By Shiran Illanperuma The BRICS New Delhi Declaration, an outcome of the eighteenth BRICS summit held under the rotating chairship of India, called for a more democratic global order and alternative payment systems. Yet months earlier, in July, India itself had purchased a record net $15.2 billion in US treasuries. The contradiction highlights the ambiguities […]
The 2024 uprising brought down an increasingly authoritarian political order. What followed poses a harder question: can political rupture produce democratic transformation? On 5 August 2024, Sheikh Hasina left Bangladesh after fifteen consecutive years as prime minister. A political order that had appeared increasingly difficult to challenge collapsed within weeks. The immediate trigger had been […]
The White Coat on the Road On the morning of 7 September 2026, a group of medical interns in their white coats and aprons marched from Gandhi Medical College towards the Chief Minister’s residence in Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh, India, with a demand for an increase in stipend from ₹14,337 to ₹30,000. They failed to advance […]
Ask a young woman in Dhaka who has just been harassed online where she is supposed to go, and you will discover something that no statute admits to the state has never actually told her. Bangladesh has passed three major cyber laws since 2006. Each law has been announced as the correction of the last. […]
In 1913, Lenin wrote a letter to Maxim Gorky so uncharacteristically vicious that it reads less like party correspondence and more like an exorcism. Gorky had been hobnobbing with Bogdanov, Lunacharsky, and the “god-building” trend, bogostroitel’stvo, the idea, half-humorous and half-messianic, that socialism need not destroy religious feeling so much as redirect it. Let humanity […]
It is cruel occurrence that a slogan outlives the movement that gave birth to it. On 21 August, several hundred protestors gathered at Jantar Mantar under saffron flags, chanting “Educate, Agitate, Organise”, three words coined by B. R. Ambedkar for a struggle against precisely the hierarchy these protestors had come out to defend (Ambedkar, 1992). […]
Imagine a very big casino. Millions of people have been invited to play the game. Everyone receives the same rules. Everyone is told that if they play well, they will win. The game appears fair because everyone enters through the same door and, at the end, everyone leaves with a result. Some players, of course, […]
“The revolution lags behind itself.” —Henri Lefebvre, The Explosion: Marxism and the French Upheaval “I hope to find “What is denied to me.” –Paul Eluard, ‘The Corner’ (1937) Theory on the Run: What and Why? It is perhaps in the fitness of things that one begins with a confession. What follows here, by way […]
If democracy is to be qualified as one, it cannot, by and large, ban protest. But protest is not simply what democracy allows. It is something people make and remake, deciding themselves how to bargain with those who holds power, when to be restrained and when to be angry. Perhaps what matters, then, is not […]
An ordinary citizen who prefers not to use digital mobile devices recently struggled to obtain an appointment at a Sri Lankan government department because he did not have a mobile phone number. A security guard issuing token numbers asked for a phone number to register the appointment. The citizen explained that he does not use […]
