1. Why was the linguistic principle applied everywhere except the Hindi belt?
2. What would a Braj Pradesh look like, and which is its capital, Agra or Mathura?
3. Can the languages be scheduled without unseating Hindi?
4. What did Ambedkar see in 1955?

Good for the South but not the North?

The States Reorganisation Commission redrew the South along language lines and left the North alone. Andhra for Telugu, Kerala for Malayalam, Karnataka for Kannada, and one enormous Uttar Pradesh for a “Hindi” that contains multitudes. Ambedkar read the report and wrote a pamphlet, Thoughts on Linguistic States, published in December 1955. His verdict: the Commission had produced “a consolidation of the North and balkanisation of the South“, and intentionally or not, the fact was there.

His remedy was specific. Divide UP into three states of roughly two crore each, capitals at Meerut, Cawnpore and Allahabad. Divide Bihar in two, capitals at Patna and Ranchi. “The idea of having bigger linguistic states is not a democratic idea at all,” he wrote, and he added the detail that pre-empts the obvious objection: each of the resulting states would still have Hindi as its language. Division did not threaten Hindi. Forty-five years later, southern Bihar became Jharkhand with its capital at Ranchi, exactly as drawn.

In November 2011 Mayawati’s assembly passed a resolution splitting UP into four, Purvanchal, Bundelkhand, Awadh Pradesh and Paschim Pradesh, and sent it to Delhi. The UPA let it die. Uttar Pradesh today holds over 240 million people, which would rank it around the fifth largest country on earth, under one Vidhan Sabha.

The Hindi umbrella

The census explains what the map will not.

In 1961, ten mother tongues were grouped under Hindi, Braj Bhasha and Awadhi among them. In 1971 the grouping widened to forty-eight, absorbing the languages previously counted as Bihari, Bhojpuri, Magahi and Maithili included, along with the Rajasthani and Pahari clusters. Hindi’s share of India rose from 30.4 per cent to 37 per cent in a single decade. Nobody learned Hindi in those ten years.

By 2011 the umbrella recorded 528 million speakers, 43.6 per cent of India, of whom roughly 320 million reported Hindi proper as their mother tongue. Inside the rest: Bhojpuri at 50.6 million, Rajasthani at 25.8 million, Chhattisgarhi at 16.2 million, Magahi at 12.7 million. Two languages have escaped, Nepali on scheduling in 1992 and Maithili in 2003, and each promptly left the Hindi count. The Bhojpuri demand has been pending since before 2009, on which the Union’s position is that no time frame can be set.

This is the quantity the undivided map protects. Schedule the four pending claimants alone, Bhojpuri, Rajasthani, Chhattisgarhi and Magahi, and roughly 105 million are reassigned on the Maithili precedent, taking the umbrella from 528 million to something near 423, from 43.6 per cent of India to about 35. The base is Hindi proper itself, just over a quarter of the country. The giant states of the North and the extra-wide Hindi column of the census are the mirrors.

Braj

Braj is the western crescent, Mathura, Agra, Aligarh, Hathras, with Bharatpur across the Rajasthan line belonging to it culturally if not administratively. It is Krishna’s country, the land of the pilgrimage circuit, and its language was not a dialect that failed to rise. It was the language that had already risen. Surdas composed the Sursagar in it. The Ashtachhap poets of the Pushtimarg wrote in it. For roughly four centuries Braj Bhasha was the premier literary vehicle of what we now call Hindi, until Khari Boli displaced it in the late nineteenth century and the court poetry of one era became the “dialect” of the next.

The 2011 census records 1.56 million people declaring Braj Bhasha as their mother tongue, 0.36 per cent of Uttar Pradesh (in Krishna’s own country, the enumerator hears “Hindi”).

A Braj Pradesh would face a problem no other proposed state has: its administrative and devotional capitals cannot be the same city. Agra has the size, the infrastructure and the economy. Mathura has everything else. Ambedkar’s western capital was Meerut, but his western state ran far larger than Braj proper. The secretariat in Agra but otherwise expect the state to be governed, in every sense that matters, from Mathura?

The communal balancing

A claim circulates that the big states were built to manufacture Hindu majorities.

Braj fails the premise outright. Mathura and Agra districts run under ten per cent Muslim; a Braj Pradesh would be among the most religiously homogeneous states in India, and it has still never been drawn.

Rohilkhand, Moradabad, Rampur, Bijnor, carries districts above forty per cent, and a Paschim or Harit Pradesh built there would have India’s largest Muslim share outside Kashmir.

So the communal reading does explain one resisted state. It cannot explain the resistance to all of them, Bundelkhand and Purvanchal and Braj included, where the arithmetic of faith changes nothing but of course dilutes the Hindu % in the rest of the State.

The case against Linguistic Reorganisation

The serious objection is not administrative. It is that the belt is a dialect continuum, that Braj shades into Kannauji and Kannauji into Awadhi with no line a surveyor could defend, that every division manufactures new minorities at new peripheries, and that unseating Hindi from its plurality hands a loaded weapon to every anti-Hindi politics in the South at the precise moment the language question is combustible again.

Ambedkar answered most of this in the pamphlet. His three states were all to be Hindi states; the official language loses nothing when its territory is administered in thirds. The continuum objection proves too much, since Telugu shades into Kannada at the border and nobody proposes remerging them. And Telangana settled the remaining question in 2014: one language now has two states, the linguistic principle survived, and Ambedkar’s formula, one state one language rather than one language one state, acquired its proof.

What has actually been divided tells its own story. UP and Bihar have both been cut, in 2000, but on hill and tribal lines, Uttarakhand and Jharkhand, never on language. The one principle that organised the entire map of the South has intermittently been permitted to touch the North.

The freeze on Lok Sabha apportionment lapses after the next census, the North’s huge numbers become the South’s open grievance, and every settlement on the table will involve redrawing of some kind. When that argument arrives, the pamphlet from December 1955 may well be the most current document in the room (Meerut, Cawnpore and Allahabad are still waiting)?

Ruchira’s daughter Sanjukta shared my tribute on Facebook this week and called it amazing. She does not know me. Her mother did, through nearly two decades of this blog, and that a stranger’s grief could reach her family and land as comfort is the whole case for keeping BP alive. The original post is here, Ruchira’s obituary is here, and her daughter’s own tribute is here.

Rest in peace, dearest Ruchira.

In her honour I have started using “I” again instead of the impersonal “we”. I wanted to emotionally invest in this space the way she did in her interactions online.

Moments like this are what I want to cultivate here, so, two years after I revived the blog here from Chennai.

Admin: Agni and myself.

Authors: RNJ, 0M-3, formerly brown and Arkacandra.

It is a tight ship, I am constantly scanning for activity, and authorship is a privilege.

To the authorial cadre, a suggestion about how to spend that privilege. When Kabir argues that South Asians are not natural democrats, or that monarchy suits “a culture that is status and caste-conscious”, the response I want is a reasoned post, not a thread war.

The same standard runs the other way: the comment claiming Pakistanis/haaris are uniquely amenable to feudal domination, should be comprehensively rebutted. Sweeping claims about any community should get answered above the fold, with texture and context. That is the point of a humanities engagement.

The blog is very active, and thanks to Calvin it now has a captain of the Opposition. The divide is ideological, not sectarian, and I intend to keep it that way. Any drift back to sectarian lines or TNT relitigation will not be looked on kindly. This blog is concerned with the Indian subcontinent, of which India, that is Bharat, is the central and defining feature; the neighbours are covered sometimes in their own right but primarily in their bearing on the natural hegemon, India.

The Nicobar thread is the kind of discussion I most want here, since I care about environmental degradation as a general matter (maybe that is Western privilege; it is a privilege I intend to keep).

Here is to the next 15 years, and to a space that Ruchira would appreciate.

1. What did Britain actually leave in 1947, institutions or a franchise?
2. Whose precedent was universal suffrage in 1950?
3. Why did the wardrobe never decolonise?
4. Are all South Asians natural democrats?

The Colonial Bequest

The parliamentary system across India, Pakistan and Bangladesh is Westminster’s. The founders, Gandhi, Nehru, Jinnah, were British-trained lawyers. Liberal democracy arrived in the West through revolutions and arrived in South Asia from the top down. Before the British, the subcontinent was ruled by monarchies, and the political parties are still run by royal houses in all but name, the Bhuttos, the Sharifs, the Gandhis. South Asians, on this account, are not natural democrats.

The chamber, the party system, the common law, the drafting language, the Inns of Court on the founders’ CVs are Albion’s gift. The Indian precedents, Chandragupta and Akbar are kings at scale, and pointing at them concedes the monarchy claim rather than rebutting it. The answer sits in the smaller polities.

The Dharmic republics

Panini, writing his grammar around the fourth century before the common era, records sangha and gana as forms of polity. Kautilya gives the sanghas their own chapter in the Arthashastra, advising that they cannot be conquered in the ordinary way and must be split from within. The Greeks who came with Alexander described communities in the Punjab and Sindh that had no king, and fought harder than the ones that did. The Yaudheyas struck coins in the name of the gana itself, victory to the assembly, not to a ruler.

The Buddhist Sangha describes the procedure in granular detail. A motion put formally, read up to three times, decided by wooden ballot sticks, counted by a teller appointed for impartiality, with quorum rules and provision for referral to committee. The Buddha’s advice to the Vajjian confederacy, meet often, meet in full, decide in concord, is advice to an assembly, recorded in the canon more than two thousand years ago.

Uttaramerur

The fullest single document is carved into the walls of a temple tank near Kanchipuram, from the twelfth and fourteenth regnal years of Parantaka Chola, early tenth century. Thirty wards. Names of eligible candidates written on palm leaves, the leaves into a pot, a young boy drawing the lots in front of the full assembly. Candidates needed land, a house, an age between thirty-five and seventy, and learning. A man who had not submitted his accounts was barred, and so were his relatives. Committees rotated annually; misappropriation disqualified for life.

However Uttaramerur was a brahmadeya village and the sabha was a Brahmin body. The franchise was narrow everywhere in the record, always propertied, always learned, always male and upper caste.

Which is the actual shape of the inheritance question. The subcontinent had deliberative procedure of considerable sophistication and a franchise that was never wide. What did Britain add?

The broadened franchise

The 1919 Act enfranchised about five million people, some three per cent. The 1935 Act took it to roughly thirty to thirty-five million, a tenth of the population, about one adult in six, qualified by property, income and education. Britain itself had reached full equal suffrage only in 1928, seven years before writing India’s.

Then Delhi, in 1950, adopted universal adult suffrage at a stroke, with literacy under a fifth, and put 173 million names on the rolls for the first general election. There was no precedent for it in the indigenous record, which was procedurally rich and narrow, and none in the colonial record, which was procedurally borrowed and narrow. Universality was chosen against both inheritances at once.

Kabir claims India is an invented nation, and Pakistanis hear the same about theirs. All nations are invented. The test is which inventions take, and this one has been taking attendance every five years since 1952, through emergencies, assassinations and, this week, a minister conceded to a movement of first-time voters. An unnatural democrat who votes for seventy-five years is difficult to distinguish from the natural kind.

The lungi

I walk around the colony in a lungi and draw looks, because native dress has quietly stopped being patronised anywhere that thinks of itself as arrived. The suit survived 1947 without a scratch. So did the accent hierarchy, the school names, the holiday geography. The Constitution overrode the colonial precedent in one article and the culture kept every other one.

“The vanquished always want to imitate the victor in his distinctive characteristics, dress, and all his other conditions and customs”. Ibn Khaldun

India and Pakistan spent their first eight decades proving they could keep an inherited machine running and improve its most important part. The next test is whether anything else gets the treatment the franchise got, kept where it serves, overridden where it does not. The ballot was decolonised in 1950. However world-over the Western dinner jacket is apparently eternal (in the colony it is now the lungi that reads as exotic).

1. Has any other South Asian government fired the anti-national frame at a major protest movement?
2. What matters, constitutionalism or state resolve?
3. Can a state be “hard” outwards without treating domestic opposition as an external enemy?

Is this the same as Delhi?

Last night, the Azad Jammu and Kashmir Police issued a statement about clashes at Rawalakot. It said that armed groups of the proscribed Joint Awami Action Committee had tried to force their way into the city, that appeals to disperse were rejected, that fire was opened on law enforcement officials, and that two officers were injured. The phrase used was challenging the state writ.

Five weeks earlier, on 23 June, Dharmendra Pradhan described the Cockroach Janta Party as a B team of disruptive elements and told India Today that tukde-tukde forces were at Jantar Mantar.

The two governments reached for the same instrument. Both took a movement making material demands and attempted to relocate it outside the nation, where its demands would no longer require an answer. This is the standard subcontinental response to a protest that cannot be conceded to.

The difference is what happened next. The JAAC is now banned. Pradhan resigned on 25 July.

Why is the Pakistani case different?

The obvious explanation is that Pakistan is a hard state and a hybrid regime, and India is not. Kabir has made this point in the threads and he is not wrong. But it explains less than it looks like it explains, because it treats the outcome as a function of how much force a government is willing to use, and the CJP was tear-gassed, baton-charged and had its internet cut off.

Azad Jammu and Kashmir is constitutionally liminal territory, and in liminal territory the accusation is permanently loaded. India-backed is always available in Muzaffarabad. It requires no evidentiary work because the geography supplies the plausibility in advance. The AJK government has duly alleged that the organisers have overseas handlers linked to India and has put the movement’s cost to the exchequer at Rs15 billion.

Anti-national was never available in the same way against a NEET aspirant in Delhi. There was no cleavage to activate, and so the accusation had to be argued rather than gestured at, and once it has to be argued it has already failed.

The JAAC charter

It is worth being specific about what the JAAC wants.

The charter asks for an end to the privileges of the ruling elite, the scrapping of the quota system, and the abolition of the twelve seats in the AJK Legislative Assembly reserved for Kashmiri refugees. That assembly has fifty-three members. Six of the reserved seats represent refugees from the Jammu division, roughly 434,000 people. Six represent refugees from the Kashmir Valley, roughly 30,000. The arithmetic is the grievance.

That is a complaint about representation and elite capture. It is the same category of demand as the CJP’s, which was about an examination system and who gets to rise through it. Both are arguments about whether the merit ladder is real. One of them was successfully reclassified as foreign subversion and one was not.

October, and after

In October last year the JAAC led protests over constitutional and governance reform. At least nine people were killed, including three policemen. Two days after the violence the government and the JAAC reached an agreement covering twelve core points and thirteen additional ones, including a high-level committee to examine the reserved seats.

That committee has produced deadlock. The JAAC wants the seats abolished. The government refuses.

Monday’s clash fell on polling day for the first phase of the assembly elections, thirteen constituencies in Mirpur Division, with more than seventeen thousand security personnel deployed and the day already overshadowed by the shooting of a political worker and allegations of rigging. Muzaffarabad Division and the twelve refugee constituencies vote on 2 August. Poonch, which is to say Rawalakot itself, votes on 10 August.

On the casualties we are attributing rather than asserting, because nothing is independently confirmed. The JAAC posted on X that five had been killed and around fifteen injured, then revised the figure to nine, including the brother of its leader Sardar Umar Nazir. The police say the JAAC opened fire and that two officers were hurt.

Pakistan’s assertions

It runs like this. Armed men attempted to enter a city on polling day. Shots were fired at police. Two officers were injured. This is not hypothetical escalation: the same movement’s agitation last October ended with three policemen dead. An election is in progress across three phases in contested territory adjoining a hostile border, and the state has a duty to secure the franchise. The authorities say they have evidence connecting organisers and overseas handlers to India.

The Information Secretary’s account is that this began as a genuine public movement and was subsequently captured. Take all of that at face value. It licenses a security cordon around polling. It does not license proscribing a movement whose published charter is about assembly seats and elite privilege.

The anti-state frame is not primarily a description. It is a conversion device. It takes a domestic argument about representation, which a government would have to answer, and turns it into a security matter, which a government can simply police. In Rawalakot the conversion succeeded. At Jantar Mantar it did not, and a minister went instead.

Global Realpolitik

We argued that the Indian climbdown was the system working, and we should not now turn around and say that hardness has been vindicated because it produced a quieter P.A.K.

History did not end in 1991. The unipolar order was not dismantled by its rivals so much as abandoned by its guarantors, who turned inward and discovered they had civil crises of their own, which is the ordinary way empires come apart.

In a genuinely multipolar decade a state that organises itself around security rather than around integration may possible be reading the century more accurately. Pakistan has been called a garrison state as an insult for fifty years.

The Indian outcome looks like accountability and we said so but the question is whether India wants to similarly “garrison up” as well like its tortured neighbour to the Northwest (as every young Pakistan Gen-Zer joked, Pakistan couldn’t afford to fund the CJP protests anyway).

1. Is the port separable from the township in practice, or only on paper?
2. Can 229 people hold a veto over a national project? If they cannot, who can?
3. 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

Jairam Ramesh has written to four ministries over two years and three have replied. His letter of 25 July puts the arithmetic plainly. The transhipment port at Galathea Bay accounts for roughly half the budget. The dual-use airport, the single component with a defence function, requires about five per cent of the 166 square kilometres sought and about ten per cent of the money.

Rajnath Singh’s reply of 17 July is the serious version of the government’s case and deserves to be stated at its strongest. Great Nicobar sits beside the Sea Lanes of Communication in a way that INS Kohassa and Car Nicobar do not. Maritime domain awareness at the mouth of Malacca is not an invented concern, and the Bay of Bengal is not a quiet ocean. Expanding INS Baaz at Campbell Bay was examined during the environmental impact assessment and rejected as requiring heavy land reclamation. The National Green Tribunal found no ground to interfere.

A project whose strategic rationale is supplied on the instruction of a finance body, eighteen months after the fact, is a commercial project that has been retrofitted.

The denotified sanctuary

In January 2021 the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change listed Galathea Bay as an important marine turtle habitat and as the largest leatherback nesting ground in the country. A week later the sanctuary was denotified.

Two classifications, moving in opposite directions, each one adjusted to fit the project rather than the project adjusted to fit the classification. A protection is removed in January 2021 because it obstructs. A strategic purpose is inserted in 2026 because it is required. This is the mechanism, and once it is visible it is hard to unsee elsewhere in the file. The compensatory afforestation for a Nicobar rainforest is to be carried out in Haryana.

The entrepôt

The draft master plan notified this year names tourism as the primary economic driver. It describes Great Nicobar as a seaside destination in a pristine, unspoilt, protected environment, and proposes business tourism, adventure tourism, biodiversity tourism, family entertainment and amusement parks. Ramesh’s reading of the 2047 plan adds cruise tourism, casinos and a finance hub, which he says reads more like an ambitious real estate project.

Population projections need care, because two different numbers are in circulation and confusing them would be fatal. The 2026 draft master plan projects roughly 336,000 people by 2055, up from around 9,000 today, with the Nicobarese rising from about 7,500 to about 11,500 and annual tourist arrivals above a million. The much-quoted figure of 650,000 belongs to earlier planning material and to the 2024 letter from genocide scholars. The smaller number is the current one. It is still a thirty-seven fold increase.

Hong Kong of India

The phrase attached to the scheme in the planning literature and repeated by its promoters is the Hong Kong of India.

Hong Kong was not an integrated part of anything. It was an entrepôt, a jurisdiction deliberately held at a distance from its hinterland so that capital could move through it without touching the interior. A free-trade zone with a finance hub attached is designed to be permeable outwards.

Consolidation and integration are different operations. Consolidation controls territory. Integration circulates value. The state can accomplish the first at Galathea Bay and still fail entirely at the second, and the plan on the table does not seriously attempt the second.

The port survives

India sends roughly three quarters of its transhipment cargo through Colombo, Singapore and Port Klang, and pays for the privilege. The shipping ministry’s own estimate is around two hundred million dollars a year in foreign exchange leaving the country for a service India could perform itself. Galathea Bay has more than twenty metres of natural depth and sits on the route.

That is an anti-extraction argument. It is the same argument we would make about elite consumption, applied to logistics. If the objection to this scheme is that value generated in India leaves India, a port that stops fees flowing to Colombo is worthwhile to consider.

So the case for an Indian transhipment port survives. The case for this port-city package does not, and the distinction matters more than it first appears. A port needs labour accommodation, power, water and roads. It does not need a casino, an amusement park, a finance hub or a million tourists a year. The township is not infrastructure for the port. The port is the anchor tenant for a real estate development, which is what the appraisal committee was circling when it asked why a commercially viable project needed public money.

One note on attribution. Rahul Gandhi’s petition of 5 June says the project is meant to benefit Adani. The expressions of interest on the public record name Larsen and Toubro, Afcons and JSW Infrastructure among eleven bidders, and construction tenders have not been awarded. The allegation may prove correct however it is not established by the tender record as it stands.

The Shompen

There are 229 Shompen by the 2011 census, perhaps three hundred. They are a Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Group, Austroasiatic, related to the Nicobarese, present on the island for at least a few thousand years. Many of their communities remain highly isolated and avoid sustained contact with outsiders.

Free, prior and informed consent was never obtained, and cannot be obtained from people who refuse contact. India voted for the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which requires that consent in several contexts, and is bound by the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, whose monitoring body has insisted on effective indigenous participation in decisions affecting ancestral land. Nearly forty scholars of genocide wrote to President Murmu in February 2024. Survival International made the same submission to the UN in April 2025.

The mechanism they identify is not malice but exposure. A population of three hundred with almost no contact with mainland pathogens sits alongside a projected city hundreds of times its size. Nobody can demonstrate the outcome in advance. That is precisely the problem with proceeding.

The Gilded Age

The Shompen are where the Gilded Age comparison breaks, and the comparison is worth making because the developmental self-image on offer is genuinely of that period.

American industrialisation happened on territory its builders narrated as empty. The narration was false, and the falseness was settled by killing the people who disproved it. The tycoons never had to answer the question because the cavalry had answered it in advance. India in 2026 cannot narrate Great Nicobar as empty, because it has counted the Shompen, scheduled them, and classified them as particularly vulnerable. The state’s own paperwork forecloses the frontier story.

Which is why Rajnath Singh’s reply repays a second reading. The stated ground for rejecting expansion at INS Baaz is that it would disturb tribal populations, flora and fauna. The principle is accepted exactly where it rules out the cheaper option and set aside where it would rule out the expensive one.

Consent withdrawn

The Shompen are the moral test. The Nicobarese are the legal one, and they are the part of this story that has been under-reported.

They are a contacted, settled community of about 7,500. They have withdrawn their consent for the project on the ground that their forest rights remain unsettled, and the matter is now before the Calcutta High Court.

That is not a submission from an international NGO. That is the resident population of the island, using a domestic statute, in an Indian court, saying that the process by which their consent was recorded was defective. Whatever one thinks of Survival International, this cannot be dismissed as foreign interference, and it is the single most likely thing to delay the scheme.

If integration is the goal, these are the tests and not the obstacles. A polity that cannot integrate seven and a half thousand people without a High Court challenge, and three hundred more without a warning from genocide scholars, has not demonstrated a capacity for integration. It has demonstrated something else.

Reinvesting into India

Vantara is the version at scale we would point to. It was seriously contested and the contest was resolved: a Supreme Court appointed team under Justice Chelameswar cleared it in September 2025, the Court accepted the finding and closed the proceedings. Take it or leave it as an example. The underlying category is what matters, which is Indian capital committed to something in India that does not extract from India.

The Indian Eilte that Summers in Italy not the Andamans

Oligarchic resources generate Indian returns which are recycled into Western institutions, Western education, Western property and Western luxury. The elite this island is being reshaped to serve does not holiday in the Andamans.

Which brings us to the argument circulating in defence of the resort component: more than nine in ten Indians hold no passport, so India must build destinations at home. An Indian who cannot afford a passport cannot afford a Galathea Bay resort either. The figure describes one population and the development is priced for another. If the concern is that Indians spend their holiday money in Phuket and Bali, the direct remedy is not a domestic imitation of Phuket built on a tribal reserve. It is visa-free movement (passport-free) across the entirety of the Indian Subcontinent and maybe a Dharmic Union (which would be long-lasting and effective), which costs no rainforest at all.

Galathea Bay takes its name from the Danish vessel that surveyed Great Nicobar for minerals between 1845 and 1847.

The case for an Indian transhipment port survives. The rest seems patchy on interrogation.

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

The origin is not the NEET leak. It is 15 May, when the Chief Justice of India, Surya Kant, sitting in open court on a contempt matter concerning senior advocate designations, described young people who do not get employment and have no place in a profession as cockroaches, as parasites of society.

Dipke, thirty years old, a political communications graduate of Boston University who had previously worked with the Aam Aadmi Party, made a joke about it online. Within a day he had a name, a website, and a logo. By late May the Instagram account had passed nineteen million followers, more than double the BJP’s and comfortably ahead of the Congress.

The inversion

An insult delivered from the highest bench in the country was picked up and worn. The state was thereby denied the first move. It could not tell the country who these people were, because they had already told the country themselves, in the state’s own words, with the state’s own contempt attached. The slogan the outfit chose, Voice of the Lazy and Unemployed, meant that one could not smear a movement that had pre-smeared itself and turned the smear into merchandise.

Dipke is not an accidental figure. He is a communications strategist by trade with an anti-corruption movement on his CV. From Wikipedia:

Dipke lived in Boston, Massachusetts, while studying at Boston University. He returned to India in June 2026 to participate in the CJP’s demonstrations. Following the movement’s rapid growth, his parents publicly expressed concern about the personal risks associated with his political activism.

Incidentally his AAP lineage matters as well, because 2012 is the last time this particular manoeuvre was executed successfully in Delhi. It is vaguely reminiscent of Khomeini flying back from Paris; a returnee from a foreign land transforming their homeland.

The inoculation

Look at what was actually chanted, sung, and printed. At Jantar Mantar on Saturday: the national anthem on loudspeakers, Jai Hind, Vande Mataram, tricolours, sweets. A protester named Tluanga Ralte walking the site with a copy of the Constitution in his hands, telling reporters this was a win for the Constitution.

The CJP’s own mobilisation poster, distributed with a standard operating procedure and a memorandum template, closes on two slogans set deliberately side by side: Inquilab Zindabad, Bharat Mata Ki Jai.

The first is the register of the anti-colonial left. The second is the register the Sangh has spent forty years trying to own outright. It is the systematic occupation of the ground from which the counterattack would otherwise be launched. To call this crowd anti-national, you had to call the anthem anti-national.

This has been tried before

Shaheen Bagh did all of this. The tricolours were everywhere. The Preamble was read aloud nightly. The Constitution was the organising symbol of the entire sit-in, exactly as it was at Jantar Mantar this week. And the sorting worked anyway. In February 2020 Ravi Shankar Prasad stood at a press conference and said, in terms, that people trying to fragment India were getting cover at Shaheen Bagh, where the tricolours were being waved. The flag was in the protesters’ hands and the minister named the flag and reached past it. Nobody in the ecosystem blinked.

So flag-occupation is not sufficient. It is not even close to sufficient.

Shaheen Bagh could be reached past because the crowd was already legible as Muslim, and the frame did not need to be argued, only gestured at. The NEET aspirant is not legible as anything. He is Hindu, he is middle class, he is upwardly mobile by intention if not yet by outcome, he is very often from a household that voted BJP twice, and his single complaint is that the ladder he was told to climb has been sold to somebody else. A senior party functionary put it to Outlook with unusual candour: these families are our own voters, aspirational young people who believe in the system, and if they begin to lose faith it has consequences.

Dipke’s inoculation, in other words, was necessary but was administered to a body that already had partial immunity.

The weapon that failed to detonate

The frame was fired, and this is the part being widely missed because it happened in June and everyone is writing about July.

On 23 June, Pradhan went on the record calling the CJP a B team of disruptive elements, and told India Today that tukde-tukde forces were at Jantar Mantar.

It did nothing. The sit-in had begun on 20 June and it did not break. Sonam Wangchuk started his hunger strike five days later. Kejriwal turned up on 16 July. The crowd on 20 July was north of thirty thousand.

Now read the resignation letter of 25 July, in which Pradhan says he is going so that the anger of students is not exploited by anti-national forces, and does not say who they are. A BJP insider ran the same line to the Tribune, arguing that the government retreated before anti-national forces could infiltrate the agitation, so that, in this telling, democracy might advance.

Between 23 June and 25 July the same category degrades from an accusation with a referent to a hypothetical with none. That is what a weapon looks like after it has been fired and failed to detonate: still being waved, now aimed at nobody, doing face-saving work rather than sorting work. The internet shutdown around Jantar Mantar for most of last week is the same fact in negative. When you cannot define a crowd, you switch off its ability to define itself. That did not work either.

What was actually conceded

Pradhan is a real scalp. He is fifty-seven, the son of a veteran BJP leader, a minister continuously since 2014, steward of the National Education Policy, reportedly part of Amit Shah’s core group, and at one time floated for party president. He is only the second minister to resign over a scandal since 2014, after M.J. Akbar in 2018.

But look at what the CJP actually put on the table when it met Nadda and Jitendra Singh on 24 July. Three non-negotiable asks:

1. Pradhan’s resignation.
2. Compensation.
3. Withdrawal of the FIRs.

Every one of those is retrospective. Not one of them touches the NTA, the CBSE on-screen marking failures that ran alongside the NEET leak, or the structure that produces leaks in the first place. They got the man and assurances on the other two, and the thirty-six day sit-in was withdrawn against a promise of talks in four weeks (sounds a bit like the Iran-USA talks).

The patriotic register that made the movement uncontainable is also a constraint on what it can ask for next. You can demand a resignation under the tricolour. It is considerably harder to demand a redistributive settlement under it, and the grievance underneath NEET is not really about question papers. Verisk Maplecroft has India as the highest-risk country on its civil unrest index, with average protest participation more than doubling in a year. That is the number to watch, not the reshuffle.

And the BJP’s mandate was already about a third of the national vote in 2024. What was punctured over the last five weeks was never Hindutva. It was the assumption that incumbency is costless. Identity politics arbitrages inequality perfectly well as long as the ladder is believed in. The leak was a claim that the ladder is rigged, made by the people who most wanted to believe in it.

The Bahá’í community of India hosted this performance in Mumbai roughly around about nine years ago, because 2017 was the sacred bicentenary of the birthday of Bahá’u’lláh.

What’s also interesting is that the prayer is translated into Shudd Hindi, whereas the two languages in the world that get the direct translation from the original Persian and Arabic language of the Writings are Persian, Arabic, and Urdu.

It’s interesting that I don’t know where the Shudd Hindi gets translated from: Urdu, Perso-Arabic or English.

I also got this invite today for this very interesting talk below; K might have some interesting views on the below.

The war in Iran seems to be raging and the CJP protests don’t seem to be piping down (yet).

• What do people think of Sonam Wangchuk?
• Why doesn’t the Education Minister just resign?
• The BJP (and especially Modi) have cultivated an aura of invincibility?

I have thoughts but I’ll write on them later on tonight. I commend the Commentariat on VERY high quality exchanges; we don’t all have to agree but when we do so in a calm and measured manner, it yields a lot of fruit.

Also Calvin as captain of the “opposition” is doing after fine job, it’s fairly obviously now that BP is an India-first blog. Pakistan and Diaspora are interesting inasmuch as they impact India’s future, which is bright.

Otherwise, the boundaries of the Sikh Empire essentially map the upper reaches of the Indus watershed. The Sutlej apparently was the Eastern boundary of the Empire.

I strongly disagree with point 5 since the idea of MP switching is key to political fluidity. Also point 1 feels very iffy; I do like point 3. The Brit in me loves the idea of titles, Upper Houses and MPs having autonomy from their party..

I have no strong views on either 2 or 4.