels their hyperbolic discourse. Historically speaking, there was a similar cycle during the dotcom boom of the late 90s and then about a decade later, during the early years of big social media platforms. My argument here is that this latest cycle of AI discourse is all about reorganising fictitious capital away from social media giants and offshored software services and into AI firms. Before I come to the main argument, some background (both theoretical and historical) is required.

When there’s a crisis, money circulation dries up, and when money stops moving around, the economy goes into cardiac arrest. Capitalism depends on continuous circulation meaning money must constantly move between banks, firms and consumers. That’s why George Bush begged Americans to continue flying and shopping in the days following the 9/11 attacks. A similar situation emerged during the financial crisis of 2008. Banks stopped lending, investors stopped investing, and financial markets froze. That is why Bush approved a $700 billion bailout to stabilise the banking system in spite of massive public anger against Wall Street. At the same time, the US Federal Reserve began a separate but related intervention known as quantitative easing or QE. It is a monetary policy tool designed to restore liquidity to financial markets.

Quantitative easing is often described as “printing money,” but the actual mechanism is more specific. The central bank creates new money electronically and uses it to purchase financial assets, primarily long-term Treasury bonds and mortgage-backed securities from banks and other financial institutions. When the central bank buys these assets, it pays for them by crediting the sellers’ bank accounts with newly created reserves. In doing so, it expands its own balance sheet. Even though it seems counterintuitive, its important to remember that the bond becomes an asset on the central bank’s balance sheet, while the newly created money becomes its liability. This process of QE has important consequences. By purchasing large quantities of bonds, the central bank pushes bond prices up and bond yields down. Investors who previously held these safe assets now receive cash in exchange. Faced with low returns on bonds, they begin searching for higher-yielding investments elsewhere, meaning in equities, venture capital, real estate and other financial assets. In effect, the central bank ends up injecting liquidity into the financial system. Capital circulates through financial markets, raising asset prices and enabling new forms of investment. Financial markets (since the late 1980s) have become the primary channel through which newly created money enters the broader economy.

Just before the financial crisis of 2008, the US Federal Reserve held total assets of approximately 900 billion dollars. By late 2009, this had increased to around 2.1 trillion dollars, an expansion of more than 1.2 trillion within a single year, effectively doubling the deficit. Over the next several years, the balance sheet continued to grow. By 2014, total Federal Reserve assets had reached approximately 4.5 trillion dollars. This expansion reflected the central bank’s large-scale purchase of financial assets, primarily long-term Treasury bonds and mortgage-backed securities, as part of its QE program. These purchases injected vast quantities of liquidity into the financial system. Interest rates fell to near zero, and financial institutions found themselves operating in an environment of extremely cheap capital. A lot of it went to Big Tech companies. Apple’s market capitalisation, for example, was approximately 191 billion dollars in 2009. By 2014, it had risen to 643 billion dollars. Amazon’s market capitalisation increased from around 60 billion dollars in 2009 to approximately 144 billion dollars in 2014. These increases far outpaced the immediate growth in the companies’ productive capacity or profits. Instead, they reflected the capitalisation of expected future earnings. Look at the year-on-year increase in stock prices of Big Tech below:

There’s another side to all this. When the US Federal Reserve buys Treasury Bonds as part of QE, it injects new dollars into the global financial system. These bonds are typically purchased from large financial institutions such as banks, pension funds, and asset managers. Many of these institutions have global operations, and the dollars created through these transactions quickly circulate beyond the United States1. Institutional investors around the world now find themselves holding more dollars, either directly or indirectly through global financial markets. These investors face a big problem. Their domestic economies and financial systems are much smaller than the United States, and cannot absorb large quantities of capital as easily. Moreover, global trade itself is largely2 conducted in dollars, which reinforces the dollar’s central role in the world economy. As a result, a large portion of these dollars are ‘recycled’ back into US financial markets. Investors from all over the world purchase US Treasury bonds, corporate bonds, equities and other financial instruments to park their dollars. Big Tech on Wall Street thus becomes the primary destination for global dollar liquidity.

This constant inflow of capital pushes up asset prices. Technology stocks in particular benefit from this process, because they offer the promise of high future growth. Rising stock prices increase the market valuation of these companies, allowing them to raise even more capital. Companies then use this capital in various ways, including investing in research and infrastructure, acquiring competitors, fat bonuses for their executives, or increasingly, buying back their own stock. Stock buybacks play a particularly important role3. When a company buys back its own shares, it reduces the number of shares available in the market. With fewer shares in circulation, the price of the remaining shares tends to rise. This further increases the company’s market valuation, reinforcing the cycle of capital accumulation. Stock buyback is a particularly easy way to increase stock prices without doing much work on the ground. Mature big tech companies are now doing this all the time.

Rising stock price starts to take on a life of its own. Initially, stock prices rise because companies expand their operations, increase their revenues and improve their profitability. But beyond a certain point, stock prices no longer reflect the present condition of the company. Instead, they begin to reflect expectations about the company’s future. Investors are no longer buying (into) the company as it exists today, but the company as it might exist tomorrow. This is what Marx called fictitious capital4. To clarify, when I use fictitious I don’t mean fake or unreal, but a form of capital that is completely de-linked from production.

To understand this more concretely, imagine a company that earns 10 billion dollars in profit every year. Based on this, investors might value the company at 200 billion dollars. But suppose investors become convinced that this company will dominate a future industry and earn far greater profits. They might then value it at 1 trillion dollars, even though its current profits remain unchanged. The additional 800 billion dollars corresponds to expectations about the future, an expectation that itself becomes tradable, acquires a price and becomes capitalised, as fictitious capital.

Most people tend to explain stock fluctuations as based on public sentiment. But this is only to look at surface level phenomena. The expansion of fictitious capital is a structural feature of modern capitalism, especially in periods following large injections of liquidity. When central banks create trillions of dollars through quantitative easing, that money must go somewhere (see footnote 1). But the productive and material economy including factories, infrastructure, industrial production etc. cannot expand quickly enough to absorb it all. Expanding production is constrained by physical limits, labor availability, supply chains etc. that expand relatively slowly compared to fictitious capital expansion. Financial markets, by contrast, can expand almost instantly. Each new user acquired (signs up/subscribes) in India, Indonesia or Brazil is valuable for the expectation of future monetisation. This is why Anthropic has just opened its second Asian office in Bangalore, India (first was Tokyo). Stock prices reflect anticipated future profits that would only be realised if these users could eventually be integrated into circuits of consumption at scale.

Yet this expectation runs up against structural limits. The consumption capacity of much of the Global South remains constrained by low incomes, informal employment and persistent economic precarity. In India, for example, the federal government guarantees till 2029, subsidised food grains to 800 million people (total population is 1.4 billion) under the National Food Security Act. While platform companies can acquire users at scale, converting those users into high-value subscribers capable of paying Western-level subscription prices remains far more difficult. As a result, the massive valuations of technology firms often reflect capitalisation of future profits whose realisation remains uncertain at best. However, fictitious capital needs to continually justify itself. Because it is based on expectations about the future, it depends on credible narratives about future transformation. Investors must be persuaded that the future will be radically different from the present, and that the companies they invest in will dominate that future.

For nearly two decades, SaaS (software as a service) companies benefited enormously from the surplus liquidity environment created by QE. Their subscription-based model allowed investors to project predictable future revenue streams. These projected revenues were capitalised into present valuations, often far exceeding current profits. Indian companies like Infosys and TCS were valued based on the assumption that enterprise software at offshore (cheap labour) rates would remain indispensable infrastructure for profits accumulating in Western companies. The emergence of advanced AI agents has disrupted that assumption. Systems such as Claude Opus 4.6 and enterprise-oriented agentic tools like Open Claw promise something fundamentally different from traditional software. Instead of providing tools that workers use, they promise to perform the work itself, such as writing code, drafting documents, managing workflows and coordinating organisational processes. In promising so, they threaten to eliminate entire layers of enterprise software thereby posing a fundamental challenge to their long term valuation models. I use words like ‘promise to’, or ‘threaten to’, because whether they actually do so is another question altogether. We are talking about claims and their impact on fictitious capital here.

Financial markets reacted immediately to the discourse. In early 2026, software stocks globally experienced sharp declines. Major US software firms lost between 15 and 30 percent of their market value within weeks (wiping out 300 billion dollars in market capitalisation). In India, the Nifty IT index experienced one of its steepest declines in years, wiping out 50 billion dollars in market capitalisation. Capital is now flowing into companies perceived to be foundational to the AI economy such as semiconductor manufacturers, data centre operators, and AI-native firms. The decline of SaaS valuations suggests a reorganisation of fictitious capital toward a new technological paradigm.

This evaporation of fictitious capital has real consequences in the US and in countries like India. The latter will probably see a continuation of mass layoffs in the SaaS industry, and there will be a ripple effect too. Secondary and tertiary economies built around the SaaS industry - office workers, drivers, food delivery ‘partners’, real estate all of them will get impacted. A lot of businesses in cities that rely on the consumption capacity of this class - cafes, restaurants etc will also see their business getting impacted. Millions of students who have trained for precisely this kind of work will find it tough to get jobs, further loosening the labour market, driving wages down. Its a vicious cycle that threatens to spiral downwards very quickly. Again, I’m not talking about AI’s actual capacity to disrupt SaaS operations, I’m only talking about the impacts of fictitious capital moving around.

If Trump is successful in carrying out his political agenda, he will seriously disrupt much of what I have described, i.e., a continuous process of dollars flowing into Wall Street from across the world, finding their way on to Wall Street. Trump has consistently argued that countries running large trade surpluses with the US such as China, Japan and South Korea benefit from undervalued currencies that make their exports cheaper and American exports relatively more expensive. This deserves some unpacking - if the yen is undervalued, then for every trade between them, America will end up paying more dollars since Japan is a trade surplus, i.e. it exports to the US more than it imports from the US. Then Japan will take all those dollars and invest it in U.S treasury bonds as a safe investment. That means central banks across the world are continuously hoarding dollars in the form of US Treasury bonds5 while the US keeps increasing its deficit every year for the privilege of having endless dollars to fight its endless wars and to dominate international trade. Through tariffs and trade pressure, his administration aims to reduce these trade imbalances. By trying to pressure these countries to appreciate their currency relative to the dollar, he wants their exports to become more expensive and American exports to become cheaper. That means Yen will appreciate and America pays less dollars to Japan. This will weaken Japanese exports and strengthen American exports. Further, Trump will try to redirect ‘recycled’ dollars coming in from the world to flow to the material or ‘real’ part of the economy, like automobile factories, steel factories and other blue collar industries; to revive the so-called Rust Belt. It is something he has been promising since his first term but has not been able to accomplish in any meaningful sense so far. Now he’s forcing this through, for example by getting India to agree to a zero percent tariff on American imports. American cotton and other commodities are going to flood the Indian market - may decrease the cost to the end consumer but Indian producers will be destroyed while the American producer benefits.

All this matters because trade surplus countries accumulate large quantities of dollars, which they often reinvest in US financial assets, including technology stocks. These inflows have played an important role in sustaining the high valuations of American technology firms. If these inflows weaken or are redirected to blue collar industries courtesy Trump, the supply of capital supporting these valuations may also decline. The AI industry in the US which depends heavily on continued capital investment and future profit expectations might soon discover its fragile financial foundations, with potentially significant consequences for both the US economy and the global financial system at large.

Infrastructural contradictions

The first contradiction manifests in the rapidly deteriorating climatic and infrastructural experience of urban spaces. Consider three examples from recent news episodes. The pollution in Delhi that gets worse every year, but conversely, harder to hide, conceal or divert with every passing year as well, so it has increasingly become a political issue. Many of the elites came down to the streets, enraged by the comical and woefully inadequate measures undertaken by the newly crowned BJP government to deal with this issue. It was clear they had no interest in even understanding the basics of the issue much less try to address it in some way through policy or action. Secondly, dozens of people died in Indore city (a city that has consistently ranked at the top in annual cleanest cities list in India for over a decade) due to unclean water getting mixed into the drinking water supply. There too, the ruling BJP MLA got into the news for insulting a reporter rather than showing any real expertise or for that matter, any political intention to get to the root of it. No accountability, and soon enough, the issue was forgotten in the hustle of the news cycle. The third example is the Aravalli matter where the government tried to sneak in a opening of the Aravalis to the mining sector. I say sneak in because it was done by changing the definition of what constitutes a valid part of the Aravali hills, a definitional shift that would render most of the hills vulnerable to extraction. Luckily, several thousands people rose up to resist and the government had to quickly retreat by getting the Supreme Court to pause the whole thing to make the attention go away.

On all three examples, the pattern couldn’t be clearer. The BJP has no idea, no expertise, no intention and no accountability in addressing complex infrastructural and climatic or environmental issues that affect all people, including Hindus. Inevitably, these issues will drive away large parts of their base through sheer incompetence or because of their arrogance in refusing to deal with these issues.

Social contradictions

Next comes social contradictions which manifest at two major levels: political Hinduism vs fundamental Hinduism; and religion vs caste. The first contradiction is manifested in the recent fracas between Shankaracharya Avimukteshwaranda (of Joshi Math) and Yogi Adityanath. These are not their real names, the former is a Brahmin and the latter is a Rajput, and these two communities have historically been at war with each other in Eastern UP. The former represents fundamental Hinduism, for whom scripture, ritual, and tradition matters more than state power, while the latter represents political Hinduism where capture of state power matters more than any fundamentalist belief in religious dogma. Here Hinduism becomes an aggregative force in the service of building a modern European style strong nation state. Historically, this is the difference between Hindu Mahasabha (political Hinduism and represented by Savarkar and BJP leaders over the years) and the RSS (fundamental Hinduism and represented by Golwalkar and the Sarsangchalaks over the years).

If Yogi does not soon apologise, he and his party will not only bleed Brahmin votes but also large parts of other caste groups who respect the sanctity of fundamental Hinduism and may chose to vote emotionally in the coming elections. If he does apologise however, it will be seen as a defeat for the Rajputs and may have negative repercussions for his future political career as a Rajput champion. For the BJP at the national level, this is a no brainer, it will or would like to do what it has always done - on the surface placate/appease fundamental Hinduism while retaining power through political Hinduism.

The other social contradiction will not be so easily sidestepped as the Brahmin-Rajput feud or the Shankaracharya-Yogi feud or what I call the Fundamental Vs Political Hinduism feud. I refer to the religion vs caste contradiction. In simple terms, the BJP wants the political terrain to be Hindu vs Muslim or in some places, Hindu vs Christian or in some places Hindu vs Bangladeshi Muslim and so on. The pattern is clear - Hindu vs minority religion. Since there is no factual or material basis for this narrative (in simple terms, its sheer fiction), the BJP drives this discourse through selectively hyping up isolated cases that suit this narrative or through disinformation, fear and suggestive innuendos. A constant flow of suspicion and hate - all to hide its basic nature - fiction. On the other hand, the real trend is equally simple - the dominant castes fear an approaching wave of OBC assertion that they are simply unable to stop no matter what. Its like a receding America trying to fight an emerging China. In this story, that refers to reality not fiction, the OBC communities have been steadily moving up the ranks in politics since the 1970s and in other spheres of public and private life since the late 1990s onwards. Once the uncontested domains of Brahmins, OBC leaders have completely dominated electoral politics in UP and Bihar - just these two states alone representing 120 seats in the Lok Sabha. Not a single dominant caste politican has been chief Minister of Bihar since the late 1990s! Between JDU and RJD, the Yadavs and Kurmis have made sure that the dominant castes and national parties are reduced to a supporting role in Bihar. That was electoral politics, but now OBCs are rising up in universities too. For a knowledge economy, the university is the factory where future players are trained and produced. OBC assertion here means a challenge to the hegemony that dominant castes have in services sector and other domains of knowledge economy that typically run on either coding or English, and of course social networks. This contradiction has now come out in the form of protests by dominant castes against UGC regulations for equity and equal opportunities in higher education.

Here, the BJP is well and truly stuck. Pull back the regulations and they lose a major chunk of the OBC and SC youth vote - a death knell in UP but also in many other states. Stay with the regulations and you have a suspicious OBC hesitantly supporting you but you definitely lose the core base of dominant castes who have steadfastly remained loyal to BJP come hell or high water for over three decades now if not much longer. Remember that dominant castes will tolerate minor advances in protection for SC and ST groups because their collective numbers are not large enough to challenge the hegemony. However, with advances in OBC, the dominant caste groups feel threatened, because even a small advance in OBC would mean a large increase in absolute numbers. This is because OBC constitute half the country’s population and there is absolutely no way a dominant caste consortium can withstand a wave of enlightened and politically unified OBC assertion. Even half of the OBC if combined with SC, ST and Muslim bloc will totally demolish the dominant caste hegemony at least in public institutions if the protections are continued and dominant caste hold over upper management is loosened and democratized. I’m just not sure what the BJP can do when it is stuck so badly in this dilemma - choosing between the devil and the deep blue sea. Or as they say in Hindi - peeche khai aage kuan.

Political contradiction

This is the final kind of contradiction because of the way BJP has structured itself in a radically different way in the last ten years compared to its earlier forms. In this latest structure, power is absolutely centralised like a pyramid where the leadership at the top controls the entire structure below it through a carefully controlled capillary flow of power to chosen nodes. This minimizes risk in terms of leakage of information, ensures compliance on policy coming from the top, and further renders everyone vulnerable to the whimsies of those above them - a structure designed to evoke complete subordination.

However, while this makes for efficient authoritarianism, it also has a few structural flaws on the other side of it. Concentration of power at the top means that for anyone who seeks real power to change something in their society or domain, the space for power shrinks as you climb to the top. This means as you seek more meaningful space higher up the pyramid, the competition increases. As a result, while the top leadership is secure in its position, those just below or a little below are fighting with each other trying to get to the top, given the shrinking surface area. Also, the incentive structures for those at the bottom are unhealthy, incentivising early career politicians to do increasingly crazy things (lynchings, hate speech etc.) to claim spotlight and climb up this rather steep incline.

A related effect of this pyramidical centralization is the decreasing ability to control things as the surface area expands on the way down. The evidence is clear on the mishandling and lack of capacity to control narratives on various controversies/contradictions mentioned above. They look flustered and clam up in silence when the script deviates from their plan. This doesn’t bode well because these days, almost anything has the potential to transform instantly from a daily banal activity to a media event - an accident, controlling a crowd, a leakage, a law passed, a meme going viral or a social media byte and so on

Another issue is the accumulation of wealth by the BJP and its instrumental use of investigative agencies to get opposition leaders in line. Both have resulted in a certain kind of saturation. Everyone who was vulnerable from the opposition has been poached (at the MLA and MP level at least), leading to hundreds of Congress and other opposition parties occupying high posts in the BJP while those cadre who have spent years trying to strengthen the party or its affiliate organisations have little to show for it, except the humiliation of now having to campaign for a former rival. The offices have become posh and large, hi-tech with security and latest gadgets but these very things have also increasingly put the party out of touch with the ordinary cadre who has neither money nor power but wants to connect with the party. The party has lost its organic grassroots kind of ‘mahaul’ that created roots down to the last mile in approachable leaders who lived nearby and yet could send a message to the top. This organic link has been severed, and the party has now begun to resemble the colonial high handedness of the state itself - large buildings serving as district offices, politicians accumulating and displaying obscene wealth. As power concentrates, so does wealth get drawn to those in power like a magnet. Inevitably some of that accumulation tends to not be in sync with each other, they are competing interests and they will compete for favour from those in power - the internal squabbles begin in this way and if the regime in power cannot handle it, eventually it will also become another kind of contradiction that will surely bring down the BJP just as quickly as they ascended.

Background

On 13th January 2026, the Government of India enacted a new law called ‘UGC (Promotion of Equity in Higher Education Institutions) Regulations, 2026’ (henceforth PoE) to introduce equal opportunities and equity in higher education through gazette notification. In 2017 the Rohith Vemula a PhD candidate in University of Hyderabad committed suicide due to caste discrimination. It proved to be a tipping point - symbolizing institutional murder of SC/ST/OBC students in higher education. Two years later, Dr. Payal Salim Tadvi, a senior student at Topiwala Medical College in Maharashtra too committed suicide due to caste discrimination. The mothers of both students, Radhika Vemula and Abida Tadvi in August 2019, filed a petition in the Supreme Court with three arguments - the existing regulations (of 2012) were insufficient, the UGC and other institutions were complacent in enforcing these regulations, and finally, that new guidelines should be issued towards equity and equal opportunities in higher education.

As soon as the notification was released, there was almost instantaneous protests from the top dominant caste Hindu associations - Brahmins, Rajputs, Bhumihars mainly, although other dominant castes such as Jats, Patels, Gurjars, Kayasths etc have protested to a lesser degree. Secondly, protests have been restricted to the Hindi heartland while hardly or no protests in South India. The UGC (Promotion of Equity in Higher Education Institutions) Regulations, 2026 were released in draft form for feedback from the public in February 2025, but it is not clear if the objections made today were made then.

Political Economy of higher education

One cannot make sense of this background without first placing the entire episode - both the petition, a precipitating cause for the PoE and the subsequent protests without situating it in historical context.

• Over the last three hundred years, power in its economic form has shifted from land and material wealth to the knowledge economy - both in public and private sectors. Naturally, during this transition, those who have had a historical (meaning at least for last 2500 years) monopoly on knowledge production, circulation and consumption, were able to take the lead in the new configuration.

• Formal political independence of ‘India’ from the British empire in 1947 concealed this above mentioned shift in power - from British elites to Indian elites.

• The discourse created by the cumulative effort of various figures - starting from Buddha to Ambedkar, resulted in constitutional protections for SC and ST communities since 1950, including in higher education. Dominant castes accepted this as a compromise in order to avoid a return of separate electorates (quashed by Gandhi in the Poona Pact of 1932).

• Liberalisation and Mandal Commission created an earthquake in the settled power geometry of caste relations in India. Many OBC communities who were in agriculture especially those who owned agricultural land, became prosperous as their lands skyrocketed in value for their commercial use. Mandal commission and the political acumen of politicians like V.P Singh and later Arjun Singh (both Rajputs) ensured that OBCs were able to enter the ivory tower of higher education in India. Till then, higher education in India was a domain of Brahmins and other dominant castes, with token presence of SC and ST - too few to challenge the field. With OBC entering the higher education field since the late 90s (both teachers and students), the composition of public higher education changed gradually.

• Within two decades, dominant castes started setting up their own private universities with very high fees (as much as 10 lakhs/year) to price out students from SC, ST, OBC and other working class groups. The idea was to set up these as a ring fenced pipeline for elite Indians to go to Ivy League universities in the US or elite European universities. In short, dominant castes started fleeing from public universities, unable to bear the changing composition of university campuses and classrooms.

• However, there is still a significant number of dominant castes who cannot afford these ring fenced pipelines and have no choice but to rely on public universities. It is these groups who are on the streets today protesting the PoE regulations.

• It should be noted that dominant castes faced or perceived no threat from reservations and protections for SC and ST students, but the minute OBCs get any reservations or protections, the dominant castes feel threatened. Why? Because OBCs are significantly more in number, around half the population of the country! And secondly, many OBCs are economically prosperous and cannot be cowed down, nor can they be stopped through insidious mechanisms like disqualification through interviews (“Not Found Suitable”).

• Now more recently, Trump’s economic policies and anti-immigration policies have impacted dominant caste aspirations and plans to flee India (with US being the favoured destination). American employers will not pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to sponsor H-1B visas for Indians, ICE agents are going beserk against anyone they suspect to be ‘illegal immigrants’ and to make matters worse, many Americans on existing H-1B visas in the US are all going to come back to India and further loosen the job market.

• Finally, there are many foreign universities going to be setting up campuses in India, competing with elite Indian universities both public and private. It won’t make a difference to public but the private ones will probably lose out in the race, unable to compete with subsidized education from the public sector and higher quality faculty, equipment and classrooms from the foreign universities. However, in the final instance, given that jobs for Indians are disappearing in the West, it looks likely that all Indians will have to compete in India itself, in a ever loosening job market. This general dissatisfaction with transformation in the status quo has manifested itself in the protests against PoE regulations - the final straw, the tipping point.

Moral failure

Now the PoE regulations were precipitated because of three claims - existing ones were insufficient, universities were complacent in enforcing them, new regulations be issued. These new regulations appear to insufficiently address the first one, appear to address the second claim, and of course fulfill the third claim. But the most important point is that these PoE regulations have ‘proceduralized’ the issue of equity and equal opportunities in higher education. So far the farce was continuing because while there were reservations for SC and ST candidates in both teaching and student bodies, they remained largely unfulfilled or woefully underfulfilled either through NFS or because the pipeline itself was broken - meaning that SCs and STs never made it through primary education because that part is fundamentally broken to a large extent, they never make it in sufficient numbers to fulfill the quota reserved for them. Now with OBCs, even though in relative terms, the underfulfillment of OBC quotas may look similar to the underfulfilling in SC and ST communities (only 4% OBCs have become professors in all 45 or so central universities), in absolute numbers, it still means a significant increase in OBCs coming into public universities. In response, the universities have casualized teaching itself, but even as ad-hoc faculty, Bahujan consciousness and assertion has been seeping into public universities, slowly but steadily. The dominant castes are only too aware of this.

The proceduralization of equity and equal opportunities is just that because the decision makers are all from dominant castes, and therefore extremely unlikely for justice to be provided in any instances of discrimination on basis of caste. Other markers of discrimination may function independently of caste discrimination. My point is that on the basis of caste, the PoE will not be able to stem the hatred and discrimination that SC, ST and OBC students face in public universities anymore than 2012 regulations, although the 2026 PoE regulations may be more effective in combating discrimination on basis of gender, disability, race, place of birth etc. Let us not forget that in the dominant caste protests against Mandal in the early 1990s, there was a large contingent of women who had come out in protest, their logic being we do not want to marry unemployed men! When it comes to caste, other markers become ‘internal’, with caste difference becoming unquestionable in its supposedly eternal nature.

Think of the change in appointing the Chief Election Commissioner. On one hand, you have Model A - Leader of Opposition, Chief Justice and Prime Minister, on the other hand you have Model B - Leader of Opposition, Minister of ruling Government, Prime Minister. It is obvious that with Model B which is what we have in India today, no matter how strong you make the procedural aspects of appointing the CEC, the appointment will always be a candidate that the government wants, because its 2 against 1. Very simple. Similarly, in PoE enabled equity committees, no matter how much representation is there for SC, ST and OBCs, it won’t matter because in the final instance, it is the VC that decides, and those are firmly in control of the dominant castes, or led by SC/ST/OBCs who obey the diktats of the ruling class.

These regulations make a lot of noise and show about timely action and how to escalate a case, even the provision of an obudsman - like I said, its fetishizing procedure. While these steps are to be welcomed obviously, my point is that it is unwise to have any expectations about real effects. As long as dominant castes remain in control of upper management, these procedures are just formalities meant to appease. Ironically, even this flimsy show of appeasement is enough to threaten huge numbers of dominant castes to come on the streets - cursing the very party and leaders that they have hitherto worshipped and protected against all logic and evidence of wrongdoing. When their own interests are perceived to be under threat, they suddenly become politically active against their masters.

Coming on the eve of a whole spate of state-level elections in states like Kerala, Tamil Nadu to Assam and West Bengal, and more worryingly, UP - this whole situation is more politicised than usual. As it is any issue of caste in higher education is extremely sensitive because higher education is the terrain on which access to knowledge economy is distributed. Any change in the geometry of this terrain provokes immediate reactions from all parties - either struggling to dislodge those in power or those in power themselves.

Reviewing the Objections

Let us quickly come to the objections themselves, trifling and absurd as they are, they deserve a response. First, there is protection for SC, ST and OBC, women, disabled etc, why not for General Category? Why no protections for us only? This is absurd in its logical form. There are so many laws to protect children from adults, but no laws to protect adults from children, why? so many to protect women from men but no laws to protect men from women. There is SC/ST Prevention of Atrocities Act 1989 but there is no Brahmin or Rajput or General Category Prevention of Atrocities Act, why? Because laws are not made from pure theoretical considerations but based on the historical record of what has happened in the past and evidence of what is happening in the present. And in both cases, the historical record of the past and evidence of the present, it is crystal clear. Dominant castes discriminate against those lower than them in a graded hierarchy. Therefore, naturally those at the top of the graded hierarchy, given that there is nobody above them, cannot be discriminated against, on the basis of caste. They can only perpetuate discrimination, not suffer from it. Someone saying something from below you cannot, in structural terms, be discriminatory, it is more of a challenge to authority.

Second objection is potential misuse of PoE to harass dominant castes. This is also absurd. Of course it is possible that an individual here or there may occasionally misuse the PoE to harass a dominant caste person. However, potential misuse by the oppressed against the oppressor cannot be the basis for preventing legislation to protect the oppressed against the oppressor. If one is calculating which scenario is more likely based on past events (caste discrimination in higher education has , it is overwhelmingly more likely that the legislation will be used to protect the weak against the strong rather than the weak attack the strong. Every legislation in this country meant to protect some special group whether on the basis of caste, gender, religion, ethnicity etc. has occasionally been misused, it is inevitable. No law or legislation can be 100% guaranteed to work as it was intended to. There are always consequences that one didn’t want, or that one didnt anticipate. But those consequences rarely cross the line to the extent that they do more harm than good for the weak. That is why anti-dowry legislation has survived, POCSO has survived, SC/ST Prevention of Atrocities Act has survived, that is why reservations have survived. There is enormous democratic pressure that politicians face if they try to reverse these protections. The protestors against the PoE have refused or cannot see the majority of cases, and straight away going to speculative fringe cases, reveal the nakedness of their thinking - there is no constitutional value, there is no spirit of solidarity, cooperation or support (fraternity) - there is only suspicion and anxiety about losing the power they have held on to for so long. This is the real moral failure of dominant caste groups - they simply have not moved on. One had hoped that the Mandal episode and its afterlife would have soothed dominant caste anxieties but it is clear they have learned nothing.

Third, lack of clarity around representation in grievance redressal mechanisms such as equity committee, ombudsman etc. This is also a weak point and if anyone has a reason to voice concern it should be SC, ST and OBCs because in a ten member committee, the PoE only says that these should be represented but it is entirely possible that the female representative, the disabled representative, the dean, faculty representatives, the equity officer may all be from dominant castes, in which case the Bahujan representation will be outvoted and their perspectives drowned out every time. Given the intersectional nature of such things, it is an impossible task to make sure each and every aspect of discrimination is represented by a single individual. Much better to have (at least some if not all) equity committee members be nominated from within the university community (students, teachers, non-teaching staff) and then elected by that community. At least their decisions and operations will begin with some credibility and hopefully trust. But as I mentioned earlier, none of this really matters until there is proportional representation in upper management.

What is to be done?

The Supreme Court (the degradation of which is a classic example of what happens to democratic institutions when there is no representation of SC, STs and OBCs at the upper levels) has stayed the PoE on 29th Jan and scheduled the next hearing on 19th of March. The first step is to spread the message everywhere amongst all SC, ST and OBC youth and to create a massive campaign around it, a show of strength. Mass visibility to signal to the government clearly that not only must it defend the PoE in court and outside but also go further in strengthening them continuously. With just over a month and a half, there should be sufficient time to reach out to all Bahujan youth and explain the issue in simple terms, get them signed up to the campaign. Social media can be an effective tool to spread the message. Tactically, the PoE should be renamed the Vemula-Tadvi Regulations 2026 for wider recognition and appeal.

The next steps are of longer time frame, listed here in short, medium and long term priorities

• Short Term - to get a OBC Prevention of Atrocities Act, i.e. a separate legislation enacted within this year or next year. Such an Act modeled on its SC Atrocities Prevention Act counterpart, would go a long way in making the PoE regulations enforceable and lend them weight. /in fact this would be an ideal campaign issue for INC-SP combine in the upcoming UP elections

• Medium Term - to liberate the faculty and upper management in higher education from dominant caste capture - removing interviews and instead appointing faculty through written tests, reservation in promotions, preventing unfilled reserved jobs from getting converted to ‘General’ jobs.

• Long Term - to fix the pipeline of primary education in public schools for SC, ST and OBC children - increased budgets, full and permanent appointment of teachers (with reservation quotas implemented of course), infrastructural funding for upgradation and digitalization, two language policy (state language and English), improving punitive measures for discrimination in schools. Unless this part of the education pipeline is fixed, most SC, ST and OBC youth won’t even make it to higher education.

But there is another bloc which is also quite large and plays a significant role in shaping Bihar’s electoral fortunes - the Scheduled Castes (SCs) of Bihar. Notice that unlike BCs, EBCs and dominant castes who have never been counted since the 1930s, the SCs and STs of this country have always been counted for the purpose of reservations, as agreed upon in the Poona Pact of 1932, and as enshrined in the Indian constitution adopted in 1950. This means the demographic strength of SCs is mapped historically through the census. The initial census records show that SCs were about 15% of the total population, consistent with the national numbers (16.6% as per the last national census in 2011). Over the decades, due to improvements in fertility, marginal improvements in access to public health, and also due to improvements in enumeration efforts, the current SC population as per the Caste survey by Bihar government in 2023, is 2.57 crore people (25.7 million) which is 19.65% of the total population of Bihar. Like Karnataka then, Bihar is also nearly 20% SC, but in both states, the SC population has not managed to convert this 20% into political leadership.

The reasons may become clear if we look into the composition of this 20% bloc. It is composed of 22 SC castes, which could be broadly grouped under the following categories:

Agriculture and land-based labour castes which includes diverse SCs such as Musahar represented by HAM(S) and led by Jitan Ram Manjhi, known as Nitish’s man and was for a brief period, appointed as Chief Minister of Bihar, currently contesting 6 seats in Bihar as part of NDA. It should be noted that Rahul Gandhi has made a special effort to woo the Manjhis by visiting the house of Bhagirath Manjhi, the son of a hero Dasharath Manjhi, the so- called Mountain Man of Bihar. After the photos of Rahul sitting in his hut went viral, Nitish quickly saw to it that Bhagirath Manjhi got a pucca house. Since then Bhagirath has publicly thanked Rahul for bringing attention to the downtrodden condition of a hero’s family. It also includes Pasis who are traditionally toddy tappers but have gone with RJD this time since Nitish has criminalised toddy by including it as alcoholic beverage, leading to hundreds of pasi men and women arrested for selling ‘alcohol’. RJD has campaigned that if INDIA comes to power, toddy will not be considered alcohol, bringing in much needed relief from the policing of this community.

Another significant caste is Pan community mostly consisting of landless agricultural labour. Nitish merged Tanti Tatwa into Pan back in 2015 thereby leading the Supreme Court to say that Tanti Tatwa was brought into SC by the ‘back door’, i.e. by merging them with existing SC group (Pan is listed as SC since the beginning in 1950) rather than as a separate identity. Tanti Tatwa leaders like IP Gupta claim that there are documents and oral histories that tie Pan and Tanti Tatwa together, they have even started adding Pan to their name. This is a normal process of building jamaat out of distinct jaatis in the grand process of Bahujan consolidation. We have seen Mukesh Saini do the same with EBCs (Mallahs, Kevat, Bind, Nishad etc in his case). Let us take that claim at face value, since it is like to take decades before the matter is settled legislatively or juridically. And also it should be taken at face value because ultimately the matter is to be settled politically as reflected in the contemporary political choices of Pan and Tanti Tatwas on the ground rather than a technical examination of some archives from the past. Other SCs in this grouping includes Bhuiyan, Rajwar/Turi, Kharwar and Bauri.

The next meso grouping can be called artisanal or craft labour castes and services. These include Lohar, Basor/Burud, Tamta/Thather, Turi, Dhanka/Dhangar, their historical occupations include ironsmithing, carpentry, bamboo/cane craft, brass/copper utensil making, basket and rope making etc. The services castes include Dhobi, Dom, Halpasi, Bantar and their occupations include washing and laundry, sanitation, cremation, village security etc.

The third meso group are either nomadic in nature or restricted to forests and hill edges or partially nomadic (i.e. dependent on employer/nature of employment). Occupations include acrobatics, traveling musicians and other forms of public entertainment, hawking, water associated labour such as boating, fishing, basket making, firewood and forest produce collection, shifting cultivation etc. Castes in this mixed meso group include Nat, Kanjar, Chandravanshi, Bind, Dhanka, Kharia, Thather etc.

Together these three meso groups, consisting of 20 SC castes make up 12% of Bihar’s population, and just over 61% of the SC population in Bihar. There are two other rather large SC groups - Chamar who also call themselves/are called Ravidasia, roughly 3% of Bihar’s population, and Dusadh who also call themselves/are called Paswan, roughly 4.5% of Bihar’s population. Remember that Nitish created EBC out of BC in 2006. The next year, Nitish made a Mahadalit Commission which categorised these three meso groups - the 12% as Mahadalits, and excluded Ravidas and Paswan from that. From 2007 to 2010, SC in Bihar was divided into Mahadalits - the 20 SC castes, and the two SC castes - Ravidas and Paswan. In 2010, under pressure, Nitish finally included Ravidas and Paswan in the Mahadalit category thereby coinciding the categories of Mahadalit and SC in Bihar.

The material conditions for SCs as a whole has been dismal inspite of caste-conscious politics in Bihar since the days of Karpuri Thakur. The caste survey conducted in 2023 reveals that nearly 43% of SC households live under 6000 rupees per month. Less than 2% of SC households earn more than 50,000 rupees per month. Just over 1% of SCs are in government services/jobs and just over 3% of SCs have graduate degrees. There’s no official data available, but if BAMCEF figures are to be believed, Paswans with 4.5% of Bihar’s population has just 1% of land holdings, and other SC groups even less.

The Ravidas caste due to the historical occupation of leather work, developed ties with urban industry and achieved limited (but relatively significant) economic mobility, which when combined with their demographic strength has made them achieve some political representation and access to state power and bureaucracy. Another significant factor in the material and spiritual development has been the influence of the social reformer Sant Ravidas (15-16th century) who continues to shape the ethical and political imagination of this community. Although his influence is pervasive in terms of geographical scope, his ideas sadly remain confined to the SC population, and other more dominant castes have not taken to, much less internalised his radical teachings. Forming 3% of Bihar’s population, they have no party dedicated to Ravidas community and their votes are split - some of the younger and more Ambedkarite leaning individuals have gone to Congress since Rahul Gandhi has started raising issues of caste-based issues, while yet others are with RJD for historical reasons, yet others support LJP as a Dalit leader speaking on behalf of all Dalits, while some have gone to BJP for nationalism and other reasons. In certain parts of Bihar, Ravidas vote goes to the Left parties as well. A few months back, the Congress has appointed Rajesh Ram who comes from Ravidas community as the state president of Congress, and this is expected to further boost Ravidas votes for INDIA. But it may be a case of too little too late.

The Paswan caste has made economic advancements due to various factors and when combined with their demographic strength, have been able to mobilise and economically prosper faster compared to other SCs in Bihar. Even today, the Paswans are sometimes called Dusadhs but Paswan commonly understood as protector, has become the name of choice. Unlike the influence of Sant Ravidas, the Paswans mythology relates more to historical figures whose valor would earn the respect from all segments of society.

It is not a surprise that Ram Vilas Paswan created the Lok Janshakti Party (LJP) in 2000 and has allied both with NDA and UPA in his brilliant but brief career. Upon his death in 2020, the party split into two factions. Ram Vilas’s brother Pasupati Paras now runs one faction called the Rashtriya Lok Janshakti Party (RLJP) which is unofficially supporting the INDIA bloc (although it was with NDA last time), and has the helicopter as its election symbol. Ram Vilas’s son Chirag Paswan now runs the other faction called Lok Janshakti Party (Ramvilas) or LJP(R), which is officially with NDA this time.

Historically, there has been a long time feud running between LJP and JDU, between Ram Vilas and Nitish, and since the former’s demise in 2020, between his son Chirag and Nitish. The genesis of the feud goes back to 2005 when Nitish believed that by contesting independently, Ram Vilas split the anti-Lalu vote by winning 29 seats, and refused to support either RJD or JDU, proposing a Muslim CM candidate instead. In October 2005, elections were held again and this time Nitish came to power supported by BJP. Merely two years after coming to power, Nitish took revenge by creating the Mahadalit comprising 20 of the 22 SCs isolating Ram Vilas. Since then, both have been in NDA but interpersonal and political relations have always been icy at best. When Ram Vilas passed away in 2020, Chirag contested LJP(R) independently, running on the campaign line Modi se bair nahin, Nitish teri khair nahin. On paper Chirag’s party was independent, but in pratice, several BJP leaders contested on LJP (R) symbol, particularly focused on seats where JD(U) was contesting. This cut JD(U)s vote and in the 2020 elections, JD(U) was reduced to just 43 seats. The slogan then was that Bhajpa hi Lojpa hai aur Lojpa hi Bhajpa hai. Meaning BJP and LJP (R) are interchangeable, to vote for one means to vote for the other. Even though Chirag got zero seats, his main objective of cutting down Nitish to size was achieved. Infamously, this is now known as the “Chirag Model” in Bihar. In 2025, both LJP(R) - 29 seats and JD(U) - 101 seats are in the NDA alliance, but many are wondering if JD(U) voters will take revenge this time, and whether EBC will really vote for LJP(R) or BJP in seats where these candidates are contesting on behalf of NDA. Time will tell.

As you can see, the SC bloc is complicated in Bihar. The Tanti-Tatwa was SC from 2015 to 2024, but suddenly has gone back to EBC. The Paswans have their own party in LJP(R) and leader in Chirag who seems firmly committed to BJP, although not to JD(U) making it problematic for the stability of NDA. On the other hand, the Musahars have their own party in HAM (S) and leader in Jitan Ram Manjhi who is committed to Nitish but could be persuaded to switch to BJP given the right conditions. All the others remain reliant on one party or the other to advance their respective castes but unable to secure political representation regardless of the alliance. Due to reservations based on current delimitation and last census in 2011, there are 38 protected seats in Bihar where only SC candidates can contest, so no matter what the results, the Bihar assembly will have 38 SC MLAs roughly 15% of the total assembly - an under-representation of their nearly 20% population. Given that both sides are aggressively wooing SCs, the vote will be split between INDIA and NDA. However, it is indicative that unlike neighbouring UP, there has been no Chief Minister from SC (yes there was Bhola Shastri from Pasi community but he was CM in the 70s and that too only for a few days), let alone multiple times like Mayawati of the BSP. With 20% combined strength, where the SC goes, so does the government of Bihar - but in principle not in practice, until a jamaat can be built out of the 22 jaatis. Can it be built? Another question is even if this jamaat is built, under whose leadership and which alliance or will it be independent? In the current political formations, there seems to be no answers to such questions. The focus of the drama seems to be entirely between the BCs and EBCs themselves, with all other groups reduced to supporting cast(e) roles.

Bihar was the first state in the country since Independence to release the results of a state-wide caste census almost exactly two years ago, and the findings were as follows: OBCs (called BCs) - 27.12%, EBCs - 36.01%, SCs - 19.65%, General - 15.52% and STs - 1.68%. Three things to note about this census or more accurately, this survey: One - It should be noted that it also included Muslims as either OBC or EBC depending on specific caste names/occupations. Two - everyone already knew the numbers informally but making this formal influences political claim-making processes on the basis of caste - an important blow to the (negative) consolidating claims of Hindutva politics. Three - In Bihar, there is no OBC, only BC and EBC. So if you look at the central list of OBCs in Bihar, it will be a combined list of BC + EBC, but in the state list of Bihar, they are categorised by BC and EBC.

Bihar is perhaps the only state in India which has not been ruled by a dominant caste leader or party since 1990. Since the last three and a half decades, Bihar has been in the grip of BCs - first the Yadavs under Lalu from 1990 to 2005, and then under the Kurmis under Nitish since 2005 onwards. Bihar saw caste mobilisation very early, as early as 1933/34 when the three relatively dominant (i.e. dominant today) OBCs - Kurmi, Yadav, Koeri (also called as Kushwaha) came together to unseat the dominant caste monopoly in Bihar politics - famously called the Triveni Sangam with each of these castes connverging like the rivers of Ganga, Yamuna and Saraswati. While Yadavs have remained loyal to Lalu’s RJD, the Kurmis and Koeris (colloquially called Luv-Kush after the Pandava brothers in Mahabharath) have become core voters of Nitish’s JD(U).

Now, out of the total 27.12% of BCs in Bihar, the Yadavs alone are 52% of that 27%, with Kurmi 10% and Koeris about 15% of the BCs. Together, these BCs make up nearly 80% of the total BC population. The other BCs are fragmented and not able to mobilise because of their low demographic strength. Most of the other BCs comprising 20-22% either go with Nitish or Lalu depending on various other factors that are local (choice of candidate, local issues etc.), and some of them have even been converted into BJP or NDA voters because of other issues - religion, nationalism, charisma of leaders like Modi etc.

Nitish created EBC out of BC in 2006, a year after coming to power. Here there are no big three castes like the BCs (Yadav plus “Luv-Kush” of Kurmi and Koeri), but rather a ‘long tail’ of many, (some say 112) castes who are all under 1-2% of the total population of Bihar. In other words, they are numerous as jaatis but they have been so far missing from the political discourse because they haven’t built a jamaat out of their differentiated jaats. Hence, it is no surprise that even though BCs have largely displaced dominant castes from Bihar politics since 1990s, 33.58% of EBC households still earn less than 6000 rupees or less per month. On the other hand, in spite of a caste conscious political culture, dominant castes enjoy material privilege even if BCs dominate electoral politics. For example, Brahmins with just 3.6% of the population own 16% of the land, or even more astoundingly, Bhumihars with just 2.8% of the population, own 39% of the land in Bihar. On the other hand, Yadavs with more than 14% of the population own just 7.5% of the land.

Given this background, the political discourse generated by the official publishing of the caste numbers and their corresponding social and educational profile has spread like wildfire across Bihar. Even though Nitish has done more for EBCs in his last 20 years (2005-2025) than Lalu in his 15 years (1990-2005), it has not been enough. Nitish has targeted welfare schemes for girls and women across religion, and specifically enabled political representation (50%) for women and EBC representation (20%) at the Gram Panchayat (village) level drastically improving their political representation at the grassroots level even though the EBCs don’t hold much power at the meso and macro levels of political power in Bihar. The EBCs have just managed to get 29 political representatives in 2020 (out of 243 Assembly seats, that converts to just under 12%) when it comes to the Bihar Assembly - vastly underrepresented when compared to their fragmented but numerically large population (36%). The INDIA and NDA blocs are keenly aware that subaltern castes hold the key to power and they have taken steps to devolve some seats to smaller caste-specific parties.

Lets take NDA to begin with. The bloc has the following parties:

• BJP party led by Samrat Chaudhary (Koeri) and Vijay Sinha (Bhumihar) representing the dominant castes

• JD (U) led by Nitish representing Kurmi and Koeri (BCs) + part of the SC vote specifically non-Paswan (Dusadh) and non-Ravidas (Chamar) SCs like Pasi, Dhobi, Dom, Bhuiya etc (about 20 SCs) + part of the Muslim vote (especially women).

• RLM led by Upendra Kushwaha representing Koeri caste

• HAM(S) led by Jitan Ram Manjhi representing Musahar - a SC caste

• LJP (R) led by Chirag Paswan representing Paswan - a SC caste (roughly 4.5% of the population)

While BJP and other parties are expected to bring in the dominant caste + parts of the SC and BC vote, its JDU that is expected to bring in the EBC vote. So far he has delivered by transferring EBC votes to his own JD (U) and to his allies in NDA (which so far did not have LJP(R) but includes them in 2025 NDA - this is significant but will explain this in the next piece). It remains to be seen whether the EBCs will continue to support JD (U) and in addition transfer their votes to NDA or will there be a split?

Lets take INDIA bloc now, which has the following parties:

• RJD led by Tejaswi Yadav representing Yadavs (roughly 14%) and Muslims (roughly 17%)

• Congress led by Rajesh Ram (Ravidas - SC caste, roughly 3% of the population) but actually has no solid caste bloc behind them. They attract a mix of dominant caste, Muslim, and SC voters - given that BC and EBC are already claimed by RJD and JD (U).

• Vikasheel Insaan Party (VIP) led by Mukesh Sahni (Mallah - EBC caste roughly 2% of the population) who has been announced as Deputy CM candidate for INDIA. Sahni is trying to make a jamaat of water-associated castes rather than only Mallahs - to include other castes such as Kevat, Bind etc and if he succeeds, it will be the first sub-jamaat effort (not the whole EBC) to consolidate about 8-9% of the 36% EBC bloc.

• India Inquilaab Party (IIP) led by IP Gupta (Tanti-Tatwa - EBC caste mainly involved in textile weaving and agricultural labour - mostly landless). IP Gupta claims their population is about 20 lakh people which if true would make them about 4 or 5% of the EBC - a powerful bloc.

• The Left bloc comprising of CPI, CPI (M) and CPI (ML). ML is the most successful of the Left and they too like the Congress have no solid caste bloc behind them since they focus on class consciousness as the main category for political mobilization rather than caste consciousness. Because of their relevant political messaging and campaigning, many of the SC, EBC and Muslim communities (especially extremely poor and landless amongst these) have shifted to the Left bloc in recent years, slowly increasing the footprint of the Left.

So while RJD brings a solid 14% Yadav plus 17% Muslim as extremely loyal base, it becomes very difficult to go beyond that 30% vote bloc. Apart from VIP and IIP, there’s no real effort or representative of other EBCs and apart from the symbolic wooing of Ravidas and Pasi (SC) by giving tickets (e.g. Uday Narayan Chaudhari - a Pasi leader) or leadership positions (Rajesh Ram), there’s no real party or vote base amongst the SCs for INDIA. The real question is will VIP and IIP succeed in even bringing 8-10% of the EBC into INDIA? Given how close the last election was, if they do succeed, it could swing the election in INDIA’s favour.

In the context of the 2025 Bihar elections, there are two important caveats with respect to BC and EBC politics. In 2015, Nitish Kumar got two major communities - Teli (oil pressers, Modi incidentally is a Teli) and Tamoli (betel-leaf sellers) shifted from BC into EBC. Representing about 3.2% of the total 36%, these communities are believed to be economically powerful (land ownership, business, education levels etc.) and the other 100-110 castes who have been in EBC much longer are upset at their pie of reservations shrinking and thus losing opportunities at the cost of these two castes.

Coming to Tanti-Tatwa represented by IP Gupta’s IIP, there is no clarity on the size of the population because this caste was classified as SC by Nitish in 2015 but the Supreme Court quashed it in 2024 and this caste reverted to EBC since last year. Now, the Tanti Tatwa want to regain their SC status and given IP Gupta’s prominence in INDIA campaign, this part of the EBC could shift to INDIA but if that messaging works, it would paradoxically discourage the existing SCs from voting because inclusion and prominence for Tanti Tatwa would shrink the pie for the other 22 SC castes in terms of reservations and associated opportunities.

It is clear that the prime minister is not being informed about the ground realities otherwise he would not have called it savings festival - a name that adds salt to injury. Why? Just dig into the recent National Household Expenditure Consumption Survey of 2023-2024. Apart from strong indicators of massaging the numbers, the Modi government has allowed these and other statistics (like GDP) to come to light because there are very few people (e.g. Arun Kumar or at a global level, Ashoka Mody, Jayati Ghosh etc) who can join the dots from different data pieces that float around to construct the real picture. With such few critical economists around willing to speak openly, its easy to suppress the issue in popular media discourse.

Even the private sector is willing to admit that of a 1.4 billion population, a billion people are barely surviving, mostly reliant on state welfare (PDS, housing, farmer schemes, women’s welfare schemes and other such subsidies). Of the remaining 40 million or so, household debt is rising to alarming levels, i.e. most of these households are taking out loans to maintain their lifestyle and manage their rising expenses. It is highly doubtful if the borrowers will be able to pay back these loans as the interest accumulates. Even if they are able to pay back, its a question of living precariously. There’s certainly no question of savings. Real wages have stagnated while costs of living have increased - this is what inflation looks like in India.

Its certainly true that reductions in GST will come as a much needed relief. However, there will be no increase in savings and nor will there be a corresponding cycle of investments or increase in consumption. Cars and bikes will continue to remain unsold, FMCG will be purchased in increasingly smaller quantities (chota recharge!) and inequality will continue to rise. The fundamental economic approach must change. Investing in business titans has not and will not result in trickle down, nor will it lead to jobs. All the while, the Modi state has no answer or willingness to address the root of the problem. They are just deferring the inevitable crisis through two ways - a reduction in the looting when pushed to it, or increasing state disbursal of welfare through a range of schemes on the eve of elections (both state and national).

The government can dress these up as festivals and what not how much ever they life, but it will not change the fundamental dynamics of our economy - a small percentage of elite people basically enjoying life while the vast majority get squeezed harder every day. The consequences of this trend is plain for all to imagine, just as we see in places like Kenya, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh, Indonesia or France. As COVID clearly demonstrated, Indians are not immune to what happens in the world!