I first noticed the nuanced talk of this entrepreneur-turned-educator in Tiktok. Then I pursued him and chatted for more than an hour through Zoom.

In this wide-ranging conversation, first ever English podcast that I have posted here, you will find many of your own concerns about the evolving media ecosystem. Please feel free to write your own opinions in the comments.

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You can watch the video version of this article in Nepali here:

In Suketu Mehta’s acclaimed book Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found, there is a true story. One day, while there on some business, he visits the office of the city’s police chief. A teenage boy is being interrogated there — arrested on charges of murder.

After a few tight slaps from the police, the boy confesses to his involvement in the killing.

“How much did you get paid to kill him?” the officer asks.

“Fifty.”

“You killed a man for fifty thousand rupees?”

“No, sir. For fifty rupees.”

The boy made his living collecting scrap from garbage dumps. That income barely covered his food. His home was a tiny shack near the garbage heap — patched together with jute sacks. The monsoon was almost there. He couldn’t go without plastic sheeting to keep the rain out. He was struggling to scrape together even a few coins.

Around that same time, a woman had conspired with her lover to kill her husband. They needed someone to dispose of the body — and they called on this boy. For fifty rupees (~0.5 USD), he had spent hours cutting the body into pieces, packing them into two to three kilogram plastic packets, and dumping them into the drain.

This happened in the 1990s. Yet even today, this level of destitution exists in many parts of the world.

A series of cascading crises in recent years has pushed hundreds of millions more people into this kind of destitution. In India — home to nearly 1.5 billion people — the sheer number living in such poverty is the highest on earth.

And tragically, in the coming year or two, even more people in India risk being pushed into extreme poverty. The middle class risks becoming poor. The poor risk becoming destitute.

You may have recently heard or read about the Cockroach Janata Party — a group that sparked a storm in India’s public discourse. The party, set up as a satirical critique of India’s ruling establishment, attracted 21.7 million young people on Instagram within just a few days. The Indian government was so alarmed that within days — despite operating fully within the law — the social media accounts of the party had been shut down or disabled.

Now many of them are back online and the party just held a landmark street demonstration in Delhi but the cloud of repression hangs heavy above the heads of youngsters daring to ask Modi the tough questions.

Few of those young people drawn to the Cockroach Party have probably read the story of that Mumbai teenager who cut up a body for fifty rupees.

But the number of young Indians turning to economic crime just to survive — for food, shelter, and clothing — is not small. According to India’s central bank, digital financial fraud in India grew fivefold between March 2023 and March 2024 alone, reaching 14.5 billion rupees.

Crime and hunger are one thing. But here is the deeper and wider crisis: the youngsters see no path to prosperity for themselves in an economy so heavily tilted against them as I elaborate in this essay.

Indian society today is clearly passing through a terrible tragedy. How deep it will go — and where it will end — no one can say for certain. And then there is the separate question of how long India’s current political order can survive it.

Recently, economist Surjit Bhalla wrote a piece in The Indian Express titled: “BJP Is Winning Elections, But Losing the Economy.” Bhalla is not a known critic of the BJP government. During Modi’s second term, he was a member of the government’s Economic Advisory Council.

In the article, he lists four causes of India’s declining economy. The Modi government comes first.

The coming economic tsunami in India is deeply relevant to Nepal — for several reasons.

First, our economy is tightly linked to India’s. India remains, even now, the only labor market for many Nepalis — especially the poor. Second, our currency is pegged to the Indian rupee, so any fluctuation in India’s currency directly affects ours. Third, many of the economic blunders India has made to reach this point are blunders Nepal risks repeating.

Given that Nepal is already behind India — and our social safety net is far weaker — repeating India’s mistakes could hurt us even more.

1. Statistics vs. Reality: The art of cooking data

India’s GDP growth rate for the fiscal year 2025-26 was 7.7%. The World Bank’s projects that it will be around 6.6% in FY 2026-2027.

In 2019, Narendra Modi promised to grow India’s economy to $5 trillion by 2024 at the end of his second term. That target was missed. But by end of 2025, the Indian government claimed the economy had reached $4.18 trillion, overtaking Japan to become the world’s fourth largest. It also projected that Indian economy would grow to $7.3 trillion by 2030.

By that measure, Indian citizens should not just be satisfied — they should be proud. After all, India overtook Japan, once an economic superpower, and Britain, the colonial power that ruled India for over a century. Indians are famously loud in celebrating such milestones.

And yet, all across India today, there is deep anxiety, fear, and a creeping sense of dread about the economy.

How did this happen?

Just four months after the Indian government announced it had become the world’s fourth largest economy at $4.18 trillion, the IMF published a report placing India as the sixth largest — at $3.9 trillion. Instead of climbing to fourth, India had fallen from fifth to sixth. Not only had Japan overtaken it— Britain, which India had triumphantly claimed to surpass in 2022, had overtaken India again.

Why the discrepancy between the Indian government’s GDP figures and the IMF’s? Hereby lies a twist in the whole India-as-the-fastest-growing-large-economy saga.

Ever since Narendra Modi came to power in 2014, his government has repeatedly been accused of manipulating economic data to inflate growth figures.

Arvind Subramanian — Modi’s own chief economic adviser during his first term — along with economist Devesh Kapur, addressed this in detail in their 2025 book A Sixth of Humanity. Their conclusion: India’s actual growth rate over the past decade has been significantly lower than the official 7–8%.

But the deeper reason ordinary Indians feel increasingly trapped in poverty — even as the statistics show rapid growth — is something else entirely.

According to leading economist Professor Arun Kumar, the author of half a dozen books on Indian economy, the reason is straightforward: the growth figures do not measure the informal sector, which provides livelihoods to 94% of India’s population.

The result: immediately after the 2016 demonetization, growth in the massive informal sector turned negative. The part of the economy that feeds 94% of Indians shrank. Yet the official data for 2017 showed India’s GDP growing at 6.8%.

In the years since, a chain of shocks — the chaotic rollout of the GST tax system, a banking sector crisis, COVID, the Ukraine war — have hammered India’s informal economy one blow after another. The backs of the poor haven’t just been twisted, they’ve been broken. None of this shows up in the statistics. Because none of it is being measured.

According to a 2021 CNN report, in just one year of COVID lockdowns, Modi’s close associate Gautam Adani’s wealth grew from $13 billion to $55 billion. In the five years since, Adani has grown his wealth to $92.6 billion — making him the richest person in Asia.

Here is the bitter truth behind India’s glowing growth story: Adani appears in the statistics but the boy condemned to dismember a corpse for fifty cents does not.

That is why, in an October 2025 podcast, Professor Arun Kumar argued — with evidence — that India’s economy was not $4 trillion but only $2.5 trillion. The remaining $1.5 trillion existed on paper only.

It is in that vast gap between paper statistics and lived reality that India’s young generation is suffocating today.

2. The Hormuz Shock

While poverty was deepening for the poor, Modi was still beating his chest — promising to make India the vishwa guru (world teacher), to move from fourth to third in the global economy, and through his Viksit Bharat 2047 vision, to grow the economy tenfold over the next twenty years — to $30–40 trillion.

Until a few months ago, things were holding together, at least on the surface.

Then the Iran war began.

The moment it did, shock waves spread across the world. From Thailand to Vietnam, Japan to South Korea, countries immediately began conserving fuel, cutting unnecessary consumption, and trimming spending. Some introduced fuel rationing from the very start.

But India had five state elections coming up. Modi needed to project not just that India was growing faster than anyone — but that even as the world was in chaos from the Hormuz crisis, as they call in a Hindi metaphor, “not a hair on our head has moved.”

To do that, petroleum prices were kept artificially frozen while they climbed up elsewhere. Modi’s extravagant campaign motorcades stretched many kilometers. Fuel imported before the Hormuz blockade — distributed by the state at enormous cost — went up in smoke for nothing.

For 73 days after the Hormuz crisis began, the Indian government and its propaganda machine pretended that everything was perfect. Eventually, oil prices remained elevated for so long that India’s foreign exchange reserves themselves began to feel the strain.

Only after the BJP had fraudulently won the West Bengal elections — removing millions of potential opposition voters from electoral rolls — and held onto Assam, did it finally acknowledge the Hormuz crisis. Modi publicly appealed to citizens: don’t buy gold, don’t travel abroad, conserve fuel.

As I write these words on early June, the Hormuz crisis is still unresolved. Whether ships will ever again pass freely through the strait without paying a toll — no one knows. And right now, India’s economy faces a crisis that could push a huge number of Indians into protracted unemployment and potentially lifelong poverty.

3. Signing Your Own Death Warrant

A few months ago, at a multinational garment factory in Gurugram, India, unfamiliar people suddenly appeared on the factory floor. They literally ordered the workers to wear the cameras on their forehead forehead while working. The workers had no choice.

According to an investigation by the Indian independent outlet Scroll.in, some workers were given a packet of mango juice in return. But the purpose of those head-mounted cameras was ultimately to replace those very workers with robots — collecting all the data needed to train the machines.

India was already suffering from jobless growth. According to Azim Premji University’s Status of Working India 2026 report, 40% of university graduates under 25 are already unemployed. Now India is not just failing to create jobs — it is in the midst of a catastrophic destruction of existing ones.

The IT sector, which has been the spine of India’s economy for three decades and employs tens of millions, is rapidly hollowing out. As Western companies that came to India for cheap labor shift to AI, India’s $300 billion outsourcing industry is on the verge of collapse. This is one of the main reasons the Indian rupee is falling so sharply.

From the ordinary garment worker sewing all day to feed their family at night, to the IT engineer earning millions a year — the changing nature of the economy is delivering a brutal kick to the stomach of both. Even graduates from world-renowned institutions like the IITs are, for the first time in history, facing the prospect of unemployment.

The collapse in demand for goods and services that will follow all this new unemployment — and the newer wave of unemployment that will follow that collapse — is almost impossible to imagine.

4. A Terrified Young Generation

With all of this happening — why isn’t India’s youth rising up in protest? Why does Modi’s party keep winning urban elections?

In an episode of the Indian Business Podcast, Axis Bank’s Head of Digital Business, Samir Shetty, presents a striking and sobering statistic. Gen Z — which makes up 28–30% of India’s population — holds just 4% of bank savings. Yet this same generation accounts for 50% of personal loans.

Similarly, while around 58 million Indians invest in mutual funds, one single online gambling company alone has 260 million registered users. The vast majority are young people. According to various data sources, more than 90% — some 230 million Indians — lose money gambling on these platforms.

Writer and investment advisor Saurabh Mukherjea recently laid out some frightening facts in an interview about how India’s young generation is coping with the economic crisis.

According to him, the Indian middle class is responding to the rapid job destruction driven by AI and other forces in a few ways: First, borrowing personal loans from four, five, or as many sources as possible. Second, taking out or topping up on home loans, sensing that their jobs may soon disappear. Third, in the years just after COVID, the number of young people taking antidepressants has risen dramatically.

Mukherjea says: “India’s situation today is far more frightening than it was during COVID — because no one has an answer to when, or how, this economic crisis and job destruction will end.”

5. The Modi Government shoots at the nation’s feet

According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, as of June 8, 2026, Gautam Adani — with a net worth of $120 billion — ranks 17th in the world, one place above Bill Gates. From $13 billion before COVID, he has grown his wealth ninefold in six years. The overall Indian stock market, in that same period, has roughly doubled.

According to respected Indian financial journalist Ravi Sinha, even that stock market valuation is not healthy — it is inflated like a balloon, and could correct sharply at any time. Already, many foreign investors who brought dollars into India have been pulling out of the stock market in recent years, having made little or nothing — their returns eaten by the falling rupee. So while those close to Modi have seen their wealth soar, both domestic and foreign investors have earned little — or lost money.

Professor Arun Kumar has been pointing to a deeper structural crisis in dozens of interviews. According to him, India’s informal sector — though it contributes just under half of GDP — employs 94% of the workforce (officially, 90%). Since Modi came to power in 2014, every major policy has benefited only the formal sector — the 6–10%, roughly 50 million people, employed in organized industry.

On top of that, Modi-linked business houses like Adani and Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance hold near-monopolies in the most profitable sectors. According to The Economist, the revenues of the two companies alone account for nearly 4% of India’s entire GDP.

The informal sector — which provides work and income to 450 million Indian workers — was crippled by demonetization in 2016, and has been further weakened by every subsequent crisis having never recovered fully from the first shock. The result: 800 million people’s lives are sustained by 5 kilograms of wheat or rice per person per month distributed by the government.

All in all, more than a billion people are being forced to cut back on basic necessities like food and clothing — collapsing domestic demand, which was itself a major driver of unemployment long before AI arrived.

Meanwhile, Modi’s government keeps pouring energy into lifting the formal sector — dreaming of making India a Singapore or Malaysia. But industrialists can’t even run their existing factories at full capacity, because the 1.25 billion Indians crushed by stagnation have no purchasing power. The excess capital the industrialists receive from government largesse is being invested abroad.

According to a CNBC report published on May 20 of this year, India’s wealthy invested $35.8 billion overseas in 2025 — 2.6 times more than two years earlier.

Billions of dollars, had they reached India’s poor, would have been spent on food, rice, and clothing, keeping India’s own economy moving. Instead, that capital is now leaving the country. Ordinary Indians may thump their chests about Indian industrialists buying companies that build prestigious brands like Land Rover and Royal Enfield. But the economic ground beneath their feet has shifted so dramatically that large parts of the middle class are themselves sliding into unemployment.

On top of all this, massive subsidies for farmers on fertilizer and electricity, reckless cash handouts for election wins, and bloated wasteful schemes have left India unable to invest adequately in infrastructure — and with almost no capacity to absorb any economic shock.

The Hormuz crisis has just exposed all of this, brutally, for the world to see.

Now, cornered by the economic disaster he himself created through twelve years of blunders, Narendra Modi is left with nothing except lecturing citizens not to buy gold or travel abroad, and crushing anyone who dares raise a voice of dissent.

6. What Nepal must avoid at any cost

India’s economy is more than a hundred times larger than Nepal’s. Its per capita GDP is nearly double ours. So it is natural to feel that we have much to learn from what appears to be a more successful economy.

There are things to learn, I concur. But at the end of this essay, I want to focus on something different: what blunders, based on India’s experience, Nepal must avoid.

India is not short of experts. When demonetization happened in 2016, the Governor of India’s central bank was Raghuram Rajan, and the Prime Minister’s chief economic adviser was Arvind Subramanian — both world-renowned economists. Both warned Modi about the risks of demonetization and advised strongly against it. But Modi’s arrogance and narcissism made him believe that demonetization would transform the economy and proceeded with it. The rest is history

Nepal’s first lesson from India: a parliamentary majority does not automatically make a ruling party or its leaders wise or far-sighted. Even a leader with a landslide mandate can easily crash a country’s economy.

The second lesson for Nepal: good intentions alone are not enough for progress and prosperity. Before 2016, India had a fragmented, chaotic tax system — effectively 26 different tax regimes in one country. A unified national tax system had been needed for decades, and no one disagreed that a GST-type reform was necessary.

But the way Modi’s government rushed the GST into effect on July 1, 2017, a body blow was delivered to an already fragile economy. Small and medium businesses were hit hardest.

Third: propaganda that presents a bad situation as good can work for a while. It can even win elections. But in the end, it proves no warmer than the brief heat of urine.

Finally, to distract from India’s fragile economic reality, Modi’s BJP, its parent organization the RSS, and the other affiliated militia groups have cultivated a near-catastrophic division, hatred, and violence in Indian society. Given where such state-sponsored violence has led societies in the past, I find it hard, at this time, to rule out a Nazi Germany-level ethnic cleansing in a country of 1.5 billion people.

As the climate crisis intensifies and desertification spreads across India — and as the Modi government’s incompetence continues — I believe only a miraculous course correction can potentially halt India’s downward trajectory towards ruin. Given the divisions and hatred the state has already spread, the voices it has silenced, and the increasingly fascist character of the government, India’s social and political crisis is even graver than the economic one.

If India moves further down the hell of 20th century Germany and Italy, Nepal will have to work very hard to protect its democracy and pluralism.

As a Nepali citizen, this is my biggest concern right now. I hope you too are now besieged by concerns about the ‘world’s largest democracy’, regardless of your nationality because when a country of 1.5 billion goes rogue, the nightmare spreads far and wide.

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As I type these words on April 13, the stand-up comedy special titled ‘Still Alive’ by Indian comic Samay Raina has over 44 million views in youtube alone. It was published in the platform on April 7.

You can easily imagine the clout that kind of popularity and magnetism can buy you in today’s world. Millions of youngsters now aspire to be nothing but a content creator with that kind of reach. And the fame and money that inevitably accompany it.

That is the kind of following which can be potentially channeled into something that can transform societies by, say, swinging an election. In less dramatic ways, you can educate an entire population with the megaphone that size.

Indeed today, nearly all the power to shape the public opinion that the mainstream media has hemorrhaged has been shifting to the influencers and content creators like Raina. Remember that Joe Rogan podcast Donald Trump did and Kamala Harris avoided before the 2024 elections?

It thus logically follows that even as India slides further down the authoritarian slope towards totalitarianism under Narendra Modi, popular influencers like Raina should pose a reasonable check to the powers of the omnipotent state. In a democracy where the opposition has been vanquished in three consecutive elections and endlessly persecuted in between, civil society is supposed to (try to) hold the state accountable for its worst excesses.

Among civic voices also, the comedians with their weapons of humor and satire, are supposed to challenge the powerful in innovative ways even when direct and plain-spoken criticism is beyond question.

If only that applied to India.

In this post, I will elaborate how the saga of persecution and comeback of Samay Raina throws floodlight into the decrepit state of India’s civil society and the society at large today.

Tragedy 1: A stupid joke becomes a crime and topples a mega-hit Youtube show

Until February 2025, there was a very important difference between democratic→authoritarian India and authoritarian→totalitarian China. In India you could laugh out loud until you passed out provided the joke was not on the dear leader or anyone who pledged allegiance to him or the RSS, his party’s mother organization.

Out of many shows that grew in this fertile environment of a billion and a half souls stripped of the right to express thought freely but allowed to indulge in self-numbing humor without the edge of satire, Raina’s India’s Got Latent (IGL) was the unrivaled champion. In the show, a panel of five or so judges roasted the participants who came to show their ‘talent’—however mediocre or idiosyncratic that may be—and got roasted back in the process.

With carefully chosen panel of judges, many of them well-known for their tendency to create outrage and controversy, this produced quite a spectacle to behold. Raina recalls in the video that his show used to be viewed in 40 million unique devices every single month.

Then came the episode where a young podcaster popular with the name of his youtube channel ‘Beer Biceps’ parroted a distasteful joke made by someone else in an earlier, unrelated show. The fact that the joke touched upon the ‘sacred relationship between parents and their children’ suddenly seemed to touch the raw nerve in a country where approximately 15.8 million girls have gone ‘missing’ at birth mostly due to sex-selective abortion since 1990.

A good number among them are certain to be infanticides instead of abortions.

In a country where no girl was born out of 200 births over a period of three months in 132 villages, it is natural to find parents conspiring to kill their baby girls with absolute impunity, little guilt and zero shame. With as many as one girl fetus out of ten aborted, India once reached an abominable record of 882 girls for every 1000 boys born.

But how could anyone in their right mind dare to joke about the ‘sacred’ parent-child relationship?

The outrage by the saffron-robed vanguards of ‘the great Indian values’ which resulted from that single stupid joke was so ferocious, visceral and violent that the issue seemed to eclipse everything else in the public discourse for weeks that followed. The venue where the program was shot was vandalized. Death threats to the offending joker (he is not a comedian, more on him below) were accompanied by death and rape threats to people who simply laughed at the joke.

FIRs, the dreaded First Information Reports about the ‘crime’ soon followed against the joker as well as the offenders who were depraved enough to laugh at his joke. One enthusiastic Chief Minister of one of the Indian provinces came forward with his own personal FIR against them on top of others from many corners in India.

A country torn apart by caste and class divisions, haunted by perniciously high youth unemployment and tormented by poverty, corruption and lawlessness just came together to condemn the band of ‘vulgars’ making and laughing at a bad joke.

It would be so comical if this were not so terrifyingly effective toolkit to transform Indian state from the democratic→authoritarian spectrum to the authoritarian→totalitarian one where thinking and having certain emotions starts becoming crime, not only the expression of those thoughts and emotions. How can anyone dare find a joke laughable—and not vulgar or obnoxious—without the ruling authority first approving it as such?

Banishment of the entire show—not merely the episode with the ‘vulgar’ joke—from youtube was the first step in the long process of payback from the creator to the offended state and the society. If you want to go through the hour-by-hour account of how all this monstrosity unfolded (provided you can understand Hindi or can get it translated to English in real time), you can watch Raina’s latest special video here which I mentioned at the beginning.

Tragedy 2: The ‘popular’ comedy acknowledges its complicity with ‘notorious’ news media in killing people’s voices

Just like any other country in the world, Indian society has its share of both the coward and the brave.

This is the country of Kailash Satyarthi, the mild-mannered Nobel Peace laureate who has been repeatedly assaulted almost to death while rescuing children from the hell of bonded labor and sex slavery. He has lost scores of his friends while orchestrating rescue of the children enslaved by the powerful and violent gangs with political connections who could command the state’s law enforcement mechanism at their service.

Such courage, however, is not limited to the glare of a Nobel Prize which Satyarthi got decades after dedicating his life to the service of enslaved children in near-total oblivion. In the obscurity of near-anonymity in the small Indian towns and villages, journalists like Subhash Kumar Mahato, Chandan Tiwari, Indradev Yadav, Amit Topno, Mukesh Chandrakar and Sandip Kothari are among the multitude of conscientious Indian citizens who have payed the price for doing their jobs honestly with their lives.

Many of them were bludgeoned to death with unimaginable brutality at the hands of the mafioso that runs the country’s liquor trade, real estate, mining and construction sectors. Others were hacked to death in silence for their courage to expose local corruption even as the Delhi-centric so-called mainstream media sold their souls to the highest bidder; in this case the mega-rich ruling party. In return, they spread the poison of communal hatred and bigotry full time in order to distract people from the sordid reality of daily life in Modi’s India.

In the largely apolitical and exceedingly cautious ‘comedy special’ recalling the entire scandal, Samay Raina blurts out a single inconvenient truth about India’s comedy and the larger arts scene. In response to the predatory coverage of the fiasco related to IGL by India’s Modi-fied television media, he jokingly says: the day we stop making people laugh, they’ll start asking tough questions (to the ruling establishment), so we are in the same team (with the TV media in slavishly serving those in power).

In this single statement, Raina indicts both the retreating mainstream media and the thriving ‘mainstream’ comedy in India as the ‘team’ that enforces the status quo by preempting any questions whatsoever that could be raised even by the ordinary people, let alone asking those questions themselves. The first one does it by spreading the maddening poison of communal hatred and bigotry, the second one by numbing the people’s conscience with the sheer banality of humor devoid of satire.

Just let that sink in for a moment: the sections of the society which are supposed to be the voice of the voiceless are openly and shamelessly into snuffing out whatever little voice the voiceless still have in service of the dear leader.

The real tragedy here is that Raina, while honestly acknowledging this reality, effectively endorses and implicitly validates the status quo in which the two potentially great avenues of public service and civic resistance submit to the state’s coercion and playfully and openly embrace the authoritarian project to stifle any—not just adversarial—thoughts and emotions that do not fit the authoritarian rule-book.

Tragedy 3: The popular becomes powerless and spineless and crumples down at the state’s feet.

In a country where an obscure electrical engineer can go on to rescue more than a hundred thousand children from forced labor in the hellish workplaces, can you imagine what a strong and conscientious moral stance from a popular creator like Raina could have accomplished?

You need not look any further than the life and work of his fellow comedian Kunal Kamra who has been relentlessly fighting to give voice to the voiceless, defend the freedom of speech and block the onslaught of censorship laws and practices in India.

In a sheer twist of irony, Kamra was among the judges of the other episodes of the IGL show who were slapped with cases for that single stupid joke even though nobody knows if they ever listened to or laughed at the joke in the first place. How could they dare sit at the spot where a ‘heinous criminal’ would go on to sit in the future?

Raina’s 81 minutes long special video describing the ‘ordeal’ on his part is deeply engrossing and relatable to anyone in or observing India closely. Some have gone as far as lauding him for ‘standing up to the powerful’ by making and releasing this video. And you may be tempted to agree with that.

But just think for a moment: what new benchmark of ‘standing up to the powerful’ has India just set up?

Bending and folding up as the spectacular instrument with which the government advertised its bulldozing of the constitutionally protected right to free speech (and free thought and emotions in that order) and then going on to elaborate how you bent down and folded up, is that the new high of creative freedom in India?

I can certainly understand and empathize with the creators in India for whom the oppressive state control of their creative life is a lived reality. But living in Nepal, a freer country (until now, at least), I feel that Raina’s special comeback video further normalizes the culture of chilling censorship and self-censorship in India.

If Samay Raina, the poster-child of the New Media with his 41 million youtube subscribers, folds so easily at the earliest sign of trouble, instantly deletes the episodes of the show which had absolutely nothing to do with the alleged crime of a stupid future joke, rushes to apologize for crimes he never committed, and is yet hounded for the ‘crime’, how could anyone planning to start a career in stand-up comedy with 41 subscribers ever try writing and speaking anything remotely critical of the regime?

Didn’t Modi’s India just create one of the most successful instrument of thought policing?

I am not faulting Raina here for creating this suffocating reality but he has definitely set a precedent and left the blueprint here for future comedians and artists as to how to fold and bend even when not at fault, and then to monitize the whole process, all along carefully avoiding the wrath of the ruling establishment.

The Joker and the Comedian

Kunal Kamra, the comedian slapped with cases for merely being on the show on whose future the ‘crime’ was going to be committed, is among the few sane and courageous voices in India who have sacrificed almost everything in their personal and social life to tell the truth.

From my vantage point outside India’s borders in Nepal, it looks like they are the reasons why the ‘world’s largest’ moribund democracy is still breathing, however faintly.

“Relationship Status – 37, Male, Straight, Single, Never Married But Feel Divorced Because Of The Court Cases," Kamra tweeted last year. Even though it looks sarcastic, this statement neatly sums up the predicament in the personal life of people like Kamra in today’s India.

As any venue where he performs has now become the ‘legitimate target’ for the attack by saffron-clad mob now handling India’s moral policing department, he has been practically banished from the live stand-up scene in India and has been forced to live in the relative safety of South India where the poisonous flowers of Modi’s communal politics are yet to bloom as well as in the North.

Rana Ayyub, the fearless investigative journalist subjected to way more vitriol than Kamra for critiquing Modi while being a Muslim and a woman in today’s India, has expressed similar sentiments in a video a few years ago while talking about her own un-marriability or perpetual single-hood.

Apparently, the rape threats and death threats, the chosen weapons against any woman standing up to the establishment in India, were not enough in her case. The leaders of India’s ruling party went as far as creating and circulating a deep-fake porn video with her face pasted in somebody else’s body; that too in the old days when doing so diligently required a budget comparable to that of a Bollywood movie.

On the other hand, the ‘joker’ whose joke disrupted the entire IGL castle was receiving the ‘disruptor of the year’ award from Narendra Modi himself as late as March 2024. Modi’s ministers jockeyed to be in his podcast as the people’s gaze increasingly shifted from the naked and shrill bigotry of the godi (lapdog) television screens to the serenely lighted podcast studios where the venom was packaged more carefully.

By charging as much as Rs. 3.3 million (USD 35.5k) per podcast package and Rs 8 lakh (USD 9k) per instagram reel, he was among the top-earning influencers in India. He was also the trailblazer in the Indian podcast world leading the way in spreading superstitions, conspiracy theories and pseudo-science, marketing snake oils, propagating the commercially adulterated spirituality and spreading outright nonsense. In doing so, he was helping the Indian lapdog media and the prostrate comedians in diverting the country’s attention away from the callousness, corruption and ineptitude in Narendra Modi’s government.

Meanwhile he was also polluting the minds of millions of Indians, erasing their already weak scientific temperament and critical thinking faculty and pushing them deeper into the darkness of superstition, blind faith and fatalism.

As he kept ascending the ladder of wealth and fame, he became inevitable for show like IGL. The rest is now history.

The Ultimate Tragedy

Please forgive me if I sounded cruel towards Raina, someone whose family was uprooted from their ancestral land in Kashmir and who has just cobbled together enough courage to expose India’s gigantic censorship machine for what it really is. I have absolutely no bitterness towards him or his fellow comics who have made a devil’s bargain with the Indian state just to survive as artists during these times of darkness.

I have heard Kunal Kamra say in some interview something to this effect: he is thankful to fellow ‘apolitical’ comedians as long as they desist from spreading the poison of division and hatred like their counterparts in news media. They may not have challenged the establishment but they have not empowered it either.

In a recent interview, he reiterates that he does what he thinks is right but does not dwell into what effect it will or will not have. That is the wisdom that Indian sages have crystallized after thousands of years of introspection including in the Bhagvad Gita, the vaunted text that the right-winger haters of him quote repeatedly and mindlessly.

He also goes to the root cause of his profound sadness and indignation as a citizen of India under Modi rule: not only have the people seen their opportunities to move upwards vanish as Modi rule keeps extending with every election, their very dreams have been erased too, leaving them unsure of what they want with life other than preserving their breaths for the longest possible time.

Before I end this piece, let’s imagine a parallel world where Raina refused to bend to the coercive state.

A few days (or weeks at the worst) of jail time would have likely followed. As Kunal Kamra has exercised after refusing to apologize for a joke on a powerful ruling politician, even the option of anticipatory bail was in front of him. The entire show, hosted in youtube and with no problems with its content guidelines, would be still online. Clipping the ‘offensive’ and distasteful joke from that single episode would have been a reasonable thing to do.

The biggest implicit justification that Raina gives in the video for bending to the authorities is that his parents were suffering too much. Apparently, those offended so badly by the Joker’s joke related to the parents were emphatically sending death and rape threats to the parents of the ‘accused’ including those who merely laughed at the joke.

Desperation to minimize pain to one’s parents in such a situation is totally understandable, but at what cost?

If you look at the larger picture, it is the same India of hurt sentiments today where Muslims, Dalits and other minorities have been jailed for more than five years without a trial, disappeared, condemned to painful death while being denied a straw after being unable to drink water without one because of Parkinsonism and simply hacked to death, all for the crime of belonging to those communities.

Whose job is it to contemplate what pain and horror the parents and children of these poor souls are going through right now?

Does the pain of someone from the majority community slapped with a few FIRs exist in a universe separate from the one which holds the pain of a Dalit or a Muslim family who were forced to witness the gruesome murder of their loved ones and were then penalized themselves for seeking justice while the murderers roamed free?

Isn’t this schism between the two universes—sustained by the ‘safe-playing’ comedians as much as the rabidly communal news anchors—the ultimate shield against any accountability for Narendra Modi’s rapaciously communal and dictatorial governance?

Isn’t this the status quo that Raina just acknowledged that he and the Joker were openly complicit in preserving by numbing people to the injustices being carried out in their midst?

It is commendable that Raina blurted out the reality about the complicity of his class with the media in saving Modi regime from the scrutiny expected in a democracy. But I sincerely wish he developed the courage to look into the pain of those on the wrong side of Modi’s India, empathized with them and used his enormous influence in the country to make India a better and more just place instead of making piles of money out of misery and penury of a billion human beings.

Thank you so much for patiently reaching to the end. Please like, comment and share it so that I can reach more people like you.

For those of you who are reading me for the first time here, a few links to my earlier work can be found here:

Interview with Harsh Mander, Indian author and activist.

Interview with Pervez Hoodbhoy, Pakistani nuclear physicist and public intellectual.

Panel discussion with both Mander and Hoodbhoy titled ‘Healing the wounds of division and hatred in South Asia’.

Interview with Messoud Romdhani, member of Tunisian civic coalition that won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2015.

For the links to a series of articles for Asia Times Online that I wrote more than a decade ago, you can visit my LinkdIn profile here.

For Nepali speakers among you, I have this bonus content, two of the videos I made during my long absence from THG: