2025 witnessed some of the most insidious attacks on the Constitution even without effecting any explicit amendment. The subversion of the Constitution is taking place on multiple levels. The basic constitutional narrative is being shifted from empowerment of citizens, accountability of the state and separation of powers to an ever expanding code of duties for citizens enforced by unregulated digital surveillance power of the state and unmitigated centralisation of power in the hands of the executive. The executive today routinely overrules the judiciary and bulldozes the legislature, while the fourth pillar which is supposed to play the watchdog role and speak truth to power has been effectively refashioned as the propaganda arm of the executive.
Protests of the people and elections at regular intervals remain the only potential checks against this executive aggression. During the last six years India did witness some powerful popular struggles, the protests against the CAA and the historic farmers' movement against corporate takeover of agriculture being the most remarkable cases in point. Powered by these struggles and the growing popular determination to stop the BJP from amending the basic structure of the Constitution, the people of India also succeeded in dealing some hefty blows to the BJP in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, bringing the party's tally down to 240 seats and making it dependent on the support of allies like TDP in Andhra Pradesh and JDU in Bihar hold on to power in Delhi. Jolted by this 2024 setback to its 400-plus ambition, the BJP has since sharpened its twin strategy of state repression and electoral manipulation, taking the fascist offensive to an altogether higher level.
In 2025 we have witnessed an open campaign of extra-judicial extermination of the Maoist stream in the name of Operation Kagar coupled with indiscriminate invocation of draconian laws like UAPA against activists leading to protracted incarceration without any trial or bail. If senior Maoist leaders are being executed in extra-judicial encounters, activists upholding a whole range of democratic concerns like land and forest rights, environmental protection, climate justice, social and economic equality, minority rights, cultural freedom or separate statehood are being implicated and incarcerated for months and years on end without bail or trial. Freedom of assembly and the right to protest by peaceful constitutional means are today severely restricted, and instead of upholding constitutional rights of citizens courts have begun discouraging and stopping citizens from exercising their rights, even suggesting what issues to talk about.
Accompanying this silencing of protests now is a systematic synthesis of electoral purge and electoral fraud being administered through a compliant handpicked panel of election commissioners. The first past the post electoral system always had its anomalies and the combination of money and muscle power always played a major role in Indian elections. But the mass disenfranchisement now being perpetrated in the name of Special Intensive Revision of electoral roll and complete abdication of transparency and accountability by the Election Commission have rendered elections extremely unfree and unfair. The Sangh-BJP fascist game plan of turning India into a one-party state with manufactured mandates in election after election ensuring an assured permanent majority for the BJP/NDA to stay entrenched in power for decades now seems ominously in place.
How does the 75-year-old republic face this juncture? There is clearly no easy exit from this mess. We need to summon all the foundational strength of the republic - the quest for social equality, rationality and humanism, the strength of India's pluralist cultural ethos, the unity and dynamism generated in the course of India's protracted anti-colonial national awakening and the rich experience of a relatively functional democracy for all these years in the post-independence period - to overcome this biggest ever challenge to Indian democracy. It was a determined assertion of "we, the people of India" that had won us our freedom from the British colonial rule. We need another awakening of India on that scale to reclaim our constitutional vision of a sovereign socialist secular democratic republic. 2025 has been a year of major gains for fascism, let us make 2026 a year of recovery for India's democratic forces.
