The sun may be setting on the Musk-Epstein-Trump class, even as its limitless avarice for dominance remains committed to further marauding global advances.Trump had vowed to improve the livelihoods of American citizens, but American masses saw him enrich himself and his clan with unabashed lust for lucre in any shape, colour, or form, and indiscriminately in any sort of company, Pakistan included, which provided the crypto in billions.Trump had vowed to end all wars, but American citizens saw him start fresh ones without the least justification, with grave damage to the everyday requirements of ordinary Americans – from mortgage dues to groceries to gas at the pump to the cost of education.Even Trump’s trusting MAGA base – certainly considerable sections within it – understood that his tariffs tool kit was a means to enrich his friends, family, and corporate cronies at the expense of the quotidian American who came to confront inflation and higher costs for consumer goods of everyday use.Even those sections of Americans who tend to be in Pavlovian fashion partial to the state of Israel came to dislike Trump‘s enslavement to Netanyahu, and the hijacking of common American interests by murderous Zionist ones.The global squeeze on common lives has thus s caused a long overdue efflorescence of street protests in country after country, city after city, in Europe and the most unprecedented bashing of the Trump ticket at the mid-term hustings in America.Typically, if Trump first claimed to be on the ticket (he said so 47 times) while campaigning, he has disavowed having been so after the scale of the electoral disaster has come to light.(Are we not used to this pattern of leadership – owning the victories and disowning the disasters – here at home too?)Further proof of the changing zeitgeist was to come from Serbia and Brazil.In Serbia, a resurgent Gen Z movement translated into a political tsunami, forcing a ten-year-old brutal dictatorship to lose state power.And in Brazil, Trump’s proxy candidate, Bolsonaro, eventually lost to the Democratic Socialist, Lula, even if 80 years of age – a highly significant rejection of an imperialist, neo-colonial agenda.As to the defeat of that agenda in America itself, just two of the plethora of electoral calamities may suffice to indicate the scale and depth of the rejection of Trumpist fascism: that in a ruby-red state like Kansas, the Senate race was won by a Democrat after 94 years, and in the other ruby-red state of Texas the Senate race was won by a Kennedyesque Democrat, Talarico, after 38 years.Recall that it was in Texas that Kennedy was shot dead at the behest of a gang of southern Rednecks in order to prevent him from signing off from the unconscionable and immoral butchery of the Vietnam invasion, and for attempting a modus vivendi with the Soviet block.Thus, there are clear signs that the Spenglerian cartwheel of history may be returning back to the leftward point yet again, as people’s protest movements gather scale and force in region after region on behalf of issues that are germane to the ideal of affordability, across a whole spectrum of quotidian needs and desires.Here at home, if you were at the mass rally of November 1, you would have heard sentient explications of the need to assert street power from common Indians come from far and wide and not affiliated to any one of the political constituents of the INDIA alliance.In clear-eyed articulation, hoi polloi seemed aware that there more than mere cost of living was at stake; it was democracy itself.Asked by an ’embedded’ reporter if the ouster of the mendacious Chief Election Commissioner, Gyanesh Kumar, would ensure opposition victories, it was eye-opening to hear the rejoinder: the point is not who wins or who loses, but whether the citizen will retain their most precious fundamental prerogative to exercise her mandate without fear or favour, without discrimination, or be treacherously robbed of the right to franchise by an Institution charged by the constitution to ensure that not a single citizen is prevented from expressing her choice of government – an institution alas, currently crony to the executive of the day.Another protester could be heard to ask should the voter choose a government or the government choose the voter?Yet, it will be foolhardy and politically short-sighted to imagine that the blue tsunami from the world’s oldest democracy may naturally now overtake the largest one, despite political-economic conditions having been parallel.If it has been the rule of the Musk-Epstein-Trump there, we have our own triumvirate of Adani-AmbaniModi and the regime-friendly godmen who reign; our situation being worse in that our state institutions and “mainstream” media breathed their last years ago, leaving official preferences as the only sources of information, analysis, and “national consensus.”Most of all, the state in India has now perfected a tool that is not easily countered by a reasoned, secular-democratic politics, namely a religiosity that permeates every moment of the totalised life of the polity – from household activity to commercial transactions, to ubiquitous turns of phrase in social life, whatever be the matter at hand.Unlike Christianity, Hindutva has now turned Hinduism into a year-long immersion in religious tropes, keeping always the Muslim “enemy” lined up as a target, and as the presumed source of all of India’s historical, cultural, political ills, and chief obstacle to her ascendance to world number one.(Note: as of this day, California at $ 4.5 trillion has a larger GDP than India. India falls between 144 and 150 in per capita rankings among 193 countries.)As staff recruitments, both academic and administrative, of India’s educational institutions, from high to low, have come to follow a ruthless ideological profile, and as contents of curricula across the spectrum of subjects of study – the Humanities being predictably the chief victims – have come to be anaesthetised, there are few sources of informed resistance left to the young Indian which she may draw upon to counter the oppressive official cultural-religious onslaught.Only a selection of social media outlets seem left for thwarting that onslaught.The only library recourse now seems the internet.Despite all that, however, large sections of India’ youth are not made fools quite to the extent that the state desires.What remains to be seen is how consequently these youth movements may gel with the push back form India’s parliamentary opposition (that, incidentally, represents 60% of the populace) to forge a tsunami strong enough to disabuse the mass of Indians of the ruse they have thus far been subject to.Put another way, how long may it take to return religious concerns back into the private sphere where they sacrally belong, and relieve India’s political life from its collapse into a profitable, everyday bigotry?The heartening feature of the recent protests at home has been the resurfacing of the democratic Left across the party spectrum.It is hoped that its exertions will mesh with those of the democratic socialists without an old and familiar fratricidal tussle for hegemony, but with an eye unwaveringly on the larger historical imperative.Grapevine has it that larger mobilisation of the Left’s street power, enabled by detailed and incisive critiques of state policies, are underway. That this new energy on the Left is inspired also by the massive demonstrations in European cities may be true and welcome at once.It will be interesting to see how far Trump’s friends worldwide may outlast a depleted and defeated Trump.Certainly, the “Modi, Modi” shouting diaspora seems to have largely deserted him this once.What may this mean for his friend, Narendra Modi?Badri Raina taught at Delhi University.