A remarkable feature of “the neodemocratic condition” is its glorification — even reverence — of what Aishwary calls “fascist competence."

In this fetishization of "fascist competence", the most potent ally of the authoritarian misanthrope turns out to be not the lawless, violent fundamentalist but the urbane, savvy liberal, one whose pursuit of convenience and the good life give fascism its silent and limitless sanction.

“This marks the return of the skilled technocrat to power at the cost of the thinker concerned with freedom,” says Aishwary. “The substitution of justice by management. The replacement of equality by a new set of constraints that are simply more convenient, perhaps even easier to inhabit in a world wrecked by inequality than they are in a fair world.”

When we speak of a “jurisprudence of neglect,” then, we don’t just mean the abandonment of populations. Rather, we refer to the fact that we have entered into an unspoken, collective compact to give up the most unequal among us as a sacrificial offering at the altar of our voracious appetites.

“We sign up to a murderous consent, in a society founded on enmity,” says Aishwary. “A society underpinned by a legal and legitimate agreement between citizen-combatants who have signed up to a world of partitions, segregations, and disparities.”

“This is what I call, following Ambedkar, the caste contract: our voluntary surrender to a fanaticism that today rides on delusions of technological infinitude; a barbarism that is at once archaic in its blunt segregation and intergalactic in its liberating ambition, and which now defines the planetary condition in fact.”