Kafila, Jinniology and Secular Modernity's Tiger of Wrath

Edit- So as to take revenge for my showering uncouth abuse upon her in the course of this blog post, Aarti Sethi has written very sweetly to me to say she thinks I might be 'erudite' not in Angrezi as wot she is spoke by Queenji also, but in 'Sanskrit and Tamil and Persian' and such like. 
OMG! She thinks I'm some dehati Uncleji type! The shame! The humiliation! 
I have written back to her saying 'Beti, kindly do Love Jihad against Muslim Professors- especially if they come from Kashmir- and rape them and force them to marry you to bachao their izzat same as what Ananya Vajpayi did to that nice Basharat Peer. Remember, true Heroines of Hindutva like Ananya are allowed to marry up 5 husbands at one time. Jai Hindutva! NaMo Shivaya!'

A Tiger of Wrath.
A mentally ill young man somehow got into the Tiger enclosure in Delhi zoo. The Zoo staff should have tranquilized the Tiger, but their dart gun was locked up somewhere and Red Tape is Red Tape.

The crowd threw stones at the tiger, which was watching the young man intently. Perhaps, this was the wrong thing to do. Maybe it caused the tiger to pounce on the poor fellow and drag him away. 

Kafila, the leading Careerist, Credentialist, faux Left-Liberal website published an extraordinarily foolish post on the death of that young man from which I excerpt the following-

'Maqsood Pardesi was the bearer of a message: Maqsood comes from the Arabic root “qasad”: intention. From which come both “qasida” a petition; a prayer; a praise, and “qasid” the messenger. In Persian the Arabic transforms to “maqsad”: meaning, and maqsood: intention; desire. What is the maqsad of Maqsood’s life? How will he be remembered?

As a “mentally ill” drunk whose “obsession” was responsible for his ludicrous death? As a sad case whose strange manner of dying testified to the destitution of his brief life? Or, as a man who wagered, and lost, his life on the impulsion of an encounter? Mourning Maqsood’s death does not preclude taking seriously the extraordinary vitality of his life. To posthumously pathologise Maqsood by calling him “mentally ill” is to impoverish his memory, and denude our capacity to receive that which is given, and appears, only very rarely.

Maqsood Pardesi walked into the enclosure of a tiger! What is lamentable about a death like this? Why must it mark a “failure”: his, society’s, the zoo authorities’? Is this not perhaps how, when the world was a richer more awake place, people went to meet the spirits and the gods?

Tigers are beautiful. Unfortunately, humans are tasty. Simone Weil said 'perhaps the primordial sin is to try to eat what one should only look at.' She didn't say it to a Tiger though. It mightn't have agreed and anyway Simone was off her head and soon died of inanition.
But what has all this to do with 'Kafila'- the caravan of the Careerist Left winding its way through the vast Sahara of Indian Secular discourse?
Surely this is not a case where 'tigers of wrath' turn out to be more worthwhile than 'the horses of instruction?'

After all, Maqsood had paid for admission to the Delhi Zoo. That institution had a duty of care towards him. Whether he jumped or fell into the Tiger enclosure is irrelevant. The Zoo has a legal obligation to protect even crazy people who endanger themselves. In this case, proper procedure required the tranquilizing of the Tiger. But the dart gun was locked away. This is criminal negligence plain and simple. 

The reason rational people should lament a death like this is because, as members of the Public, we need to take responsibility for the actions of Public Bodies which act on our behalf. The Delhi Zoo is a Public Body. It had a duty of care. It failed to discharge this duty and is guilty of criminal negligence. This certainly is cause for lamentation, for breast beating, for righteous indignation and a calling of public officials to account. What it isn't cause for, at least for rational members of Civil Society, is some belles lettrist vapouring about how mebbe the world was a richer more awake place when people went to meet the spirits and the gods and ended up being mauled and eaten.

The writer of the post from which I have quoted is a lady with a Hindu name. She explicitly mentions the young man's religious and cultural background- viz Muslim and 'foreign' (the literal meaning of his surname). The tiger, incidentally, had a Hindu name- 'Vijay'- 'victory'.

A person with a male Muslim name- Imtiaz Ali- left several increasingly irate comments on the lady's post. He appeared to believe, that the duty of Hindu intellectuals is to condemn Hindutva, not parade their knowledge of Urdu and engage in Akeel Bilgrami type waffle about 'Enchantment'.
 Clearly, Hindu intellectuals need to establish that Maqsood was killed by Modi's minions- something they can easily do if they stop pretending to know Persian and Arabic and concentrate simply on doing 'a proper anthropology of Hinduism' so as to disclose 'the ontology of Hindutva'. This, surely, is the 'need of the hour'.

The lady, in reply, pointed out that Hindutva is as boring as shite and saying Hindusim is crap requires some pretence of knowing about Hinduism so fuck that and anyway all the big league Professors have already vomited all over the subject so gimme a break, hon.
The Muslim gentleman replies that it is the responsibility of people with Hindu names to vomit all over Hinduism because when people with non-Hindu names do it they just come across as ignorant or ISIL.  I mean a Muslim dude can scarcely write stuff like ' Hinduism is an evil religion which creates Hindutva which is an evil ideology responsible for thousands of people risking their own lives to kill non-Hindus.' without looking a complete wally. Thus ladies with Hindu names should take on the job coz they can always pretend they just been raped by Hindutva guys who tore open their belly, dragged a fetus out of it, raped the fetus and then ripped open its belly to drag a fetus out of it which they raped and like ever since Modi became PM it's like totally going down 24/7 in every Hindu household and nobody notices coz they aint Hindu ladies and like Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum gonna write a book about it soon which I will co-author so just take my word for it already.'
Clearly the Muslim dude is making a valid point. Hindu ladies have a duty to tell vicious lies about Hinduism coz non-Hindus don't wanna look stupid by publishing those same lies, as original research, under their own names.

 How does the Hindu lady get out of the stern task the Muslim gentleman has set for her?

To find out,  why not read the whole thing for yourself?

Imtiaz ali permalink

September 27, 2014 3:48 PM

The tragedy of secular moderns of India is their fascination with Islam. Having said that I think all attempts to understand any object of knowledge are welcome!
Aarti do you not feel that the need of the hour, the need of several decades now is to understand Hinduism in India. Bhrigu does focus on Hinduism but then again the forms which he investigates are devoid of any political agency.
Does not India desperately need an anthropology of Hinduism, particularly of Hindutva. What do we know about the maqsad of Hindutva. What is it about Hindutiva that people ready to sacrifice their life for this ideology.
Where is the definitive account anthropology of contempt that Hindutva sows.
How does Hindutva operate within a Hindu canon. What has transformed in the motivation of people who joined Hindutva organisations a 100 years back and now. What is the ontology of Hindutva.
Yes there are several hundred articles written on Hindutva, on Hindusim. Yes there are tens of book on this topic as well. But somehow on an everyday commonsensical level knowledge about Hindutva and Hinduism does not seem to be have crossed a discursive threshold.
No secular modern non-Hindu can attempt to ask questions on Hindutva in India as an object of inquiry. Even if she wants to study Hinduvta, has familiarized herself with the cannon and so on she probably will not do it. No secular modern non-Hindu can do an anthropology of the Sangh. And it appears secular modern Hindus are too busy analyzing jinns of Delhi, which is really sad!
Why is it that I can’t think of any Bollywood film or any novel for that matter any anthropological account which depicts radicalisation of Hindus in India. Maybe boys in the branches is an exception but that it is so old now. I wonder how many people know about it. At the same time films like Fiza, Shahid readily comes to my mind when I turn the angle.

Reply

• Aarti Sethi permalink*

  September 28, 2014 7:35 PM

  @Imtiaz,
  Thank you very much for your comment. You raise some very serious questions. Let me try and respond
  So first, I disagree with you :) In my opinion “Hindutva” is precisely that of which we do not need any anthropologies. Of course if someone wishes to write one they should do so, but I personally would have zero interest in such an undertaking. Why? Because I do not think such an exercise will yield anything particularly productive. When it comes to phenomenon such as Hindutva there could be, broadly, two reasons for why one might be interested in studying them. The first, which we can call an “instrumentalist” reason, is because it is good to know one’s enemy in order to fight. So we need to study Hindutva so we can sharpen our weapons against it. If this is our purpose then the hundreds of studies, as you yourself mention, on the history, emergence, demographic composition, political vocabulary, and everyday practices of Hindutva produced by a legion of political scientists and historians already give us a detailed understanding. And more, there are classic works on fascism as well that address not the specificity of Hindutva, but tell us how and why and through what means ideaologies such as Hindutva find resonance amongst particular groups at particular moments in history.
  But there may be another reason to study Hindutva: because in itself there is something exciting vivifying about Hindutva for the.researcher, and on this count for me Hindutva falls flat. This is I think the source of disagreement between us: i.e. on what constitutes a “resource”.
  You mention Bhrigu’s work and say that the sorts of popular Hinduisms he studies have no “political agency”. You are right, and I think that is precisely what is exciting about his work and the practices he looks at. Again for you the study of Djinns is a cause for lament while for me Anand’s work opens an entire terrain of . The question is, at what level must “resources” be produced and towards what purpose. The kinds of practices that Bhrigu and Anand study do not operate at the level of what you term “politics”, and therefore cannot be marshaled for “political agency”. This is precisely why they continue to produce pathways along which people find routes of escape. Because these practices have somehow (thus far though I wonder for how much longer) managed to elude capture by the state form and the dead-end exhausted trap of representational politics.
  So what sort of study of Hindutva would you wish for that has not been undertaken already? Towards what purpose?
  

  Reply
  • Aarti Sethi permalink*

    September 28, 2014 7:48 PM

    @Imtiaz,
    One last connected thought: If you ask me, the need of the hour is to turn our back on all thought that takes the current form of the state as its starting point and its destination. Everyone has their own functions to perform, and if academics have been given the extraordinary privilege and liberty to be the priests of a secular world and get paid for thinking, then at the least they can do is produce (and/or recover/discover) images of worlds which we may wish to inhabit. If this is the case, then these images, to my mind, will not come from an exploration of the wastelands (imaginative and actual) that the state has produced. They will have to come from elsewhere, precisely from sites such as Anand and Bhrigu point to.
    Does this mean that we should give up on even analyzing what the state, and things allied with it, does? No of course not. We are condemned to live under one, so we are condemned to not ignore our master. However these must be seen as reports on the doings of power. Not as sites from which alternative visions of life can flow. Therefore I think there is no need for anthropologies of Hindutva. What we have, and thankfully we have a lot, will do :)
    

    Reply
    • Imtiaz ali permalink

      October 5, 2014 4:50 AM

      Aarti,
      I am sorry but did I make an argument about knowledge? Whether the knowledge appeals to instrumentalist reason or whether it is vivifying is not the point I was trying to make. The point I wanted to raise and still want to raise pertains to the responsibility of intellectuals.
      For in a society where knowledge is such a scare resource is it not the responsibility of intellectuals who are in a privileged position to expose the lies of power, to analyze actions according to their causes and motives and often hidden intentions? And explain to the general public through the help of their training what is power up to.
      Tell me what do I do with the knowledge of emerging liberal ideologues working for the empire writing enchanting texts about chattan baba or the jinns? Their work is slowly appearing to be as crucial and critical as that of a German anthropologist working diligently in the 1930’s writing about peripatetic priests of Calvinism or the jewish mysticism in Munich.
      Should I not look upon intellectuals to explain what called the mobs to murder a techie in Pune? What message did Dhananjay Desai bear? How would you, as a trained anthropologist, look at what’s coming from Mangalwari Mahal in Nagpur? How would you look at the PMO? Can you even do an anthropology of PMO with as much of command over ideas as you wrote about Mr. Pardesi? My guess is perhaps you can but you’d rather not. Because you suggest, do you not, Hindutva as an idea, as a practice, as a system of thought does not matter now because too much has been already written on that subject, isn’t it?
      No one can tell anyone what to write and what to research. It is as much a researcher’s imperative to write as it is of a reader’s to read and comment. You wrote an extremely moving piece about Mr. Pardesi. I know now because Mr. Pardesi bore a message therefore he went to meet Mr. Tiger. Mr. Tiger did not kill Mr. Pardesi. Mr. Pardesi died a tragic death while meeting Mr. Tiger. The logic of your interpretation is resolute. Your interpretation is deeply nuanced and could I dare say absolutely brilliant! I thank you for your keen observations and look forward to read more of your wonderful writings.
      

      Reply
• Aarti Sethi permalink*

  October 5, 2014 2:21 PM

  @ Imtiaz,
  Thanks again for coming in. I think we disagree on some very fundamental questions to do with how one lives in the world and what might constitute a responsibility towards it. It remains to be seen if these disagreements are productive or not, and what their political stakes are.
  So, you say:
  

  “Whether the knowledge appeals to instrumentalist reason or whether it is vivifying is not the point I was trying to make. The point I wanted to raise and still want to raise pertains to the responsibility of intellectuals.”

  What we think of as the ends of knowledge is intimately connected to what you call the “responsibility of intellectuals”.
  

  “Should I not look upon intellectuals to explain what called the mobs to murder a techie in Pune? What message did Dhananjay Desai bear? How would you, as a trained anthropologist, look at what’s coming from Mangalwari Mahal in Nagpur? How would you look at the PMO? Can you even do an anthropology of PMO with as much of command over ideas as you wrote about Mr. Pardesi? My guess is perhaps you can but you’d rather not.”

  The responsibility of academics and intellectuals towards the world they live in is contiguous with the responsibilities of others who live in the world also. (Is this true? Can we imagine a doxastic logic based on the notion of contiguity? Sure. Why not? Cogs in a machine, or operations along a critical path, could be thought of as having 'contiguous' responsibilities. Why? Because they don't need to have an internal picture of how the whole coheres. They face no concurrency, race hazard or co-ordination problems. In other words, 'contiguous responsibilities' are precisely the sort which can be discharged without the use of the intellect or the carrying forward a Research Program.  Thus, Intellectual or Academic responsibility must always be overlapping or pre-emptive, never contiguous- otherwise, for starters, Maths would be exhaustible and thus the demarcation problem would have a canonical solution and stuff like 'angelology' be wholly Scientific and Popperian) Therefore an academic must do what they can to protect lives and limit harm, (excluding harm to people who lose their life due to the criminal negligence of Public officials at Delhi Zoo) and oppose power (Zoo officials have the power to make the tiger enclosure safe- but you aint opposing their failure to do so are you? Instead you write illiterate shite) and help, (what fucking help have you ever given anyone you stupid jhollawallah careerist? You have a responsibility to use your brain and think logically.) in whatever way they can, those who find themselves in powers’ crosshairs. And this academics do all the time. But there is something more at stake here for you I think. Which has to do with what you see as the “professional” function of academics (and by extension I presume intellection in general). So let me try and address some of this.
  If it is illumination you are seeking, then there are already several works that academics have produced that try and grapple with the murder of a techie in Pune. (Either those 'several works' are shite or the don't exist or you haven't read them or you are too fucking mean spirited to tell this poor semi-literate Muslim nutjob what great discovery they have made)  And Dhananjay Desai bore the same message that fascist thugs everywhere bear. (Fuck off! Fascism comes in a lorra different flavours. Their message aint univocal. It is an elementary rule of survival that has us look for wedge issues to divide our assailants- e.g. back in the Seventies I always called skinheads 'proddy bastards'- which meant the Catholic Irish amongst them gave me a pass. My calculation was based on the knowledge that, had the skinhand band I encountered been wholly Protestant, I'd have been kicked to death anyway. )This is why beyond stating this, there is nothing that a further excavation of his experience can yield. (Absolute shite. Look at the work of Vibhuti Narain Rai. His meticulous research and accessible writing genuinely changed the Hindu mind-set in a wholly salutary way.) What would such an exploration open? (An exploration of Dhanjay Desai would open the fact that he is a Frankenstein monster created and propped up by  the 'Secular' Congress-NCP alliance) How would it extend our expand or further the ways in which we might inhabit our worlds? (Are you fucking kidding me? By finding out about who is actually backing this worthless cunt who got an innocent 24 year old techie killed we stop living in your fucking cartoon world of 'Fascist thugs' and Foucaldian parrhesia as Arundhati Roy ranting and shite.  We wanna see that fucking double D getting titty fucked in Tihar Jail. Then we want him hanged along with his better educated, orAfsal, Gurus.) This is the rub, this is where our differences lie: on what we see as the ends of thought and its connection to responsibility....
   ...But seriously, I think you should interrogate what makes you think that an engagement with mysticism and human experiences of this sort is somehow a less valuable, or less critical, engagement with the crises of the present, than an anthropology of the PMO. BTW, I'd read a  properly researched Bourdieusian social anthropology of the PMO. So would any BRIC hedge fund manager. So would any Mechanism Design guy. So would any sensible person. Why? There are no fucking Gods and magic Tigers involved. Is it because things like mystical experience strike you as frivolous, or “not located in the real world” (a favourite barb thrown at academics such as myself)? As if somehow we are writing or thinking about experiences that inhabit some other, and indeed a lesser world? I am telling you now that if you are searching for redemption to the crises of this current moment, it will not come from undertaking an anthropology of the PMO.
  A fair question at this stage would be to ask, so to what “crises” are these engagements responding? At what level is this”crises” located? I’m afraid the answer to that is far too long to undertake here. You don't fucking know do you? You seriously haven't a clue. Deracinated poseur- you can always emigrate to La-La land. Fuck you, fuck Kafila- youse guys r shite.
  
  

  
  

So, kids, what have we learnt today?
A Public Body, the Delhi Zoo, is guilty of criminal negligence. A young life is snuffed out. Public intellectuals need to identify the cause of the tragedy and to show how the same sorts of mechanism design error in other Public Bodies is leading to massive avoidable loss of Life and Life Chances.
This is a widespread problem. Plenty of the people who read Kafila, even some vernacular contributors to Kafila,  are engaged in fighting bureaucratic inertia and stupidity of the sort exhibited by Delhi Zoo when it locked away the dart gun that was mandated to be used in an emergency of the sort under discussion.
However, sensible conversing about Mechanism Design is not what Kafila's Public Intellectuals do. Why? Because they are frivolous dilletantes, poetes maudits manque (okay me dunno French bon)  masquerading as the sort of sober, scrupulous, Careerist, Credentialized, gobshites we have come to revere.
A tiger with a 'Hindu' name kills a lunatic with a Muslim name and Kafila's best and brightest immediately play up the young man's Religion, even though it is entirely irrelevant, simply to start babbling on about Spirits and Gods and Fairies and their own worthless researches into the same.
Nobody in the comment section says 'this is a stupid post.' Instead we have a Muslim dude say 'Your duty is to tell vicious lies about Hinduism and Hindutva because a Muslim or Christian or Jew would look stupid telling the same lies because everybody can see the biggest slaughters of Muslims are
1) Fellow Muslims
2) Christian America and its drones (the boy Cameron was born to be a Drone)
3) Jews
4) Buddhists.
Hindus just don't make the cut.
This is why it is vital that women with Hindu names write pseudo-intellectual shite about 'hidden violence' and everybody getting raped and Suttee and Thuggee and so on.

Nor has this topic wholly died out and been forgotten in Kafila's caravanserai of ultracrepidarian crapping on everything. A young guy with a Hindu name who is an Assistant Prof in the U.S has written a longish post, taking on the Muslim dude previously referred to and defending his own faux Foucauldian 'jinneology'. I'm not kidding. Take a gander at this-

Jinnealogy: Everyday life and Islamic theology in post-Partition Delhi

Anand Vivek Taneja

Abstract

#In this article I explore what I call jinnealogy, a theological orientation that emerges when the genealogies of human memory are confronted with the amnesic forces of an obliterated landscape. In stories told in contemporary Delhi, long-lived jinn act as transmitters connecting human beings centuries apart in time. In petitions deposited to jinn-saints in a ruined medieval palace, medieval ideas of justice come together with modern bureaucratic techniques. Both stories and rituals attest to a theological newness intricately entwined with the transformations of the postcolonial city’s spiritual and physical landscapes. Jinn are present in the blank spaces of the map, where the plans of the bureaucracy, the verdicts of the judiciary, and the illegibility of the post-Partition Indian state coincide to attempt vast erasures of the city’s Muslim landscapes. Jinnealogy, the supersession of human chains of memory by the long lives of the jinn, challenges the magical amnesia of the state by bringing up other temporalities, political theologies, and modes of witnessing against the empty, homogenous time of a bureaucratically constituted present.'
Is this guy saying that Muslims in Delhi worship djinns in a manner different from Muslims in Karachi or Lahore or Mombasa? Nope. Djinn worship was worse before 1857. Guys born after that date stop giving credence to djinns in their autobiographies. Yet 'erasures' and 'magical amnesias' and 'bureaucratically constituted present' were a bigger feature of 1857 than 1947. In any case, it is Pakistan, not India, where 'jinneology' really flourishes- a senior Nuclear Scientist wants to harness the powers of jinns- and where the Salafis really have their work cut out. Sure, shite like that goes down amongst the very old and the very poor and the just plain stupid in India but so what? They have no institutional power. India aint a theocracy. You can appeal straight to God coz the State aint claiming to monopolize channels to Him.  You don't have to bribe a djinn or conjure up a demon or a ghost or some such shite to get your work done in despite of the Priestly Bureaucrat.  

Still, Vivek's article is not more egregiously shite than its ilk and, being penned by a guy with a Hindu name, not punishable by fatwa for heresy re. Barzakh. It is merely a silly infidel posing as an initiate but grinning so inanely and cutting such antic capers that no scandal is afforded the rightly guided.
This then is the proper terms of trade between Secular Hinduism and Progressive Islam. The Hindu's job is to make a fool of himself by fastening onto only the superstitious practices condemned by the Salafis while telling vicious lies about Hindutva so as to establish his 'Secular' credentials as an apologist for that uncreated Truth which the Secular order must serve.
Thus the author's 'jinneology' allows him to pretend that the Delhi Waqf board doesn't contain anti-social elements (they kill each other) and anti-national elements (with proper genealogies, not jinneologies, going back to the Muslim League and the demand for a chain of Muslim states linking the 'East & West' wing. No doubt, there are double agents and 'channels of communication' and so on. Still our jinneologist is being disingenuous when he pretends not to know that documents relating to property claims (not deeds, these are claims merely) are precisely what anti-social elements fasten on to back up encroachment on Public and Commonly owned land and buildings- not to mention privately owned buildings. More often than not, disputes of this sort are intra Barelvi or Barelvi Deobandi or Shiah Sunni and it is indeed anti-national to allow communities to get divided and to shed blood over such issues.
Our jinnealogist, no doubt, wants us to imagine that the State is doing something very sinister by not handing out photocopies of contradictory 'sanads'. However, the plain fact is that these documents have no force in law and can also serve to stir up trouble to no good purpose.
The rest of his post is as shite as his paper.

I have left the following helpful comment for our jinniologist who only printed it to call me a homophobe but then censored my answer. Here it is-

'Aamir Mufti’s Karachi Grammar School background and long years as a desi stowaway on American Scholarships warps his views and renders him meaningless in the context Imtiaz is framing.
The truth is that both ‘Hindutva’ & Jamaati identity politics is intended to benefit the provincial bazaari middle class by freeing them of the necessity to conform to purely local and subaltern shibboleths- i.e. the sweeper putting ‘nazar’ on you and granny saying you have to skip your shaka or Rotary club meeting to go perform some humiliating ceremony in a stinking ruin. This has nothing to do with ecology or preserving some mythical apocatastatic folk memory of organic unity such that as Savarkar pointed out prior to the creation of the I.N.C, Hindus and Muslims spent so much time hugging and kissing and cuddling each other on the street that they neglected to purchase the dhania their wives had sent them out to purchase which is why all the womenfolk (with the honorable exception of Rani of Jhansi) got very angry and complained to Queen Victoria Ji who was immediately constituting ‘Divide and Rule’ policy which involved rape of mother earth due to otherwise how to pry apart them continually cuddling Hindus and Muslims and Sikhs and what have you?
Queer theory explains how like Colonialism and neo-Liberalism and stuff are like a total cock blocker dude and like how can that not be women’s fault? Which man would rape Environment if the conga line of Hindu-Muslim anal intercourse continued to wind its way down our immemorial streets? Sarmad and Abhay Chand, Bedil and that Khattri boy he cursed, along with numerous djinns and Pirs and Vir Savarkars & Naokhali’s Husseini Pir would at last achieve not the Miri of mere dominance but Hegemony also.
In Vikram Seth’s ‘suitable boy’ the son of a Secular ‘Rafian’ Congress Minister has butt sex with the son of a Muslim Nawab. Later, he stabs him? Why? Was it due to Hindutva or Jamaati politics? Was it because he’d learnt nastaliq? No. It was because of cherchez la femme. The Hindu thought the Muslim was trying to get it on with his mistress whereas in fact, as is right and proper and in accordance with Ruswa, the Muslim nawabzada was in fact trysting with the Pakeezah who, obviously, was his own half-sister and the daughter of the Hindu’s mistress who had been raped by his friend’s father while still little more than a child.
As the Mahatma was wont to say- there is a lesson here all who run can read.
What is the way forward? It is time for action not words. Only Hindu Muslim Conga lines of continual buggery can resist the Indian National Congress- which is the only truly Fascist party that has successfully taken root (due to cock blocking widows like Indira, Sonia etc) on our soil- and of which Modi sarkar is a merely meretricious and vernacular simulacrum.
So far, I have only spoken of the responsibilities of genuine intellectuals and engaged academics like you and Mufti Sahib.
What of ordinary people like me? In the late Nineties and early Noughties, it was our salutary practice to drunk dial Indian Heads of Mission claiming to be Rahul Baba and saying ‘Tell mummy I won’t come home and become PM unless she legalizes it pronto! Ciao, ciao.’
Now what are we to do? Muril Manohar Joshi, we used to say, murli him but good. But this is not a panacea. Modi has done that dirty deed in Varanasi, but what good will it do? Some say the ‘Swacch Bharat’ toilet building program will be the salvation of India. Yes, if toilets are only used for cottaging. But how to prevent women from banging on the door and passing coarse and hurtful remarks about what you are getting up to?
Maqsood and Vijay may have found one way out. But it isn’t for everybody, though I do hope you and Aamir will give it a try. Read a bit of Walter Benjamin together. That will put you in the mood.'

Bilgrami's Evil Enchantment.

Akeel Bilgrami believes that Gandhi was an erudite philosopher rebelling against some terrible metaphysical atrocity that occurred in the Seventeenth Century which involved killing off 'Enchantment'- i.e. fairies and elves and hobbits- and turning Mother Nature into an ugly quarry or all polluting iron-works for evil Orcs laboring under the blazing eye of Sauron who had somehow managed to unite all the multitudinous forces of Darkness under his sole command.

Bilgrami believes that Pantheists protested against Sauron but were mercilessly crushed. Perhaps, if he were writing about Islamic history, he would equate the Zanj rebellion (whose leader, though claiming to be a Syed, had an Indian slave in his maternal lineage) with a similar Pantheistic protest against Puritanical Plutocratic Capitalism. However, the crushing of the Zanj rebellion did not involve a Sauron who co-ordinated Capital, Religion and Science in such a manner that they turned into an evil 'thick' concept of Scientific Rationality which went on to rule the World and systematically exterminate fairies and elves and hobbits and everybody just worshiping trees and peacefully having orgies under the Midsummer Moon and other such hippy shite.
Why did Seventeenth Century succeed in yielding all power to Sauron while Ninth Century Iraq failed to achieve the same thing? The answer, judging by the evidence Bilgrami provides, is that Ninth Century Iraq did not have the Printing Press and so all manners of Pantheistic nutjobs- Ranters, Diggers, Quakers, Levellers, Anabaptists, Monetarists etc- did not get to circulate their silly pamphlets. True, they were crushed, just as the Zanj rebellion was crushed, but they were not exterminated and continued their corporate existence and textual availability cascades and preference falsification hypocricy down to our own day. Gandhi, according to Bilgrami, was part of this long running tradition of stupidity but for the shrill existence of which Sauron doesn't get hegemony and the ability to enforce 'thick' scientific rationality which is like totally evil and genocidal and not at all nice.
So there we have it. For Evil to triumph- i.e. for 'thick' Scientific Rationality to become hegemonic and make fun of Pantheism's pee-pee- it is both necessary and sufficient that Gandhian shite is endlessly spouted. Suppose Gandhian shite isn't spouted or its spouting is ended by killing those who spout it then Sauron doesn't get the Magic Ring which enables the unification of Capitalism and Science and Metaphysics and Ethics and dunno other such shite such that the entire planet is laid waste and no blade of grass is spared by Mammon's maw.
Bilgrami writes - 'Were we to apply the thin conception of “scientific” and “rationality” (the one that I imagine most of us in this room embrace), the plain fact is that nobody in that period was, in any case, getting prizes for leaving God out of the world-view of science. That one should think of God as voluntaristically affecting nature from the outside (as the Newtonians did) rather than sacralizing it from within (as the freethinkers insisted), was not in any way to improve on the science involved.
'Both views were therefore just as “unscientific,” just as much in violation of scientific rationality, in the “thin” sense of that term that we would now take for granted. What was in dispute had nothing to do with science or rationality in that attenuated sense at all. What the early dissenting tradition as well as Gandhi were opposed to is the metaphysical orthodoxy that grew around Newtonian science and its implications for broader issues of culture and politics. This orthodoxy with all of its implications is what has now come to be called “scientific rationality” in the “thick” sense of that term and in the pervasive cheerleading about “the West" and the Enlightenment'.'

So, kids, what have we learned in School today? Bilgrami admits that Pantheistic shite is shite. He doesn't say- 'if stupid Lefty nutjobs stop spouting holier-than-thou Pantheistic shite then there would be no market for 'thick' Scientific rationality and endless triumphalist cheerleading for 'Western Enlightenment' values and that would be a good thing coz Sauron would be foiled in his quest for the Magic Ring'. He doesn't need to say it. That's the only possible take-away point from his lecture. Unless you really believe there are fairies at the bottom of your garden. In which case, lay in a couple of six-packs and get busy with the weed whacker.

This follows if you believe, as Bilgrami does, that Spinoza was right when he said you can't predict and intend to do something at the same time- i.e. if you intend to do something it can't be because you predict it is what you want to get done. Hence, if your are an Ethical Consequentialist or Epistemological Instrumentalist, you can't intend to do anything at all- unless you are stupid and don't get Spinoza though you intend to get Spinoza and haven't predicted that you won't coz Spinoza is stupid and so are you and there is nothing to get anyway. But this also means there really are fairies at the bottom of the garden whom you are currently killing with your weed whacker while drunk off your head on Special Brew. This is because there is a predictive element in visual and all other perception. But, since you can never intend to see what you predict you will actually see, the fact that you don't see you are in the garden killing fairies proves that you can't have the intention of not killing fairies at this very moment.
 Predictions can be falsified, not so intentions. We can imagine a situation where you can intend to have your predictions falsified in a systematic way. Perhaps not seeing you are killing fairies when you intend to do so and are doing so is good strategy on your part. Ergo you can't prove you aren't killing fairies if and only if you don't see that you are killing fairies.
Bilgrami wants us to see that the World may be value laden. This is the phenomenological project which features such egregious shite as Hegel's refutation of Newton and Goethe or Schopenhauer's theory of Color and Malfatti's crazy Tantric nonsense and so on down to Weber's silly ideas about Capitalism and Protestantism and Husserl's wasting his time on Phenomenology and Heidegger's worthless rubbish and so on and so forth.
Bilgrami doesn't get that Gandhi fucked up big time with his Khadi (his chakri added negative value to cotton) and Basic Education (Zakir Hussain ultimately called it a fraud) and other such fuckwittery.
Kenneth Boulding, a Quaker and Environmentalist avant la lettre but also a great Economist, has written about why Gandhians fucked up. It was because they were as stupid as shit and refused to use their brains. Screw Scientific Rationality. Common sense tells us that prediction and intention are inextricably intertwined. But this means when you see that stuff aint panning out as you intended you stop doing what you're doing and try to think of a better solution.  Scratch that. Don't try to think of a better solution. Ask around till you find a guy who HAS a better solution. Copy him.
The alternative is killing fairies.
To see why consider Bilgrami's rejection of Economics on the basis that it doesn't permit a 'secular enchantment' of the world such that if you see a glass of water you don't think of the opportunity cost of your drinking the water but rather ask yourself- whom does that glass of water want to be drunk by?- and then go out on a mystic quest to hunt down that suffering Grail-King because only in this way can you end your own 'alienation'.
That way all the water gets spilled and you lose your job as a waiter at the Tandoori Restaurant coz the customer choked to death on his onion bhaji when you snatched away his water and so your kids back home starve to death and as for them fairies they all just laughed themselves to death at the spectacle of your stupidity.

Bilgrami thinks Gandhian politics in pre-Independence India was made possible because Indians were stupid and believed in fairies. He is wrong. Gandhi got money off the Hindus and Jains and Khojas and Memons and other such business castes. They got a 'reputational' benefit from such largesse as did lawyers who signed up with Gandhi. In the short run, some weavers did get a bit of money out of it and, ultimately, secured their main goal which was to get a quota of mill-spun (NOT HAND SPUN) yarn. Still, the Gandhian interlude meant a lot of weavers starved to death and the industry as a whole was de-skilled. Capitalist methods have revived some sectors. Gandhi himself wanted to boycott the one prosperous section of weavers because they were doing well by supplying the luxury market.
The reason the 'Untouchables' are so angry with Gandhi is that his ideas fucked them up big time. They now shrilly campaign for compulsory English medium Govt. schools. They have even declared English a Goddess and worship a statue of Macaulay!
 Scientific rationality says all human beings have evolved such that there is territory specific canalization of Cognitive and Perceptual faculties.
Bilgrami type shite says that fairies are a persecuted minority or silently suffering subaltern majority whose cause only Ivy League Professors of Philosophy can legitimately champion. But, this is killing fairies with a vengeance because only kids can see fairies and a Credentialized 'Liberal Arts' Education System,  the apex of which pyramid Bilgrami occupies, is itself the blazing eye of Sauron which destroys all that is enchanting about this our, albeit ontologically dysphoric, World.
For which, needless to say, I blame David Cameron. That boy aint right.

Bilgrami's Gandhi-2

It is a commonplace in our understanding of the western moral tradition to think of Kant's moral philosophy as the full and philosophical flowering of a core of Christian thought.
Our? Bilgrami, you are an Indian Muslim. It is not a commonplace for your people to believe any such shite. Nor is it commonplace for any German Christian to do so. Radhakrishnan did not make so vulgar an error in his engagement with Lutheranism even as a student. Why are you writing such ignorant shit? Does your colour (which actually is pretty white) or your status as a Muslim (non believing, it seems) give you a laissez passer to tell stupid, illiterate, lies?
No. But you are a Professor of a shit subject and that's all the excuse you need you worthless fuckwit.

 But Gandhi fractures that historical understanding. By stressing the deep incompatibility between categorical imperatives and universalizable maxims on the one hand, and Christian humility on the other, he makes two moral doctrines and methods out of what the tradition represents as a single historically consolidated one.
I see-only acting according to a maxim that can become a universal law means you have to be a self righteous dick and get up everybody's nose with your holier than thou sermons. Why? Who would agree that 'be a self righteous dick' is a universal law? Imagine the following- Gandhi turns up and starts telling you what a worthless cunt you are coz you wear trousers rather than a diaper. You promptly tell him he's an even slacker twatted ho coz he didn't personally sow the cotton from which his diaper is woven, He's going 'yeah, but like your're wearing trousers dude! Diapers trump trousers.' 'Ordinarily they would,' you reply suavely,' but these aren't trousers at all. What they are is the collected faeces of low caste bhangis which have been cunningly moulded to look like trousers. I personally, as a form of satyagraha, gathered all the shit by hand out of the anuses of Untouchables and as a gesture of humility and a blow in the face of British Imperialism fashioned them into the appearance of trousers. Ha, Ha- I win.'
Is that the sort of world anybody- more especially a self righteously dick- want to live in?
Surely, Bilgrami is wrong. Kant's categorical imperative entails'don't be a holier than thou Gandhian dick or Taliban dick or Amartya Sen type dick.' Why? Imagine a world where everybody is a dick of that sort. The Taliban dicks kill each other because the true Taliban kills anyone who might not be a true Taliban- i.e. everybody.
And discarding one of them as lending itself ultimately to violence, he fashions a remarkable political philosophy and national movement out of the other.
Shite cobbled together from Ruskin and Chesterton and Carlyle aint a Political Philosophy. It is shite. Why are you not saying Gandhi fashioned Khilafat and hence Al Qaida and the Taliban etc? Gandhi got money off the Khilafat guys for his shite Ashrams and Congress work.
He also got money and prestige off the I.N.C by promising to deliver Swaraj within 18 months.  He didn't.
Both Khilafat and the Swaraj movement existed before Gandhi. He just made money out of them and gained a temporary obligatory passage point status. But, he made himself irrelevant by his antics. He was a stupid fuckwit.
I want to stress how original Gandhi is here as a philosopher and theoretician. The point is not that the idea of the 'exemplary' is missing in the intellectual history of morals before Gandhi. 
Are you fucking mad or just stupid? What does 'insaan-e-kaamil' mean? What about 'Purushuttama'? Hang on, here's one you definitely do know- how's about Thomas a Kempis' Tshirt slogan- 'What would J.C do?'
The notion that the moral axis of the World does not coerce or criticize but that a sort of Boscovich 'field'- as in the Vimalakriti- emanates from him has been a constant feature of the 'intellectual history of morals' for at least two thousand years. Indeed, Occasionalism gains ethical salience precisely because this type of 'field' theory is hugely fecund.
What is missing, and what he first brings to our attention, is how much theoretical possibility there is in that idea. It can be wielded to make the psychology surrounding our morals a more tolerant one. 
Gandhi spoke his mind. He generally thought other people were selfish swine who didn't really understand stuff like their own Religion, Economics, Politics, Law, Education, Medicine, etc. He was swift to condemn behavior he thought immoral and to mete out punishments.
Now it is true that Spiritual Religion- whether Buddhist or Hindu or Sufi or Christian- teaches techniques to conquer cognitive dissonance and to control visceral reactions. Thus the sage should be able to serenely contemplate the most atrocious of spectacles without losing his equanimity.
Gandhi makes no special contribution. Furthermore, he simply wasn't a Philosopher.
If exemplars replace principles, then it cannot any longer be the business of morals to put us in the position of moralizing against others in forms of behaviour (criticism) that have in them the potential to generate other psychological attitudes (resentment, hostility) which underlie inter-personal violence. Opposition to moralizing is not what is original in Gandhi either. There are many in the tradition Gandhi is opposing who recoiled from it; but if my interpretation is right, his distinction between principle and exemplar and the use he puts it to, provides a theoretical basis for that recoil, which otherwise would simply be the expression of a distaste. That distaste is a distaste for something that is itself entailed by a moral theory deeply entrenched in a tradition, and Gandhi is confronting that theory with a wholesale alternative. 
When was Gandhi not 'moralizing' and criticising? He says again and again that anyone who does not do exactly what he says is evil and corrupt and likes eating nice food and wearing cool clothes and probably having sex and stuff.  True, he was 'passive aggressive' and backed down pretty quick unless it paid him to put on a gesture political drama to suggest otherwise.  Still, he was a major holier than thou shithead of the worst Gujarati type. Which is why Narendrabhai loves him so much.
Bilgrami doesn't say what 'Tradition' Gandhi was opposing. Was it Hindu? No- Bilgrami can't make that claim because he knows he is ignorant of Hinduism. If not Hindu, then what was it? It couldn't be Western because Gandhi denounced Western education.
Perhaps Bilgrami means 'Universal tendency' not 'Tradition'. In that case he is making an extraordinary claim- viz. Gandhi was the first and last man to achieve some very elevated moral stature.
But Gandhi was also a worthless fuckwit who alienated Jinnah and Ambedkar and did lasting damage to India in every conceivable way.
Moreover, his worshipers tell stupid lies about him like 'Gandhi got Freedom for India' or 'Gandhi healed Hindu Muslim disunity.'
So even if Bilgrami's claim is true, it is not interesting
This conception of moral judgement puzzles me, even while I find it of great interest. It has puzzled me for a long time. Before I became a teenager (when I began to find it insufferably uncool) I would sometimes go on long walks with my father in the early mornings. One day, walking on a path alongside a beach we came across a wallet with some rupees sticking visibly out of it. With a certain amount of drama, my father said: “Akeel, why should we not take that?” Flustered at first, I then said something like, “Gee (actually I am sure I didn’t say ‘gee’), I think we should take it.”  My father looked most irritated, and asked, “Why?” And I am pretty sure I remember saying words more or less amounting to the classic response: “Because if we don’t take it then I suppose someone else will.” My father, looking as if he were going to mount to great heights of denunciation, suddenly changed his 
expression, and he said magnificently, but without logic (or so it seemed to me then): “If we don’t take it, nobody else will.” As a boy of twelve, I thought this was a non sequitur designed to end 
the conversation. In fact I had no idea what he meant, and was too nervous to ask him to explain himself. Only much later, in fact only while thinking about how to fit together the various elements in Gandhi's thought, did I see in his remark, the claims for a moral ideal of exemplary action. But notice how puzzling the idea is. 
Not puzzling at all you fuckwit.  BTW you did too say 'Gee' or rather its homophone 'Ji'.
In any case, there is no great aporia here. Simply a story of any Ashraf or Caste Hindu taking a stroll on the beach with his Dad.
If you don't take the money you are somebody- i.e. a khandani Bilgrami Ashraf who will go on to occupy Chairs of Philosophy without blushing- this does not mean nobody takes the money but that a 'nobody' takes it.
Of if you feel this smacks of 'Casteism', look at it Game Theoretically. Your discounted reputational gain as the man who didn't take a wallet in the sight of another fully offsets the monetary loss.
Here is a wallet, abandoned, and we should not take it. This would set an example to others, though no one is around to witness it. 
No it wouldn't. Not unless you believe in something totally fucked liked Rupert Sheldrake's morphic resonace or shite. Fuck me, you probably do!
The romance in this morality is radiant. Somehow goodness, good acts, enter the world and affect everyone else. To ask how exactly they do that is to be vulgar, to spoil the romance. Goodness is a sort of mysterious contagion.
No. It's doing good things. Like tracking down the owner of the wallet. Or, if that is too difficult, just fucking obeying the law- which says hand it in to the nearest Police Station.

Gandhi was not a good exemplar. There were thousands of Gandhians but they produced nothing lasting. By contrast, take the case of Abdul Sattar Edhi. He came to Karachi a penniless refugee and penniless he remains to this day. Yet thanks to his personal example, nothing more- no long speeches or dramatic political gestures- his foundation is probably the largest voluntary Ambulance and Hospital service in the world.
Gandhi would have loved to have such a legacy. He probably genuinely believed something good would come out of his Khadi work and Basic Education scheme. Both were a massive waste of resources.
The Gandhi cap became a symbol of corruption- and, latterly, criminality and rape.
Perhaps, Bilgrami, in his own way is veering round to this view in his essay. He finally comes out and says Truth has to be about, at least partly, facts about the world. It can't simply be empty posturing. Perhaps, Gandhi wasn't really concerned with Truth at all. Perhaps he was a 'bullshitter' jumping on any bandwagon as an occasion to spout his self-serving holier than thou shite. True, Gandhi was afraid of violence because he himself and his own followers would die first, and this meant that he needed to spread hate by criticizing others without that hate spilling into violence because his side would get their heads kicked in. It was a tightrope that Gandhi had to walk. Fortunately it was a tightrope to nowhere and affected nothing. People who write shite may have their own reasons to pretend otherwise. Still, it is perhaps a good thing that they write shite on a topic which we have prior knowledge about. In this way, we are able to properly judge shite-writers as worthless shitheads whose oeuvre we do well to avoid.

Bilgrami's Gandhi- 1

Prof. Akeel Bilgrami, a nice guy- not obviously a witless careerist- has some extraordinarily foolish things to say about Gandhi. So what? So does Prof. Sorabji- an all round good egg. Surely, writing foolish things about Gandhi is what Indian origin Philosophers are supposed to do?

My contention- and, sure, I admit it is a scandalous one- is, NO, nice guys needn't write shite even if it's about Gandhi.  Omitting to publish one's quota of shite every other year won't directly result in Modi becoming P.M.

Writing non-shite, at least for an Ivy League Prof who has the ear of Rahul's elite buddies,  could however, at the margin, have helped the 'Secular' forces (by definition, anti-Modi) put up a better show in the recent elections. If nothing else, it might have given Modi an excuse to cull some of the more repellent senile shitheads in his own party- like the 84 year old Home Minister of Madhya Pradesh, Babulal Gaur Yadav, who reckons rapes are okay provided the rapist is a Yadav but a bad thing if the reverse is the case.

In what follows, I'll be quoting Bilgrami's Essay on Gandhi from his Columbia Uni. Webpage. My remarks are in bold.

Bilgrami's Thesis
1) Gandhi held a consistent but highly unusual philosophical position. 
'Universalizability suggests merely that if someone in particular holds a moral value, then he must think that it applies to all others (in relevantly similar situations).'
Bilgrami is wrong. A moral value can militate for a 'mixed strategy'- i.e. one with a stochastic component- which can't be simply dominated. Thus a man who abhors gambling may still permit a contentious zero-sum issue to be decided by a coin toss. Yuddhishtra was a moral man. If some people in his kingdom MUST be slaves why should he and his kin themselves become slaves by virtue of a coin toss? It's a perfectly plausible Rawlsian, or 'overlapping consensus' solution IFF Econ 101 in the original position tells you that some necessary Public Good only becomes available if some people are slaves. Otherwise the species goes extinct.
As a matter of fact, in the Mahabharata, the Just King, to overcome his vishada or harmatia, has to learn both Game theory (in the Nala episode) as well as the wisdom of the low-caste butcher (the Vyadha Gita) which shows that perfect felicity in this world and the next is attained by ignoring Kings and Priests and just taking your own elderly parents as your Gods. Notice, the Vyadha's ethic is universalizable; yet entails no obligation to go around making a nuisance of yourself lecturing all and sundry on their moral shortcomings and ignorance of the Chandogya's highest truth which is known equally to the carter and Krishna Devakiputra neither of whom go in for pi-jaw.
2) Philosophers aren't stupid and Gandhi was a philosopher
 Yet despite the fact that it is much weaker than universality in this sense, it still generates the critical power that Gandhi finds disquieting. If moral judgements are universalizable,  one cannot make a judgement that something is morally worthy and then shrug off the fact that others similarly situated might not  think so. They (unlike those who might differ with one on the flavour of ice cream) must be deemed wrong not to think so.
Why? All we can say about them is that they have a different Vyavahara/Jati dharma/Verstehen than we do. Since Gandhi claimed to have read the Gita- indeed, he claimed to understand it better than anyone else- why should we assume he hadn't read its dual, the Vyadha Gita? Furthermore, Gandhi learned a little Jainism from his greatest supporter's brother-in-law. Where is the scandal for Anekantavada in what Bilgrami is saying? Indeed, there is no scandal for European thought here either.  No doubt there is some narrow textual availability cascade in the Academy that pretends otherwise- but it is fuckwitted merely and has had zero impact on anyone whether Western of Eastern or whatever.
3) Gandhi was a hermeneut of traditions he was entirely ignorant of.
Gandhi repudiates this entire tradition. His integrating thought is that violence owes to something as seemingly remote from it as this assumed theoretical connection between values and criticism.
Gandhi was blissfully unaware of any such tradition. People would tell him about it and he'd basically tell them to fuck off in a polite way while underlining his firm conviction that everybody else was a moral worm or eunuch and he alone was worthy of worship. Why did Gandhi do that? The answer is because that's what guys who run expensive Ashrams with other people's money do if they want to be successful and get to sleep naked with young girls.
Take the Maharishi, instead of saying 'ply chakri and Universal Peace will reign' he said 'Do Yogic Levitation and then Universal Peace will reign'. Still, Mia Farrow wouldn't sleep with him. The Beatles wrote 'Sexy Sadie' to commemorate this terrible crime which the Materialistic West inflicted on the Spiritual East.
4) Shite gobshites write can cause violence even without the instrumentality of a sociopath
Take the wrong view of moral value and judgement, and you will inevitably encourage violence in society. There is no other way to understand his insistence that the satyagrahi has not eschewed violence until he has removed criticism from his lips and heart and mind.
Urm...not just satyagrahis, every one who knew him well,  was constantly tempted to criticise Gandhi for sleeping with naked chicks and making his wife cook mutton chops for Maulana Azad and fucking up the Independence Movement, the Khadi Movement, the Basic Education scheme and anything else he stuck his oar into. Telling his wife she was guilty of 'himsa' (violence) if she didn't cook mutton chops (coz Azad really liked them and was a total fuck-wit of Gandhian proportions who had dreamed of becoming the Imam ul Hind and buggering with all them smart Aligarh M.U. types) was par for the course.  
Gandhi, himself, of course, criticised everybody and anybody unless they got stroppy and made him stop. That's just standard operating procedure for charismatic fuckwits running a Credentialized Ponzi scheme is all.
5) My name is Bilgrami and I'm an Indian Muslim and can't reason for shit. Watch Slumdog why don't you?
But there is an interpretative challenge hidden here. If the idea of a  moral value or judgement has no implication that one find those who disagree with one's moral judgements, to be wrong, then that
suggests that one's moral choices and moral values are rather like one's choice of a flavour of ice cream, rather like one's judgements of taste. In other words, the worry is that these Gandhian ideas
suggest that one need not find one's moral choices and the values they reflect relevant to others at all, that one's moral thinking is closed off from others. But Gandhi was avowedly a humanist, and repeatedly said things reminiscent of humanist slogans along the order of 'Nothing human is alien to me'. Far from encouraging self-enclosed moral subjects, he thought it the essence of a moral
attitude that it take in all within its concern and its relevance.
A guy running a Ponzi scheme has an interest in broadening the base of his pyramid to cover not just all sentient beings but imaginary ones too.
Now, it is true that there is a Jain Gandhism- originating with Dr. Pranjivan Mehta and Raichandhbhai and very effectively developed in vernacular languages like Gujerati and Hindi (see for e.g. H.H. Amar Muni Upadhyay of Veerayatan fame) but it is based on a monadology which is 'self-enclosed' and which rejects the notion that one substance (dhravya) can, for woe or weal, operate directly on another. However, this is a dynamic conception- i.e. a field theory- and features fuzzy logic and other such high I.Q stuff- so forget I mentioned it okay? 
How, then, to reconcile the rejection of universalizability and of a value's potential for being wielded in criticism of others with this yearning for the significance of one's choices to others? That is among the hardest questions in understanding the philosophy behind his politics, and there are some very original and striking remarks in his writing which hint at a reconciliation.
Name one. Go on. I dare ya.
So far, I have presented the challenge of providing such reconciliation as a philosophically motivated task.
Why? Gandhi was a stupid guy. He passed the University entrance exam, but realised he'd gotten as far as he could and, sensibly, never pretended otherwise- at least to himself.
But it is more than that. It is part of the 'integrity' that I am pursuing in my interpretation of Gandhi that it also had a practical urgency in the political and cultural circumstances in which he found himself.
We know very well that it was close to this man's heart to improve India in two ways which, on the face of it, were pointing in somewhat opposite directions. On the one hand there was the violence of religious intolerance, found most vividly in the relations between Hindus and Muslims. This especially wounded him. Religious intolerance is the attitude that the other must not  remain other, he must become like one in belief and in way of life. It is an inclusionary, homogenizing attitude, usually pursued with  physical and psychological violence toward the other.
Right! Jinnah was constantly trying to get Hindus to convert to Islam wasn't he? Liaqat actually did convert one person- his second wife, but she was Xtian to start of with and, come to think of it, she converted voluntarily. Under Muslim Law, Liaqat could have kept an Xtian wife. 
Who else? Savarkar was constantly badgering everyone to like get with the program and worship a cow already. Same was true of Bal, Pal and Lal.
Are you fucking kidding me? The whole point about Ashraf Muslims like Bilgrami is they didn't want their Kayastha clerks or Bania agents to convert to Islam and then start inviting themselves around on the excuse of Eid or whatever.  If nothing else, it would damage their efficiency.
Similarly, no Iyer has ever tried to convert a Muslim. Them guys are way smarter than us Smarthas.  The last Tamil Avadhani was a Muslim. As for Sanskrit- don't even start.
As a particularly vicious Hindutva nutjob myself, suppose I have a chance to slip A.R. Rehman a mind-altering drug and then to 'shuddify' him- i.e. reconvert him to Hinduism. Would I do it? Fuck no! The Tamil film (music) industry was a sewer of drugs and drink and dishonourable conduct to women. God bless the Pir who- WITH NO INTENTION TO CONVERT- helped the family when the father was dying in hospital. Thank God, the young genius took shelter in Islam! That way he could refuse drink or drugs on the grounds of Religion. Had he remained a Hindu, those bastards would have forced him because- don't you know?- Hinduism is very evil and the best way to escape its to get drunk and rape some girls belonging to a lower caste.
Modi has been in power for 12 years in Gujerat. Show me the Muslims he has converted even from his own 'Ghanchi' caste (for example those in Godhra). 

Ethnic monopoly and/or cleansing is a different kettle of fish. Partition wasn't about converting people- it was about coveting their possessions and perquisites of office and then conducting a cull. Still, it is noteworthy, Pakistan banned the exodus of 'bhangis'- i.e. the guys who did the dirty jobs- while, Paul Brass tells us, the Jat Sikhs deliberately cleansed their own Muslim 'service castes' so as to create space for Mazhabi Sikhs. (I don't personally believe this story- but a 'Secularist' like Bilgrami is bound to pay lip service to it.)
On the other hand, for all his traditionalism about caste, there was something offensive to Gandhi within Hinduism itself.
Yes. It was the notion that he himself wasn't educated enough in it to claim a scholarly or clerical title.
The social psychology of the Hindu caste system consists of an exclusionary attitude.
Unlike the non-Hindu caste system.
For each caste, there was a lower caste which constituted the other and which was to be excluded from one's way of life, again by the most brutal physical and psychological violence.
Is this true? Let us look at Dr. Ambedkar's biography.  Parsis beat him and throw him out of their lodge. Muslims deny him water. A low caste Hindu 'banjara' won't carry him to his destination- even though he's just a child and well educated and affluent.
By contrast, his teacher is a Brahmin who delights in him and gives him his own surname- which is why Gandhi thought him to be some over-educated Westernised Brahmin who didn't really understand the 'Harijans' and thus was heating his brain for no reason- and, later on, his second wife- a Medical Doctor whom he married to care for him because he was diabetic- was also a Brahmin. She was ostracized and accused of having poisoned him after his death by his own son.  Yet, right from the start, the educated Mahar (thanks to the British Indian Army) was a significant threat to the Maharashtrian Brahmin. 
Yet it is from that equally martial community that he received most support. Hegdewar and Gowalkar loved him. He himself appreciated the R.S.S for its anti-caste attitude. That's why, later on, people like Barrister Khobragade had no compunction in allying with the BJP or Shiv Sena even though it wounded the hearts of LSE fuckwits like me.
Why? What was the reason?
The Chitpavan, who were getting demoralized and sinking as a community, knew that the Mahars were a heroic people like themselves.  
Dr. Moonjee volunteered to serve during the Boer War, as did Gandhi, so as to learn Military tactics. Any future Indian Army which neglected the Mahars' martial prowess- their sheer courage and intelligence and long tradition of uprightness and pietistic 'Bhakti' religion- would be bound to fail.  The great qualities of this 'caste' are visible to all- then and now. But, I can multiply instances.  Look at the Balmik caste, the Jatavs, or (for Tamils) the Valluvars who technically are 'Pariahs'. Can you imagine Tamil without Tiruvalluvar? Hinduism without Valmiki? A.K Ramanujan tried but he also told us his grandmother enjoyed being taken from behind by underemployed fishermen, but only with the fell purpose of using her vagina dentata (I'm not making this up) to bite off their low caste dicks.

Army discipline requires that the 'high born' show 100 per cent obedience to the orders of his 'low born' superior. Nothing else will do.  This is the basis of the R.S.S ethos and the real reason people like me used to hate them. Don't get me wrong. I love the Indian Army- but only coz their officers looked so smart and their lovely wives and daughters spoke such beautiful English.
Now, because my 'posh' English accent (hey! I went to St. Columba's!) is starting to fray,  and I can't understand Rahul Baba's English (he did spend a little time at St.Columba's but then Harvard got hold of him) and have to settle for Modi's Hindi- what? I'm a fucking Madrasi!- all bets are off. Let the Indian Army promote according to Merit. Let English die in India. But fucking fix it so children don't get raped!
Sorry, for that outburst. I'm truly shit, I am. Senile fucking debility, mate. 
Anyroad...
Returning to Bilgrami's thesis, there may well be 'alterity' here. But it is an alterity which cries out for an, I will not say Levinasian, but 'Mussar' response such that 'the spiritual needs of the other are my material needs'. If Acharya Kosambi, a Brahmin, and Babasaheb Ambedkar, a Mahar, both embrace Buddhism- where is the problem for the 'Caste' Hindu?
Are we so fucking stupid that we prefer to be ruled over by Mlecchas just so as to preserve our 'Smarta Vicharams' and plague afflicted 'Agraharams'? 
Bilgrami, as a deracinated emigre, may believe Gandhi's return to India marked something genuinely new. It didn't. If Khilafat was a success- was it because of Gandhi? As for Hindu 'Anushilan' or 'Jugantar' type radicalism- Gandhi was no where in the picture.
As a prematurely senile but active man, no doubt, he provided a cover for those- like Birla- who needed to retreat from Revolutionary politics. He was the provider of a 'Good Conduct' certificate which kept you out of the clutches of blackmailers and police-spies while also granting you a sort of post-obit on the resources of the dying Raj.
When I think sometimes about caste in India --without a doubt the most resilient form of exclusionary social inegalitarianism in the history of the world-- it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that even
the most alarming aspects of religious intolerance is preferable to it. To say, "You must be my brother", however wrong, is better than saying, "You will never be my brother." In religious intolerance there is at least a small core that is highly attractive.
Bilgrami Sahib, you must know the expression 'sag bash birader-e-khurd na bash' (better a dog than an younger brother). Is that not what has happened in the Indian subcontinent? 'You must be my brother' means- 'you must be my younger brother and let me shit in your mouth.'
You may find this 'small core' in Religious intolerance highly attractive. Why? Believe me, the stuff they are serving you isn't goulash- it's shit. I found out the hard way.
The intolerant person cares enough about the truth as he sees it, to want to share it with others.
Why, Bilgrami Sahib, why? What you describe is a strategy that is easily dominated if the other has an equal endowment of knowledge and/or reasoning power. Even if he doesn't, still, the optimal strategy is to only grant the privilege of being witnesses to your truth to those who immediately die for it- i.e. martyrs or shaheeds.  
Of course, that he should want to use force and violence in order to make the other share in it, spoils
what is attractive about this core. No need to do so. Just pretend that the truth is esoteric or requires some long praxis of unquestioning obedience. If you are speaking of 'cognitive dissonance reduction'- just pretend to be a bien pensant humanist till some over-educated shithead from somewhere else turns up to sit at your feet. It was Gandhi's humanistic  mission to retain the core for it showed that one's conception of the truth was not self-enclosed, that it spoke with a relevance to all others, even others who differed from one. How to prevent this relevance to others from degenerating into criticism of others who differed from one and eventually violence towards them, is just the reconciliation we are seeking.
O...kay. You're about to say something real interesting, right? After all, you're one smart dude and, more to the point, belong to the Bilgrami khandan.
In the philosophical tradition Gandhi is opposing, others are potential objects of criticism in the sense that one's particular choices, one's acts of moral conscience, generate moral principles or imperatives, which others can potentially disobey. For him, conscience and its deliverances, though relevant to others, are not the wellspring of principles. Morals is only about conscience, not at all about principles.
There is an amusing story about two Oxford Philosophers, which makes this distinction vivid. In a seminar, the formidable J. L Austin having become exasperated with Richard Hare's huffing on about how moral choices reveal principles, decided to set him up with a question. "Hare", he asked, "if a student came to you after an examination and offered you five pounds in return for the mark alpha, what would you say?" Predictably, Hare replied, "I would tell him that I do not take bribes, on principle!" Austin's acid response was, "Really? I think I would myself say, 'No Thanks.' " Austin was being merely deflationary in denying that an act of conscience had to have a principle underlying it. Gandhi erects the denial into a radical alternative to a (western) tradition of moral thinking. An honoured slogan of that tradition says, "When one chooses for oneself, one chooses for everyone". The first half of the slogan describes a particular person's act of conscience. The second half of the slogan transforms the act of conscience to a universalized principle, an imperative that others must follow or be criticized. Gandhi embraces the slogan too, but he understands the second half of it differently. He too wants one's acts of conscience to have a universal relevance, so he too thinks one chooses for everyone, but he does not see that as meaning that one generates a principle or imperative for everyone. What other interpretation can be given to the words "One chooses for everyone" in the slogan, except the principled one?
WTF! That's your apercu culled from decades and decades of elitist Anglo education? Austin was clearly wrong. He said 'No thanks'- which means the other guy has to offer him more money or a beating or a buggering or whatever. The point about deontics is that it solves a co-ordination problem. It is Eusocial. Austin should have punched the student. A punch has illocutionary force. A.J Ayer once argued Mike Tyson out of raping some hot chick. How? Flattery and nimble footwork. Language is strategic or not at all. 
Gandhi was too making a privileged claim re. his Conscience. It was the voice of God. Marie Stokes heard the Voice of God in 'a dark yew wood' and it is to her we have all harkened. Flaubert spoke of Art as being the Soul's condom in this brothel of a World; Bilgrami spouting Gandhian shite too is a prophylactic but not for the Soul, no, rather for a burnt out Careerism which now must take recourse to the dirtiest sort of Senile, Syphilitic, gesture politics.

Why all internal reasons are actually external prejudices

Bernard Williams' doctrine that all reasons for a person doing something must be internal to that person- i.e. involve a motivation within himself rather than arise out of some Social Convention- appears easy to dispose off- at least on the assumption that human beings evolved by Natural Selection. This is because, assuming it is costly to have motivations which are subject to some calculus such that they inhibit or permit an action; it follows that for any given action, the Evolutionary Stable Strategy will militate for some proportion of actors not possessing an 'internal reason' but proceeding by mimicry, including lagged mimetic effects- i.e. for an external reason- to complete the same action. Indeed, Amotz Zahavi's work on warning calls and predator 'mobbing' shows how 'external reasons' can improve predator-prey outcomes and hence are trans-species Eusocial.
The same point would be true for artificial agents- e;g. those used in a simulation- provided it is costly to acquire information and apply reason to it and there is heterogeneity in terms of either information access or processing capacity amongst agents.
True, one could simply change the way one defines 'internal reasons' or 'motivations' such that we now speak of a desire to mimic or a desire to be lead or a desire to roll the dice and so forth. However, since these desires or motivations are encoded in Language, then- by Wittgenstein's argument against Private Languages- clearly these are 'external reasons' merely. The one doing the action may not even be aware of it, let alone have an internal reason for doing it. Certainly, it would also be a case of quod nescis quo modo fiat, non facis.
 However, since Public Language has different granularity than either 'Mind stuff' or whatever Cognitive process determines action, and furthermore, since we know in advance that any given set of terms available to Public Language for use as explanans is either incomplete or misleading or both- it follows that no external reasons exist save by way of prejudice.
The literature on this subject, in so far as it relates to counter-factuals, misses the point that for agents who have evolved by Natural Selection, Uncertainty always exists as to which World we live in- this one or a counter-factual. Indeed, the Evolutionarily Stable Strategy- assuming it is costly to find out the answer- is to always remain in a state of 'buzzing blooming' confusion in this regard, at least for some proportion of the population. Philosophy has no Archimedian point here. On the contrary, opening its jaws to digest Game Theory it  becomes merely the Ouroburos of the latter's shed skin.

No doubt, those familiar with the literature may think I'm missing the point. Perhaps, Williams is referring to ideal agents with infinite and instantaneous computing power? The problem here is such agents would have a type of Theory of Mind which would disintermediate Language and the essentially linguistic distinction between 'internal' and 'external'. Indeed, it is far from clear that the word 'reason' would retain any utility.

Alternatively, we may posit some special barrier to perfect Theory of Mind. But, in that case, Language would be entirely strategic because arising wholly from that barrier and the reason for it. Here again the distinction Williams makes becomes wholly hypocritical and empty of Philosophic content.

What about William's criticism of 'external reasons?'

The answer, of course, is that the agent believes he's hit on a 'cheap talk' ploy in a particular sort of game. To turn it into a 'costly signal' he may pretend to be undergoing some terrible inward struggle productive of the costive truth in question. Indeed, there's a Kavka's toxin type twist to this such that he has an incentive to convince himself that this is what is genuinely happening.
A bit like Bilgrami's Gandhi.

Akeel Bilgrami on Modi

Prof Akeel Bilgrami writes-
'In the Europe of the 1930s and 1940s, the term “fascist” came to be associated with two defining features. First, the finding of an external enemy within a nation (in the case of Germany, the Jews, the gypsies) and despising and subjugating them. Second, what Mussolini offered as an explicit definition of fascism: the fusion of the interests of corporations and the state. I ask the reader to look at Modi’s record with Muslims and his avowed economic programme and decide for herself where the lack of intelligence really lies. '
Is Bilgrami correct?
Let us look at the facts. The word Fascist, in the 1920's, as popularized by Mussolini had nothing at all to do with Jews. It did however have everything to do with
1) Defeating the Communists and other Leftists who
a) had opposed Italy's participation in the War
b) aimed at Bolshevik style Revolution. Mussolini was a  former Socialist who supported the War and had the backing of the Army for this reason.
2) Stressing the role of the Military and seeking for a revival of Imperial glory. This was to be done by making Business Corporations and Trade Unions and other elements of Civil Society- including the Education system and, after the signing of the Lateran treaty, even the Church- subordinate to the interests of an expansionist State. Mussolini's 'Corporatism' meant subordinating, not fusing, the interests of the Capitalists to the greater glory of the Nation.

Which other European countries could be described as Fascist?
1) Hungary. Bela Kun had led a Communist Revolution. With help from the armies of neighboring countries like Romania and Czechoslavakia, Admiral Horthy launched a 'White Terror' and became Regent.  Kun and many of his comrades were Jewish but Horthy wasn't Anti Semitic because Jews had traditionally been loyal to the dynasty.
2) Germany also faced the problem of Red Insurrection which was put down by 'Freikorps'- disbanded soldiers. The size of the Army had been drastically cut by the Peace Treaty. Hence, the German Army wanted a 'force multiplier' in the shape of a Mass Movement. They were also keen on projecting the 'stab in the back theory' so as to absolve themselves of War guilt. Hitler was a paid agent of the Army when he joined the Nazi party. Luddendorf was beside him during the Munich Putsch. But, the mentally unstable Luddendorf refused to go to jail to pose as a martyr and so Hitler gained salience.  Hitler's path to power was paved by Generals like Schliecher (whom Hitler killed) and Blomberg (whom he hounded out of the Army in disgrace) and all this happened when Hindenburg was President. Hitler had no particular love for the Corporates. They and the German Army however agreed to subordinate themselves to the State- which, thanks to them, Hitler came to embody.
3) Spain. The Left came to power and went a little crazy. General Franco, with help from Mussolini and Hitler, invaded from Morocco having first declared the Virgin Mary to be the Captain General of his Army. But Franco wasn't serving Corporate interests. Primo de Rivera's idiotic Falangism hurt Corporates. Unlike the First World War, the Second War was a period of stagnation for Spain. It was only after ditching the ideologues that Spain, from the Fifites onward, took a Technocratic direction under American tutelage. Franco wasn't particularly anti-Semitic.
4) The Romanian Iron Guard- vicious anti semites but they thought they were serving the Archangel Michael, not the Corporations. They considered Capitalism sinful.
5) Pilsudski's 'Sanation' in Poland featured massive State action. Hiter's Germany did see Privatization but Corporations had to serve the interests of the State. Had German Capital been in the same parlous state as Poland's, Hitler and Blomberg and so on would have gone the Pilsudski route. Indeed, to a certain extent, they did.

One can multiply instances but one conclusion is inescapable. Inter-war Fascism was a product of-
1) Fear of Communist Revolution and/or invasion or subversion by the Soviets. The Military had a disproportionate say and they considered Capital to be a junior partner.  Some military men, but also some Business men like Henry Ford, came to believe in the 'Protocols of the Elders of Zion'- i.e. a paranoid fantasy in which the Jews controlled both the Kremlin and Walll Street and were aiming to destroy Spiritual 'Christianity' or 'Aryan Values' by 'Materialist' ideologies like 'Capitalism' and 'Communism'.

2) Anger at or anxieties arising out of the Peace treaties. Defeated powers looked to get back territory by Armed Might; Victorious powers sought to keep their gains by the same means.

Some 'Fascist' countries had an 'internal enemy', some did not. What they shared in common was Militaristic rule and a willingness to abandon International Treaties and the League of Nations in pursuit of their National Interest. When people thought of Hitler or Franco or Mussolini, they didn't think- 'oh that fellow is in the pocket of Big Business and his only other passion is killing some specific minority'. 
Instead, what people thought was 'that nutjob is willing to start a World War to expand his territory. He will ruin his own country- including its Businessmen- but he doesn't care.'
Suppose Hitler was a puppet of Big Business. Then, there would have been no War. Just pay the German industrialists to rein in Hitler. After all, money is what those guys care about, right? France and England had plenty of money to buy peace. They didn't use their money in that way because it couldn't be used in that way. Big Business wasn't in charge in Germany. Hitler was- but only because people like General Blomberg had come to see that he would push through the Army's maximal program better than they could do so themselves because
a) he was simply more ruthless
b) he could pose as the Charlie Chaplin like 'Little Corporal' whom the English assumed would be anti-War because he'd experienced its horrors himself.

Now let us look at Modi. Is he in the pockets of Big Business? No. Adani is a junior partner in the development of Gujarat. Jindal, the former Congress M.P, wasn't anybody's junior partner. Manmohan scarcely wanted Coalgate. Yet it happened. The country got no benefit whatsoever. 
Some people can make money even in a failed State. However, the Business Sector as a whole goes down the toilet.
It is undeniable that Corporates, as a class, backed Modi this time round. What was the alternative? If the Economy continues to stagnate- which it would have done because Congress didn't even have a P.M candidate- then many of them either go bankrupt or have to severely retrench. If Growth gets back on track- which it will under Modi simply because he isn't a senile idiot- most of them will be able to raise money and get back to profitability. It is an Existential question. 

What about Bilgrami's second assertion- viz. Modi has risen to power by attacking an 'external enemy within the Nation'? Surely the secret of his electoral win is that he himself was attacked by all other parties as that very 'external enemy'? This split the Muslim vote. Furthermore, there was a 'counter polarization' amongst Hindus because 'Secular' politicians, with great cynicism, were claiming to have given Muslims a special most favored status. 
Still, the fact remains, people have voted for Modi because they believe he's a 'Good Governance' man who will treat everyone equally and not play caste/creed vote-bank politics.  
If Bilgrami were correct, wealthy Muslims would now be fleeing the country. To my certain knowledge, they are not doing this. Instead, we see Muslim N.R.I businessmen ramping up their investment plans and planning to spend more time in India and not just Gujarat or Rajasthan or M.P or the N.C.R either. People are talking of opportunities in U.P and Bihar.

Bilgrami is a nice guy. He writes well. But, if he wants to challenge Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum on their own home turf, he will have to up his game. I suggest he make a deep study of my blog. That will enstoopidify him sufficiently to come into his own.

Akeel Bilgrami on Secularism

As one of West London's most vituperative, albeit least widely read, Hindutva bloggers, I feel it my duty to take Prof. Akeel Bilgrami to task for his view that Secularism 'is not a general political truth, suited to all historical contexts, but rather apt only in some contexts, such as, for instance, when there is an implicit and pervasive threat of "majoritarianism". And second, for the conclusion that any justification and implementation of secularism in contexts which are not fully modernist - in a sense of "modern" that was articulated first in western Europe - must turn on an appeal to the conceptual vernacular.
It so happens that we know in advance- coz it's the Evolutionarily Stable Strategy- that the heterosexuals will always be a majority-  which raises the question,- how is 'Secularism'- as opposed to Legalistic pragmatics, which sublates the 'conceptual vernacular', coz that's in its job description- at all 'apt' in the context of Philistine heteros buggering with the happiness of Philosophical homos? 
Perhaps, Bilgrami might answer, the Homos could set up Religions of their own in which sexual acts become sacraments and thus gain protection for those practices that way. But, this is an odd type of Secularism. 

What about Bilgrami's notion that Secularism is only relevant in contexts which are 'modernist'- that too in some supposedly univocal Western European sense? The problem is, for Legalistic pragmatics- i.e. that which acts as a check and balance on the power of the Secular- be it Statist or Contractarian- those contexts have disappeared or never existed in the first place. Once again, Bilgrami's notion of Secularism is just too fucking bizarre to have any salience in Public Discourse because while the Law is a Social reality and obligatory passage point, Academic Philosophy is a Solipsistic oubliette.

Perhaps, as a matter of full disclosure and uttermost good faith, I ought to have prefaced my analysis of Bilgrami's thesis by pointing out that 17 trillion of my Hindu ancestors were ruthlessly slaughtered by Muslims, yet Bilgrami- a self confessed Muslim- won't even kill just 3 or 4 of my cousins in America living close to him despite being in receipt of several peremptory Emails from me reminding him of his ancestral duty in this regard. What further proof is needed that the 'Sickular' Muslim created by Congress tyranny is like totally faltu yaar?

You may argue that Bilgrami has been brainwashed by Bernard Williams (husband of the egregious Shirley) into rejecting 'externalism' and holding that only 'internal' motivations count as providing a reason for action. Thus, you may say to me- "Vivek, you gave Bilgrami only an external reason to kill your cousin not an inner motivation. Suppose you had said- 'these three or four Hindus in your vicinity are calling you a great big gandu and saying yore Momma so fat and like they gonna git you in a drive-by so you gotta kill them first, see?'- that's an internal reason. But you didn't do that did you?. You just wrote- 'Bilgrami, Sir, as a Muslim it is second nature for you to kill Hindus; please be advised, the following Hindus are conveniently located, for killing purposes, by your good self ; kindly do the needful ;  have a nice day.' While the wording of your Email was impeccable and any true Muslim would recognize the skilful means whereby you have presented a 'farz e kifaayah' within the courteous context of 'adab', the fact remains that Bilgrami's Iman has been totally ass raped by Shirley Williams' ex-husband and so he rejects external reasons.

My answer to you is- 'I will eat your children and burn down your house. Fuck off. You are probably a Niyogi Telugu Brahmin and consequently totally gay and spend all your time jerking off to the video of Rahul Gandhi's speech to the Indian Federation of Industry.
'Bilgrami can't possibly be so stupid as to reject externalism- more especially for farz e kifaayah type duties. Everybody knows that there are some actions required for the Community to continue to exist in a manner such that our own lives and property are protected. If someone else discharges those duties, well and good. If no one does, then an external reason exists for oneself dispassionately completing that task. More generally, it is of the essence of voluntary human interaction in a repeated game that the momentary absence or incapacity of the other is compensated for by the rule of culpa levis in concreto- i.e. to maintain a relationship, sometimes we have to do things the other party would have done had they been capable and this is a reciprocal obligation.'

Your may reply...really? That's your reply? You expect me to print that? This is a respectable blog, Madam. Mind it kindly.

Getting back to Bilgrami- he writes
Charles Taylor has convincingly argued that in a religiously plural society, secularism should be adopted on the basis of what Rawls called an ‘overlapping consensus.’ An overlapping consensus, in Rawls’s understanding of that term, is a consensus on some policy that is arrived at by people with very different moral and religious and political commitments, who sign on to the policy from within their differing points of view, and therefore on possibly very different grounds from each other. It contrasts with the idea that when one converges on a policy one must all do so for the same reason.'
Is Bilgrami speaking of different doxastic systems generating the same Rule-set or Policy prescription by sheer coincidence? Obviously not. Clearly there is a Co-ordination problem for the different doxastic systems such that they occupy the perceived  Moral high ground. But, there is an alethic and computational aspect, wholly unconnected to the imperative, involved in identifying 'focal points', which is 'external' to any given doxastic system and which involves some action which can't be discharged save in concert or on behalf of the concerned Faith community. But, this means that 'overlapping consensus' exists within heterogenous doxastic communities.Clearly, if the 'overlapping consensus' is about a collectively necessary action that can be discharged by some subset of agents AND if each agent agrees that there is some circumstance where they would themselves, however reluctantly, join this subset, then an 'external reason' exists on which all converge and this 'external reason' trumps internal reasons even though subjectively agents may experience repugnance or cognitive dissonance or ontological dysphoria or a real bad case of the shits.
Once this is admitted and acted upon- i.e. a situation arises where all are compelled to discharge at one time or another the collective necessary action (e.g. jury duty)- the 'external/internal' distinction disappears because, on the one hand, dispassionate actions gain an idionomic emotional colouring and qualia, while, on the other hand, hedonic or instrumental actions acquire new and powerful valency of a repugnancy or thymotic type.
Collectively necessary actions can be of two sorts- Sacred (where God or some Omniscient or Transcendent Being has substantive knowledge of what is required and thus humans have only defeasible procedural rationality absent Revelation or Divine Inspiration of a Charismatic kind) and Secular (where the State gets the ultimate say as to what is obligatory, what is punishable, and what lies between.)
Bilgrami's central claim re. Secularism is-  'there are no external reasons that would establish the truth of secularism. If secularism were to carry conviction, it would have to be on grounds that persuaded people by appealing to the specific and substantive values that figured in their specific moral psychological economies. Such a view might cause alarm in those who would wish for secularism a more universal basis. Internal reasons, by their nature, do not provide such a basis. As, I said, internal reasons for some conclusion that will persuade some people, may not persuade others of that conclusion, since those others may not hold the particular substantive values to which those reasons appeal and on which those reasons depend. Only external reasons could persuade everyone since all they require is a minimal rationality possessed by all (undamaged, adult) human minds and make no appeal to substantive values that may be variably held by human minds and psychologies. Alarming thought it might seem to some, there is no help for this. There are no more secure universal grounds on which one can base one’s argument for secularism.'

Let us think about this for a moment.  Bilgrami lives in the United States. That State can conscript him for some purpose of its own- he can be called up for Jury duty, he can be drafted into the Army, he can be interned or quarantined, he can be killed and his vital organs removed for some medical purpose.
Is it really the case that Secularism- not that poncey word but the power of the State- has no 'external reason' that could establish its truth? How about getting ass raped in Gitmo till you acknowledge my truth, bitch?
Is not American Secularism- I'm now referring to the poncey word- inextricably tied to the founding Fathers' notion of what was necessary to the State? Jefferson, writing to a Rabbi, said 'in matters or Religion, divided we stand, united we fall.'  This is overlapping consensus as an external reason which has the most secure possible universal ground for acceptance behind it- viz. if you don't the State will fuck you up. Sure you can pretend and pose and posture, but- bottom line- only so long as aint being hanged by the neck. 
The Secular sphere can kill you if you're the wrong sort of secular or not secular enough. Any 'external reason' not grounded in this truth must, by definition, be a trespass on the Sacred.
In the same way that Bilgrami proudly said 'I'm a Muslim' to the Hindu landlord in a lower middle class Hindu majority area, so too might Bilgrami, at the end of the day, say 'Because there is no God but God' when required to explain why he should not commit a crime demanded by the State even though he himself, and his loved ones, are killed for it.

You may say- Vivek, you are a rabid Islamophobe and also have a  very small dick. Moreover, you are as ignorant as shit. You don't understand the very subtle point Bilgrami makes in what follows-
'I have been a little wary of this use of the notion of overlapping consensus since in Rawls it has always been a notion embedded in the framework of his celebrated idea of the ‘original position,’ i.e., the idea that one contracts into policies to live by without knowledge of one’s substantive position in society. I find myself completely baffled by why the idea of the original position is not made entirely redundant by the notion of an overlapping consensus. If one did not know what one’s substantive position in society is, one presumably does not know what one’s substantive values are. If so, the very idea of internal reasons can have no play in the original position. It follows that if one were to adopt an overlapping consensus on the basis of divergent internal reasons that contractors may have for signing onto a policy, then the original position becomes altogether irrelevant to the contractual scenario. Of course, if one were to completely divorce the idea of an overlapping consensus from Rawls’s conceptual apparatus within which it has always been formulated (even in his last published work, The Law of Peoples), then it would be exactly right to say, as Taylor does, that secularism should be adopted in pluralistic society on the basis of an overlapping consensus. But now, the only apparatus one has to burden the contractors with is the capacity for internal reasoning, that is, with psychological economies with substantive values that yield internal reasons. Rawls would not be recognizable in this form of contractualist doctrine. Indeed one would be hard pressed to say that one was any longer theorizing within the contractualist tradition at all, which is a tradition in which serious constraints of an ‘original position’ or a ‘state of nature’… were always placed as methodological starting points in the making of a compact. Shorn of all this, one is left with something that is the merest common sense, which it would be bombastic to call ‘a social contract.’ We now need only say this: assuming no more than our capacity for internal reasoning, i.e., our capacity to invoke some substantive values we hold (whatever they may differentially be in all the different individuals or groups in society), we can proceed to justify on its basis another substantive value or policy—for example, secularism—and so proceed to adopt it for the polity. If this path of adoption by consensus, invoking this internalist notion of justification, works in a religiously pluralist society, it will be just as Taylor presents it, an overlapping consensus, with none of Rawls’s theoretical framework.'

My reply is- 'Mum, I've warned you about harping on about my tiny dick on this blog. Nobody is interested, okay? As for your quotation from Bilgrami- listen, Rawls was stoooopid. He didn't know that the courses in  Econ 101, Pol Sci 101, Ethics 101, Jurisprudence 101 etc which his contractors were supposed to have completed before making their choice WERE NOT AT ALL Amartya Sen type sententious shite but, on the contrary, high powered, discrete Math, Game theoretic & Muth Rational- i.e. the sort of stuff the Mahabharata shows Yuddhishtra as having to learn to conquer his Vishada and rule as a Just King.
Since the Mahabharata was written for 'women, drunkards, slaves'- i.e the privileged class of the Vyadha Gita-  it follows that everybody, except Ivy League fuckwits,  knows that the Muth rational reflective equilibrium is a mixed strategy- i.e. has a stochastic component. But that's cool. What we all choose behind the veil of ignorance is this lottery in Babylon in whose well (chaah-e-baabil) Hindu or Muslim, Harut or Marut, we all lie suspended repenting our seduction by the Zohra of English- Enid Blyton- but for whom I might have turned into a less ignorant Iyer whose American cousins Prof. Bilgrami would feel compelled to butcher coz I'd, like, know the lingo them Muslims talk- y'know- berka, berka jihad, I command you to kill those fucking cousins of mine already- berka berka..
What? That's not racist.
Ask Shah Rukh Khan. He used to be known as Sheshadri Ramaswami Kaddalooraiiyah till he got tired of my stealing his tiffin (he was a couple of years junior to me at St. Columba's) and invented this tough guy persona for himself.  Secret message of Chennai Express is simbly that aaall theeze so called Muslims are actually thair shadam eating Tambrams like Kamal Hasan.
Mind it kindly.
Aiyayo.