Modi, Money & Mass Obedience: The Indian Republic

Aditya Dhaka, 6:12 PM

Republic Day: the one day we pretend our republic isn’t being pissed on by the very men we elected. You all pretend it everyday… but nevermind. Forget celebrating it; today I remind you all that power loves an audience willing to applaud its own erosion.

A republic is not just about choosing rulers. It’s about limiting them after they’re chosen. That limit is the Constitution. And, dear Mr Prime Minister, it's not an optional reading! 

A decade-long exercise in seeing how far you can bend a republic before it breaks. Is India broken? Who did you vote for in the last general election? You have your answer! So yes, you helped in ruining your nation. You betrayed it. But alas! You are a Hindu. And therefore, the best class of Indian citizens. The BJP voter. You are more Indian than I am. And I, unluckily, according to the UAPA, am an “anti-national”. Questioning power is treason now. Asking for accountability is sedition. And a new fundamental duty is to applaud the PM’s speeches and put them on WhatsApp statuses. 

Dear reader, this is not a malfunction of democracy. This is its deliberate rewiring; what happens when citizens confuse loyalty to the nation with loyalty to the men temporarily running it. You were never meant to trust Prime Ministers, ministers, or any politicians. You were meant to watch them. Question them. Restrain them. Make sure they do not overexercise power. It's your tax money that's paying for their life, you don't need to love them or be their fans. But somewhere along the way, obedience became a virtue. Elections are the bare minimum. 

Your tax money funds endless trips. Prime Minister. Foreign Minister. Delegations flying business class to everywhere and nowhere. Outcomes? Photo-ops. The political executive expresses deep desire to attend Donal Trump's swearing-in ceremony: gets insulted. The BJP government and its IT cell call the entire left-wing “deep state funded”, but their own prime minister calls Donal Trump “sir”. If Trump saying that Modi doesn't wish to displease him wasn't insulting enough, the Karachi stock exchange growing at a faster rate than Sensex since the last 11 years, would do it. A man who abandoned his wife,bof course, not suspend his leaders convicted of raping minors. Let's do him fair! But I would like to inform you all that India has not seen any significant growth in the "CHAI" sector, if that exists. 

The BJP survives on fear. It has successfully planted fear in the minds of you all that a massive demographic change is underway, that Muslims are “outbreeding” Hindus, that they will one day overpower, replace, and eventually kill every Hindu in this country. You have been trained to imagine an Islamic takeover of India that exists nowhere except WhatsApp forwards, TV debates, and election speeches. This fear is manufactured, repeated, and carefully maintained.

You stop asking for evidence because fear doesn’t need proof, only repetition. And once people are afraid, the BJP positions itself as the only saviour. Not a government. “A saviour”. The protector who will rescue you from a problem that does not exist. Muslims become the threat. The BJP becomes the shield. You become the blind citizenry. 

 A frightened population is easier to rule than an informed one. When you are busy panicking about population ratios and imagined invasions, you are not asking why unemployment is rising, why education is collapsing, or why public institutions are being hollowed out. Fear keeps you distracted. Fear keeps you obedient.

And let’s be honest about who benefits from this fear. Not you. Not your family. BJP politicians stay in power, fund their lifestyles, send their children to elite universities, while your children die over whether a college named after Mata Vaishno Devi should even allow Muslim students. This is an engineered division, just sold as pride.

There is no Muslim conspiracy to take over India. It is mathematically, politically, socially impossible. No opposition party is waiting to impose an Islamic regime. Congress ruled this country for decades and India remained secular throughout. But suddenly, you are told that only one party can save Hinduism, save India, save civilization itself. This is all whataboutary and paid lip service. The tragedy is not that fear exists. The tragedy is that it has worked.

Hitler didn’t seize Germany by announcing a dictatorship on day one. He planted fear first. Fear of Jews. Fear of outsiders. Fear of cultural collapse. Germans were told they were under siege, that enemies were everywhere, that only one man could restore greatness. Sounds familiar? Ordinary Germans didn’t wake up thinking, today feels like a dictatorship. They thought they were being protected. Slowly, thinking was outsourced. Loyalty replaced reason. Questioning became betrayal. By the time the annihilation of Jews began, the moral muscles of society were already dead. The state had successfully trained people to obey. 

That is the playbook, to reduce citizens to followers. Elevate the leader to something beyond human accountability. When Modi hints he is “non-biological” or “sent by God,” it's politics borrowing religion to silence criticism. The leader is no longer wrong, because how do you question destiny? History doesn’t repeat in identical outfits; it rhymes in strategy. Fear first. Dehumanisation next. Institutions hollowed out quietly, all media bought out by Mr A. Dissent framed as danger. Germans didn’t think it would go that far. That’s the point. Dictatorships are not voted in as dictatorships. They are assembled piece by piece while people argue that comparisons are exaggerated, that critics are overreacting, that the leader means well. By the time people realise thinking has been replaced with chanting, it is already expensive to dissent.

Fear is the tool. And when citizens stop thinking and start following, history does not ask for permission before repeating its worst chapters. Rise now!

UAPA is not about terrorism but time, about cribbing dissent. It traps people inside the legal system so long that the process itself becomes the punishment. Bail becomes nearly impossible. Courts are told not to examine evidence properly at the bail stage. Trials crawl for years. Acquittal, when it comes, arrives too late to undo the damage. The government misuses the UAPA to arrest anybody who stands up to it, some people with speech targeting national unity were arrested but that doesn't mean those who you suspect of can also be jailed. Under the UAPA, you can be arrested even before you have said anything; if the government suspects that you “can” or you “may” speak something Anti-government on a particular issue, then it can detain you; and also do you know India is the world's largest democracy? And notice the asymmetry. Those who openly incite violence from the “right” are handled gently, if at all. Those who question the state are labelled threats to the nation. UAPA becomes a message: dissent is expensive. Never before had we had a government so sensitive to criticism that it could ruin lives. 

Umar Khalid has not been accused of throwing stones, carrying weapons, or leading mobs. There is no recovery of arms, nor any video of violence, nor any terror module uncovered. The case against him rests largely on speeches, alleged meetings, and interpretations of conversations. The prosecution claims he was part of a “larger conspiracy” behind the Delhi riots, yet struggles to establish direct linkage between his actions and the outbreak of violence. Courts themselves have acknowledged that the material is circumstantial. Still, bail has been repeatedly denied because UAPA does not permit courts to deeply examine evidence at the bail stage. The law demands only that the accusations appear “prima facie true”, a dangerously low threshold when the state controls the narrative. So Umar Khalid remains in jail not because guilt has been proven, but because the law makes prolonged incarceration legally convenient.This is the pattern: to delay as discipline.

What makes this worse is the selective application. Those aligned with power, even when they openly incite hatred or violence, are rarely touched with the same urgency. Cases move slowly. Permissions are granted. Words are contextualised generously. But critics are treated as existential threats. The definition of “national security” expands just enough to swallow dissent and contracts just enough to spare loyalty; the ruling party's fragility masquerading as authority.

CAA and NRC are sold as harmless, even benevolent. One gives refuge. The other just “verifies citizens.” That’s all a lie! The danger is not in each law separately, but in the logic they introduce together.

CAA breaks a basic constitutional idea: that citizenship has nothing to do with religion. For the first time, the state openly says religion is a qualifying factor. You can dress it up as “persecuted minorities,” but the filter is still faith. The BJP keeps saying demography is changing but it's changing because of them, because they are letting Bangladeshis come and infiltrate your land, Oh, so they are not Bangladeshis because they are Hindus? But you who call Indian Bengalis Bangladeshis, why this love for the real ones!

NRC then adds the second move: citizenship is no longer assumed. It must be proven. In a country where millions of people lack paperwork due to poverty, displacement, floods, illiteracy, or sheer bureaucratic chaos, this is not governance, it is roulette. Who proves citizenship easily? Those with resources. Who struggles? The poor. The marginalised. Today it is projected onto Muslims. Tomorrow, it will not ask your religion first. It will ask for papers.

Be practical, the people who live in slums or don't have pucca houses to live in, how will they have their birth certificates, aadhar cards, and voter cards. How will they? And if they don't, they are illegal immigrants. In a country where the majority of the population is poor, focus less on NRC and freebies and more on kapda, roti, makaan. But the BJP can take its chance, give these poor people voter ID cards, maybe they'll vote for them but why would you do that: the ECI way is more fun! 

You will ask why I, a Hindu, is so concerned about a law related to Muslims? But that’s exactly how you have been trained to think. The BJP has convinced you that laws affecting Muslims are not your problem. That your citizenship is secure by default. That you are on the “right side” permanently. This is political brainwashing, not patriotism. The Constitution does not work on permanent exemptions. Once the state learns it can question belonging, it will question anyone who becomes inconvenient.

The demographic panic used to justify CAA and NRC is fiction. Muslims are not “outbreeding” Hindus into extinction. Fertility rates across communities are converging. India is not on the brink of an Islamic takeover. There is no mathematical, political, or constitutional pathway for that to happen. This fear exists because it is useful. It keeps voters anxious and obedient. It allows politicians to pose as saviours against an enemy they invented.

Ask the obvious question. If infiltration is the threat, why is it being blamed on state governments? Borders are controlled by the BSF. The BSF reports to the Home Ministry. The Home Ministry reports to Amit Shah. If borders are porous, the failure is central, not regional. Blaming chief ministers who have no jurisdiction over borders is not governance. It is a theatre.

CAA–NRC is not about Muslims versus Hindus. That framing is the trap. It is about the state versus the citizen, about shifting power upward and accountability downward. About making people fight over identity while institutions quietly lose their spine. You do not protect a republic by deciding who belongs. You protect it by limiting the power of those who decide. The moment citizenship becomes conditional, everyone is on probation. And that is why you should care, that's why I, as a Hindu, care. Even more horrific is a Muslim man, somewhere in rural Bengal saying,"Maa, eta tomar nitir lorai, kintu amader banchar lorai";Mother, for you this is a battle of ideology, but for us it's a war for survival. 

When we talk about politics and power, we also need to talk about money because politicians don’t just wield influence, they accumulate assets, often visibly more than ordinary citizens could ever imagine. In Indian elections, every candidate has to file an affidavit declaring assets — movable and immovable — before they contest. These declarations tell you where they stood before and after certain elections.

Take Amit Shah, for example. His 2024 Lok Sabha election affidavit showed his total assets at about ₹38.81 crore, which was more than three times higher than what he and his family declared back in 2012 when he first contested major elections. So that's a 300%+ increase in personal, declared wealth over roughly a decade.

Even beyond central figures like Shah, BJP candidates often appear high up in asset rankings. In the 2025 Delhi assembly elections, multiple BJP candidates were among the wealthiest in the entire state — people declaring assets in ₹100 crore+ ranges, including some reporting wealth well over ₹200 crore. Five candidates in that election alone were billionaires by declared assets, and three of them were from the BJP. Stop MLALADS for these people, they can install their street lights on their own. And compare that to other parties’ leaders in the same contests — for example, AAP’s Arvind Kejriwal declared assets around ₹4.2 crore, meaning even after years in power and contesting big elections, his wealth stayed dramatically lower than some BJP heavyweights in the same region.

The new income tax law is not about increasing taxes. It is about expanding state access. Earlier, tax investigations were anchored to physical evidence: cash, papers, lockers, hard drives. Now, the law formally upgrades your digital existence into taxable evidence. Emails, WhatsApp chats, Telegram messages, cloud backups, social media DMs, app data, digital wallets. If it exists on a screen, it now exists in the tax department’s line of sight. This is done by redefining what counts as “books of account” and “documents.” Digital records are no longer secondary or incidental. They are primary material. Their money is structured, offshore, lawyered, and politically insulated. This expands control downwards. Middle-class professionals, small business owners, freelancers, activists, journalists. People whose entire lives sit on one device. When the state can legally read your chats for tax purposes, privacy stops being a right and becomes a privilege granted by discretion.

During a tax search, officers can legally access devices, demand passwords, copy data, mirror storage, and examine cloud-linked content. What was earlier a grey zone has now been written into procedure. Your phone is no longer private property in practice; it is a portable filing cabinet. The law requires that information may be relevant to undisclosed income. That word “may” is doing the real work. Suspicion is enough. Why is this government so desperate to gain control over its citizens? Why does it want the country to work on their suspicions? Wake up, India and her people, your Right of Life, Right to Freedom and Right to Privacy are being hurt!

My words will be incomplete if I don't highlight the abysmal state of the economy; of the arcane jugulary that this government practices. India’s economy today is dressed impeccably. The numbers are pressed, the indices behave, the dashboards glow reassuring shades of green. My blog is not interested in whether India is “doing well.” That question is analytically useless. Economies do not succeed or fail; they allocate risk, reward, and time. Everything is in order, at least at first glance. And that, perhaps, is what should make one suspicious. Economies rarely look this composed unless something more interesting is happening underneath. 

Gross Domestic Product measures value added plus net taxes on products. Gross Value Added measures value created before those taxes. There are two types of taxes, Direct taxes and Indirect taxes. Direct taxes are progressive. These are levied directly on income, profits, or wealth (income tax, corporate tax). Earning ↑ Tax ↑. Indirect taxes are levied on goods and services (GST, sales tax & excise duties).

When tax rates are rising faster than underlying production, GDP can outpace GVA without any meaningful improvement in real economic activity. That gap matters. Over the last few years, India’s GDP growth has consistently outperformed GVA growth. This divergence signals that a non-trivial portion of “growth” is being propped up by higher indirect tax collections rather than broad-based expansion in value creation. So that means that the economy is showing revenue growth driven by pricing and taxation, not volume.

When you disaggregate GVA, a pattern emerges that is far less flattering than the headline suggests. Manufacturing GVA has remained volatile and intermittently sluggish, despite repeated policy emphasis. Construction shows strength, but this strength is tightly coupled to public capex cycles rather than private investment confidence. Trade, hotels, transport and communication recovered post-pandemic but plateaued faster than expected, reflecting constrained consumption elasticity. Agriculture, still absorbing a disproportionate share of employment, continues to underperform in value-added growth, reinforcing income fragility at the base. The result is growth that is narrowly distributed across sectors but widely advertised.

THE TAX-STATE EFFECT: Net taxes on products have become an increasingly important contributor to GDP growth. GST collections are robust, excise duties have been selectively weaponised, and compliance has improved. None of this is inherently negative. But it does mean that growth is being mediated through the state’s extraction capacity rather than the economy’s productive breadth.

This introduces a subtle fragility that when fiscal buoyancy substitutes for production buoyancy, growth becomes sensitive to administrative efficiency rather than entrepreneurial momentum. 

If GDP tells us how fast an economy is moving, the structure of government spending tells us where that motion is allowed to land. In India’s case, the most revealing fault line runs between Capital Expenditure (Capex) and Revenue Expenditure (Revex). Both are indispensable in theory. In practice, their imbalance has become the signature of the current growth model.

Capex is the state’s investment in permanence. Highways, ports, airports, power grids, digital corridors. Revex is expenditure on continuity: wages, pensions, healthcare delivery, education systems, administrative capacity. One leaves behind monuments; the other keeps institutions alive. A functioning economy requires both. A skewed one chooses spectacle.

Over the past decade, India has made that choice decisively. Central government Capex has risen from roughly ₹2.4 lakh crore in FY14 to over ₹7.5 lakh crore in FY24, expanding far faster than nominal GDP. As a share of output, Capex has steadily climbed, while Revex growth has been kept deliberately restrained. This reallocation is routinely marketed as fiscal prudence. The spreadsheet cooperates. The underlying economics, less so. Capex flatters GDP quickly. Construction inflates output, lifts core-sector indices, and registers cleanly in national accounts. It is growth that appears before it matures. The wager embedded in this strategy is simple: once assets exist, productivity will follow. That wager only pays off when complementary Revex—staffing, training, maintenance, operational funding—keeps pace. In India’s case, it has not.

Real public-sector wage growth has stagnated. Operational health spending remains below 1.5 percent of GDP. Education expenditure continues to hover around three percent, well short of stated policy targets. The state has chosen to scale infrastructure faster than the human and administrative systems required to make that infrastructure economically productive. The economy, as a result, expands outward before it deepens.

Asset creation has raced ahead of income creation. Employment elasticity has weakened. Consumption growth has lagged output growth. Public services exist, but operate under strain. What looks like momentum at the macro level increasingly resembles compression at the household level. The financing structure compounds the risk. Much of the Capex surge is debt-supported, directly or through public-sector balance sheets and off-budget mechanisms. When asset returns underperform, the adjustment does not occur through a retreat from Capex but through tighter Revex.

The RG Kar case was not ignored by the BJP-media ecosystem. It was aggressively, selectively, and strategically weaponised. The crime was horrific, yes. But the way it was amplified had very little to do with justice and everything to do with West Bengal politics. The BJP smelled an opening to dent Mamata Banerjee’s strongest voter base: women. And they went all in.

Suddenly, studios discovered feminism. Anchors who sleep through rapes in BJP-ruled states developed a moral spine overnight. Protests were elevated, not suppressed. Narratives were sharpened. The state government was put on trial before any investigation had even stabilised. The message was clear: this is Mamata’s Bengal. Just Bengal. Just TMC. What next, Amit Shah, UP is a women's haven?

But here’s the punchline the BJP didn’t plan for. TOI reports:

“Kolkata: The TMC swept bypolls in West Bengal on Saturday, retaining five seats and wresting Madarihat from BJP, further cementing its political dominance in West Bengal, even as the ongoing protests over the RG Kar incident failed to sway voters. The bypolls were held in six constituencies - Naihati, Haroa, Medinipur, Taldangra, Sitai (SC), and Madarihat (ST)”

Today I say, the Bengalis who you all judge with Biharis, the Bengalis whose West Bengal and Bihar are economically and socially same for you, the Bengalis who become Bangladeshis for you, the same Bengalis are smarter than you, they can look through the BJP’s conspiracies, and they will look through it all again in May 2026. 

Rekha Gupta, the BJP’s Chief Minister in Delhi, gave one of the most striking real-world examples of political disconnect when, instead of addressing the capital’s choking smog with science, she effectively described the Air Quality Index as a kind of “temperature” you can read off an instrument and claimed spraying water around AQI monitors was a legitimate solution — a remark so baffling that the AAP’s Arvind Kejriwal mockingly asked “when did this new science come?” and critics pointed out even watering near monitors won’t magically make toxic air safe while people breathe it in. The moment was so memorable that crowds at a Lionel Messi event greeted her not with cheers but chants of “AQI, AQI,” underlining both public frustration and how televised coverage can flip between furious focus and swift forgetfulness depending on political convenience. 

 Unnao happened under BJP rule in Uttar Pradesh. A minor accused a sitting BJP MLA, Kuldeep Singh Sengar, of rape. The police first protected him, her father died in custody, a truck later rammed into her car, killing two family members; the media outrage came late, after the damage control failed. Hathras, again Uttar Pradesh. Don't you feel something moving in you? This is Modi's India. Is this the man you want to tie rakhi to? 

A Dalit woman was brutally assaulted, later died, and her body was cremated by police at night without the family’s consent. Neither a prime-time marathon, nor a sustained national protest. Kathua, where an eight-year-old girl was raped and murdered. BJP leaders marched in support of the accused, holding the national flag. That image should have ended political careers. It didn’t. Fast-forward to today: rape cases of minors continue to surface from BJP-ruled states like Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, and Haryana, often involving delays in FIRs, intimidation of families, or quiet transfers of officers. You didn’t “miss” these cases. You were trained not to see them. Because outrage in India is not about violence, it’s about utility. And if you’re wondering why you don’t know the names of half the victims from BJP-ruled states, relax. You were busy watching videos of the Prime Minister feeding fodder to his cow on prime hindi channels. 

What’s worse than the crimes themselves is how normal they’ve started to feel. That hollow feeling you get when you hear “another rape case” and just scroll past? That’s conditioning, darling. The BJP era has trained citizens to process horror the way we process weather updates. Bad, sad, next. जब नाश मनुज पर छाता है, तो पहले विवेक मर जाता है. When violence becomes routine, outrage stops being moral and starts being selective. You react only when the media tells you to react, only when the crime is politically profitable. Otherwise, it is just background noise. The story of a successful brainwash. When the same party is constantly in power, constantly controlling narrative, constantly framing what matters and what doesn’t, the public psyche adapts. 

“जिस सुब्ह की ख़ातिर जुग जुग से हम सब मर मर कर जीते हैं

वो सुब्ह कभी तो आएगी

इन भूकी प्यासी रूहों पर इक दिन तो करम फ़रमाएगी

वो सुब्ह कभी तो आएगी

इंसानों की इज़्ज़त जब झूटे सिक्कों में न तौली जाएगी

वो सुब्ह कभी तो आएगी

दौलत के लिए जब औरत की इस्मत को न बेचा जाएगा

चाहत को न कुचला जाएगा ग़ैरत को न बेचा जाएगा

अपने काले करतूतों पर जब ये दुनिया शरमाएगी

वो सुब्ह तभी तो आएगी”

So, here we are. Republic Day. You have waved the tricolour, school kids are done singing Vande Mataram, and you? You clapped. You waved. You put it on your Instagram story like the republic is alive and well, while the very system you celebrate turns a blind eye to horror, manufactures fear, and rewards the guilty. Today, the nation pretends it’s proud, while every BJP-ruled state quietly whispers: “Next.” Next rape ignored. The next law twisted. Next outrage selected for optics. And yes, the RG Kar circus proved how selectively outrage is served—politics first, justice… maybe never. And as Bob Dylan famously said:

“Come gather 'round people

Wherever you roam

And admit that the waters

Around you have grown

And accept it that soon

You'll be drenched to the bone

For the times they are a-changin’”

And here’s the real gift: you don’t need to protest. You don’t need to read. You don’t need to think. Just smile at the parade, applaud the floats, and forget the skeletons in the backrooms. Because if horror becomes ordinary, outrage becomes optional, and patriotism is measured by how loud you cheer for spectacle, then congratulations—you’ve mastered the BJP way. Happy Republic Day, folks. The republic is dead, but hey, at least your selfie with the Prime Minister’s cow went viral!

Until next time….