4:56 PMThis passage argues that India's digitalisation drive is fundamentally a class project serving corporate and imperialist interests. The ruling classes deploy "digital" as a magical catchword to bypass the need for genuine public investment and social transformation, treating digital service delivery as equivalent to actual benefit received. Technology is fetishised to conceal the class interests behind its deployment, while its real costs — lost wages, exclusion from welfare, privatisation burdens — fall entirely on working people. Digitalisation deepens existing inequalities of class, caste, gender and region, atomises collective social institutions into individual consumer relationships, and harvests public data as a subsidy to private capital. The "India Stack" and its sectoral iterations amount to state-funded infrastructure for corporate extraction. Meanwhile, the process accelerates financialisation, enables the withdrawal of the state from healthcare, education, banking and agriculture, and further subordinates the Indian economy to imperialism — all while the very word "imperialism" is scrubbed from mainstream discourse on the subject.