Welcome to Watch the State.
Born out of protest, built as archive, Watch the State was launched by The Polis Project in the aftermath of India’s anti-CAA uprisings in 2019.
Students, activists and citizens were being brutalised, arrested and disappeared. The state was not just enabling the spread of disinformation; it was also actively erasing proof of its crime and impunity. As mainstream media abdicated its duty to report and social media became the digital archive of violence.
Every image, every report, every piece of information, and every post we share is credited, verified, and placed in context. We do not masquerade opinion as investigation. We hold the line.
Our focus is clear:
We document protest.
We archive repression.
We track state-sanctioned violence against students, workers, journalists, farmers, women, and the undocumented. We record the silencings, the disappearances, the everyday brutality that doesn’t make prime time. But it helps us understand the pattern.
So what is ‘the state’?
It’s not just the government. It’s the media that launders state propaganda. The technocrats and capitalists who profit from silence. It’s the entire machine that thrives on impunity.
In the coming months, at Watch the State, we’re deepening the work: – First-person debriefs and video dispatches – Archival returns that link the past to the present
If The Polis Project is the finished essay, Watch the State is the marginalia. Scrawled in urgency. Backed by rigour. And always remembering that everything will be remembered.
Follow us. Read closely. Share carefully. Stay alert.
The BJP is systematically reengineering the conditions under which Indians vote:
— Gerrymandering Muslim voters out of representational power in Assam and Kashmir
— Deleting 9.1 million names from West Bengal’s voter rolls before a state election
— Pushing through a bill that would synchronise all elections into a single cycle that benefits whichever party dominates national politics
This is a project of electoral exclusion.
Electoral engineering distorts representation and rewires the public’s imagination. Over time, the systematic hollowing out of institutions, courts, election commissions, legislatures, watchdog bodies, and procedural safeguards erodes both their credibility and their capacity to function. Citizens learn to experience democratic processes as rituals emptied of consequence.
The most enduring victory of authoritarian politics arrives when people cease to believe that due process matters, that institutions can protect them, or that democratic participation can alter political outcomes. At that point, the erosion of democracy becomes self-sustaining.
Sources: Scroll, Al Jazeera, The Wire, BBC, The Guardian, Hindustan Times, Indian Express, New Indian Express, The Hindu, Business Standard.
Kerala’s Left Democratic Front lost the state assembly election to the Congress-led United Democratic Front. For the first time in nearly five decades, no Indian state is governed by a left-wing party. Economists including Amartya Sen pointed to the “Kerala Model” as proof that democratic public action, not GDP growth alone, could deliver genuine human development.
The decline is structural as much as it is electoral. The Indian state has long been hostile to left-wing governance. In 1959, Nehru’s government constitutionally dismissed Kerala’s first communist government. Under the BJP, this hostility has been institutionalised at scale.
As the late Sitaram Yechury acknowledged, the Left too bears responsibility — its failure to speak to gig workers, urban informal labour, and climate-affected communities reflects a prolonged inability to analyse concrete conditions. But the ground it now operates on has been deliberately narrowed.
Sources: Al Jazeera, Arab News, Jacobin, Aeon, Indian Express, Third World Quarterly, State of Power 2026 (Transnational Institute), The Marxist.
Chris Smalls, founder of the Amazon Labor Union, was arrested outside the Met Gala for holding a sign. Inside, Jeff Bezos co-chaired a $100,000-a-ticket event celebrating the wealthiest people on earth. We have a system that arrests the worker and gives the billionaire a red carpet.
Bezos’ record is labour suppression, political capture, media control, and the use of corporate infrastructure in the service of state violence. The Met Gala does not launder this record.
Sources: Gallup/USA Today, United for Respect, HuffPost, LaborLab, Forbes, Mother Jones, Robert Reich/Substack, IBT, TUC, IRS leaked documents via ProPublica, In These Times, Jacobin, NPR.
On April 22, four worker advocacy organisations filed a criminal complaint with the Paris prosecutor’s office against Uber Eats and Deliveroo for human trafficking, a global first. The complaint is based on a landmark study by Doctors of the World, conducted with over 1,000 couriers across Paris and Bordeaux, which found that delivery workers average 63 hours of work per week for a gross hourly wage of €5.83 — less than half the French legal minimum of €12.02. 64% are undocumented, and none are classified as employees.
At the heart of the complaint is the platform algorithm. It sets differential pay rates for couriers in the same location without explanation and issues account deactivations without cause or recourse.
Sources: Doctors of the World, Harsha Walia, Nick Srnicek, Human Rights Watch, Business and Human Rights Resource Centre, ARPE France, Georgetown University, Primus Partners, Janpahal RIGHTS Survey, Chandan Kumar / Anousha Peters / T. Aishwarya, Nesrine Malik, Le Monde, InfoMigrants, The Guardian, BBC.
The U.S. positions itself as the hemisphere’s moral authority on drug trafficking. But a mounting body of evidence tells a different story.
The United States Mint has been purchasing gold controlled by the Clan del Golfo, a U.S.-designated terrorist organisation.
The Army’s Lake City plant supplied 47 percent of the .50-caliber rounds seized from Mexican cartels since 2012.
Between 2000 and 2012, the DEA maintained a working arrangement with the Sinaloa Cartel, allowing it to move billions of dollars of narcotics into the United States.
In November 2025, President Trump pardoned Juan Orlando Hernández, a former Honduran president convicted of receiving cartel money from El Chapo.
In this colonial matrix of power, military force, legal frameworks, economic dependency, and information warfare work together to keep Latin American resources available to Northern capital. The cartels are its instruments, its customers, and its alibi.
Sources: New York Times, The Guardian, Forbes, Canal RED, Hondurasgate, International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, El Universal, PBS NewsHour, Financial Times, The Cradle, The World, PRI, US Treasury Inspector General Audit, US Southern Command public statements, DEA federal court documents.
Every May 1, we return to the unfinished project of liberation. We believe, as artists and organisers always have, that imagination is the foundation of every struggle that has ever moved the world forward. You cannot organise toward a world you cannot yet picture. Art is how we picture it.
The history of radical art is a history of refusal. The most transformative art has not come from the centre of institutional sanction but from its edges. Many hands. Shared authorship. Work made in the service of people rather than markets.
Collective authorship is, in itself, an act of resistance against a system that converts creative labour into private property and keeps artists competing rather than organising.
May Day belongs to everyone who has ever worked, which is to say it belongs to everyone who has ever made something. Art makes you feel something, and what makes you feel something can make new life grow. On this day and every day, we remember that there can be no revolution without art. There never has been.
On April 29, the Supreme Court issued a 6-3 ruling in Louisiana v. Callais that ended Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. It’s the last remaining federal tool protecting minority voters from racially discriminatory district maps. It now requires plaintiffs to prove intentional discrimination, a standard Justice Elena Kagan called “an almost insurmountable barrier.”
Analyses by Fair Fight Action and Black Voters Matter estimate the ruling could enable Republicans to flip as many as 19 majority-minority seats currently held by Democrats. In states like Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, and North Carolina, legislatures may now draw maps that crack and pack Black, Latino, and Native communities.
This ruling is the result of a coordinated, decades-long legal strategy. Voting is the guardian of nearly every right we hold in a democratic society. What the Roberts Court has done, ruling by ruling, is dismantle that guardianship.
Sources: Louisiana v. Callais, Shelby County v. Holder, Rucho v. Common Cause, ACLU, The Guardian, AP, Roll Call, LA Public Press, Gilder Lehrman Institute, Mother Jones, Brennan Center for Justice, Fair Elections Center, Center for American Progress, North Carolina State Conference of the NAACP v. Berger, LULAC v. Texas, Wise v. Missouri, PBS, MS NOW
When Mali’s Defence Minister General Sadio Camara was killed on April 25, Western media hardly paused. But his assassination is the latest chapter in a decades-long campaign to prevent African states from exercising genuine sovereignty.
NATO’s 2011 destruction of Libya was motivated in part, as declassified Hillary Clinton emails confirm, by Gaddafi’s plan to establish a gold-backed pan-African currency. It has since armed “insurgent” networks that have flooded the Sahel with weapons and fighters. The Africa Center for Strategic Studies documented a 100,000 percent increase in terrorism deaths across Africa during the U.S. “War on Terror.”
The Alliance of Sahel States — Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger — is the most serious challenge to this system in a generation. These governments have expelled French and American forces, renegotiated extractive mining contracts, nationalised strategic resources, and built regional institutions oriented toward African self-determination. In response, the European Parliament passed a resolution demanding the restoration of deposed Western-aligned leaders.
Sources: Tricontinental Institute for Social Research; Africa Center for Strategic Studies; Responsible Statecraft; Al Jazeera; Janata Weekly; Joseph Solis-Mullen; Black Agenda Report; Sandra Bebubuateng; Jeffrey Wernick; Hillary Clinton declassified emails; West Point Combating Terrorism Centre; New America; AFRICOM.
Censorship doesn’t announce itself as censorship. It’s blocked archives, removed reports, book bans, immigration vetting, platform takedowns, algorithmic distortions, legal intimidation, and the restriction of public access to information. States, corporations, and political actors are attacking the very infrastructures through which people document reality and contest power.
Watch the State traces a new age of censorship in which truth is made harder to reach. Control over information becomes control over public memory. When access is restricted, evidence disappears. When evidence disappears, accountability becomes easier to evade.
Warner Bros. Discovery shareholders have approved a proposed $110 billion merger with Paramount Skydance, moving the deal into its next phase. The deal will still require approval from regulators in the U.S. and Europe. If cleared, it would create an extraordinary media empire. David Ellison, son of Oracle-founder Larry Ellison, will be at the centre of one of the most powerful communications infrastructures in the world. The Ellison family is a vocal Trump supporter.
When billionaires control newspapers, news networks, studios and social media platforms, they shape what becomes visible, and politically possible. Ultra-rich media owners have a direct interest in protecting their wealth from democratic challenge, especially when their businesses depend on favourable regulation.
As the Washington Post’s slogan still says, democracy dies in darkness. Today, darkness is closing in because so much of the U.S! wealth and media ownership is concentrated in the hands of a few fascists.
We must fight to get our democracy back. Supporting independent journalism is one good place to begin.
Since March 2, Israel has killed 2,454 people in Lebanon, displaced over 1.2 million, demolished 34 villages entirely, and destroyed or damaged more than 62,000 housing units. On April 8 alone, 376 people were killed in a 10-minute barrage.
On April 22, journalist Amal Khalil lay trapped under rubble for seven hours while Israeli forces prevented emergency workers from reaching her. The Committee to Protect Journalists found that Israel was responsible for two-thirds of all journalist killings worldwide in 2025.
What is unfolding in Lebanon is uncontested, and it is continuing with impunity. Israel’s conduct constitutes violations of international humanitarian law, and in several instances, war crimes.
Sources: Lebanese Ministry of Public Health, WHO Lebanon Health Emergency Sitrep #19, Lebanon’s National Council for Scientific Research, Committee to Protect Journalists, Reporters Without Borders, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, BBC Verify, UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, UNIFIL, Al Jazeera, CNN, AP, Reuters, The Public Source.
