My letter to the LRB re. Perry Anderson on India

This is the text of the letter to the LRB I wrote regarding Perry Anderson's essays on India. The fact that they did not publish it, despite my unsubtle hints that the comelier amongst their interns were welcome to Monica Lewinsky me as a quid pro quo, militates to the conclusion that their decision was prompted not by considerations of good taste but a mean spirited desire to deny avenues of spiritual advancement to young people belonging to the large breasted community. 

Here is the text of my epistle-

10th July

'Prof. Anderson writes-

 'Nehru’s claim of an ‘impress of oneness’, going back six thousand years, persisted from the prewar writings collected in The Unity of India to his final dispute with China, in which the Mahabharata could be invoked as proof that the North-East Frontier Agency had been part of Mother India from time immemorial, rather as if the Nibelungenlied were to clinch German diplomatic claims to Morocco.'

What Prof. Anderson is referring to is the Indo-Chinese border dispute which led to a brief war in 1962. The Chinese claim to Arunachal Pradesh (N.E.F.A) is based on their claim to Tibet which in turn is based on the special relationship that obtained between the Manchu conquerors of China and the Tibetan theocracy. Perhaps Prof. Anderson believes that the Chinese claim to both Tibet and Arunachal Pradesh is well founded. Since Hong Kong once belonged to Britain and Macao to Portugal, he may believe that the Chinese have a legitimate claim to both London and Lisbon.

Prof. Anderson compares Nehru's decision to defend N.E.F.A to the German Kaiser's saber rattling during the Agadir Crisis. Is this a fair or reasonable analogy? Are Morocco and Germany geographically contiguous? Was the German Kaiser seeking to stir up his people to sacrifice blood and treasure to preserve their own kith and kin- or people mentioned as such in the Holy Book of his people- from a stronger and more ruthless foreign adversary? This begs the question, is the Nibelungenlied indeed a Holy Book for the German Nation? Does it state that peoples of entirely different languages, complexions and mores are all inalienably part of Germany? Does it contain anything comparable to the Bhagvad Gita within its covers? Prof. Anderson may believe it does. If so, his choice of analogy is apt. If not, it is a proof of bad faith.

India- that is Bharat (the official name of the country)- has a special relationship with the great epic, the Maha-bharata. Nehru, an Indian, was descended from Sanskrit scholars. That is why he was called Pundit Nehru. A goodly proportion of the Indian intelligentsia at that time were similarly descended from Sanskrit scholars.  As a practical politician, if he chose to highlight the Mahabharata in connection with the defense of N.E.F.A, he is to be commended for it. He did the culturally appropriate thing. Had he, instead, simply blurted out the truth- viz. that Chairman Mao was a crazy dictator, like Hitler or Stalin, and that his regime was inflicting horrendous atrocities upon its own people, not to mention the Tibetan nation it had brutally enslaved- then he would have alienated some of his fellow Left Wing 'Liberal' friends. 

Prof. Anderson tells us -  'Of the three larger empires it witnessed, none covered the territory of Nehru’s Discovery of India. Maurya and Mughal control extended to contemporary Afghanistan, ceased much below the Deccan, and never came near Manipur. The area of Gupta control was considerably less. Separated by intervals of five hundred and a thousand years, there was no remembered political or ideological connection between these realms, or even common religious affiliation: at its height the first of them Buddhist, the second Hindu, the third Muslim. Beneath a changing mosaic of mostly regional rulers, there was more continuity of cultural and social patterns, caste – the best claimant to a cultural demarcation – being attested very early, but no uniformity.'  

What is the point Anderson is making? Is it that proper countries are those all of whose territory fell within an Empire? If so, the United States is not a proper country. Perhaps, he is saying that countries must have the same language and legal code- in which case Canada and the United Kingdom are not  proper countries. Surely, as a historian, Prof. Anderson understands that no large country displays complete uniformity. Nor are Empires very exactly definable- where does suzerainty shade into paramountcy or something more ambiguous yet? Is Prof. Anderson really unaware of the implications of the work of people like Morton Fried or Elman Service for tribe and caste formation in India? 

Anderson mentions three Empires- Maurya, Gupta and Mughal. He thinks the Maurya Empire was Buddhist and that meant it shared nothing in common with Hinduism. Anderson is wrong. Some Mauryas were Buddhists, others were Jains- and though Ashoka, the Buddhist slaughtered Jain monks- he himself, like others of his dynasty, was a patron of Brahminical Hinduism. 
  The Mughals, as Muslims, were not permitted to have Brahmin Purohits or Shraman Gurus but did patronize the patrons of those religions and also indirectly subsidized them by richly rewarding artists and intellectuals from those traditions for things like dhrupad music, riti poetry, kathak dance etc.

If Anderson has read Prof. Sheldon Pollock, he may have been mislead into thinking that Sanskrit is somehow Hindu and associated with the Gupta Empire and that this marks some sort of watershed.
The truth, however, is that Jains and Buddhists and Hindus all adopted Classical (Paninian) Sanskrit at the same time. The motivation was to have a way of distinguishing Scholastic texts from Scripture-  a bread and butter issue because otherwise Vyavahara (i.e. rules relating to diet, livelihood, etc) might metastatize and kill off Dharma- and also to 'bracket', or place in Epoché, Ontological differences between Schools, which, for quotidian Soteriology, had become 'distinctions without a difference'.

Thus, to apply the method of an Auerbach to Indian literature- a temptation for those approaching India through English language anthologies with their modishly stupid translations- is to subscribe to Anderson's folly. It might seem that there is a marked disjunction between 'margi' and 'desi'- i.e. High vs Folk Culture. 

No such distinction exists. Today, as throughout Indian history, it is more difficult to write correctly in the lyrical Vernacular than in any Classical language- and Academic English is a Classical Language- precisely because the threshold for meta-meatphoricity is more steeply raised whereas the lintel of entrance has been borne down and fractured by the greater weight that living languages carry, thus requiring a superior gracility and suppleness from Poetry's votive offerings- which explains perhaps the proverbial irritability of the genus irritabile vatum.
 What, in Hindi, are called riti texts, occur in every vernacular. Far from being songs of the soil, they are the pourriture noble of Classicism's vineyard. Thus, contrary to my cherished belief, Keshav Das wasn't really some rustic rube chased away from the bathing ghat by irate village belles. Nor are references to Buddhism in Sheikh Noor ud Din Wali (Alamdar-e-Kashmir) derived from 'subaltern' interaction with Ladhaki traders. Kabir wasn't ignorant of 'High Caste' Religion and Philosophy any more than Valmiki. On the contrary, the people I've named weren't ignorant shit-heads like myself. What there was to be known was known by them. They mightn't have been born into well off families. So what? They weren't stupid and did nothing to deserve the horrible modern English translation of them.

I don't deny that it was and is possible for learned men not to be aware of great classics in their own language possessed by those of different sects. It may well be that the compradors amongst my 'Iyer' ancestors only rediscovered the sublime 'Sillapadikaram', by the Jain Monk, Ilango Adigal towards the end of the Nineteenth Century. But the important point to note is that it was a re-discovery. There is no reason to believe that Kumbakonam Iyers did not know that text in the first half of the Eighteenth Century. The fact is, contact with Jain monks or nuns, by itself, is enough for any Indian- no matter how stupid, no matter how 'tamsic'- i.e lazy, uneducated or (in my case) plain downright vicious- to gain 'darshan' of the synoptic kerygma of the whole of Indian history, Indian geography, the entire Jurassic Park of Time's fossil forms.

Prof. Anderson says- 'The ‘idea of India’ was a European not a local invention, as the name itself makes clear'. What on earth could he possibly mean? If Anderson is referring to the Hindu idea of India- it is well defined as Jambudvipa- a sort of notional island in which certain rituals or religious practices have a specified soteriological result. To move out of Jambudvipa is to lose caste. Indeed, one of the causes of the Mutiny of 1857 was the demand that Hindu sepoys cross 'the black water' thus losing caste. 

Prof. Anderson continues-'No such term, or equivalent, as ‘India’ existed in any indigenous language.' This is entirely untrue. Every dynasty from every part of India has at one time or another made a claim to paramountcy of Jambudvipa and there are numerous highly poetic ways of expressing this concept as attested by epigraphic evidence and surviving literary works. 

The absurdity of his own position does not strike Anderson even when he writes - 'A Greek coinage, taken from the Indus river, it was so foreign to the subcontinent that as late as the 16th century, Europeans could define Indians simply as ‘the natives of all unknown countries’ and use it to describe the inhabitants of the Americas.' 

Let me try to make sense of what the Professor is saying. Europeans invented 'the idea of India'. No Indian ever had a thought which corresponded to this European idea. Actually, even the Europeans didn't know the meaning of this idea. They didn't call the indigenous inhabitants of the Americas 'Indians' because Columbus believed he'd reached India; no, their idea of India was imperfect and included the American and other indigenous peoples they encountered on their voyages. Fortunately, at some point, the Europeans corrected their idea of India and passed it on to the Indians. however, because the Indians didn't invent it, nor did any Empire of theirs (that we know about) correspond to the present borders of India- therefore... therefore, what precisely? Well, for a start, clearly Pundit Nehru, the democratically elected Prime Minister of India, had no business resenting the Chinese invasion of Arunachal Pradesh. Why? India is a European idea. Nehru, despite his European education, was not European. Thus, he had no right to invoke it. But, if not European, what was he? Indian? No, Indians don't know the meaning of that word or, if they have learned it from the Europeans, still, precisely because they are Indian they can't validly claim to be Indian. Clearly, this is a question of Intellectual Property. Europeans invented the word India and a couple of thousand years later decided what that word would mean. Anderson is European, Nehru is not. Nehru might claim to be using the word 'India' under a license agreement on which he is paying royalty. However, Anderson, being European, can cancel that license at will. That will teach them darkies! 

The remainder of Prof. Anderson's essay on Gandhi, because rather than in spite of the (all utterly worthless) books listed in the bibliography, is similarly flawed in its arguments and conclusions. I have recently published an essay on Gandhi in a volume titled Ghalib, Gandhi, & the Gita which suggests that the two interesting things about Gandhi were the meta-metaphoric aspect of his thought and the manner in which this facilitated 'interessement' such that Gandhi became an 'obligatory passage point' in Indian politics. However, I confess I'm Indian. What's more I don't know Greek. Since 'India' is a Greek word, clearly I don't know India. Now, if only I could forget how to reason, I'd be fully qualified to write about Gandhi for the LRB.

Perry Anderson's 'After Nehru'.

Perry Anderson's essay, 'After Nehru'- is written after the style of that vacuous nitwit and improves on its original in idiocy, irrelevance and fake moral outrage.

Essentially, Anderson thinks the fact that the Indian State operated like a State is a very bad thing. Why? Perhaps, he believes India should have embraced Communism. But which brand and under whom? Every single Indian politician or ideologue would have been prepared to describe himself as Communist if that helped his career. Indeed most Indian Communism is simply careerism of this sort.
The problem with the Communists was that the 3 planks of their program were catastrophes waiting to happen.
1) Collectivization of land would have resulted in a massive famine, a million Mutinies, and the complete collapse of the State. The brief career of the Khalq faction in Afghanistan proves this. A corrupt sort of Land reform was the only viable option.
2) Nationalize everything. We all know how that turned out.
3) Self determination for Minorities- i.e. Bantustans as Gulags

Anderson writes ' The role of caste in the political system would change, from the years after independence to the present. What would not change was its structural significance as the ultimate secret of Indian democracy. Gandhi declared that caste alone had preserved Hinduism from disintegration. His judgment can be given a more contemporary application. Caste is what preserved Hindu democracy from disintegration. Fixing in hierarchical position and dividing from one another every disadvantaged group, legitimating every misery in this life as a penalty for moral transgression in a previous incarnation, as it became the habitual framework of the nation it struck away any possibility of broad collective action to redress earthly injustice that might otherwise have threatened the stability of the parliamentary order over which Congress serenely presided for two decades after independence. '
Is there any possible Universe in which Anderson's claim is not either vacuous or obviously false? Let us suppose a bunch of people from different parts of India come to a certain place. They belong to different castes. This strikes away any possibility of broad collective action, on their part, to redress earthly injustice. I bet there are Indian students at the University where Perry Anderson teaches. I bet those Indian students belong to different castes. Do those students join together to form an India Soc? If the University decides to impose higher fees on Indians or if Indian students are being racially abused, will that India Soc. sit idly by?  Will the Indians say to each other- alas! we belong to different castes. Prof. Anderson has said that we can't come together to take collective action. Instead, we must weep over our bad karma and resign ourselves to injustice.'

Indian Students were already showing their ability to rise above caste to come together when Aurobindo was at University. The Indian National Congress itself was composed of men of different castes. Before Democracy, people of different castes had shown themselves capable of working together. Why else did India become a Democracy? It wasn't something imposed from outside. Yet, Prof. Anderson says, that after Indians of different castes, by means of a broad collective action, decided to give themselves a Democratic form of Government, they- at that very moment- became incapable of broad collective action by reason of belonging to different castes. Further- this was and is 'the ultimate secret of Indian Democracy.'

Reading this got me real mad at Indian Democracy. I immediately phoned her and said 'You damn slut! Your ultimate secret has been revealed to all and sundry by Perry Anderson in the London Review of Books! Why you are going and making us Indians incapable of broad collective action to redress earthly injustice? Have you no manners? Don't you know this is completely unacceptable behavior? Kindly stop it. I don't want to have to tell you this again.'

I urge all my readers to do the same- unless you are of different caste to me, in which case don't bother.

Why Partition?- More howlers from Perry Anderson

What caused the Partition of India? 

The answer, today, is blindingly obvious. Islam, independent of local conditions, has the potential to set the establishment of a purely Confessional State as the Political horizon par excellence for its followers. This, by itself, militates for the demand for Partition of any developing  country such that Muslim majority areas have a choice as to the degree of Islamization they wish to embrace. The alternative- viz. that Islam essentially quit the political arena without a fight- is closely associated, in living memory, with the tyranny of Kings or Military cliques and the chauvinism of dominant clans. Both One Party Socialism and Globalized Capitalism have proved themselves unable to inculcate Civil Society with Rational and Humane values, never mind endowing it with a countervailing power against arbitrary dispossession or immiseration.
 Since Islam's political agenda, at least in countries with large pre-modern sectors, remains hazy and contested, Rationality and Humanism are valorized as regulative principles within its own noisy, internecine, discourse and the corollary is that every sort of prescriptivism or partisanship within Islam tends to cash out as a vision of what the ideal Islamic Republic might look like.  
In other words, discourse within Islam, in a developing country, is always going to take the establishment of an Islamic state as its reference point or 'first-best' equilibrium. In a sense, even for secularists, it may appear that Islam first needs to take Power in order to then give it back and function as part of a wider system of Checks and Balances. Azad as an anti-Aligarh ultramontane Muslim gains power through Khilafat but, precisely because he was accepted as a sort of Imam ul Hind- at least by Gandhi- he can then cede Power back to the Secular realm. 
However, given Islam's historical record, this sort of discourse is going to scare non-Muslims shitless which by itself might be enough to set off a chain reaction of polarization ending in Partition and ethnic cleansing. The alternative is that Mullahs concentrate on denouncing each other as heretics and fighting over who gets to control which Mosque- still scary but less linear in leading to the same end result.

All conjecture aside, the simple truth is- the Partition of India occurred because one section either wanted, or was susceptible to a preference falsification bandwagon towards an Islamic state and another did not, for the best of reasons, wish to live under any such regime. But, since the non-Muslims were not prepared to fight to the bitter end to prevent the setting up of such a State- though they may have been prepared to fight the continuance of European rule upon the territory of the sub-continent- Partition was inevitable.

Perry Anderson misses this obvious point in  his recent follow up  article in the London Review of Books, in which, with an added virulence of pi jaw, he affirms various foolish academic availability cascades about Partition only to end up making Nehru, and not just Nehru, even Gandhi, look intelligent- or, at least, more intelligent than himself. 

Anderson does not know much about India, so it is inevitable he will perpetrate some howlers.

These are some of them.

1) Nehru came from a much higher social class than Gandhi. Nonsense. Both were barristers and Gandhi was by far the more eminent man. Indeed, he was offered the Congress Presidentship before Motilal Nehru who was merely a pleader who came up by his own efforts. Gandhi's dad was a Dewan. Had Gandhi followed his father's footsteps, his position would have been similar to his old friend Sir Prabhashankar Pattani. 
Moreover, from the point of view of Hindu orthopraxy, the Gujerati Bania of Jain/Vaishnava background is not lower than the heterodox Kashmiri Kaula. Indeed, the former's Vegetarianism gives him the edge. The Kaula, being followers of Kapalika Tantrism, even have a saying- 'in Religion, claim to follow Saivism; in behavior, appear Vaishnava'. Gandhi's ancestors had been Dewans (Chief Ministers).  Nehru's ancestors had reached no higher position than that of kotwal (Police Station House Officer) in Delhi- that too after its decline had begun. Those members of his extended family who gained positions as Dewans had a lower, bird-of-passage type, position in the thymotic scheme of things- being Estate Managers merely rather than reputable local Men of Substance with a hereditary claim to office-  than that enjoyed by Gandhi's ancestors.  Indeed the old Thakore of Rajkot saw nothing improper in becoming a disciple of his erstwhile subject, whereas the Nehru clan remained hirelings merely, possessing less moral authority than the Court Purohit.
One last point- Gandhi's sub caste had been on an upward trajectory for hundreds of years, indeed their mores are now normative in much of Hindu India, whereas Nehru's ancestors have been on a downward trajectory for a thousand- many now being homeless refugees. 
On what basis, then, can Anderson say Nehru was 'much higher class' than Gandhi?

Education?

Gandhi could have taken a degree while in London- he just wasn't particularly gifted academically. Perry Anderson seems to think that going to Harrow makes one a gentleman. That may have been true about England, it wasn't true of India- especially Hindu India.

Why does Anderson- who has access to Wikipedia or at least Yahoo Answers- insist that Nehru was higher class than Gandhi? He wants to blame Nehru for partition. Apparently there is some iron law which says Higher Class people get to decide what happens because...urm...it's like a law of Nature- right? Just suppose, Nehru had been swapped at birth with Jinnah. Then the movie 'Gandhi' would have ended quite differently.  Edwina would have embraced that cadaverous old scarecrow- 'Darling, I now see it is you who are truly higher class. Thus, I must conspire to make you Prime Minister of Hindustan.' Gandhi would have said with tears in his eyes- 'beta, is budhe ko maaf karo! You are higher class. I should have seen it and made you my heir'. Mountbatten then confesses to being the dacoit who stole the Crown Jewels & Joseph Stalin sings a qawwali as the credits roll.

2) Nehru was emotionally dependent on Gandhi in an infantile manner- as opposed to showing reverence for him in typical Hindu Guru- Shishya style.

Since Anderson believes Nehru was higher class than Gandhi and since higher class people are just so much better and more powerful than lower class people, the mystery remains as to why Nehru was subservient to Gandhi. Turns out, Nehru was a big baby and Gandhi breast-fed him.

Is this true?

 The Brits had cracked down on Radical students in England a couple of years before young Nehru graduated. Still, Nehru did have his own political ideas but, like other men of his generation, he was skeptical about them. The age of enthusiasm had ended and the era of careerist political engagement still lay in the future.  In the interregnum, only a, G.E. Moore type, non cognitive Elite relationism could 
underpin Ethical prescriptivism's participation mystique- i.e. pi jaw's Passion & Transfiguration . Far from having no interest in metaphysical or mystical philosophy, Nehru had been tutored at home by a Theosophist and, though studying Natural Sciences at Cambridge, was influenced by the vitalist notions current at that time. His preference for Gandhi over Annie Beasant- though her Mum had been a House Matron at Harrow- is explainable by the fact that she claimed to be in contact with Spiritual Masters on the Astral plane and to have found the new Universal Messiah- some dark skinned Tam Bram urchin.
 Nehru's choosing Gandhi reflects the fact that his generation's affectation of blasé  skepticism masked a deep and abiding spiritual thirst.  Motilal, it seems, was not mistaken in his choice of a bride for his son.

In any case, Nehru was a well brought up young man from the super-polite intelligentsia of Allahabad. At that time, virtually every well established family had a Pir-Murid or Guru-Shishya relationship with a Spiritual personality. Nehru may have been hot tempered but he was not ignorantly jahil or boorishly beadaab. People of our generation may find his writings about Indian History smack too much off 'Hindutva', but it was a pardonable fault at that time. Azad was a rabid 'takfiri' but later turned into a Secularist.

3)  as Gandhi’s favourite, Nehru could count on prevailing over rivals to head Congress`- heading Congress wasn't a big deal. He'd have got that feather in his cap simply for being his father's son and having put in jail time.  The truth is, Nehru didn't believe India would really become independent in his life-time. He read Atlee's plan in 1938 and said, when he came down to breakfast, 'well, you're giving us everything we wanted!' but then forgot the entire episode and never mentioned it again even after Atlee came to power.

4) The contrast with Subhas Chandra Bose, a brilliant student of philosophy at Cambridge, who was the first native to pass the exams into the elite ranks of the Indian civil service and then decline entry to it on patriotic grounds, is striking. 
 Actually, Aurobindo's failure to present himself for the horse riding test is generally considered a patriotic non serviam. That was 30 years before Bose.
 Aurobindo, who could have headed up the I.N.C if he  wanted, initially took a more, not less, radical path than Bose. But, ultimately, his embrace of Spirituality was far more extreme than Gandhi. 
Why does Anderson say 'the contrast (between Nehru and Bose) was striking'? Nehru was a little older. Politically, there wasn't much difference between them. Bose trusted the Capitalists, like Tata, more. He broke a strike at Tata's led by an Parsi engineer on the grounds that the Tatas were Nationalists. Nehru was suspicious of the industrialists and didn't like the Modi-Lee pact. Communists like Saklatvala and Rajni Palme Dutt found Nehru more congenial. Bose's writing is fuckwitted 'dialectical' Marxism for shitheads which could easily shade into Left adventurism or Trotskyism or some other such theological heresy. M.N Roy's escape from Stalin's assassins to the safety of a British Jail cell showed the dangers of lining up behind a clever-too-clever Bengali. Nehru's  belletristic guff, on the other hand, was perfectly safe. The fact is, it was Bose who revived the Jugantar idiocy of a German pact with the help of the Indian Nazi Party.  But, in any case, neither Bose nor Aurobindo nor any other politician of the period- including Ambedkar, who revived some antiquated Dalits-were-Buddhists nonsense of Ayothi Dasa- made any original, as opposed to totally fuckwitted, contribution to Indian public discourse. 
5) Nehru didn't care about Untouchability-
'When Gandhi was blackmailing Ambedkar to submit to the demand that Untouchables be treated as loyal Hindus within the caste system rather than pariahs excluded from it, Nehru uttered not a word in solidarity or support for Ambedkar. 
Anderson is being disingenuous. Gandhi fasted to prevent the granting of separate electorates- a mistake on his part because it might have allayed Muslim fears. But Nehru didn't support Ambedkar for the best of reasons. Firstly, the senior most and most popular Dalit leader, the cricketer, Palwankar Baloo- whom Ambedkar took as his inspiration- supported Gandhi as did the Dalits of Madras. The Rajah-Moonje pact had cut the ground under Ambedkar's feet- ground he did not recover till Gandhi's attempted to monopolize the 'Harijan' issue and run it into the ground, like he did Handloom Weaving and Basic Education and so on, in the crackpot belief that all Dalits were Bhangis and since he himself cleaned toilets, he was one himself- indeed, he was the only true Dalit. Incidentally, the Hindu Mahasabha leader, Dr. Moonje, like Gandhi, had served in the Boer War but with higher rank. In fact, Ambedkar's decision to become a Buddhist was in line with Hindu Mahasabha thinking. 
Anderson ignores all such nuances to paint Nehru as an Oxbridge High Caste/Class snob guilty of a faux pas involving lack of noblesse oblige towards some Lower Class/Caste LSE type. Yet, Nehru being a non-vegetarian himself, had less rather than more visceral motivation to cling to Untouchability.
Under the circumstances, the only reason for him to support Ambedkar would have been if it really was objectively true that only British officials, supported in the Legislature by Dalit reperesentatives, could advance that community.
This was flagrantly untrue.
The British had failed to remove Untouchability when their power was at its height. Indeed, the Court judgement which sparked off the Vaikom agitation showed their readiness to reintroduce it in a more virulent form because it chimed with the Eugenic nonsense popular at the time. Gandhi gave Ambedkar a larger number of reserved seats than they would otherwise have got. Separate electorates appeared at the time to merely yield power to British officials as opposed to elected representatives. Nehru had every reason to believe that the British would not use this power to end Untouchability because their recent trajectory had been retrograde in this regard.
Anderson continues-
Gandhi was fasting, and even though the lot of the Untouchables was a ‘side-issue’, as Nehru significantly dismissed it, that was enough. Separate electorates really were a 'side-issue' in the sense that their provision couldn't help Dalits and might harm them compared to what Gandhi was offering.
More was involved here, however, than simple unwillingness to differ with Gandhi on any issue on which he chose to take a political stand. 
Yes, more was involved. Once the Legislature was packed with representatives elected by different castes and interest groups- representatives for the Zamindars (landlords), others for the Ryots (tenants), others for Labor constituencies, others for women and so on- it would operate pretty much like the old Legislative Councils with nominated members. If the British were serious about abolishing Untouchability- they could use their existing powers. Separate electorates were a red herring.
Nehru, as he often confessed, was no believer: the doctrines of Hinduism meant little or nothing to him. But, in much the same artless way as Gandhi, he identified the religion with the nation, explaining that ‘Hinduism became the symbol of nationalism. It was indeed a national religion, with its appeal to all those deep instincts, racial and cultural, which form the basis everywhere of nationalism today.’ By contrast Buddhism, though born in India, had lost out there because it was ‘essentially international’. Islam, not even born in India, was inevitably even less national.
Hinduism- as defined by the British- did indeed have a national character. It also had a transcendental aspect- which is why some passionate Nationalists like Aurobindo retreated from Politics- but there can be no question that it was a source of National Identity, Social Cohesion and motivator to make patriotic sacrifices. As a leader, Nehru needed to convince others that he represented something more than his Daddy's son or a costly foreign education. The sentimental guff in his books and speeches, far from being artless, was nicely calculated to shore up his credentials as following in the footsteps of 'Bal, Pal & Lal'. 
Even so, Iqbal was suspicious of him. This is what he wrote to Jinnah in 1937- 
' The Muslim has begun to feel that he has been going down and down during the last 200 years. Ordinarily he believes that his poverty is due to Hindu money-lending or capitalism. The perception that equality [is (?)] due to foreign rule has not yet fully come to him. But it is bound to come. The atheistic socialism of Jawahar Lal [Nehru] is not likely to receive much response from the Muslims. The question therefore is: how is it possible to solve the problem of Muslim poverty? And the whole future of the League depends on the League's activity to solve this question. If the League can give no such promises I am sure the Muslim masses will remain indifferent to it as before.

Happily there is a solution in the enforcement of the Law of Islam and its further development in the light of modern ideas. After a long and careful study of Islamic Law I have come to the conclusion that if this system of Law is properly understood and applied, at last the right to subsistence is secured to every body. But the enforcement and development of the Shariat of Islam is impossible in this country without a free Muslim state or states. This has been my honest conviction for many years and I still believe this to be the only way to solve the problem of bread for Muslims as well as to secure a peaceful India.

If such a thing is impossible in India the only other alternative is a civil war which as a matter of fact has been going on for some time in the shape of Hindu Muslim riots. I fear that in certain parts of the country, e.g. N.W. India, Palestine may be repeated..Also the insertion of Jawarhar Lal's socialism into the body-politic of Hinduism is likely to cause much bloodshed among the Hindus themselves. The issue between social democracy and Brahmanism is not dissimilar to the one between Brahmanism and Buddhism. Whether the fate of socialism will be the same as the fate of Buddhism in India I cannot say. But it is clear to my mind that if Hinduism accepts social democracy it must necessarily cease to be Hinduism. '
So Iqbal, a contemporary of Nehru, thought he was a Socialist. He predicted that there would be a struggle to the death between Socialism and Brahmanism. Anderson, however, knows better. Nehru must be some sort of Brahmanist because ...urm... otherwise the following sentence is just a bunch of stupid lies-

'It followed that the system Gandhi had always insisted was the foundation on which Hinduism rested, historically preserving it from disintegration, had to be presented in a roseate light. Caste had its tares, of course, as Gandhi too conceded. But in the larger view of things, Nehru explained, India had no reason to hang its head. ‘Caste was a group system based on services and functions. It was meant to be an all-inclusive order without any common dogma and allowing the fullest latitude to each group.’ Mercifully free from what had handicapped the Greeks, it was ‘infinitely better than slavery even for those lowest in the scale. Within each caste there was equality and a measure of freedom; each caste was occupational and applied itself to its own particular work. This led to a high degree of specialisation and skill in handicrafts and craftsmanship’, in a social order that was ‘non-competitive and non-acquisitive’. Indeed, far from embodying any principle of hierarchy, caste ‘kept up the democratic habit in each group’. Later generations, hard put to take in that Nehru could have composed such enormities, can point to other passages in which he added that ‘in the context of society today’ – as opposed to the (undated) past – caste had become a ‘barrier to progress’ that was no longer compatible with democracy, political or economic. Untouchability, as Ambedkar would note bitterly, Nehru never so much as mentioned.'

Anderson's mistake is to confuse stuff Nehru wrote with what he actually thought. Bolsheviks could pretend that the Russian 'mir' was actually Communism avant la lettre. Why shouldn't Indian leftists pretend that the Rg Vedic 'kavi' means 'proletarian' and that Castes were all originally highly egalitarian institutions? Ambedkar pretended Buddhism hadn't been casteist and this is now a well established Academic availability cascade which bien pensant Western Professors keep trundling down the road.  
Nehru, like Ambedkar,  knew Technological Industrialization, Scientific Education, Modern Medicine,  the emancipation of women, urbanization and so on were what would kill off Untouchability and Caste discrimination.  Neither separate electorates nor religious conversion would do the trick. Ambedkar's widow- a Doctor whom he had married to safeguard his health- was accused of poisoning him by his son and ostracized by the Dalit Community. Why? She was a Brahmin and Brahmins are untouchable to the Mahars. Clearly, even if she didn't actually put something in his food, just by being of a caste inauspicious to his own, she had hastened his demise.

The sad thing about both Ambedkar and Nehru is that they ended up slowing Industrialization and the spread of Scientific education and so on. In Ambedkar's case it was because he suddenly got it into his head that Buddhism- which had spread untouchability to Japan and Korea- was a panacea. It wasn't. Burma's 'Buddhist Socialism' destroyed its economy and empowered a brutal military Junta. In Ceylon, Buddhist monks like Budharakshita- 'Buddy racketeer'- wrecked the polity and set it on the path to Ethnic Cleansing.
Nehru's culpability, but also his capability, was somewhat less. He let himself be captured by those who controlled access to him, aware but unable to do anything about the corruption of even his own kith and kin, and went along with a corrupt sort of Agency Captured 'Socialistic' license-permit Raj which was nothing but the Modi-Lee agreement writ large.

Still, the fact remains, Ambedkar and Nehru and Gandhi and other politicians born after Gokhale were all stupid fuckwits because that is the job of politicians during a transition to democracy. 
 IN A NUTSHELL, THIS IS WHY PERRY ANDERSON GETS INDIA WRONG. He thinks people like Gandhi and Nehru were supposed to be intellectual pioneers leading their benighted people out of the swamp of superstition. This is nonsense. The first Indian I.C.S officers and Oxbridge graduates and barristers and Doctors and Mathematicians and so on dated from BEFORE any of these guys WERE BORN. Gandhi and Nehru  were always considered intellectually second rate by educated Indians. They were barristers, but wouldn't have made the cut to be appointed High Court Judges.  Still, they were relatively clean and not raving sodomites, so perfectly good Jail fodder.  Furthermore, at crucial moments, they signed the papers put in front of them by clever bureaucrats like V.P Menon.

No country in the Twenties and Thirties chose its political leaders on the basis of intellect and education. Nehru certainly wasn't egregiously more stupid than politicians of comparable stature in other countries.  Bose had done better in his exams. So what? He studied philosophy. That's another word for shite. 
In any case, Bose was Hindu- that would have kept him from the Premiership of Bengal because it was Muslim majority. Nehru, a Hindi speaking Hindu, on the other hand could be a Hindi belt leader.

Gandhi believed he was a Man of God- and okay many people took him at his word, when it suited them. He wasn't a worse Godman than many others, though no doubt he too had his little fads and fancies. Similarly Nehru was just one of a large number of sons or nephews or grandsons of prominent barristers who acted as their Political Aide de Camps, and made up the numbers at Congress tamashas. Nehru, to his credit, kept his nose clean. After his father died, he didn't take money from the odious Dalmia but paid his own way by writing books while in prison. True, he was stupid. Politicians usually are. True, his books are fairly crappy- so what? They served the cause, earned him money- thus keeping him out of the clutches of  crooked Capitalists or Enemy Agents- and, moreover, his books express sentiments which, by their very meaninglessness, conform to the approved belletristic pattern of the Urdu or Hindi of the period. Incidentally, his 'Discovery of India', translated into Farsi, was found inspiring by young people in Mossadegh's Iran. 

Perry Anderson, persisting in treating Nehru as an intellectual as opposed to a popular writer, quotes this harmless piece of fluff from Nehru- behind which we can easily hear the Hindi or Urdu- 

'Perhaps we may still sense the mystery of nature, listen to its song of life and beauty, and draw vitality from her. That song is not sung in the chosen spots only, and we can hear it, if we have the ears for it, almost everywhere. But there are some places where it charms even those who are unprepared for it and comes like the deep notes of a distant and powerful organ. Among those favoured spots is Kashmir, where loveliness dwells and an enchantment steals over the senses.

and draws this conclusion-

A mind capable of prose like this was unlikely to show much realism about the difficulties facing the national movement.

This is quite mad. Nehru wrote books which served his cause and made him financially independent. To his credit he hadn't taken money from the Birlas and Tatas in the Twenties and refused Dalmia's money after his father died. He wrote gentlemanly nonsense because nonsense sells and all he wanted was to remain a gentleman rather than a paid lackey of the crooked Capitalists. There is absolutely no evidence that he took himself seriously as a stylist or thinker. In fact he mocks the notion. 

The style and subject matter of his books were perfectly in harmony with his objectives and what's more sound like Hindi or Urdu translated, actually quite gracefully, into English. But then he was a politician from U.P- that's where he won elections from. 

Had Nehru written in the style of an Akbar Illahabadi or a Lu Hsun- not to mention a Kazi Nazrul or Miraji- he'd have scared off the straights. Even a Firaq was too strong for the taste of the times.

The remainder of Anderson's essay is in keeping with the howlers listed above. He does not understand that Nehru had little power of his own. Had he joined the Leftists he'd have been rendered even more irrelevant.  Some far-sighted Hindus had already begun to see what is now obvious to all the world- viz. emigration is better than minority status in a Muslim country. This is not because Muslims are inherently intolerant but that preference falsification under democratic or quasi-democratic regimes in Muslim majority states tends to bandwagon towards second class status for non-Muslims- but also ethnic cleansing if Law & Order breaks down. 
It is noteworthy that the position of Christians in Iraq and Eygpt and now Syria has got worse, not better, in recent years. 

Nehru had little power, Wavell had some- but told Whitehall that the quantum of power he had left was only enough to get the Whites out of the country safely, nothing more. Mountbatten was able to play a bluff but only for a very short time. He told people he was the King's cousin so war-weary Britain would be obliged to send troops to get him out of a jam. Still, to be on the safe side, he also pretended he was in a hurry to get out of India so as to get the top job at the Admiralty and that was the reason he was bringing forward Independence. 

The notion that the British Army had the strength, or the British Economy the wealth, to prevent the nightmare scenario Wavell had outlined- in other words, the myth that the Brits could have averted the slaughter of Partition when they were lucky to save their own skins- is one which makes for good headlines and bien pensant breast beating in holier than thou circles. It is a dangerous myth. I recall attending a dinner party some years ago where an earnest young gentleman, of the colored persuasion, kept going on about how we have to send troops into Somalia and everybody agreed till I suddenly recalled I'm black- not the good sort of black, but Tamil black- and I cut in to explain why this would be a disaster. Somalis, on average, are smarter and tougher than other people. The Americans- with April Glaspie, no seriously, April Glaspie!- hovering in the background blundered into a minefield till finally they had the sense to just up-sticks and run away. Running away, incidentally, is true Military Intelligence.

Partition happened. Why? Some Muslims and non-Muslims wanted to kill each other. But many Muslim politicians and administrators and smaller land-lords had an incentive for ethnic cleansing against non-Muslims. Preference falsification did the rest. In East Pakistan, Partition did not end ethnic cleansing of non-Muslims. The Hindu proportion of the population has declined decade on decade. If the same isn't true of Muslims or Christians in Hindu majority states in India, it is because Hindu politicians and administrators and land-lords and businessmen have no similar incentive and, in any case, Caste trumps Creed. Some Hindu castes- notably in districts where a demographic change is imminent- may have an incentive and a preference falsification mechanism to do ethnic cleansing but those incentives and that mechanism don't have more than regional currency.

The British had to leave because they weren't in control. They secured their main objective- India stayed in the Sterling zone- and got out without a scratch on their skin. Congress was around to catch the thali they had let fall from their hands. This wasn't greed so much as fear of what would happen if the thali smashed to pieces on the ground. Meanwhile, an Indianized administration made pragmatic decisions and found pragmatic 'Netas' to sign off on those decisions.  At this juncture Nehru's guff about the essential unity of India actually turned into a reality. The Tamil and the Punjabi were able to get along at the Cabinet table. The previous trend towards Provincial autonomy was reversed. Most importantly, the Congress leaders- thanks to the esprit de corps they'd built up in prison- didn't try to roast and eat each other. The Army- apart from one moment of madness on the part of Cariappa- stayed out of politics. Nehru continued on the conservative path which Gandhi had accustomed him to. India didn't lurch to the left to the extent of Burma. It muddled along. However, it was in the aftermath of Indira Gandhi's Emergency that Gandhi and Nehru's Congress showed its true strength. Unlike Bangladesh, where the very people who had liberated the country from Pakistan turned upon each other, like rabid dogs, killing whole families and stringing up comrades in arms; unlike Pakistan, where a General hanged the very man who had appointed him, unlike Sri Lanka where Mother and daughter were rivals for power; in India dog did not eat dog. Filial piety was maintained. Appearances kept up. The masses muddled along somewhat more purposefully than before. The British could and can take a certain quiet pride in the achievements of their ancestors but for whom the English language would not echo, with an equal meaninglessness, in the Law Courts and Parliamentary Chambers of Ind's coral strand.

All of this is common sense. Anderson raises the straw-man of British responsibility for Partition simply to take a dig at Mountbatten. Yet, he later presents evidence that there was absolutely nothing Mountbatten could have done differently. The fact is, Wavell was planning to evacuate Whites from Hindu areas first. If Hindus were the greater threat to Whites, it makes sense for Mountbatten to appease the Hindus. His job was to get the Whites out and he managed to do that- though maybe some nuns were raped in Kashmir by the invaders or something like that.
Anderson's logic is warped. He tells us the Congress had only 3% Muslim membership. What percentage of non-Muslims did the Muslim League have? He tells us that Nehru was from Kashmir. That means, if the invaders took the Valley, Nehru's own people would be killed. (In fact this did happen later on). Why was it wrong for him to seek to defend his own people? What was he supposed to do? Say 'well, Muslims are in the majority in the Valley. Some other Muslims are invading the valley and though killing and raping and looting both Muslims and Hindus- it is only the latter they want to wipe out as a matter of principle. Since I am a Hindu I must let it happen...because...urm...well the Law says invaders should get to murder minorities because...urm... dunno but Perry Anderson thinks its a good idea and he's a Professor of Law at Cambridge...what? he's a Professor of History? That too in America? Oh fuck, I'd better send in the Army.'
The fact is, Nehru did not establish Hindu rule in the Valley. His Muslim friend, Sheikh Abdullah, ruled and took land away from people of Nehru's caste. He was cool with that.

The truth is, if the doctrine of Command Responsibility- established at Nuremberg- applies, then it is Jinnah and Suhrawardy and Liaqat and so on who stand condemned for genocide. Nehru is vindicated.
Jinnah, whom Anderson holds up as a great legal luminary and respecter of laws made the mistake of giving the Maharaja of Kashmir the option of acceding to India. Yet he did not prevent the invasion which caused the Maharaja to jump into Delhi's lap.
Similarly, it was Jinnah who put forward the utterly mad 'hostage theory' whereby the majority would not kill the minority for fear of reprisals against their own people somewhere else.  Was he utterly ignorant of Islamic history?Jinnah did not protect minorities in Pakistan. Even personal friends of his had to flee. Nehru did, to a certain extent, protect Muslims and, certainly, those close to him like Azad and Kidwai- or Chaghla who abandoned his old mentor, Jinnah- got a seat at the top table after Independence.
Anderson mentions Muslims killed in Hyderabad but not the Rezakar massacres which preceded this. How is it Nehru's fault if some idiots in Hyderabad thought they could kill the Hindu majority with impunity simply because God was on their side?

One cause of the massive bloodshed of Partition- also an exacerbating factor in the Bengal famine- was that the British had given too much power to the Provinces and Native states. Both Punjab and Bengal were Muslim majority states whose bosses had jointly issued the Lahore declaration favoring Pakistan. Did Punjab send food to Bengal? No, even though all the traders who stood to make a windfall profit were Muslims, not Hindus.
Later, the Premier of Bengal could use his power to precipitate the bloodshed of the 'Day of Action'. The Center was too weak to bring him to book. Similarly, during Partition, some of the Princely States were arming and sending out irregulars for ethnic cleansing.
Anderson, of course, either doesn't know or doesn't care about details like that. He wants to blame Nehru for Partition just because he rejected the stupid and unworkable Cabinet Mission Proposal.
Nehru wasn't doing something underhand in rejecting a weak federation. The right thing to do was blindingly obvious. That's why Nehru received support from the people who mattered for his strong Center policy- the alternative was a hundred Partitions- but Anderson thinks this makes him the bad guy. Why? Well,  Anderson tells us, Nehru must have known that he himself would become Prime Minister so he wanted to rule over as big and powerful State as possible. But how did Nehru know he'd be Prime Minister? Did he have a crystal ball? Did he believe in astrology? No.  Anderson's argument is mean spirited simply.

Anderson continually attacks Nehru for saying things which it was convenient, or incumbent, on him to say. That's what happens in Politics, Anderson baba. People make empty speeches.  Yet, even Nehru- not the sharpest tool in the box by any means- is not as fucking stupid as you Perry baby. You are criticizing Nehru for things he got right. Common sense things. Why?

P.S- funniest thing in the article- ' When in the summer of 1945 an emissary of the Communist Party, the one other force in the subcontinent that understood something of the principles of self-determination...'
The Communist Party! In 1945! Understood the principle of self-determination!
You couldn't make it up if you tried.

Perry Anderson on Gandhi

Perry Anderson has written an essay on Gandhi in the London Review of Books  in which he has recycled the usual myths about the Mahatma. But, before listing them, let me first highlight his notion that India was invented by the British-

'For the nationalist movement against the rule of the British, it was an article of faith that, in Gandhi’s words, ‘India was one undivided land … made by nature’, in which ‘we were one nation before they came to India’ – ancestrally, indeed, ‘fired … with an idea of nationality in a manner unknown in other parts of the world. We Indians are one as no two Englishmen are.’ Nehru’s claim of an ‘impress of oneness’, going back six thousand years, persisted from the prewar writings collected in The Unity of India to his final dispute with China, in which the Mahabharata could be invoked as proof that the North-East Frontier Agency had been part of Mother India from time immemorial, rather as if the Nibelungenlied were to clinch German diplomatic claims to Morocco. This is a bad analogy. No Morrocan considers the Nibelungenlied part of his culture. No German, would be prepared to sacrifice blood and treasure to defend Morocco. On the other hand, Buddhists, Hindus and Jains do consider the Mahabharata- which includes the Ramayana- as part of their culture and 'sacred geography.' Some Buddhists live in N.E.F.A. No Chinese did. The Chinese claim to N.E.F.A arose because Tibet had some sort of relationship with the Mongols and the Manchus, both of whom had conquered China at some point in time.   What is unreasonable about what Nehru said? If Kennedy says 'ich bin ein Berliner'- is that ridiculous? As a matter of fact N.E.F.A remains part of India. Had it become subjected to China, its people would have been massacred during the Cultural Revolution. Incidentally, this worthless pile of shite, Prof Anderson, teaches History in America.
Such notions have not gone away. The facts gainsay them. What facts are these, Prof. Anderson? Your ridiculous comparison between the Morrocans, who are Muslims and the Germans who are not? How fucking stupid are you actually? The subcontinent as we know it today never formed a single political or cultural unit in premodern times. So what? Neither did the United Kingdom, the United States, Germany, France, Spain, Austria etc. For much the longest stretches of its history, its lands were divided between a varying assortment of middle-sized kingdoms of different stripes. So what? Germany was divided into lots of small states. So was Italy. Of the three larger empires it witnessed, none covered the territory of Nehru’s Discovery of India. Maurya and Mughal control extended to contemporary Afghanistan, ceased much below the Deccan, and never came near Manipur. The area of Gupta control was considerably less. Separated by intervals of five hundred and a thousand years, there was no remembered political or ideological connection between these realms, or even common religious affiliation: at its height the first of them Buddhist, the second Hindu, the third Muslim. Beneath a changing mosaic of mostly regional rulers, there was more continuity of cultural and social patterns, caste – the best claimant to a cultural demarcation – being attested very early, but no uniformity.  So what is your fucking point, Prof. Anderson? There is no uniformity in any extant country. A Liverpool Council Estate has different mores from a Berkshire village. The ‘idea of India’ was a European not a local invention, as the name itself makes clear. It does no such thing.No such term, or equivalent, as ‘India’ existed in any indigenous language. False. Plenty do. A Greek coinage, taken from the Indus river, it was so foreign to the subcontinent that as late as the 16th century, Europeans could define Indians simply as ‘the natives of all unknown countries’ and use it to describe the inhabitants of the Americas.' So, you're saying Europeans were stupid and didn't know from Geography. What has their ignorance to do with the people of India?

The problem with Prof. Anderson's analysis is that it fails to take into account that the authors he mentions- Gandhi, Nehru and more recently Sen and Guha and so on- were born into castes or sects which made a clear distinction between places where it was allowable to settle and those where settlement or sojourn involved loss of caste. In Islam, too, a similar distinction was made such that a Muslim of foreign extraction, the famous Reza Khan of the time of Warren Hastings- had a scruple against accepting land rather than money on the grounds that the Bengal of his time was imperfectly Islamicized and thus 'dar-ul-harb'. Indian Muslims- no matter how purely 'Ashraf' their pedigree held no such scruples. Talk about the size of Empires is not germane. The Mauryas were merely one among many dynasties. So too were the Tirmurids. 

At one time there was a scruple amongst Brahmins against settling in Magadha but that scruple had fallen into abeyance by the time of the Buddha. 

In other words, Indian writers who say things like 'India is one and indivisble' aren't merely making stuff up. What they say is true about their families. If some great-great Uncle went and settled in Madras or Calcutta, his descendants would still belong to the same endogamous caste. However, a journey 'across the Black Water' was a different matter. One of the causes of the Mutiny was the unwillingness of the Sepoys to lose Caste by travelling outside India. 

Prof. Anderson tells us that Indians didn't have a concept or name for the country that now exists. What, then, is meant by the term 'jambudvipa'? If there is no 'jambudvipa', how can there be a concept of 'kala pani'- the black water, crossing which Caste is lost?

Did the Greeks really invent the word 'India'? Did the Persians and the Arabs learn this word from the distant Greeks or is it not rather the case that the Greeks learnt the word from the Persians? In any case, what was the view of people like Warren Hastings and Colebrooke and H.H. Wilson and so on? Did they find that there was really nothing uniting the people of India together? If so, how are we to explain the manner in which they developed and administered Hindu and Muslim law? We find that the British made no difficulty in treating Ceylon as a separate entity. Nor did they cavil at Burma being separated from India. Why did they not treat the different Presidencies as separate entities? Or is it really the case that there was some magic in the English language such that at a certain point in time, little Indian boys, at their school books all across the country, suddenly all put up their hands and said 'Teacher, teacher- I get it now! I'm Indian! Hooray! Previously, I thought I was an elephant.'

Prof. Anderson writes- 'When the British arrived, it was the sprawling heterogeneity of the area that allowed them, after a slow start, to gain such relatively swift and easy control of it, using one local power or population against the next, in a series of alliances and annexations that ended, more than a century after the Battle of Plassey, with the construction of an empire extending further east and south, if not north-west, than any predecessor. '

This isn't true. India had been outsourcing military and administrative functions for a long time in the same way that other feudal Civilizations did. The British were just better at the game- for one thing, they had superior esprit d' corps- than anyone else. It was the essential homogeneity of India- at least, large interconnected tracts of it- which facilitated a sort of 'canopy' government- something overarching but mobile and with no deep roots. It is the sort of government India still has.

What was new about the Raj was things like Railways and telegraphs and an explosion in the vernacular press.  The story about Macaulay's 'Brown Britishers' is nonsense. Such a class never existed- except as an object of satire.  

When Indian authors speak of India's unity as being miraculous, what they mean is that Railways and Telegraphs and Vernacular literature should have set the people of different Provinces against each other.  When the Tamil Brahmin discovers that the Bengali Brahmin pronounces Sanskrit differently, we would expect him to denounce the Bengalis- more especially as they were doing better Educationally and spreading around India taking jobs from locals. Instead, the reverse happened. The fact that Bengalis or Kashmiris or Sindhis do things differently became an argument for Liberalism, for Catholicity, in thought and deed. If fueled Patriotism because Patriotism was no longer squalidly parochial. 

Prof. Anderson misses these points about India- but he can scarcely be blamed. The Indian authors he cites- Sen, Guha and other idiots of that stripe- are all quite worthless.

Moving on to Anderson's comments on Gandhi- these are the things he gets wrong.

1) That Gandhi had no experience of Indian political life but was respected for his work in South Africa-

'This was the stage onto which Gandhi stepped on his arrival in Bombay in 1915, after 21 years in South Africa. Though preceded by his reputation as a fearless spokesman for the Indian community there, he had no experience of political life in the subcontinent, and initially confined himself to study tours and setting up an ashram in Ahmedabad. But by the end of the war, his active support of local struggles by indigo labourers in Bihar, farmers and textile workers in Gujarat, bringing tactics he had developed in South Africa to each, had given him a countrywide reputation. Within another two years, he had transformed Indian politics, leading the first mass movement to rock British power since the Mutiny, and remaking Congress as a popular political force. After the upheaval of 1919-21, he twice again launched campaigns, in 1930-31 and 1942-43, in size each bigger than the last, challenging the authority of the Raj in successive landmarks of a struggle for national liberation.'

This is a tad misleading The Indians had developed an obsession with South Africa. Gandhi's unwise remarks on a trip back to India encouraged a crackdown on the Indians there. He received a lot of money from Tata but pursued a crazy policy with respect to the Pass Law- the idiot decided that to carry a Pass is a good thing and Indians should do it voluntarily. Some Muslim South Africans, suspecting Gandhi was trying to destroy them to advance his own community, contacted Jinnah pleading with him to come and resolve the issue. Gokhale and Bhowagree pulled his chestnuts out of the fire because he'd come out against the Revolutionists- Savarkar and Shyamji Krishna Rao and so on- but it was the strike by the indentured workers which forced Smuts to hand Gandhi some sort of face saving device to quit the country.  Gandhi, thus, was already part of Indian politics, not as a principal but as a useful tool. What he had going for him was his exemplary track-record of service to the British in three wars and Smuts own endorsement that he'd made things a lot easier for him. In other words, here was a supposed 'Moderate' who quite genuinely was the sort of Moderate the British wanted.   He could checkmate Annie Beasant- still remembered in England as the firebrand leader of the Byrant & May match-girls' strike. Unlike Beasant- a one time atheist, like her friend Charles Bradlaugh- Gandhi was pals with Baptist preachers and Anglican clergymen. Moreover, he had broken with the Pacifists/Vegetarians nutjobs back in Blighty over his support for the War. 

The key to Anderson's stupidity is that he doesn't understand that decentralized Political movements are about preference falsification, availability cascades and a sort of senile Credentialism aimed at turning rents into pensions. Instead-

2) Anderson believes Gandhi orchestrated things like the Khilafat campaign rather than being caught up in them.

The British had every reason to trust, not just Gandhi, but anyone who collaborated with him. This was important. They'd stamped out the Revolutionists with a boot of iron. They were channeling Muslim discontent into the laughable Khilafat Campaign, and that was the springboard which enabled Gandhi to rise to National Status. Khilafat paid his bills when he did Congress work. Neither Champaran nor Kheda were National movements. They literally went nowhere. Gandhi only became Gandhi through Khilafat. He did not 'choose to broaden his appeal by including Muslims'. He was recruited by Muslims, paid by Muslims and never lost his profound respect for the principal, theological, advocate of Khilafat- the worthless shithead Maulana Azad. He made his wife cook lamb chops for Azad- Nehru got none.

Gandhi's endorsement of Khilafat- a product of his stupidity, ignorance and unrelenting opportunism- gave him a sort of token leadership of the Non Co-operation Movement which, I suppose, had it been well managed or at least not set up to fail, might have got the Indians what Allenby offered the Egyptians- in other words a corrupt sort of deal, or more comprehensive Modi-Lee pact. Gandhi's genius was to frustrate this, thus putting off a generational conflict for a couple of decades.

3) Anderson believes Gandhi had great political skills.

 'In orchestrating these great movements, Gandhi displayed a rare constellation of abilities in a political leader. Nonsense. Gandhi was invited not just by people in Champaran or Kheda or in the Khilafat movement but hosts of others whom he fucked up to the best of his ability with his worthless advise. Back then, every prominent barrister got telegrams from every such cause. Gandhi did not orchestrate anything. If the music was playing, sure he'd occasionally jump up and do a bit of bhangra claiming to be the Lord of the Dance or Jeanie with the light brown hair or the Strawberry blonde or whatever. But then he'd go back to his Ashram or Jail cell and give people enemas and spin cotton and eat plenty of nuts.

No doubt capable people on the ground did get some local grievances redressed from time to time, but everybody simply chased Gandhi away if he came back to them with some stupid idea- e.g. his bid to recruit soldiers for the War in his native Gujerat. Charismatic mobilisation of popular feeling was certainly foremost among these. There was no such charismatic mobilization. If people believed Gandhi was advancing their interests, they smiled sweetly. If not, they chased him away. In the countryside, adoring crowds treated him as semi-divine. They'll treat anybody who claims to be a religious nutjob as semi-divine. That wont stop them beating and chasing away that same religious nutjob if they think such a move better serves their interests. But, however distinctive and spectacular in his case, this is largely a given in any nationalist movement. What set Gandhi apart was its combination with three other skills. He was a first-class organiser and fundraiser – diligent, efficient, meticulous – who rebuilt Congress from top to bottom, endowing it with a permanent executive at national level, vernacular units at provincial level, local bases at district level, and delegates proportionate to population, not to speak of an ample treasury.  Khilafat was richer and better organized than the I.N.C. Gandhi didn't organize or raise funds for Khilafat. It follows that India contained people who were good at organizing and fund-raising. Yes, Gandhi was an interfering old busybody, but it simply isn't true that he was a sort of superior Accountant or filing clerk. That stuff was delegated. He never recruited anybody, in the manner of a head-hunter, but did attract one or two not totally shite people. But, the majority of his Ashramites were loony toons whom, the Chartered Accountant, Kumarappa for one, refused to pay because they were quite useless for any productive work.

Gandhi did not make the Congress richer or more cohesive or capable of thought. By insisting people pay their membership dues in hand-spun yarn, he turned it into a corrupt, caste ridden, Tammany Hall type of machine. Compare the I.N.C with the Servants of India which functioned like a think-tank. The I.N.C produced no original research or policy documents worth the name. It was a sort of mela for windbags. 

4) Anderson believes Gandhi was an excellent mediator and communicator.

 At the same time, though temperamentally in many ways an autocrat, politically he did not care about power in itself, and was an excellent mediator between different figures and groups both within Congress and among its variegated social supports. Surely, Prof. Anderson must be completely mad to write this. If Gandhi was an excellent mediator why did Partition take place?  Gandhi's genius was for finding 'wedge issues' . He didn't mediate anything but stalemated progress in a manner which suited the British rulers. It also suited old men who did not want to be displaced by better educated, smarter, younger people. Since, ultimately, it was the British who would decide whom they'd share power with or transfer power to- it was Gandhi's ability to prevent opposition to the British from becoming effective which made him an 'obligatory passage point'.
Oh, one other thing- like every other charlatan godman, he'd got a couple of millionaires to pay his bills.

Finally, though no great orator, he was an exceptionally quick and fluent communicator, as the hundred volumes of his articles, books, letters, cables (far exceeding the output of Marx or Lenin, let alone Mao) testify. Yes, but they are all poisonous crap. Have you read 'Hind Swaraj' where he says Women shouldn't go out to work- because that is a sort of prostitution- much less vote, because Parliament is nothing but a brothel or a prostitute because, every few years, it gives itself to a new Master? To these political gifts were added personal qualities of a ready warmth, impish wit and iron will. It is no surprise that so magnetic a force would attract such passionate admiration, at the time and since. Godmen like the Maharishi (Wold peace through levitation) or Rajneesh (Sex, drugs and Rolls Royces) attract passionate admiration. That's why they become very rich. There is a sort of Darwinian competition amongst Godmen and those lucky enough to stumble upon a formula which works 'attract passionate admiration' and get their crackpot schemes paid for by their disciples. In some cases, rich people who donate money are getting a good return on their money in the shape of Social Prestige- things like getting to hobnob with celebrities. Gandhi was only one of a number of fuckwit failed politicians setting up as a Mahatma. They didn't divide the market equally between them but had market share determined by a Power Law. Gandhi just happened to come out on top, that's all.

5) Anderson believes Gandhi served some cause

But Gandhi’s achievements also came at a huge cost to the cause which he served.  What cause was that? At one point he said 'I'll get you 'Swaraj' in a year' but then he changed his mind. He abandoned that cause and that's why the Brits didn't deport him but just kept him in prison for a bit to give him face.

There was no cause he was not prepared to abandon- even hand-spun cloth. 'If the weavers won't wear their own cloth- I'll just wash my hands off them and go fuck up subsistence agriculture for a change.' 
As for Non-violence- he was never for it in the first place.

Anderson goes on to discuss the sources of Gandhi's stupid religious ideas. But, his comments miss the mark because Gandhi did not actually believe anything at all. What interested him was fads and shortcuts. How can I save money on medicine? I know! I'll just rub some mud on myself! How can I save on school fees? I know, I'll just keep my sons at home and they can learn from me! How can I get that boring old Annie Beasant, or that sharp dressing Jinnah, or that crooked Jew, Lord Reading, to just shut up and go away? I know, I'll talk some shit about how only I understand India and Muslims and true Democracy and proper Economics and like who needs Armies and guns? A real Man doesn't need a gun. All you people are terrible cowards. You should become truly Manly like me.'

Anderson quotes Kathryn Tidrick’s Gandhi: A Political and Spiritual Life approvingly - 'the composition of Gandhi’s faith, Tidrick has shown, was born of a cross between a Jain-inflected Hindu orthodoxy- no it wasn't, the guy was totally ignorant-  and late Victorian psychomancy, the world of Madame Blavatsky, theosophy, the planchette and the Esoteric Christian Union- not so, he didn't believe that he was part of a Spiritual Brotherhood or an 'initiate'. The two were not unconnected, as garbled ideas from the former – karma, reincarnation, ascetic self-perfection, fusion of the soul with the divine – found occult form in the latter. Little acquainted with the Hindu canon itself in his early years, Gandhi reshaped it through the medium of Western spiritualisms of the period. Not true. There were a lot of other, smarter, better educated, people in India playing that game and Gandhi would have looked a complete idiot if he'd tried to compete with them. His one aim in life, he decided, was to attain moksha: that state of perfection- moksha means 'liberation' not perfection or 'kevalya'-  in which the cycle of rebirth comes to an end and the soul accedes to ultimate union with God. ‘I am striving for the Kingdom of Heaven, which is moksha,’ he wrote, ‘in this very existence.’ The path towards it was ‘crucifixion of the flesh’, without which it was impossible to ‘see God face to face’ and become one with him. But if such perfection could be attained, the divine would walk on earth, for ‘there is no point in trying to know the difference between a perfect man and God.’ Then there would be no limit to his command of his countrymen: ‘When I am a perfect being, I have simply to say the word and the nation will listen.’

This is mere gibberish. It may be attractive to a Western professor to think of Gandhi as a sort of auto-didact piecing together a Credo out in the boondocks but the facts are against Anderson. Gandhi could read Gujerati. Hindu and Jain works covering topics like Epistemology and Ontology were available to him. Krishna Rao Verma had shown up the fraudulence of the Theosophical Society when Gandhi was a young student. Gandhi was just a bog standard shithead talking senile nonsense like everybody else. 

'Crucifixion of the flesh, in this conception, meant far more than the vegetarian prohibitions prescribed by his caste background. Not in food, but sex lay the overriding danger to liberation of the soul. The violence of Gandhi’s revulsion against carnal intercourse of any kind mingled Christian fears of sin with Hindu phobias of pollution. Celibacy was not just a duty for the dedicated few. It was enjoined on all who would truly serve their country. ‘A man who is unchaste loses stamina, becomes emasculated and cowardly. He whose mind is given over to animal passions is not capable of any great effort.’ If a married couple gratified these, it was still ‘an animal indulgence’ that, ‘except for perpetuating the race, is strictly prohibited’. 

Anderson doesn't seem to be aware that the notion of celibacy for National Service had been espoused by the Revolutionists- like Aurobindo- before Gandhi took it up.  Like all his other ideas, it was just another preference falsification based availability cascade, or Idée reçue, popular amongst eternally adolescent cranks and shitheads back then.

Indeed, every piece of nonsense he spouted had already been suggested by some other idiot. What appealed to him was idiocy- supposedly short cuts but short cuts to stalemates and backwardness and tears before bedtime requiring peremptory intervention by the British Nanny.

Anderson writes'..for Gandhi self-rule was far from simply political. It was mastery of the passions and of the senses in the ascent of the soul to its appointment with divinity. Swaraj was a religious imperative, its political form no more than a means to a higher end. It entailed not a struggle to evict the British from India, but a struggle of Indians with themselves that, if won, would bring the British to reason.'

This is nonsense. If Indians stop reproducing they will disappear. The British will have to bring in people from other parts of the world to populate the country.

 The method of that struggle was passive resistance – non-violence. No. Non-violence was a method of struggling against those who wanted change without suffering ostracism in the process. This was a big boon for men of Gandhi's generation and social position. They had an excuse to continue to tyrannize over their sons and daughters-in-law and grand children without being accused of being running dogs of the British. More to the point, you also saved money by not having to send the little shits to School and College and Hospital and so on.

 Gandhi had come upon this conception in Tolstoy, where it was already suffused with religious yearning. But his own version, satyagraha (a neologism he liked to translate as ‘truth-force’), was an original development of it. Tolstoy, unconventionally vegetarian and pacifist though he became in advanced old age, remained a Christian. Gandhi, in drawing on his ideas, gave them a distinctively Hindu cast, fusing them with millennial traditions of a more radical asceticism and extra-terrestrialism. What is this shit? Coz the guy wears a dhoti, that's a distinctively Hindu cast? The Hindu Revolutionists had been put down with violence. They'd had enough and cried 'uncle'. No doubt, during Khilafat, there was some reason to say 'well, Gandhi is a Hindu- he represents the majority community'. But Khilafat was silly. It was so silly, it fell apart by itself despite British support. Later on Gandhi tried to say 'well, I'm a high caste Hindu and see, just look, I'm being nice to the Untouchables.' But it was too little too late. The Chitpavan Brahmins had gone a step further. Gandhi himself thought Ambedkar was a Brahmin and lectured him on how only he himself was a true 'Bhangi' and thus able to understand their plight. Foreigners may believe Gandhi was a Hindu Tolstoy on the basis of an impartial ignorance of both Tolstoy and Hinduism. But this belief has no instrumental value. It's like me calling David Cameron a French Cambodian rent-boy as opposed to the obligatory taunt of his being an Old Etonian. It does not add anything to our knowledge or open up any very interesting avenue of speculation.

 ‘Passive resistance’ he felt too weak a term for the movement he set out to inspire: truth was not passive, it was a force.  Nonsense. Gandhi knew satyagraha would fail but that so long as he got arrested from time to time this would not hurt him particularly or impede the grand career of his self regard. He had shown how effective it could be in South Africa- no, he failed in South Africa-, where Indians were a small immigrant minority. What could it not achieve on native soil, where they were the totality of the population? Ramarajya, he told the crowds at his meetings, was within reach if they followed his teachings – the Golden Age of the god-hero Rama, born in Ayodhya, victor over the demon Ravana, for two thousand years the stuff of Hindu legend.

Once again, Anderson- as a foreigner- is getting things wrong. The Ram of Gandhi's day wasn't a 'god-hero' who killed a demon, but the Deity of Tulsi and Kabir. Muslim monarchs, including the Nizam, were worshiped as avatars of Ram by, for example, the Deendars.  The nature of Ramrajya wasn't a sort of super-rich Camelot- that was actually Ravana's Lanka- but a bucolic place where everybody lives together happily.

The original politics of the Congress elite had been studiously secular. Nonsense. Tilak's Ganapati Puja or the various Godmen of the Revolutionists weren't secular in the least. Gandhi’s takeover of the party not only gave it a popular basis it had never possessed before but injected a massive dose of religion – mythology, symbology, theology – into the national movement.  This puts the cart before the horse. The driver was unrest amongst the young, the returning ex-servicemen, Muslims, Akalis and so on. The Indian Industrialists and Financiers had serious grievances re. Fiscal and Monetary policy.  Neither Gandhi nor the old idiots in the INC orchestrated anything. Khilafat wasn't their baby. Most of them opposed it. But it cleared the path to Non Co-operation and it was useful to have Gandhi take the blame for calling that off. But, what was the alternative? The Brits could cut the INC out by transferring power to the feudal nobility. 

Anderson acquitting Gandhi on the charge of hypocrisy (perhaps as a White man he is afraid to suggest the logical alternative of sheer stupidity) does in the end give the lie to all the arguments he has assembled by stressing Gandhi's determination to prevent Independence.

 ‘My ambition is much higher than independence.’ To head off pressure for it from a younger generation in Congress, he invoked a loftier national eminence to come: a ‘world commonwealth’, in which India would no longer be an equal but ‘the predominant partner, by reason of her numbers, geographical position and culture inherited for ages’.

'Gandhi’s resistance to calls for independence stemmed from the same fear that governed the abrupt quietus he delivered to Non-Cooperation. He did not want to evict the British in India if to do so was to risk a social upheaval. Revolution was a greater danger than the Raj.'

This makes sense. But Anderson won't stop there. He thinks a guy with a proven track record of service to the British, a guy who had managed to keep himself abysmally ignorant of Hinduism, a guy with no fixed principles or beliefs, nevertheless was a guy who only wanted the British to stay because he was a Hindus and like Hindus probably have  some god with lots of hands and one of those hands slaps you if you throw out the Brits or Turks or whatever and anyway I read it in a book or maybe it was a movie like the Temple of Doom or something.

Thus Anderson writes-

 'Behind his refusal of any prospect of it lay both religious belief and social calculation. On the one hand, Hinduism bound all who adhered to it into a single interwoven community, in which each was allotted their appointed station. To break its unity by setting one part against another was contrary to divine order. But he did that. Non Cooperation was about some Hindus giving up their jobs- because they worked for the Govt.- while others kept theirs. On the other, the movement he called into being in 1919 was extensive, but not comprehensive. The Congress he commanded was a coalition with determinate frontiers. It comprised industrialists, traders, professionals and better-off peasants; it did not include urban workers or the rural poor who formed the vast majority of the population. To pit these against their employers or landlords was to divide what God had joined; to mobilise them against their rulers, to risk setting fire to the country. Class conflict was out. ‘We must gain control over all the unruly and disturbing elements,’ he explained as labour unrest boiled up during Non-Cooperation. ‘In India we want no political strikes.’ In the countryside, as a newspaper account of one of his speeches put it, he ‘deprecated all attempts to create discord between landlords and tenants and advised the tenants to suffer rather than fight’, in the cause of preserving national unity. Property was a trust that had to be respected and – should that be necessary – protected. Under the Raj, such protection was afforded by the law and its guardians, the police. In Chauri Chaura, a mob propelled by economic grievances had respected neither, in an awful warning of what popular passions might unleash in India. At all costs, their momentum had to be stopped. What fucking momentum? A bunch of guys protesting high meat prices roast some policemen to death- but fail to eat them. Those idiots had been stupid enough to pay a small fee and put their names down on the Congress Register. The Brits, in their own good time, would turn up and hang a lot of people and confiscate their property. The constables and petty officials were already licking their lips calculating how much money they'd be able to extract in bribes from families caught up in this idiocy.
Bardoli, where Gandhi had planned to lead a refusal of the land revenue, was an area within his native Gujarat where Congress was well implanted and which he knew at first hand. It was also, however, within the zone of ryotwari cultivation, where peasants paid taxes directly to the state, rather than in the huge zamindari sector where taxes were collected in the form of rent by landlords, passing on a due proportion to the state, and refusal of the revenue would mean a social revolt against them. But even in its most cautious form, a tax strike threatened the existence of the Raj- no, Land Revenue was too small a part of British finance. So long as the controlled the ports, their rule was safe- , by pulling its economic infrastructure out from under it, and therewith its ability to enforce its will coercively. If it were observed countrywide, imperial law and order would face not a nebulous swaraj within a year but a complete breakdown. This was the spectre – as he saw it, Chauri Chaura writ large – at which Gandhi drew back. The Raj must get its revenue if it was, as he wished, to remain on Indian soil.

Anderson's mistake here- a mistake of logic- is to ignore the very large number of genuine Hindus (guys who knew Sanskrit and stuff) who didn't just want the Brits out but also the landlords out, the usurers out and so forth. Thus Gandhi wasn't being 'Hindu' in wanting the Brits to stay or the Rajas to stay or the landlords to stay- he was just acting out of self interest- he liked being an 'obligatory passage point' and did whatever it took to keep himself a center of attention. Talking pseudo-religious shite was just something he liked doing. What was he supposed to talk about? The Law? Fuck he knew about the Law?

'While this drama was unfolding in India, a battle in parallel was being fought in Ireland. By the summer of 1920 Non-Cooperation and the War of Independence were in progress together. Gandhi called off the first in February 1922, as British forces were sent packing by the second: the treaty conceding the Irish a Free State had been signed just two months before, and by August the 26 counties were shot of them. Since the mid-19th century, Britain had always stationed a much higher number of troops relative to population in Ireland than in India, with a lower proportion of local recruits: typically, a military establishment of about 25,000, and a constabulary of 10,000, for an island of 4.5 million inhabitants, less than a hundred miles from England – a ratio of 1:130. In India, 4000 miles away, where the machinery of repression mustered some 400,000 for a population of 300 million, the ratio was 1:750. Yet within less than three years, an Irish guerrilla of not more than 3000 combatants at any one time had destroyed the colonial police and effectively driven the colonial army – upped to 40,000 for counter-insurgency – from the field in the larger part of the country. Had there been any synchronised campaign in India, with its hugely more favourable balance of potential forces, not to speak of logistics, the issue could hardly have been in doubt.'
The Indians knew about Ireland- and what the Black & Tans were up to. O'Dwyer and Dyer had shown a willingness to be beforehand with Black & Tan methods. The Brits, at an extremity, could raise up warlike tribes- like the Meos- and hand over rebellious Cities for plunder. Instead, there was the fiasco of Bardoli, and the postponement of independence for a quarter of a century. The postponement has to do with Gandhi's odd attitude to Reading- he refused to deal because he said there was a threat of violence behind what was offered- this itself only explainable as the determination of the old men not to be seen to doing a deal with the Brits so as to escape the ire of the younger men. That was the real lesson of Ireland. The price of national liberation was not small in Ireland: division of the country and civil war. But it was tiny compared with the bill that would eventually be paid in India.

From here on wards, Anderson begins talking sense. Being a White man, he didn't dare say Gandhi was a stupid self-promoting windbag but what he does say- that Gandhi was in some sense a Hindu, rather than a shithead quite common on the streets of West Kensington down to our own day- is, in my view, much worse.

Incidentally, Jinnah had gone to London on a stupid Khilafat mission. Gandhi stayed loyal to Maulana Azad- an egotist & fantasist of Gandhian proportions who, quite madly, thought he was about to become the Imam-al Hind, the Chief Imam of India, presiding over a vast network of Sharia courts, that too at the tender age of 30-  and it is Azad who should get the blame for much subsequent Congress stupidity, in particular that of Nehru who was his cell-mate during the war.

Anderson quotes Ambedkar - ‘No matter what the Hindus say, Hinduism is a menace to liberty, equality and fraternity’ – words few Indian intellectuals would dare utter today. 

This is mad. I'm Hindu- maybe not an intellectual- but these are words I would be amply rewarded for saying by the Governments of several states in India. What penalty exactly would I have faced in Mayawati's U.P or Communist West Bengal or, indeed, in my native Tamil Nadu? 

Anderson shows the futility and stupidity of Gandhi's politics but draws the wrong lesson from it.

Satyagraha had not been a success: each time Gandhi had tried it, the British had seen it off.

Gandhi would have abandoned satyagraha if it had succeeded just as he decided to abandon 'khaddar' (hand-spun) when it seemed to becoming commercially viable.

 His great achievement lay elsewhere, in the creation of a nationalist party, whose road to power forked away in another direction. 

The INC existed before Gandhi came on the scene. Genuine Revolutionists would sometimes come under its umbrella but soon quit in disgust. Yet, as Anderson explains, it rallied and put down deep roots when it got a taste for the fruits of office. It acted like a Tammany Hall and survived on that basis, but it was not a Political Party in the real sense of the word. Gandhi had seen to that by making it subservient to him- making its members pay their membership dues in handspun cotton yarn. Obviously, people who wanted control of their local branch flooded the membership with their own creatures. 

Gandhi was an idiot and his politics a swindle. Had Anderson introduced his 11, ooo word essay with this pithy statement, everything that followed would have made perfect sense.

Instead,for some unknown reason, he has chosen to pretend that

1) Gandhi was like deeply Hindu rather than a run of the mill West Ken shithead. 

2) Gandhi had great political skills.

Occam's razor, Prof. Anderson.  Try it sometime.