u/Practical-Lab5329

The stereotype of Muslim Terrorist is quite a common phenomenon (at least as per my experience) but it is exceptionally new. For centuries the Muslim world was renowned for its contributions to science, philosophy, political theory, art and so on but from the 20th century this image was gone. For roughly half a century the Muslim world, especially West Asia, has been known for making terrorists. A well known story. Pick up any book by the left and you will find declassified files after files that talk about how the NATO funded radical right wing (often called the Wahabi muslims) islamic orthodoxy in the region. The ISI in Pakistan,the house of Saudis, the Haqqani network and a host of other groups were provided with money, arms and intelligence to combat the progressive movements in the region. In the process these radical right wing groups dominated over and often crushed more moderate movements like Sufism. It was all justified in the name of combating communist influences, especially the influence of The USSR but its effects were felt by the vast majority of the moderate muslims throughout the cold war who dreamed of a more free and democratic world. Learned comrades know about the series of regime change operations like in Indonesia, Iran, Iraq , Afghanistan, Libiya, and most recently Syria and many others that took place. What is usually missing from the conversations about these monumental changes in global politics is the role of the deep state.

We know a regime change happened in India in 2014 but can we rule out foreign collusion? Journalist and author Josy Joseph in his book The Silent Coup: A History of India's Deep State. had written to understand the Deep State in the Indian context. Now the concept of deep state is simple. It is the state that is not accountable to the electors but it has state-like powers and can even influence the decisions of the political state. You can understand it as the private state of the uber wealthy that looks after their interests when the law cannot. Joseph shows in his book that the Indian deep state is fused with the political state in India in a very unique way. There are a series of middle men connecting different institutions and consisting of governmental and non governmental personnels who mediate decision making processes of the society. These personnels work completely independently of the political will of the people. Obviously the media is a big part of it. You can look at most histories of regime change operations and you are bound to find that the regional deep state was involved in them. The best examples I know are Chile, Ukraine (during the Euromaidan event), Pakistan and recently Bangladesh but you can find many examples. The deep state is also popularly called “The Fifth Column” when talking about its international role in regime change.

Now this deep state in India includes both formal and informal workers which is unique. Another unique point about the Indian deep state is that the military is mostly subservient to it (with the exceptions of AFSPA governed areas) while in countries like Pakistan and many others the army is a strong part of the deep state, but that is not important for this discussion. Concerning the composition of the deep state I give the following examples of formal and informal workers that operate within the deep state respectively. We have the police but also the informants that work for the police informally, you have banks and non banking financial entities that hire goons informally to recover properties of defaulters, the Intelligence Services (R&AW) that hire agents to give them intelligence and execute overseas operations (as you may have seen in Dhurandhar), the shell companies and hedge funds that pay the corrupt politicians for favours and the party workers who depend on the politician’s corruption to get some income from party or public funds (think the Ram Mandir stolen funds scandal recently) and many more. Needless to say the deep state is a machine of immense violence that can take out powerful people who don't tow the official line like Justice Lohia and can conjure up riots at the drop of a hat as we have seen in the Gujrat, Delhi riots for example. Then the whole state machinery is activated to protect the perpetrators and scapegoat innocents.

In the Indian deep state the informal workers far outnumber the formal workers but they have almost no control over its workings. So any damage to the deep state affects the incomes of many informal workers too. For example if you go to a big government hospital for some tests or treatment there are these agents who earn a commission for redirecting patients to private labs and nursing homes. They may have other jobs but they earn a significant amount from cashing in on government inefficiencies.The decision to under-fund government hospitals is made from the top, from the political state (maybe influenced by big Pharma and IMF etc.) but if the government decides to reverse this decision then the incomes of these many informal workers get hit. So the system is fueled by both the class interests of formal and a vast number of informal workers. Hence the deep state is the political counterpart of the Black Economy (on which Arun Kumar the retired JNU professor have written and spoken extensively). Needless to say that the Deep state and the Black economy are intimately interconnected because the majority of the money circulating within the deep state is unaccounted money.

Now I must be a bit tedious here and I definitely don't want to bore you with theory but it is important to be more specific when you are talking about something that is so detrimental to democracy. The deep state doesn't produce any new value in the Marxist sense. That is not what it's for. It works on meditating decision making processes and enforcing private property, hence it counts as a state not as part of the productive economy. The political state is like the tip of an iceberg and the deep state constitutes the vast majority of state machinery but they are parts of the same body.

There are formal workers that work in the deep state like there are formal workers employed in the productive sector while most informal workers often work in both but the functions of the deep state are purely politico-bureaucratic not productive. In other words The deep state is not necessitated by the social requirements of production (like factories or farms etc.) but the political requirements of the ruling class.

As we see from Arun Kumar’s work, the black economy creates various inefficiencies in the economic system. For example building a new police station increases local crimes, doctors over prescribe to waste patient’s money, infrastructure crumbles, teachers take more time from the students than needed to teach the same things, GDP growth becomes slower etc.The most recent incidents include the privatisation of the competitive exam system that claimed the lives of many students.

The deep state creates similar inefficiencies as well in the decision making process of the society. For example a judge might deliver a biased judgment influenced by money (or gifts/a seat at the Rajya Sabha or some other private benefits), a politician may hand tender to a contractor who charges more money from the exchequer and delivers poorer results than his competitors only due to personal connections, a bureaucrat may show favouritism by delaying your work, the police may refuse to register an FIR against a rich or upper caste person, the state policies and budget gets shaped in favour of big business and against workers etc. In the heart of all these inefficiencies is the deep state or the private state in which money power and traditional alliances reign supreme. The deep state is also responsible for creating massive deficit in trust the citizens have with respect to their governments which makes India a low trust society

Now let's return to geopolitics. Now we know from all regime changes funded by the US and other imperial powers like France have required the cooperation of the regional deep states or The Fifth Column. What makes the deep state so vulnerable to outside influence is that it runs purely on the interest of private money. People like George Soros use their money openly to influence the politics of other countries. Various NGOs, CIA cutouts like the Freedom foundation, media, and institutions influence the political state in foreign soil. This creates a massive internal security threat to the nation because your representatives are not working for your interests.. For example the PM cares fund is said to have received massive amounts of funds from Chinese firms before the PM's infamous speech regarding the Galwan Valley clash in which he refused to recognise China as an aggressor. We have pretty good indications that this has been happening in India for a long time. We have APCO World Wide which did extensive PR work for Modi and the Gujarat government under him has extensive links to western corporations, Cambridge Analytica has been said to have worked with various political groups in India, the Israeli NSO group which is a private company had helped India spy on its citizens with the malware called Pegasus, social media platforms changing their rules to influence public opinions, the scandal of the Rafale deals have exposed the corruption in foreign trade deals and many more. We only see glimpses of the workings of the deep state but we never get the full picture because it is by design meant to be secret. But we see the same pattern i.e. a network of government and private entities acting as middle-men and moving money across the globe.

The most important part of this is that these channels are used to exercise control over the Indian society to serve the interests of the imperial core. The most appropriate example that I can think of is the following. The former chancellor of Germany, Angela Merkel in 2021 when India was going through a shortage of COVID 19 vaccines for its own citizens had insisted that India prioritise the vaccine demands of the West above its own consumption because, (and I'm almost quoting her verbatim), they have “allowed” India to become a pharma hub so it would prioritise exports over its own requirements. If this is the power of a petite imperialist power like Germany, imagine the power the US has to shape our economy and the society at large. It has single handedly changed India's political alignment in favour of Israel, almost brought Adani (the richest man in Asia) to his knees and is making us buy stuff we don't even need. This is a massive violation of sovereignty by the imperial core and none of this will change much with only a change in the regime.

Now many of you might be thinking that this is just old colonialism in a different form but you couldn't be more wrong. The sheer autonomy of the deep state in India suggests that it is not like a puppet of the comprador. It is qualitatively a new phenomenon although its effects may be similar to old colonialism. In this case the Indian bourgeoisie is a stakeholder to the imperial plunder. Massive amounts of Indian capital is being invested in mines in Africa, Australia, pharmaceuticals and other consumer items worth billions are exported overseas which are not even of good quality. If the Indian bourgeoisie wants to keep exporting cheap low quality products and services overseas it needs the cooperation of the imperial core. Hence India cannot even speak when its own sailors die by American missiles while crossing the Strait of Hormuz. This wouldn't be the case if it were not for the influence of the Indian deep state.

Now the question you might be asking is if the deep state and the black economy create so much inefficiencies and are even a threat to internal security then why doesn't anyone do anything about it. The reason is simple, class interest. Millions of people depend on the deep state and the black economy for their livelihoods and most are in the informal sector. It is actually impossible to crush the deep state without also causing harm to a good part of the informal sector. So what is the solution?

Arun Kumar gives a number of solutions for the problems of the black economy both for short and long term in his book Understanding The Black Economy and Black Money in India That also applies to the Indian deep state like breaking the nexus of corrupt politicians, corrupt executive and businessmen through broad mass movements but I'm going to explore a different angle. The present regime has waged a war against the informal sector which is obvious from its policy decisions thus far. There are many reasons for why it's doing so but the main reason is that it enables growth. Basically every economy that has been able to crush its informal sector like South Korea, China, Singapore etc. have been able to grow faster and have more stable governments (not necessarily democratic governments but relatively stable ones). India is trying to follow this exact route so it is actively killing its informal sector and creating what in South Korea is called “chaebolism”, which is Asian for an oligopoly. In this the deep state becomes more formalised and centralised making it easier to control. In such a situation the domestic military industrial complex can also grow at a disproportionate rate as India plans to be a leading arms exporter and “net security provider" of the QUAD in the South Pacific. Hence a broad based decentralised alliance of parties and political and social groups can at best change the regime not abolish the deep state and take away its autonomy. Today those who are being immiserated by the crushing of the informal sector can be organised as a parallel government with its own parliament (in the form of workers councils), tenants associations and women’s committees, people's courts and municipalities etc. This will take a lot of time, efforts and resources to materialise but it is the only way in my opinion that the deep state can be decisively dethroned.

The stereotype of Muslim Terrorist is quite a common phenomenon (at least as per my experience) but it is exceptionally new. For centuries the Muslim world was renowned for its contributions to science, philosophy, political theory, art and so on but from the 20th century this image was gone. For roughly half a century the Muslim world, especially West Asia, has been known for making terrorists. A well known story. Pick up any book by the left and you will find declassified files after files that talk about how the NATO funded radical right wing (often called the Wahabi muslims) islamic orthodoxy in the region. The ISI in Pakistan,the house of Saudis, the Haqqani network and a host of other groups were provided with money, arms and intelligence to combat the progressive movements in the region. In the process these radical right wing groups dominated over and often crushed more moderate movements like Sufism. It was all justified in the name of combating communist influences, especially the influence of The USSR but its effects were felt by the vast majority of the moderate muslims throughout the cold war who dreamed of a more free and democratic world. Learned comrades know about the series of regime change operations like in Indonesia, Iran, Iraq , Afghanistan, Libiya, and most recently Syria and many others that took place. What is usually missing from the conversations about these monumental changes in global politics is the role of the deep state.

We know a regime change happened in India in 2014 but can we rule out foreign collusion? Journalist and author Josy Joseph in his book The Silent Coup: A History of India's Deep State. had written to understand the Deep State in the Indian context. Now the concept of deep state is simple. It is the state that is not accountable to the electors but it has state-like powers and can even influence the decisions of the political state. You can understand it as the private state of the uber wealthy that looks after their interests when the law cannot. Joseph shows in his book that the Indian deep state is fused with the political state in India in a very unique way. There are a series of middle men connecting different institutions and consisting of governmental and non governmental personnels who mediate decision making processes of the society. These personnels work completely independently of the political will of the people. Obviously the media is a big part of it. You can look at most histories of regime change operations and you are bound to find that the regional deep state was involved in them. The best examples I know are Chile, Ukraine (during the Euromaidan event), Pakistan and recently Bangladesh but you can find many examples. The deep state is also popularly called “The Fifth Column” when talking about its international role in regime change.

Now this deep state in India includes both formal and informal workers which is unique. Another unique point about the Indian deep state is that the military is mostly subservient to it (with the exceptions of AFSPA governed areas) while in countries like Pakistan and many others the army is a strong part of the deep state, but that is not important for this discussion. Concerning the composition of the deep state I give the following examples of formal and informal workers that operate within the deep state respectively. We have the police but also the informants that work for the police informally, you have banks and non banking financial entities that hire goons informally to recover properties of defaulters, the Intelligence Services (R&AW) that hire agents to give them intelligence and execute overseas operations (as you may have seen in Dhurandhar), the shell companies and hedge funds that pay the corrupt politicians for favours and the party workers who depend on the politician’s corruption to get some income from party or public funds (think the Ram Mandir stolen funds scandal recently) and many more. Needless to say the deep state is a machine of immense violence that can take out powerful people who don't tow the official line like Justice Lohia and can conjure up riots at the drop of a hat as we have seen in the Gujrat, Delhi riots for example. Then the whole state machinery is activated to protect the perpetrators and scapegoat innocents.

In the Indian deep state the informal workers far outnumber the formal workers but they have almost no control over its workings. So any damage to the deep state affects the incomes of many informal workers too. For example if you go to a big government hospital for some tests or treatment there are these agents who earn a commission for redirecting patients to private labs and nursing homes. They may have other jobs but they earn a significant amount from cashing in on government inefficiencies.The decision to under-fund government hospitals is made from the top, from the political state (maybe influenced by big Pharma and IMF etc.) but if the government decides to reverse this decision then the incomes of these many informal workers get hit. So the system is fueled by both the class interests of formal and a vast number of informal workers. Hence the deep state is the political counterpart of the Black Economy (on which Arun Kumar the retired JNU professor have written and spoken extensively). Needless to say that the Deep state and the Black economy are intimately interconnected because the majority of the money circulating within the deep state is unaccounted money.

Now I must be a bit tedious here and I definitely don't want to bore you with theory but it is important to be more specific when you are talking about something that is so detrimental to democracy. The deep state doesn't produce any new value in the Marxist sense. That is not what it's for. It works on meditating decision making processes and enforcing private property, hence it counts as a state not as part of the productive economy. The political state is like the tip of an iceberg and the deep state constitutes the vast majority of state machinery but they are parts of the same body.

There are formal workers that work in the deep state like there are formal workers employed in the productive sector while most informal workers often work in both but the functions of the deep state are purely politico-bureaucratic not productive. In other words The deep state is not necessitated by the social requirements of production (like factories or farms etc.) but the political requirements of the ruling class.

As we see from Arun Kumar’s work, the black economy creates various inefficiencies in the economic system. For example building a new police station increases local crimes, doctors over prescribe to waste patient’s money, infrastructure crumbles, teachers take more time from the students than needed to teach the same things, GDP growth becomes slower etc.The most recent incidents include the privatisation of the competitive exam system that claimed the lives of many students.

The deep state creates similar inefficiencies as well in the decision making process of the society. For example a judge might deliver a biased judgment influenced by money (or gifts/a seat at the Rajya Sabha or some other private benefits), a politician may hand tender to a contractor who charges more money from the exchequer and delivers poorer results than his competitors only due to personal connections, a bureaucrat may show favouritism by delaying your work, the police may refuse to register an FIR against a rich or upper caste person, the state policies and budget gets shaped in favour of big business and against workers etc. In the heart of all these inefficiencies is the deep state or the private state in which money power and traditional alliances reign supreme. The deep state is also responsible for creating massive deficit in trust the citizens have with respect to their governments which makes India a low trust society

Now let's return to geopolitics. Now we know from all regime changes funded by the US and other imperial powers like France have required the cooperation of the regional deep states or The Fifth Column. What makes the deep state so vulnerable to outside influence is that it runs purely on the interest of private money. People like George Soros use their money openly to influence the politics of other countries. Various NGOs, CIA cutouts like the Freedom foundation, media, and institutions influence the political state in foreign soil. This creates a massive internal security threat to the nation because your representatives are not working for your interests.. For example the PM cares fund is said to have received massive amounts of funds from Chinese firms before the PM's infamous speech regarding the Galwan Valley clash in which he refused to recognise China as an aggressor. We have pretty good indications that this has been happening in India for a long time. We have APCO World Wide which did extensive PR work for Modi and the Gujarat government under him has extensive links to western corporations, Cambridge Analytica has been said to have worked with various political groups in India, the Israeli NSO group which is a private company had helped India spy on its citizens with the malware called Pegasus, social media platforms changing their rules to influence public opinions, the scandal of the Rafale deals have exposed the corruption in foreign trade deals and many more. We only see glimpses of the workings of the deep state but we never get the full picture because it is by design meant to be secret. But we see the same pattern i.e. a network of government and private entities acting as middle-men and moving money across the globe.

The most important part of this is that these channels are used to exercise control over the Indian society to serve the interests of the imperial core. The most appropriate example that I can think of is the following. The former chancellor of Germany, Angela Merkel in 2021 when India was going through a shortage of COVID 19 vaccines for its own citizens had insisted that India prioritise the vaccine demands of the West above its own consumption because, (and I'm almost quoting her verbatim), they have “allowed” India to become a pharma hub so it would prioritise exports over its own requirements. If this is the power of a petite imperialist power like Germany, imagine the power the US has to shape our economy and the society at large. It has single handedly changed India's political alignment in favour of Israel, almost brought Adani (the richest man in Asia) to his knees and is making us buy stuff we don't even need. This is a massive violation of sovereignty by the imperial core and none of this will change much with only a change in the regime.

Now many of you might be thinking that this is just old colonialism in a different form but you couldn't be more wrong. The sheer autonomy of the deep state in India suggests that it is not like a puppet of the comprador. It is qualitatively a new phenomenon although its effects may be similar to old colonialism. In this case the Indian bourgeoisie is a stakeholder to the imperial plunder. Massive amounts of Indian capital is being invested in mines in Africa, Australia, pharmaceuticals and other consumer items worth billions are exported overseas which are not even of good quality. If the Indian bourgeoisie wants to keep exporting cheap low quality products and services overseas it needs the cooperation of the imperial core. Hence India cannot even speak when its own sailors die by American missiles while crossing the Strait of Hormuz. This wouldn't be the case if it were not for the influence of the Indian deep state.

Now the question you might be asking is if the deep state and the black economy create so much inefficiencies and are even a threat to internal security then why doesn't anyone do anything about it. The reason is simple, class interest. Millions of people depend on the deep state and the black economy for their livelihoods and most are in the informal sector. It is actually impossible to crush the deep state without also causing harm to a good part of the informal sector. So what is the solution?

Arun Kumar gives a number of solutions for the problems of the black economy both for short and long term in his book Understanding The Black Economy and Black Money in India That also applies to the Indian deep state like breaking the nexus of corrupt politicians, corrupt executive and businessmen through broad mass movements but I'm going to explore a different angle. The present regime has waged a war against the informal sector which is obvious from its policy decisions thus far. There are many reasons for why it's doing so but the main reason is that it enables growth. Basically every economy that has been able to crush its informal sector like South Korea, China, Singapore etc. have been able to grow faster and have more stable governments (not necessarily democratic governments but relatively stable ones). India is trying to follow this exact route so it is actively killing its informal sector and creating what in South Korea is called “chaebolism”, which is Asian for an oligopoly. In this the deep state becomes more formalised and centralised making it easier to control. In such a situation the domestic military industrial complex can also grow at a disproportionate rate as India plans to be a leading arms exporter and “net security provider" of the QUAD in the South Pacific. Hence a broad based decentralised alliance of parties and political and social groups can at best change the regime not abolish the deep state and take away its autonomy. Today those who are being immiserated by the crushing of the informal sector can be organised as a parallel government with its own parliament (in the form of workers councils), tenants associations and women’s committees, people's courts and municipalities etc. This will take a lot of time, efforts and resources to materialise but it is the only way in my opinion that the deep state can be decisively dethroned.

Yes, I am an anti-national. I refuse to support a nation that cannot look its children in their eyes.

Yes, I am anti national. I mourn the deaths of Gauri Lankesh, Narendra Dabholkar, Father Stan Swamy and Rohit Vemula.

I shiver at the thought of a Hindu Rashtra in which my brothers have no place and my home is solitude.

The corpses of my dreams block my consciousness and they do not look familiar to me anymore.

The weeping of widows is buzzing in my head.

Yes, I am anti-national. I refuse to support a nation that dances on the rubbles of war.

Yes, I am anti-national because the blood rain falls on millions who stand naked.

I cry at the sight of every mother who drugs her children to sleep while they beg on the footpaths.

It is now when poetry must ignite and words of fire must spread and give voice to the voiceless. Our phrases must be forged from the crucible of oppression. We are all in this together. The time for hollow promises and dead sermons is over.

I despise the netas, the bureaucrats, the teachers,the journalists, the doctors and the lawyers who have been bought for dimes. I abhor the sight of molten asphalt under the scorching sun. I feel the puke rising up inside me when I hear the sirens wail and smell the burning fuel.

Yes, I am anti-national. Because the songs of my forefathers are still fresh in my memories and they beg for a peaceful death. The specter of Lennon's ‘Imagine’ haunts my dreams and I wake up with a pounding heart. Hundreds of prisoners are cramped in a small cell where the cries of torture keeps them awake at night.

The body of a Gond woman gathering tendu leaves in the forests was filled with bullet holes. They cried ‘wolf’ and everyone believed them.

Yes, I am an anti-national because I've been rejected by both gods and demons.

The nimble fingers of my childhood play with me on the corner of a road. They ask me about poverty and all the questions I can't answer. Mum’s the word then.

I am all those who long for a new order. An order in which the mind is without fear of destitution, disenfranchisement and the head is held high. In the words of the Tagore; a world “where knowledge is free”.

Something we instinctively understand about caste but are often unable to articulate is that caste culture is an instrument of the ruling exploiter class of India. It is pretty much obvious but we are not completely sure how to talk about it with scientific precision because we haven't developed the vocabulary for this yet. For example, the term" jati" which is usually referred to as one's caste can also mean kind, species or even nationality. Varna system and the scriptural laws we find in the Shastras for example are what Srinivas called the "book view of caste" and they do not reflect material reality most of the time. Since Historical Materialist ideas are shunned from the mainstream public conversations we haven't developed a way of talking about caste as an instrument of class exploitation.

Imagine if you didn't have the periodic table and you couldn't refer to water as H20. You would still have the same water but you wouldn't have a way to talk about its constituent parts and how they interact. Hence what we need is to develop a language that does not only match our common sense but also goes beyond it.

Castes constitute of both the exploiter class and the exploited class. In this we understand that there is a relation of correspondence of class with caste. But it is important to note is that the exploiter class is the biggest beneficiary of the caste system and the working poor are the biggest victims Some have said that the caste system was instumentalised as a tool of class exploitation to reduce the role of violence somewhat. This is probably an over-simplification because caste system (especially now) is very violent. Only recorded cases of caste atrocities in India is in tens of thousands. But the role of consent in making the working class commit atrocities against dalits, adivasis and other marginalised people and even tolerating them cannot be understated. All exploiter classes use some combination of consent and coercion to reproduce its role as the ruling class and they vary from culture to culture. Getting too hung up on cultural differences to conclude that some people (eg. Indians) are so unique like aliens for whom known laws of human history do not apply, is ridiculous. Can you claim that the people speaking Nihali of mainland india are some different sort of species because their language doesn't share the same ancestry with other surrounding languages? We know all languages have syntax, semantics, pragmatics etc and they are all capable of conveying similar if not same ideas and Nihali is no exception.

The point is we must not get hungup on the cultural differences of the ruling class. Indian capitalism will have its own specificities and the indian bourgeoise will have its own unique cultural differences especially in terms of how it rules. To give a simple example to make it more concrete, some bourgeoisie finds it easier to rule with a monarchy and some with a republic but the class remains the same.

The idea that the analysis of class does not apply to Indians because of the existence of the caste system is the most brain-dead take that can ever be.

I don't follow a lot of tech news but it is my impression that the tech sector, especially the one in India is sort dumb. Like we are going spend enormous amounts of resource on infrastructure for chatbots and the market is flooded with copycat products. Today what the indian tech sector does is doing is either just support for other businesses, sometimes for overseas businesses or trying to sell a startup in the share market for a higher price. Neither has anything to do with innovation. You will notice that India is one of the lowest spender on R&D as percentage of the GDP. The indian capitalists fund reasearch not nearly enough like many western and non western countries. The reason for this is often stated that the indian ruling class is 'risk adverse' for whatever reason or maybe the dominance of finance capital made it so that they are more interested in short term profits than long term gains and I don't disagree with all that. But I think there is another explanation.

We see around the world a dumbing down of social sciences especially in India. The social science in India especially after Modiji became our PM is all about outsourcing social sciences to western countries. This is like obvious from their education policies like setting up foreign universities in india to cutting budgets for grants to allowing Bill Gates to fund research in India. Like its insane how dependent we are on the dominant paradigms of the west but I'll not go into that here. But my point is because social sciences are so dumb especially in india the tech sector doesn't know what the heck do ordinary people actually want. They can't afford their services anyway so who cares. This alienation of the tech sector, especially in India mainly driven by copy paste logic is the result of a dumbing down of indian social sciences and complete dependency on western bourgeois paradigms that had started a long time ago (although I don't know when).

We cannot think of tech and social sciences in isolation because they are like two sides of one brain. If you have problems in the part of your brain that does visual processing (occipital lobe) then obviously your motor system will not work optimally. It is like that and it is not just in research and higher studies. This dumbing down is done from school by STEM biased teachers and faculty who have created a "merit hierarchy" (insanely stupid) in school based on individual interests. This hierarchy is then used to segregate students and define their whole intellectual life. I know there are recent reforms to allow for more academic flexibility but the "merit hierarchy" remains. So, returning to my key argument is that a dumbing down of indian social sciences and its dependence on western bourgeois intellectuals is one of the important causes for the dumbing down of the tech sector in India. Love to hear your thoughts on this.

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So the Minister representing the Labour and Employment Ministry in India went all the way to Geneva to update the shareholders that the state has implemented the four labour codes in India. The reason why I say capitalism is broken is because for a long time foreign direct investments weren't coming very much, instead India was seeing a great number of capital flights. Most of the FDI that comes to India mostly comes in the finance sector which doesn't produce shit. This has landed India into a severe unemployment crisis and inflation. Then the Iran crisis started early this year and the sector that usually does most of the heavy lifting i.e fuel got hit

Now the ruling class knows that even if the Iran crisis reaches some sort of resolution it does not guarantee India's growth story. The solution both the ruling party and oppositions have thought about is to attract investments at any cost. Take for example this article from The Wire which talks about how India can tap into the international credit market to boost investments. Ashok Kumar Lahiri the chief of NITI Aayog has already said that India must forget about demand and implement structural changes to encourage investments (especially FDI) which is the same thing written in the Wire article. This is the logical conclusion of supply side economics in which the mode of redistribution is always meant to be profit driven. The problem lies in the fact that it's not working anymore. Investment is low, inflation high and job growth inadequate. Few persons who are concerned with the demand side like Prabhat Patnaik for example want a redistribution of wealth through taxes on the rich (top 1% or .1%) to meet the demand side constraints but everybody knows that the rich will find their way to evade taxes which they always had. In fact it is far easier now than ever in history. So the only option left is to beg international capital to enable growth in India by showing them the labour laws are as per their requirement. This might make some short term improvements in the rate of returns to investment but in the long run it will not be able to save Indian capitalism from falling profitability.

The insatiable thirst of the monopoly houses in India is being quenched by the BJP. From the time it came to power in 2014 it has declared a war on the informal sector. Policies like GST and Demonetisation have broken the backs of the informal sector and even liberal mainstream economists have been talking about a K shaped growth in which the organised sectors have been growing at the expense of the unorganised, informal sectors. In Bengal, where BJP has come to power with the votes of the marginalised and salaried classes, it has declared an uncompromising war on the informal sector by bulldozing hawkers' shops and homes in some of the busiest places. The salaried class is overwhelmingly in support of this move because the previous government in spite of its sympathies for the informal sector has successfully killed any semblance of class consciousness in favour of cultural chauvinism. I will point out some of the social and economic implications of this in this post.

The small vendors that constitute the informal sector in India are people who don't get sufficient work throughout the week and thus have to resort to selling vegetables, fruits, fastfood, cheap jewelry, household wares etc. to make ends meet. They lack the capital to produce, process and transport commodities so they have to use their labour for financing their business. The salaried class do not show any solidarity with them as they see them as fundamentally from a different class. One might very well make the case that the upper most strata of the salaried class is petite bourgeoisfied beyond any saving but this does not explain the antipathy shown by the rest. My argument is that 15 year long conditioning during the TMC rule has made the salaried class disassociate themselves from the common man and in the process completely forget their own class interests.

The minor inconvenience that is caused by hawkers and the informal housing in general is more than made up for by their real effects on the consumer goods/service market. They provide cheap commodities and services (like housekeeping) due to which the large branded companies have to keep their prices low. The salaried class thinks that BJP is working in their favour by cleaning up the streets and footpaths but the interests that are being served are those of the big capital that will further monopolize the market and gain massively in pricing power. This will reduce the purchasing power of the salaried class. If BJP has its way then even roadside tea or coffee would be replaced by Starbucks. This doesn't serve the interests of the working class but only of big capital. The micro, small and medium producers will be the biggest loser alongside the salaried class.

In its pathological drive for cleaning the streets of the poor, BJP is removing informal shops and homes that serve as the means to livelihoods for thousands. They don't even give a week's notice for them to prepare, thus causing a gigantic humanitarian crisis. Under Article 21 of the Indian constitution the right to livelihood cannot be taken away by the whims of the state. The Supreme Court of India interpreting the article in this way has mandated that a 15 day notice period must be given to the supposed encroachers to challenge the demolition or to make alternative arrangements, which the government has ignored. Now thousands of livelihoods across Bengal are at stake. Even the humble slum-dwellers are increasingly coming to the understanding that their inevitable displacement will be to serve the big moneyed interests.

BJP's unwillingness to see the large reserve army of labour having to make ends meet by illegally encroaching on public property as an economic problem rather than a law and order problem is bound to cause a bigger law and order problem in the long run. Those who are being uprooted from their livelihoods will resort to crimes and distress migration which will increase social tensions and make an unsafe environment for everybody. The solution to the problems of illegal encroachment by hawkers and slum-dwellers is proper rehabilitation on which the government is not interested in spending any money. It is much easier to deploy the police and bulldoze the property of the poor to make it seem like they are solving a problem when they are actually creating much bigger ones.

When talking about the BJP's bulldozer politics the communal angle cannot be ignored. It is of no surprise that the properties that have been targeted thus far largely belonged to muslims. In the name of law and order communal poison is being spread by the state whose chief minister has openly declared that he will work only for Hindus. In the showing of hollow piety muslim ways of life are being threatened by banning beef and shrinking religious freedoms. This targeting of minority communities will cause further polarisation of society along communal lines.

The BJP has come into power in Bengal by riding on a wave of anti incumbency sentiments of the petite bourgeoisfied classes, electoral malpractice, religious propaganda and enormous money power thus exposing the weaknesses of the electoral system. It has also bought some “social justice warriors” (mostly Ambedkarites) on its side by bringing to power some people from lower caste backgrounds. They think that this has given them a license to saffronise the state and wage a war against the poor. This will be resisted with all the might of anti-fascist forces on the ground.