Squash To Play
Institutional Analysis
The Maculate
Systems Analysis Series — India — June 2026
Squash to Play:
A Systems Analysis of the Indian State and What It Produces
The Maculate publishes from a position of structural disinterest. We do not require India to be as good as it advertises or as bad as it is. We require only that it be legible. It is not legible. That is the first finding. The attempt to make it so follows.
Every claim in this analysis is sourced from public record: court filings, NHRC data, NCRB statistics, RSF rankings, government press releases, and published academic and legal literature. The Maculate applies no analytical framework that is not derivable from the documented evidence. The state this piece describes has detained people for social media posts. It has detained journalists for less than this. Published in full knowledge of that fact. The knowledge is part of the argument.
In India, what the state says it does and what it demonstrably does have diverged far enough that using the former as an analytical lens is a category error. The Indian state delivers something other than what it advertises. Design, not dysfunction, is the appropriate frame.
Every framework applied here is derivable from the documented evidence. We have no stake in the conclusion. The sections that follow analyse the Indian state as a system. Readers seeking a defence of India or an indictment will find neither. They will find a description. Whether the description constitutes an indictment the reader can answer without assistance.
Three outputs, produced with considerable consistency. First: the extraction of value from the population without accountability to that population. Second: the systematic disabling of any mechanism that might impose that accountability. Third: the production of a class of people psychologically adapted to participate in the first two functions without recognising them as such. They are the system’s outputs, not its failures. A system that has produced encounter killings at the rate of one every three days for six years, zero convictions across those killings, a counter-terrorism law with a 2.2% conviction rate functioning as indefinite detention, and a press freedom ranking of 157th out of 180 is not malfunctioning. The question worth asking: what is it designed to do.
On the Matter of Origins
The colonial administration built extraction into the legal architecture and made the suppression of accountability legally routine. Less examined is the quality of the handover at independence: the architecture wasn’t dismantled. Staffed by different people. The Factories Acts, the sedition provisions, the emergency powers, the administrative frameworks allowing the state to act on its own populations without judicial interference, all survived, with modifications that expanded rather than constrained their reach. Independence transferred authority. The relationship between state and subject wasn’t part of the transfer.
The British built an industrial economy in India on the principle that Indian labour was cheap because Indian lives were worth less. They codified this in the Factories Acts, the plantation labour laws, the indentured servitude system. Legal architecture designed to make extraction efficient and resistance impossible. When independence came, India inherited that architecture almost intact. The laws changed names. The logic didn't.
Independence added its own layer. The licence raj protected incumbents, suppressed competition, and handed bureaucratic power to whoever had the right connections. Exploitative labour practices faced no market correction and no regulatory pressure. What emerged was a business culture built on access and hierarchy, not productivity. The employer's relationship with the state mattered. With workers, it didn't.
The current iteration is called Make in India. Come here, set up a company, the first three years of profit are tax-free. For up to five years, you can self-certify your compliance with six labour laws and three environmental laws. No inspection will occur unless a credible complaint is filed and approved by a senior official. The compliance burden is yours to declare and nobody's to verify. The regulatory infrastructure that might otherwise catch wage violations, unsafe conditions, or contract fraud has been administratively suspended in the name of entrepreneurship. (Should you succeed, moving the money out is a different matter. FEMA governs every rupee that crosses the border. Capital arrives easily. It leaves with difficulty.)
Make in India has one consistent achievement: making scams legal and acceptable. The design works exactly as built.
BharatPe. Byju's. GoMechanic. The fraud at India's most celebrated startups was the logical endpoint of a system that rewarded growth metrics and penalised nothing else. Self-declaration substitutes for accountability. The worker carries the burden of proof, not the employer. The ten-year window before any serious scrutiny applies is long enough to extract, exit, and rebrand.
The world noticed, and the lesson drawn wasn’t condemnation. A country of 1.4 billion people built a startup ecosystem celebrated globally while underpaying its workers, defrauding its investors, and suspending its own labour laws, and faced no meaningful consequences. The template was available to anyone. Regulatory arbitrage dressed as innovation. Extraction dressed as disruption. The Indian startup model didn't stay in India. It became the model.
The state that made it effortless to exploit workers made it complicated to exit with the proceeds.
India wants the jobs, the investment, the optics of a startup ecosystem worth celebrating. The profits leaving is a separate question. The worker who was underpaid to generate them doesn't figure in either calculation.
The Administrative Elimination of Civil Society
The pattern has a sequence. It runs in five stages, applied consistently enough across targets and time periods that describing it as a pattern is taxonomy, not interpretation.
Stage one: amend the law to make compliance structurally difficult. The 2020 FCRA amendments reduced the organisations eligible to receive foreign funds, tightened certification requirements, and mandated that all foreign contributions flow through a single designated account at the State Bank of India. One chokepoint. Every rupee entering Indian civil society passes through it. Every organisation dependent on foreign funding is now technically at the mercy of a single administrative decision.
Stage two: income tax raids as intimidation. In January 2024, the Income Tax Department conducted simultaneous surprise survey operations against the Centre for Policy Research, Oxfam India, and the Independent and Public-Spirited Media Foundation. Staff were questioned. Books were inspected. The operations ran through the night. No charges followed. None were required. The raids were the message.
Stage three: FCRA license cancellation as execution. The government refused to renew Oxfam India’s license in January 2022. The Centre for Policy Research lost its license. Amnesty International India Foundation’s license was revoked, then the organisation was booked for sedition. Greenpeace India’s license was suspended in 2015. The Ford Foundation was placed on a Prior Approval Category watch list the same year, meaning every transaction required government sign-off before it could be processed. The Public Health Foundation of India, backed by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, had its foreign funding banned for lobbying on tobacco control policy. In 2015 alone, the government cancelled the FCRA registrations of over 9,000 organisations. By March 2026, 21,933 had lost their licences.
Stage four: CBI investigation as criminalisation. Amnesty International’s offices in Bengaluru and Delhi were raided. Staff were ordered to stay put. Laptops were shut. Phones were confiscated. The Local India Foundation for Environment was booked by the CBI for using foreign funds to target and stall coal projects. The CBI alleged no fraud. Opposing coal was the crime. Opposing coal was the crime.
“The use of FCRA against civil society represents a pattern of restrictions that are incompatible with international human rights law and standards.”
Stage five: bank account freeze as collapse. Amnesty India shut its operations entirely in September 2020 after its accounts were frozen. No conviction. No trial. The administrative mechanism was sufficient.
The Third Reich didn’t build the camps first. It built the paperwork first. The sequence was identical: new legislation making existing organisations technically non-compliant; tax authority raids serving as harassment and intelligence-gathering; forced dissolution through licence revocation; criminal prosecution of leadership; asset seizure and organisational collapse. India has replicated every stage of that sequence with FCRA as the legislative instrument, the Income Tax Department as the harassment arm, the CBI as the criminalisation mechanism, and bank account freezes as the asset seizure equivalent. The 21,933 cancelled licences aren’t administrative error. The output specification.
The organisations most affected are, as Amnesty International documented, those working on environmental rights, climate action, minority rights, and freedom of expression. The foreign founder who reads this piece and decides not to enter the Indian market is reading the documentation correctly.
The Disappearance Apparatus
Delhi recorded 807 missing persons in the first fifteen days of 2026. Fifty-four a day. Over 60% of them women and girls. In all of 2025, 24,508 people went missing in Delhi alone. Nationally, 3.42 lakh remain untraced as of the most recent NCRB data. Over a decade, 2.3 lakh have gone missing in the capital, with 52,000 cases still unresolved.
The blockage that follows is documented. Uttar Pradesh registered 1,08,300 missing persons complaints between January 2024 and January 2026. Police acted on fewer than 9,700 of them, under 9%. The Allahabad High Court described its response as “aghast” and “lethargic.” In one documented case, a man went missing in July 2024 and an FIR wasn’t filed until December 2025, seventeen months later, only after court intervention. Karnataka courts found police routinely declining to record FIRs in missing persons cases. Delhi Police’s response to the capital’s own missing persons crisis was to characterise public concern as “paid promotion” and threaten legal action against people raising the alarm.
The family finds out from the newspaper.
The National Human Rights Commission registered 132 alleged extrajudicial killings in the first eight months of 2025 alone. Encounter killings have increased nearly five-fold over six years nationally. Uttar Pradesh accounts for 1,114 deaths in police shootouts since 1997. The mechanism is documented: cases originally filed against unknown persons, cold storage FIRs, are retrieved from archives and used to retroactively criminalise a target. The person is then killed in a staged encounter. The family learns from the newspaper.
The social license for this apparatus rests on a specific argument: that the courts are too slow, that criminals walk free on technicalities, that encounter killings deliver what the judiciary cannot. The argument is widespread. Educated professionals repeat it. It receives applause. It is also structurally dishonest.
India has approximately 18 judges per million people. The recommended threshold is 50. The Supreme Court carries a backlog exceeding 70,000 cases. Across the system, over 40 million cases are pending. The judiciary is not slow because justice is complicated. It is slow because the state that funds it chose not to fund it adequately, chose not to appoint judges at the rate the caseload required, and chose not to build the institutional infrastructure that a functional court system needs. A judiciary that cannot deliver verdicts is a judiciary that cannot constrain executive power. That is the feature, not the malfunction.
When the public accepts encounter killings because the courts don’t work, it has accepted that the state may determine guilt without evidence and execute accordingly. The transfer is precise: the slow court is used to justify the fast bullet, and the fast bullet removes the need for the court. The person who receives the bullet has, by definition, not been convicted of anything. The person who fired it has, by documented record, never been convicted either. The argument from judicial failure is not impatience with a broken system. It is consent to its replacement with something that has no procedural constraints at all.
272,198 murder cases were under trial in Indian courts in 2023. Convictions in 7,181 of them, a 37.7% rate. Rape conviction rate: 22.7%. 95% of crimes against women pending in court. 30% of all IPC cases pending investigation at year end. Impunity isn’t an accident. The baseline condition.
The silencing infrastructure runs parallel. An Ashoka University professor was arrested in May 2025 for posting that he wanted the India-Pakistan conflict to end, charged with endangering sovereignty. At least 125 people were detained between April and July 2025 for social media posts about Operation Sindoor. 329 free speech suppression incidents in Q1 2025 alone. The Wire blocked. Free Press Kashmir blocked. 8,000 X accounts suspended. A YouTube channel with 7.3 million subscribers taken down. New 2026 IT rules would treat anyone who comments on news online as equivalent to a registered publisher. The Sahyog portal already forces platforms to remove content within three hours, no judicial oversight. India ranked 157th out of 180 on the RSF Press Freedom Index in 2026, down six positions from the previous year.
The legal architecture holds the stack together. AFSPA in Kashmir and the northeast provides effective immunity to security forces. The NSA has been deployed against climate activists. UAPA carries a 2.2% conviction rate, meaning 97.8% of those arrested remain in prison awaiting a trial that may never come. The colonial sedition law was replaced in 2024 with new legislation carrying identical reach and broader, vaguer language criminalising anything deemed antinational. Section 69A authorises content blocking with no transparency requirement. Courts have repeatedly found these uses unlawful. Nobody is held accountable.
The system doesn’t need to be coordinated to be effective. Each part, the police station, the platform, the prison, the encounter squad, operates on its own institutional logic. The person is removed. The removal is made to look routine.
Challengers disappear from the record before they disappear in person. The FIR is denied, so the complaint doesn’t exist. The person goes missing. No case exists to investigate it. If they resurface in an encounter, the cold storage FIR provides the retrospective criminal history. If they’re arrested for a social media post, UAPA keeps them in prison for years without trial. If they survive all of that and try to speak again, their platform is removed within three hours.
The Visibility Infrastructure
The denied FIRs, the cold storage encounters, the UAPA detentions: the visible layer. The less visible part is digital, and considerably more comprehensive. India built the world’s largest biometric civilian database under the banner of financial inclusion. By April 2025 it had logged over 150 billion authentications. Every resident enrolled provides fingerprints, an iris scan, a facial photograph, and demographic data. The 12-digit number generated links all of it to a single identity. That identity is then mandatory for banking, for telecom access, for welfare delivery, for tax filing, and, since October 2025, for making payments on UPI.
UPI processes over 20 billion transactions a month worth more than $280 billion. In October 2025, the National Payments Corporation of India introduced biometric authentication for UPI payments, meaning a fingerprint or facial scan matched against the Aadhaar database can now substitute for a PIN. Every transaction is logged. Every authentication is recorded. The system connects identity, payments, and location into a single national framework. The government calls it data sovereignty. The architecture is a complete financial and biometric record of every person in India, held by the state, accessible under conditions the state determines, with oversight mechanisms that remain, as one legal analysis put it, in a legal vacuum.
The surveillance potential is documented, not theoretical. Aadhaar’s design allows tracking of an individual’s activities across multiple domains of service using a single identifier. Every time the number is used, the authentication is logged. Link enough of those logs and you have a detailed record of where a person goes, what they buy, which services they access, and when. The documented architecture of the system as designed. Not a privacy concern extrapolated from hypothetical misuse. In January 2025, the government extended Aadhaar verification access to private companies, meaning the state’s biometric infrastructure is now commercially available to corporate actors as well.
A person removed from the financial system in India loses access to banking, welfare transfers, SIM card registration, and increasingly payments of any kind. Aadhaar-enabled Payment System failures are documented as disproportionately affecting rural and marginalised users, whose biometric data registers less reliably. The same infrastructure that promises inclusion can function as exclusion on demand. You don’t need to arrest someone to make them economically invisible. You need only to ensure their authentication fails.
The connection to the disappearance apparatus is direct. The FIR denial makes a person legally invisible. The UAPA detention makes them physically immovable. Aadhaar and UPI make the residual question, what does this person spend money on, where do they go, who do they interact with, answerable in real time. The surveillance layer doesn’t replace the coercive tools. It makes them precise. A state that can track every transaction a dissident makes, map their financial relationships, and if necessary freeze their access to the payment system without judicial oversight, has added a dimension of control that the physical apparatus alone cannot provide.
India presents Aadhaar and UPI internationally as a model for financial inclusion. Several countries are adopting it, along with the surveillance architecture. The two aren’t separable. Neither was designed to be.
The Formation Protocol
“Lost rights are never regained by appeals to the conscience of the usurpers, but by relentless struggle.”
The state’s most significant engineering achievement is the education system, which shouldn’t be understood as one. A population processing facility with one output specification: individuals adapted to compete within the existing hierarchy without questioning it. The mechanism isn’t subtle.
Every year, over 2.4 million students compete for approximately 110,000 seats in NEET, the medical entrance exam. Over 1.4 million compete in the JEE for engineering. Preparation begins at twelve, eleven, sometimes ten, funnelled into coaching centres that operate as academic factories, where the curriculum is a distillation of a single skill: passing this exam. Kota, Rajasthan, the country's most notorious coaching hub, receives over 200,000 students a year. In 2023 it recorded 28 student suicides. Nationally, student suicides rose 21% between 2019 and 2021, with 12,526 recorded in 2021 alone. Hostels in Kota have been fitted with anti-hanging devices on ceiling fans. The physical infrastructure of the dream.
Children raised as performance instruments for their parents’ social ego develop zero-sum instincts where healthy relationships with ambition, failure, and peers should be.
The pressure starts with the parents. They are managing investments for their own social standing, not raising children. The logic is encoded in a phrase every Indian child knows before they can explain it: log kya kahenge. What will people say. The child's career choice, marks, institution, salary, marriage, all of it is social currency for the family, and the family collects and spends it against the community. The child is the vehicle, their success the return on investment, their failure a liability they understand before they understand much else.
The psychological output is predictable, documented everywhere except the professional literature of the sectors that eventually employ these people. Children raised as performance instruments for their parents' social ego don’t develop healthy relationships with ambition, failure, competition, or peers. They develop zero-sum instincts. They learn early that the classmate who does better is a threat, not a collaborator. Advancing means discrediting, manipulating social standing, backstabbing, cultivating alliances that can be weaponised. They learn these things in school, in the coaching centre, in the family home, before they learn most other things. By the time they enter a workplace they are fluent in every tactic of social dominance and entirely unpractised in the skills, accountability, honesty, genuine collaboration, ethical reasoning, that functional institutions require.
The professional class this produces is, in aggregate, angry, status-obsessed, emotionally stunted, and operating with an ethics framework calibrated entirely around not getting caught. A system that treats childhood as a training ground for economic competition, with no room left for it to be a stage of human development, produces exactly this. It was designed to produce people who win exams, not good people. Whether those people subsequently run companies, manage teams, build climate startups, or commit white-collar fraud is largely a function of the opportunity available to them. No values were instilled. The coaching centre had no time for that. Neither did the parents.
India's education system produces a generation that learned to be ruthless before it learned to be human, then releases them into institutions that expect both.
None of this is new. The intersection with the climate sector is. A sector marketing itself as values-driven staffs itself from exactly this population. The gatekeepers who control access to climate jobs, fellowships, and networks are products of the same pressure cooker as everyone else. Their values vocabulary is fluent and their ethical core is, in many cases, entirely absent. Not because they’re uniquely bad people. Because the system that made them never asked them to develop one. The climate sector doesn't transform this. It provides a new context in which the same behaviours, credential hoarding, network manipulation, the social discrediting of competitors, can be performed with a green backdrop and a mission statement as cover.
A generation in, this produces a more sophisticated version of the same dysfunction in different clothes. The extractive instincts are intact. So is the ethical atrophy. Only the vocabulary changed.
The Control Stack: Layer by Layer
Sustainability gets applied to carbon, ecosystems, supply chains, investment portfolios. Not to the workforce. The industry filed its workers' social condition under human resources and closed the productivity question, and never seriously asked whether the workforce it assembles can do what it claims to be doing.
Social sustainability, the capacity of a human system to function, cooperate, and produce over time, requires at minimum that the people in it can work without operating under constant threat, that they have enough psychological stability to engage honestly with complex problems, and that the incentive structures around them reward genuine contribution rather than survival behaviour. The Indian professional class, as it enters the climate sector, arrives with none of these conditions met. It arrives traumatised by an education system designed to produce anxiety. It arrives having learned competition as the primary mode of human interaction. It arrives in a hiring environment that discriminates on axes so numerous and so structural that simply being the right person for the job is rarely sufficient. And it arrives in a workplace culture where the threat matrix, false accusations, social discrediting, regional or caste exclusion, surveillance running constantly, is high enough that cognitive capacity goes to navigation rather than work.
The workforce this produces is fawning and predatory in equal measure. Fawning toward those above in the hierarchy, because the consequences of failing to perform deference are real and immediate. Predatory toward those alongside or below, because the gladiatorial formation doesn't switch off at the office door. These are adaptive responses to an environment that selected for them. The climate sector didn't create these conditions. It staffed itself with the people they produced, gave them mission-aligned language to describe what they were doing, and called it a movement.
The second mechanism rarely gets named directly: the pseudo-intellectual arrogance of the Indian professional class. The belief, absorbed so deeply it presents as common sense: unless something can be coded, scaled, or measured in server capacity, it is probably worthless. Without the right institutional pedigree behind whoever is proposing it, definitely worthless.
The Indian startup world runs on a credential hierarchy so rigid it functions as a caste system in a different register. At the top, IIT and IIM graduates who have absorbed the idea that their institutional affiliation is evidence of merit and not evidence of access. The ecosystem below them is organised accordingly, still run by the same 300 people from the same 10 institutions, where a Tier 2 degree or unconventional background is grounds for dismissal before a conversation starts.
The climate sector inherits this hierarchy and adds its own layer. The correct credentials are a combination of engineering or finance background, preferably with a Global North stamp: an Oxford certificate, a Silicon Valley fellowship, a Harvard extension course, plus demonstrated fluency in the vocabulary of impact. The content of what you know matters less than the chain of institutions that certified you knowing it. Meritocracy in Indian corporate culture is the transformation of privilege into the appearance of merit, conducted so smoothly that most participants believe they’re operating a fair system.
Networking in this environment is gatekeeping with refreshments. The climate events, the fellowship cohorts, the Slack communities and WhatsApp groups: access to all of them runs through the same narrow channels. Fellowships charging $1,990 for entry aren't coincidentally priced beyond most Indians' reach. They're priced to produce a specific kind of network.
The network is almost certainly upper-caste, urban, English-educated, and connected to a Bengaluru tech cluster or a Global North institution. The racial and xenophobic dimensions are neither incidental nor subtle. The Indian professional ecosystem is hostile to outsiders, which in practice means anyone from the Northeast of India whose features mark them as different, anyone from a linguistic background other than the dominant languages of the tech belt, anyone foreign who has not arrived with the correct institutional affiliations. This hostility operates through the texture of who gets introduced to whom, whose ideas are taken up in a meeting and whose are repeated five minutes later by someone else to applause, whose accent marks them as credible and whose marks them as suspect. Racism that requires no racist, only a room that has decided in advance who belongs in it.
The xenophobia travels outward too. Indian professionals who have internalised the hierarchy export it wherever they go: into diaspora hiring networks, into international fellowship cohorts, into global climate organisations where the informal power still routes through the same upper-caste-IIT pipeline that structured the original exclusion. The H-1B corridors of Silicon Valley have documented versions of this for twenty years. The climate sector's international networks are reproducing it now, with a green vocabulary applied over the same architecture.
The export is documented in law. In November 2023 the Ontario Human Rights Commission published a policy position formally recognising caste-based discrimination as covered under the province's Human Rights Code, specifically under creed, race, and ethnic origin. British Columbia's Human Rights Tribunal, the same year, awarded a Dalit man $9,000 after colleagues at a Richmond taxi company slurred him by caste and physically attacked him at a company function. Neither province passed a standalone caste discrimination law. Both had to consciously reinterpret existing anti-discrimination frameworks to catch something that arrived with the South Asian diaspora. The caste system didn’t stay in India. It crossed the Pacific on the same visa as the IIT graduate, settled into the diaspora hiring network, and waited. Canada's legal system eventually noticed. The climate sector’s international networks haven’t.
The climate sector's particular irony: The communities most exposed to climate risk in India, agricultural workers watching their harvests fail, coastal fishing communities whose livelihoods are already underwater, urban informal labour breathing the worst air in the world, Adivasi populations whose forests are the first to be sacrificed for green infrastructure, are entirely absent from the fellowship cohorts, the recruitment pipelines, the networking events, and the thought leadership. Not underrepresented. Absent. The sector wasn't built to include them. Built to profit from their predicament, at a comfortable distance, by people who paid $1,990 to be qualified to speak on their behalf.
The hiring process is where the hierarchy becomes most nakedly operational. The mess is specific, documented, and bigoted. A landmark study by economists Sukhadeo Thorat and Paul Attewell sent identical job applications to over 500 companies, varying only the surnames. Applicants with Dalit surnames received interview callbacks at roughly two-thirds the rate of applicants with upper-caste surnames. That was in 2007. The IT sector's response since then has been to automate the bias: applicant tracking systems trained on historical hiring data reconstruct caste from the variables that remain after the surname is removed: postal code, undergraduate institution, father's occupation, employment gaps, extracurriculars. When a researcher named Dhiraj Singha asked an AI to draft his academic cover letter in 2023, the system quietly substituted his surname for Sharma, a dominant-caste name more statistically common in Indian academic documents. Remove one signal, and the system finds ten others. The discrimination didn't disappear when it became inconvenient. It went structural.
Regional origin is a second exclusion axis, so normalised it presents as preference, never named as discrimination. Indian corporate culture, particularly in the tech belt, operates with an informal geography of hiring that maps closely onto linguistic and cultural proximity. A Bengaluru company run by Kannadigas will find reasons to prefer Kannadiga candidates. A Chennai firm reads a Tamil name as culturally legible where a Bihari name isn’t. Maharashtra's sons-of-soil movements have explicitly advocated for regional hiring preferences for decades; the corporate sector simply practices the same principle more quietly. The equivalent in the United States would be a company in California or New York refusing to hire someone from Nebraska or Texas because of their accent and their zip code of origin. In the United States that reads as absurd and probably illegal. In India it is called cultural fit and it happens every day.
The third axis is colourism. Gendered. The formal experimental evidence on skin tone and hiring callbacks in India is mixed. Studies have found that at the point of initial selection, lighter and darker-skinned candidates can be evaluated similarly. Colourism operates primarily through career advancement, promotion, and the informal social layer of professional life: who gets introduced, who gets invited, who gets the visibility that precedes the opportunity. A filtering mechanism that becomes more powerful the further up the hierarchy you look. Three axes, caste encoded in name, region in surname and accent, skin tone in every photograph and face-to-face interaction: a hiring ecosystem that has pre-decided the answer before the interview begins. In Indian corporate culture, meritocracy is the process by which the pre-decided answer gets documented.
The gender dynamic in hiring is documented by the evidence, though not cleanly by sector. Women in hiring roles show a tendency toward gender homophily: they refer and select other women more often than men do in comparable positions, particularly in roles that are not already coded as male-dominated. Documented in referral research, which partially explains why sectors with more female leadership produce more female hires at entry level. The evidence is sector-specific and doesn’t generalise into a straightforward “women hire women” rule. More consistent across the Indian data: men’s preference for younger women in junior and mid-level roles. Not support. Control. World Bank analysis of Indian job portal data found that women are explicitly preferred for low-quality, low-status, and low-paid roles, while ads targeting men specify significantly higher salaries even for comparable positions. Preference for younger women in junior roles has nothing to do with their talent. It maps onto a workplace culture that values compliance, presentability, and disposability over competence. For senior roles, the calculus inverts: men prefer men, and women who have navigated to senior positions often don't extend the support downward that the homophily data might predict. The literature calls this the queen bee phenomenon: senior women who, having absorbed the discrimination of their own career trajectories, distance themselves from junior women rather than advocating for them, either as a survival mechanism or because the system has convinced them the hierarchy is legitimate. The perverse outcome is that the one axis of gender bias that might partially counteract the others , women in hiring positions selecting other women, is most likely to be interrupted precisely where it would matter most: at the senior level, where decisions about who gets real power are made.
One layer requires framing before it can be named honestly. Sexual harassment in Indian workplaces and academic institutions is epidemic, structurally under-reported, and catastrophically under-addressed. The 2024 Deloitte report found 43% of women experienced harassment or microaggressions in the past year. POSH Act complaints at major Indian companies rose 29% in a single year, while the backlog of unresolved cases jumped 67%. Most harassment goes unreported entirely. When it surfaces, institutions routinely protect themselves and leave the complainant exposed. That's the baseline. State it before naming what sits alongside it, because conflating the two is how both problems get dismissed.
Alongside it: the strategic weaponisation of sexual harassment policy as a tool for competitive elimination in workplaces and academic institutions. The Supreme Court of India, in a 2023 judgment, noted that an Internal Complaints Committee had conducted hearings at such speed and denied the accused such basic procedural fairness that the entire process was vitiated, a finding that documented not only institutional failure but a specific pattern of complaint being used to remove rather than redress. Section 14 of the POSH Act anticipates malicious complaints and provides for action against them, a provision that wouldn’t exist if the phenomenon were merely theoretical. The courts have additionally flagged a recurring pattern of long-term consensual relationships being retrospectively reframed as harassment under criminal law when those relationships end badly. None of this is the majority experience of the mechanism. A minority abuse of it. Real, documented, and in specific competitive environments, elite academic institutions and early-stage startups where a single complaint can end a career before an investigation concludes, a precise instrument of elimination.
The echo chamber that produces it is a particular variety of Indian extremist feminism that has collapsed all gender-related conflict into a single accusation mechanism and treats any questioning of that mechanism as evidence of the accused's guilt. Internally consistent, self-validating, hostile to external evidence, producing increasingly extreme outputs the longer it runs without friction. Not representative of feminist thought or practice. A fringe the broader movement has largely failed to discipline, partly because the genuine harassment problem is severe enough that any internal critique feels like a betrayal, and partly because the fringe's vocabulary has been absorbed into mainstream HR and compliance culture faster than its logic could be examined. The residue: a surveillance posture. Monitoring male colleagues and competitors in both professional and academic settings for any behaviour that can be coded as inappropriate, scanning for leverage rather than safety. The people it catches aren’t the powerful men it was designed to constrain. They are mid-level male professionals and male students in competitive academic programmes, whose removal requires no physical evidence, whose careers can be ended by an anonymous complaint filed to a committee with no legal training, and whose position in the hierarchy makes them worth eliminating.
Damage runs in both directions. Genuine victims get less justice because the mechanism has been visibly corrupted and institutions now respond to every complaint with a combination of box-ticking and reputation management. Men with legitimate grievances have no mechanism to pursue them and no language to name the experience without being dismissed. And the extremist fringe, having made itself visible, is used by bad-faith actors, predominantly men in positions of power, to argue that the entire category of sexual harassment complaint is suspect. Which is what the bad-faith actors wanted all along. The echo chamber didn't weaken the patriarchy. It gave the patriarchy better arguments.
A connected silence, older and more total, sits in the same patriarchal structure that produces everything else named in this section. The Ministry of Women and Child Development's own 2007 national study, the largest of its kind, conducted with UNICEF and covering thousands of children, found that 53% of child sexual abuse victims in India are male. Boys and girls are equally affected. In 85 to 95% of cases, the abuser is a known person, typically within or adjacent to the family. Only 3% of cases are ever reported to any authority. Among boys the number is almost certainly lower. The social architecture around male victimisation isn't silence. It's active erasure. Boys are supposed to be strong. Boys aren't supposed to have been violated. The family that would silence a girl's report to protect family honour applies the same logic to a boy's report, with the additional layer that acknowledging male victimisation requires the family to confront a category of harm the culture has decided does not exist.
Structural support for male child abuse survivors in India doesn’t exist. The POCSO Act is technically gender-neutral, but the entire support infrastructure built around it, the counselling services, the awareness programmes, the NGO ecosystem, the public health framing, addresses child sexual abuse as a phenomenon that happens primarily to girls. No dedicated services exist for male survivors. No public campaigns address boys. No school programme tells male children what happened to them has a name, isn’t their fault, and that help exists. A 2017 clinical study found that in a multidisciplinary hospital unit handling child abuse cases, boys received three out of 27 referrals to psychiatric support over twenty months. Fewer boys were not abused. The pathway from abuse to identification to referral to support was blocked at every stage by the assumption that boys do not need it.
None of this is peripheral. The same patriarchal formation that produces emotionally stunted, ethically atrophied adults, raised in gladiatorial families, processed through pressure-cooker education, sorted into hierarchies of caste and gender and region, is the formation in which this abuse occurs and is buried. The child who was abused within the family and told nothing happened, given no language and no support, grows up and enters a workplace. That workplace doesn't resolve the history. It deploys it.
The fourth axis operates outside India's borders, a direct export of everything above. Indian men abroad, and by racial misidentification South Asian men more broadly, and mixed-race men whose features place them somewhere in the vague perceptual territory that Western eyes read as South Asian regardless of their actual origin or citizenship, carry a reputational burden that affects their social lives, educational environments, professional prospects, and intimate relationships in ways that are rarely named directly because naming them requires holding two uncomfortable things at once. The category is imprecise. Deliberately so. The person doing the categorising isn’t interested in accuracy. A man who is half Sri Lankan and half Irish, or Bangladeshi by birth and Dutch by citizenship, or Tamil by ancestry and Singaporean by passport, or simply brown in a way that cannot be immediately resolved into another more familiar category, gets pigeonholed anyway, assigned to the Indian-male threat projection by a perceptual shortcut that runs faster than any correction he might offer. The stereotype is real in its consequences. So are the conditions that produced it.
India's rape conviction rate has hovered between 27% and 28% for years, one of the lowest for serious crimes in the country. Marital rape isn’t criminalised. Fast-track courts created to handle sexual violence cases have conviction rates as low as 5 to 10%. The Nirbhaya case, gang rape and murder on a Delhi bus in 2012, produced global headlines, domestic protests, legislative reform, and four executions. It produced no structural change in the rate at which sexual violence occurs or is prosecuted. Internationally it produced one image: India as a country where women aren't safe, Indian men as the reason. The image isn't fabricated. A compressed and racialised version of a real and documented systemic failure. The problem is what happens when it travels.
An ethnically Tamil student from Singapore, studying at a British university, with a refined British accent acquired at a British international school in Singapore, arrives in a social environment that has already decided what he is. The accent doesn't register. The specific biography doesn't register. The fact that he has never been to Delhi doesn't register. He is watched in ways his European peers aren’t. He is excluded from social networks, house shares, friendship groups, dating, through a pattern of decisions that individually look like preference and collectively function as discrimination. In professional environments the same dynamic operates more quietly: the brown man whose manner is slightly formal, whose social calibration is slightly off in ways that are entirely explicable given that he learned social behaviour in a completely different cultural environment, reads as suspect rather than as foreign. His career advancement is shaped by that reading in ways that are impossible to document precisely because they happen in the subjective layer of professional judgment where bias lives most comfortably. Racism born out of a real systemic failure for which he is not responsible, directed at him as though he were, and it compounds every other disadvantage his migration was supposed to resolve.
Indian women are received in the same environments in an equally dehumanising but different register. The Indian man reads as a threat. The Indian woman as an aesthetic category. She is exoticised, desired in the specific depersonalised way that orientalism has always desired the women of the cultures it feared and coveted at once. The dark hair, the features, the presumed docility mapped onto her by a Western imagination that constructed South Asian femininity as decorative and compliant. She is fetishised in dating contexts, tokenised in professional ones, and curated in cultural spaces where her presence serves as evidence of diversity without requiring that she be treated as an equal. The exoticisation is predation with better manners, the kind that strips personhood in a warmer register. Neither the threatening man nor the exotic woman is being seen. Both are being processed through a racialised lens that was manufactured in the same colonial encounter that manufactured everything else in this piece.
Both projections originate in the same impunity culture that produced the 27% conviction rate, the 3% child abuse reporting rate, and the structural silence around male victimisation. The reputation travelled. The people who had nothing to do with producing it pay for it. Changing anything would cost powerful people something, and the people carrying the reputational weight abroad aren’t those people.
In practice: a workforce with genuine talent, a sector drowning in ambition, and yet a substantial portion of available intelligence consumed by threat management, status navigation, survival performance, and competitive elimination before any of it reaches the actual work. The climate crisis requires people capable of complex systems thinking, honest confrontation of difficult evidence, genuine collaboration across difference, and ethical reasoning under pressure. The pipeline described above isn’t producing those people. It produces people who are very good at surviving the pipeline. A different skill set. It doesn’t transfer.
The implications of this formation apparatus for India’s climate sector, including the fellowship pipeline, wage suppression, carbon market fraud, and accountability standard, are documented in “The Purpose Tax,” published by The Heat Is On as the companion piece to this analysis.
The climate sector doesn't interrupt this. It inherits it. The green hiring pipeline is the same pipeline with a sustainability vocabulary attached. The fellow with the correct surname, the right regional origin, and the preferred phenotype, from the correct institution, with the Terra.do certificate, gets the callback. The candidate without two or three of those markers doesn’t. They may have every skill the role requires. The system was never built to find them.
Regional Variants of the Same Experiment
India is a regional model. The neighbours have run versions of the same experiment long enough that the results are visible in demographic data, psychiatric statistics, and the specific silence of countries that can’t admit what they’ve done to their own young.
Every variant runs on the same engine: the decision to treat young people as a resource to be harvested, never a generation to be supported. The outcomes across East and South Asia converge on the same destination: demographic collapse, epidemic mental illness, and populations so exhausted by the extraction that they have stopped reproducing.
South Korea has a total fertility rate of 0.75, the lowest ever recorded by any country in human history. In 2024 an estimated 14,439 South Koreans died by suicide, a rate of 28.3 per 100,000, more than double the OECD average. Life satisfaction among South Korean youth ranks 31st out of 38 OECD countries. Over 70% of young South Korean adults cite economic instability, unaffordable housing, and job insecurity as their reasons for not having children. The state's response has been to offer cash incentives for childbirth and declare the demographic situation an emergency, without examining the competitive examination system, the 80-hour work culture, or the corporate hierarchy that produced the emergency. These governments believe they're still in their golden age and want it back, with none of the postwar resources, none of the rebuilding momentum, and none of the political will to dismantle the structures that are killing the people they need.
Japan's fertility rate stands at 1.15. Successive governments have acknowledged the population decline as an existential crisis and responded with childcare subsidies that don’t address the actual condition: a society that trained its people to subordinate every human need to institutional productivity, and is discovering that people trained this way don't form families, don't experience joy, and don't produce the next generation the institution requires. The machine consumed its own fuel. It runs now on institutional inertia and the savings of an elderly population that won't live long enough to see what comes next.
South Korea TFR 0.75 (2024). Japan TFR 1.15 (2024). South Korea suicide rate 28.3/100k vs OECD avg 10.7 (2024).
China is the model India is most explicitly attempting to replicate. Not the democratic rhetoric. The state-directed economic mobilisation, centrally managed growth metrics, and the suppression of anything that might complicate the narrative of national ascent. In China: the top 10% of income earners now capture 41% of national income, up from 27% in 1978, while the bottom 50%'s share has fallen from 27% to 15%. The Gini coefficient sits at approximately 0.47, higher than the United States. The 1990s produced a saying that hasn’t become less accurate with time: China's cities look like European cities; its countryside looks like the poorest places in Africa. The luxury apartment towers and the informal settlements occupy the same city block. Different parts of the same city block. That adjacency, ultra-wealth and squalor occupying the same postcode separated by a wall or a train track, isn't a failure of planning. It's the physical layout of an economy that decided inequality was acceptable as long as the aggregate numbers pointed upward.
India produces the same adjacency. Pretending otherwise is increasingly difficult. Walk down one side of the railway track in Worli, Mumbai, where Mukesh Ambani's 27-storey residence faces the Golibar slum across a distance you could cover in under five minutes. Turn into the back streets of Koramangala or Indiranagar in Bengaluru, the neighbourhoods that appear in every international feature about India's startup boom, and find the service economy that sustains them, the domestic workers, the delivery riders, the day labourers, living in conditions that the tech sector's whitepapers on talent gaps do not mention. Cross to the other side of Adyar in Chennai. Stand at the intersection of Park Street and any street running east in Kolkata, where the colonial-era wealth of the Ballygunge neighbourhood gives way within walking distance to the density of Chetla. Take the Ring Road in Delhi, where the diplomatic enclave of Jorbagh and Sunder Nagar sit minutes from JJ colonies that the municipal authorities have been promising to redevelop for thirty years.
The sector wasn't built to include them. It was built to discuss them, at a safe distance, by people who paid $1,990 to be qualified to do so.
A note for any government official reading this: we are fully aware that this paragraph will now trigger a rapid slum clearance campaign in at least two of the above locations, followed by a press release about urban renewal and a set of revised statistics showing that the relevant settlements have been reclassified as something other than slums. This isn't a joke about India's capacity for PR. It describes the response mechanism precisely: a government so frightened of the appearance of poverty that it removes the poor and leaves the poverty, and so committed to fudging the numbers that a former chief statistician described the official poverty line of ₹55 per day as not only unrealistic but an intentional move to project a rosier picture. The poverty estimates produced by NITI Aayog have been challenged by independent researchers whose alternative figures range from 9.9% to 26.4%, a spread so wide that it isn't a statistical disagreement. It's an argument about whether the state is telling the truth.
Political short-termism produces this. The election cycle doesn't reward governments that tell their populations the infrastructure is failing, the inequality is worsening, and the model that generated the last twenty years of growth is producing diminishing returns and increasing misery. It rewards governments that announce that a quarter of a billion people escaped poverty in nine years, using a methodology that substitutes health survey data for income data and sets the poverty line at a level no one can actually live on. The number is designed to be celebrated. The people behind the number are designed to be invisible. And when the invisible people become visible, when the slum is in the frame of the drone photograph, when the delivery rider dies on his way to a Koramangala address, when the coaching student in Kota hangs herself from a ceiling fan, and the state's first instinct is to clean the frame, not fix the condition.
The difference between India and China isn't that India is more honest about its inequality. India's inequality is simply becoming harder to aestheticise. The weather is changing. The climate is producing floods in the streets of Mumbai's financial district and heat events that close schools in Delhi. The gap between those who can adapt and those who can’t is the same gap that separates Worli Sea Face from Dharavi, Indiranagar from the households that service it. That gap isn't closing. It's getting starker every year. And the sector that was supposed to be addressing it, the fellowships, the recruiters, the ESG consultancies, the carbon market, is making its living from the distance between the two sides of the track, without any intention of crossing it.
The Rational Actor Problem
Looking at this, the suspended labour inspections, the self-certified compliance, the worthless offsets, the fraudulent unicorns, the underpaid fellowship graduates, the recruitment intermediaries with no payroll and no accountability, the education system producing ethically atrophied professionals by the million: a reasonable person might ask a simple question. What is the point of starting a business in a country that protects its fraudsters, encourages the defrauding of its investors, and extracts its young people's labour under the cover of purpose?
The young people themselves have started to ask the same question, in the only language the system has left them. They are so desperate, and the formal channels so closed, that they threaten business owners on LinkedIn. They name-drop connections they don’t have. They perform credentials they paid for and can’t use. They bargain down their own worth in cover letters, offering to work for less than the posting asked, because they have been taught that demonstrating willingness to sacrifice is the price of consideration. The behaviour of people who survived a pressure cooker designed to crush independent thought, emerged with ambition intact and judgment removed, now applying the only tactics they were ever taught: compete, manipulate, don’t show weakness, don’t stop.
You haven't built a startup ecosystem. You've built a mafia state with a sustainability certification. The mafia, at least, pays its people.
Serious investors, the ones intending to deploy capital at scale into India's energy transition rather than chase ESG optics, are already running the calculation. The calculation includes: a regulatory environment where self-declaration is compliance; a market where the most celebrated companies turned out to be defrauding their own investors; a labour ecosystem where the workers doing the actual work have no recourse and no record; a carbon market where the credits backing net-zero claims are largely fictitious; and a professional class produced by a system that industrialised dysfunction and called it ambition. The calculation produces a risk premium, and at some point that premium exceeds the return. At that point, the capital goes somewhere else.
A country that mistakes the appearance of a functioning economy for an actual one ends up here. The fraudsters get rich and leave. The genuinely competent ones with real options ask whether the risk of building something here is worth the cost of building it. Some of them are already answering that question. The ones who stay aren't rewarded for staying. They're exploited for it. And the sector that was supposed to be different, the one that was going to solve the crisis the old economy created, was built by the same people, using the same methods, producing the same outcomes, in a different colour.
The good people leave. Not all of them, not all at once. The ones with the most options and the clearest view of what the system is leave at the first opportunity and don't return unless forced to. Over 75,000 skilled professionals emigrate from India every year. The ones who leave for the United States join a queue that, as of mid-2026, stretches effectively 134 years for Indian nationals in the employment-based green card categories, a per-country cap designed for a world in which India sent a trickle of professionals abroad, now processing a million-person backlog at a rate that makes permanence a generational fantasy. They live in the adopted country on renewable visas, building careers, paying taxes, raising children who will age out of dependent status before the parents are permanent residents. The country benefits from their labour without offering them belonging.
Some of them come back. When they do, the narrative in India is triumphant: reverse brain drain, returning talent, global expertise coming home. The narrative doesn't examine why they came back or what they come back with. Some return because their visa expired. Some because their H-1B was denied in a policy environment that now charges $100,000 per petition and treats skilled immigration as a threat to be managed. Some because a decade of professional success in a country that won’t give them a path to citizenship has made clear that they are a resource to be used, not a person to be included. They come back having absorbed the experience of being treated as a second-class presence in the country that was supposed to be the destination, and they return to a country whose systems they know, in most cases, to be worse.
What they do with that combination, the technical competence, the international network, the memory of being excluded, the fluency in extraction tactics, isn’t uniformly the perpetuation of fraud. The conditions produce it reliably. The good ones who return and try to build something differently are working against the current of every institution around them. The ones who come back angry, or exhausted, or simply pragmatic about what works, they find the existing playbook ready and waiting. The system didn't need them to be bad people when they left. It just needed to be intact when they returned. And it is, reliably, every time.
A parallel story runs alongside the brain drain, rarely told because its protagonists rarely stay long enough to tell it. The foreign founder, the person who looked at India the way well-intentioned people look at Kenya or Rwanda or Indonesia or Vietnam and thought: this is where the work is. The scale of the problem is here. The population exposed to climate risk is here. The gap between what exists and what is needed is here, and I want to help close it. They aren’t naive. They have done the research, talked to the right people, attended the fellowship cohorts, positioned themselves to be part of the solution. And then they try to enter.
What they encounter is structurally hostile. The word for it is not difficult. The regulatory architecture alone can end a well-capitalised enterprise before its first anniversary. Company registration requirements, GST compliance that varies by state and sector, FEMA restrictions on how foreign capital moves in and how any returns move out, labour law self-certification that offers no protection against retrospective enforcement if someone with influence decides to make a point. The banking system requires documentation that takes months to obtain for a foreign national. The investment environment, until very recently, included an angel tax that treated foreign equity investment in unlisted Indian companies as potentially fraudulent income and taxed it accordingly, a provision that functioned as a structural penalty on exactly the kind of small-scale impact investment that foreign climate founders carry.
The foreign funding problem compounds this. The Foreign Contribution Regulation Act, India's mechanism for controlling overseas money flowing to civil society, has had 21,933 organisations stripped of their licences. The organisations most impacted, according to Amnesty International, are those working on environmental rights and climate action. Greenpeace India. Oxfam India. The Local India Foundation for Environment, booked by the CBI for using foreign funds to, and the government stated this plainly, target and stall coal projects. A foreign founder trying to build a small climate enterprise in India isn’t operating in a neutral bureaucratic environment. The state has decided foreign-funded climate work is a threat to national interest. The paperwork isn't merely tedious. It's potentially the precursor to a CBI investigation.
The social layer is a separate barrier. Foreign founders in Africa or Southeast Asia typically find local partners who have an interest in helping them navigate. In India, the person best positioned to help you navigate is almost certainly the person best positioned to extract from you: the fixer, the consultant with the right connections, the partner who explains that certain approvals require certain understandings. The foreign founder who can’t read these dynamics, who arrives with a good-faith model of how business relationships work, isn't just disadvantaged. They are prey. The ones who figure this out early enough leave before the debt accrues. The ones who don't leave after two years having spent money they may never recover, having produced something, a pilot, a partnership, a set of relationships, that promptly disappears into the ecosystem without credit or continuity once they're gone.
The climate sector is poorer for the talent and capital it never receives. The government stripped foreign climate NGOs of their licences, taxed foreign equity, restricted capital repatriation, and stands at international climate conferences asking for more investment in India's green transition.
The ones who stay aren't rewarded for staying. They're exploited for it. And the sector that was supposed to be different runs the same model with better branding.
Congratulations. You have produced a mafia state where good people question whether to invest at all.
The Model Sources
India assembled its authoritarianism from a specific set of international models. What distinguishes it from most is that it knew what it was buying.
The surveillance infrastructure, the legal mechanisms of disappearance, the encounter apparatus, the financial control layer, the systematic disenfranchisement of minorities, the suppression of press and civil society: assembled deliberately. India went looking for models and found them in specific, identifiable places.
“The paperwork came before the camps. It always does.”
China provided the surveillance blueprint: a biometric population database, a payment system tied to identity, content removal infrastructure operating faster than judicial oversight can respond, and the demonstrated proof that a nominally open economy can sustain comprehensive population monitoring without triggering international consequences that matter. India adapted the model and called it Digital India.
Nazi Germany provided the legal architecture. Not the gas chambers, which are historically singular. The legal architecture: the majoritarian legislative frameworks that made certain populations progressively invisible, the administrative mechanisms that stripped citizenship categories without individual trial, the institutional capture that made the courts instruments of the state rather than checks on it, the nationalism that converted ethnic and religious identity into the primary criterion for belonging. India’s post-2014 legislative record, the CAA, the NRC, the amendments to citizenship criteria, the deployment of anti-terrorism law against minorities at rates that don’t reflect actual security threats, follows this architecture deliberately.
Right-wing Europe provided the cultural nationalism: the vocabulary of civilisational threat, the framing of minority religious identity as incompatible with national identity, the use of democratic institutions to progressively close the space for democratic opposition. The BJP absorbed these frameworks from Hindutva's mid-twentieth century correspondence with European fascism and has since updated them with contemporary European far-right communications strategy.
Conservative America provided the corporate impunity: the regulatory capture, the suspension of labour protections in the name of economic freedom, the fusion of religious nationalism with economic extraction, the media ecosystem that converts factual reporting about the state into partisan attack. Make in India is, structurally, Reaganomics with a Hindu majoritarian overlay and no First Amendment.
The assembled result: a mafia state, an oligarchy, and a majoritarian ultranationalist project whose closest rival, in the deliberateness of the legal architecture it constructed, is the Third Reich. The likeness is in the paperwork: a legal architecture built to make certain categories of person politically invisible, economically removable, and physically disposable. That architecture is now export-ready.
The climate sector operates inside this state and calls itself a movement. The fellowships, the recruiters, the ESG consultancies, the carbon market: the mafia's green division, staffed by people the system produced, serving corporations the system protects, in a country the system controls. Understanding it is a precondition for changing any of it.
The Cockroaches Are Gathering at Jantar Mantar
“Cockroaches and parasites of society.”
On 15 May 2026 the Chief Justice of India, Surya Kant, described unemployed young people who criticise the government as “cockroaches” and “parasites of society” during a Supreme Court hearing. The following day, Abhijeet Dipke, a political communications strategist and former AAP operative, launched the Cockroach Janta Party. Slogan: Voice of the Lazy and Unemployed. Eligibility: unemployed, chronically online, able to rant professionally. Within days, the movement had millions of followers. On the morning this piece was finalised, hundreds of them gathered at Jantar Mantar in New Delhi, wearing cockroach masks, holding dog-eared exam guides, demanding the education minister’s resignation over a cascade of examination scandals. They had taken the state’s slur and worn it to parliament.
The Chief Justice of a country with a 2.2% UAPA conviction rate, a five-fold increase in encounter killings, and a press freedom ranking of 157th called the people complaining about it “cockroaches.” The cockroaches showed up. In masks. At the historic protest strip. Chanting.
France has had four revolutions, depending on what you're willing to call one. Germany two, officially, though the history books are doing considerable work with that word. Britain didn’t have them at home so much as absorb them from its colonies at significant cost: the American one, the Indian one, the various African ones that are still working themselves out. The United States is currently experiencing something that its participants can’t agree on whether to call a revolution or a collapse. What all of these have in common is that they began at the moment the people who could still articulate what intolerable looked like decided to stop performing acceptance.
India has had independence. It has had partition, a different and more catastrophic event. It has had emergency, which the establishment survived by waiting it out. Whether it is approaching something that merits the word revolution, this piece can’t say. What it can note: a satirical cockroach party founded sixteen days ago drew hundreds to Jantar Mantar today. That the state’s own judiciary handed the resistance its name. And that the generation doing the gathering is the one described at length throughout this piece: processed through Kota, shaped by zero-sum instinct, paying $1,990 for a fellowship that leads to a climate job that pays them less than software, holding Ambedkar in one hand and trying to explain to their parents why they can’t afford a flat.
Power corrupts. In India in 2026 this means: the educated class that benefited from the system supports the regime voluntarily, out of a narcissism so thoroughly internalised that it presents as political conviction. They have access. They have credentials. They have capital. The regime doesn’t threaten them and in fact rewards their continued performance of deference. Supporting it costs them nothing and signals the right things to the right people. These are the IIT graduates, the IIM alumni, the Terra.do fellows, the sustainability consultants whose net-zero claims rest on junk credits. Not coerced. They are complicit in the specific, comfortable way that people who benefit from a system always have been.
The uneducated, or those the system designated as such, support it for kicks and cash. The kicks are real: the BJP’s majoritarian project offers the psychic dividend of belonging to the winning side, of having a target for the accumulated frustration of a life spent at the bottom of multiple hierarchies at once. The cash is also real: the paid troll armies, the WhatsApp forwards ecosystem, the local level patronage networks that distribute government contracts and police protection to those who deliver votes. Not stupidity. Rational behaviour within a system that has constructed this as the most available option. The Cockroach Janta Party represents a third category: people who can’t afford the narcissism of the educated class and haven’t accepted the terms of the patronage network. People who have enough left to be angry, and enough internet to organise it, and enough self-deprecation to wear a cockroach mask to parliament and make the state look ridiculous in the process.
Whether that is the beginning of something is an empirical question. This is not: every system that called its dissenters cockroaches eventually found out what cockroaches do when you stop being able to kill them fast enough.
The Maculate — Institutional Analysis — ShiKahr Editorial Office
A companion analysis, “The Purpose Tax,” examining the climate sector, is published by The Heat Is On. The Maculate operates independently of that editorial process.