2026

BOOK EXCERPT
An excerpt from Chapter 5 of The Measurement Trap: India’s Quest for Social Progress Through Eight Decades (Routledge, forthcoming). Endnotes have been omitted; full references appear in the book. ON 6 APRIL 1996, in the market town of Beawar in Ajmer district, a few hundred labourers, farmers and their organisers sat down at Chang Gate and stayed for forty days. The Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan, the organisation of workers and peasants that had by then held a series of (…)

The people are in revolt, and the entire social order is collapsing
19 October 2026
It’s like a traffic accident: a fatal junction, a death. Macronism is dying at the crossroads for which it has always been destined: the intersection of capital and people. Here, capital appears in its purest form — the form of money that makes money, without mediation: finance capital. And opposite it: the fire. The Financial Times ran an early headline: ‘France Caught Between the Bond Market and the (…)

JOINT STATEMENT BY LEFT PARTIES
October 9, 2026
Right to Assemble & Protest A Fundamental Right
We strongly condemn the extraordinary restrictions imposed by the Delhi Police under the directions of the Union Home Minister to prevent and curb the October 10 mobilisation against the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls and the functioning of the Election Commission of India (ECI). The denial of permission for the proposed demonstration, extensive barricading, (…)

Communist Party of India
October 9, 2026
Press Release
The National Secretariat of the Communist Party of India issued the following statement today (October 9, 2026):
The National Secretariat of the Communist Party of India has strongly condemned the repressive tactics of the BJP government to crush the democratic rights of people to protest.
CJP and all Left student youth organisations have declared that they will have peaceful demonstrations at Jantar Mantar in Delhi to demand (…)

On 7 October, 2026, a bench of Justice Atul Sreedharan and Justice Achal Sachdev of Allahabad High Court remarked that police’s condition in Uttar Pradesh is a mess and that the officers think they can do anything and get away with it. Hearing the habeas corpus petition of one Deepak, the Court told the Assistant Commissioner of Police, Gautam Buddha Nagar and Station House Officer that they should be ashamed of having issued a notice to the accused under section 130 of Bhartiya Nagrik (…)

Is it that the CJP movement that erupted across India in mid-2026 is testament of the societal collapse of sense making that mirrors death of aspiration? Vervaeke, a noted cognitive scientist and a psychologist, calls it a crisis of meaning at the macro level or existential exhaustion (Vervaeke, 2019, Flipo, F and Schneider, F, ( 2015), This, as one learns from history, emerges when the development and institutional order loses its capacity to connect peoples’ lived experiences with the (…)

A report carried in The Indian Express on September 23, 2026, has completely shattered public confidence in the mode of operations of the Election Commission of India. To put it in the words of the report: “The Election Commission of India’s (ECI) Special Intensive Revision (SIR), which began in Bihar in June 2025, an otherwise routine clean-up of the rolls, has struck more than 13 crore names off the draft voter rolls in 30 States and Union Territories. This has put the Commission at the (…)

Modi has turned into social phenomenon where some living actors and non living actors work to sustain the phenomenon. Living actors like CBI chief ED chief, Police chief and EC chief. All these establish relationships to sustain such a phenomenon of Moditva. CBI chief faced mid night coup when his words did not work and he wanted to look into the file related to Air Force planes imported from France where a large scale corruption has got involved. In the mid night coup he was removed with (…)

​Prologue
​Conservative British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan is said to have been once asked what he feared most and to have tersely replied: "Events, dear boy, events." This famous story, accurate or not, vividly brings out a very significant side of the way political developments take place. Even the best-laid plans of the mighty may, all of a sudden, get severely upset by the unscripted.
​Since the May 2014 mandate that brought the BJP to power, the new regime, all the (…)

I did entertain some serious doubts about the efficacy of the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of India’s electoral rolls when it began in Bihar. But I surmised, naively I now realise, that it would mostly affect the mass of poor who travel long distances for work and so would be “absent” when officials visit their homes.
This was until I began following news reports of mass purges from voters’ lists in state after state. The ugly truth hit home hard when my own name disappeared from (…)