Sugata Srinivasaraju

Delighted to announce my new book: THE CONSCIENCE NETWORK: A CHRONICLE OF RESISTANCE TO A DICTATORSHIP. June 2025 marks 50 years since #IndiraGandhi imposed the #Emergency. Check out the book’s dramatis personae at the end of this #thread. Pre-order: amzn.in/d/ecCcJQQ 1/9

@ShabbirABashir1 @mileeashwarya @PenguinIndia You have articulated well. Mostly agree with your assessment. Thanks.

Read this post and your article. A question. Do u think society begets the polity, political party and the system or is it other way round- Do political parties shape social thinking and political choices? Of course, it’s a 2 way process but there is foundational trigger. I think it’s society that chooses and shapes. Political parties run the opportunity and amplify it. The society today operates on a different DNA. Different from what it was in the 70s, 80s and 90s. It craves authority, nationalism, deep cultural and religious association. The society is young. Impatient. Restless. Seeks security. Seeks pride. It’s rational and knows the broken system. So it co-opts what’s most convenient. Congress DNA is different. It falters on nationalism particularly cultural nationalism. Its leadership is jaded and Rahul Gandhi doesn’t inspire brute force. He is the nice polite next door guy and not the street fighter. Its leadership is elite. Philosophers! Think Tharur. Not the grass roots from the bye-lanes of mohalla politics. Changing to reflect the society is like replacing its DNA and changing its blood type. It cannot. Pranoy Roy cannot speak the language of Sudheer Chowdhury or carry the bravado of Arnab Goswami. Pranoy Roy’s quiet polite persona is indelibly etched. It cannot change. He can only wait for the society to change and accept him back! Congress cannot morph. It’s only hope lies in the society turning towards what it offers. And that’s not going to happen anytime soon and that, if it does. Congress can only wait and bid its time assuming it survives the decades ahead. The high command writ is always the nature of Indian politics. And for any national party. Just that BJP does it better with its all powerful Delhi leadership. Congress leadership is eroded. Emaciated- ideologically, financially, and in its political capital. It cannot revitalise before its gets chosen. To get chosen it must reflect the society and for that it needs to transform. And for that it cannot speak the language it does. That’s old school. It cannot be the party it was and the priorities it stands for.

Delighted to announce my new book: THE CONSCIENCE NETWORK: A CHRONICLE OF RESISTANCE TO A DICTATORSHIP. June 2025 marks 50 years since #IndiraGandhi imposed the #Emergency. Check out the book’s dramatis personae at the end of this #thread. Pre-order: amzn.in/d/ecCcJQQ 1/9

@tnrags Thank you.

Vijay’s triumph cleared the deck of rigid Dravidian loyalties to foster a universal vote that works beyond ideology, caste, religion & gender. This is a brilliant point, @sugataraju

#OPINION | In the recent years, in its anxiousness to be at least a party of the south, the #Congress has committed some grave strategic errors. They embraced the ideological rigidity of a party like the #DMK on a number of issues like OBC politics, federal autonomy, cultural politics and delimitation. The arguments it embraced in the south divested it of an argument in the rest of India, writes @sugataraju. @santwana99 🔗newindianexpress.com/opinion/2026/M…

2/2 Open link to read of my @NewIndianXpress piece: newindianexpress.com/amp/story/opin…

My New Indian Express piece on the state of the Congress limbo. I look at the party’s position in the southern states of Kerala, Karnataka, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu. “To be in limbo is undoubtedly a platitudinal appellation for the party that has been in decline since 2014. But the irony is that the Congress itself has not come to reflect or rue about its perch of non-progress. Rather, it has attempted to develop, with some reverse ingenuity, capital around its very state of being left dangling by the voter. The party neither has its feet on the ground, nor is its leadership at the top able to hold things together. The Congress, perhaps, stopped thinking like a national party a while ago. It tried to adopt the ideological agenda and smarts of regional outfits that fared better against the Modi regime, but those regional parties did not concede an inch to the Congress… There is a kind of consolatory half-truth spoken about the Congress these days when people say it has essentially become “a party of southern India”. It is an attempt to anchor the grand old party somewhere on the map, but the ground realities for the party in the south are quite harsh.” Open link to read: newindianexpress.com/amp/story/opin…

@nistula @gm_madras @INCIndia @INCKarnataka @BJP4India @INCKerala @INCTelangana @INCTamilNadu @TVKVijayHQ @arivalayam @JaiTDP @YSRCParty Thanks.

@sugataraju @gm_madras @INCIndia @INCKarnataka @BJP4India @INCKerala @INCTelangana @INCTamilNadu @TVKVijayHQ @arivalayam @JaiTDP @YSRCParty Good piece!

The Indian Political Action Committee (I-PAC) has been in the news following the defeat of the Trinamool Congress (TMC) in the West Bengal assembly elections. TMC leaders and workers have accused the organization of sabotaging its poll campaign. It has been accused of destroying the party’s grassroots structure, its communication mechanism and the years of connect it had established with the people of West Bengal. The Enforcement Directorate also arrested one of the co-founders of I-PAC in April 2026. The case had to do with the West Bengal coal smuggling scandal. Meanwhile, the Samajwadi Party in Uttar Pradesh has called off its potential partnership with I-PAC. When there is such a flood of bad news for the I-PAC, I replug here my August 2021 column written for The Times of India on Prashant Kishor, the founder of I-PAC. In 2021, Prashant Kishor had worked on TMC and Mamata Banerjee’s campaign in West Bengal, and had still not founded the Jan Suraj party in Bihar. Link to read: open.substack.com/pub/sugataraju…

Maria Popova is famous for her personal blog, The Marginalian, where she's published more than six million words. All the nights I've spent reading her writing were like an entry point into intellectual curiosity. She's introduced me to more writers and ideas than just about anybody, and this conversation is about how she does it. Timestamps: 00:00 Introduction 00:37 Why writers should visit archives 04:39 Lessons from reading diaries 09:41 Letters vs diaries 11:35 Presence over productivity 18:30 How language shapes thought 19:48 Why Maria started reading poetry 36:46 Why college failed her 39:58 Reading to survive 41:41 Why epiphanies don’t stick 43:57 Thoughts on famous quotes 47:32 Why AI can never make art 53:10 Stop calling it content I've shared the full interview with Maria Popova below. If you'd rather watch it on YouTube, or listen on Apple / Spotify, check out the reply tweets.

So this situation I speculated 5 days ago has been avoided, wisely. @vdsatheesan has been named CM. As I mentioned on @BDUTT show last evening, Congress had splintered into 12 distinctive units in #Kerala since 1964. Picking anyone other than VDS (with whom the party workers were, and who led the assault against the LDF) would have perhaps created a 13th unit eventually, if not instantly. On a separate note, I saw a picture of the Kerala CM designate with @yanisvaroufakis’s book ‘Techno-Feudalism’, it is a heartening fact that he reads. @INCKerala @INCIndia

@philbinu @BDUTT @DILIPtheCHERIAN @henryaustin0 @DrJSROfficial But the Kerala Congress itself splintered from the original Congress in 1964. Then further splits happened. So how is it factually wrong.

@BDUTT @DILIPtheCHERIAN @sugataraju @henryaustin0 @DrJSROfficial Rarely agree with @sugataraju as yesterday. Just that the 12 splinter groups was factually incorrect. That’s the Kerala Congress.

Congress will Reveal the name of the Kerala Chief Minister tomorrow - as mystery posters surface warning Wayanad will go Amethi way, what's at stake in the choice- with @DilipTheCherian @SugataRaju @HenryAustin0 @DRJSROfficial. In full youtube.com/watch?v=Ou0Akn…

My new piece: Vijay and the accidental inauguration of new politics in Tamil Nadu. “In the early years of MK Stalin’s tenure, people started identifying themselves as belonging to the ‘Dravidian stock’. It was a kind of odd race definition to counter characterize the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) as belonging to North India, and by implication, to a different race. However, this race characterization of south India was limited to Tamil Nadu, and did not find much currency in other southern states. The rigidity they created around it was not exactly ingenuity but a shallowness of imagination. It was an exclusionary narrative that provoked a more universal and humanist appeal for the TVK.” Link to read: open.substack.com/pub/sugataraju…

@sugataraju @arivalayam @BJP4India @INCIndia @TVKVijayHQ Sugata Sir is perhaps among the rare few in India who engages consistently with the normative while reflecting and reporting on the present moment in Indian politics. Very thoughtful, always decent, & sort of lyricism in the writing that comes from clarity and unpretentiousness.

@ImPawan_96 @arivalayam @BJP4India @INCIndia @TVKVijayHQ Thank you🙏🏽

"this race characterization of south India was limited to Tamil Nadu, and did not find much currency in other southern states. The rigidity they created around it was not exactly ingenuity but a shallowness of imagination." Superb read