The protestors at Jantar Mantar, and across the country, are the primary casualties of this unforgiving ecosystem with Modi as the central symbol. It has deeply fractured the public psyche. As the political scientist Suhas Palshikar has observed, this environment has stripped the youth of hope, rendering their aspirations seemingly meaningless. The reality has become starkly Kafkaesque; much like the faceless, unyielding bureaucracy in Franz Kafka’s The Trial, the current state machinery remains entirely disconnected from the moral realities of its citizens. The resulting lack of institutional accountability does not deter dissent or rehabilitate the public; instead, it inflicts a state of profound psychological exhaustion.
https://thewire.in/government/modis-ecosystem-had-mistaken-a-terrified-silence-for-peace
This leadership nurtures an ecosystem which operates as a well-oiled machine of institutional indignity, targeting individuals and entire communities with casual cruelty.
The current regime believes that public education lies outside its political syllabus. Instead of addressing the systemic rot of recurring paper leaks, unyielding unemployment, and institutional decay, the state treats the rightful aspirations and questioning minds of Gen Z as a mere law-and-order crisis. Parliament’s recent passage of the anti-paper leak bill rests on a comforting but historically flawed assumption: that legal severity is an effective deterrent to crime. Legal deterrents were already firmly in place when these rampant leaks occurred. Given the government’s dubious track record of punishing the truly guilty, this new bill simply adds insult to structural injury.
by Naseeruddin Shah and Ashok Lal
04/08/2026