THE Communist Manifesto had observed that the executive of the modern state is nothing but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie. In today’s India, even that formulation requires revision. The explanation of the current situation goes beyond the routine management of bourgeois affairs through the neutral machinery of a liberal state. The current situation is qualitatively different and unprecedented. The country is witnessing a capture of every institution that was designed to mediate, moderate, or constrain executive power. These institutions have now been subordinated to the interests of a specific fraction of big capital, which is fused organically with the ideological apparatus of Hindutva. This distinction demands us to do a clear-eyed analysis.

THE CORPORATE STATE AND ITS POLITICAL ECONOMY

Begin with the economic foundation, because everything else flows from it. India has had pro-market policy since 1991. However, the decade of BJP rule has produced something that deviates from the general pro-market trajectory that was being followed till 2014. In 2014, a process began that facilitated the merger of the ruling party's political apparatus with a specific cluster of corporate houses, in a relationship of mutual reinforcement so dense that the boundary between state and private capital has become, in critical sectors, functionally invisible.

The corporates made a political investment in BJP and received material returns in the form of public sector disinvestment, the rewriting of environmental and land acquisition clearance norms, the restructuring of the banking system to absorb corporate debt, etc. Even more importantly in this case, the political power itself has been organised as a return on corporate investment. All these pose a grave threat to democratic governance whose character itself is being slowly altered to suit the needs of the ruling party and their friends.

ACQUISITIONS, MERGERS AND THE NEW ACCUMULATION

The language of corporate finance has migrated, with remarkable precision, into political practice. Acquisitions. Mergers. Hostile takeovers. Corporate boardrooms often use a term M&A, which in the sphere of politics, has been perfected by BJP as the dominant technique of electoral consolidation.

It began with the fall of Governments engineered through the organised poaching and wholesale purchase of elected Congress legislators in states like Madhya Pradesh, Karnataka, Manipur, etc. Congress, a party already weakened by its own contradictions was made even more vulnerable through these defections which were engineered from outside and were a blatant attack against the verdict given by the electorate. It was done through the exploitation of legal ambiguity.

Later the targets have shifted to Shiv Sena, AAP and the Trinamool Congress. Eknath Shinde's capture of the Shiv Sena's legislative group, Ajit Pawar's fracturing of the NCP and Raghav Chaddha’s defection to BJP along with six other MPs were like corporate acquisitions, complete with inducements, timelines, and post-merger rewards. The "future trading" in political leaders has become so normalised that it now barely registers as scandal.

These manoeuvres are connected to the larger question of delimitation and it will become clearer in the second part of this analysis. For now, it is sufficient to note that the arithmetic of acquisition is deeply intertwined with the arithmetic of political geography.

THE WASHING MACHINE

There is a piece of political vocabulary that has entered common parlance with good reason: the washing machine. A leader in the Opposition carries corruption charges, criminal cases, ED summons — the full weight of investigative agencies deployed as instruments of political pressure. The same leader crosses the floor, joins the BJP, and watches, with apparent wonder, as the cases thin out, the summons grow infrequent, and the prosecutorial urgency evaporates.

It is not difficult to notice the implementation of an unwritten, uncodified policy that is consistent enough to constitute a doctrine. It achieves two things simultaneously. It disciplines the Opposition through the permanent threat of prosecution. And it rewards defection with impunity, making the BJP's offer to Opposition leaders irresistible for those with exposure. When the force of the law operates selectively and become a function of political loyalty rather than evidence, the law ceases to be a law in any meaningful sense and becomes coercion wearing law's clothing.

THE ANTI-DEFECTION LAW: ARCHITECTURE WITHOUT FOUNDATION

To prevent the kind of wholesale political commerce described above, the Tenth Schedule, popularly known as the anti-defection law, was introduced in 1985. Although the loopholes of the Tenth Schedule were visible from the beginning, but it still represented a constitutional acknowledgment that the buying and selling of legislators goes against the ethos of representative democracy.

That acknowledgment has now been rendered ceremonial. The mechanism of "merger" (requiring two-thirds of a legislative party to defect) has been exploited with clinical efficiency. Speakers, who are the constitutional authorities charged with deciding disqualification petitions, have discovered remarkable reserves of procedural delay whenever the petitions concern their own party's beneficiaries. The Supreme Court has noted this pattern, has expressed displeasure, has issued directions yet the pattern has continued. The anti-defection law today is a building whose foundations have been quietly removed. The facade stands.

PRESIDING OFFICERS AND THE ELECTION COMMISSION: THE ARCHITECTURE OF SUBMISSION

The Speaker of the Lok Sabha, the Governors, the Election Commission of India are some of the constitutional positions that were designed as counterweights or referees, in a constitutional order where it is assumed that the players will not also own the referee.

However, this assumption no more stands true. The partisan functioning by Governors in states like Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Telangana, and West Bengal has been discussed and documented in detail. These Governors manufacture constitutional crises, sit on Bills, and act as extensions or even pawns of the Union government rather than discharging their role of being constitutional heads. Their functioning shows a remoulding in action, where constitutional offices are being actively converted into political instruments.

The same trend is discernible in the functioning of presiding and returning officers entrusted with conducting elections. Recent controversies surrounding the Rajya Sabha elections in Madhya Pradesh and Jharkhand, alongside the Chandigarh mayoral election where the Supreme Court found that the Returning Officer had unlawfully interfered with the electoral process, have raised serious concerns regarding the neutrality of officials expected to function as impartial arbiters. These episodes reinforce the growing perception that even procedural referees are increasingly susceptible to partisan influence.

The Election Commission's conduct demands separate attention, because the ECI is not a peripheral institution. It is the body on whose independence the very possibility of electoral democracy rests. And its conduct in recent years has raised questions that cannot be answered by reference to procedure alone. One of the most visible examples includes the firm refusal by ECI to act on complaints against the Prime Minister and the Home Minister for speeches that, by any reading of the Model Code of Conduct, constituted communal appeals. ECI’s partisan positioning becomes more than evident when the Prime Minister speaks of the Congress "distributing the country's wealth among infiltrators" and invokes "Mangalsutras," when the Home Minister deploys language calibrated to polarise along religious lines, and the ECI finds no violation.

THE CHIEF JUSTICE IS NO LONGER AT THE TABLE

In March 2023, a Constitution Bench of the Supreme Court — in Anoop Baranwal v. Union of India — directed that appointments to the Election Commission be made on the advice of a committee comprising the Prime Minister, the Leader of the Opposition, and the Chief Justice of India. The judgment explicitly stated that leaving appointments entirely in the hands of the executive was "seriously detrimental to the health of our democracy."

Like in all matters which concern their unethical interests, here too the government's response was swift and surgical. By December 2023, Parliament had passed the Chief Election Commissioner and Other Election Commissioners (Appointment, Conditions of Service and Term of Office) Act, 2023. This act replaced the Chief Justice of India with a Cabinet Minister nominated by the Prime Minister. The selection committee now consists of the Prime Minister, the Leader of the Opposition, and a minister of the Prime Minister's choice. Two out of three votes are the executive's own.

That the Bill was passed in the Lok Sabha while the majority of the Opposition's members were under suspension is a detail that cannot be buried. Cases challenging the 2023 Act have been pending in the Supreme Court since January 2024 and no stay has been granted. As of May 2026, the matter is still being argued before a Division Bench and two Chief Justices have recused themselves along the way. The Election Commissioners appointed under this disputed Act are in office and the election cycle is continuing.

THE ORDINANCE AND THE J&K TEMPLATE

Two further instances of constitutional subversion deserve to be placed on record in this context because they establish a method for overcoming inconvenient judicial verdicts.

The first case is of the Supreme Court, in May 2023, restoring the elected government of Delhi's control over services. This is a matter of fundamental importance in a constitutional democracy where a city-state's elected government had been reduced to a ceremonial body. Within days, the Union government responded with an Ordinance, which was specifically designed to nullify the effect of the judgment. The Ordinance was subsequently legislated. The government did not have to challenge the Court's verdict as it was simply able to bypass it through the executive's legislative majority.

The second template is of J&K. The abrogation of Article 370 and the conversion of a full-fledged State into two Union Territories was accomplished through a sequence of constitutional manoeuvres that exploited the absence of a functioning state assembly. It is worth pointing out that one of these Union territories is Ladakh, which even lacks a legislature. The Presidential Order under Article 356 was used to make amendments that Article 370 itself required the concurrence of the State's Constituent Assembly, which no longer existed. The constitutional requirement of consent was circumvented by the simple fact of its prior abolition. It was a case of a loophole being manufactured by the ruling party to further its agenda.

BUILDING A SCAFFOLDING

What the foregoing makes clear is that the BJP's project of institutional capture is a scaffolding where each element reinforces the others. The hollowing of the ECI makes elections more manipulable. The defanging of the anti-defection law makes post-election manipulation easier. The Washing Machine makes defection more attractive. The Ordinance power and the J&K template demonstrate that even judicial resistance can be absorbed. And the compliant presiding officers ensure that the processes which might generate accountability (like disqualification petitions, Money Bill certifications, anti-defection proceedings, etc.) are slowed or stalled.

This scaffolding serves a purpose beyond the maintenance of power. It is being erected to support the demographic engineering, the reordering of citizenship, and the Hindu Rashtra project. We will deal with it in the second part of this analysis.

[Part II: "Delimitation, Demography, and the Hindu Rashtra: The Electoral Architecture of a Theocratic Order" to follow in the next issue]