India stands caught between two powerful illusions. One is the sense that history itself is a vast waiting room, a place where the present exists only as preparation for some promised golden age. The other is the quiet invitation to return to days that, viewed from a comfortable distance, appear pure and complete. Both illusions form a double edged...
Face Recognition Errors and the Youth Protest
The recent revelations surrounding the use of face recognition technology during the student led protests at Jantar Mantar in July 2026 have cast a long shadow over the reliability of such systems in public spaces. Investigations by media outlets including the Indian Express examined records linked to the Delhi Police claim that nearly three thousand individuals with prior criminal...
Mandate as Sacred Property: How Goa’s Democracy Was Looted Through Transferable Loyalties
In any healthy democracy the vote of the people is not a temporary loan that politicians may later reassign like surplus furniture. It is a nontransferable asset. Once the ballot is cast, the resulting mandate belongs to the electorate and cannot be traded, gifted, or quietly walked across the aisle without their consent. In Goa this basic principle has...
They Know Not What They Do
Fyodor Dostoevsky is said to have declared that if there is no God, everything is permitted. Jacques Lacan, on the other hand, teaches that precisely because there is God, anything is possible. God can thus be the source of all good, but God can also be used as a cover for evil deeds. Put psychoanalytically: if there is God,...
A Draconian Assault on Charity and Religious Freedom
The Catholic Church in India express a felt need to dialogue with the Government on the Foreign Contribution Regulation Amendment Bill. This proposed legislation represents a severe threat to the Church’s work of service to the poor, the sick, the uneducated, and the marginalized. Far from promoting transparency or national security, the Bill arms the State with sweeping powers...
When Mockery Becomes a Weapon
The new politics in India has emerged not from solemn marches or stern manifestos but from the irreverent laughter of the young. Generation Z refused the traditional scripts of resistance that demanded sacrifice and gravity. Instead, they turned mockery into a weapon and humour into a shared language that cut through the carefully staged authority of demagogues. What once...
The changing Political in India
Sudipta Kaviraj , an India political philosoher has long argued that the political is not a timeless or universal category. It is a historical formation that took a distinctive shape in modern India. In pre-modern India the dominant mode of thinking about power was rajaniti, the art of kingly conduct. Rule was limited, hierarchical, and constrained by custom, dharma,...
The Rupture of the political effected by Gen Z in India
The political in India has undergone a significant reconfiguration under the Bharatiya Janata Party. As Sudipta Kaviraj has shown the political is never a fixed category. It is a historical formation shaped by successive imaginaries of power and the state. The earlier secular developmental enchantment of the state gave way after 2014 to a cultural nationalist one. In that...
THE CRIME MACHINE IN INDIA: THE RISE OF THE PANPARAPTOMATICON Biopolitics, Post-Crime, and Theological Resistance in the Age of AI
This paper introduces and systematizes a new critical concept , the Panparaptomaticon to diagnose an emergent regime of governance in India and beyond. Derived from Greek pan (all), paraptoma (misdeed, offense, lapse) and icon (instrument, image, device), the term denotes an apparatus that watches all and automatically produces offenses from the fabric of ordinary life. The paper traces a...
The Overreach of Police on Student Protesters
Police forces around the world have increasingly turned to artificial intelligence and face recognition systems in their daily operations. These tools promise faster identification of individuals in crowded places and quicker matching of faces against large databases. In the context of student protests the application of such technology raises serious questions about privacy rights legal boundaries and the risk...
