Deleted, devalued, and domineering
Heya!
I am not going to lecture you on anything today. It has been a very busy week but I wanted to do this anyway because this is my happy place and you guys are my happy folks. So this is me, from the train, at 10PM on Saturday night, prepping this for publication. The stories below caught my attention this week so I wanted to bring them to you with full context.
Hope you find them insightful.
See you!
Just the gist
A Joint Parliamentary Committee is reviewing bills that would eventually align all state Assembly elections with the Lok Sabha, but only starting in 2034, since the bills require any Assembly elected after the next general election to have a curtailed term specifically to sync up in the following cycle.
What is reportedly being explored now is a faster, parallel route that does not require the bills to pass at all. The NDA governs 22 states and Union Territories. Of those, 11 have elections due in the next two years anyway, and four, Andhra Pradesh, Arunachal Pradesh, Sikkim, and Odisha, already vote simultaneously with the Lok Sabha. The idea being floated is that NDA state governments could simply dissolve their own Assemblies early, ahead of schedule, so elections happen in 2029 alongside the Lok Sabha instead of waiting for 2034. This does not need new legislation. Article 174(2)(b) of the Constitution already lets a Governor dissolve an Assembly on the advice of its own Council of Ministers. In other words, ruling parties in these states could simply choose to end their own terms early.
The scale of self-shortening involved varies wildly by state, and some of it is significant. Goa, Gujarat, Manipur, Uttar Pradesh, and Uttarakhand would be cutting their Assembly terms short by three years. Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Meghalaya, Nagaland, Rajasthan, and Tripura would be cutting theirs by four years. Delhi's Chief Minister Rekha Gupta has already said, in writing, that Delhi is willing to shorten its own term by a year and would be happy to be "among the leading states" to do so "in the national interest." Three other BJP Chief Ministers, from Goa, Uttarakhand, and Haryana, have expressed similar support after meeting the committee.
This is not a neutral electoral reform being applied evenly. It only works because the NDA currently governs a critical mass of states, giving it the power to voluntarily shorten its own terms in a coordinated way. Opposition-ruled states with elections due before 2029, Punjab, Himachal Pradesh, Karnataka, Mizoram, and Telangana, are under no such pressure and have shown no inclination to volunteer their own early dissolution. So if this actually happens as floated, you would end up with NDA states voting alongside the Lok Sabha in 2029 while opposition states continue on their own separate schedules with three to four years still left on their terms when 2029 arrives.
Congress has called the underlying One Nation One Election proposal "unconstitutional, anti-democratic and against accountability" since it was first introduced, and DMK MPs opposed even introducing the bills in 2024. Jairam Ramesh declined to comment specifically on this NDA-states-only acceleration, calling it hypothetical for now, while reaffirming the party's broader opposition.
➡️ If this plan proceeds, it effectively lets the ruling coalition test-run and normalise simultaneous elections on its own terms, in its own states, years before the actual constitutional reform has cleared Parliament or been properly debated nationally. I say 'properly debated' as if the recent Monsoon Session did not show us that there is no such thing left these days. Anyway, this creates a kind of electoral fait accompli where by the time (and if) the formal 2034 framework comes up for real implementation, a chunk of the country will already be voting this way, making the eventual national rollout feel like a formality rather than a genuine democratic choice. Whether you think simultaneous elections are ultimately good policy or not, the way this is reportedly being executed, coordinated early dissolutions confined entirely to states one party already controls, is worth watching closely as a template for how major structural changes to India's electoral system might get implemented going forward.
🔗 Local politician dares to say the P word
At a college event in Pune this week, Rahul Gandhi told young women to "smash patriarchy," urging them to be loud, be proud, and belong to no one but themselves. So bare minimum, yet so revolutionary!
We have normalised politicians, our elders, basically everyone always referring to women in our country as 'our daughters', 'our sisters', 'our mothers', that him calling a spade a spade actually sounded shockingly refreshing.
But the significant part is not the sentiment itself, but the specific vocabulary. Indian political leaders, including generations of Congress leadership, have almost never used the word "patriarchy" directly in mass political speech. The standard language has always been softer and often times patronising: the upliftment of women, the welfare of women, the empowerment of women. When a leader talks about welfare, the natural response is a government scheme. When a leader names patriarchy specifically as the problem, the demand shifts to something structural, asking men and institutions to actually give something up rather than asking the state to hand something down.
India's history with women in politics and especially that of the Congress is substantial. Sarojini Naidu became the first Indian woman to preside over Congress in 1925. The 1931 Karachi Resolution promised legal equality regardless of sex and adult suffrage, two decades before the Constitution delivered either. Fifteen women sat in the Constituent Assembly and helped write equality directly into Articles 14, 15, and 16. India gave every adult woman the vote immediately from its first general election, while many older democracies (* cough * colonisers ) did it in slow, staged phases. In the 1950s, Nehru and Ambedkar pushed the Hindu Code Bill through intense orthodox resistance, giving women, for the first time, a codified legal right to divorce, maintenance, and inheritance. Dowry became a crime in 1961. The 1992-93 constitutional amendments reserved a third of all panchayat and municipal seats for women, creating the largest cohort of elected women anywhere in the world, over 1.4 million today.
But years of votebank politics, poor implementation of public policy, and pandering to political outrage has consistently eroded the path that the founding minds of independent India had set out for us. So when a key political figure, a man no less, literally calls out patriarchy, it is refreshing when it should really be the bare minimum. The BJP meltdown that followed has been a cruel reminder of why this was needed and why "if not him then who" is really not an acceptable argument anymore.
➡️ Political vocabulary shapes what becomes demandable in public discourse. A society that only ever hears about women's welfare from its leaders learns to expect schemes and handouts. A society that hears its leaders name patriarchy directly starts expecting structural change, which is a fundamentally different and more difficult conversation to have. Whether this specific speech translates into any actual shift in Congress's policy language going forward, or whether it was a one-off rhetorical moment for a specific audience, is yet to be seen. But for once, I want to be hopeful.
🔗 When you can't win them you delete them
We have followed the West Bengal SIR story closely in this newsletter, from the initial 27 lakh voter deletions through the electoral roll ruling. This week brought a shock that one should have seen coming it is so wild you almost don't want to believe it. Because believing it could mean an election was stolen.
Of the 27 lakh voters who were deleted from the electoral roll, 7 lakh had managed to submit an appeal against the decision. After 5 months, the tribunals taking in these appeals have managed to review only 82,000 appeals out of 38 lakh appeals. Where is this 38 coming from, you ask? That's 7 lakh appeals from voters who were deleted and 31 lakh appeals from the Election Commission requesting to delete voters!
But wildest part of this story is that of the 82,000 resolved appeals, 75,000 were in favour of the deleted voters! 75,000 people out of 82,000 were wrongfully removed from the voter list before the election. Again, that's only out of 82,000. 91%!! If this math remains the same moving forward, it could mean at least 6 lakh voters were wrongfully disenfranchised before the West Bengal election. And that is only out of the 7 lakh that appealed. There are 20 lakh deleted voters who did not appeal within the 15 day window they were given! Simply put, that is very many people. Enough to change the winning/losing margin.
➡️ The Supreme Court has now directed the Election Commission to file a proper affidavit breaking down exactly how many appeals are inclusion requests versus exclusion requests, how many are pending, and how many have been decided, before it decides whether to set up additional tribunals. Chief Justice Surya Kant, notably, agreed with the petitioners' broader point that voting rights need to be settled well before the next round of elections, saying plainly that everything should be decided atleast before the Parliament elections comes, and ideally much before that. Yeah, you think?
🔗 Selling India's dreams at wholesale prices
In more (not) shocking news, the government is selling more of the country's infrastructure to private parties. If Adani starts to become a desi Elon Musk, don't look surprised.
Reports emerged suggesting a significant privatisation push in India's space sector, and the opposition is on the front food again. Congress general secretary Jairam Ramesh raised concerns about ISRO's future role, an institution built over six decades under legendary scientists including Vikram Sarabhai, Satish Dhawan, and APJ Abdul Kalam. ISRO's role in rocket development and manufacturing could be take a hit, a substantial share of its satellite-related assets could shift to private companies, and the second spaceport being built at Kulasekarapattinam in Tamil Nadu, where ISRO has already invested roughly Rs 1,000 crore, could be handed over to a private company.
The government is telling a different story. One of freeing up resources for better and bigger things. They claim that ISRO is not shrinking, but is being enabled to concentrate increasingly on frontier missions such as Gaganyaan, Chandrayaan-4, the Bharatiya Antariksh Station, and future Moon, Venus, and Mars missions, while private industry takes over the manufacturing scale-up needed to hit India's target of 50 launches a year. Excuse me if I have trust issues. -_-
That said, India now has over 440 space startups, up from essentially none a decade ago. Skyroot Aerospace's Vikram-1, launched July 18, was the first privately developed Indian rocket to reach orbit. Foreign satellite launches through ISRO have grown from 35 before 2014 to over 430 now. Chandrayaan-3's south pole landing remains an undisputed achievement. And the government's stated ambition, a $44 billion space economy, does plausibly require the kind of manufacturing-at-scale that a research-focused government agency was never really built to do efficiently on its own. So you know, if I did not have trust issues, for all the right reasons, I would not be this sceptical of this 'development.'
Furthermore, an audit report shows that ISRO's infrastructure was already being sold to private parties slowly. What is alarming is the price at which they were being sold with some technology being sold for as cheap at INR 6,000. There has not been a proper valuation done of these technologies that were built with public money. Should we not ensure that we at least recover the costs taxpayers' money bore?
➡️ India's space dream is real and has been consistent across party lines. The problem is the lack of consistency in investment. The space sector genuinely is diversifying beyond ISRO's traditional monopoly on space activity, and that diversification, if done well, could be exactly what allows ISRO to focus on the ambitious frontier missions it has actually signed up for, Gaganyaan, Chandrayaan-4, a full Indian space station. But "if done well" is pulling the weight here. Given how much national pride and genuine scientific achievement is tied up in ISRO specifically, this is a debate worth watching for the actual policy documents and asset transfer details, rather than settling for either side's framing of the story.
That's all for this week, folks! It has been a long one so I need a break.
Thanks!
