Debasish Roy Chowdhury

This you?

@anniezaidi Because direct assault on communal harmony is now state policy. Governments in general aim to avert social unrest, this one thrives on them

I wonder how such acts are not a direct assault upon communal harmony and why they are not punished immediately to establish deterrence

Bengal desperately needs heat relief centres to escape a real heatwave, but is desperate to build detention centres to hold imaginary infiltrators. This is what hate does to policymaking - heat camps are not even a part of political discourse when it should be a top citizen ask

The good news is "the government is taking it seriously". That's a relief

No need to mourn the fall of Bengal's incorrigibly corrupt govt, but that our institutions have become so skewed that elections can be so brazenly stolen should worry us all. Losing a fair election process puts us in the twilight zone of undead democracies frontline.thehindu.com/politics/manag…

Uttar Pradesh : Gonda power department turns to cooling overheated transformers amid rising temperatures.

"India is overcrowded" is the most successful gaslighting campaign Indian babus ever ran on their own citizens. They underbuilt the country for forty years and convinced 1.4B Indians to blame themselves for it. Every overcrowded space you've ever queued in is a supply failure the state engineered, not a demographic accident. Five lifts in a hospital, one working. Seven railway counters, one ticketer. Toll plazas, water boards, municipal offices: built once in 1972, patched once in 1996, abandoned ever since. The only exception is airports, and even those lounges are gigafried at peak. Why did this happen? 4 reasons, none of them are "too many people." 1. Cost of capital. Rupee down 60% against the dollar in two decades. Inflation 5-7% on paper, 8-10% in reality. Risk-free rates above 7%. No rational allocator underwrites a hospital with a 30-year payback under those conditions. Capital flows into software and consumer brands; anything with a 3-5 year ROI window. Parks, ports, metros, dams, schools need multi-decade underwriting that India's macro structurally cannot support. 2. The regulatory stack is engineered to prevent construction. 50+ clearances across municipal, state, and central bodies for any large project, each with its IAS gatekeeper extracting rent. Real builders give up. The only construction happening at scale is therefore illegal, which is exactly why slums mushroom while sanctioned housing projects sit at 15% completion for a decade. 3. The corruption tax. Budget 15-20% of project cost in bakshish before pouring a single slab. Stacked on top of GST, stamp duty, capital gains, property tax, labour cess. Software shops escape it; they ship from a laptop. Anyone touching cement, steel, or land pays the surcharge in cash, off the books, with zero recourse and zero deductibility. 4. State capacity has collapsed into pure friction. GST portal crashes on filing deadlines. MCA21 is a relic. Every regulator (SEBI, RBI, IRDAI, FSSAI, BIS) optimises for CYA, never throughput. Babus paid 1990s salaries to administer 2026 complexity respond rationally by doing nothing. India's perpetual undercapacity is a capital allocation story the political class would rather you never learn. The 1.4B is a feature. The people running the country are the bug. Until cost of capital drops, the regulatory fat gets gutted, and the corruption surcharge gets squeezed out, the lifts and the counters and the hospitals will stay exactly as broken as they were when your grandfather first complained about them in 1987.

From public transport and public health to sanitary standards, it's always been evident that India's ruling classes see the ruled as cockroaches. The chief justice merely vocalised it

Insidious, hate-filled propaganda everywhere. This is in the Mumbai Metro, with millions travelling.

More than 100 people died because of demonetisation. Logic works in countries with rule of law

It's that ridiculous and the law enforcers are that helpless before the unlawful mob fronting the parallel state that now runs much of the country

Bengal's illegitimate election leaving 3.4 million voters in limbo was the result of an all-round capitulation of institutions. But none played a more duplicitous role than the Supreme Court, once respected but now seen as the despot’s handmaiden (toda.org/publications/p…)

More sign the economy is rocking

It's become impossible to determine who, why, and how people are voting as popular will is now subordinate to the ruler’s will. From being the 'greatest show on earth', Indian elections have been reduced to the despot’s sideshow in our managed democracy frontline.thehindu.com/politics/manag…

NEW | The Assembly election in Bengal suggests India is moving from a flawed democracy towards a Russian-style managed democracy, where elections are increasingly engineered to favour the ruling party. Debasish Roy Chowdhury (@Planet_Deb) ✍️ frontline.thehindu.com/politics/manag…

The results of the provincial elections in India in April 2026 indicate that India’s democratic backsliding has hit a new low, writes @Planet_Deb @TodaInstitute tinyurl.com/2pw4mmvk

And they wonder why cockroaches are so pissed

God have mercy on us and forgive us.