This article argues that the refugee, imagined by the 1951 Convention as a temporary condition awaiting return, integration, or resettlement, has become a permanent legal category sustained by the mechanisms once designed to end it. Drawing on current displacement figures, the collapse of resettlement and humanitarian funding, and the persistence of protracted refugee situations, the article traces how durable solutions have been repurposed as instruments of deferral. It examines the legal silence surrounding climate displacement and the case of India, a state that hosts refugees while denying the category enforceable content, showing that permanence defines the refugee condition itself.



The Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, signed at Geneva in 1951, was conceived by its framers as an instrument of closure rather than continuity, a document meant to resolve the displacement of a particular generation of Europeans rather than to inaugurate a permanent architecture of exile, and it is this assumption of temporariness that the subsequent seventy-five years of state practice have comprehensively dismantled. The Convention defines the refugee through a grounded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, and it presumes that such fear will eventually be resolved through one of three durable outcomes: voluntary return to a country made safe again, integration into the society of first asylum, or resettlement in a third country willing to grant permanent membership. What the architecture of 1951 could not anticipate, and what the present moment makes impossible to ignore, is that the condition it names has ceased to function as an exception awaiting correction and has instead become a structural feature of the international order itself, so that the refugee today exists less as a person moving through a temporary status toward eventual resolution and more as a permanent legal category that the world has learned to administer rather than to end.

The scale of the present crisis offers the first and most immediate evidence for this claim. By the close of 2025, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees recorded 41.6 million refugees and 9 million asylum seekers awaiting a decision on their claims, alongside 68.7 million people internally displaced by conflict and roughly 4.5 million people rendered stateless and denied the most basic entitlements of nationality. Taken together, these figures amount to 117.8 million forcibly displaced people worldwide, a number so vast that it now accounts for one in every seventy people on the planet. Such figures would be alarming enough if they described a crisis in the process of resolution, yet what the annual pattern of the last decade reveals is a population that grows even as individual crises appear to close, since new emergencies consistently outpace the capacity of existing mechanisms to resolve older ones, and the aggregate condition of displacement therefore compounds across time. Even the modest four per cent decline recorded in 2025, celebrated by some observers as the first sign of progress in a decade, was almost immediately overtaken by fresh waves of flight from Lebanon and Iran, a reminder that any single year of improvement in the global tally says little about whether the underlying machinery of displacement has been altered in any lasting way.

The concept most revealing of this shift toward permanence is one that UNHCR itself was forced to coin, the protracted refugee situation, officially defined as any population of at least twenty-five thousand refugees from a single country of origin who have resided in one country of asylum for five consecutive years or more without securing a durable resolution. That an international agency devoted to protection should need a technical category for displacement lasting half a decade or longer is itself a quiet admission that the temporary status envisioned in 1951 has become, in practice, indistinguishable from a permanent one, and Syria supplies the starkest illustration available today, since even as 1.3 million Syrians returned home following the fall of the Assad government in 2025, the total refugee population from that country still stood at 4.9 million at year’s end, trapped in a condition of exile that already spans more than a decade and shows no clear terminus.

If the scale of displacement demonstrates permanence as a demographic fact, the collapse of the three durable solutions demonstrates permanence as a structural design. Resettlement, the pathway by which the most vulnerable refugees gain formal membership in a third state, fell from 116,000 in 2024 to just 37,000 in 2025, a contraction that occurred just because the wealthiest states capable of receiving refugees chose retrenchment over expansion. The International Rescue Committee’s report marking the Convention’s seventy fifth anniversary found that global humanitarian funding fell by more than 31 billion dollars in a single year while resettlement commitments dropped by more than half, and scholars studying this pattern have described the emerging regime not as a retreat from the Convention, but as its quiet transformation into what one can call, an “architecture of containment” (see Davutoglu, P. (2025). The Architecture of Containment: Refugee Protection in a Postliberal Order. 

(S1), S180–S193. doi:10.1017/S0020818325101100), a system through which states recalibrate their obligations without formally renouncing them, preserving the appearance of compliance through border externalization, procedural delay and the delegation of protection duties to poorer third countries. Even the record wave of returns recorded in 2025, the second-highest annual figure in sixty years, has been read by both UNHCR and the IRC as its clearest symptom of failure, since so many of these returns proceed from engineered desperation rather than restored safety, and a return achieved through the collapse of camp funding or the closure of legal pathways cannot honestly be called voluntary. The refugee, in this light, becomes permanent because the endpoints they offer have themselves become instruments of pressure rather than genuine resolution.

The permanence of the category becomes still more apparent when one considers the forms of displacement that fall entirely outside its boundaries. Climate change has already displaced more people than conflict and violence combined since 2008, and the projections for upcoming decades run into the hundreds of millions, yet no multilateral treaty and no domestic legal system currently recognizes a person fleeing drought, flood, or rising seas as a refugee in the legal sense. The 1951 definition, anchored as it is in persecution by a human agent, offers no vocabulary for harm inflicted by atmospheric systems, and the phrase climate refugee, however common in journalism and advocacy, describes no status that any court or asylum authority is bound to honour. This gap exposes the deeper truth that the legal category of refugee was fixed at a single historical moment and has proven remarkably resistant to expansion ever since, so that the world’s capacity to name new forms of forced flight has grown while its capacity to protect them has remained frozen since 1951.

A regional case sharpens this argument further and brings it closer to home. India hosts one of the largest refugee populations in South Asia, drawing Tibetans, Sri Lankan Tamils, Chakmas, Afghans, and Rohingya across decades of regional upheaval, yet India remains neither a signatory to the 1951 Convention nor possessing any domestic refugee law, choosing instead to manage each community through ad hoc executive discretion. The consequences of this arrangement became starkly visible in 2025, when dozens of Rohingya refugees registered with UNHCR were reportedly detained in Delhi, stripped of their identification documents, and forcibly returned to Myanmar by sea, an act that the Supreme Court’s own jurisprudence had earlier permitted on grounds that India’s non-signatory status released it from any binding duty of non-refoulement. What this makes visible is that a state can host refugees indefinitely while denying the category any enforceable legal content, producing a form of permanence that has nothing to do with protection and everything to do with administrative convenience, since the refugee remains permanently present within Indian territory while remaining permanently outside the reach of any law designed to secure their safety.

Taken together, these strands point toward a disturbing conclusion. The refugee has become a permanent legal category as it has built lasting structures capable of managing it indefinitely, converting what the drafters of 1951 imagined as a temporary exception into a durable feature of how the modern state system distributes protection and denies it in equal measure. Every step taken in the direction to end the condition of exile, from resettlement quotas to voluntary return programs to the promise of eventual integration, has instead been repurposed as an instrument to prolong that condition on sustainable terms for the states that host it. The permanence of the refugee, then, lies in the accumulation of practices, protracted situations, contained borders, frozen definitions, and selective non-signatories, through which the exception has been allowed to become the rule. The refugee endures as a permanent legal category because the world has found it more manageable to sustain the condition of limbo than to resolve it, and until this changes, the temporary status invented in Geneva in 1951 will continue to describe a permanence its own framers never intended, and the refugee will remain, as a matter of law and of lived experience alike, a fixture of the world rather than a passing disruption to it.

Joel K. Albert is pursuing his Master’s in English from Jamia Millia Islamia

The Refugee as a Permanent Legal Category

Contemporary fiction confronts artificial intelligence on two fronts that rarely get read together. Novels such as Klara and the Sun and Machines Like Me use artificial minds to question human specialness, staging that anxiety from a position of complete authorial safety. At the same moment, the publishing industry itself has fallen under suspicion, as episodes from the Clarkesworld submissions flood through the Shy Girl and Minotaur controversies to the Cairo book fair incident show authorship being questioned. This article argues that these two crises, the thematic and the material, have become entangled and can no longer be treated as separate concerns.

Contemporary fiction now meets artificial intelligence on two fronts, and the coincidence makes this present moment distinct from any earlier encounter between literature and technology. On the one hand, the novel has taken artificial intelligence as its subject, writing about androids and companions and simulated minds that ask the reader to reconsider what separates a person from a program. On the other hand, the novel has begun to suspect artificial intelligence as its author, so that the very anxieties a book like 

 stages within its plot are now being staged, in the offices of publishers and the inboxes of literary magazines. It is this doubling, the thematic and the material colliding in the same decade, that gives the question of AI and authorship its contemporariness and criticism.

The recent wave of literary fiction that takes artificial minds as its central figures, of which Kazuo Ishiguro’s 

 are the most widely discussed instances, tends to arrive at a broadly consistent set of concerns. Both novels place an artificial being inside a domestic world and ask what happens to human relationships when a manufactured consciousness is admitted into their midst as something closer to kin than to appliance. The general critical consensus around such fiction, running from reviews of Ishiguro’s novel through to broader discussions of the posthuman turn in contemporary letters, holds that these books are rarely interested in artificial intelligence as a technical problem at all. They use the artificial mind as a device for interrogating human specialness, for asking whether love, grief, or moral standing depend on some essence that only a human body can hold, or whether they are simply patterns of behaviour that a sufficiently attentive machine could learn to reproduce. Klara, watching and adoring from the shop window and then from inside a family she serves, becomes a kind of mirror held up to human selfishness and human tenderness in equal measure, and the discomfort her narration produces has less to do with her circuitry than with what her devotion exposes about the people she serves. McEwan’s android, arriving in a rewritten twentieth century, performs a similar function from a different angle, using the machine’s growing moral seriousness to embarrass the moral compromises of the humans around him. In both cases, authorship remains untroubled in the narrow sense, since a human novelist unmistakably wrote every sentence, and the anxiety these books stage belongs entirely to their characters and their readers rather than to the fact of their own composition.

This relation between the novel and its author is precisely what has come under strain elsewhere in the same period, and it is worth being specific about how recent and how rapid this strain has been. In February 2023, the science fiction magazine 

, which had built a decades-long reputation for openness to unsolicited submissions, was forced to close its submission portal entirely after being overwhelmed by stories generated by large language models, with its editor, Neil Clarke, reporting that hundreds of machine-written entries had arrived within weeks, driven less by any genuine literary ambition than by online promises of easy income. The episode was treated at the time as an aberration at the margins of the industry, confined to short fiction and to opportunists rather than to serious novelists, but the years since have shown that the disturbance did not stay at the margins. In March 2026, 

 withdrew its edition of the horror novel 

 by Mia Ballard after readers and reviewers raised sustained doubts about how much of the text had been generated by artificial intelligence rather than written by its credited author, a controversy significant enough to draw coverage from the New York Times and to leave the publishing industry, without agreed guardrails for distinguishing legitimate authorship from machine assistance. Another similar incident that took place recently, where 

imprint Minotaur abandoned a contract worth over two million dollars for an unpublished debut (

) after similar questions were raised about its author, even as that author insisted the accusations were unfounded, which suggests that suspicion alone, whether proven or not, has become sufficient to unmake a literary career. At the Cairo International Book Fair earlier this year, meanwhile, several newly published Arabic novels were found to contain visible fragments of chatbot dialogue, prompts, and responses about plot direction left uncut inside the printed text, a lapse that critics read less as an isolated editorial failure than as evidence of how casually generative tools have already entered the workflow of contemporary fiction across markets and languages.

What these events across time and place share, and what separates them from the thematic fiction discussed above, is that they relocate the crisis from the page to the signature. A novel like 

 can ask whether an artificial being might deserve love or moral consideration without ever threatening the reader’s confidence that Ishiguro himself composed the sentence in which the question is asked. 

 controversy and cases like it threaten exactly that confidence, since the doubt no longer concerns what a character might be but concerns who, or what, actually produced the words the reader is holding. Legal and institutional responses have begun, unevenly, to catch up with this shift. The United States Copyright Office has repeatedly ruled that text generated by artificial intelligence without meaningful human creative input cannot be copyrighted, while text that reflects substantial human authorship remains protected to the extent of that human contribution, a distinction that sounds precise in principle and proves extraordinarily difficult to apply to a manuscript that has passed back and forth between a human writer and a language model across many drafts. Retailers, including Amazon, now require disclosure of AI assistance at the point of publication, a move that acknowledges the scale of the problem even as it does little to resolve the deeper question of what, exactly, counts as a book’s true author when drafting, revision, and even prose style can now be delegated in part to a machine.

The tension between these two fronts is not accidental, and reading them together clarifies something that neither can show on its own. The thematic novel dramatises artificial intelligence as an object of sympathy or suspicion precisely because its authorship is never in doubt, which allows the reader to sit with hard questions about consciousness and personhood from a position of safety. The authorship crisis in the publishing industry withdraws exactly that safety, since it asks the reader to wonder whether the very voice they are trusting to explore such questions might itself be partly manufactured. A novel that asks whether an artificial mind can genuinely feel grief becomes a strange and slightly vertiginous object when the reader can no longer be certain that a human mind stands entirely behind the sentence doing the asking. Contemporary fiction has therefore arrived at a moment in which its oldest subject, the nature of the human, has become entangled with its oldest guarantee, the presence of a human author, and the two can no longer be treated as separate concerns. Criticism that continues to read novels like 

 purely as thought experiments about artificial others, without acknowledging that the conditions of literary production around such novels are undergoing the very crisis those novels imagine from a safe fictional distance, will increasingly miss half the story. The machine has entered the novel as a character, and it has entered the writing of the novel as a possibility, and contemporary fiction will be defined for some years to come by how honestly it holds both facts in view at once.

 is pursuing his Master’s in English from Jamia Millia Islamia.


Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this Publication are those of the author. They do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of The Jamia Review or its members.

The Crisis of Authorship in Contemporary Fiction

Plato’s Republic insists that only minds trained rigorously in dialectic and practised at interrogating their own convictions have earned the right to hold power over others. The philosopher king rules because he has learned to think about thinking and has an unquenched thirst for knowledge and wisdom. India’s universities have suffered the exact opposite of this vision. The state has not cultivated future guardians through patient thought and value; it has instead moved to silence the teachers, students, historians and philosophers whose training most resembles the discipline Plato demanded of rulers, keeping the machinery of authority while discarding the thinking meant to justify it.

The anxiety in learning that the Indian university now stands where it stood during the darkest constitutional interval of the republic’s history hints at one of the most substantial losses for Indian academia. The Academic Freedom Index, compiled annually by the V-Dem Institute in collaboration with the Scholars at Risk Network, has placed India in 2026 among the bottom fifth of 179 countries and territories surveyed, with its composite score having fallen from near 0.65 in 2012 to a mere 0.14 today. Researchers describe this as the lowest recorded level of academic freedom in India since the index began in 1900, a level that falls even below the Emergency years of 1975 to 1977, when censorship was declared, and constitutional rights were formally suspended. That the university should now be freer on paper and less free in practice than it was under an acknowledged authoritarian government is the powerful argument that one should consider.

The index measures five things: the freedom to research and teach, the freedom of academic exchange and dissemination, institutional autonomy, campus integrity, and the freedom of academic and cultural expression, and every one of these five indicators has fallen since 2015. Campus integrity, which analyses whether universities remain free of politically motivated surveillance and security intrusion, has fallen furthest of all. The numbers describe, in aggregate, the record of the last decade, and it is worth taking a close look at the statistics to get to the bottom of things.

Starting with the faculty, since it is the faculty who are meant to embody the university’s claim to independent thought. The Indian Academic Freedom Network has documented sixty-two teachers penalised between January 2014 and April 2026 for opinions expressed in public or in the classroom, ten of them terminated outright, sixteen suspended, twelve forced into resignation, and twenty-one arrested, with several cases still before the courts (Najeeb, 2026). A professor at the Central University of Kerala was suspended in 2021 for remarks critical of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and made to sign a letter of regret before he was reinstated. A professor at Ashoka University was arrested in 2025 for comments made amid the government’s messaging around Operation Sindoor, his offence being criticism of mob violence directed at Kashmiris. At Jamia Millia Islamia, a professor was suspended in December 2025 for the crime of setting an optional examination question on atrocities committed against Muslims in India, which the Jawaharlal Nehru University Teachers’ Association condemned as an unacceptable policing of academic thought carried out under a disciplinary order that could not even specify what negligence had occurred. Twenty-eight academics currently face charges under sedition provisions or the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act. All of this reads as a method, applied with consistency across institutions, that any teacher who has watched a colleague suspended for a sentence now knows, without doubt, which sentences are safe to write on an examination paper and which are not.

The students have fared no better, and their treatment matters because it demonstrates that the apparatus of control does not stop at the lectern. In February of 2025, seventeen students at Jamia Millia Islamia were detained and suspended for protesting without ‘permission’, a word that signals that dissent on campus now requires clearance from the very authority it might be directed against. Seven of those students sought relief from the Delhi High Court and had their suspensions stayed, a small mercy that depended on judicial intervention rather than institutional restraint. At Banaras Hindu University, fourteen students were suspended in October, stripped of hostel accommodation and library access, for having protested a year earlier over the alleged gangrape of a fellow student at IIT BHU, and by doing so having disturbed the academic ambience of the campus. When a university’s central complaint against its own students is that they disturbed an ambience, the university has told you plainly what it values above the grievance the students were raising.

A subtler mechanism operates alongside outright suspension, and it is the quiet cancellation of the speech a university never gets the chance to hear. In January of 2026 a lecture on the revolutionary Odia poet Bhima Bhoi, to be delivered by the journalist and poet Kedar Mishra under Banaras Hindu University’s Kabi Samrat Upendra Bhanja Odia Chair, was cancelled after Mishra had already arrived on campus as a guest, an act the opposition Biju Janata Dal alleged was carried out under pressure from the Odisha government acting in coordination with Bharatiya Janata Party leaders in Uttar Pradesh, where the university sits. A speaker at Mumbai University was uninvited the day before a scheduled talk, the cancellation attributed to a senior official uneasy about the speaker’s open criticism of the government. At the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, an investigation was opened into a seminar on caste and race after some faculty objected that a technical institute had no business hosting the question at all. Each of these episodes is small enough to be forgotten within a news cycle, and that is precisely their function, since a pattern of small closures accumulates into a campus culture where organisers begin pre-emptively narrowing who and what they invite, long before any government official needs to make a phone call.

If the faculty and the students represent the present tense of this decline, the curriculum represents its attempt to rewrite the past tense as well. Since 2022, the National Council of Educational Research and Training has revised textbooks for classes six through twelve under the government’s National Education Policy, trimming or removing substantial material on the Delhi Sultanate and the Mughal emperors, and softening references to the Gujarat riots of 2002 and the demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya. NCERT’s director has defended these changes as routine rationalisation undertaken by subject experts to reduce the burden on students, insisting there has been no attempt at what critics call saffronisation and no imposition from above. Over two hundred historians from Indian and international universities signed a joint statement rejecting that defence, arguing that the selective removal of inconvenient chapters amounts to a negation of history rather than its simplification, and that a syllabus which quietly drops the Mughals while retaining the Bhakti and Sufi movements has made a choice about which past the republic’s children are permitted to inherit. A curriculum is presented as a fact children are given no reason to question, which is what makes it the most durable instrument of ideological control.

The final front is institutional rather than individual, and it concerns who gets to choose the people who run these universities in the first place. The University Grants Commission’s 2025 draft regulations propose that the Chancellor, ordinarily the state Governor and therefore a political appointee of the centre, should constitute the search committee for Vice Chancellor appointments, a role previously distributed more broadly across university bodies. The regulations further open the Vice Chancellorship itself to professionals from industry or public administration with no academic background at all. Kerala’s Chief Minister has called this a means of installing ideological loyalists under the cover of merit reform. Opposition-ruled states including Tamil Nadu and West Bengal have argued the regulations violate the federal structure of a Constitution that places education on the Concurrent List precisely so that no single authority could capture it entirely. Whatever the regulations’ stated purpose, their practical effect is to move the final word on who leads a university away from the university and its faculty and toward the political executive that appoints its Governors, which is the central government of the day. The result is clear: when leadership answers to the state, the university cannot protect the teacher whose lecture displeases it or the student whose protest embarrasses it. Institutional autonomy, the index’s own framework insists, is the precondition on which every other freedom depends.

None of this occurs in isolation from the world, and it would be a mistake to treat India’s decline as a peculiarity of the postcolonial state rather than an instance of a wider authoritarian pattern. Nitasha Kaul, a British Indian academic at the University of Westminster, was denied entry to India ahead of a conference she had been invited to address. The Delhi University historian Apoorvanand Jha was refused permission to travel abroad for a seminar after he declined to have his paper vetted by the Ministry of Education, a denial he called, with evident irony, a case of the university surrendering its own autonomy willingly. The V-Dem researchers who compile the index have been careful to note that the United States too has seen a marked decline in academic freedom since 2019, driven by political polarisation rather than a single dominant party, which should complicate any comfortable assumption that this is a disease of fragile democracies alone. Scholars at Risk’s own Free to Think report for 2025 places India among sixteen countries and territories it identifies as showing concerning developments, and states plainly that the ruling party has acted to extend its authority over the higher education system in ways that undermine university autonomy while imposing what the report calls a Hindu nationalist agenda over campuses. Two independent networks, one quantitative and one built from case documentation, arrive at the same conclusion from different methods. What distinguishes India’s case is not that it is unique but that its decline has been so steep and so sustained across a full decade that it is no longer possible to sit idle and believe that we are on the right track.

Although we have had enough evidence to not consider this serious downfall in academic standards as arising from natural or unforeseen causes, commentators sympathetic to the government have pointed out that Indian campuses remain visibly contentious, filled with protest and argument and student politics of every ideological stripe, and have asked how a system so alive with dissent can be called repressed in the same breath as war-torn states or single-party regimes where no dissent is heard at all. They note too that enrolment in Indian higher education has expanded substantially over the past decade, which is true and worth acknowledging. But this objection mistakes the core of the argument. A campus can host a thousand protests and still be repressive if the outcome of those protests is suspension, arrest, or the loss of a hostel room, because what the index measures is not whether dissent occurs but what happens to the people who voice it afterwards.

We now see that every mechanism discussed above traces back to the same institutional lineage. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh has supplied the ideological framework, and the Bharatiya Janata Party has spent a decade translating it into policy, its student wing, Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad providing the campus muscle that disrupts lectures and files complaints against dissenting faculty, its intellectual affiliates supplying the language of saffronisation that NCERT’s revisions now enact through curriculum rather than decree. The correlation with BJP’s coming into power and the steady downward trajectory of academic freedom from around 2014 is the visible signature of an organisation that has always understood the university as a battlefield for the national imagination it wishes to project, and that has used a decade in government to move from criticising that imagination’s custodians to formally disciplining them, replacing the slow persuasion the Sangh once relied upon with the harder instruments of suspension, arrest, and appointment that state power now makes available to it. (May be removed if deemed unfit by the editors)

What emerges from faculty suspensions, student detentions, cancelled lectures, rewritten textbooks and captured Vice Chancellorships depicts how the very structure of a university is re-moulded to answer to the state rather than to the truth. An index score of 0.14 is a serious wake-up call and a diagnosis of an institution that has forgotten, or been made to forget, that its only legitimate authority was ever the authority of the argument that could withstand scrutiny, and a republic that allows its lecture halls to forget this should expect the amnesia to spread and destroy, since a nation rarely protects, when it has already stopped protecting in its universities.

Najeeb, H. (2026, April 29). Forced resignations, suspensions, threats, imprisonment: India’s shrinking academic freedom. 

https://thewire.in/rights/forced-resignations-suspensions-threats-imprisonment-indias-shrinking-academic-freedom

Academic Freedom Index. Academic Freedom Index Update 2026. Friedrich Alexander Universitat Erlangen Nurnberg and V Dem Institute, 2026, 

academic-freedom-index.net/research/Academic_Freedom_Index_Update_2026.pdf

“Delhi HC Stays Suspension of Protesting Jamia Students, Calls University Action ‘Worrisome’.” The Wire, 5 Mar. 2025, 

thewire.in/rights/delhi-hc-stays-suspension-of-protesting-jamia-students-calls-university-action-worrisome

“14 BHU Students Suspended for ‘Disturbing Academic Ambience’ During 2023 Protests over IIT BHU Gangrape Case.” ThePrint, 3 Mar. 2025, 

theprint.in/india/14-bhu-students-suspended-for-disturbing-academic-ambience-during-2023-protests-over-gangrape-case/2295452/

“Naseeruddin Shah ‘Disinvited at the Last Moment’ From Mumbai University Event.” The Quint, 5 Feb. 2026, 

thequint.com/news/breaking-news/naseeruddin-shah-disinvited-mumbai-university-event

“Why Discussing Caste Is a Crime: Faculty, Scholars Shocked by IIT Delhi Probe on Conference.” ThePrint, 27 Jan. 2026, 

theprint.in/india/why-discussing-caste-is-a-crime-faculty-scholars-shocked-by-iit-delhi-probe-on-conference/2837863/

Kumar, Abhijeet. “No Delhi Sultanate, Mughals in Books: A Look at Past NCERT Syllabus Changes.” Business Standard, 28 Apr. 2025, 

business-standard.com/india-news/ncert-revises-class-7-history-syllabus-no-mughals-or-delhi-sultans-cbse-125042801049_1.html

“‘Sanitised History’: Historians from Indian, Foreign Universities on NCERT Textbook Revision.” Careers360, 8 Apr. 2023, 

news.careers360.com/ncert-textbook-revision-class-12-history-historians-indian-du-jnu-foreign-universities-raise-concerns

“Explained: Why TN, Kerala and Karnataka Are Against the UGC Draft Regulations.” The News Minute, 24 Jan. 2025, 

thenewsminute.com/news/explained-why-tn-kerala-and-karnataka-are-against-the-ugc-draft-regulations

“UGC’s New Draft Framework for Vice Chancellors Faces Southern Heat.” The South First, 10 Jan. 2025, 

thesouthfirst.com/kerala/ugcs-new-draft-framework-for-vice-chancellors-faces-southern-heat/

“‘Immigration Officials Spoke of Orders From Delhi’: Academic Deported Ahead of Karnataka Govt Event.” The Wire, 26 Feb. 2024, 

thewire.in/rights/nitasha-kaul-kashmiri-academic-uk-deported-denied-entry-karnatak

Scholars at Risk. Free to Think 2025. Scholars at Risk Academic Freedom Monitoring Project, Sept. 2025, 

scholarsatrisk.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/SAR_F2T2025_R5.pdf

“India’s Academic Freedom Lowest Since 1900 — Worse Than During the Emergency.” ThePrint, Aug. 2026, 

theprint.in/feature/indias-academic-freedom-lowest-since-1900-worse-than-during-the-emergency/3005276/

Sethy, Itishree. “BJD Slams Odisha Govt Over Cancellation of Kedar Mishra’s Lecture.” Pragativadi, 20 Jan. 2026, 

pragativadi.com/bjd-slams-odisha-govt-over-cancellation-of-kedar-mishras-lecture/

DATA TABLES from “India Academic Freedom Network”. 

https://www.indiaacademicfreedom.net/resources

. Six tables documenting the decline of academic freedom in India, compiled from research and inputs by Nandini Sundar (2018, 2020), Sumit Kumar and Rajat Sonkar (2020), Ananya Redkar (2021), Mohona Chaudhuri, Madiha Iqbal, and Uttam Kumar (2022), Ateen Das, Saniya Rizwan, and Arul Singh (2023), Ashwin Thomas, Tulip Bannerjee, Samra Iqbal, and Vedant Nagrani (2024), and Lavanya Senthil and Vedant Nagrani (2025 onward). First published on The Wire. Individual tables: Censorship of Books and Interference with University Syllabi. Denial of Permission and Disruption of Seminars, Meetings, and Events on Campus. Suspension and Termination of Faculty and Students. Arrests of and Criminal Charges Against Faculty or Students. Denial of Research Visas and Restrictions on Academic Exchanges. Physical Attacks on Students and Faculty.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this Publication are those of the author. They do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of The Jamia Review or its members.

The University Under Siege

India’s artificial intelligence boom is celebrated as a significant leap toward a silicon-built future, yet its digital economy rests upon a material foundation excavated from the commons. Beneath the narrative of technological progress lies a story of extraction where forests are cleared, aquifers contaminated, and settlements demolished, selectively displacing marginalized Dalit and coastal communities for automated server halls. From Visakhapatnam to Mumbai, state machinery and corporate power combine to orchestrate this dispossession, offering minimal permanent employment in return. Without radical structural corrections, artificial intelligence will merely become the latest vehicle for an old, unequal enclosure.

The arrival of artificial intelligence in India has been narrated almost entirely as a story of ascent, a leap from agrarian dependency into a future built on silicon and electricity. Data centre capacity has nearly tripled within five years, climbing from roughly five hundred and twenty megawatts in 2020 toward nearly one and a half gigawatts by the middle of 2025, with industry forecasts placing eventual capacity somewhere between four and a half and six and a half gigawatts by the end of the decade. Yet beneath this narrative of technological progress lies an older and more familiar pattern, one in which forests are cut down, water tables are drained, public land is enclosed, and settlements built by the poor are erased so that server halls might rise in their place. The digital economy, for all its claims to immateriality, rests upon a material foundation excavated from the commons that working people and marginalized communities have long depended upon for survival.


Consider what is unfolding in Visakhapatnam, where the state government has cleared land for a data hub backed by Google’s subsidiary Raiden Infotech, together with the Adani Group. Environmental groups have determined that ninety percent of the chosen site in Tarluwada lies within the notified Pedda Chukka Konda Reserve Forest, a designation that under Indian law should have triggered a far stricter appraisal process than the one the state’s pollution control authority ultimately granted. Activists allege that officials were pressured into declaring that no forest existed on the land at all, a claim contradicted by survey records and now contested before the central ministry. The irony deepens when one considers that roughly two hundred acres of this same land were originally granted to landless Dalit families during a redistribution programme meant to redress centuries of caste-based exclusion from land ownership. Although the state eventually raised its compensation offer to fifty lakh rupees per acre, many families have refused to surrender plots that represent the only inheritance their community has ever been permitted to hold, and they point out that land owned by dominant castes nearby has remained untouched by the same acquisition machinery. Hundreds of acres belonging to a local temple have likewise been transferred to private developers even as thousands of low-income families in the surrounding region continue to wait for the regularization of their own modest homes. When a short documentary detailing this displacement reached more than two million viewers online, the government issued a legal notice under the Information Technology Act, and Meta duly blocked the video within India, a sequence of events that reveals how thoroughly digital infrastructure and digital censorship have become intertwined.


A parallel story has unfolded in Mumbai, where six hundred and fifty households in Jai Bhim Nagar, a settlement of mostly Dalit families established in the late 1980s, were demolished in June 2024 at the very onset of the monsoon, clearing land reserved for redevelopment amid the expanding commercial holdings of the Hiranandani Group, whose Yotta subsidiary operates among the largest data centre parks in the country. A special investigation team appointed by the Bombay High Court later found that the order invoked to justify the demolition possessed no legal standing whatsoever and that the action directly violated a state resolution prohibiting evictions during the rains. The families remain in makeshift shelters along the roadside while legal proceedings continue at a pace far slower than the bulldozers that displaced them. To keep the city’s expanding server farms supplied with power, Maharashtra reversed earlier plans to retire ageing coal plants operated by the Tata Group and Adani Power in Trombay and Mahul, granting them long extensions explicitly justified by rising digital demand. Leaked figures indicate that Amazon’s colocation facilities in Mumbai alone consumed over six hundred and twenty-four thousand megawatt hours of electricity in a single year, a quantity equivalent to the annual needs of four hundred thousand households. The cost of this arrangement falls heaviest on Dahanu, a coastal town where particulate pollution from a coal plant supplying Mumbai has measured more than ten times the national air quality standard, withering chikoo orchards through a fungal blight carried on drifting fly ash and blackening the dried fish that local communities have sold for generations.


In Telangana, the pattern repeats itself through water rather than air. Microsoft’s data centre near Mekaguda village sits beside Tungakunta Lake, into which construction and server waste have allegedly been discharged, contaminating the shallow aquifer that more than twenty thousand residents across five villages depend upon for drinking water. Farmers describe soil rendered unfit for vegetable cultivation, agrarian labourers report chronic skin ailments from contact with the polluted water, and at least twenty dairy cattle have died after drinking from the lake over a two-year period. A public interest litigation filed by dozens of farmers remains pending before the Telangana High Court, which has so far declined to halt construction even as it admitted the case for hearing.


The same logic of enclosure extends to Gujarat’s coast, where the Adani Group’s industrial expansion at Mundra, undertaken partly to supply renewable energy credentials for data centre operators, has according to independent ground surveys resulted in the clearing of mangrove forests and the filling of tidal creeks that once served as natural drainage systems and fishing grounds for coastal communities. The destruction proceeds despite environmental clearance conditions that were explicitly written to protect this fragile ecology, demonstrating that even projects marketed under the banner of clean energy can reproduce the very dispossession they claim to remedy.


What unites these cases across such different states and ecologies is a shared plight. Microsoft’s completed facility in Mekaguda is projected to employ only one hundred and eighty people permanently. A fifteen thousand crore rupee investment in Tamil Nadu generates a mere five hundred permanent positions, whereas two other projects signed in the same agreement - an electronics manufacturing hub and a shipyard expansion, costing a combined thirty-six hundred crore rupees, less than a quarter of the data centre's outlay are projected to create seven thousand seven hundred jobs between them. Hyperscale computing, once built, requires astonishingly little human labour to sustain, since its operations are automated almost entirely. The communities that lose their forests, their lakes, their assigned lands, and their homes, therefore, receive little in permanent exchange for what they have surrendered, while the companies and state governments that orchestrate these transfers reap the lasting benefit of cheap land and compliant regulation.


If India intends to build its digital future without repeating the worst habits of its industrial past, certain corrections are no longer optional. Environmental clearances must be assessed cumulatively rather than project by project, so that the combined pressure of multiple facilities upon a single watershed or forest cannot be concealed through administrative fragmentation. Land historically assigned to Dalit and other marginalized communities deserves statutory protection against the kind of selective acquisition now visible in Tarluwada. Public disclosure of water and energy consumption should become a condition of operation rather than a matter left to leaked documents and investigative journalism. The choice before Indian policymakers is not between development and its absence but between a digital economy built through consent and one built through enclosure, and the way that choice is made will determine whether artificial intelligence becomes an instrument of shared progress or merely the latest vehicle for an old and unequal extraction.


is pursuing his Master's in English from Jamia Millia Islamia.
Edited by: 

The Foundations of India’s Artificial Intelligence Boom

This article examines the Great Nicobar Project through the lens of competing narratives, tracing how the government’s vision of strategic ascendancy obscures a tragic underside of shifting deforestation estimates, inadequate compensatory afforestation and institutional capture. It argues that the National Green Tribunal, in weighing ecological questions against geopolitical ones, has effectively abandoned its proper jurisdiction, while the absence of embodied resistance on a remote island leaves the project’s opponents confined to paperwork rather than presence on contested ground, thereby concluding that neither the comic nor the tragic vision can yet claim final authority over the island’s fate.

Every large infrastructure project asks, from the moment it is announced, to be read in a particular way, and how a nation reads its own ambitions tells us nearly as much as the ambitions themselves. Great Nicobar proposes a transshipment port, two new townships and a greenfield airport, all on an island that has for most of its recorded history kept heavy machinery at bay. Its sponsors have narrated this as the dawn of an Indian Hormuz or Malacca, a correction long delayed, by which the country finally claims its share of trade that already passes a few dozen nautical miles from its own coast. It is this comic vision in which a remote biosphere becomes a gleaming city, a settlement of a few thousand becomes a township of three and a half lakh, and the wilderness is not lost but fulfilled. Whether this comic reading can survive contact with the facts of soil, sea and settlement is the question worth asking.

Our opening description already puts us in a difficulty, since it asks us to accept the government’s metaphor before we have even asked whether the metaphor holds. On one side sits what we might call casual judgment. This is the judgment that praises or condemns the project depending on which party happens to hold office, so that a visit by the Leader of the Opposition produces one verdict and a ministry press release produces the opposite one, neither owing much to the island itself. On the other side sits the slower and far less quotable work of actually reckoning with the thing, counting trees, measuring forest, tracing a clearance through tribunal and committee, asking what will be done with land that does not simply belong, in any straightforward sense, to the government proposing to develop it. The comic vision of Hormuz and Malacca tends to crowd this second kind of judgment out of 

public view. Not because the facts are hidden, since they sit openly enough in committee reports and parliamentary answers for anyone willing to read them, but because a strategic narrative, once it takes hold, makes those facts feel like a digression from the real subject.

The forest land approved for diversion in the project’s first stage comes to a little over a hundred and thirty square kilometres, of which roughly sixty-six are meant to be retained as green cover under the clearance's own terms. The number of trees expected to fall within what remains has travelled, across successive government statements, from eight and a half lakh up to nearly ten lakh and back down again to just over seven lakh. Each revision gets presented as a refinement rather than an admission, so the very instability of the figure becomes a kind of argument, though hardly the one its authors intend. A count that cannot 

settle on its own order of magnitude is not yet a measurement; it is an estimate wearing the costume of one, and a forest that has stood through several geological ages deserves a more patient arithmetic than a number that shifts with the political weather.

To offset this loss, the government has turned to an entirely different geography, proposing to plant trees across tens of thousands of hectares in Haryana and Madhya Pradesh, much of it degraded scrub in the Aravalli range, on the reasoning that the Andaman and Nicobar Islands already hold more forest cover than the law demands and can therefore export their compensatory planting elsewhere. As policy, this reasoning is sound enough. As for ecology, it is false, because a tropical evergreen forest sheltering several hundred species found nowhere else on earth cannot be made whole again by acacia and babul taking root on an arid plain a thousand miles to the northwest. The vegetable world of the comic vision, to borrow a distinction this kind of criticism has taught us to draw, is a garden or grove continuous with the life it replaces. What is on offer here instead is a substitution of unlike for unlike, a ledger entry standing in for a forest, and no resolution built on confusing the two deserves to be called green.

The institutions charged with judging this project on ecological grounds have, in the end, judged it largely on strategic ones. Presented in 2022 with a challenge to the environmental clearance, the National Green Tribunal found real, unanswered deficiencies in that clearance and ordered a high powered committee to look into them again, only to conclude this year that adequate safeguards exist and that the project’s strategic importance tips the balance in its favour, a finding reached partly on the strength of a committee report the petitioners' own lawyers were not even permitted to read in full. A tribunal asked whether a forest can survive a port, has in substance, answered a different question altogether, namely whether India can afford to be without one, and these two questions, however much they deserve separate answers, have quietly merged into a single verdict. This is the besetting danger of any criticism, literary or environmental, that lets itself be governed by considerations belonging to another discipline entirely. A tribunal that decides ecology by way of geopolitics has stopped being a tribunal of ecology at all and become something closer to an extension of the ministry it was meant to check.

India has not lacked a different model of resistance. The women who embraced trees in the Himalayan foothills during the nineteen seventies, and the activists who waded into the rising waters of the Narmada two decades on, offered a form of protest continuous with the very land they defended, a repeated and embodied act drawing its force from presence rather than from paperwork. The contest over Great Nicobar has produced no real equivalent so far. Not because the cause is any smaller, but because the geography of resistance itself has changed. The forest in question lies at the farthest edge of the republic, reachable mainly through petition, parliamentary question and tribunal filing rather than through bodies gathering on threatened ground. What was once ritual, a sustained physical claim upon contested land, has now become something closer to an oracle, a scattering of legal fragments, affidavits, sealed committee reports and parliamentary replies, each lighting up a corner of the matter without ever quite assembling the whole.

Beneath the comic vision of a gleaming transshipment hub lies a tragic one that the official narrative is careful never to complete. Galathea Bay, chosen for the port’s deep natural harbour, also happens to be among the principal nesting beaches of the leatherback turtle in this part of the Indian Ocean, and a beach handed over to container traffic rarely keeps a second tenant for long. The Shompen, a hunter-gatherer people numbering only a few hundred, are promised in policy documents that they will not be displaced, even as the very forest reserve overlapping their territory is being de-notified by the same administration issuing that promise. A guarantee that depends on the goodwill of the party most interested in breaking it is not much of a guarantee at all. Whether the comic or the tragic vision turns out to be the truer reading of Great Nicobar will not be settled by the next press release or the next tribunal order. Neither induction from the numbers we presently have, nor deduction from the strategic doctrine framing them, can yet tell us exactly where the forest ends and the argument begins, and it is precisely this uncertainty that ought to keep the question open.

Great Nicobar and the Comic Vision Under Construction

This article examines the recent wave of parliamentary defections in India, where the Tenth Schedule’s merger clause has converted a constitutional safeguard into a route around it. Tracing the Trinamool split into the Nationalist Citizens Party, the Shiv Sena defections styled Operation Tiger, and the Aam Aadmi Party’s Rajya Sabha losses, it argues such transfers sever the continuity between electoral mandate and parliamentary conduct on which representative democracy depends. A comparative turn to Malaysia and the Westminster tradition shows two opposed remedies, statutory penalty against voter reckoning, neither fully adequate, though only one returns the final judgment to the electorate.

Politics, like literature, often repeats its own stories, and the current situation in the Indian Parliament has become almost ritualistic. Recently, 20 of the 28 members elected to the Lok Sabha from the Trinamool Congress realized, after their party lost in West Bengal, that their loyalties now lie with a party based in Tripura called the Nationalist Citizens Party of India. This party’s entire electoral history could be counted in a few hundred votes. The term defection hardly fits when two-thirds of a party distances itself from the charge. The legality of this move doesn’t stem from conviction but from a clause in the Tenth Schedule that allows mergers to bypass disqualification. What was meant to block opportunism has become, through its own loophole, a gate that lets opportunism through with legal approval.

A similar incident in Maharashtra makes this pattern hard to see as mere coincidence. Six of the nine Lok Sabha members under 

 Shiv Sena have switched to the rival faction led by 

. The receiving party has openly labelled this move as Operation Tiger, treating the capturing of representatives as wildlife management rather than a blow to representative government. The name suggests a hunt instead of a reunion and reveals something the creators likely did not intend to show. It casts the defectors not as converts but as secured by other means. Claims that money running into tens of crores changed hands before the switch adds an uncomfortable reality to the metaphor. Three of the six openly admitted that their move aimed to secure funds for their constituencies. This reasoning turns representation into a transaction and leaves voters wondering what their initial vote purchased.

In another case, seven of the ten Rajya Sabha members from the Aam Aadmi Party merged into the Bharatiya Janata Party using the same process. The ruling coalition’s pursuit of these individuals is closely connected to its goal of achieving the two-thirds majority necessary to amend the Constitution, something they failed to attain in April. They have sought to build this majority not by convincing voters but through acquiring their representatives. In this light, numbers represent not a true victory but a substitute for it. What cannot be secured at the ballot box is collected later in the lobbies if one waits long enough. Meanwhile, the average number of sitting days in the Lok Sabha has dropped from over 130 annually in the 1950s to about 55 today. This decline forces lawmaking into haste and deprives important bills of the scrutiny they received in earlier years. With members bought and sold openly and rushing to secure a majority for passing laws by sheer strength, no one in the chamber seems to have time left for discussion.

The more significant question here is not whether such transfers are legal, as the law surprisingly allows them, but whether an arrangement permitted by law can still align with the principle it was created to uphold. A voter who marks a ballot next to a party’s symbol chooses not only a name but also a program and identity that the member is supposed to uphold in the legislature as a trust. Democracy depends on the connection between the mandate given and the conduct that follows. When that connection breaks, what remains is empty representation, a shell without the ideology it was meant to carry, still occupying a seat and drawing a salary. The member who switches sides for a price hasn’t changed his mind in a way conscience usually demands, for conscience does not typically ask for fifty crores as the price for awakening. What seems like realignment from one perspective looks from another like turning public office into private property, sold at whatever the market for defections is offering.

It’s simplistic and flattering to the electorate to blame this corruption solely on the defectors, as the system rewards defection more reliably than it rewards loyalty. A system where loyalty to voters leads to nothing, while disloyalty brings ministries, funds, and protection from disqualification, has set up incentives against the very virtues that democracy requires. Therefore, it shouldn’t surprise us when enough people choose the path encouraged by these incentives. A democracy that allows this to continue for too long will find its citizens no longer believing their votes matter. If citizens believe their votes are useless, they have little reason left to cast one. This is the slowest and least dramatic way a democracy can die.

The Indian experience becomes clearer when compared to other parliamentary democracies. This comparison highlights two opposing strategies for handling the same impulse, neither of which has entirely succeeded. Malaysia has tried to close loopholes by law. It states that a member who changes allegiance loses their seat immediately and must face their constituents again in a new election. This law was a response to the notorious Sheraton Move of 2020, when enough defections collapsed a sitting government overnight in a hotel rather than at the polls. It has also been challenged through 2026 by the issues surrounding 

breakaway faction, whose members navigated the same constitutional loopholes exploited by Indian defectors, merging and regrouping in configurations designed to avoid the vacancy the law intended to enforce. The outcome in both Malaysia and India is not the elimination of defection but its transformation into a more complex legal disguise. The original parties have become splintered into weak remnants unable to regain their former standing.

In contrast, the Westminster tradition takes a different approach. It imposes no legal penalties on members who switch sides and argues that a member of Parliament represents constituents rather than a party and should be free to change loyalty. Here, the enforcement of discipline comes from consequences, not statutes. The electorate administers these consequences during the next opportunity they have. When 

ed a mass defection of Wildrose members into Alberta’s governing party in 2014, the voters who had sent those members to the legislature under a different banner punished the governing party severely at the next election. The governing party’s decades-long power did not survive the verdict. The defectors who formed Britain’s Change UK in 2019 faced an even swifter judgment, losing their seats within months, suggesting that voters without any legal system to demand immediate accountability will create their own response at the first chance they get.

What stands out from comparing these systems is not just the outcomes but the timing and responsibility for maintaining loyalty. In the stricter systems, like India and Malaysia, the burden falls on the legislature itself. In more flexible systems, the responsibility shifts to voters, who cannot be merged or organized into a qualifying fraction. Voters have shown, as seen in Alberta and Westminster, a readiness to impose penalties in ways no constitutional clause could have predicted. Neither arrangement hinders a politician determined to defect. However, only one gives the final say to the people who cast the initial vote. After examining the Indian case, filled with merger clauses and operations, we are left facing a silence that neither law nor precedent can fill. Do the people really rule? Do representatives truly represent? And if neither is true, what exactly does “democracy” signify?

The Hunt for a Majority

On the fourth of May, 2026, India woke to a political reality it had not encountered since 1957, where no communist party governs any of its twenty-eight states. The Kerala election results, which handed the United Democratic Front one hundred and two seats while reducing the CPI(M) to twenty-six, closed a chapter that West Bengal’s simultaneous election closed from the other end, the BJP sweeping a state where the Left Front had once governed for thirty-four unbroken years. What these two results accomplish together, in a way that neither could accomplish alone, is the transformation of a regional reversal into a national historical verdict: the long retreat of parliamentary communism in India has reached its conclusion.

Elamkulam Manakkal Sankaran Namboodiripad

 led the Communist Party of India to an electoral majority in the newly constituted state of Kerala, he accomplished something that no Marxist party had done before or has done since in quite the same way, which is to say that he entered the chambers of parliamentary democracy not as a guest or an interloper but as a legitimate inheritor, winning governance through the very mechanisms that orthodox communist theory had always regarded with deep and principled suspicion. The world took notice, for it was one thing to seize power by revolution and quite another to be handed it by a ballot, and the experiment that began in Thiruvananthapuram that year carried within it a question that Indian politics has been slowly, fitfully, and sometimes painfully answering ever since; whether an ideology whose animating force is the critique of bourgeois institutions can survive, in any meaningful sense, by administering those institutions decade after decade.

On the fourth of May, 2026, the answer arrived, and it arrived not with the drama of a coup or a collapse but with the quiet, devastating finality of two election results delivered on the same day from opposite ends of the subcontinent. In Kerala, the Congress-led United Democratic Front won one hundred and two of one hundred and forty assembly seats, while the CPI(M)-led Left Democratic Front, which had held power for ten consecutive years and had in 2021 achieved the remarkable distinction of a back-to-back majority in a state whose voters had historically alternated between the two fronts with almost pristine regularity, was reduced to thirty-five seats in total, with the CPI(M) itself falling from sixty-two to twenty-six. In West Bengal, the state that had been the cradle of Indian communism, where the Communist Party of India found its earliest and most durable organisational base, where 

 governed for twenty-three unbroken years, and where the Left Front had held power for thirty-four years before 

 ended that tenure in 2011, the BJP swept to a commanding majority while the CPI(M) polled figures so marginal as to constitute not an opposition but a remnant. What these two results accomplish together, in a way that neither could accomplish alone, is the transformation of a regional electoral reversal into a national historical verdict. It so happens that there is no more communist-governed state anywhere in India for the first time since 1957, and that fact carries a weight that goes considerably beyond electoral arithmetic.

It would be a mistake, and a historically careless one, to treat these results as though they arrived without preparation, for the retreat of parliamentary communism in India has been a staggered and legible process, each stage of which repeated the logic of the one before it. West Bengal fell to Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress in 2011, when the agrarian constituencies that the Left Front’s land reforms had created in the 1980s had long since transformed into an urban and peri-urban electorate whose aspirations the party could neither address nor acknowledge. Tripura followed in 2018, falling to the BJP in a result that signalled the penetration of Hindu nationalist politics into spaces the Left had once considered structurally secure. Kerala was the last remaining tower, the final proof that democratic communism in India could sustain itself against the pressures of globalisation, caste realignment, and aggressive cultural nationalism, and when that ground gave way simultaneously with Bengal’s own decisive verdict, the pattern that had been forming across fifteen years snapped into unmistakable clarity.

The question that any serious account of this collapse must confront is whether the defeat belongs primarily to the CPI(M) as an organisation or to the ideology it claimed to embody, for these are not the same thing, and the confusion of the two produces very different conclusions. Those who argue that the Kerala loss is essentially an organisational point to the evidence of internal party dysfunction, which is considerable. In the 2026 elections, a significant number of rebel CPI(M) candidates, running against their own party’s official nominees, won their constituencies, which is not the behaviour of a movement in ideological crisis so much as the behaviour of a party whose internal discipline has decomposed into competing interests dressed in the language of principle. Party cadres, speaking privately in the aftermath of the results, described a leadership structure that had grown, over the Pinarayi Vijayan years, less like a mass political movement animated by class consciousness and more like a corporate administrative apparatus animated by the imperatives of staying in power, and what is striking about this description is not that it was offered by the opposition but that it was offered by the faithful. 

The parallel with Bengal is instructive here, for what ended the Left Front’s thirty-four years in that state was not, at its core, an ideological rejection either, but rather the accumulated weight of cadre violence, land acquisition controversies at Singur and Nandigram, and a party machinery that had confused its own perpetuation with the interests it was constituted to serve.

And yet to rest the entire explanation on organisational decay is to avoid the harder question, which is why the Indian Left proved so consistently incapable of renewing itself when the conditions that produced its historical constituencies underwent transformation. The mill workers of Kanpur and the plantation labourers of the Nilgiris, whom the Left parties had organised in an earlier India, did not map onto the gig economy workers, the IT professionals, and the remittance-dependent families of contemporary Kerala, and the CPI(M)’s attempts to address these new constituencies were, in the judgement of those constituencies, too hesitant, too ideologically encumbered, and too late. What gives the Kerala defeat its particular sharpness, as distinct from the Bengal and Tripura losses which preceded it, is that Kerala had offered the most sustained recent evidence that the Left could govern progressively and effectively within a parliamentary framework, and that evidence is complicated rather than cancelled by the 2026 result. The Pinarayi government’s record on public health, its management of successive Nipah outbreaks, its expansion of the Kudumbashree network, its investment in digital infrastructure across rural districts constituted a real and documented achievement, which is precisely what makes the scale of the electoral rejection so difficult to account for by reference to governance failure alone. 

Voters in Kerala appear to have distinguished between what the government did and what the party had become, between the public goods that the Left delivered and the political culture, marked by opacity, centralisation, and an intolerance of internal dissent, that increasingly surrounded the delivery of those goods.

The CPI(M) Polit Bureau, in its first statement after the results, was careful to distribute the responsibility collectively, noting that the moral weight of the defeat did not rest with Pinarayi Vijayan alone but with the party leadership as a whole, and this formulation, whatever its tactical merits in preventing a destructive internal reckoning, at least signals an institutional awareness that the problems are structural and not merely personal.

 It is worth remembering, as one surveys this landscape of extinguished red flags from Thiruvananthapuram to Kolkata, that the questions which Indian communism raised about land, labour, caste, and the distribution of capital are not questions that have been answered by the Left’s electoral decline, for they have been answered by no one else either. 

And so one is left, finally, with a question that no election result can answer and that the CPI(M)’s internal reviews will not resolve, which is whether a political ideal that built hospitals in Kerala, redistributed land in Bengal, and taught a significant portion of the Indian poor that their condition was not natural but political, can find, in a country whose inequalities are deepening even as its aggregate prosperity grows, the organisational form and the ideological language adequate to its own revival, and whether this catastrophic failure, marks not the conclusion of democratic communism in India but merely the end of one of its chapters, so that the flag that was furled that day may yet, in some future that the present cannot see but that the persistence of the questions it raised makes not unimaginable, be raised again?

is pursuing his Masters in English from Jamia Millia Islamia.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this Publication are those of the author. They do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of The Jamia Review or its members

`From Kerala to Bengal, the Left Has Left 

Why Urban India Cannot Afford to Slow Down?

In India’s rapidly expanding cities, slowing down has become a luxury few can afford. From students handling multiple internships to workers navigating insecure jobs and rising living costs, productivity is no longer just about ambition, it is about survival. As Herbert Spencer rightly commented after reading Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, “Survival of the fittest… or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life”, urban life has grown to reward exhaustion while denouncing rest, creating a culture where being constantly busy is equated with responsibility and worth.

, productivity has transformed from a professional expectation into a moral standard. Being busy is no longer just about earning a livelihood; it has become a measure of character. A casual conversation often begins with “What are you doing these days?”, a question that rarely leaves space for an honest answer involving rest, pause, or uncertainty. To be constantly occupied and reserved is seen as progress, while moments of stillness are interpreted as stagnation. This cultural shift is visible across workplaces, universities, and social media platforms that increasingly celebrate exhaustion as evidence of commitment.

The rise of hustle culture has played a significant role in shaping this mindset. Platforms like 

 are flooded with posts that glorify long working hours, multiple internships, and the idea of “grinding” through one’s twenties. Viral posts on these platforms frequently warn young people that taking breaks will cost them their future, reinforcing the belief that rest equals falling behind. In 2024, a post on LinkedIn that claimed “work-life balance is a myth” sparked both applause and criticism, revealing how deeply internalised this logic has become. News articles on India’s startup ecosystem often praise founders who work through weekends and holidays, rarely questioning the sustainability of such lifestyles.

Students and young professionals are perhaps the most vulnerable to this pressure. In cities like Delhi, Mumbai, and Bengaluru, it is now common for students to juggle academic work with two or three internships simultaneously, many of them unpaid. The fear of an “empty CV” has turned learning into a race for credentials rather than understanding. Several education-focused news reports have highlighted how internship culture increasingly exploits labour while framing it as an opportunity. Doing nothing, even briefly, is portrayed as a risk one cannot afford. In this environment, rest becomes a source of guilt rather than recovery.

This obsession with productivity is closely tied to economic insecurity. Urban living costs have constantly been on the rise while stable employment becomes harder to secure. For many workers in the gig economy, delivery agents, freelancers, content creators—visibility and constant activity are essential for survival. Algorithms reward those who are always online, always producing. A day off can mean reduced reach, fewer orders, or lost income. Here, productivity is not aspirational; it is compulsory. Yet this structural compulsion is often reframed as personal ambition, masking deeper systemic failures. Mental health consequences are an inevitable outcome of such endless expectations. Burnout, anxiety, and chronic fatigue are increasingly common but are rarely acknowledged as legitimate reasons to slow down. When public figures speak about taking breaks, the responses are telling.

Class and privilege further complicate the narrative around rest. For affluent urban professionals, “self-care” often takes the form of expensive retreats or wellness episodes. For working-class urban residents, rest is rarely a choice. Missing a day’s work can mean lost wages or job insecurity. However, societal judgement cuts across classes. Whether it is a student taking a gap year or a worker refusing overtime, inactivity is frequently framed as irresponsibility. Rest, in this sense, becomes a privilege disguised as a personal failing.

What is perhaps most troubling is how deeply these values have been normalised. Productivity is no longer questioned; it is assumed. Schools encourage constant competition, workplaces reward overwork, and social media amplifies the idea that success must be visible and continuous. It has become commonplace to assume that a celebrity or an influencer must post at least 5 or 6 posts in a week (assuming to be sarcastic as if it is a means of showing that they haven’t died or quit social media) The result is an urban culture where worth is measured by output, not well-being. Slowing down is seen as surrender rather than sustainability.

Urban India’s obsession with productivity reflects more than individual ambition—it exposes a system that measures human worth through constant output. When rest is framed as weakness and exhaustion as discipline, cities risk normalising burnout as a way of life. This culture may produce resumes filled with achievements, but it also produces a generation that is anxious, overworked, and uncertain of its own value beyond labour. If urban India continues to treat slowing down as failure, the question is no longer who succeeds, but at what cost. Let us recall 

 phrase here, “There is virtue in work and there is virtue in rest. Use both and overlook neither (

)”. Reclaiming rest as a social necessity rather than a personal indulgence may be our first and probably the best step toward a more humane urban future.

Articles by Joel K Albert