More foolishness from Feisal Devji

In an essay for the Hindu, Dr. Devji makes 2 fatuous claims

1) The Indian State is unwilling or unable to monopolize the use of violence in its own name. 

2) Hindu Nationalism has never possessed a theory of the State.

He writes (my comments are in bold)
'We might argue that secularism remains a polemical category because it is deployed in order to capture the state while never fully inhabiting it. We might, indeed, argue precisely this but only if we had not only captured the State but also thrown it down into a pit and were now saying- 'It rubs the lotion on its skin, otherwise it gets the hose again'. 
In other words, if the purpose of 'capturing the State' is to skin it alive to make a body-suit for ourselves, then it makes sense of speaking of 'never fully inhabiting it'. This is because though we wear the skin of that which we captured, the fact that we had to get rid of a lot of messy internal organs means we don't 'fully inhabit it'. 
For as in colonial times, during which its exclusion from state power made for a nationalism grounded in society and its cultural and religious languages, Indian politics today continues to be divided between state and society. Why? There was no Democracy under Colonial rule. There is now and has been for 5o years. Why doesn't this make a difference?  This is nowhere more evident than in the way in which even the most powerful of India’s governments have never been able or indeed willing to monopolise the use of violence in the classical form, as defined by Max Weber, that is meant to characterise nation states. Was Nehru or Patel or Shastri or Indira or Morarji or Vajpayee 'unwilling or unable' to assert the State's monopoly of legitimate violence?Vajpayee sent in the Army after Godhra. Hindus were killed by Army bullets. On the contrary, they tolerate and even rely upon what we might describe as “social” violence, whether or not it is encouraged and even organised by agents of the state. When did this happen? The anti-Sikh riots? But the boy Rajiv scarcely counts as one of the 'most powerful of India's' rulers. Narasmiha Rao, similarly, was a senile has-been who only go the P.M's job after if was turned down by Shankar Dayal Sharma. Congress, latterly, might be totally shite but Patel wasn't shite, Shastri wasn't shite, and as for Indira, she didn't muck around mate. R.A.W was too a State Actor and it had its bumboo up your proverbial just so you'd remember.

This inability or unwillingness to monopolise the use of violence in its own name, I want to argue, illustrates neither the weakness nor backwardness of the Indian state, but instead constitutes its dynamic structural logic, one that has again come into its own after India’s liberalisation in the 1990s, when society, in the form of the private sector and informal economy, re-emerged as an important site of political contestation. Dynamic structural logic? There aint no such beast. You're just making this up.  We know Pakistan has plenty of non-State actors running around creating mayhem. Does the Pakistani unwillingness or inability to crack down on those nutjobs 'constitute its dynamic structural logic'? If so, is Devji saying that, post Bhutto, when the Economy was freed up, Pakistan's 'private sector and informal economy' re-emerged 'as an important site of political contestation'? Is that what the Peshawar School massacre was about? Contestation of private sector Schools? Is Devji completely off his head? Unlike Pakistan, India is not a country where private armies are officially tolerated or sanctioned. There are insurgencies and sometimes there are political settlements but it is not the case that India tolerates, as a matter of 'dynamic structural logic', any violation of State Monopoly of legitimate coersion. In this sense- i.e. nonsense- the non-Weberian character of the Indian state is as linked to neoliberalism today as it had been in the colonial past to the anticipatory politics of a nationalism based in society. India is not a soft State. It's a hard State. It will fuck you up if you try to fuck with it.  At the margin, no doubt, its potency is contested just as Westminster's potency was contested during the hoodie riots a few years back. So what? Like Britain, India has a unitary State with the monopoly of legitimate coercive power. Pakistan is a different story. It had autonomous Federally Administered Territories and then a terrorist State-within-a-State in the shape of ISI backed Lashkars and Talibans. Pre-independence Indian politics wasn't anticipatory at all. It provided rich pickings in terms of graft and had achieved all but its foreign policy objectives prior to 1939. Neoliberalism is a word coined by Marxist fucktards. It doesn't mean anything.And it is the BJP that is now in the position of traversing the path from social to state power, and wrestling, as the Congress once did, with the problem of striking a balance between the two, if one can indeed be found. Right! Coz that's what keeps Narendra Bhai up at nights! How to stop Sushma Swaraj and her crack team of Swatantra Stree Sainiks launching a para-military assault on Holy Angels Primary School. What is this guy smoking?

Hindu nationalism

Hindu nationalism, which in the form of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) has repeatedly (thrice and very briefly each time) been banned, and thus not deprived of a political life in public institutions, has for a long time now represented the quintessential form that social power takes in India. Rubbish. Caste based Parties are the quintessential form of social power in India. Okay, the Bhadrolok did manage to terrorise Bengal by pretending to be Communists but those senile shitheads are now well and truly in the crapper. Devji isn't Indian. He doesn't know better. Still, the editors of the Hindu, who published this, do know better. What 'social power' does the R.S.S have in Chennai? In Hyderabad? In Kerala? In Bengal? In U.P? Even in Gujarat, an old school LSE type like me has complete impunity for bashing fellow Tambrams like Subramniyam Swamy. Indeed, it is probably the only State in India where I could get away with posing as a 'pravachak' albeit of a most ungodly kind. (Full disclosure- this is because I'm very dark, ugly and put on a hilarious Madrasi accent.)For by the time Indira Gandhi’s premiership came to an end, the once formidable social base of the Congress had been whittled away, as the party chose to concentrate its power in the institutions of the state. Nonsense. Indira split Congress in favor of a dynastic cult of personality. She concentrated power, not in institutions, but loyalist buffoons. Of course it continued to rely upon non-state actors, most violently during the anti-Sikh pogroms of 1984, rely? rely? Are you saying Rajiv needed the Sikhs killed and he had to rely on Youth Congress thugs rather than just send in the Central Reserve Police or some other such bunch of jokers?  but these did not represent the kind of mass base that the Congress had possessed in colonial times. A mass base so small that Congress couldn't chuck the Brits out even with the Japs knocking at the door. Hindu nationalism, on the other hand, augmented its social power while keeping it separate from the fortunes of the BJP as a political party, though this relationship has been placed under strain whenever the latter has been in government. Really? Hindu Nationalism has a strained relationship with Narendra Modi in Gujarat? Are you out of your freaking mind!

More interesting than the shifting balance of power between the BJP and its “family” of non-state Hindu organisations, however, might be the fact that Hindu nationalism has never possessed a theory of state. Unlike the vision of an Islamic state, for instance, with its distinctive if non-egalitarian constitutional structure, Hindu nationalism has no alternative political model, apart from an insistence on the dominance of majoritarian culture and concerns. And this is its triumph as much as tragedy, since the absence of a distinctive theory of state repeatedly casts Hindu nationalism back into a social movement, one that can only make claims on cultural and demographic rather than constitutional grounds. And in this sense it is the most appropriate heir of a concept of secularism that had always been populist in its argumentation. If anyone has recognised this, it is, unsurprisingly, the Muslim “fundamentalists” who support secularism in India, but want an Islamic state where they are in a majority. They deny the hypocrisy of this position by arguing that since Hindu nationalism has no theory of state, and so no critique of secularism, it might be oppressive but is still capable of being secular.

But the fact that Hindu nationalism possesses no theory of state also means that it carries the non-Weberian logic of Indian politics to its conclusion, by refusing to depoliticise social life or condemn its concerns as “irrational” and “superstitious”.  Listen, Devji mate, you're a nice guy. You probably 'lurv' India way more than wot I do. Let me tell you something about 'irrationality'- it is fucking irrational to treat people who clean your toilets as 'unclean' and beyond the pale as far as Development goes. That's a recipe for endemic typhoid. 
Let's talk about superstition. Say you are on your way to deliver a lecture at Oxford or Cambridge or wherever it is that you teach. You see a sanitation worker. You stop in your tracks. You have to go home. You have to cancel your lecture. Seeing a 'bhangi' is inauspicious. You can transact no business this day. 
Is there a way round this? Sure. Indoor sanitation. Toilets for everybody. Modi, at Red Fort, saying 'make in India' was also was saying 'make in the fucking toilet for fuck's sake- not all over the fucking place'. That's Hindu Nationalism.
In doing so, it is not only heir to the whole history of nationalism in colonial India, but at the same time is also best placed to capitalise on the importance of “civil society” activism in our own neoliberal times. Fuck off.  I want an immediate crackdown on 'eve teasing' in my parent's Delhi neighbourhood, who am I gonna call? I want Madhu Kishwar to work the streets and Kiran Bedi to fix the Admin side. Fuck I care about their politics? True Daddy tried to fix me a play date through the RSS helpline after I was diagnosed with Alzheimers, but that's a different story.
Commentary on both secularism and communalism in India has tended to focus too readily on plots and conspiracies that are meant to illustrate the coming together of sinister caste, class and other interests with popular prejudice and fear. But while accurate in some ways, these modes of understanding may be too superficial in others. We should attend instead to the structural and historical factors that define Indian politics, which appear to show a much greater continuity between parties and politics than is usually recognised to be the case.

Wow! Devji is now saying only the BJP can be a Secular Party because...urm... well them Saffron types are stooopid. They don't got a theory of the State unlike those smartypants from Taliban Central.

But Hindu Nationalism does too have a theory of the State- it goes like this 'That which enables our 'Rashtra' (Nation) to quickly grow strong while observing Niti (ethical policy) is the form and content of the State we democratically call into being. Our self-sacrificing celibate leaders need to hold the high offices in the State. Immediately, corruption, weakness, ignorance, slavish attitude to West etc, all such things will disappear. India will turn into a Galactic Super Power. As a great scholar of Indian origin, we will do 'ghar wapsi' ceremony for Devji Sahib before appointing him our first Ambassador to the Horse head Nebula so that it too can speak to us through his donkey's ass.

Faisal Devji's foolish 'Muslim Zion'

Prof. Devji is at it again. In his latest book, about Pakistan, he says

Why is this silly?
Well, European Jews had been persecuted for hundreds of years. But even Jews living in other parts of the world, who had never been persecuted, nourished the hope of returning to their holy land. Why? It was part of their religion.
By contrast, though some Muslim immigrants to the sub-continent retained a scruple regarding accepting land-grants as opposed to money payment because it was sinful to settle in a country that might be considered dar-ul-harb in that it was not fully Islamicized;, this scruple fell into abeyance in the second or third generation. Indeed, the Indian Muslim came to identify strongly with the region in which he had settled. Pious people might wish to retire to Mecca or Najaf and be buried in that holy soil but there was never any notion, prior to the ill fated 1920 Hijrat to Afghanistan, of a mass exodus. How could there be? Muslims were never ejected from their Holy Land. They had an obligation to return there but only as pilgrims- not as settlers.
What about Devji's assertion that 'the emergence of national minorities' in Nineteenth Century India turned Muslims there into a minority? How can the emergence of a thing result in bringing that very same thing about?
Fuck if I know. But then I don't teach History at Oxford.

Implausible Indian- Feisal Devji on Gandhi.

 South Africa. It's a kinda spooky place. First you have a Xhosa leader who thinks the way to win power for his people is to kill all their cattle coz that will bring dead warriors back to life. Next, you have a smart guy like Smuts throwing his lot in with boorish illiterate Boers who had no conception of the extent of British power, or their ruthlessness. Finally you have people like the Chinese leader, Leung Quinn,, who managed to get 50,000 of his people deported, and Gandhi, who thought the Pass Law was a good idea.
Smuts smartened up quite quickly, the Xhosas produced politicians of the caliber of Sistulu and Mandela. Leung Quin disappears from history but I imagine lived to see Sun Yat Sen's revolution.

Gandhi alone remains to so fascinate academics as to cause them to write mischievous nonsense.

Born, not  in South Africa, but Zanzibar, Prof Feisal Devji- who believes Gandhi created a new type of sovereignty based not on violent conquest but the abject victim-hood of those effortlessly vanquished after a merely masochistic display of non-violence- has this to say in Tehelka-

'what Mahatma Gandhi objected to about the colonial order in India was the very thing he disliked in Britain’s liberal society. For, in some ways, the colonial state was even more liberal than its metropolitan cousin, since it could, with far greater certitude, assert its impartiality with regard to the varying interests of a subject population. And so, it was not simply its lack of representative government to which Gandhi objected, but more importantly, the colonial state’s role as a third party. His targets were law and order, ostensibly the most attractive part of British rule in India. The peace brought about within such an order, argued the Mahatma, was illusory because it also produced the violence against which order had to be maintained.

In other words, Devji is telling us, Gandhi wanted the Brits to leave because they were stopping Indians killing each other. But by stopping the Indians from turning each other into kebabs the British just made them want to do it all the more. And that's really bad. It's like Smuts saying Indians all have to give their fingerprints and carry Passes and pay handsomely for that privilege.  I mean, actually carrying a Pass is a very good thing but it's wrong of Smuts to force us to do it because that's like totally insulting because we do too  WANT to carry passes- it's just Gandhi hasn't yet explained to us why Passes are so wonderful. 

Gandhi explained all this with reference to the stereotyped, if sometimes violent, rivalry between Hindus and Muslims, seen as the two great political interests in British India. Nationalists had often claimed that conflict between these communities was fostered by a colonial policy of divide and rule, and while the Mahatma agreed with this theory in principle, he did not view religious violence among Hindus and Muslims as the consequence of any deliberate planning by the British. Instead, he argued that the colonial state’s neutrality made religious conflict possible, its autonomy permitting Hindus and Muslims to define themselves as equally autonomous interests. And it was because the State stood as a third party between these interests that it was able to mediate between them, thus actively preventing any direct dealing among the Hindus and Muslims. In this way, the colonial state served not as a perversion of its liberal alternative, but rather as its secret truth.

What is Devji saying here? The State is neutral if it does not take sides in a quarrel between two groups. But, surely, if it takes sides then it becomes the main party to the dispute. Hitler did not take sides with the Anti Semites to kill Jews. He killed Jews. That was the policy of his Reich.
The Colonial State did take sides in various disputes between communities. It persecuted some people and protected some others. But this was in accordance with the Laws it enacted. To speak of the Colonial State as a perversion of 'its liberal alternative' is to utter an oxymoron. A Colonial State may have Liberal Institutions and the Rule of Law but it is not a Liberal State unless it has representative Government. But if it has that, it isn't Colonial in any sense of the word. This business of  saying things like 'the Nazi State was the Secret Truth of its Liberal alternative'- is simply paranoid gesture politics at its silliest. 
The Colonial State did not impede Hindus and Muslims working directly with each other. The direction in which the Administration was going in the Twenties and early Thirties was precisely the opposite. Sidney Webb delivers full adult franchise with strong minority protection to Ceylon in 1931. Only after that protection was disabled did Ceylon spiral into chaos. In India, Reading and Irwin were more cautious than Webb but, nevertheless, that was the direction in which things were moving.

Because they didn’t have to deal directly with one another, Hindus and Muslims could press their claims by enlisting the State’s support against each other, giving rise to a manipulative politics of solicitation in which loyalty was offered in exchange for rewards designed to discomfit the rival community.

What is Devji talking about? The Communal awards? But, that changed nothing on the ground. Is Devji suggesting that the Brits favored the Muslims because they were 'more loyal'? Did the Aga Khan get Tanganika because he was 'loyal'? 
I don't recognize Devji's analysis as applying to India in the Twenties and Thirties. During the War, yes, that was a factor but it existed mainly in the mind of Churchill. 
India was run by bureaucrats who wanted a quiet life. The British did minority protection because that was their job for which they collected tax money in return. They were quite good at minority protection because, in the long run, you secure a quiet life at a cheaper cost by doing 'broken windows theory' type vigilance. 
If the majority got to loot the minority, what would be their incentive to hand over a portion of the loot in taxes? A Colonial State is a 'stationary bandit'. Metic protection is part of that racket.

 And since they had no responsibility for governance, these interests could afford to look upon the outbreak of violence with equanimity, for it was after all the role of the colonial state to impose order. Riots were, therefore, a sign of political luxury as much as anything else, which is to say risks that might be run because the state would always be there to limit their effects and at most return to the status qua ante. 
Were riots a 'political luxury'? No. Not for Gandhi. Riots lost him legitimacy- they forced him to the Conference Table. Kanpur was a disaster for Gandhi and, to his credit, he apologized. Only the Salt March, which was financed by Dalmia, retrieved his reputation, though, of course, it didn't achieve anything.
Riots may have helped the Muslim League after the War but that is a different story- one where Wavell had confessed his inability to do anything more than evacuate the European population.
Of course, the liberal centre could not hold, and eventually the colonial state, buffeted by opposing interests, was forced to relinquish its impartiality. The British had lost legitimacy simply by holding so firmly to it.

What liberal centre is this that 'could not hold'? There could have been a Liberal Center if the Indians, led by Gandhi- or whomever- had co-operated with the British in creating Responsible Govt based on the Rule of Law- but they did no such thing. The British kept legitimacy by being financially solvent and having the political will to fight. After 1945, Britain was bankrupt. Attlee was thinking of releasing kids from School so they could bring in the harvest. 1948 was the worst year for rationing in the U.K.  America was calling the shots and America was so hostile to Britain's Empire in the East that they would have handed Hong Kong over to Chiang Kai Shek if they'd gotten to it first.
Devji's bizarre theory of sovereignty achieved through being masochistically vanquished or pointlessly blowing yourself up- for which he finds support in Gandhi- involves him in a truly mischievous piece of sophistry- viz. the notion that Gandhi wanted India and Pakistan to just duke it out over Kashmir rather than find a diplomatic or U.N solution.

Given the subcontinent’s fate as a site for some of the most destructive proxy wars of modern times, from the anti-Soviet jihad to the War on Terror, who is to say if the Mahatma was not correct in his estimation?

The scary thing about Devji's article is not that the picture of Gandhi that he paints isn't plausible but that a leading academic can believe that military conflict can occur without third party help. India and Pakistan simply didn't have enough bullets to keep a war going for more than a few weeks. Indeed, no two countries can go to war without involving the big powers who have great mounds of military hardware to sell. Perhaps Devji believes the Indians and Pakistanis would have just started hitting each other with lathis when they ran out of bullets, till their lathis broke and they then had to chuck stones at each other. At that point, they might decide to settle their dispute by a wrestling match or bout of fisticuffs or something equally honorable.

Sadly, this is not a reasonable scenario. Armies don't tamely pick up lathis when they run out of bullets for their guns. They demand guns, more guns, better guns, from the political leaders till either the politicians make peace or they are all slaughtered.
Fighting does not clear the air- look at Burma or Sri Lanka or Karachi or any Naxalite afflicted district. Locking up stupid agitators and shooting rioters, on the other hand, is the duty of the State. So is killing actual rebels- like Bagha Jatin- not lawyer politicians, like Gandhi who should simply be locked up from time to time for their own good. If a State does not fulfill this duty, it will cease to exist. General Dyer may not have fully pacified the Punjab with half an hour's worth of Machine gun fire, but, after Jallianwallah Bagh, the specter of the Mutiny was well and truly laid to rest.
Violence may have an ethical dimension in a 'balanced game' symmetrical agon. Non Violence may have an ethical dimension even under unbalanced games. Talking stupid nonsense has no ethical dimension.

Gandhi preferred direct dealings even of a violent kind to the protracted, if sometimes intermittent and low-grade, conflicts that were the special gift of mediation. So he would have liked to see a real war between India and Pakistan, because it might make possible an equally real resolution of their dispute by honourable means. And let us remember that the wars India and Pakistan have conducted represent perhaps their most honourable dealings with one another. For unlike Pakistan’s sponsorship of terrorism in India, to say nothing of the excessive and unregulated violence that marks internecine conflict in both countries, their wars have always been engagements of the most civilised kind, textbook exercises conducted outside civilian areas for the most part and replete with instances of camaraderie and honour among the opposing armies. And in this perverse way they might well represent the greatest step towards non-violence that either nation has ever taken.

Sadly, Devji's rosy tinted view of honorable soldiers speaking with clipped accents and all being terribly terribly honorable to each other is far from the truth. During peace-time this may be how the German and the British officer corps behaved to each other- as in Powell & Presburger's Colonel Blimp- but once hostilities heated up, both sides were quite happy gassing each other and playing every type of dirty on each other. The Kaiser was a soldier- the Honorary Colonel of a crack British Regiment. That didn't prevent the cry 'Hang the Kaiser!' from rising from the Officer's Mess. 

Wars aren't a good thing. Nor are periodic communal riots. They don't clear the air. Mediation is a good thing. Sending crackpot agitators to jail from time to time is a good thing. Not selling guns to poor countries like India and Pakistan is a good thing.

British 'Rule of Law' was, at least potentially, a good thing. The Brits needed the Indians to co-operate with them to establish a properly functioning Civil Society. Gandhi, for some reason, decided that co-operation was wrong though it was also a good idea to himself sabotage the Indian Non- Cooperation  Movement, so as to hinder an advance towards Responsible Govt and postpone the inevitable alternative-viz. irresponsible Government- a little while longer..

If Devji is right, Gandhi was a maniac who thought Violence something good in itself. The truth is less sensational. Back then, all middle aged men were convinced that the younger generation were totally effeminate and probably all getting Gay with each other and reading Oscar Wilde and like their Moms have totally spoiled them and have you seen those new skinny jeans?- don't tell me anyone who can dance in those things has any testicles left end of the day. Basically, what we need is another War- teach the lads a bit of discipline, put some backbone in 'em as opposed to them just boning each others backsides they way they do at those fancy Colleges which charge an arm and a leg and in any case, believe me, I could easily bench press 300 pounds and sure, I mean at a pinch, to repopulate the earth, I could definitely do my share- say a dozen twenty something hotties every week as a baseline- because my message is essentially one of Peace and Non Violence and every man under 50 being shipped off to the military coz they are all benders anyway.

Turning to Devji's central thesis- viz. a once and for all war is better than prolonged intermittent conflict- what does History say? In the case of India and Pakistan, the evidence is unambiguous. Both sides stepped back from conflict in '48 and both sides benefited by that decision. But for it, there would have been no Indus Water treaty- by which a casus belli involving an existential threat to Pakistan was resolved equitably. Unfortunately, Begum Fatima Jinnah attacked Ayub Khan for selling out to India on that issue and so the scene was set for '65 during which the Indians really felt miffed coz they didn't got those nice shiny American tanks like wot the Paks did and so they sulked and sulked and then started some mischief up in Bangladesh. After '71 the revanchist Pakistani Army under pressure on the Afghan front developed a counter-strategy which paid very handsome dividends and enabled it to take a hegemonic role without even pretending to deliver on Socio-Economic Goals in the manner which Ayub had done.

The reason India and Pakistan did not have a big war- like the Iran Iraq war (which, contra Devji did not clear the air between the two countries)- was because  d'uh look at the map- wot are u stoopid? Indo-Pak conflict is not 'a balanced game'- so it can't have the property Devji valorizes- viz. being a cathartic agon. True, if Pak as an American client, had developed into the Israel of the region- but, d'uh, it  couldn't coz Israel didn't trust the Pakis not to pass on military technology to their own Arab enemies- so we're back to square one. The Pak army played the hand they were dealt and enriched themselves in a manner unimaginable to their Indian opposite numbers. Oddly, this might increase Indian fighting morale and handicap the Pakistanis because they literally have more to lose.

Still, credit where credit is due, the Indian Govt has never been 'Gandhian'. They aint stupid or evil or at least not more evil and stupid than they they need to be. So mediation and interessement and pi jaw problematisation we shall always have with us- Terrorism is a small price to pay for keeping the show on the road a little longer. Give Civil Society a chance, people. Anyway, what is the alternative?

Devji, post-modern fuckwit that he is, tells us Al Qaeda type imbecility is identical with Gandhian silliness-  Al-Qaeda, he argues, uses the “abstract and vicarious emotion that characterizes the actions of pacifists or human rights campaigners.” In other words, violent jihadists act less out of a sense of personal victimhood than “out of pity for the plight of others.” And they try to foster a sense of universality by framing their struggle as one of justice and equality.

Even if Devji is right, this is an argument for just locking up all the bomb chucking idiots, who get worked up over imaginary insults and fabricated grievances, till their madness passes. This is because one can tackle a genuine grievance such that an enemy is placated, but what can one do about imaginary grievances? Shrill Gandhian, or Green, or Gramscian anal slurry, on the other hand, should be treated on a par with UFOology and the theories of David Icke. Don't lock them up till they really run amok but, by all means, do appoint them to Professorships at Ivy League Colleges where their idiocy will do no harm.