Preface
REGIME CHANGE is the flavour of the season and it is not a topic for a high-school elocution contest though I’m not sure whether high schools still have these things. If they do, Shashi Tharoor would win it decisively.
Regime change is also not a topic for nightly TV debates where loudmouths identify themselves with wings, not as people.
Regime change is the Great Truth of our time and there are no sides or wings or ideologies to truth. Regime change is the truth because its practitioners and purveyors have stated it in so many words. The name of its vilest purveyor also begins with P—Prashant Bhushan.
The so-called Arab Spring, which began in 2010, made the shrillest noise at the time and was globally hailed as an exemplary “revolution” in the twenty-first century. Nobody remembers it now. But a longer view of history shows us that the ultimate consequence of all such blood-soaked “springs” has been to simply replace tyranny with tyranny. An even longer civilisational view shows that such periodic—recurrent—revolutions are a hallmark of the Asuric mindset. Oh! The so-called Arab Spring was simply regime change in disguise in the nascent social media era.
In the social media age, Nepal and Bangladesh count as paragons of regime change. The Deep State forces that enabled them haven’t been merely brazen—they’ve advertised their regime change operation with a clear warning: India, you’re next.
Back to the Future
For the first time since World War II, India is having a firsthand taste of what all those blighted South American dictatorships suffered for roughly three decades—from the 1960s to the 90s. India can’t be fully equated with those regimes except on the yardstick of US-engineered trouble.
The fundamental nature of regime change remains almost changeless throughout history—internal subversion, which is the most effective and the least expensive. In the post colonial period, the modus operandi of regime change has undergone substantial modifications. The so-called Cold War era had two distinct camps: the USSR which defined itself as the champion of peace, equality and fraternity, and the US which defined itself as the champion of the same values albeit using a different lexicon. But both Asuric powers had played the same game—power. Sri Sita Ram Goel has written perhaps the most profoundly philosophical exposition on the ideology and the dynamics of these USSR-US power games. The goal of both Soviet Russia and America was the same: global domination. Both engineered regime changes in their own ways.
The world has become almost unrecognisable in the three decades after the collapse of Soviet Russia. An unfathomable array of unelected and therefore unaccountable power centres has emerged. While it is fashionable and perversely comforting to exclusively blame the American Deep State for all regime changes, this imputation is a partial truth.
Brave New World
The US Deep State has always existed; Eisenhower first warned about it; so did Kennedy. The term “Deep State” originated ironically, not in America, but Turkey. However, the Deep State as it now exists is no longer the sole preserve of the US. Its players are global and include Indians as well. Any one power centre in this chilling ecosystem has both the capacity and the means to topple regimes that are not cautious enough. The distinction between capitalism, socialism, liberalism and other such formulations fully dissolved about fifteen years ago. Power for its own sake is the exclusive new ideology.
It is this ecosystem that put a Mamdani in power—a Muslim birthed by a self-loathing Hindu mother, Mira Nair, who is still officially an Indian citizen. Another component of the same ecosystem put a popstar Zelensky in power in Ukraine. Yet another component played a significant but invisible role in hauling Joseph Vijay into the Chief Minister’s seat. Oh, and the American Deep State’s generous patronage in building up Arvind Kejriwal is no longer a secret.
The global Deep State has to be understood not as a single entity but as an organism. Mike Lofgren in his brilliant Deep State, gives the best and the devastatingly accurate definition of this organism:
Then there is the lethal new entrant to this ecosystem—technology companies. More specifically, social media tools and platforms have demonstrated that they can play a vital role in both creating and fanning unrest leading to regime change and that elected governments are mostly powerless to muzzle them. Their siamese twins are the new elites on Wall Street and elsewhere in the murky, opaque realm of high finance.
Taken together, a compelling conclusion emerges: today, democracy as a system of self-rule exists in name only in the very homeland of its birth: the West. Its live proof is visible—most recently on the streets of Europe and India. The violent “protests” led in June and July by the lumpen masses of the so-called Cockroach Janata Party (CJP) and the relentless hounding of India’s Chief Election Commissioner are all aimed at dismantling the very pillar of democracy: elections. The CJP was midwifed by a sustained narrative which wants a summary dismissal or overthrow of the Narendra Modi-led Government.
The narrative was seeded and propagandised by a variety of pamphleteers from a well-entrenched network comprising Far Left academics, activists, lawyers and mediapersons. The selfsame Prashant Bhushan and Yogendra Yadav publicly declare that “democracy will be reclaimed on the streets.” Their compatriot is the sophisticated academic groomer of Leftist terror, Pratap Bhanu Mehta. Almost in every column, Mehta pronounces that the Indian government is an “elected autocracy” and that Indian voters are deplorable because they repeatedly vote for Narendra Modi.
This tribe of traitors thrives largely due to generous funding, a well-oiled support system and a broken and even friendly judiciary. Their dogged war against elections itself stems from an unambiguous realisation—that no single party in the whole spectrum of the Opposition can come to power on its own or even in coalition.
Engineering Stupidity
Until recently, the goal of every regime change operation was to reduce the target country into a client state of either the US or the former USSR. But now in the vastly altered geopolitical situation where power has been globally diffused, the idea of a client state has become largely notional. Bangladesh, for example, is the client state of the US but the US itself is a client state of the diffused global power elite. To state a real-life example, Jeffrey Epstein’s island of depravity had a global clientele that included former royalty; no better instance shows how power is wielded today.
The tactics of subversion too have changed concomitantly. In the Cold War period, common tactics included bribing or blackmailing politicians, buying out the media, indoctrinating the academia and rigging public opinion. In dictatorships, it was rather straightforward: funding the rival aspirant and supplying him with arms and ammunition.
But in the last three decades, these tactics have morphed into the wholesale dismantling of the societies of the target nation. Education among others, has proven to be the most powerful weapon in this sinister enterprise. Over the last fifteen years or so, the tactic has taken the form of engineering… stupidity from the cradle to the grave. Indeed, Will Durant’s ominous words come to mind:
It may be true, as Lincoln supposed, that ‘you can’t fool all the people all the time,’ but you can fool enough of them to rule a large country.
The most lethal outcome of doctoring education is the so-called Woke phenomenon. Woke is the most evil experiment ever conducted in human history. It must take a special strain of depravity to consciously engineer insanity on a global scale. It is a project that begins in childhood and “ends” with the individual’s death. A woke is an artificial being whose sense of reality has been irreparably, irreversibly, distorted. Indeed, one shudders to even imagine an actual woke becoming a Head of State. Actually, we don’t even need to go so far into the future. The spectacle of a hideous, incoherent Kamala Harris announcing that she “identifies as a… she” was an eerie portent of this dystopian Woke future. Kamala was obviously flattering her vote bank with such antics but it only proves how fully she is in their thrall.
Sandeep Balakrishna
Sandeep Balakrishna
Sandeep Balakrishna
Sandeep Balakrishna
More worrying is the fact that India stands alone in the non-western realm that has been deeply infected by Woke. Russia punishes woke; the whole Islamic sphere forbids even feminism, forget extreme forms like LGBT; China preemptively censors western notions of progressivism, liberalism and feminism; even Sri Lanka, despite facing an avalanche of Western feminist-LGBT propaganda, has done better than India.
While it is impossible to predict the actual future outcome of an entire nation turning Woke, societies that have gone Woke in substantial numbers are imploding before our eyes. Any call for course correction is typically met with denial.
When we pry open the Woke project to its bare essentials, it boils down to the same thing: architecting, propagandising and empowering stupidity so that the real engineers of stupidity get to wield actual power. In a limited sense, the current situation seems to be moving towards some kind of World Government of the kind that Orwell, Huxley, Koestler and others warned about in the 1930s and 40s.
Etymology as a Guide
Just as France is the womb and playground of all bad ideas generated over the last three centuries, the English word, stupid is derived from the French stupide.
Stupid originally meant persons who were “mentally slow, lacking ordinary activity of mind,” “dull” and “inane.” However, for the longest time, stupid was almost exclusively associated with stupor, meaning “insensibility,” “numbness,” “dullness,” “apathy,” and “torpor of the mind.” But over the last century, stupid is used as a synonymn of “foolish,” “idiotic,” “dense,” “mindless,” “brainless,” “witless,” “gullible,” “crazy,” “vacuous,” “vapid,” “dull,” “dumb,” “asinine,” “lunatic,” “dopey,” “cretinous” and “unintelligent.” These are accurate in general. However, in the specifics, there are clear nuances. Consider the two most common synonymns of stupid—idiotic and foolish.
Foolish is “exhibiting folly in words, actions or behaviour.” For the longest time, a fool was a person who was “silly, ignorant, sinister, a rascal, a jester, a clown.” In its original sense, a fool was a windbag because the word is derived from the Latin follis, meaning “bellows,” ”leather bag” and so on. In medieval England, a fool was also a legitimate profession.
Idiotic signifies the trait or traits of an idiot. We have an unambiguous definition of an idiot dating back to the fourteenth century—“a person so mentally deficient as to be incapable of ordinary reasoning.” The word’s Greek and Latin meanings are rather numerous but its English definition is settled. Indeed, Shakespeare’s immortal line in Macbeth, “It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing,” gives the word the ultimate imprimatur as to its meaning. In general, an idiot is a madman, an insane.
It is therefore clear that the stupid person is the most dangerous in this triad.
Folly can be cured.
Idiocy can be contained.
But stupidity is incurable and has an innate epidemic quality to it.
The Invasion of Stupidity
As I’ve written innumerable times, stupidity is what our children are being “taught” in the garb of “education.” Indeed, “modern education” has accomplished the unthinkable—that it is possible to actually teach stupidity. In Woke terminology, this means that men can breastfeed and that infants need to ask for consent to suckle their mother’s or father’s breast and you “earn” a PhD if you write such “theses.” When Bertrand Russell memorably wrote in 1928 that “men are born ignorant, not stupid; they’re made stupid by education,” he hadn’t envisioned a future where people advocating male breastfeeding or women growing penises would be regarded as scholars. Clearly, Russell’s imagination of what constituted stupidity had its limits.
If “education” is the incubator of stupidity, social media—especially Instagram—is the global showcase of self-mutating strains of stupidity. Indeed, stupidity is akin to Para-Brahman—infinite and unknowable except through experience. Thus, to “know” stupidity, you must become stupid—Tat Tvam Asi, Thou Art That.
Now imagine one of these Instagram showpieces as your Prime Minister or President.
The Power Shift Hiding in Plain Sight
This takes us back to the history of the institution called Government. Monarchy is arguably the longest and most successful experiment in Government. Against that protracted backdrop, democracy is still in its childhood and given our times, is speedily eroding across the world. Two of its greatest vulnerabilities stand plainly exposed. The first is its inability to prevent totalitarianism; the second is its demonstrated impotence against Islamism, which has adroitly used democracy to subvert it.
By any measure, a monarchy is much simpler, more straightforward. If the monarch was wise, just and good, things were good; if he wasn’t he could be deposed sometimes easily, sometimes at great cost. Matters were settled with fists or swords or both—but they were settled, not adjourned. A stupid person who became king could be dethroned with relative ease.
A democracy—appreciating all its virtues—makes things extraordinarily difficult because the system is extraordinarily complicated. A simple oral royal order got a public park built in no time. In a democracy, it takes 786786786 committees and forms and documentation to merely approve the park plan. Likewise, it is much harder to build real and solid leadership in a democracy. A king on the other hand, had to demonstrate sustained military leadership, a willingness to die for his people and an ability to govern well by the force of his personality.
A survey of leadership in democracies over the last two centuries reveals several broad and overlapping categories.
First, leaders who emerged from a hardened military background such as Washington, Hamilton, Wellesley, Churchill, Eisenhower and Atlee.
Second, the “traditional” leaders with hardcore political instincts such as Lincoln, Lyndon Johnson, Theodore Roosevelt, Sardar Patel and Lee Kuan Yew.
Third, idealists such as Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, Jimmy Carter, Jefferson, Gladstone, Atlee and Margaret Thatcher to an extent.
Fourth, erudite and scholarly leaders such as John Adams, Madison, Jefferson, Gladstone, Balfour, Churchill and P.V. Narasimha Rao.
Then there is that ignoble pool of dictators, power-mongers and reckless ideologues.
Notwithstanding their legacies, none of them were… stupid.
The slide into stupidity in the political realm is perhaps the most definitive marker of the quality of leadership that has emerged over the last fifteen years in the West. Zelensky arguably, is the posterboy of this phenomenon. His Canadian predecessor was the recently ousted Justin Trudeau. To a limited extent, Joseph Vijay reflects the same phenomenon but that topic merits a separate examination. These are creations of the same forces that created Woke.
But to consider another eminent example in the light of ongoing events, we have Macron—a leader who was carefully groomed from his teens by a lady old enough to be his mother. Because a political leader is judged by the consequences of his policies, the verdict is clear—France has witnessed the maximum number of public riots in Macron’s tenure. The most recent eruption of riots in Paris is just the latest evidence of empowered stupidity.
The CJP-unleashed violence on the streets of Delhi in June-July shows the same forces at work. The outfit did not emerge suddenly in 2026. It was being assiduously groomed for years on various international platforms and emerged only after it had a well-defined plan of ground action. The CJP’s fundamental agenda is to overthrow an elected Government but deep down, it is not motivated by a concrete ideology. While it is lavishly funded by the usual breaking India forces, its actions are fuelled by stupidity. A Neha Bora for example, becomes an overnight icon in those circles because she advertises stupidity so eloquently—and is also the loudest. The CJP tribe is also in the forefront now because the colossal investment in Rahul Gandhi has yielded substantial negative returns.
In the overall reckoning, popstars, actors, entertainers and street-activists are gradually replacing top leadership positions which were once helmed by wise, erudite, patriotic and experienced leaders.
On another front, a whole new generation has been created—Gen-stupid, which has already occupied key positions in both the political and its allied spaces. The societal space is what is truly terrifying. Juvenal’s dire caution, two thousand years ago, about the dangers of a society obsessed with Panem et circenses—bread and circuses—is playing out grotesquely before us. Instagram, the global engine and enabler of stupidity in all forms is the surest proof of Juvenal’s warning. In India, it has spun wildly out of control. Gen-stupid, which proudly flaunts videos of fatal stunts, sexual degeneracy and even decapitated human heads on Instagram reveals a frightening reality—that society in general is powerless against this generation. Unless we are careful, Gen-stupid will vote for a “leader” who will pamper it and that’s when we will have a real-life version of what Thucydides predicted:
A nation that makes a great distinction between its scholars and its warriors will have its laws made by cowards and its wars fought by fools.
At the moment, democracies throughout the world are facing an untramelled invasion of embodied stupidity.
Just wait till they are fully in power.
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