What the Deeper State Means for India — and What Must Be Done

 

 

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 state” — the Sangh Parivar’s century-long project to make its ideology co-extensive with Indian society — is not a sudden catastrophe. It is the outcome of patient, layered, ideologically coherent work. Understanding the perils it poses is the first condition of resisting them. The second condition is a citizens’ roadmap: concrete, unsentimental, and suited to the actual levers of change that remain available in a democracy that is not yet fully closed.

“A constitution is a promise. The deeper state is a project to make that promise unenforceable — not by tearing it up, but by quietly draining it of all meaning.”

 

PART I   The Perils: What Is Actually at Stake

 

 

I. The Unravelling of the Federal Compact

India’s constitutional architecture is explicitly federal. States possess their own legislatures, their own police forces, their own domains of policy. That design was a deliberate settlement: a recognition that a country of India’s scale and diversity could not be governed as a unitary state without fracturing it. The RSS has never accepted this logic. Its foundational texts reject the linguistic reorganisation of states as a concession to “many nations” where there should be one.

The mechanisms of undoing are already visible. Delimitation — the forthcoming redrawing of Lok Sabha constituencies, based on population data from northern states where the BJP’s electoral base is concentrated — threatens to transform southern states, which have invested heavily in education and fertility reduction, into permanent also-rans in national politics. Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh will likely lose parliamentary seats relative to Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Madhya Pradesh. The implicit message is that states that governed themselves well will be penalised for it.

Governors appointed by the Centre — disproportionately from RSS backgrounds under the current dispensation — have been used to delay or withhold assent from state legislation, effectively giving Delhi a veto over opposition-governed states. The three-language formula, and the pressure to adopt Hindi as a medium of instruction in non-Hindi-speaking states, is a cultural corollary of the same project. Federalism in India is not merely a constitutional arrangement. It is the guarantee of Tamil, Bengali, Kannada, and Malayali identity within a shared republic. Its erosion is the erosion of what India actually is.

The Federal Compact Under Strain •  Delimitation threatens to permanently reduce the parliamentary weight of south Indian states that have outperformed on governance •  Raj Bhavan (governors) weaponised to obstruct legislation passed by opposition-governed state assemblies •  Hindi imposition in education undermines the linguistic settlement that makes a diverse union possible •  Central investigative agencies (CBI, ED) deployed asymmetrically against opposition chief ministers and leaders •  National Eligibility Tests and centralised curricula override state educational autonomy

 

II. The Second-Class Citizen: Minorities and the Receding Promise of Equality

Article 14 of the Indian Constitution guarantees equality before the law. Article 15 prohibits discrimination on grounds of religion, race, caste, sex or place of birth. These provisions are not aspirational; they are justiciable rights, enforceable in courts. The deeper state does not abolish them. It makes them progressively unenforceable by ensuring that the institutions meant to give them effect — police, prosecutors, courts, election commissions — are either captured, intimidated, or staffed by people who do not believe in their purpose.

For India’s 200 million Muslims, the practical consequences are already documented. Cow-protection vigilantes operate with near-total impunity in most BJP-governed states; their victims, overwhelmingly Muslim and Dalit, rarely obtain justice. The Citizenship Amendment Act of 2019 explicitly excludes Muslims from its protections — a departure from the constitution’s non-discriminatory framework so stark that it prompted the largest nationwide protests since the Emergency. The National Register of Citizens, piloted in Assam, produced a bureaucratic machine capable of rendering citizens stateless. Its nationwide extension remains a declared policy goal.

The peril extends well beyond Muslims. Christians face church attacks in BJP-governed states with a frequency that has prompted formal diplomatic protests from Western governments. Dalits — constitutionally protected from caste discrimination — face violence that is increasingly framed, in RSS ideology, as a conflict between Hindus rather than as discrimination against a constitutional category. Adivasi land rights, protected by the Forest Rights Act, are under systematic pressure. When the state chooses which citizens to protect and which to expose, it ceases to be a republic and becomes something else.

“The constitution does not need to be formally amended to become a dead letter. It needs only to be consistently unenforced — and the deeper state has made unenforcement its operating principle.”

III. The Closing of the Epistemic Space

Democracies require an informed citizenry. An informed citizenry requires a free press, independent universities, and the uninhibited circulation of ideas. All three are contracting in India at a pace that should alarm anyone who has watched how other democracies have closed.

India has fallen to 159th place in the World Press Freedom Index. The consolidation of national television ownership among conglomerates with close ties to the ruling party has been extensively documented; prime-time news in India has, in the assessment of most media scholars, become an exercise in competitive government promotion rather than journalism. The Foreign Contribution Regulation Act has been used to cut off international funding to civil-society organisations that the government finds inconvenient, including Amnesty International India, which was effectively shut down in 2020.

Universities have not been spared. The appointment of vice-chancellors sympathetic to the government, the harassment of students and faculty who organise against it, the rewriting of history curricula to excise Mughal contributions and amplify a Hindu-nationalist narrative — these are not isolated incidents. They are a systematic project to control the terms in which the next generation understands its own country. A generation that is taught a falsified history cannot make accurate judgements about the present. That is, of course, the point.

The suppression of dissent through the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act — a law that permits detention without bail for years while charges are framed at leisure — has produced a chilling effect among journalists, academics, lawyers and activists that is difficult to quantify but pervasive in its impact. The most talented members of India’s civil society increasingly self-censor. Some emigrate. The institutional memory of how to resist is being lost.

IV. The Economy as a Tool of Exclusion

Economic policy in any democracy reflects political choices. In India, those choices have increasingly reflected the priorities of the Sangh Parivar rather than the constitutional commitment to an inclusive economy. Crony capitalism — the concentration of economic opportunity in the hands of conglomerates with close government ties — has accelerated dramatically over the past decade, as documented in the Hindenburg Research report on the Adani Group and in the pattern of public-sector contracts and regulatory approvals.

The consequences for the young are acute. India adds roughly 12 million people to its labour force each year. The economy, even in years of strong GDP growth, has not been generating formal employment at anything close to that rate. The Centre for Monitoring the Indian Economy estimates that over 90 percent of India’s workforce is in informal, insecure employment. Graduate unemployment is, by several assessments, at historic highs. The NEET and other competitive examinations — increasingly centralised and increasingly subject to allegations of paper leaks and manipulation — have become pressure points of extraordinary intensity for young Indians who see a narrow funnel between education and dignified work.

The economic exclusion of minorities adds a further dimension. Systematic discrimination in hiring, housing and credit — documented in field experiments by economists across multiple cities — means that the constitution’s formal guarantees of equality coexist with an informal economy that routinely denies opportunity on grounds of religion and caste. When the state does not enforce anti-discrimination law, the market does not correct for prejudice; it amplifies it.

The Economic Perils at a Glance •  Crony concentration — regulatory and contract capture by politically connected conglomerates crowds out competitive markets •  Youth unemployment — formal job creation has lagged population growth for a decade; graduate unemployment is at record highs •  Informalisation — over 90% of workers lack job security, social protection or enforceable labour rights •  Minority exclusion — documented hiring and housing discrimination compounds formal inequality with informal exclusion •  Examination manipulation — centralised tests (NEET, UPSC) subject to paper leaks undermine meritocracy and public trust •  Fiscal centralisation — GST revenue distribution and Finance Commission awards penalise better-governed southern states

 

V. The Permanence Problem: Why This Is Hard to Reverse

The deepest peril of the deeper state is not any single policy or act. It is the possibility of irreversibility. Democratic backsliding in Hungary, Turkey and Poland has been serious; in each case, however, there remains a plausible path to institutional recovery through electoral change. In India, the RSS’s social networks — the shakhas, the vigilante groups, the professional associations, the ideologically captured bureaucracy — would outlast any change of government. A Congress or INDIA bloc victory would not dissolve the cow-protection squad that patrols a Rajasthan highway, or compel the district police officer whose sympathies lie with the Sangh to enforce the law equally.

Delimitation, if completed, would cement northern-state dominance of the Lok Sabha for a generation. Constitutional amendments requiring a two-thirds majority — feasible if the BJP consolidates its position further — could entrench changes that no subsequent government could reverse by simple majority. The appointment of sympathetic justices to the Supreme Court is a decades-long project; a new government cannot simply remove them. India may be approaching a threshold beyond which course correction, though not impossible, would require a generation rather than an election cycle.

“The question is no longer whether India’s democracy is under stress. The question is whether it is approaching the point at which stress becomes permanent deformity.”

 

 

PART II   The Roadmap: What Citizens and Youth Must Do

 

 

THE HISTORY OF DEMOCRATIC RECOVERY is not a history of passive hope. It is a history of organised, patient, creative citizens who understood that institutions do not defend themselves. In India’s specific circumstances — where the deeper state has colonised the spaces between official institutions — the roadmap for citizens must be equally layered: social as well as political, local as well as national, long-term as well as urgent.

What follows is a framework in six registers. It does not promise quick victories. The deeper state was built over a century; it will not be undone in an election cycle. What it offers instead is a coherent sequence of action calibrated to what is actually possible — and what has worked, in various forms, in comparable situations elsewhere.

 

1. Build Counter-Networks: Society Against the Deeper State

The RSS’s strength is social, not merely political. Its shakha network, professional associations, and vigilante apparatus were built by showing up — in villages, in slums, in district courts, in university common rooms — over decades. The democratic response must match it in the same register. Not by imitating its methods, but by demonstrating that a pluralist, constitutional vision of India can also be lived, in daily social practice, at the neighbourhood level.

The precedents exist. The anti-Emergency movement of 1975-77 was sustained by a network of civil-society actors — lawyers, journalists, students, trade unionists — who maintained solidarity across ideological lines because the threat was seen as existential. The contemporary challenge is to rebuild that solidarity before the emergency is formally declared, rather than after.

For Citizens: Build the Counter-Network 1.  Join or create neighbourhood-level civic organisations that cut across caste and religious lines — resident welfare associations, reading circles, legal-aid cells — and make them explicitly pluralist in membership and purpose 2.  Support and participate in civil-society organisations working on constitutional rights: the People’s Union for Civil Liberties, the Association for Democratic Reforms, local bar associations with independence credentials 3.  Establish inter-faith solidarity networks — not as political theatre but as sustained social relationships that make communal violence politically and socially costly at the local level 4.  Organise professional guilds — doctors, teachers, engineers, accountants — around constitutional rather than ideological solidarity, creating spaces that the RSS does not control 5.  Document vigilante activity, discrimination and institutional failure at the local level and share it with journalists, legal-aid organisations and international human-rights bodies

 

2. The Youth Compact: From Grievance to Organisation

India’s young are the demographic fact that both the deeper state and its opponents must reckon with. There are approximately 600 million Indians under the age of 25. They are disproportionately unemployed, disproportionately educated beyond the jobs available to them, and disproportionately connected — to each other, to information, and to a global awareness of what democratic governance can deliver. They are, in short, the kindling of a political transformation. The question is whether that kindling ignites in the direction of authoritarian populism or constitutional democracy.

The precedent of Bangladesh is instructive. The student-led uprising that removed Sheikh Hasina in 2024 was not organised by established parties. It began as a protest against a particular quota policy, swelled into a broader rejection of cronyism and impunity, and succeeded because it generated its own leadership from within rather than borrowing it from discredited political establishments. India’s circumstances are different in scale and in the sophistication of the apparatus it faces. But the basic dynamic — youth grievance, economic frustration, and a critical mass of organisational energy — is present.

“Six hundred million Indians under twenty-five. Chronically underemployed, digitally connected, and in possession of a constitution that promised them something very different from what they have received. That is not a demographic footnote. It is a political fact of the first order.”

For Youth: From Anger to Architecture 1.  Organise around concrete, verifiable grievances — unemployment data, NEET paper leaks, university autonomy — rather than abstract political allegiances, making the movement harder to dismiss as partisan 2.  Build decentralised, leaderless (or multi-leader) structures that cannot be neutralised by the arrest or discrediting of a single figure — the weakness of the Hazare movement was its dependence on one face 3.  Use RTI (Right to Information) applications systematically: file requests at district, state and central level on job creation, contract awards, vigilante prosecutions and electoral-roll changes. Make the data public 4.  Create peer-to-peer legal-literacy networks that help young people understand their rights under Articles 14, 19, 21 and 32 — and how to invoke them 5.  Resist the temptation of social-media virality as a substitute for organisation. Viral moments dissipate; networks persist. Invest in the latter 6.  Engage with the judiciary proactively: public-interest litigation remains one of the few institutional levers not yet fully closed. Law students and young lawyers should treat PIL as a civic instrument, not merely a career option

 

3. Defend the Institutions That Remain

Not every institution has been captured. Pockets of independence survive — in some High Courts, in some state election commissions, in some universities, in some district courts, in some police forces in opposition-governed states. These pockets are fragile. They require active defence by citizens who use them, support them publicly, and make the cost of capturing them visible.

The High Courts have, in several instances, provided relief that the Supreme Court declined to grant. The Kerala and Tamil Nadu High Courts have been notably more assertive than the apex court on questions of state autonomy and civil liberties. Supporting the bar associations and judges who maintain independence — through public recognition, through filing cases, through defending lawyers who face harassment — is not romantic; it is pragmatic.

For Citizens: Defend Remaining Institutional Redoubts 1.  Use the Right to Information Act aggressively and help journalists and civil-society actors do the same — each RTI application that produces a result is a proof-of-concept that transparency remains possible 2.  Attend and publicise the proceedings of High Courts when they hear cases touching on civil liberties — judicial behaviour changes when it is observed and recorded 3.  Support opposition-governed state governments in using their constitutional prerogatives fully: the Governor’s obstruction of legislation, for example, is not legally absolute and can be challenged 4.  Engage with the Election Commission through the formal complaint mechanisms that remain open — and publicise non-responses to build a documented record of institutional failure 5.  Support independent media financially: subscribe, donate, amplify. A press that cannot pay its journalists cannot hold power to account

 

4. The Electoral Strategy: Imperfect Instruments Are Still Instruments

Jaffrelot’s caution about elections is well-founded: the playing field is tilted, the referees are compromised, and the rules of the game are being rewritten in real time. None of this means that elections are worthless. The 2024 Lok Sabha result demonstrated that the BJP can be checked — that a sufficiently unified and motivated opposition, competing on a field that is imperfect but not yet completely closed, can constrain the ruling party’s ambitions. The lesson is not that elections are futile but that they require a degree of opposition discipline and voter mobilisation that has historically proved elusive.

The specific challenge of delimitation is technical but critical. If citizens and civil-society organisations fail to contest the methodology, the data, and the legal parameters of delimitation now — before it is completed — the resulting map will be a fait accompli that constrains Indian democracy for a generation. Electoral strategy must therefore encompass not only voting but the meta-game of how votes are counted and constituencies drawn.

For Citizens: Engage the Electoral System Strategically 1.  Verify your name on the electoral roll and assist others in your community to do the same — roll deletions are the simplest and least visible form of disenfranchisement 2.  Train as polling-booth agents for opposition parties in constituencies where you live: the presence of independent witnesses at the counting table is the most direct check on local electoral fraud 3.  Engage with the delimitation process: the Delimitation Commission holds public hearings. Attend, submit objections, and organise collective responses from affected communities 4.  Support the INDIA bloc’s efforts at seat-sharing: the 2024 experience showed that opposition fragmentation is the ruling party’s most reliable ally 5.  Document and report Model Code of Conduct violations to the Election Commission — and, when the commission fails to act, to the press and to international election-monitoring bodies

 

5. The International Dimension: Making India’s Trajectory Costly

Democratic backsliding in large, strategically important countries is rarely reversed through domestic pressure alone. External pressure — from governments, international organisations, diaspora communities, and global civil society — has played a role in most cases of democratic recovery, from South Korea in the 1980s to Poland in 2024. India is uniquely difficult in this respect: its size, its democratic self-image, and its strategic importance to Western powers seeking a counterweight to China have insulated it from the level of international scrutiny that smaller or less strategically valuable backsliders have faced.

That insulation is not, however, complete. India’s extensive diaspora in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia includes a significant cohort of constitutionalists who can bring organised pressure to bear on their host governments. The treatment of minorities in India is a legitimate subject of concern for international human-rights bodies, including the UN Human Rights Council. The targeting of foreign-funded civil-society organisations creates legal obligations in the countries whose citizens have contributed those funds. These levers are underused.

For the Diaspora and Global Citizens: The International Lever 1.  Engage parliamentarians and legislators in host countries: the UK Parliament, the US Congress and the European Parliament have mechanisms for raising human-rights concerns about foreign governments 2.  Support international human-rights organisations — Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the International Commission of Jurists — in their India-focused work 3.  Use shareholder activism to raise questions about the governance and social practices of Indian conglomerates listed on international exchanges 4.  Build academic and journalistic networks that maintain rigorous, evidence-based documentation of India’s institutional changes, making the factual record available to policymakers 5.  Resist the temptation of diaspora nationalism that conflates criticism of a government with criticism of a country

 

6. The Long Game: Culture, Curriculum and the Battle for India’s Self-Understanding

The RSS has understood for a century what democratic politicians have rarely grasped: that political power follows cultural power. Control the terms in which a generation understands its history, its identity and its obligations, and you control the emotional infrastructure of its politics. The rewriting of school curricula, the production of films and television that embed a Hindu-nationalist narrative, the capture of cultural institutions from the Sahitya Akademi to the Indian Council of Historical Research — these are not sideshows. They are the core of the project.

The democratic response must engage at the same level. This does not mean producing ideological counter-propaganda. It means insisting on historical accuracy, celebrating India’s plural inheritances — Mughal architecture, Sufi music, Dravidian philosophy, Buddhist scholarship, Sikh egalitarianism, Dalit intellectual traditions — as constituents of a shared civilisation rather than threats to it. It means supporting writers, filmmakers, musicians and artists who work in the tradition of India’s constitutional pluralism. And it means doing so not only in English — the language of the metropolitan elite — but in Hindi, Tamil, Bengali, Marathi, Telugu and Kannada, where the cultural battle is actually being fought.

“The RSS built its power not by winning elections but by winning the argument about what India is. The constitutional response must contest that argument at the same depth — in every language, in every district, in every generation.”

For Citizens and Youth: The Cultural and Educational Long Game 1.  Support and circulate historically accurate, constitutionally grounded educational content in regional languages — online platforms make distribution possible at a scale that was inconceivable a generation ago 2.  Engage with local history: document the plural, composite history of your district, town or neighbourhood and make it publicly available as a counterweight to the homogenised national narrative 3.  Support independent publishing, film and theatre that works in the constitutional-pluralist tradition — financially, through attendance, and through amplification 4.  Challenge curriculum changes through parent-teacher associations, school boards and state education departments — the rewriting of textbooks is a policy decision that can be contested through democratic means 5.  Create intergenerational cultural transmission: older Indians who lived through the Emergency, or who remember a more plural public culture, carry knowledge that the young urgently need. Facilitate those conversations deliberately 6.  Reclaim public space: festivals, cultural events and civic gatherings that bring together Indians across caste, religious and linguistic lines are not trivial. They are demonstrations that the RSS’s vision of India is not the only one on offer

 

The Stakes: What Kind of Country

India in 2026 is at a fork in the road that is not, in truth, a fork. One path is clearly marked, clearly resourced, and has been under construction for a century. It leads toward a Hindu Rashtra — not a formal theocracy, necessarily, but a state in which Muslim, Christian, Dalit and Adivasi citizens are permanent subordinates, in which the federal compact has been replaced by a centrally administered Hindu nation-state, and in which the constitution survives as ceremonial text while its substance evaporates.

The other path is not marked at all. It has to be built, by citizens who decide that the constitution’s promises are worth defending — not because India has always lived up to them, but because a country that abandons them formally is a country that abandons the possibility of ever living up to them. That is the threshold that India’s deeper state is approaching.

The youth of India did not create this situation. But they will live with its consequences longer than anyone else. The generation that is today between the ages of 18 and 35 will be 40 and 55 when the full consequences of delimitation, of institutional capture, of constitutional amendment, are felt. They will inherit either a republic that their grandparents built and their parents allowed to be hollowed out — or one that they chose, at a moment of genuine peril, to defend.

History does not grade on effort. It records outcomes. The outcome in India is not yet determined. The deeper state is formidable, patient, and ideologically coherent. So, in a different register, is India’s constitutional inheritance. The question — the only question that matters now — is which one India’s citizens decide to act on.

 

 

This article is the second in a series on India’s democratic transformation, drawing on the scholarship of Christophe Jaffrelot (Sciences Po / King’s College London) and on an extended interview conducted by Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay for Conversations with Nilanjan. The views on institutional failure expressed herein are based on documented scholarly and journalistic sources. The recommendations reflect the editors’ independent assessment of democratic best practice.