The gig economy and the startup of the century.

The BJP must be awarded the Centicorn startup of the early 21st-century award.

I shall not go into the depths and details of its achievements and how it managed to beat the odds and become the darling of investors and shareholders alike, even while screwing over its vendors and customers, how it has never turned a profit because of its very high customer acquisition and retention costs, how it has kept upping its valuation and used the FOMO amongst investors to its advantage, how it has used its dominant position to kill all competition and suck out all the money in the ecosystem, how it has broken literally every law and regulation meant to prevent just such an entity from controlling so much of the market, how its founders now own very little of the equity and how its cap table is stacked with investors and current management, how it keeps exploiting regulatory and compliance loopholes as it expands its footprint massively while operating on the fringes of the law, how it lies brazenly on its balance sheet and press releases, as well as on its product promises about new features and old bugs and how it blames the users and customers for flaws in its product, how the founders and managers keep giving totally useless but profound-sounding gyaan to others in a mono-directional broadcast using the very media they have manipulated and control, how its PR and optics is its strongest point and not what it actually delivers to the customer, how it has poached every employee of its competition and priced them out of the market, how it is unscrupulous in terms of how much harm it can and does cause to its users, the society it operates in, and the environment, how it is now so big that when (not if, thankfully) it fails, it shall take down an entire country, with its economy and the well-being of its people, with it, how it was never about the value it was adding to its customers’ lives or the society it operates in but always about valuations and bagging another round of funding, and how it has learnt to adapt and mould itself to new and changing situations like a chameleon, among other skills and tricks it has in its trunkful of magic tricks.

But I shall say one thing: The BJP are now moving to the gig economy. They have already transformed the administrative services and other civilian government services and jobs with lateral entry, they have reduced the weightage of board exams in admissions to universities by creating their own centralised entrance exams, they have normalised elected representatives moving allegiances post-elections, they have privatised almost every strategic asset except the actual running of the government (which, unbeknownst to their customers and buyers, they have already converted to an outsourced model), and now, finally, they are turning to the armed forces. Temporary workers, recruited outside the usual system, fit into newly created positions with fancy-sounding names, to be hired and fired at will, and intended to be used as cannon fodder and menial labour for a short duration, until they run out of juice, only to make way for fresh bodies, without having to bother about niceties such as pensions and ranks, education and professionalism, loyalty and bonding, and then discarding those that have been bled dry to return them to the civilian world with no other skills but that of a contract soldier, aka a mercenary, ready to be inducted into low-paying jobs that will sap their self-confidence and self-respect, or a life of crime where they can use their unique skills, or become an easy target for radicalisation due to the frustration of having nothing productive to contribute, given the youth’s background in learning only the ‘josh‘ part of the military, without giving him enough time to learn ‘hosh‘. Like all gig economy startups, the BJP has created a system of plausible deniability by claiming that the very people it keeps talking about caring for are not employees and stakeholders to be included in their plans, but merely independent contractors, circumventing not just established law, but also common sense and morality. But then, to be fair, like any super-successful startup, they never claimed morality to be their guiding principle. You see, one company’s mistake of promising not to be evil before turning into the epitome of immorality was enough learning. समझदार को इशारा काफ़ी है।

Say anything about the BJP and their Führer, लेकिन एक बात तो माननी पड़ेगी: They are adaptable as fuck. Beat that, Softbank!

P.S: Their next step would be to, of course, start leveraging this gig workforce and monetise it by renting out its services to paying customers like the USA, to fight its wars and do its dirty work. What’s a few hundred, or even thousand, body bags when you have the world’s largest young population as your reservoir to draw fresh recruits from. शायद इसी को demographic dividend कहते है, है न?