“Why the Government of India should establish a Department of Indic Studies”, samyakdixit.substack.com, June 21, 2022
“There are various scenes that stick out when you watch The Kashmir Files, but one scene truly stood out to me, and many others.
“Government unki hai toh kya hua, System toh hamara hai”, says Pallavi Joshi’s Radhika Menon, an obvious amalgamation of several “eminent academics/intellectuals” whom we are familiar with, making a declaration with an obvious confidence of someone who is sure of their own correctness, and the institutional backing they possess. And sadly, those of us who consider ourselves as coming from an Indic point of view, KNOW that she is correct about this as well. Politics in a democracy is, as every student of the subject knows, just as much a study of the permanent institutions of a society as it is a study of the constant churn of the democratic process.
Eight years into the Modi regime, as we reflect on the complete asymmetry of the BJP’s dominance in the electoral arena, versus the legacy (Nehruvian+Marxist) elite’s successful holding of the fort in the institutions like the Judiciary (India’s premier example of Robert Michel’s Iron Law of Oligarchy), the media, academia, and culture, we are left with a sense of frustration – frustration at the BJP/RSS’s refusal/inability to topple the legacy elite’s sovereignty over these institutions (or even any attempts to do so). This essay, in its small way, attempts to find a way out of this maze……”
Read full article at samyakdixit.substack.com
