Every nation-state sustains its authority by exercising control over the bodies of its people. The nature of this control determines whether individuals live as rights-bearing citizens or as subjects under coercive power. The French philosopher Michel Foucault described this process as biopolitics , where power operates not only through laws and institutions but also through everyday practices that regulate human bodies and behavior. Similarly, Franz Fanon argued that

Every human society produces elites. These elites design, dominate, and reproduce political, social, economic, ecological, and cultural institutions in that society. History is shaped either by these elites or by resistance against them. In South Asia—home to more than one-fourth of the world’s population—understanding power requires a comparative examination of elite formations across national borders. Despite sovereign separation, the ruling classes of India, Pakistan, Bang

Growing up as a Bahujan teenager in the 1990s, deprived, crime-infested slums and public housing projects in Yerwada , Pune city, India, becoming ‘Dada’ (i.e, ‘Local street gang leader’) was my definition of success and respect. As a teenager, I was walking on a thin line between becoming what Indian laws called- ‘ Child in conflict with the law ’. Today, being a Public Policy scholar at the University of Chicago and living closer to the South Side of Chicago , I am empat