Calcutta University, Department of History.
November 1, 2025.
The November sunlight, filtered through the smog of College Street, slanted across the high-ceilinged lecture hall of the Ashutosh Building, illuminating a galaxy of dust motes dancing over fifty heads. It was a room that smelled of old paper, damp teak, and the accumulated anxiety of generations of students. Outside, the faint, metallic clang of a tram navigating the chaotic traffic provided a rhythmic backbeat to the silence inside.
Professor Anirban Sen stood at the chalkboard, his back to the class. He was young for his tenure—thirty-two, with a sharp jawline and sleeves rolled up to his elbows, revealing forearms dusted with chalk. He finished writing, the chalk snapping on the final punctuation mark. He turned. On the board, in jagged white script:
"The Congress System and the Legacy of Hereditary Power"
He scanned the tiered benches. M.A. students in History and Political Science. Bright, cynical, and glued to their screens until this moment. He took off his spectacles, cleaning them on his shirt tail.
"History doesn't repeat, my friends," Anirban said, his voice low, forcing them to lean in. "It inherits."
He walked to the edge of the dais. "And sometimes, what it inherits is corruption dressed up as tradition. We are here to discuss how the Republic of India—a modern democracy born of a freedom struggle—became the world's most sophisticated feudal network."
A hand shot up in the third row. Riya, a student known for her fealty to party politics. "Sir, you're talking about the Gandhis, right? The decline of the Grand Old Party?"
Anirban smiled, but it didn't reach his eyes. "Ah, the low-hanging fruit. Yes, the Nehru-Gandhi lineage is the poster child for the argument. But let me ask you: if the Congress Party vanished tomorrow, dissolved into the ether, do you think the structure of patronage, the culture of 'Ji Huzoor,' and political feudalism would vanish with it?"
He didn't wait for an answer. He turned back to the board and drew a timeline: 1947 — 1975 — 1991 — 2014 — 2025
.
"The Congress didn't just build a party; they built a psychology," Anirban continued, pacing. "When the British left, we were meant to be a meritocratic experiment. Instead, the Congress became a coalition of princely egos and feudal loyalties, all bleached clean by Khadi. They centralized legitimacy around one surname. And once you teach a nation that legitimacy is inherited, corruption becomes structural. It stops being a crime; it becomes a birthright."
"But Sir," Aamir interrupted from the back, his voice sharp. "That's reductionist. The Congress built the IITs, the ISRO, the constitutional framework. You can't equate institution-building with mere nepotism."
"I'm not equating them, Aamir. I'm saying one poisoned the other," Anirban retorted. "Look at the Scindias. Look at the Pilots. Look at the regional satraps—the Yadavs in UP, the Thackerays in Maharashtra, the Abdullahs in Kashmir. Who wrote the playbook for them? Who taught them that a constituency is a private jagir to be passed from father to son? The Congress System provided the blueprint. It turned democracy into a series of royal courts."
He paused, letting the weight of the statement settle. "And that brings us to the uncomfortable truth of 2025."
He tapped the board where he had written DNA.
"Every party that followed—whether Left, Right, or Regional—carries this DNA. Even those who claim to hate the Congress are busy imitating it."
Kavya, sitting in the front row with a saffron thread on her wrist, frowned. "You mean the BJP, Sir? But the BJP is a cadre-based party. It's meritocratic. A tea seller became Prime Minister. That's the opposite of Congress."
Anirban leaned against his desk, crossing his arms. "Is it, Kavya? Or is that just the marketing?"
The room went quiet. The hum of the ceiling fans seemed to grow louder.
"Congress invented vote-bank politics; BJP perfected the micro-targeting of it," Anirban said, ticking points off on his fingers. "Congress used the Governor's office to topple state governments in the 80s—look at what Indira did to N.T. Rama Rao. Now, look at how the Raj Bhavans operate today. Congress used the CBI to reward loyalty and punish dissent. The BJP simply digitized that machinery and gave it sharper teeth. This isn't reform, class. This is evolution. The predator has just shed its old skin for a new, shinier coat."
"But they are ideologically opposite!" Sagnik argued, looking around for support. "Secularism versus Hindutva. You can't say they are the same."
"Ah, ideology," Anirban sighed, walking over to the projector remote. "The perfume sprayed on power to mask the rot."
He clicked a button. A slide flickered onto the wall: State Capitalism: The Siamese Twins. The names Reliance, Adani, GMR, GVK floated in a web connecting to both 10 Janpath and 7 Lok Kalyan Marg.
"You think the corporate-state nexus is new?" Anirban asked, pointing at the light. "Dhirubhai Ambani didn't rise in a vacuum; he rose because he understood the License Raj created by Indira Gandhi. He knew how to manage the Congress system. Fast forward to today. The names change, but the model remains: State-Controlled Capitalism. The government doesn't own the factories, but it owns the access to opportunity."
He picked up a yellowed paperback from his desk—Rajni Kothari's Politics in India.
"In 1964, Kothari called it the 'Congress System'—a massive, consensus-building organism that swallowed all opposition. What Kothari couldn't foresee was that the organism would mutate. Today, the BJP has become the new Congress. It occupies the vast center, it commands the institutions, and it demands total loyalty. And the regional parties? They are just mini-Congresses, fighting for scraps."
Nihal, a quiet student who rarely spoke, raised his hand. "So, if the system is designed to be a monopoly... is that why a Third Front never survives?"
"Precisely," Anirban beamed. He grabbed the chalk again and drew a crude diagram: a two-headed beast sharing a single stomach.
"I call this the 'Indian Political Organism.' When this organism faces a threat—war, sanctions, or a genuine peasant uprising—the two heads, Congress and BJP, act in unison. They unite to protect the centralized state. They unite to protect the corporate funding model. But when the threat passes, the heads go back to biting each other. Why did the Janata Party fail? Why did the United Front collapse? because the body rejects them. They are foreign transplants in a system built for duopoly."
The class was murmuring now. Phones were lighting up; students were typing furiously. Someone whispered audibly, "He's going to get cancelled for this."
Anirban ignored it. He walked to the tall colonial window. The haze over Kolkata was thick, blurring the skyline where new high-rises were eating into the old city.
"We built a republic of institutions," he said softly, staring out. "But we run it like a family business. Even if the BJP one day becomes a fully hereditary party—and looking at the sons and daughters of their MPs taking over constituencies, they are halfway there—it won't be an aberration. It will simply be the ghost of the Congress System, reborn in saffron."
He turned back to the fifty young faces, seeing the mix of anger, confusion, and dawning realization.
"Power in India doesn't change hands, my friends," Anirban said, checking his watch. "It merely changes costumes."
He dusted his hands, the chalk powder drifting like smoke
.
"Alright. That's the provocation. Now, open your books. Who wants to be the first to defend the system?"