Yogendra Yadav : BJP Has Gone So Deep Into Power, Leaving Is No Longer an Option

ELI5 / TLDR

Yogendra Yadav — political scientist, psephologist, and activist — sits down for a 90-minute conversation covering almost everything wrong with Indian democracy in 2026. The BJP, he argues, has embedded itself so deeply into the machinery of the state — electoral rolls, judiciary, media, defense contracts — that even if it wanted to leave power cleanly, it probably cannot. There is too much to hide. The SIR (Special Intensive Revision) of voter rolls is being rushed through before elections in ways that delete real voters and manufacture phantom ones. The census is being quietly moved outside constitutional protection so that the coming delimitation can be done by ordinary law rather than by constitutional amendment. And India’s foreign policy has gone from moral leadership of the Global South to begging America for a thirty-day waiver to keep buying oil.

The Full Story

The Book and Its Title: Ganarajya ka Swadharma

The conversation opens with Yadav explaining his new book. The title translates roughly as The Republic’s Own Duty — and he chose both words with deliberate care.

Ganarajya (republic) is not the same as ganatantra (democracy). The latter is just jan + tantra — people + system. The former adds man, the collective mind and moral conscience. Yadav’s argument is that India’s republic has a soul, and that soul predates the 1950 constitution. It is the distilled residue of three thousand years of civilisational argument — Buddhism, Sufism, the Bhakti movement, the freedom struggle. The constitution is not an imported document. It is that long argument, finally written down.

Swadharma is even more loaded. In Sanskrit, dharma has nothing to do with religion as the English word understands it. It means something closer to the duty that a thing owes by virtue of what it is. A river’s dharma is to flow. A republic’s dharma is to protect equal citizenship. The RSS has hijacked the word to mean Hindu sectarian loyalty. Yadav is trying to reclaim it: the republic’s swadharma is precisely the opposite of what the current ruling ideology preaches.

He names four pillars of that swadharma: maitri (fraternal solidarity — what we now call secularism, but present in India since the Buddha and Ashoka); samata (equality — what the Sufi saints and Bhakti poets practiced centuries before socialism was a word); loktantra (democratic practice — the Pali canon describes voting procedures and quorums in the Buddha’s sangha); and sangh (federalism — the principle that local custom and authority must be respected).

These are not Western imports. The defenders of the constitution made the mistake of speaking a language — English, liberal, cosmopolitan — that felt alien to most Indians. Gandhi never made that mistake. His successors did.

Three Mentors

Yadav speaks with visible emotion about the three people to whom he dedicated the book: Kishan Patnaik, Sachchidananda Sinha, and Ashok Sekasaria.

Patnaik was a socialist MP from Odisha at thirty-two, one of the great thinkers of the post-Lohia left, and died with no house and no bank balance. His wife’s teacher’s salary was their household income. He refused to draw his MP pension until he turned sixty — he found it undignified to collect state support when ordinary people could not. Yadav lived in his orbit for twenty years and says he never once heard the man lie. Not even in small matters.

Sinha was the son of a Bihar cabinet minister and chose to organize coal miners in Bombay. He wrote more books than ten professors combined, and lived in a kuccha house in a Bihar village.

Sekasaria was from a famous Calcutta Marwari family, a freedom fighter’s son, and lived in the servants’ quarters of his family’s bungalow. When Yadav once sent him an essay he was proud of, Sekasaria returned a postcard: There is some exaggeration here. In trying to be vivid, you have said slightly more than the truth. Don’t do this.

Yadav’s point is not nostalgia. It is that these people showed him how to think, and he feels that what they gave him is not his to keep.

Can BJP Be Dislodged?

The interviewer asks the obvious question: Congress lasted about fifteen years before it started cracking. BJP is eleven years in. Is the comparison useful?

Yadav says the situations are structurally different. First, Congress fell because of sustained effort by socialists, communists, and Jan Sangh cadres who spent decades building opposition. It did not just happen. Second, and more importantly, BJP has now accumulated so much liability that it cannot leave power in an orderly way. A successor government would open Adani’s contracts. It would trace which companies bought Russian oil at a discount while the petrol price for Indian consumers stayed high. The Epstein files could implicate people. The defence deals have commissions running into tens of thousands of crores. A clean exit is no longer possible. This is what Yadav means by the title of the interview: the ruling party has gone so deep into power that leaving is no longer a real option.

He adds that India is not Putin’s Russia. Russians had seventy years of Soviet rule before Putin — they have no living memory of what working democracy feels like. Indians do. The Emergency is within living memory. People remember big leaders being thrown out. That institutional memory is not gone. It is suppressed, not erased.

SIR: Deleting Voters, Creating Phantoms

The SIR — Special Intensive Revision — is the Election Commission’s process of intensively re-verifying voter rolls before elections. Yadav has been in court and on the ground challenging it, and he describes what he found.

In practice, SIR means sending enrollment agents door to door with a form. If you are not home, or if the agent never actually came, your name gets struck off. The deletions are concentrated in Muslim-majority areas, in informal housing, in migrant worker settlements — anywhere the poor live in ways the state finds hard to enumerate. People who have voted for twenty years suddenly find themselves off the rolls.

The phantoms are the mirror image. Yadav brought three witnesses before the Election Commission in a Supreme Court hearing — people whose names appeared on the rolls at addresses where they had never lived, or who did not exist. The Election Commission, after receiving the witnesses’ full details (name, father’s name, age, constituency, sex), took two weeks and then told the court it could not verify who these people were. Yadav had already verified all three in 2.7 seconds using the public database. The Commission then accused him of bringing “fake names” — and did so in a written affidavit, despite having those names on WhatsApp messages timestamped to the minute.

The Supreme Court, which heard this matter, was initially skeptical of the Commission’s rush. The bench noted that deleting rolls right before an election was strange and asked why it couldn’t wait. Then, without issuing a judgment on the constitutional validity of the SIR, the court said: it cannot be stopped. Yadav’s reading: the court has delivered a verdict without having announced one.

One Nation, One Election

The government’s push to hold all state and central elections simultaneously is framed as an efficiency measure — it will save money, reduce policy disruption, allow governance to flow uninterrupted.

Yadav dismantles the cost argument in about three sentences. Most election spending is by candidates, not the state. If a candidate was going to hand out sarees and cash in a Lok Sabha election, he will do the same in a simultaneous assembly election. The actual saving would be perhaps thirty or fifty percent of state election costs — significant, but nothing compared to a single defence deal’s commissions. A single defence procurement has kickbacks larger than the entire national election budget.

The real motive is simpler. In Odisha in 2024, the BJP swept the Lok Sabha seats and also won the assembly — something that could only happen if both votes were cast on the same day under the same Modi wave. Separating them would have required Odisha BJP to win on its own record. They could not have.

The deeper problem is structural: simultaneous elections will eventually mean federal elections being dragged into alignment with the centre’s schedule, subordinating state democracy to national momentum.

The Census, Delimitation, and the Constitutional Sleight of Hand

This is the section Yadav is most agitated about, and which received the least media coverage.

Delimitation — the redrawing of parliamentary and assembly constituencies — must be based on a census. The current seats are apportioned on the 1971 census. A new census, once done, triggers a new delimitation. Southern states, whose populations grew slowly because they invested in education and family planning, stand to lose seats dramatically to high-fertility states in the north. The political implications are enormous.

The constitutional provision requiring a census is being quietly shifted to ordinary law — meaning it can be amended by a simple parliamentary majority rather than requiring the two-thirds plus state ratification that amending the constitution demands. This is not an arcane procedural point. It means the government can redesign the very data on which all future political representation is based, whenever it wants, by whatever methodology it prefers, with minimal checks.

Yadav tweeted about this on April 14 and says the tweet was essentially ignored by national media. He is not surprised. The national media — he calls it “notional media” — has operating instructions.

India’s Foreign Policy: From Moral Force to Mendicant

The final section is the sharpest. Yadav describes India’s current international position with undisguised contempt.

The specific trigger is the “grant” — a thirty-day American waiver allowing India to continue buying oil from Russia and Iran. Indian government spokespeople treated this as a diplomatic achievement. Yadav asks: when did India become a country that had to beg a foreign power for permission to decide where it buys its groceries?

India was once the leader of the non-aligned world, the country that spoke for Palestine and South Africa when no Western power would. It had moral authority that outweighed its military or economic size. That authority has been spent. Sri Lanka can publicly rebuke Trump. Spain can. Mexico’s president said what he thought. India’s Prime Minister cannot.

Why? Because multiple pressure points exist. Adani faces criminal charges in the United States — not civil, criminal. The Epstein files reportedly contain material that could be released selectively. The leverage is real. When you have compromised yourself on every front for small transactional advantages, you lose both the deal and the dignity. India got neither.

In China’s case, the humiliation is direct: Modi government’s own statement that “no one entered” Indian territory during the Galwan standoff was used by China in international forums as Indian government confirmation that there was no intrusion. The clip was broadcast by Chinese state media.

Bangladesh, once India’s closest partner in the subcontinent, is now moving toward China. Nepal, Maldives, Sri Lanka — the same story in each. Pakistan is hosting ceasefire talks and receiving thanks from Trump. India is not in the room.

Key Takeaways

BJP’s accumulation of legal and financial exposure makes a clean exit from power genuinely difficult — the party is trapped by what it has done in office.
The SIR (Special Intensive Revision) of voter rolls is deleting real voters in poor and minority areas while the Election Commission blocks legal challenges with bad-faith procedural moves.
Moving the census mandate from constitutional to ordinary law is a structural change that almost no one has noticed, and it sets up a delimitation that could permanently redraw political power.
One Nation One Election serves BJP’s electoral arithmetic more than any governance efficiency — it fuses state results to national Modi-wave momentum.
India’s foreign policy has traded moral authority for transactional micro-benefits, leaving the country unable to stand up to American pressure, Chinese territorial aggression, or regional neighbours who used to look to Delhi.
The constitution’s defenders lost ordinary Indians because they spoke an alien language. Reclaiming democratic legitimacy requires speaking in the idioms the civilisation actually uses — maitri, samata, dharma — not in imported liberal vocabulary.

Claude’s Take

This is a long conversation and Yadav does not waste much of it. He is meticulous in a way that political analysts on television rarely are — when he makes a claim about the SIR or the census, he has dates, WhatsApp timestamps, and court filings behind it. The section on how voter rolls are manipulated is the most concrete and the most alarming. The census-to-ordinary-law move is genuinely underreported.

Where the conversation is weaker: the philosophical sections on swadharma and ganarajya are interesting but run long relative to what they deliver. The book sounds like it makes those arguments more rigorously than the interview does. Yadav’s nostalgia for his socialist mentors is moving but occasionally tips into a slightly self-congratulatory register — the implicit point being that he, having known the truly pure, is better positioned to judge the impure present.

The BJP-trapped-by-corruption argument is compelling but not fully tested here. It assumes that a successor government would actually prosecute rather than negotiate. Indian political history suggests the latter is more common.

On foreign policy, Yadav is at his most emotionally engaged and analytically thinnest — the argument is broadly correct but the causal chain (Modi’s personal compromises → India’s inability to speak up) is asserted rather than demonstrated.

Still, 8/10. This is one of the clearer articulations available of what Indian electoral manipulation actually looks like in practice, from someone who has been in the courtrooms fighting it.

Yogendra Yadav : BJP Has Gone So Deep Into Power, Leaving Is No Longer an Option | People's Affairs