Once in a Blue Moon Academia (OBMA)

  Democracy for Sale: Anti-Defection Law, Horse-Trading, and the Crisis of the Electoral Mandate in India Posted on 1st May, 2026 (GMT 07:03 hrs) AKHAR BANDYOPADHYAY  ⤡ ABSTRACT The Anti-Defection Law (Tenth Schedule, introduced by the 52nd Amendment 1985 and strengthened by the 91st Amendment 2003) was designed to curb opportunistic defections and safeguard the electoral mandate in India’s parliamentary democracy. Yet its critical loopholes—the two-thirds merger exception (Paragraph 4), unpenalised mass resignations, partisan Speakers, and ambiguities between organisational and legislature parties—have institutionalised sophisticated horse-trading. This article offers a doctrinal and empirical critique, centering on the Shiv Sena crisis (2022–23) and the Supreme Court’s Subhash Desai judgment (2023), which exposed how rebellion, strategic resignations, resort politics, and institutional delays enabled the toppling of a democratically elected government. Examining defecti...

  From Cough Syrup to Contested Survival: Piramal Pharma’s Phensedyl and OTC Citizenship Posted on 30th November, 2025 (GMT 03:48 hrs) ABSTRACT This not-an-essay traces the cultural, political, and pharmaco-poetic life of Phensedyl—now manufactured by Piramal Pharma—and situates the codeine-laced syrup within a broader history of scarcity, surveillance, and self-medication in South Asia. Moving between memoir, literary analysis, public-health framing, and theoretical lenses drawn from Foucault, Derrida, and contemporary critiques of cannibal capitalism, the piece investigates how a seemingly mundane cough syrup becomes a portal into the infrastructures of regulation, desire, and dispossession. It examines how Phensedyl served, for many in the 1980s–90s, as a substitute for alcohol in restricted environments, how codeine’s codification reflects state power over pain, and how bodies transformed into sites of both rebellion and compliance. Through lyric passages, sociological ins...