5 min readJul 9, 2026 06:36 PM IST First published on: Jul 9, 2026 at 06:36 PM ISTIndia is currently witnessing a capture of every institution that was designed to mediate, moderate or constrain executive power. These institutions are now being subordinated to the interests of a specific faction of big capital, which is fused with the ideological apparatus of Hindutva, which pursues the idea of Hindu Rashtra. It is an ongoing project of legal, electoral and territorial engineering which is being materialised through legislation that says one thing and does another. It is also being established through a sustained assault on constitutional firewalls that stand between a secular republic and a theocratic state.Since 2014, the ruling party’s political apparatus has merged with a specific cluster of corporate houses, in a relationship of mutual reinforcement so dense that the boundary between state and private capital has become, in critical sectors, functionally invisible. Corporates that made investments in the BJP are receiving material returns in the form of public sector disinvestment, rewriting of environmental and land acquisition clearance norms, restructuring of the banking system to absorb corporate debt etc. Political power itself is being reorganised as returns on corporate investment.AdvertisementAlso Read | Pratap Bhanu Mehta writes: When corruption does not make a political noiseAcquisitions. Mergers. Hostile takeovers. Terms used in corporate boardrooms have been perfected by the BJP as the quick fix to overcome electoral setbacks. It began with the fall of state governments through the organised poaching and wholesale purchase of elected Congress legislators in Madhya Pradesh, Goa, Karnataka, Manipur etc. Later the targets shifted to the NCP, SS, AAP and TMC. The “future trading” in political leaders has become so normalised that it now barely registers as a scandal.To prevent this kind of wholesale political commerce, the Tenth Schedule, also known as the anti-defection law, was introduced in 1985. Despite its loopholes, it represented a constitutional acknowledgment that the buying and selling of legislators goes against the ethos of a multi-party democracy. That acknowledgement has now been rendered ceremonial. The mechanism of “merger” — requiring two-thirds of a legislative party to defect — is being exploited with clinical efficiency.Speakers, governors and the Election Commission are some of the constitutional positions that were designed as counterweights or referees. However, speakers, who are the constitutional authorities charged with deciding disqualification petitions, have discovered remarkable reserves of procedural delay whenever the petitions concern their own party’s beneficiaries. The partisan functioning of governors in states like Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Telangana, and West Bengal has been documented. The EC is the body on whose independence the very possibility of an electoral democracy rests. But, it has repeatedly refused to act on complaints against the prime minister and the home minister for speeches that, by any reading of the Model Code of Conduct, constituted communal appeals.AdvertisementNow with the SIR exercise, the current ECI’s lack of non-partisanship lies further exposed. While upholding the legality of the SIR exercise in its May 2026 judgement, citing Article 324, the Supreme Court directed the ECI to send the names of those who were deleted on the grounds of doubtful citizenship to the Union government for adjudication under the citizenship laws. This officially linked the electoral roll revision to citizenship determination. The SIR deletes names. The CAA offers a conditional reinstatement to some who belong to the right religion. The NRC is the eventual settling of accounts. The ultimate goal of the SIR is becoming clearer.you may likeThe Places of Worship (Special Provisions) Act, 1991, prohibited the conversion of any place of worship and directed that the religious character of every such place as it stood on August 15, 1947, be maintained. In 2022, the Supreme Court said during the Gyanvapi hearings that though “conversion” of a place of worship is barred by the Act, “ascertaining its religious character” is not. In practice, the distinction between “ascertaining” and “converting” has proved to be illusory. The RSS-BJP project requires an endless supply of “disputes” to sustain communal polarisation as an electoral resource.Delimitation based on a skewed population data will restructure the arithmetic of the Parliament in favour of the BJP’s core states. The SIR purges the rolls of those most likely to vote against the BJP — poor, migrant, minority, marginalised. The CAA offers a back-door for religious sorting. The assault on the 1991 Act generates the communal charge that keeps the Hindutva coalition together.The CPI(M) and the Left are fighting for the defence of the constitutional framework within which the working class, minorities and democratic forces can still organise, agitate and alter the course of history.The writer is general secretary of the CPI(M)