Political Pandora

The contemporary Indian political landscape is a battle of ideology and rhetoric. Instead of being built on any grounded sense of reality, it is set up on a hyperreality that is continuously being created and reinforced through media. The last decade has seen a profound shift in how politics is experienced, especially with the rise of digital platforms that do not just reflect public sentiment but actively produce it.

In the shadow of the Bodhi tree, where Buddha attained enlightenment, a profound struggle continues to unfold. The Mahabodhi Temple, Buddhism’s holiest shrine, remains at the heart of a protracted and deeply symbolic conflict between Brahmanical control versus Buddhist reclamation of sacred heritage.

What does it mean to move on from violence when memory itself is a site of conflict? In Gujarat, the legacy of the 2002 pogrom has been carefully, even violently, curated into the official memory of the state, one that erases as much as it remembers. What remains is not reconciliation, but a selective memorisation that excludes the lived trauma of the Muslim community.

With standardisation comes homogeneity, and homogeneity creates anomalies who do not fit into the mould and therefore need to be discarded on the margins. These beings on the margins, who do not fit sanitised and legally-enforced definitions created by states and adopted by nations, are at the centre of the discussion. Dalit-Queer folx (people who are both Dalit and Queer) inhabit the "death worlds" that Achille Mbembe discusses in his theorisation of Necropolitics.

The global rise of right-wing gender discourse and advocacy is a testament to the fact that there is no monolithic gender system that exists in any given society.