SMASH INDIA’S AVIATION TYRANNY NOW

N any market mutilated into a duopoly or distorted into a monopoly, the consumer ceases to be a sovereign participant and is instead reduced to a supplicant—stripped of agency, dignity, and choice, compelled to accept whatever crumbs the corporate colossi condescend to toss.

- PRABHU CHAWLA

The illusion of free choice evaporates the moment two dominant players begin dictating the terms of national mobility. Monopolistic might thrives not on efficiency but on engineered insufficiency. It manufactures scarcity with meticulous calculation, inflates fares with merciless consistency, and treats society’s needs as expendable footnotes to balance sheets.

Adam Smith cautioned that people of the same trade seldom meet without conspiring against the public. Today, this once-philosophical warning has hardened into a structural certainty. Chomsky’s indictment of capitalism’s autocratic instincts, Lenin’s denunciation of capitalist democracy as a privilege for the rich, and Brandeis’s unflinching declaration that democracy cannot coexist with concentrated wealth now read notas ideological provocations, but as empirical observations of contemporary lived reality. Corporate concentration corrodes democracy. When private dominance diminishes public authority, the state begins to shrink before the shadow of the very forces it should regulate.

This corrosion became catastrophically visible in India’s civil aviation sector last week, where a single airline’s collapse of operational integrity plunged the nation into confusion, chaos, and contemptible exploitation. IndiGo, holding an astonishing 63 percent of the domestic market, allowed its operations to disintegrate with breathtaking negligence. More than 2,000 flights were cancelled in just three days and over amillion passengers were stranded all over the country—weddings wrecked, dignitaries disoriented, and families flung into logistical limbo. Airports devolved into arenas of exhaustion and exasperation.