The Price of India’s Soul?

July 27, 2026 X.T.M 25 Comments filed under X.T.M

On Great Nicobar, and what integration would actually require

Is the port separable from the township in practice, or only on paper?
Can 229 people hold a veto over a national project? If they cannot, who can?
Does Indian elite capital reinvest at home, and what would it look like if it did?

The Strategic Case

In August 2024 the Public Investment Board, the Finance Ministry body that vets projects with a financial fallout, examined the Great Nicobar proposal brought to it by the Ministry of Shipping. It recorded that the project did not have strategic objectives, and that strategic objectives should be added to it.

They were added. In March 2026 the Ministry of Defence notified the project as strategic. The Hindu has reviewed both the 2024 board documents and the March 2026 records of the Public-Private Partnership Appraisal Committee, the Finance Ministry branch that must clear anything above five hundred crore.

In between, the shipping ministry asked for ₹12,300 crore of viability gap funding. The appraisal committee asked why a commercially viable project required a subsidy, and why the ministry wanted to depart from the funding norms in this case. It also asked how the port would compete with Colombo, Port Klang and Singapore. The funding was refused and the Ports Ministry was told to find the money internally.

Congress Intervenes

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The Cockroach Takes a Bow

July 26, 2026 X.T.M 186 Comments filed under Popular, X.T.M

On the CJP, the NEET leak, and the weapon that failed to detonate

1. How much of the patriotic framing was strategy and how much was simply the sincere register of the people who happened to be there?

2. Does the Shaheen Bagh comparison hold? The counter-case is that 2020 and 2026 are not comparable because the CAA was a policy the government wanted and the NEET leak was an embarrassment it did not.

3. Can a satirical formation convert?

Sorting out the Cockroaches?

Every major Indian protest movement of the last twelve years has faced the same attempted execution. Not by baton, though the batons come, and came again on 20 July. The execution is attempted when the state tries to answer the question who are these people? before the movement can answer it. Shaheen Bagh was minorities. JNU was tukde-tukde. The farmers held out longest and won their repeal, and were still, in the telling, Khalistanis with tractors.

It is a sorting mechanism. Once a crowd has been sorted out of the nation, its demands become negotiable in the way that a hostile faction’s demands are negotiable, which is to say not at all.

The Cockroach Janta Party won in large part because Abhijeet Dipke understood this and moved first.

The insult

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The origin and variation of ethnic violence in South Asia

June 21, 2026 Fly Die 4 Comments filed under FlyDie

It’s been a few days since I last appeared here, so I don’t know what’s going on here. Either way, I had previously mentioned in some of my past comments about a few useful sources for understanding communal and caste conflict. One of the books that I mentioned was “The Colonial Origins of ethnic violence in India” by Ajay Varghese. I have been meaning to make a post about the book, but I couldn’t really fully summarize everything in a meaningful manner until I remembered a summary the author wrote in the concluding chapter himself, which I am just going to fully quote below since I think it’s an interesting insight about violence in present-day South Asia.

Summary of the Book

This book has argued that patterns of ethnic violence in India stem from legacies of colonial rule that were reinforced over time through institutions. India is well known as having been the “jewel in the crown” of the British Empire; less well known is that the British never controlled the entire country. Most of the areas that were already British colonies prior to the conquest of India had been brought under direct rule, but the Rebellion of 1857 prevented the subcontinent from being entirely annexed. Afterward, roughly one-fourth of the Indian population lived in princely states ruled by largely autonomous native kings. This key historical divide forms the colonial origins of ethnic violence in contemporary India. Both the British administrators and the princely rulers governed heterogeneous populations, but they had very different conceptions of how to manage this ethnic diversity. In the provinces, British administrators emphasized the centrality of caste. Colonial officials chose this particular identity after the Rebellion of 1857, which they perceived as a religious(primarily Islamic) uprising, because they were intent on de-emphasizing religion. Caste (along with tribal identities) was promoted as the central organizing principle for a new, modern society. During the latter half of the nineteenth century, the caste system was divorced from its Hindu origins and became largely a system of social categories. It was subsequently viewed as scientific in character, bearing resemblance (depending on the administrator) either to race or to the class structure of Victorian England.

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The Long Dark Night for India’s Muslims

May 23, 2026 X.T.M 73 Comments filed under Comment as Canon, Popular, Precedent, X.T.M

Our own Hindufication

We write this not as outsiders pretending to diagnose India, but as people who have undergone a gentler version of the same process. Over fifteen years of family and work on the subcontinent, our own Islamicate inheritance has been quietly sifted. The Persianate was retained. The Arabic was allowed to fall away. The qawwali, the food, the manners, the ghazal, the Mughal grammar of taste. All survived. The devotional Islamicate self did not. We arrived as something close to a Anglo-Islamicate hybrid. We are leaving, slowly, as a Hindu-Persianate one. We did not plan this. We watched it happen to ourselves.

The Persian survives. The Arabic does not. The poetry survives. The prayer does not. This is the formula. Once you see it, you cannot unsee it.

We made this passage with privilege, with distance, with choice, and with somewhere else to be if we changed our minds. The Indian Muslim, the one with no other passport and no other country, is being asked to make the same passage on terms set by people who never had to make it themselves. That asymmetry is this post.

The morning song

The news this week was Memo No. 470-ME, dated 19 May 2026, signed by the Director of Madrasah Education, Government of West Bengal. The order makes the singing of Vande Mataram mandatory at morning assembly in every state-recognised madrasa: government, aided, unaided, all of them. Immediate effect. Approval of competent authority.

Note the date. Suvendu Adhikari was sworn in as the first BJP Chief Minister of West Bengal on 9 May, ten days earlier, on a 207-seat mandate that ended Mamata Banerjee’s fifteen-year run. The order is ten days into the new government. Of all the actions available to a freshly-installed state administration, this is the gesture chosen. The first major item on the agenda was the Muslim schoolchild’s morning. The signal is the signal.

The Pakistani faction of our commentariat is aghast, and not unreasonably. The song is a hymn to the Great goddess Durga, drawn from a novel that called for war on Muslims, and forcing a Muslim child to recite it is a small humiliation that announces a large arrangement. One of our Pakistani commenters compared it to forcing a vegetarian Hindu to eat beef. The comparison overstates and understates at the same time. It overstates because nobody is forcing food into anyone’s mouth. It understates because food is forgotten by the afternoon, and a song sung daily for ten years writes itself into the spine.

The row is the symptom. The disease is older. Bengal is the latest frontier, not the first.

The Persianate without the Muslim

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The Hindification of East India

May 7, 2026 X.T.M 57 Comments filed under Popular, Precedent, X.T.M

The Saffron Block

The map of East India has changed colour. Bihar fell to the NDA in November 2025 with 202 of 243 seats, and Samrat Choudhary now sits as the first BJP Chief Minister Bihar has ever had. Odisha went saffron in 2024 under Mohan Charan Majhi. On 4 May 2026 Mamata Banerjee lost Bengal after fifteen years; the BJP took 206 seats and will form its first government in Kolkata. Himanta Biswa Sarma returned in Assam with 82 seats, a two-thirds majority and a third consecutive term. The old Bengal Presidency, once the largest province of British India, is now a single saffron block.

This is the completion, by ballot, of a partition the British attempted by map.

1905

In 1905 Curzon split Bengal. The eastern half was to be Muslim and centred on Dhaka; the western half was to be joined to Bihar and Orissa, which made the Bengalis a linguistic minority in their own province. The Bengali Hindu elite, the bhadralok who ran Bengal’s commerce and letters, fought it bitterly. They did not want to be drowned by Bihari and Oriya numbers. In 1911 the British relented and reunited Bengal.

The Biharis, for their part, had spent two decades campaigning to escape Bengali domination. The 1912 reorganisation that gave them their own province, jointly with Orissa, was their reward.

Linguistic identity then was the prime axis. Hindu and Muslim mattered, but not as much as Bengali, Bihari, Oriya.

The Historical Axis Flipped

A century on, that axis has flipped. The Bengali, the Bihari, the Oriya and the Assamese are voting as Hindus, and they are voting for the same party. The two-nation theory, which Bengal once threw off, is doing its work the long way round.

Hindi,, Hindu, Hindustan

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The 1000 Years Frame Erases 80% of India

April 26, 2026 X.T.M 26 Comments filed under X.T.M

girmit, high signal as ever as the Comment threads threaten to get engulfed in flames (the Crescentiate are being more provocative than usual). Will return to this properly in a separate post. as an aside when we see girmit, we think Kermit. Probably one of our wises voices in BP.

Indians and their gratitude for Partition

You will be hard pressed to find a normal person in India who doesn’t accept this. If you listen to young people talk they would treat the fact that India-Pakistan were once part of the same polity as some kind of surprising trivia. My point is that, while TNT was used to litigate for partition , and the results of that have been accepted by all parties, the *further* application of TNT will find no takers among liberals. An example would be a statement like “Kashmir should have gone to Pakistan because of having a muslim majority”. There are excellent reasons why one can argue for Kashmir as an independent state in 1947 or even part of Pakistan, that don’t depend on TNT. The foremost being the idea that the process of accession was corrupted somehow. J&K had the same exact right to self-determinaton as Travancore for instance. But the underlying principal is self-determination in the Wilsonian sense i suppose, not TNT. (This goes both ways, as Indians use an imperial logic of their own that a fully intact successor state to the british raj was their entitlement, which is quite outageousely grandiose to be fair).

BJP is a broad tent

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