The “Charitable” Sovereign: PM CARES, Philanthrocapitalism, and the Erosion of Democratic Accountability

Posted on 1st August, 2025 (GMT 13:30 hrs)

ABSTRACT

The Prime Minister’s Citizen Assistance and Relief in Emergency Situations (PM CARES) Fund, established in March 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, was designed as a citizen-driven mechanism for emergency relief. However, its formation and functioning reveal profound contradictions between its stated ideals and actual governance. This article critically examines PM CARES as an emblem of philanthrocapitalism, executive populism, and corporate-state entanglement. Drawing on theoretical frameworks such as Foucault’s governmentality, Agamben’s state of exception, Fraser’s critique of progressive neoliberalism, and Chatterjee’s political society, the analysis illustrates how PM CARES reconfigures welfare into a spectacle of personalized legitimacy, evading democratic accountability. The case of Mr. Ajay Piramal’s reported donations—alongside alleged regulatory favors and the questionable DHFL acquisition—demonstrates how philanthropy can become a strategic substitute for justice and a vehicle for crony capitalism. Ultimately, PM CARES signifies a broader ideological reconfiguration in India’s political economy: the transformation of crisis governance into a post-democratic regime characterized by moralized coercion, symbolic aid, and technocratic opacity.

I. Introduction: Between Morality and Manipulation

In March 2020, as India entered its first COVID-19 lockdown, the central government announced the PM CARES Fund. Framed as a citizen-responsive, humanitarian intervention, it solicited voluntary donations for emergency relief. Invoking the Prime Minister’s moral authority, PM CARES was projected as a symbol of national unity. Yet, beneath this façade lies a complex and troubling apparatus of concentrated executive power, regulatory evasion, and symbolic authority.

PM CARES operates not as a conventional relief mechanism but as a technocratic-political instrument of neoliberal governance, reflecting India’s post-liberal shift from institutionalized welfare to discretionary, spectacle-driven beneficence. It is “technocratic” in being aligned with the projected goal of a so-called “Digital India”, which is being realized via the conduits of crony and monopoly capitalism.

II. Theoretical Framework: Populist Statecraft and Philanthro-capitalism

This article integrates three critical paradigms:

• Philanthrocapitalism (Bishop & Green, 2008): the strategic use of private capital for public functions under the guise of humanitarianism, which often entrenches elite influence and masks structural injustice.
• Executive Populism (Laclau, 2005; Urbinati, 2019): the personalization of state authority in the figure of the leader, displacing institutional mechanisms.
• Governmentality and Exception (Foucault; Agamben): governance through crisis allows the state-power to bypass law under the justification of emergency.

PM CARES, read through these lenses, exemplifies a governance model where crisis legitimizes opacity, spectacle displaces accountability, and philanthropy replaces civic entitlement.

IIA. Spectral Power and Ethical Collapse: A Deeper Theoretical Interlude

The PM CARES paradigm exemplifies what Michel Foucault called governmentality—a mode of power that works not merely through coercion, but through the normalization of control via institutions, technologies, and discourse. Unlike traditional state authority, which operated through laws and coercion, governmentality disperses power, making obedience appear voluntary and even virtuous. In the case of PM CARES, this manifests in the depoliticized grammar of “care,” where citizens are interpellated not as political agents, but as moral participants in a benevolent spectacle. The very act of donating becomes a ritual of consent to executive authority, erasing the distinction between governance and glorification.

Giorgio Agamben’s state of exception further illuminates how emergency becomes the new norm, wherein legality is suspended and replaced with executive discretion. The fund’s immunity from RTI and audit mechanisms is not a bureaucratic oversight—it is the very mechanism of exception-as-rule. In such a regime, what Arendt termed the banality of evil—the routinization of moral disengagement—takes bureaucratic form: symbolic compassion displaces structural redress, and opacity replaces deliberation. The charisma of the leader (Laclau) operates not just through populist language but through a reified moral imaginary, where dissent appears as betrayal, and asking for transparency seems anti-national.

Together, these thinkers allow us to frame PM CARES not merely as a fiscal aberration, but as part of a broader epistemic and moral crisis—what Judith Butler might call the precarization of critique itself. Under this regime, legality dissolves into loyalty, and democratic oversight becomes indistinguishable from sedition. The philanthropic spectacle thus becomes a ghostly double of democracy—its form retained, its substance hollowed.

III. Legal Ambiguity and Institutional Evasion

While PM CARES employs the Government of India’s digital infrastructure and features the PM and ministers as trustees, the PMO insists it is not a “public authority” under the RTI Act. This contradiction allows the fund to:

• Evade Right to Information (RTI) obligations
• Avoid CAG audits and parliamentary scrutiny
• Maintain selective disclosure of donations and expenditures

The fund’s exceptional legal status, as mentioned before, reflects what Agamben calls a “state of exception,” where normal democratic procedures are suspended in the name of urgency.

The PM CARES, as a phenomenon, exists at once as governmental and non-governmental. Consequently, it is inherently marked by a transparency that is also somewhat opaque in its manifestation.

IV. Parallel Institutions: The Bypassing of PMNRF

India already had the Prime Minister’s National Relief Fund (PMNRF), established in 1948, with established procedures and partial audits. PM CARES duplicates its function while personalizing authority:

Institutional Ideal	PMNRF	PM CARES
Legal Basis	Established under public finance norms	Extra-statutory trust
Oversight	Subject to audits and public scrutiny	Exempt from RTI and CAG
Governance	Institutional continuity	Personalized authority

The shift from “national relief” to “PM CARES” reflects a grammatology of power: turning public duty into “moral” spectacle.

V. Corporate Patronage and Crony Philanthropy

Despite claims of being citizen-funded, a significant portion of PM CARES funding came from major corporations—many with close ties to the ruling regime. Notable features include:

• CSR Eligibility: PM CARES was declared valid for mandatory Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), converting obligatory giving into state-endorsed benevolence.
• Electoral Bonds Overlap: Firms donating to PM CARES were also large contributors to the BJP via opaque electoral bonds.
• Regulatory Leniency: Donor conglomerates often received favorable treatment—tax benefits, contracts, or policy relaxations.

Case Study: Mr. Ajay Piramal and the DHFL Case

All statements regarding Mr. Ajay Piramal should be interpreted as exploratory observations drawn from reputable newspaper and media reports, not as conclusive assertions intended for defamation. The subsequent statements serve to challenge an unjust corporate power structure rather than targeting any individual, such as Mr. X or Mr. Y.

Mr. Ajay Piramal, who acquired DHFL under the IBC framework amid reported regulatory controversy, also allegedly donated significantly to PM CARES. His group:

• Donated via tax-deductible CSR
• Contributed through electoral bonds
• Gained from controversial DHFL acquisition, causing massive losses to small depositors

This illustrates Nancy Fraser’s notion of progressive neoliberalism, where elite philanthropy masks dispossession.

VI. Secrecy, Spectacle, and the Moral Economy of “Care”

PM CARES operates on a double register:

• Secrecy: Evasion of audits, lack of detailed beneficiary data, and opaque trustee appointments
• Symbolism: Branding around the PM’s persona, generating an aura of moral legitimacy

This substitutes emotion for responsibility (Arendt, 1963), where citizens are repositioned not as rights-bearing stakeholders but as donors or recipients of selective state generosity.

This secrecy aligns with a deeper conceptual formation: the “will to hide” (jugupsā or erit celare), which operates within authoritarian political economies as both strategy and symptom. Drawing on the metaphorical structure of the Cor-Police game and the Upanishadic invocation to unveil the truth obscured by a “golden disk,” the will to hide serves as a strategic response to surveillance, coercion, and information asymmetry. From Freudian repression to Derridean concealment, and Deleuze-Guattari’s schizoid deterritorializations to Brechtian estrangement, this dynamic complicates the governance of truth and accountability.

Empirically, the opacity surrounding PM CARES is part of a broader ecosystem that includes the Electoral Bonds Scheme, denial of RTI requests, suppression of independent media, and proposed legislation such as the Broadcasting Bill. These instances reflect the ruling regime’s effort to conceal evidence while projecting moral authority. The state’s refusal to offer reciprocal transparency—despite its power to surveil—produces what this paper identifies as a “paradox of access” in an age of data overload: the citizen is overwhelmed with information but denied meaningful insight. This concealment is not accidental but structured into governance as a tool of executive control, guilt management, and depoliticization.

VII. From Citizens to Supplicants: The Crisis of Democratic Accountability

PM CARES enacts a larger transformation:

Principle	Pre-COVID Governance	PM CARES Paradigm
Accountability	Parliamentary, institutional	Executive, opaque
Rights-based welfare	Entitlement-based	Charity-based
Citizen role	Sovereign participant	Supplicant or donor
Transparency	Legal norm	Moral exception

Emergency has evolved into a perpetual state, rationalizing exceptionalism and consolidating authority. In this context, the power appears to reside within the state-corporate nexus, particularly reflected in the modus operandi of the current political executive in India, which allegedly operates in a quid-pro-quo arrangement with select business magnates such as Adani and Ambani. This dynamic not only facilitates the concentration of wealth but also engenders heightened digital surveillance, stringent control over citizens’ personal data, and a reduction in the free expression of speech, among other implications.

VIII. Conclusion: Reclaiming the Language of Rights

The PM CARES Fund is not merely a logistical or legal anomaly—it is a political technology that recasts democratic welfare as discretionary care, where executive populism and corporate moralism form a closed loop of legitimacy.

The Ajay Piramal–DHFL episode reportedly underscores how philanthropy appears to function as a substitute for justice: moral cover for economic harm. In this light, PM CARES is not a neutral relief mechanism but a discursive apparatus of (pseudo-)moralized authoritarianism.

Reclaiming democratic accountability in this context means:

• Challenging the normalization of legal exceptions
• Restoring institutional oversight and transparency
• Resisting the conflation of charity with justice

In the era of philanthro-statism, transparency is not enough. What’s required is a renewed assertion of rights, institutional memory, and civic sovereignty against the creeping encroachment of charismatic despotism cloaked in humanitarian urgency.

SEE ALSO: