> In The Shock Doctrine, renowned journalist Naomi Klein presents a searing account of how disasters were used as cover to steamroll market fundamentalism by authoritarian regimes in Chile and Argentina, among others. The title alludes to the practice of psychiatric shock therapy used in the early twentieth century. She calls this disaster capitalism, defined as “orchestrated raids on the public sphere in the wake of catastrophic events, combined with the treatment of disasters as exciting market opportunities.” For instance, Klein talks about how the U.S. government saw wrecked post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans as an opportunity to use “moments of collective trauma to engage in radical social and economic engineering.” In short, there are several examples of how neoliberal deep states are eked out by gaslighting an economic crisis at an exigent moment to pawn civil liberties and natural resources. We might ask: What is the context? It is to understand the shifting—and sliding—terrains of constitutional politics in present-day India. And to do so, we need to look at illiberal or undemocratic regimes as examples.2 In this context, several polemical comparisons have been made between the Indian prime minister Narendra Modi’s autocratic tendencies and those of Adolf Hitler. This comparison has enjoyed durability given the allegiance of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) mothership Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) to the German National Socialist (Nazi) Party. Recently, political theorist Partha Chatterjee has offered a characteristically brilliant study of popular sovereignty and its competing models in Europe and Asia in the last two centuries. Some of what RSS brings to the Nazi project and why Modi represents a new kind of capitalism in India is evident in this work. However, how the violent Hindutva precepts of the current BJP regime are being foregrounded as part of a larger neoliberal apparatus remains an open question, which has assumed special weight in light of the pandemic. [...]