Notes of Nagesh

    The Deeper State: Peril & Response What the Deeper State Means for India — and What Must Be Done The RSS’s century-long social project now threatens India’s federal compact, constitutional rights and democratic future. For India’s youth and citizens, the hour for passive observation has passed.     CHUPPALA NAGESH BHUSHAN   Hyderabad — May 2026 CONSTITUTIONS ARE EASY TO ADMIRE and difficult to defend. India’s, adopted in 1950, is among the most ambitious documents of the post-war era: a federal republic of extraordinary diversity, built on the explicit promises of equality before the law, freedom of conscience, and the protection of minorities. It has survived famines, wars, a state of emergency, and several cycles of democratic backsliding. Whether it survives the present moment is the question that India’s citizens — and above all, its young — must now answer. The rise of what Professor Christophe Jaffrelot calls the “deeper ...

  The Deeper State India’s transformation goes far beyond elections. A century of RSS groundwork has built a parallel power structure so deeply embedded in society that no ballot box can easily dislodge it. HYDERABAD — May 2026 WHEN ANALYSTS SPEAK of a “deep state,” they generally mean something visible and violent: generals who pull levers behind a civilian facade, as Pakistan’s military has done for most of that country’s history. India’s predicament is simultaneously more subtle and more permanent. Professor Christophe Jaffrelot, one of the world’s foremost scholars of Hindu nationalism, has coined a different term for it: the “deeper state.” It is not a structure imposed from the top down. It is one that has grown, root by root, from the bottom up — woven so tightly into the fabric of Indian society that the distinction between the Sangh Parivar and the nation it claims to represent is becoming genuinely difficult to draw. The distinction between the two concept...

    India Special Report The Unfinished Subversion How the BJP and RSS are redrawing India’s constitutional order — and why the project may be closer to completion than its critics wish to believe   HYDERABAD — May 2026   FOR DECADES, the ideological blueprint was hiding in plain sight. In 1957 — barely a decade after independence — the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, forerunner of today’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), published an election manifesto that called linguistic states a fragmentation of Indian nationhood. The reorganisation of India’s map along language lines, carried out between 1953 and 1956, was denounced as a concession to “many nations” within a single country. The RSS, the Hindu-nationalist mothership from which the Jana Sangh sprang, had gone further still: its founding ideologue, M.S. Golwalkar, had argued that Muslims who did not pledge allegiance to Hindu culture should forfeit the rights of citizenship. Those words spent the bette...