Azadi, or Democratic Unfreedom? A Video Message from OBMA

Posted on 15th August, 2026 (GMT 06:52 hrs)

Spoken by Akhar, Co-founder, Once in a Blue Moon Academia (OBMA)

ABSTRACT

This video asks, from the standpoint of a young citizen, what “Azadi” (freedom) means in India today, and whether the formal existence of democracy can coexist with a lived condition of democratic unfreedom. Tracing the period from 2014 to 2026, it examines the erosion of civil liberties, institutional accountability, democratic participation, ecological security, and economic justice, before asking what genuine freedom might require: the Right to Reject, the Right to Recall, a partyless democracy, and an ecological politics rooted in Oikos — our shared home.

VIDEO OVERVIEW

From my teens to the present (2014–2026), what I have come to understand, as a citizen of India, is that azadi here amounts to nothing more than a democratic unfreedom. What I have witnessed is the negation of azadi: the throttling of free speech and of press freedom, the collapse of accountability across the four pillars of democracy, and — installed in their place — cronyism, duopoly, large-scale corruption, vote chori, horse-trading, bribery through electoral bonds, the passage of ill-conceived anti-people bills without debate or discussion, simulated war, the opacity of PM CARES, conviction without trial, ecocide, hunger, self-harm, and the proliferation of theocracy in defiance of the spirit of secularism and of Article 51A(h). All of these — and many more, within an undeclared emergency — factually attest to the legitimation crisis of the Indian state.

Nor is this merely a matter of private impression. The verdict is corroborated from without: Freedom House has downgraded India from “Free” to “Partly Free”; V-Dem’s Varieties of Democracy has reclassified it as an “electoral autocracy”; the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index ranks it only a “flawed democracy”; the Global Hunger Index places it among the world’s worst performers; the RSF World Press Freedom Index consigns it to the lowest tier; and the Yale–Columbia Environmental Performance Index has ranked it at or near the very bottom of all nations — this alongside entrenched poverty and mounting external debt. To this must be added the Chinese incursions across the Line of Actual Control in eastern Ladakh — the Galwan Valley clash of June 2020, and the sustained standoffs at Pangong Tso, the Depsang Plains, Demchok, and Hot Springs–Gogra, where the People’s Liberation Army has transgressed the LAC and Indian forces have forfeited access to long-held patrolling points.

Confronting so catastrophic a situation, I find myself deeply disillusioned. Yet this disillusionment is not mauvaise foi: I am not fleeing the facts into resentment or motivated hostility, but confronting them lucidly, in good faith. What I have seen, in sum, is the negation of a free and just society.

And so, mindful of the irreversible consequences of anthropogenic global heating and of the wider polycrisis into which it folds — ecological, economic, political, and civilisational at once — I set out the following propositions, not to defer catastrophe but to face and act upon it while there is still time to act.

First, the Right to Reject — a genuine, consequential None-of-the-Above, whereby an electorate may repudiate the entire slate on offer and compel a fresh contest, rather than the ornamental NOTA that at present registers dissent only to discard it.

Second, the Right to Recall — the power of constituents to unseat a representative who betrays their mandate between elections, so that sovereignty is continuous rather than surrendered for a five-year term.

Third, and encompassing both, a partyless democracy — a polity freed from the duopoly and the party-machine that have reduced representation to a managed auction. For the party form, as I understand it, is precisely the mechanism by which the citizen’s freedom is alienated and resold; its dissolution is the condition of any real self-regulatory mechanism.

The organising principle of such a democracy must be the oikos — the household, the home-as-habitat — from which both economy (oikonomia, the law and management of the home) and ecology (oikologia, the logos of the home) descend. The two are not rivals but a single care for a single dwelling: the Earth. A politics worthy of the polycrisis is therefore one that refuses to set economy against ecology, and instead co-regulates the common home — its livelihoods and its living systems together — as what it is, our only habitat. This is the ground on which I stand, and from which these demands are made.