S. Vikram
What twelve years of the second independence has done
- CHAPTER FOUR
The Reckoning
Twelve years is long enough for the gap between promise and performance to stop being deniable. Let us go through the ledger — not as polemic, but as accounting.
On Federalism and Centre-State Relations
The manifesto promised that Chief Ministers would be genuine partners in national governance, that states would have fiscal autonomy, and that the Inter-State Council and National Development Council would be revived as active bodies. What followed was the most aggressive centralisation of power since the Emergency. The GST, in principle a needed reform, became in practice an instrument of fiscal coercion. Governors appointed by the Centre were used as tools of political obstruction with brazen consistency — refusing to administer oaths to elected Chief Ministers, sitting on legislation for months, dismissing state governments on constitutionally threadbare grounds. In Arunachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Manipur, Goa, and dramatically in Maharashtra — where a government was toppled through the engineering of defections from within the ruling coalition itself — the Centre demonstrated that it regarded the constitutional autonomy of states as a negotiating position rather than a settled fact. The Inter-State Council convened once in ten years and was allowed to lapse. The National Development Council met once during the decade and was quietly allowed to die.
On Institutions and Rule of Law
The CBI and the Enforcement Directorate became instruments of political enforcement whose selective deployment the Supreme Court itself described as alarming. The pattern was mechanical: opposition leaders were investigated in the months before elections; the cases went quiet once elections were over. Leaders who crossed over to the BJP found their cases mysteriously archived — “washing machine politics,” because those who joined the BJP found their records cleaned.
The Bhima Koregaon case stands as the decade’s darkest illustration of what happened to the rule of law when it became inconvenient. In 2018, academics, lawyers, activists, and writers — including the eighty-year-old Jesuit priest Father Stan Swamy, suffering from advanced Parkinson’s disease — were arrested under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act on charges of being Maoist conspirators. The digital evidence on which the charges rested was later established by independent forensic analysts to have been planted by sophisticated malware on the defendants’ computers. Father Stan Swamy died in judicial custody in July 2021, having been denied, while awaiting bail, even a sipper cup to manage his trembling hands. He had never been tried. He died an undertrial, charged with crimes the evidence did not support.
The Electoral Bond scheme, introduced in 2018 and struck down by the Supreme Court in 2024, was the decade’s most elegant corruption instrument. When the data was compelled into the open, it revealed a consistent correlation: companies that had received government contracts, or were under investigation by central enforcement agencies, were disproportionate donors to the BJP. The scheme was not incidental corruption — it was corruption systematized, given a legal framework, and routed through the country’s premier public sector bank.
On Corruption and Black Money
The fifteen lakh rupees per citizen never came. What came instead, in November 2016, was Demonetisation — the overnight withdrawal of 86 percent of India’s currency notes. The RBI’s own data showed that over 99 percent of the demonetised currency returned to the banking system. The genuine costs were borne entirely by those least able to bear them: daily wage labourers, small traders, farmers unable to purchase inputs for the season. Conservative academic estimates placed the permanent GDP cost at 1 to 2 percent. Over a hundred people died in the chaos of queuing at bank branches.
What demonetisation revealed — and what subsequent years confirmed — was not a war on crony capitalism but its consolidation at a higher level. The Oxfam India Inequality Report found that India’s top 1 percent held more wealth by 2024 than the bottom 55 percent of the population combined. The Forbes India rich list saw the net worth of certain business houses with conspicuous proximity to the ruling party multiply many times over across precisely those sectors where government contracts and regulatory decisions were most determinative.
On Employment and the Economy
The manufacturing sector, the foundation of Make in India’s employment promise, stubbornly refused to absorb the 12 million young Indians entering the labour market each year. India’s share of manufacturing in GDP actually declined across the decade. The Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy consistently showed the formal sector employment rate deteriorating, with youth unemployment touching 40 percent by some measures. The NSSO employment survey of 2017–18, which showed the highest unemployment rate in 45 years, was suppressed until after the 2019 general election. Members of the National Statistical Commission resigned in protest at political interference in data.
On Secularism and Minorities
This is where the distance between promise and reality is not a gap but a chasm — not a failure of delivery but a reversal of direction. The manifesto promised to empower Waqf Boards. The Waqf Amendment Act of 2024 undermined their autonomy. The manifesto promised to promote Urdu. Urdu-medium schools lost funding across BJP-governed states. The manifesto promised a permanent Inter-faith Consultative Mechanism. No such mechanism was established. Not even attempted.
The Citizenship Amendment Act of 2019, for the first time in India’s history, made religion a criterion for citizenship — offering expedited citizenship to persecuted minorities from three neighbouring countries, explicitly excluding Muslims. The Ram Mandir consecration in January 2024 placed the Prime Minister at the centre of a ceremony that the entire machinery of the Indian state treated as a national event of the first order — an unambiguous statement that the secular republic had given way to something else.
India Spend documented 252 incidents of cow-related violence between 2010 and 2017, of which 97 percent occurred after May 2014. In Uttar Pradesh, “bulldozer justice” — the extrajudicial demolition of properties belonging to accused persons, overwhelmingly Muslim, before any conviction — was celebrated by senior ministers as efficient governance and condemned by courts as a violation of due process. In North-East Delhi in February 2020, over fifty people died, mostly Muslim, in communal violence while Delhi Police stood and watched and in some cases participated. No senior person was held accountable.
On Foreign Policy
The 2020 Galwan Valley clash — in which twenty Indian soldiers died in hand-to-hand combat, the first combat deaths on the Himalayan border since 1975 — was preceded by a Chinese incursion that Indian intelligence had failed to detect. The Prime Minister’s initial statement — that “no one has entered our territory, no one has captured our posts” — was contradicted by events within days and quietly revised without explanation. The government never publicly acknowledged the extent of the subsequent territorial concession. The relationship with Canada deteriorated to its worst point in history when India was credibly accused by the Canadian Prime Minister, in Parliament, of ordering the assassination of a Canadian Sikh citizen on Canadian soil.
- CHAPTER FIVE
The Change of the Governing Class
The standard account of what happened on May 16, 2014, is a story about a party winning an election. It is not wrong, but it is radically incomplete. What happened was not merely a change of government. It was a change of the governing class — the deep stratum of people who staff, animate, and give direction to the institutions of the state across time and across changes of elected government. And unlike the electoral victory, this change was not spontaneous. It had been in preparation for ninety-nine years.
The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh was founded in Nagpur in 1925. It is the oldest and most persistent political organisation in India — older than the Republic, older than Independence, older than the Partition that preceded it. Its founding purpose was not electoral. The RSS did not seek power through votes. It sought to build, slowly and systematically, a cadre of ideologically formed men who would permeate every institution of Indian public life and, in time, reorient those institutions toward the Hindu Rashtra that it regarded as India’s authentic form.
This strategy is entirely unlike the political strategies of other organisations. It is not a vanguard strategy in the Leninist sense — there is no revolutionary seizure, no single moment of rupture. It is closer to what the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci described as the war of position: the patient, decades-long effort to achieve cultural and institutional hegemony, so that when political power arrives, the institutions are already populated by people who share the cultural assumptions of the new order. The BJP’s electoral victory in 2014 was the moment at which the war of position converted, finally and decisively, into a war of manoeuvre. The long preparation made the rapid transformation possible.
The Shakha Network
The RSS’s primary instrument of cadre formation is the shakha — the daily local assembly, held in parks, playgrounds, and community spaces across India, where men gather before dawn or after dusk for physical drill, ideological instruction, and the cultivation of collective strength. At its peak, the RSS maintains over 60,000 active shakhas, reaching an estimated five to six million regular participants. These are not passive members who pay a subscription fee. They are formed men — men who have spent years in daily discipline, who have absorbed the RSS’s ideological framework through repetition, song, discussion, and the lived experience of the collective.
The shakha produces a particular kind of person: disciplined, ideologically coherent, networked through personal loyalty, capable of sustained organised effort without expectation of immediate individual reward. This is the RSS’s distinctive contribution to Indian political life — not money, not media, but manpower of a particular quality. In an election, this manpower is transformative: the RSS’s booth-level ground organisation, activated for the BJP in 2014, was the difference between a good result and a historic one. But the manpower is also transformative in governance — because when the government needs people to staff institutions, it draws on a pool that has been forming itself, quietly, for decades.
The Parivar: A Parallel Civil Society
The shakha is the RSS’s spine, but it operates through a vast web of affiliated organisations — the parivar, the family — that covers almost every domain of Indian public life. The Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh is India’s largest trade union federation — allied not with the working-class left but with the Hindu right. The Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad is present on almost every Indian university campus and a primary feeder of political cadre into the BJP. The Vishwa Hindu Parishad manages temple networks, religious mobilisation, and communal campaigns. The Vidya Bharati manages over 12,000 schools across India — an educational network that shapes the minds of millions of children in the RSS’s ideological formation before those children ever encounter the public curriculum.
Together, these organisations constitute a parallel civil society — a genuine alternative institutional infrastructure that exists alongside and increasingly within the formal structures of the Republic. When the government of India after 2014 needed a vice-chancellor for a central university, a director for a cultural institution, a member for a regulatory board, a police commissioner for a sensitive posting — it did not have to search. The parivar had been producing candidates for exactly these positions for decades. The question of where the new bureaucrats, the new vice-chancellors, the new police commissioners came from is not a secret. It is the RSS’s answer to the question it had been preparing to answer since 1925.
The Transformation of Universities
Nowhere is the change of governing class more visible than in India’s universities. Since 2014, the appointment of vice-chancellors and directors has followed a pattern so consistent as to constitute a policy: RSS-affiliated candidates, recommended through ABVP and VHP networks, placed in leadership positions that determine curriculum, faculty hiring, campus culture, and the intellectual direction of institutions that will shape Indian higher education for decades. The Indian Council of Historical Research — which controls access to archives and determines the funding of historical research — has been placed under leadership aligned with the Sangh Parivar’s revisionist account of Indian history. The removal of the Mughal period from NCERT school textbooks, the introduction of concepts from Hindu scriptural tradition into the science curriculum: these are not isolated decisions. They are the implementation of a considered programme to reshape what India’s educational institutions teach, and therefore what India’s next generation believes to be true about its own past.
Pratap Bhanu Mehta, one of the most distinguished political philosophers India has produced and the former vice-chancellor of Ashoka University, resigned his position in 2021 in circumstances that made clear that his continued presence had become a liability for the institution under political pressure. His resignation letter was not explicit about the cause. It did not need to be. The message to India’s academic community — that independence of thought was incompatible with institutional survival in the current climate — was received and understood.
The Ponzi State’s Governing Class
The change of governing class and the transformation of the economy are not parallel stories. They are the same story, seen from two angles. The fiscal architecture of the second independence produces what might be called an impossible triangle: at peak tax extraction, the state simultaneously reaches peak sovereign debt and plans the largest liquidation of public assets in its history — the National Monetisation Pipeline, which proposes to sell or lease sixteen lakh crore rupees of publicly built infrastructure to private capital. This is not comprehensible as economic policy. It is comprehensible as a transfer mechanism — the conversion of public assets into private accumulation, conducted at scale, structured to favour those with the capital and the political relationships to participate.
The new governing class is not merely the ideological custodian of this transfer. It is the administrative apparatus through which the transfer is conducted. The regulatory boards that approve the deals, the bureaucrats who design the terms, the judges who decline to scrutinise them, the vice-chancellors who produce the economists who provide the theoretical justification — these are the people the parivar has been placing, patiently, for years. The ninety-four percent informal workforce that the fiscal architecture leaves unreached — the workers who generate no taxable surplus, who access no social insurance, who exist in the economy’s permanent shadow — are not the governing class’s concern. They are its condition of possibility. The extraction requires their invisibility.
What the RSS understood, and what its critics consistently underestimate, is that ideological transformation requires institutional control — and institutional control, once achieved, compounds. The people placed in universities today will train the people who fill institutions tomorrow. The textbooks rewritten today will form the assumptions that tomorrow’s administrators treat as common sense. The second independence is designed to be irreversible not because it will amend the Constitution — though some of its proponents would like to — but because it is changing the people who will interpret and administer that Constitution for the next fifty years.
- CHAPTER SIX
The Panopticon and Its Architects
Every state surveillance apparatus arrives wearing the face of security. The particular genius of India’s surveillance state is that it arrived wearing a second face as well: the face of welfare. The great identification project — Aadhaar, the biometric identity system that now covers over 1.3 billion people — was launched by the UPA government as a mechanism for delivering welfare benefits directly to the poor, bypassing the corrupt intermediaries who had historically siphoned off the money before it reached its intended recipients. It was a genuine reform idea, and in its initial application it achieved genuine gains: LPG subsidies transferred directly to bank accounts, MGNREGS wages paid without the village contractor’s cut, ration cards verified against biometric identity. But a database of 1.3 billion people’s fingerprints, iris scans, addresses, bank accounts, and phone numbers is not simply a welfare delivery mechanism. It is an architecture. Its uses depend entirely on who controls it and what they decide to do with it.
Aadhaar: From Welfare to Surveillance
The Supreme Court’s 2018 Aadhaar judgment upheld the constitutional validity of Aadhaar while striking down its mandatory use by private entities and attempting to define its permissible scope. The court’s attempt to cabin the system’s reach was sincere. It was also largely unsuccessful, because the architecture of Aadhaar integration had already spread so widely across both state and private systems that the court’s prohibitions could be circumvented without formal violation. The linking of Aadhaar to mobile phone numbers meant that every Indian’s communications were, in principle, attributable to a biometric identity. The linking of Aadhaar to bank accounts meant that every financial transaction could be tracked. The linking of Aadhaar to the income tax permanent account number completed a triangle: identity, communication, and money, all tethered to a single biometric record controlled by the state.
The state’s argument for these linkages was always the same: transparency, accountability, anti-corruption, anti-terrorism. The argument was not without merit in specific applications. But the argument for the linkages was also always an argument for a particular distribution of power — one in which the state has comprehensive visibility into the lives of its citizens, while the citizens have no reciprocal visibility into the state. The second independence’s governing class, which has shown a consistent interest in knowing what its citizens are doing and a consistent hostility to citizens knowing what their government is doing, found in Aadhaar an instrument of extraordinary utility.
Pegasus and the Targeting of Dissent
In July 2021, the Pegasus Project — a consortium of seventeen international media organisations — published its findings around leaked data from the NSO Group, an Israeli cyberweapons company whose Pegasus spyware can silently take complete control of a smartphone, extracting messages, emails, and photographs, and activating the microphone and camera without the user’s knowledge. Among the 50,000 phone numbers identified as potential targets were the numbers of Indian journalists, opposition politicians, lawyers, and activists. The list included prominent reporters from independent publications, the phones of Congress leader Rahul Gandhi’s associates, a former Election Commissioner, and the number of Priya Ramani, then embroiled in defamation proceedings after making sexual harassment allegations against a former Minister.
The government’s response was the bureaucratic non-denial that has become a signature of the second independence’s communications strategy: neither confirming nor denying, citing national security, refusing to engage with specific evidence. A Supreme Court technical committee reported in 2022 that it could not conclusively establish that Pegasus had been used by the Indian government — a finding that noted, without resolution, that the government had declined to cooperate with its own investigation. The absence of evidence, in other words, was partly the government’s work.
Facial Recognition and the Protest Panopticon
The Delhi Police’s use of facial recognition technology during the anti-CAA protests of 2019–20 — scanning faces in crowds and matching them against databases of “suspects” — was reported in detail at the time. In 2024, the Andhra Pradesh High Court ruled on a challenge to the use of facial recognition at protests, acknowledging both the technology’s deployment and its constitutional implications. The court’s analysis was careful: the use of facial recognition at protests is not a neutral law enforcement tool. It is a tool that chills the exercise of constitutional rights. The person who knows that their face will be scanned, recorded, and matched against a database when they attend a demonstration is not as free to attend that demonstration as the person who knows no such surveillance occurs. The chilling effect is the point. The second independence’s surveillance architecture does not need to arrest every protester. It needs only to make every potential protester aware that participation carries a traceable, permanent cost.
The Suspicious Transaction Reports regime and the vastly expanded PMLA — whose 2019 amendments removed safeguards against arbitrary asset attachment and swept in a vast range of predicate offences — complete the picture. The financial surveillance infrastructure has become, for practical purposes, a tool of political enforcement whose pattern of deployment is consistent with the use of Pegasus, of Aadhaar, of the ED: capabilities nominally designed for security and anti-corruption purposes, redirected toward the management of political opposition.
The Data Protection Vacuum
The Digital Personal Data Protection Act of 2023 — the legislation designed to protect citizens from surveillance by the state — exempts the state from its own provisions on grounds of national security or public order so broad as to be effectively unreviewable. Civil society organisations and international data protection experts almost universally regarded the Act as providing far weaker protections than its stated purpose required. The surveillance state is not an accident of the second independence. It is a considered architectural choice — the construction of an infrastructure of social control that will outlast any particular government and that, once built, is extraordinarily difficult to dismantle. The second independence’s most durable legacy may not be the laws it passed or the institutions it weakened. It may be the data it collected, the faces it mapped, and the communications it stored, waiting for a future occasion when that information becomes useful.
- CHAPTER SEVEN
The Pandemic as Accelerator
On March 24, 2020, at 8:00 in the evening, Narendra Modi appeared on national television and announced that India would enter a complete lockdown in four hours. The country’s 1.38 billion people had four hours to prepare for an indefinite shutdown of all movement, all commerce, all public life. There was no consultation with state governments — whose constitutional responsibility includes public health. There was no prior announcement to allow people to stock food or return home. There was no plan for the tens of millions of migrant workers who lived in cities without savings, without legal protection, without any means of sustaining themselves when the informal economy in which they worked abruptly ceased to exist.
What followed was the largest forced migration in India since Partition. Hundreds of thousands of workers began walking home. They walked on highways, on railway tracks, through police cordons. They were stopped at state borders and forced into quarantine facilities — schools or community halls with inadequate sanitation. Some died on the roads. Some died in the facilities. The Shramik Special trains that were eventually arranged for the walking workers were charged for. In a moment of administrative indifference whose symbolic resonance was unmistakable, the state that had spent billions on bullet train feasibility studies could not find the resources to bring its migrant workers home for free.
The Emergency as Governing Template
The sudden lockdown’s form — announced without warning, implemented without consultation, presented as the decisive action of a strong leader — was not simply a pandemic management failure. It was the governing template of the second independence applied to a public health crisis. The same pattern that produced demonetisation: a unilateral top-down decision, presented as a surgical strike against an enemy (black money; the virus), implemented without preparation, its costs borne disproportionately by those with the least capacity to absorb them. The form preceded the content. The theatrics of decisive leadership, which the campaign had promised and the decade had repeatedly performed, determined the substance of the pandemic response before the substance had been worked out.
The Epidemic Diseases Act of 1897 — a colonial-era law — was invoked to give the Centre powers that overrode state autonomy in a domain that the Constitution assigned to states. The Disaster Management Act was used to centralise the procurement and distribution of medical oxygen, personal protective equipment, and vaccines at a moment when the supply chains for all three were catastrophically strained. The centralisation produced predictable failures — bottlenecks, misallocation, delays — and the Centre blamed the states. The patients died while the attribution dispute continued.
Vaccine Policy and Its Contradictions
India’s vaccine programme illustrated the contradictions of the second independence’s governance with rare clarity. In an abrupt policy reversal that state governments were given hours to prepare for, the Centre announced that all adults could be vaccinated but that states would need to procure their own vaccines from manufacturers at prices higher than those the Centre was paying. The result was a bidding war between states — some unable to procure vaccines at all, others procuring at enormous cost — while the Centre continued to supply its own programme at a subsidised price. The policy’s effect, whether intended or not, was to create a differential in vaccine access that tracked, with uncomfortable precision, the political alignment of state governments.
The Vaccine Maitri programme — the export of vaccines to neighbouring countries, presented as a demonstration of India’s global leadership and generosity — was launched before India’s own vaccination coverage had reached levels that could sustain large-scale export. When the Delta variant arrived and the second wave overwhelmed India’s healthcare system, the country was both out of vaccines and without the moral standing to request that the exported doses be returned. The Vaccine Maitri programme had served its purpose: it had produced the press conferences, the diplomatic photographs, the global headlines. The actual public health calculus was secondary to the spectacle.
The Suppression of Mortality Data
The scale of death during India’s Delta wave of April and May 2021 has never been officially acknowledged. The government’s reported COVID death toll for the period was contested by every serious epidemiological analysis that attempted to reconstruct excess mortality from civil registration data, satellite imagery of cremation grounds, and state-level health statistics. The World Health Organization’s excess mortality estimates, published in 2022, suggested that India’s actual COVID-related death toll was between 3.3 and 6.5 million — compared to an officially reported figure of approximately 500,000. The Indian government contested the WHO methodology vigorously, but did not provide alternative data that would have resolved the discrepancy.
The suppression or downplaying of excess mortality data during the pandemic is not simply a public health failure. It is of a piece with the suppression of the NSSO unemployment data before the 2019 election, with the controversy over the GDP recalculation methodology, with the statistical commission resignations — it is the systematic subordination of evidence to narrative. The Ponzi State’s core mechanism — the maintenance of a linguistic veneer over a reality that the numbers, read clearly, would reveal — operated during the pandemic as in every other domain. The difference is that during the pandemic, the numbers being suppressed were not economic statistics but bodies.
Emergency Conditions That Never Ended
The pandemic’s most consequential legacy for the second independence’s project was not the deaths or the economic destruction. It was the demonstration that emergency conditions could be used to concentrate power, override constitutional structures, and suppress inconvenient information — and that the emergency, once declared, need not formally end for these effects to persist. The laws passed during the pandemic, the regulatory powers assumed, the surveillance capabilities deployed, the norm of central command over state public health systems — none of these were fully rolled back when the pandemic ended. They had proven useful, and their rollback would have required an admission that they had been excessive.
The pandemic was not an interruption of the second independence’s project. It was an acceleration — a compression, into two years, of institutional changes that might otherwise have taken a decade to normalise. The walking workers walked home in 2020. The institutions that should have protected them were not there. And when the emergency was over, the institutions were no more there than they had been.
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