If the Saffron Cage is a loud, crowded stadium filled with smoke and chanting, the Khadi Ruins are a quiet, dusty museum.
You know the feeling of walking into this space. It smells of old paper, privilege, and a desperate, clinging sense of “noblesse oblige.” Here, the language is English—polished, sophisticated, and entirely irrelevant to the man standing at the bus stop.
This is the world of the old establishment. For seventy years, they held the keys to the kingdom. They gave us the slogans of the 1950s and expected them to work in the 2020s. They wore the Khadi—the hand-spun cloth of the freedom struggle—as a costume, forgetting that the cloth was meant to represent self-reliance, not a license to rule by birthright.
But the ruins are now visible to everyone. The roof is leaking, the walls are cracked, and the curators are still arguing about what happened in 1947.
The Dynastic Rot
The most fundamental failure of this camp is its absolute surrender to biology.
In a 21st-century world that is ruthlessly meritocratic—where a kid in a village can learn to code on a cheap smartphone and compete with a graduate from Stanford—the Khadi establishment still believes that leadership is a sexually transmitted trait.
They have turned a political party into a family business.
This Dynastic Operating System is not just “unfair”; it is structurally suicidal. When the top job is reserved for a single family, the ceiling for everyone else is lowered. A brilliant, hardworking grassroots leader looks at the structure and realizes they will always be a “subordinate,” never the CEO.
What happens then? The talent leaves. The ambitious, the competent, and the visionary exit to other parties or leave politics altogether. What remains is a culture of Sycophancy as Survival. The people surrounding the “Crown Prince” are not chosen for their ability to win elections or govern states; they are chosen for their ability to nod in unison.
A system that values blood over brains will eventually be out-competed by a mob that values rage over everything.
Pseudo-Secularism Unmasked
The Khadi establishment’s greatest claim to moral superiority was “Secularism.” They told us they were the only thing standing between India and a religious bloodbath.
But look closer at their version of secularism. It wasn’t the secularism of the French or the Americans—a clean, principled distance between the state and the altar. It was Transactional Tolerance.
They did not treat minorities as “Empowered Citizens” with equal rights and equal duties. They treated them as “Vote Banks” to be managed.
They made deals with the most conservative, regressive elements of every community. They protected personal laws that oppressed women to keep the clerics happy. They offered symbols—Iftar parties and Haj subsidies—instead of the things that actually matter: quality schools, modern hospitals, and safe streets.
By refusing to implement a Uniform Civil Code, by playing one religion against another for tactical gains, they didn’t “save” secularism. They poisoned it. They made the word “Secular” a slur in the Indian street. They created the very grievance—the feeling that the majority was being “appeased” at the cost of justice—that the Saffron Cage used to take power.
The Khadi establishment did not fight the fire; they provided the fuel.
The Lutyens’ Gaze
There is a specific kind of blindness that comes from living in a bubble of English-speaking privilege. We call it the Lutyens’ Gaze.
From the manicured lawns of central Delhi, the rest of India looks like a “project.” The poor are not seen as stakeholders in a thriving economy; they are seen as “beneficiaries” of government schemes.
This is the Paternalism of the Elite.
They speak of the “Idea of India” in seminar rooms while the “Reality of India” is struggling with a broken judiciary and a predatory police force. They are more concerned with a tweet from a Western celebrity than they are with the fact that an Indian entrepreneur has to pay twenty different bribes just to open a small factory.
They have lost the ability to speak the vernacular of aspiration. While the new Indian wants to build wealth, move to the city, and join the global elite, the Khadi establishment is still trying to sell them the dignity of poverty.
The License Raj Hangover
Deep in the DNA of this camp is a lingering, socialist belief that Profit is Sin.
They come from a generation that viewed the businessman with suspicion and the bureaucrat with reverence. They built a system where “wealth creation” was treated as something that needed to be permitted, regulated, and eventually taxed into oblivion.
Even as they “liberalized” the economy in the 90s, they did it with a heavy heart and a slow hand. They never truly embraced the idea of the Sovereign Indian Entrepreneur. They preferred the “Crony Capitalist”—the billionaire who knew which door to knock on in Delhi—over the startup founder who wanted to disrupt the system.
They left us with a bureaucracy that is a “Regulatory Cholesterol,” clogging the arteries of Indian growth. A system where it is easier to beg for a subsidy than it is to build a product.
The Verdict
The Khadi Ruins offer you a sense of “decency.” They offer you the comfort of the familiar, the nostalgia of a more “civilized” time when the shouting was quieter.
But they offer no future.
They are a spent force, paralyzed by their own history and their own hierarchies. They cannot fight the Saffron Cage because they are its mirror image—one uses the past to create rage, the other uses the past to hide incompetence.
If you are a Rational Indian, you look at the Ruins and you feel pity, but you cannot stay. You cannot build a Renaissance in a museum.
So you keep walking. You head south, or perhaps towards the red flags of the industrial belts. You look for “Social Justice.” You look for “Regional Pride.”
You enter the Black & Red Dead End.
