When CJP was conceived and cast into the ether, it was a movement in search of a cause. A staggering 65 percent of India’s population—over 350 million youth and counting—are more aspirational than ever. The IT and pharma industries that surged after the nineties propelled and sustained internal economic growth, while education yielded a windfall of foreign remittances, albeit at the high cost of brain drain. Securing admission to a professional course had become the critical milestone for many of them—achieved either through merit or money.
Keeping the admissions and evaluation process fair and accessible is not only necessary to select the best and brightest minds; society needs to trust the system in which it has invested its faith, hard-earned money, and children’s futures. When the system decays and opportunistic criminals find ways to game the process, it erodes the very foundation of a functioning society. The fallout—a frustrated youth stripped of hope—can drag a nation into chaos and turmoil.
In the era of social media, CJP caught the imagination of a vast swath of society that had lost faith in the system and the politicians running the machine. Ironically, the movement was quickly hijacked by opposition parties who had originally subverted the education system to perpetuate politics as a rent-seeking enterprise. Political leaders from Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, and Kerala arrived in hordes, with a clear reason to back the movement: finding an external adversary cost them nothing in terms of their local governance or economic models, as the BJP was not the dominant political force in most of those states. (There are exceptions too, like Gujarat, where similar structures are firmly in place.)
A rent-seeking political economy creates sector monopolies, state patronage, and administrative gatekeeping to replace actual wealth generation. When the state controls access to security, livelihoods, and institutional power, controlling those access points becomes the primary political strategy. The public sector and education become rent engines; state-dominated education and government services (like the Public Service Commission) are treated not as public goods, but as patronage distribution systems. Meanwhile, admission quota systems squeeze out candidates who do not belong to reserved groups based on caste, religion, “management,” or special interests.
Education and jobs have become direct methods for distributing rent to loyalists.
For example, Kerala accounts for roughly 60% of all PSC recruitments nationwide despite having only 3% of the country’s population. A public sector job is the ultimate prize—secured via backdoor appointments, temporary-to-permanent conversions, or board placements. The state also harbors “Aided” Education Cartels: school and college networks in which private management boards (caste, religious, or political bodies) control hiring, while the taxpayer-funded government pays salaries. Hiring rights are routinely monetized by management, while political unions dominate university syndicates, dictating appointments, curricula, and campus access.
We typically see funny Instagram reels of politicians with multiple postdoctoral degrees struggling to articulate basic English. The issue is not their command of English—or any language—but the widening gulf between academic certification and demonstrable competence. This also explains why the battle over vice-chancellor appointments has become so ferocious. It is routinely framed as a constitutional dispute between the Centre and the states or an ideological contest over the soul of Indian education. It is certainly both. But it is equally an economic struggle. Whoever appoints the vice chancellor influences faculty recruitment, promotions, research funding, procurement, university syndicates, and the patronage networks that flow through them. Universities do not merely shape ideas; they allocate careers, resources, and influence. Control the institution, and you control all three.
Both Left and Right parties employ the exact same playbook:
Institutional Control: LDF party cadres have penetrated deep into state service unions, university syndicates, and cooperatives. The UDF distributes state resources through caste and community organizations (e.g., NSS, SNDP, IUML) and religious education trusts. Both factions maintain vast networks of cooperative banks for partisans and communities to fund loyalists, offer jobs, and leverage credit.
Labor Market Control: Union-enforced strictures, trade-union dominance, and administrative gatekeeping actively stifle private manufacturing. The UDF, when in power, grants liquor licenses, real estate clearances, and bar permits to its own patronage networks.
Because both fronts rely on state distribution rather than expanding the economic pie, neither side has a true incentive to dismantle the system. When state institutions become rent-distribution engines for the political class, productive private investment is squeezed out. With local industry suppressed, educated youth are forced into two paths:
Compete for state-allocated rents (government exams, PSCs, party cadre jobs). OR emigrate to the Gulf, Europe, or other Indian states to earn a living.
The irony is profound: remittances from citizens who fled this system underwrite the state’s tax revenues. Those revenues then fund the salaries, pensions, and patronage networks of the state-dominated apparatus, sustaining the cycle without necessitating economic reform. In essence, the political strategy across the spectrum has been to control the gates of the state, distribute the toll to loyalists, and rely on citizens working abroad to keep the broader economy alive. The deep institutional integration of the state’s exploitative machinery is woven into the psyche of its citizens with clinical precision.
West Bengal had its “Party-Society,” adapted rigorously and ruthlessly by TMC cadres. Gujarat has its Panna Pramukh system. Tamil Nadu operates a welfare machine that sustains a perpetual transactional loop between voter loyalty and the state. Similar examples cut across Marxist, Dravidian, or Hindutva booth management.
If CJP is to rise against the malaise that plagues Indian society, it must go after these very patrons—the ones currently farming public outrage to maneuver their way back into the glory days of rent collection.
Chronicles 
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