India is currently witnessing a capture of every institution that was designed to mediate, moderate or constrain executive power. These institutions are now being subordinated to the interests of a specific faction of big capital, which is fused with the ideological apparatus of Hindutva, which pursues the idea of Hindu Rashtra. It is an ongoing project of legal, electoral and territorial engineering which is being materialised through legislation that says one thing and does another. It is also being established through a sustained assault on constitutional firewalls that stand between a secular republic and a theocratic state.

Since 2014, the ruling party’s political apparatus has merged with a specific cluster of corporate houses, in a relationship of mutual reinforcement so dense that the boundary between state and private capital has become, in critical sectors, functionally invisible. Corporates that made investments in the BJP are receiving material returns in the form of public sector disinvestment, rewriting of environmental and land acquisition clearance norms, restructuring of the banking system to absorb corporate debt etc. Political power itself is being reorganised as returns on corporate investment.

Acquisitions. Mergers. Hostile takeovers. Terms used in corporate boardrooms have been perfected by the BJP as........

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