“But why are they risking so much? What exactly do they want?”

– Minority Report, Philip K. Dick 

On December 3, the Narendra Modi government issued a press release outlining orders it had issued to all smart phone manufacturers, including those of imported devices, to pre-install an application that can read, write, and record at all times on each individual device, while apparently denying the user the power or the right to turn it off or override it. That is, this software will have had root access to individual smart phones, which is something the users do not have. This translates into holding administrative powers on individual phones, granting the government the proverbial “keys to the kingdom”. The order appears to since have been modified, or withdrawn, perhaps on account of the largest mobile phone and operating systems manufacturers of the world – the two American corporations, Apple and Google – refusing to comply with it. 

Both the order and its apparent withdrawal are harbingers of the intention of our rulers. Our concern should be: why did they take this step risking the reputation of the ‘power’ of the government of India? What do they want? What is it that is being conveyed through the order and the offer of its withdrawal? 

When we use the expression, “keys to the kingdom”, we refer to the taking away of the legal and political sovereignty of all individuals in India. The immediate implications of this government wish and order are apparent: journalists who rely on protecting their sources and conducting their research away from the gaze of power will not be able to function, judges will not be able to deliberate without alerting the powerful of judgments harmful to them, academics will not be able to fearlessly gather data, from networks, and create new schemas for understanding the world, under total surveillance copyright laws will be null and void – which remain the impetus of capitalism, and, above all, opposition parties will not be able to confer and prepare to oppose the government. This is to render India into a Russia or a Belarus.

From the stealthy steed Pegasus – spyware snuck into the phones of some – to now the steering shadow 'Saathi' – an all-seeing and all-controlling app inserted officially in the phones of every citizen...why is our country being steered down this path?

This moment signifies a critical development in the self-understanding of the Bharatiya Janata Party-Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and of the imminent danger posed to the people of India. This reflection is neither a prophecy nor haruspices' words, but rather what is no longer un-seeable in the tumbling entrails of our republic – the present and imminent condition of our institutions. 

From Pegasus to Saathi

The BJP-RSS had already understood that their days of electoral engineering, both legal and the questionable kind, came to the end in 2024 – the last national election which the BJP lost. Narendra Modi has been since ruling in the first coalition government in which he has needed the support of other parties. Therefore, we find the government extracting the final drop from the exhausted Election Commission labourers using the more than compliant 'Election Commissars'. Even a dysfunctional electoral system does not augur well for the BJP, and thus we find ourselves moving towards autocracy with or without electoral pretences.  

In 2022, opposition leaders, lawyers, scientists activists, and journalists had been targeted through the use of the spyware Pegasus, which is manufactured and sold by the Israeli firm NSO Group, which claims to sell only to "vetted governments".  Among those targeted were activists who have been jailed in the aftermath of the 2018 celebrations at Bhima Koregaon of the 200th anniversary of the Dalit army’s victory over the Brahmin Peshwa kingdom. The event saw the participation of several anti-caste activists, judges, and intellectuals. This event and its memory are part of the ongoing intensification of anti-caste struggles led by lower caste intellectuals and activists for equality, dignity, and power, which is unstoppable. 'Upper' caste supremacists represented by the RSS-BJP thus sought to respond to it in a way they often have.

First, the 2018 celebrations were turned into riots under the guidance of Sambaji Bhide, the RSS worker on whose feet the wife of India’s technology billionaire and the mother-in-law of the previous British prime minister,  once prostrated. Then, a state-led campaign commenced against those who were the organisers of the event such as Father Stan Swamy, as well as those who were not, including Mahesh Raut. Activists were arrested and jailed in violation of human rights and jurisprudential norms. Father Swamy, who died in custody, and Rona Wilson were among those who had their computers hacked and had evidence planted against them. 

This violation of constitutional rights and human rights by the government investigative agencies – which have rarely been autonomous in the history of the Union of India and which have acted like a militia for the ruling dispensation is yet to be checked by the Supreme Court of India. It makes one wonder what the invented ‘basic structure doctrine’ of the constitution is for. From the writing on this surface, it should be apparent that anyone who is not an affiliate or servant of the interest of the RSS and its crony capitalist backers, will face a fate similar to a preloaded Pegasus-like software with root access. 

From government officials to ministers, even those who may not pretend to any political interest can be subjected to blackmail and extortion, given the history of those who currently govern us. It is this history – of 'upper' caste supremacism, its mythic charioteers defending the caste system, and its motorised charioteers demolishing mosques – that is now culminating in the installation of the digital charioteer who would abduct our freedom.

The politicians of the government say they have withdrawn the direction to go ahead with the app –  this ‘Hindutva’ ‘Pegasus’ (born from Medusa’s blood, and then the Palestinians, and now the Republic of India). But the principal lesson is that trusting the government or any of the state institutions to correct this injustice will be the innocence of bad faith. One way or another, by making such an app mandatory for certain bureaucratic functions, such as updating state ID (Aadhaar) or the electoral ID, this Pegasus charioteer will steer the soul of the republic – stepping back once only to take two steps ahead. 

The ancient haruspices 

The ancient world had disdain for the future, which was seen as the bringer of the unacceptable: the indignity of old age and death, and the irregular events of wars and ravages of nature breaking the ceremonial tranquillity of the few who could afford it. The future was to be read through the signs of the irregular appearing against the regular, such as the flight of birds, encounters on the streets, the form of lightning, and the entrails of animals. There were many names for these arts according to their speciation – portenta, haruspicina, extispicium, augury. In ancient Rome, the “haruspex” was a religious official designated for such hypophysical divination to protect the state from the irregular; foretelling was almost always performed from the point of view of the ends and interests of the powerful. The very origin myth of the haruspices is the Etruscan story of Tages. A farmer who, while ploughing the field, came upon a spot where the soil was stirring by itself until a mouth formed in it and a body began to rise, that of Tages, an adolescent with the wisdom of an old man, already uttering the things to come.  

The myth of Tages reveals how the emergence of the first prophet is itself the most irregular amongst the regular, purporting to save us from irregularity by foretelling the inevitable. A complement of the myth and the office of harupsices is the aesthetic ideology of the Greek tragic drama.  Guided by a foretelling, the hero chooses a path to avoid the foretold but only to end up fulfilling it. This form is mimicked and unmasked well in the science fiction story Minority Report. 

With the arrival of philosophy in Asia minor, these ‘arts of divination’ were displaced by growing speciation of thinking the future, especially with Aristotle, through whom we still have physics, biology, political theory, philosophy among other species. However, Rome retained the Iranian-Etruscan influences in its continuation of the culture of divination. Much later in Rome, Cicero would refuse the roles assigned to the descendants of Tages in all domains of life. In a short and rushed speech he said,

"When the question is as to what is morally right, or morally wrong, or as to what is neither the one nor the other, do we usually have our doubts resolved by diviners? In fact, do we often consult them in such a case? Certainly not, for problems of this kind belong to philosophers."

His words remind us that that which may come to be, should be evaluated from the quality of the ends, whether good or bad. It is not to be evaluated in terms of a preordained something, which in any case is often posited as well as attained through force by those with power. 

The new offices of divination 

This excursus is not for antiquarian interests but for identifying the most recent descendants of Tages – the computational industry, ‘big data’, what is called AI, and Large Language Models. The contemporary Tages does not merely surveil and breach privacy, it produces industrial levels of control, increasingly sanctioned by states.

Since the 2010s, the wider adoption of mobile phones, the spread of faster internet and the scaling up of computational architectures (popularly inaugurated by Google much earlier) have together created the possibility of amassing all the data generated by the activities of the people, such as movement, calls, texts, social media interactions. This data could be used to determine election campaign strategies, marketing and prediction of the conduct of the people in general. 

People lead urban lives in more or less coordinated regularities, such as those of office hours, schools and their homes. These regularities also grasp one another, as if they were the components of a machine; for example, daily traffic congestion is a meeting of the beginning and end of office hours and school timings. They are comprehended to a certain extent by the state through regulations and arbitrary restrictions: today, fearing protests and mass mobilisations, many roads leading to the richer parts of Delhi are controlled by the police, thus creating more traffic congestion. 

All these regulations make the lives of the people predictable, in the probabilistic sense. However, we the people are not predictable, but merely probable; nothing stops us from getting out of our vehicles, when held up in traffic for an industrialist, and march to the ministers obeying the orders of the industrialist. Freedom terrorises prediction. 

The more data the machine systems can accumulate, the more probable our conduct becomes. The philosophical and computational-theoretical limits of these large machine systems (earlier called ‘big data’) are, to a certain extent, irrelevant to their powers to render our lives predictable once certain controls can be imposed on human freedom. The traffic checks in Lutyens’s Delhi are one example of such controls; they extend further into the restrictions on the organisation and planning of protests and the creation of mass movements through the instrumentalisation of the judiciary and the media. The latter complies with the legitimisation of terms such as 'urban Naxal' for those who speak for the 'lower' caste majority and the Adivasi people, and 'jihadi' for all those who oppose the oppression of  Muslims in the name of ‘cow protection’. These controls will soon extend to autonomous reporting and internet-based news sharing by the youth. 

Temples of filth

Today, there is a hierarchy of secrecy. The powerful have total secrecy while the poor live out their lives in an unchosen transparency. Between the two extreme degrees we find the minor politicians (in relative terms), bureaucrats, judges, journalists, and activists; here, what should have been private or secret for these in the middle is held – as a commodity which has a market in a major section of the Indian media and in exchange for which the corruption of their profession is extracted – by even more powerful people. 

We are already in an epoch where everything in principle can be recorded and can also be leaked. These recordings of all things and events have been prepared for generating a comfortable reality for the fascistic powers behind technological corporations in pursuit of the permanent imprisonment of human lives – which, for example, is also the lesson of the story of Epstein (networks, corruption, finance, and blackmail) and how men like him helped set up the international far-right. This aspect of the computational industry – control to the point of virtual imprisonment – is concerned with the extinguishing of the faculty of freedom. 

Freedom is the principal faculty and telos or end of politics, which does not seek destiny, but indestinacy. Freedom has disdain for regularity, especially the regularity and the ceremonialised luxuries enjoyed by the few. Despite having all the knowledge about the people no despot will ever be able to imprison them, for any moment the people can claim what is rightfully theirs – the streets, the water, the forests, the land, and politics itself. This impending eruption of the people terrorises all those powerful little men of the world. 

Hence, the incremental interventions through technological means to enforce regularities that we find advancing today – border controls, ID checks, biometric barriers, autonomous vehicles which take away human autonomy, and one can go on. Those who were expressing discontent against the unbreathable existence in Delhi found that metro services were shut down before protests began and barricades were erected along all the roads that belong to the people. We the people are now unwelcome in our own land and our own streets! Thus do these measures manufacture the convenient reality of a land without discontent or protests, a land of celebration of the ignorance of the leaders of the RSS-BJP, of euphoria around the fake economic growth figures officially released, all of which the majority of desperate-to-be-agreeable media now frames with Islamophobia and casteism. 

The confinement of people to the routines of hate, servitude and fear to create a ceremonial society of decay. will be advanced further through remote shutdowns of the internet (which are common in parts of India), the denial of rations, control or shut down of phones without which almost no activity can be conducted, the denial of voting rights – the little remaining while we play at this pretence, and eventually remote arrests performed by autonomous vehicles.  

This epoch has already been prepared elsewhere by those who are more powerful than the RSS, Modi, Adani, Ambani, and so on. That list includes the affiliates of Epstein such as the technologist billionaire Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Steve Bannon and others. Those who govern us are the meek before the mighty Americans in the list (as recent revelations confirmed in which the petroleum minister Hardeep Singh Puri figures as someone with whom Epstein scheduled five appointments, and who, coincidentally, increased the import of American oil to India). It can be said that those who hold the knowledge of all the powerful leaders of the first world control the less powerful leaders of the third world. 

In this method of ‘trickling down filth’, the powerful hand down tasks to minor powers. The government of India implements the Epstein-Bannon-Trump world. We the people had already begun our entry into this conductance of filth when the Indian media illegally obtained and illegally published the private messages of the actress Rhea Chakraborty – none of which had any remote bearing on the public interest – without a moment of doubt or shame. We are already being trained into accepting the loss of our autonomy in the domain of social and political life, by demonstrating the cruel punishment which has turned many into ‘disposable’ lives. 

The recently imposed order to bring total surveillance and control through smart phones is meant to make us, the people, in the image of the cowardly politicians of this dispensation, to corrupt the whole of India through blackmail and to infuse fear into the stench of unbreathable air. 

The entrails of our republic

We must, therefore, read the entrails of our Republic, and practice another haruspicy than that of the religious officials of yore and the technofascists of today. This other haruspicy serves the care for freedom of the people as care for a future without prediction and control. It is the art of apprehending what comes next by discerning the tendencies in the reality before us. 

The temple of filth, blackmail, corruption and intimidation built in the last 11 years was possible due the conditions which prevail in India. Today, this temple stands over and above the Indian constitution (be it an imperfect document) to protect some of those very conditions, or the interests of a few, a minority among the less than 10% of India, the 'upper' caste minority. This minority controls the media, the judiciary, the bureaucracy, the academia, book publishing, the police and the army. 

Today this control, for the sake of the bourgeois 'upper' caste minority is exercised by the lumpen RSS, which is a paramilitary organisation that is officially unregistered and yet has the funds and administrative infrastructure to engage in lobbying with the American government. At complete odds with the majority lower caste people of India (including the lower caste real majorities among Muslims, Christians, and Sikhs), the project of the RSS is to displace the constitution of India framed by Dr B.R. Ambedkar, with the text he despised, the Law book of Manu which codified the “Aryan” doctrine as rules to enforce the caste system through the enforcement of endogamy, that is, the denial of autonomy to women of all castes. 

In the current state, our constitutional, political and social institutions, which are infected with the peculiar lumpenism and ignorance characteristic of the RSS, are not going to survive in forms resembling what they once were. The day is not far when the universities will be directed by the RSS, the election commissars wrapped in saffron robes, and the judges of the Supreme Court summoning the Brahmin’s gods before delivering each judgment. 

The liberals of bourgeois Brahminism are refusing to read the entrails of the republic. Only recently were we wincing at the editorials on the New York mayoral elections written by liberal Indians; they do live in a fantasy world, with its contrived reality of parties and international friendships that are confronted with the realities of India that are inadequate to that fantasy. The delivery of safe environs for this fantasy is what made the Congress once their party. There is, in the last instance, cruelty in this exercise of finding equations between New York and the whole of India, neglecting the poverty, the state engineered illiteracy, blood shedding, the stench of life squeezing through corruption. 

The Congress used to be the party of the 'upper' caste interests, which it represented through bourgeois accoutrements. In this it is not very different from the oft Brahmin-led Communist-named parties of India. But the Congress lost this status in all those states of India where caste consciousness appeared in one way or another – in Bihar and Tamil Nadu as early as late 1960s. Later, through the anti-Mandal agitations, the 'upper' caste supremacists – both the bourgeois and lumpen kind – found the Congress unsuitable to handle the lower caste surge in politics, which is only increasing in its revolutionary clarity. 

Today, Rahul Gandhi certainly speaks the language of the Phule-Ayyankali-Periyar-Ambedkar movements, but only occasionally and not consistently enough to inspire confidence nor coherently enough to articulate a political project for the annihilation of caste. Yet still, he faces the most severe opposition from the bourgeois Brahminical liberals, the ruling parties, many opposition parties, and also some members of the Congress itself, for speaking in caste. The Congress may also be closer to another split, with the Large Language Model politician with scant intelligence, programmed elsewhere, acting in concert with the present rulers. This syntagma of facts does not elevate Gandhi, but it evidences the hostility of the bourgeois and lumpen Brahminisms towards the very idea of the rightful ascent of the lower caste majority to power to correct the injustice of millennia. 

What can be done

We should do well to read – as the haruspices would – the tendencies of the BJP, its government, its paramilitary parent, its industrial owners, and the international pressures (the Epstein kind and others) it is falling under. In their general form, these tendencies are lumpenisation. Lumpenism never creates something new. Instead, like the mafia and highwaymen, they take what already exists as made and they profit from it. In the sense of Marxist discourse, lumpenism appeared in conjunction with the bourgeois, and was regulated by the latter. Therefore, the question "what is lumpenism all by itself" is yet to be encountered in theory. It could very well be the locust swarm that not only devastates the crop but the seeds and the soil too. 

These lumpenist tendencies are: 

1. The tendencies of techno-fascism, which commands the lumpen Brahminist leaders of India; 
2. The progressive lumpenisation – corruption directed by illiteracy – of academic, journalistic, jurisprudential and other offices;
3. The tendency of lumpenisation of businesses – Adani, Ambani and others – leading to the loot and plunder of water, forest, land, air and animal lives;
4. The accelerating exodus of Indians with qualifications and qualities which can be sold as labour elsewhere;
5.  And, militaristic adventurism in the extraordinary complexity of the present world to which lumpenism is blind.   

It is clear that the theatre of mere pretence to voting as politics, of photos with the ink-stained finger, of curses flung at the poor women of Bihar, and the laments in general about the state of our electoral institution will not last much longer. The only possibility is through protests, mass movements, general strikes, led by the good telos of a political project. That is, the people as the irregular and the people as the prophets who bring a future according to the ends chosen by them. There are many names to such a people, including revolutionary. 

But why should we suddenly speak about a political project when the liberal order tells us to speak out about ‘issues’ – traffic congestion, pollution, taxation, less duty on imported luxury goods, and clean parks? Because, a country and its constitution are not a collection of housing societies, in which case it has no legitimacy. The only reason for a democratic arrangement as a country to exist is to pursue national projects of equal wellbeing of all its people. Democracy makes sense only when it is for the eudaimonia (the wellbeing, to oversimplify) for all. And the state of a real democracy is the quality of the people who are without the qualities of inequalities. 

Such a conception of democracy is blocked – kept in stasis – by 'upper' caste supremacism which refuses to acknowledge the reality of the millennia old humiliation, abjection, pain, penury and deaths of the more than 90% of India’s population, the real mass of India, the lower caste majority. If there is to be a mass movement to give us the redemption of democracy, it must be preceded by the promise to be led by the lower caste majority and the will to render the annihilation of caste.

Without it, there will be no mass movements, and not even nominal democracy. 

Divya Dwivedi and Shaj Mohan are philosophers based in the subcontinent, and are authors of Indian Philosophy, Indian Revolution: On Caste and Politics, Hurst UK, OUP USA, Westland India, 2024. 

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