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When AA+ Means “Ask Again”: Manufactured Ratings, Piramal Finance, and the Credit Ratings Trap by DebaprasadBandyopadhyay Via Flickr: onceinabluemoon2021.in/2026/01/06/when-aa-means-ask-again... Under India’s captured financial regime during BJP–NDA rule (2014–2025), credit rating agencies—dominated by the CRISIL-ICRA-CARE triopoly—have shifted from risk sentinels to enablers of crony expropriation, sustaining a cycle of manufactured trust, retail entrapment, delayed collapse, and oligarchic consolidation. The Piramal Finance–DHFL case is emblematic: despite whistleblowers, Cobrapost exposés, and KPMG audits revealing ₹29,000–34,000 crore in promoter diversion, investment-grade ratings persisted until DHFL’s 2019 default, enabling reckless borrowing. Post-collapse, Piramal—amid allegations of political shielding and elite proximity—acquired DHFL through a controversial IBC resolution that priced ~₹45,000 crore in suspected fraud recoveries at Re 1, while ~2.5 lakh retail depositors suffered 55–77% haircuts and losses exceeding ₹50,000 crore across NBFC failures. Rapidly rehabilitated via reverse-merger alchemy, Piramal Finance secured fresh AA+/Stable ratings in January 2026, lowering funding costs and restoring legitimacy even as governance risks linger. This pattern—issuer-pays conflicts, oligopolistic convergence, and “too-connected-to-fail” pricing—reveals CRAs as architects of performative credibility that privatizes distressed assets and socializes ruin, demanding structural rupture through de-captured ratings, personal liability, and retail-centred justice.

Piramal Finance and the Rating Ruse: How India’s Credit Rating Agencies Manufacture Trust to Enable Systemic Expropriation by DebaprasadBandyopadhyay Via Flickr: onceinabluemoon2021.in/2026/01/06/piramal-finance-and-the... In India’s deeply captured financial regime under prolonged BJP-NDA rule (2014–2025), credit rating agencies (CRAs)—dominated by the CRISIL-ICRA-CARE triopoly—have degenerated from purported risk sentinels into systemic enablers of crony expropriation, perpetuating a predatory cycle of manufactured trust, retail mobilization, delayed collapse, and crony oligarchical consolidation. The Piramal Finance–DHFL saga stands as the paradigmatic indictment: investment-grade ratings (AA to AAA) were stubbornly retained despite whistleblower alerts, Cobrapost exposés, and KPMG audits exposing ~₹29,000–34,000 crore in promoter diversions through shells and evergreening, facilitating continued borrowing until 2019 defaults; post-crisis, Piramal—bolstered by dynastic kinship to Mukesh Ambani (via his son’s marriage to Isha Ambani) and alleged political shielding through disproportionate ruling-party contributions—secured DHFL via a sweetheart IBC resolution that controversially valued ~₹45,000 crore in fraud/avoidance recoveries at a nominal Re 1, acquiring the ~₹90,000+ crore portfolio for ~₹37,250 crore while the Supreme Court’s April 1, 2025, ruling vested all future windfalls exclusively in the bidder and condemned ~2.5 lakh retail depositors (mostly middle-class and elderly savers) to brutal 55–77% haircuts, aggregating colossal losses exceeding ₹50,000 crore across similar NBFC failures. Swiftly rebranded as Piramal Finance through reverse merger alchemy, the entity achieved rapid rehabilitation—~₹91,447 crore AUM with over 80% retail pivot, PAT doubling to ~₹327 crore in Q2 FY26, and fortified net worth ~₹27,000 crore—crowned by CRISIL’s fresh AA+/Stable assignment in January 2026 (with A1+ short-term), shaving funding costs by 50–80 bps and unlocking diversified inflows, even as Moody’s Ba3/Stable alone cautioned lingering wholesale exposures (~14%) and volatility. Driven by issuer-pays conflicts, oligopolistic convergence, epistemic blindness to governance rot and political proximity, and implicit “too connected to fail” pricing, CRAs orchestrate performative legitimacy—inflating optics pre-crisis, reacting belatedly post-default (as in IL&FS’s AAA-to-junk plunge and Yes Bank’s pre-moratorium investment-grade persistence), and aggressively upgrading post-consolidation—thereby externalizing ruin onto vulnerable constituencies while privatizing distressed assets for networked oligarchs within a broader architecture of institutional capture, democratic erosion, and cunning capitalism that demands radical rupture: abolishing issuer-pays, imposing personal liability, deconcentrating markets, and centering retail justice to reclaim accountability from this reverse merger republic.

Piramal Finance and the Rating Ruse: How India’s Credit Rating Agencies Manufacture Trust to Enable Systemic Expropriation by DebaprasadBandyopadhyay Via Flickr: onceinabluemoon2021.in/2026/01/06/piramal-finance-and-the... In India’s deeply captured financial regime under prolonged BJP-NDA rule (2014–2025), credit rating agencies (CRAs)—dominated by the CRISIL-ICRA-CARE triopoly—have degenerated from purported risk sentinels into systemic enablers of crony expropriation, perpetuating a predatory cycle of manufactured trust, retail mobilization, delayed collapse, and crony oligarchical consolidation. The Piramal Finance–DHFL saga stands as the paradigmatic indictment: investment-grade ratings (AA to AAA) were stubbornly retained despite whistleblower alerts, Cobrapost exposés, and KPMG audits exposing ~₹29,000–34,000 crore in promoter diversions through shells and evergreening, facilitating continued borrowing until 2019 defaults; post-crisis, Piramal—bolstered by dynastic kinship to Mukesh Ambani (via his son’s marriage to Isha Ambani) and alleged political shielding through disproportionate ruling-party contributions—secured DHFL via a sweetheart IBC resolution that controversially valued ~₹45,000 crore in fraud/avoidance recoveries at a nominal Re 1, acquiring the ~₹90,000+ crore portfolio for ~₹37,250 crore while the Supreme Court’s April 1, 2025, ruling vested all future windfalls exclusively in the bidder and condemned ~2.5 lakh retail depositors (mostly middle-class and elderly savers) to brutal 55–77% haircuts, aggregating colossal losses exceeding ₹50,000 crore across similar NBFC failures. Swiftly rebranded as Piramal Finance through reverse merger alchemy, the entity achieved rapid rehabilitation—~₹91,447 crore AUM with over 80% retail pivot, PAT doubling to ~₹327 crore in Q2 FY26, and fortified net worth ~₹27,000 crore—crowned by CRISIL’s fresh AA+/Stable assignment in January 2026 (with A1+ short-term), shaving funding costs by 50–80 bps and unlocking diversified inflows, even as Moody’s Ba3/Stable alone cautioned lingering wholesale exposures (~14%) and volatility. Driven by issuer-pays conflicts, oligopolistic convergence, epistemic blindness to governance rot and political proximity, and implicit “too connected to fail” pricing, CRAs orchestrate performative legitimacy—inflating optics pre-crisis, reacting belatedly post-default (as in IL&FS’s AAA-to-junk plunge and Yes Bank’s pre-moratorium investment-grade persistence), and aggressively upgrading post-consolidation—thereby externalizing ruin onto vulnerable constituencies while privatizing distressed assets for networked oligarchs within a broader architecture of institutional capture, democratic erosion, and cunning capitalism that demands radical rupture: abolishing issuer-pays, imposing personal liability, deconcentrating markets, and centering retail justice to reclaim accountability from this reverse merger republic.

Remembering What “Definitions” Make Us Forget: A Statement on the Aravallis and the Politics of Ecological Erasure by DebaprasadBandyopadhyay Via Flickr: onceinabluemoon2021.in/2025/12/28/remembering-what-defini... The Ecotopians of Alternity (EOA) as part of the Once in a Blue Moon Academia (OBMA) Collective asserts that the current legal crisis surrounding the Aravalli mountain range is a deliberate act of “definitional erasure” that threatens the ecological survival of North India. By narrowing the definition of these ancient hills to landforms rising 100 meters or more, the state effectively excludes over 90% of the range—including critical lower ridges, scrub forests, and groundwater recharge zones—from legal protection. This is not a neutral administrative update but a strategic maneuver that renders ecologically vital terrain “invisible” to the law, thereby clearing the path for corporate mining and real-estate expansion. Drawing on the Indian philosophical concept of lakṣaṇa (defining something based on characteristic mark), the EOA argues that a definition based solely on height fails to capture the holistic reality of an ecosystem that stops desertification and sustains regional aquifers. This logic of reductionism mirrors a broader national pattern of prioritizing extractivist “developmental rationality” over indigenous lifeworlds and long-term climate resilience, as seen in projects from Great Nicobar to Hasdeo Arand. Against this regime, the EOA calls for a coordinated resistance that refuses to let life be reduced to “administrative residue,” demanding a lived ecological imagination that protects the Aravallis as an indivisible, living system rather than a collection of disposable units.

Of Debt and Delusion: India’s $747 Billion Burden and the Mirage of Neoliberal GDP Fetishism by DebaprasadBandyopadhyay Via Flickr: onceinabluemoon2021.in/2025/12/30/of-debt-and-delusion-in... This article critically examines India’s external debt surge to approximately USD 747 billion by mid-2025—a near-doubling since 2014—as a hallmark of crony capitalism under the Modi regime, where liberalized external commercial borrowings (ECBs) and public sector bank hollowing facilitate upward redistribution, oligarchic consolidation (favoring conglomerates like Adani and Ambani), and asymmetric risk socialization amid volatile private dominance (over 77% non-government), USD-heavy exposure (54%), and intergenerational burdens. Intersecting with GDP misreporting flaws (IMF C-grade accounts, unorganized sector proxies inflating growth) and colonial-era inequality peaks (top 1% holding 40% wealth), this financialized precarity—diagnosed via Toussaint’s World Bank “never-ending coup” and Lazzarato’s “indebted man”—enforces neoliberal discipline, commodifies survival, and erodes sovereignty despite orthodox “sustainability” metrics. Countering GDP fetishism’s ontological violence, it invokes Mahabharata’s aṛṇī ethics of non-indebtedness alongside nisargaṛṇa stewardship, proposing pluriversal alternatives like Felber’s Common Good Balance Sheet (non-commensurable axes of dignity, solidarity, ecology), A. K. Dasgupta’s Economics of Austerity, Raworth’s Doughnut Economics, Norberg-Hodge’s localization, degrowth/post-growth sufficiency, and gift/moneyless economies to reclaim community sovereignty from predatory entanglement toward justice, reciprocity, and unburdened flourishing.

End of Year Bombshell: How BJP-NDA-Hindutva Failed India – A Scathing 2014-2025 Indictment by DebaprasadBandyopadhyay Via Flickr: onceinabluemoon2021.in/2025/12/31/end-of-year-bombshell-h... As 2025 draws to a close, this comprehensive dossier documents not a series of discrete policy missteps, but a systemic transformation of governance in India (2014–2025): a shift from democratic accountability to political executive dominance; from evidence-based policymaking to manufactured narrative control; from social protection to structural precarity. Spanning the economy, federalism, data integrity, labour, the natural environment, digital freedoms, education, public health, cultural institutions, civil liberties, and fundamental rights, the record reveals enduring patterns of power centralization, calibrated opacity, selective enforcement, and institutional hollowing—accompanied by crony consolidation and the routinized criminalization of dissent. Democratic indicators decline as surveillance infrastructures expand, grassroots welfare erodes, and truth itself is rendered an object of administrative management. This is not a partisan ledger, but a counter-archive: an evidence-grounded indictment that affirms accountability as the necessary cost of power. In closing the year, it calls for a civic reckoning—not to foreclose debate, but to reclaim and restore it.

Agnihotri’s “The Kashmir Files” and “The Bengal Files” in Violation of the Nāṭyaśāstra: An Open Sanātanī Hindu Indictment by DebaprasadBandyopadhyay Via Flickr: What happens when cinema abandons ethical frameworks like the Nāṭyasāstra and becomes a political weapon? This detailed essay critiques The Kashmir Files and The Bengal Files—examining history, propaganda, cultural memory, and the erosion of democratic discourse. [Sarcasm intended under Plutocracy] Read & share: onceinabluemoon2021.in/2025/12/20/agnihotris-the-kashmir-...

Emotion of Motion: Piramal Pharma’s Naturolax and the Politics of the Gut by DebaprasadBandyopadhyay Via Flickr: onceinabluemoon2021.in/2025/12/16/emotion-of-motion-piram... Inspired by Chekhov’s “On the Harmful Effects of Tobacco”, this self-reflexive, darkly satirical essay stages constipation as a material, political, and ecological symptom of contemporary Indian capitalism, tracing an embodied genealogy from the Green Revolution’s chemical agriculture to financial trauma following the DHFL insolvency and the Supreme Court’s 2025 endorsement of the reportedly expropriative Piramal resolution plan. Through the narrator’s lived experience of chronic constipation and IBS, the text theorizes the gut as an archive of injustice, where delayed justice, hoarded capital, and authoritarian governance translate into stalled peristalsis. Naturolax—branded Isabgol marketed by Piramal Pharma—emerges as both literal laxative and critical allegory: a modest, reliable agent of movement contrasted against constipated institutions, crony capitalism, regulatory laxity, and the commodification of traditional remedies. Drawing on cinema (Piku, Moloch, Toilet: Ek Prem Katha), lore (Gopal Bhar), political economy, pharmacology, and environmental critique, the essay argues that bodily dysfunction mirrors democratic paralysis and planetary blockage under anthropogenic heating, where circulation—of wealth, truth, water, and accountability—is systematically arrested. Rejecting grand revolutionary spectacle, it proposes peristalsis as a politics of rhythm rather than rupture: small, coordinated movements that insist on passage. In doing so, the piece reframes health, justice, and ecology as inseparable processes of circulation, asserting that resistance begins where systems still remember how to move—within the gut, across society, and ultimately through the planet itself.

Bhagat Singh Speaks in 2025: A Spectre Haunts the Rulers of India! by DebaprasadBandyopadhyay Via Flickr: onceinabluemoon2021.in/2025/12/08/bhagat-singh-speaks-in-... This manifesto—framed as Bhagat Singh’s return in 2025—condemns the erosion of democracy, secularism, and socialism in contemporary India under the BJP-led oligarchy. It denounces crony capitalism, authoritarian governance, and the DHFL scam as symbols of systemic exploitation. Calling for reason, scientific temper, and constitutional duty, it urges India’s oppressed citizens to resist through coordinated legal action, peaceful yet militant mass mobilization, and digital activism. The message rejects silence, warns against authoritarian decay, and invokes revolutionary solidarity to reclaim justice, dignity, and democratic rights.