Robots pour cocktails and run marathons, but still can’t multitask

AFP
June 18, 2026

A humanoid robot that can do a bit of everything is still years off – Copyright AFP JULIEN DE ROSA

They can mix cocktails, run marathons and fold laundry. But humanoid robots are still a long way from doing lots of different jobs on command, whatever the marketing says.

The gap was easy to spot at the Robotics Summit in Boston in late May. The glossy brochures promised one thing. The people who actually build the machines said another.

Elon Musk loves to show off his Optimus prototype, recently filmed jogging in short strides. Figure 03, a third-generation robot developed by Figure AI, can tidy and clean a living room by itself.

China’s AgiBot and Matrix Robotics say their robots can greet visitors, serve coffee and give them a tour, a little like C-3PO from “Star Wars.”

The reality is more modest.

“Most of the humanoids you see are being teleoperated, or they’ve got very specific paths and chores that they do,” said Chris Matthieu of startup RealSense, which makes cameras for robots.

In other words, many are either run by a human with a remote control or stuck doing one narrow task.

Take Neo, the robot that 1X launched with great fanfare last October. It was billed as “the world’s first consumer-ready humanoid robot designed to transform life at home” — but was actually steered by a person off to the side.

Progress is real, though, and artificial intelligence is driving it. “I think AI has extremely accelerated that growth,” said William Okazaki of sensor maker Renesas.

One big hurdle is the hands. Long the holy grail of robotics, they are getting close: robots can now grip with a delicate touch, and some sensors can even tell when they are touching human skin.

Much of this comes from a new kind of AI known as a VLA model, short for vision-language-action. It blends written instructions with what a camera sees in real time, so the robot can link what it is looking at to what it should do.

There is also the “world model” — an AI that learns from vast amounts of images and video until it can predict what will happen next in the real world, such as how an object will shift when it is squeezed.



— Hunt for data —



But an android that can do a bit of everything is still years off.

“For general purpose robots, it will take longer,” said Daniel Fan of Innodisk, which makes parts for robots.

Plenty of humanoids are already out in the world — Boston Dynamics’ Atlas at Hyundai, Hexagon Robotics’ AEON at a BMW site — but these are trials, not final products.

“Until you actually get the robot actually trying to do the thing you think it can do, you don’t really know,” said Charlie Kemp of Hello Robot, which sells robots for people with limited mobility.

Running fully on their own, at scale, is not yet possible, “because there is not enough data,” said Xinrui Bi of AgiBot.

To gather it, companies are setting up cameras everywhere to record human movement — from people cooking at home to workers in a textile workshop in India.

The stakes are higher than for a chatbot like ChatGPT. A robot acts in the physical world, so its mistakes can hurt someone.

“If you want to move into a more social domain, it really has to be safe for the users around the robot,” said Valentino Fagard of Japan’s XELA Robotics, which works on giving robots a sense of touch.

Engineers can set limits — telling the machines not to grip too hard, or not to get too close to a person. But there is a catch. Like chatbots, these AI systems don’t always behave the same way twice, which makes them hard to predict.

“The issue with, call it the world model, or the end-to-end VLA, is they’re non-deterministic, they’re a black box,” said John Black of Brain Corp, whose robots stick to a very specific task, like cleaning floors or checking store shelves.

“They’re nowhere close to reaching the safety levels required,” he said, because even the people who build these systems can not fully see why they do what they do.

‘Alter-Ego’: An Italian hospital’s little robot carer

AFP
June 19, 2026

Humanoid robot Alter-Ego is designed to perform basic tasks to free up healthcare workers – Copyright AFP MARCO BERTORELLO

A robot with expressive eyebrows that is designed to perform basic tasks to free up healthcare workers is being given a trial run by a hospital in Milan.

Named “Alter-Ego”, the 1.2-metre tall robot can stand in for a doctor working remotely, bring a patient a bottle of water or guide them to treatment.

Daniel Senna, a 31-year-old patient at the Maugeri Hospital, transmits his pain level on a screen attached to the robot’s chest.

“Hi Dani. How are you? Do you need anything?” Ego asks wheelchair-bound Senna, as the data collected is sent instantly to the ward’s nurses.

The robot has been undergoing testing since April in a department which treats people with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a neurodegenerative disease.

“At first, we were afraid the patient might have a negative reaction,” Christian Lunetta, director of the hospital’s neuromotor rehabilitation department, told AFP.

But they soon were “very satisfied, because the robot was designed to spark curiosity and its movements, or at least its functions, suggest a wide range of potential uses”.

The project is a collaboration between the Italian Institute of Technology and the University of Pisa in northern Italy and is currently being remotely controlled by an operator.

From July, the robot will work autonomously.

The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) has significantly accelerated progress in robotics but robots still need a great deal of training to operate independently.

The aim with the Milan experiment is to work with patients and caregivers to better understand the limits of what a robot can or should do in a hospital ward, said Manuel Catalano from the Italian Institute of Technology.

“Alter-Ego” could also eventually assist patients and their caregivers at home, he said.

Lunetta pointed out that hospitals “have repetitive tasks” which “could be delegated to a good robot”.

“This would also allow us to better value human beings, giving them the time to focus on the human relationship they must maintain with the patient,” he said.

Nurses monitor patients while handing out medicine, picking up signals about physical or mental health.

“Alter-Ego” may seem capable but “no-one has considered directly delegating the administration of pills” to it, neurologist Rachele Piras said.

It can be helpful in other ways though, “as the (neurodegenerative) disease progresses”, she said.

Patients could find it liberating to be able to directly ask the robot for things, while doing so would also reduce the tasks of a caregiver, allowing him or her to “revert to simply being a companion, mother or daughter”.

 

Reformed Capitalism, a Pipedream

Prabhat Patnaik | 15 Jun 2026

There is no alternative to socialism, but care must be taken to ensure that immanent tendencies of capital, such as centralisation of capital, are kept under strict check.

Progressive Liberals, and Social Democrats in general, have this common belief that capitalism can be “reformed” to become more humane and acceptable to society, and that this can be done by the use of State power which can be acquired through elections in a political democracy; this state of reformed capitalism can be institutionalised for ever, which makes any struggle for socialism unnecessary.

The theoretical basis for this belief was provided by the economics of J M Keynes (who himself had drawn upon the reformist intellectual tradition of the Cambridge School of Economics). Keynes had called his philosophy “new liberalism”, the pre-fix “new” being added because it advocated not the absence of State intervention as liberalism traditionally had done, but, on the contrary, effective State intervention to achieve full employment and greater equality in income distribution.

In post-war Europe, the Keynesian agenda had been adopted by several Social Democratic governments that came into being in order to usher in high levels of employment and welfare State measures; their idea was to build “capitalism with a human face”.

Yet, within a few years of this post-war experiment, neo-liberalism had overtaken Europe. State expenditure for increasing employment, which, to be successful, had to be financed either by a fiscal deficit or by taxes on the rich, had become impossible because of the opposition of finance; and the welfare State measures that had been put in place, though not exactly withdrawn, had been run down.

A clear inkling of this changed scenario was provided when Francois Mitterand was elected President of France against the background of rising unemployment, and adopted standard Keynesian measures to increase employment. But instead of employment rising, finance flowed out of France, the French franc fell on the foreign exchange market, and Mitterand had to withdraw his Keynesian measures in order to restore the “confidence of the investors”, which is just a euphemism for appeasing a bunch of speculators.

Instead of the State intervening to “improve” capitalism, the State itself had become a prisoner of globalised finance capital, willy-nilly doing its bidding. “Reformed” capitalism had proved to be a chimera, belying the high hopes reposed in it by the liberal-social democratic intellectual-political circles.

The vision of a controlled capitalism, however, was not confined only to the advanced countries in the post-war period. In many countries of the Global South, where the national, patriotic (as distinct from comprador) bourgeoisie had been sizeable, and had been a part of the anti-colonial front, the economic policy regime that came into being after decolonisation envisaged a role for the capitalists even as the country was embarking on a public sector-led “socialist”-oriented development path.

In India, for instance, the objective of development was described as the building of a “socialistic pattern of society” and the presumption was that the island of capitalism that remained within the economy as it was moving towards this goal, would help in developing the productive forces, while being amenable to control so that the achievement of this ultimate goal would not be sabotaged.

And yet today, India has a level of income inequality higher than at any time in the previous hundred years, and one of the highest in the world. What is more, this sharp rise in inequality represents a reversal of the trend that existed till the early 1908s: the top 1% of the population that had around 12% of the national income at the time of Independence (1947), had seen a decline in its share to 6% by 1982. Since then, this share has climbed to 22.6% by 2022-23 under the regime of neo-liberalism (these figures are taken from the World Inequality Database).

The question arises: why has the vision of a controlled, and by implication reformed, capitalism turned out to be a chimera? Even if in countries of the Global South, the re-assertion of spontaneous capitalism became unavoidable, once such re-assertion had already occurred in the metropolitan economies, the question still remains: why did the latter see such re-assertion? The answer to this question lies in the very nature of capitalism.

Keynes had only half understood the nature of capitalism. What he had seen clearly was that the aggregation of individual decisions in this system, even when each such decision is taken on the basis of some “rational” calculations, does not add up to a “rational” outcome. Put differently, the system is subject to anarchy. Keynes recognised this anarchy and wanted the State to intervene to overcome this anarchy.

Anarchy, however, is only one of the features of capitalism. There is an additional property of capitalism, apart of course from its exploitative nature; and that is its being a spontaneous or self-driven system. Individual agents act in the ways they do because they are compelled by competition to do so, and the overall functioning of the system which is independent of the will and consciousness of the individual economic agents, is characterised by a set of spontaneous tendencies.

One such tendency that Marx had talked about was the tendency toward centralisation of capital, that is, the formation over time of larger and larger blocks of capital. But an immanent tendency of capital that is not much discussed, is that capital seeks to overcome or by-pass whatever constraints are placed upon it.

This is exactly akin to the tendency of capital to introduce new processes and new products. In one case the drive is to overcome State-imposed constraints, for whoever does so first, gets an extra profit. In the other case, the drive is to overcome the technologically-given production constraints, for whoever does so first, earns an extra profit.

Capital may not succeed, of course, in by-passing the constraint placed upon it by the State at any given time. But over time, since centralisation keeps increasing the size of capital, the ability of capital to overcome or by-pass this constraint also increases, as larger capital is better able to overcome such a constraint than smaller capital. Hence, even though some constraints upon capital may be binding in any given period, or over a succession of periods, these same apparently binding constraints of today would tend to get by-passed tomorrow as centralisation occurs over time.

Controlled capitalism, it follows, is unlikely ever to be a permanent state of affairs. Even if controls hold for a time, and controlled capitalism appears to have become a frozen state of affairs for a time, the centralisation occurring all the time acts to undermine it over time.

This is not just speculative talk. The undermining of Keynesianism occurred exactly in this manner. Among advanced capitalist countries, those needing temporary balance of payments support, found it convenient to accept short-term funds from other countries. Such short-term funds in the beginning did not interfere with the ability of the State to intervene in the economy to maintain high levels of employment and the tempo of welfare expenditure.

But as centralisation of capital occurred and the short-term funds coming into an economy increasingly belonged to large agglomerations, such as pension funds, whose withdrawals too would be on a much larger scale, State policy became geared toward preventing such withdrawals; and it did so by pursuing policies approved by globalised finance.

Put differently, the autonomy of the nation-state to pursue policies that it considers to be in social interest, an autonomy that Keynesianism had assumed, which was not off the mark in the beginning, got subverted over time. This was not accidental; it was immanent in the nature of capitalism.

If capitalism, unlike what is taught in text-books, does not meekly accept whatever constraints are placed upon it, if it forever attempts to overcome such constraints and becomes more and more capable of doing so over time because of centralisation of capital, then any vision of a reformed capitalism, or welfare capitalism, becomes a chimera. Any such vision must entail a degree of control over capital by the State; and if such control by the State, exercised by placing constraints upon capital, gets subverted over time, then such a vision obviously becomes untenable.

It is this simple truth that also underlies the current crisis of social democracy, why it is increasingly losing ground to neo-fascism. Its political crisis, in other words, is the expression in the sphere of politics of its theoretical crisis, arising from the undermining of Keynesianism.

Welfare capitalism being a chimera, there is no alternative to socialism; and if in the transition to socialism, small capitalist enterprises are allowed to exist, care must be taken to ensure that immanent tendencies of capital, such as centralisation that produces ever larger blocks of capital, are kept under strict check.

Prabhat Patnaik is Professor Emeritus, Centre for Economic Studies and Planning, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. The views are personal.

Bengal After Trinamool: Political Economy of a Collapse

Sandip Chakraborty | 15 Jun 2026

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What replaced the Left Front was not a more progressive alternative. TMC’s populist slogan “Maa, Mati, Manush" delivered nothing solid to the real peasantry, rural & urban poor.

Image Courtesy: PTI

When the results of the West Bengal Assembly election were declared on May 4, 2026, much of the national commentariat reached for a familiar frame: a personality story, the rise and fall of Mamata Banerjee, a morality tale about one leader's hubris. There is truth in that frame, but it is also a convenient one, because it allows the deeper story to go untold — the story of how, for 15 years, West Bengal was governed by a political formation that represented no class interest except that of capital in its most parasitic, rent-extracting forms, dressed in the language of the poor. And and how that formation's collapse has now handed the state to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the most organised vehicle of Hindutva and corporate consolidation that Indian politics has produced.

To understand what just happened in Bengal, it is necessary to go back to what the Trinamool Congress (TMC) actually was — not as a cult of personality, though it was certainly that too, but as a political-economic project. And to understand that, one has to start with what it replaced.

What the Left Front Built, and What Replaced It

For 34 years, the Left Front government in West Bengal carried out the most far-reaching land reform programme: Operation Barga gave sharecroppers recorded rights over the land they tilled, redistribution broke up the largest holdings, and a functioning three-tier panchayat system devolved real power — and real budgets — to elected bodies at the village level. This was not a perfect record, and the Left Front's own missteps, particularly its turn toward forced land acquisition for industry in the mid-2000s, opened the door for everything that followed. But it is important to be clear about what was actually lost when that government fell in 2011, because the TMC's entire subsequent narrative depends on nobody remembering it.

What replaced the Left Front was not a more progressive alternative. It was a coalition assembled, opportunistically, from every force that had a grievance against the Left Front government — some with legitimate grievances rooted in the Singur and Nandigram land acquisitions, others with grievances rooted in something closer to their opposite: landlords and rural elites whose interests Operation Barga had curtailed, real estate and construction capital that found the Left Front's regulatory apparatus inconvenient, and a layer of rural strongmen who saw, in the breakdown of Left Front discipline, an opportunity to build their own local fiefdoms. The TMC's genius — if that is the word — was in holding this coalition together under a single populist banner, "Maa, Mati, Manush," while delivering, in practice, almost nothing to the actual peasantry and rural poor that the slogan invoked.

The Class Character of Trinamool

It has become fashionable to describe the TMC as having "no ideology," and there is a sense in which that is true: it never produced a programme document, never articulated a position on land, industry, or labour that it held consistently for more than an electoral cycle. But "no ideology" is itself a kind of ideology — it is the ideology of capital that does not want to be governed by any rules at all, that prefers a state which can be approached transactionally, deal by deal, rather than one bound by policy.

This is the thread that runs through the TMC's entire history in government, from the appointment of Amit Mitra — formerly Secretary General of the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry, India's most powerful corporate lobby, and a public advocate for retail FDI and the deregulation of fuel prices — as Finance and Industry Minister, to the systematic dismantling of trade union activity in the state's remaining industrial belts, to the return of factory lockouts with police protection for management rather than workers. None of this required a manifesto. It only required a government willing to let capital operate without the friction of organised labour or regulatory oversight — and willing, in exchange, to extract its own cut through a parallel economy of "syndicates."

That parallel economy deserves to be named for what it was: a mechanism of primitive accumulation, in which party functionaries inserted themselves as gatekeepers — over construction material, over small business licensing, over local infrastructure contracts — and extracted a toll from the petty-bourgeois and working-class people who had to pass through that gate to make a living. This was not a deviation from TMC governance. For millions of people in Bengal's towns and peri-urban areas, the "syndicate" was the most direct daily experience of what TMC rule actually meant.

The Sangh Parivar Link: A History TMC Would Rather Forget

If there is one part of this story that the TMC's current self-presentation — as Bengal's last secular bulwark against Hindutva — depends most heavily on erasing, it is the party's own history of collaboration with the Sangh Parivar. After breaking from Congress in 1998, Banerjee joined the BJP-led NDA, served in the Atal Bihari Vajpayee cabinet, and in September 2003 addressed an RSS (rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh) gathering in Delhi, praising the organisation as a body of "true patriots" engaged in a "fight against communists" — language for which RSS leaders reportedly hailed her as "saakshat Durga." Through the late 1990s and early 2000s, TMC alliances with the BJP extended across Lok Sabha, Assembly, panchayat, and municipal contests in Bengal.

This history matters for a reason that goes beyond hypocrisy, though it is certainly that. It matters because it was the TMC, not the BJP acting alone, that did the work of normalising Hindutva politics as a legitimate participant in Bengal's electoral landscape — a state that had, for decades, kept communal politics on the margins. Every subsequent BJP gain in Bengal, including the 2026 sweep, was built on a foundation that the TMC itself helped lay, brick by electoral alliance, two decades earlier, purely in pursuit of ministerial office in Delhi. When TMC leaders now warn voters that a BJP government represents an existential communal threat to Bengal, they are not wrong about the threat — but they are concealing their own role in making that threat electorally viable in the first place.

Singur, Nandigram, and the Forces That Gathered

The Singur and Nandigram agitations of 2006–2008 are remembered, in mainstream accounts, as a popular uprising against forced land acquisition — and there was real, justified anger in both places that deserves to be taken seriously on its own terms. But the political coalition that formed around that anger was not a coalition of the peasantry alone, and it is worth being precise about who else was in the room.

Maoist cadres, operating in the Jangal Mahal districts, found in the TMC a useful ally against a common enemy — and the alliance went well beyond rhetorical convergence. Investigations later attributed 245 deaths of CPI(M) workers and civilians in Jangal Mahal to this TMC-Maoist nexus, and the relationship reached its most extreme point on November 2, 2008, when an assassination attempt on sitting Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharya at Salboni was met, from sections of the TMC leadership, not with condemnation but with statements that read, in retrospect, as closer to satisfaction.

Maoist commander Kishenji publicly endorsed Banerjee for the Chief Minister's post in an interview published in October 2009, and again ahead of a Lalgarh rally in August 2010 — open collaboration between a mainstream party holding ministerial office at the Centre and an organisation the same Central government had designated the country's gravest internal security threat.

A parallel pattern unfolded in North Bengal with the Kamtapur Liberation Organisation, whose cadres had killed more than 60 CPI(M) workers, including five shot dead at a party office in Dhupguri in August 2002. When the TMC took power in 2011, KLO chief Tom Adhikari and several senior associates were released from custody, vanishing underground within months, with KLO operatives again under suspicion in a 2013 bombing.

Religious fundamentalist organisations and foreign-funded NGOs — the latter a category that deserves scrutiny rather than the automatic benefit of the doubt that "civil society" branding often receives — also found common cause with the TMC during this period, for the same reason the Maoists did: not because they shared an analysis of land policy, but because they shared an enemy. Once that enemy was removed from power in 2011, every one of these alliances was discarded. The Maoist label was redirected at the TMC's own critics. The KLO leaders went back underground. The NGOs moved on to other causes. What remained was the TMC, now in government, having drawn on every reactionary current available to it on the way up, and having no further use for any of them on the way down.

Saradha, Narada, and Financialisation of Politics

The Saradha chit fund collapse of April 2013 is usually narrated as a corruption scandal — and it was that, on a staggering scale: roughly 1,700 companies under the Saradha umbrella extracted more than ₹2 lakh crore from more than one crore depositors, the overwhelming majority of them working people putting aside small savings. But it should also be read as something more structural: an example of what happens when a state government's relationship to capital is organised entirely around informal, personalised channels rather than regulated ones.

Saradha's promoter, Sudipta Sen, built ties with the TMC from 2009 onward, and a month before Banerjee became Chief Minister in 2011, he purchased paintings attributed to her for roughly ₹1.8 crore — the first of a series of such purchases, by entities later identified as shell companies, totalling more than ₹21 crore, that investigators characterised as a channel for laundering chit fund deposits into the party's finances.

In communications with the CBI, Sen described being required to make large recurring payments to TMC-linked media operations, in the explicit expectation of regulatory protection. That protection was, for years, delivered: the Union Home Ministry's warnings between 2011 and 2012, the RBI's repeated flags, and SEBI's multiple show-cause notices between 2010 and 2013 all went unanswered until the scheme collapsed under its own weight — at which point Banerjee's claim to have "known nothing" was directly contradicted by her own government's sworn court affidavit.

The Narada sting operation, in which hidden cameras recorded TMC leaders and a police official apparently accepting cash, and the later confrontation over CBI access to Kolkata's police commissioner — including the extraordinary 2018 episode in which the CBI's own headquarters were effectively occupied overnight by Delhi Police on instructions from the Central government — extended this story onto the national stage.

But for Bengal's voters, the headline figures were simpler: more than 12 lakh Saradha victims remain uncompensated, a state compensation scheme disbursed barely half of what it promised, and at least a hundred victims are reported to have died by suicide, while implicated party figures returned to public life with their standing largely intact.

This is what "financialisation without regulation, mediated by a single ruling party" looks like in practice — and it is not unique to Bengal, or to the TMC, but Bengal under the TMC offered as clear an illustration of it as any state in the country.

2021: The High-Water Mark That Wasn't

The 2021 Assembly election result — a landslide for the TMC against a BJP campaign that had thrown enormous national resources at the state — was presented, including by significant sections of the liberal commentariat outside Bengal, as a victory for secular politics against Hindutva consolidation. There was something to that framing: the BJP's defeat in 2021, after a campaign built heavily around polarisation, was not nothing.

But the result contained a detail that ought to have tempered the celebration considerably: Banerjee herself lost her own seat of Nandigram, to Suvendu Adhikari, a former TMC heavyweight who had defected to the BJP only months earlier. A landslide for the party, delivered while its leader lost her own constituency, is not the sign of a movement. It is the sign of a patronage machine — one capable of delivering votes through its local networks even as the central brand frays, but one whose loyalty to the Centre is conditional on the Centre continuing to deliver patronage in return. Machines of this kind do not have reserves of ideological loyalty to draw on when the patronage stops. They have only the machine itself, and the machine's interest in its own survival.

Within months of that 2021 result, the next chapter began — and it would be the chapter that, more than any other, exhausted whatever reserve of goodwill the TMC had left among Bengal's middle class and aspirational youth.

Cash for Jobs: The SSC Scandal as Class Betrayal

In July 2022, the Enforcement Directorate arrested Partha Chatterjee, then Commerce and Industries Minister and formerly Education Minister during a 2016 School Service Commission recruitment drive, after recovering roughly ₹28 crore in cash and a large quantity of gold from the residence of his close aide, Arpita Mukherjee. What followed was a slow-motion judicial reckoning with what courts eventually termed a "systemic fraud": tampered answer sheets, manipulated merit lists, and, by the Calcutta High Court's own count, 25,753 appointments from the 2016 cycle declared null and void in April 2024 — a ruling the Supreme Court upheld in full in April 2025, ordering those who had obtained posts fraudulently to return their salaries with interest.

It is worth dwelling on what this scandal actually represents, because it is qualitatively different from Saradha, even if the underlying logic — informal payment in exchange for access to state-mediated opportunity — is the same. Saradha defrauded depositors of their savings. The SSC scandal defrauded an entire generation of educated, unemployed young people of the one credible pathway into stable employment that a state with limited industrial growth still offered: a government teaching post. For a party whose foundational claim was that it represented "Maa, Mati, Manush" against an indifferent establishment, presiding over a scheme in which teaching jobs were allegedly sold to the highest bidder while genuinely qualified candidates from working and lower-middle-class families were shut out was not merely corruption. It was a betrayal of the precise social base the party claimed to speak for.

Sandeshkhali, RG Kar, and the Limits of "Maa, Mati, Manush"

If the SSC scandal exposed the TMC's betrayal of Bengal's aspirational youth, two events in 2024 exposed something more fundamental: the relationship between the party's local power structures and the safety of the women in whose name "Maa" — mother — sat at the head of its own slogan.

In Sandeshkhali, women came forward in early 2024 with allegations of land-grabbing and sexual coercion against a local TMC strongman and his network — a structure of local power that, by multiple accounts, had operated for years before the protests forced any state response. Months later, the rape and murder of a trainee doctor at RG Kar Medical College in Kolkata produced some of the largest protests Bengal has seen in a generation, directed not only at the crime itself but at what protesters experienced as an institutional culture of cover-up. A similar pattern recurred in 2025 with a gang rape at a Kolkata law college, where the accused had prior links to the TMC's student wing and a documented history of complaints that had gone unaddressed.

These were not isolated failures of individual policing. They were the visible surface of a governing model in which local power, exercised through party-linked strongmen, was effectively unaccountable until a crisis became too large for the state to ignore — at which point the response was performative rather than structural. By the time the 2026 campaign began, both Sandeshkhali and RG Kar had become central to the opposition's case, to the point that the mother of the RG Kar victim contested the election on a BJP ticket, citing the state government's handling of her daughter's case as her reason for entering politics. That a victim's family found the BJP — a party whose own record on communal violence and on crimes against women in states it governs is hardly exemplary — more credible on this issue than the incumbent TMC is, in itself, a measure of how completely the TMC had exhausted its claim to represent "Maa, Mati, Manush" by 2026.

The 2026 Verdict and What It Actually Means

The result declared on May 4, 2026 — the BJP crossing the two-hundred-seat mark in a 294-member Assembly, ending 15 years of TMC rule, with Suvendu Adhikari sworn in as Chief Minister — should not be read, as much of the national press has read it, as simply "Bengal turns saffron." It is that, and that alone should be cause for serious concern: the BJP's ascendancy in Bengal represents the consolidation, in one of India's largest states, of the most organised vehicle of Hindutva and corporate power in the country, a force whose record on minority rights, on press freedom, and on the rights of organised labour in the states it already governs gives no reason for optimism.

But the 2026 result is also something else: the collapse, under the weight of its own contradictions, of a 15-year experiment in governing through patronage networks, informal financial channels, and a populist slogan increasingly divorced from any material content. The TMC did not lose because Bengal's voters suddenly discovered, in 2026, facts that had been hidden from them. The Saradha scandal was public knowledge for over a decade. The Maoist alliance was reported on as it happened. The SSC verdicts were delivered by courts, in public, over years. Sandeshkhali and RG Kar played out on national television for months. What changed was not the information. It was that a model of governance built on patronage requires patronage to keep flowing — and a state with West Bengal's fiscal constraints, governing through extraction rather than production, eventually runs out of patronage to distribute, leaving only the extraction itself visible.

Within weeks of the defeat, the TMC's internal contradictions — a long-simmering divide between an older generation of district-level leaders and a more centralised operation built around Mamata Banerjee's nephew, Abhishek Banerjee — broke into open rebellion, with significant numbers of MPs and MLAs publicly challenging the leadership of both. A party held together for nearly three decades almost entirely by the personal authority of one leader, and by that leader's ability to deliver state power to her local networks, discovered in real time how little of that unity had been about anything else.

The Absence That Matters Most

What is most striking about the 2026 result, from the standpoint of anyone concerned with the actual material conditions of Bengal's working people and peasantry, is not the TMC's defeat — which, on the record above, was earned many times over — but the absence of any political force, in this election, organised around the interests of those people as a class, rather than as a vote bank to be assembled through patronage, communal appeal, or some combination of both.

The Left, whose land reform legacy remains the single most consequential redistribution of agrarian power in any major Indian state, has spent 15 years in the electoral wilderness, a casualty in no small part of its own missteps over Singur and Nandigram, but also of a media and political environment in which the only permitted choice was framed as TMC or BJP — two formations that, for all their mutual hostility, share a common commitment to a state that serves capital first and negotiates with the working population only through patronage, charity, or communal mobilisation, never through organised, collective power.

The TMC's fall is not, in itself, a victory for anyone except the BJP. What Bengal's politics needs now — and what its history, going back to Operation Barga and the panchayat reforms of the 1980s, suggests it is capable of producing again — is a political force willing to organise around the actual material interests of tenants, sharecroppers, industrial and informal workers, and the educated unemployed whose hopes the SSC scandal so comprehensively betrayed. Whether such a force re-emerges, or whether Bengal simply settles into a new equilibrium between Hindutva consolidation and whatever remains of the TMC's patronage networks, will determine far more about the state's future than the headline result of May 4, 2026 — significant as that result undeniably is.

(The views are personal.)

INDIA

Telegram & NEET: When Governance Fails, Censorship Steps in

Tanya Arora | 18 Jun 2026

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Invoking exam security to suspend access to a platform used by millions raises serious questions about proportionality, transparency and the growing tendency to restrict communications whenever governance challenges arise.

Days before the NEET (UG) 2026 re-examination scheduled for June 21, the Union government took the unprecedented step of blocking Telegram across India. Acting on recommendations made by the National Testing Agency (NTA), the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) reportedly issued directions under Section 69A of the Information Technology Act, 2000, restricting access to the platform until June 22. In addition, Telegram has reportedly been directed to disable its message-editing feature for Indian users until June 30.

The government has justified these measures as a response to organised examination fraud, alleged paper-leak scams and misinformation campaigns. According to statements carried by Mint, WION and other media outlets, authorities identified several Telegram channels allegedly offering access to examination papers in exchange for money. The NTA further claimed that Telegram’s message-editing feature had been exploited to create fabricated evidence of paper leaks by allowing administrators to insert examination papers into older messages while retaining original timestamps.

The importance of maintaining the integrity of national examinations cannot be disputed. The future of lakhs of students depends upon a fair and credible examination process, and organised cheating networks undoubtedly deserve stringent action. However, the constitutional question raised by the Telegram ban is not whether examination fraud should be prevented. The question is whether the State can suspend access to an entire communication platform used by millions because some actors are allegedly misusing it. Once that question is asked, the government’s decision begins to appear far less straightforward than official statements suggest.

The real problem is not Telegram

The government’s explanation begins from a fundamentally flawed premise. The recurring problem in India’s examination system is not Telegram, WhatsApp or any other communication platform. Paper leaks do not originate on social media. They originate within the examination apparatus itself. Every leak necessarily begins somewhere in the chain of printing, storage, transportation, administration or distribution of examination materials. By the time a question paper appears on a messaging platform, the breach has already occurred.

Detailed report on paper leaks may be read here.

This distinction is critical because it reveals the extent to which the government’s response is directed at symptoms rather than causes. Telegram may be one of the channels through which leaked material is circulated, but it is not the source of the leak. The source lies within the institutions responsible for safeguarding examination integrity. A serious response to examination fraud would therefore focus on identifying vulnerabilities within the examination system itself: who had access to the papers, how the chain of custody was compromised, where security protocols failed and what reforms are required to prevent future breaches.

Instead, the government’s intervention directs public attention towards the platform through which information allegedly travels. This approach risks obscuring the more uncomfortable reality that examination fraud is ultimately a governance failure. Blocking Telegram may create the appearance of decisive action, but it does little to address the institutional weaknesses that make such fraud possible in the first place.

The NTA’s own explanation undermines the ban

Perhaps the most striking aspect of the government’s justification is that it appears to undermine the necessity of the measure it seeks to defend. The NTA’s own statement acknowledges that the Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre (I4C), state police forces and specialised cybercrime units had already identified and removed numerous Telegram channels, groups and bots allegedly involved in examination fraud. Law enforcement agencies had reportedly conducted investigations, tracked financial transactions and made arrests.

These admissions raise a difficult question for the government. If authorities were already capable of identifying specific channels and specific offenders, why was it necessary to block the entire platform? If targeted interventions were available and functioning, what justified the escalation to a nationwide platform-wide restriction affecting millions of lawful users?

The significance of these questions becomes even clearer when viewed through constitutional principles. Democracies do not permit governments to adopt the broadest possible restriction merely because it is administratively convenient. The burden lies on the State to demonstrate why less restrictive alternatives were inadequate. Yet the government’s own account suggests that channel-level takedowns, criminal investigations and targeted enforcement actions were already underway. The NTA therefore appears to have supplied the strongest argument against its own decision.

A constitutional problem of proportionality

The Supreme Court has repeatedly held that restrictions on fundamental rights must satisfy the doctrine of proportionality. In Justice K.S. Puttaswamy v. Union of India (2017), the Court made clear that even where the State pursues a legitimate objective, it must demonstrate that the measure adopted is necessary, that less restrictive alternatives are unavailable and that the benefits of the restriction outweigh the harm caused.

Preventing examination fraud is undoubtedly a legitimate objective. The difficulty lies in establishing that a nationwide platform ban was necessary to achieve it. The government’s own statements reveal the existence of multiple alternatives. Channels could be removed. Fraud networks could be investigated. Individuals could be arrested. Financial transactions could be traced. Criminal prosecutions could be initiated.

Once these alternatives are acknowledged, the constitutional burden shifts to the State to explain why they were insufficient. The public explanation offered thus far does not convincingly do so. Instead, it suggests that a platform-wide restriction was adopted despite the existence of narrower measures. That is precisely the scenario the doctrine of proportionality seeks to prevent.

What Anuradha Bhasin case actually says about internet restrictions

The Telegram ban also cannot be separated from the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Anuradha Bhasin v. Union of India (2020). While that case arose in the context of internet restrictions in Jammu and Kashmir, the principles articulated by the Court have broader relevance for all forms of digital restrictions.

The Court recognised that access to the internet is closely intertwined with the exercise of freedom of speech, access to information, education, trade and professional activity. It held that restrictions affecting digital communications must satisfy standards of necessity and proportionality and cannot be imposed through opaque executive processes. Most importantly, the Court emphasised transparency. Orders restricting communications must be published. Citizens must know why their rights are being restricted. Affected parties must have an opportunity to challenge such restrictions before courts.

In the present instance, however, the public has largely been presented with press releases and official explanations rather than the actual legal order. The reasoning adopted by the authorities remains unavailable. Whether Telegram was given an opportunity to be heard remains unclear. Whether less restrictive alternatives were seriously considered is unknown. These omissions are not procedural technicalities; they go to the heart of the constitutional safeguards identified by the Supreme Court.

The Shreya Singhal problem

The legal basis of the government’s action raises another serious concern. The reported reliance on Section 69A of the Information Technology Act immediately invites scrutiny because the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of that provision in Shreya Singhal v. Union of India (2015) only because it was presented as a narrow and carefully structured mechanism.

The Court accepted Section 69A because it involved targeted blocking of specific information under limited circumstances and subject to procedural safeguards. Its constitutional validity depended upon its narrow scope.

The Telegram ban raises the question of whether that narrow provision is now being transformed into a sweeping power capable of disabling entire communication platforms. As the Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF) has argued, there is a significant difference between blocking particular content and shutting down an intermediary used by millions. If Section 69A is interpreted broadly enough to justify platform-wide restrictions, the reasoning that underpinned its constitutional validity begins to weaken considerably.

The message editing direction may be even more troubling

The direction requiring Telegram to disable its message-editing feature raises concerns that extend even beyond the platform ban itself. While the government has publicly explained why it believes the feature was being misused, it has not clearly identified the legal authority under which it can compel a platform to redesign a feature for an entire country’s user base.

This distinction matters because blocking information and redesigning technological architecture are fundamentally different exercises of power. One concerns content regulation; the other concerns direct intervention in the design of digital infrastructure.

The implications are far-reaching. If governments can order the removal of editing functions today, similar arguments could potentially be invoked tomorrow against encryption, anonymous communication or other platform features. The issue is therefore not confined to Telegram. It concerns the broader relationship between state power and digital architecture.

Another example of India’s growing shutdown culture

The Telegram ban is not an isolated incident. It forms part of a broader pattern in which communication restrictions increasingly become the preferred response to administrative challenges. Over the last decade, multiple states have suspended internet services during recruitment examinations, teacher eligibility tests and competitive entrance examinations. These shutdowns are almost always justified as temporary and necessary measures to prevent cheating.

Yet despite repeated restrictions, examination leaks continue to occur. Fraud networks continue to operate. Recruitment scandals continue to emerge.

What persists is not the effectiveness of these measures but their repetition. Instead of reforming institutions, authorities increasingly appear to restrict communications. The result is a governance model in which the burden of institutional failure is shifted onto citizens rather than addressed at its source.

The real danger is the normalisation of censorship

The most significant concern raised by the Telegram ban is not its duration but the principle it reflects. Every time the State confronts a difficult administrative problem, there appears to be a growing willingness to restrict communications as part of the solution. Each restriction is presented as temporary. Each is described as exceptional. Yet collectively they establish a troubling precedent.

Over time, extraordinary measures become ordinary ones. Communication restrictions become routine administrative tools. Fundamental rights become subject to considerations of convenience and expediency.

The future of lakhs of students deserves protection. But constitutional freedoms deserve protection as well. A secure examination system will ultimately be built through accountability, transparency, stronger institutions and effective criminal investigation—not through platform bans and communication restrictions. The Telegram ban therefore raises a question that extends well beyond NEET. It forces us to confront whether India is becoming increasingly comfortable with restricting communications whenever governance becomes difficult. If that trend continues, the consequences will be felt far beyond a single examination cycle.

Courtesy: sabrang India