Schweke's Trivialisation of Hindu Nationalism

Schweke is a young German scholar whose recent essay trivializes various Anglophone post-Ayodhya academic availability cascades about how like Hindutva is Hitlerism and Modi must be Adolph coz Adolph was Austrian and Austrians keep attacking Italians, and Soniaji is Italian; what's more, all Austrians yodel except Adolph who gave fiery speeches instead- thus Modi is Hilter because he doesn't yodel.
Schweke's essay is worth skimming because it takes at face value our Careerist Campus Lefties various vainglorious screeds shrilly crying wolf and pretending to battle Nazism in the streets, or the Hindu equivalent of the Taliban in the Temples, while actually holed up in an Ivy League ivory tower.
In doing so, Schweke (who may have a German sense of humor like mine- I was born in Bonn- and thus achieves his best effects by simulating stupidity under a deadpan pedantic style) takes the piss out of our Academics something rotten by pointing out that, no matter what Oxbridge eminence they have attained, they still don't have a sleek Cliodynamic Mercedes, by way of Theory of History, in their intellectual garage but rely on an old fashioned Ambassador car which, since its wheels fell off long ago, now has to be be towed around on a bullock cart.

Thus Schweke says-

Schweke is not lying about the relevant Academic literature- the vast mass of which is written by Hindus. What he isn't mentioning is that the Hindus are lying and don't care if their fellow Hindus know they are lying because it's all in a good cause- viz. the advancement of their own career and the careers of those of their own clique who pretend to criticize them.
Hindu nationalism- apart from that of the Gandhi/Nehru INC 'Syndicate'- has 2 separate roots
1) Bengali Swamis, including Westernised Swamis like Vivekananda and Aurobindo and his younger brother, who helped inspire Jugantar which split after Bagha Jatin's death with people like M.N Roy turning to Moscow while others re-grouped under C.R Das. In general, there was a Leftward movement but both the Ananda Marg and the Bhaktivedanta movement share a common genealogy in this respect. Modi pays lip service to Vivekananda and Shyama Prasad Mookherjee- though the latter was actually avenged on Sheikh Abdullah by Kidwai- but Bengal has been marginalized by stupid Economic policies and no longer counts.
2) Chitpavan reformism. Under the Peshwas, the Chitpavans earned the well merited hatred of other Brahmins- e.g. the Deshasts though the Daivadnya Brahmins were worse treated - as well as other castes.
 Under the Raj, there was a danger that young men from this community would simply turn into village thugs. However to rise up through education- e.g. by taking jobs as teachers etc- rules re. ritual purity had to be dispensed with. Thus Social Reform within the Chitpavan community was directly linked to repairing links with other communities and getting rid of ritualistic thinking. Ultimately, people like Ambedkar found that the R.S.S- which had to turn away from Revolutionary politics because the British could use still smoldering anti-Chitpavan sentiment to their advantage and punish people like Savarkar very severely- was more committed to getting rid of the most obnoxious aspects of caste than people like Nehru who genuinely didn't understand what all the fuss was about.

Savarkar, it must be said, was originally Shyamji Krishna Varma's protege and his first book peddled the standard myth that Hindus and Muslims were always cuddling and kissing till the Brits turned up and made them get jobs- which led to rivalry- boo to you British man! Kindly go away so Hindu Muslim kissing and cuddling can resume.
A long spell in prison- not the cushy sort which M.N Roy preferred to Stalin's Gulag- deranged Savarkar completely. Poor fellow, by the time he died he was praising both Socialism- that 'servile State' which his mentor, a staunch devotee of 'Harbhat Pendse', opposed- as well as the consumption of panchgavya, though he had earlier admitted he was a little squeamish about quaffing cow's urine and chowing down on bovine shit. My own Mimamsa, I should mention, holds that the holy cow's blood (which the Masai drink), not its urine was meant and that beef patties should be substituted for cowpats.

The one good thing about the RSS was that it pariah status after Independence meant that it was less open to careerist entryism and thus gained an enviable salience in the Seventies during the Nav Nirman and anti-Emergency campaigns. Still, had the Communists got their act together- if, for example, Jyoti Basu had been permitted by his politburo to become P.M- and if Atal or Advani had died, the Sangh might have remained marginal. Instead, people like Modi were able to come up by arbitraging the distance between Delhi and Nagpur but this could only happen because of a new tech savvy Managerialist Weltgeist which rendered Gandhi and Marx and Nehru impotent as anything other than Mickey Mouse brands. Modi didn't read Deendayal Upadhyay (a joke name for a silly U.P bhaiyya who hadn't the nous to keep from falling off a train) or anything else for that matter, but paid attention when sent to America to learn about modern P.R techniques. Later he actually bought a cowboy hat!
How could this guy not become P.M when nobody- literally nobody- was saying 'I want to be P.M because I'll be good at the job'? Rahul Baba was saying 'It doesn't matter who becomes P.M. Mummy has already handed over power to the village panchayat. M.P's have nothing to do. Ministers have no power. The P.M's office is wholly ceremonial'  Mulayam was saying 'My people kicked me out and made my son Chief Minister. Give me the job to preserve my honor'. Mamta was saying 'It is all a terrible conspiracy. I will expose it. Who is being raped? They are all loose women. Since I am C.M of Bengal, if anyone should be P.M it must be me. Calcutta used to be the Capital- not Delhi. Who stole the Capital from us? It is all a conspiracy due to loose women who are falsely saying they are raped. I will beat them all with my chappal.' Jayalaitha too asserted Tamil pride. If she had to choose between Jail and being P.M, she was ready to commute to Delhi.
But facts are facts. U.P politicians, like Charan Singh, only want to be P.M when U.P throws them out. Chandrashekhar was so useless, Rajiv recognized that it legitimated his claim to the office he had himself previously held. Narasimha Rao, poor fellow, only got the job because Shankar Dayal Sharma wasn't interested. As P.M, his own diplomats turned him into a laughing stock- as a proverbially verbose Babu- in International circles. Still, one can't deny he was intelligent. Thus his being sentenced to jail was entirely condign, though of course he never actually spent a day behind bars.
The fact is. Politics is trivial. Being P.M doesn't matter- that's why the dynasty which had least competence (Nehru spent only a year or two doing actual politics, running the Allahabad Municipal Corporation) was permitted to reign in New Delhi- which has only began to look like a proper City since about 1987. Under Indira, it turned out C.M's too were just going through the motions. Thus she could appear an autocrat. But an autocrat without power to change the country- the Emergency was just a story about Potemkin villages- and once everybody saw the truth of this, even Rajiv or Sonia or Rahul or Rahul's cat could be P.M. It wouldn't make a difference.

Can Modi make a difference? Yes. Leaders should be good at P.R- both at home and abroad. That's Modi's professional forte. But changing the optics can only take a country so far. Ultimately, Modi will be rendered ineffectual, his P.R coups increasingly trivial, unless those who voted for him show determination to change their own lives. How? They must migrate from a culture of rent-seeking to one of risk-taking. This is the fundamental bifurcation or source of conflict within any class or interest group. When the rent-seekers win, everybody loses because Uncertainty is a fact of life. Risk taking reduces Uncertainty whereas the determination to hang on to rents no matter how the fitness landscape changes increases catastrophic risk. Those old soldiers fighting valiantly for bigger pensions don't realize they are stoking up a Greek style disaster- they themselves may die before the Ponzi scheme collapses but their last senile act will have endangered the country they, in the prime of their manhood, shed their blood to protect.

Why Modi is the new Hitler

Far from being semi-literate Naipaulian 'mimic men', Indian Public intellectuals have an abiding interest in, and deep understanding of, European Philosophy and Social Science.

Furthermore, great Indian scholars, like Guha, Chakroborty, Bannerjee, Chatterjee, Bananaji, Mangoji etc, have made very significant and subtle contributions to the Marxist Theory of History.

Thus, the Indian elite's equation of Narendra Modi with Adolf Hitler is not, as many in the West consider it to be, merely a rhetorical trope. Rather it is based on the following unassailable facts- to wit
1) Hitler wasn't German. He was Austrian.
2) Austria and Italy were often at war.
3) Austrians are of two types- those who yodel, like the Von Trapp family, and those who don't yodel- actually there was only ever one Austrian who didn't yodel- viz. Adolf Hitler- who made long bombastic speeches instead.

Now consider the following equally incontrovertible facts-
1) Soniaji is Italian. Hence some Austrian or other is bound to come and pick a fight with her. Narendra Modi did in fact come and pick a fight with her. Hence he is proven to be Austrian.

2) Modi is an Austrian who doesn't yodel, thus he must be Adolf Hitler and, what's more, isn't even trying to hide the fact because he too gives long speeches! I mean, just look at the shameless of the man! At least he should try to yodel once in a while to try to throw us off the scent! Why not hire a playback singer or just mime to the Julie Andrews' song in the Sound of Music? Would that be too much to ask?

Muslims under Modi Raj

Rafi Ahmed Kidwai, who first rose to prominence on the wings of Khilafat (he falsely accused Jinnah of betraying the cause), became the Private Secretary of first Motilal and then Jawaharlal Nehru in the Twenties. But he was no sycophant or loyal family retainer. His position in the U.P politics owed everything to his own skills and his band of devoted 'Rafians'. But for his loyalty to Nehru and his own love of intrigue at the Center, Kidwai could have emerged as the driving force of the Kisan Mazdoor Praja Party and become the Political Godfather of Charan Singh and, later on, Mulayam Singh and so forth. Imagine an India where the popularly elected C.M of U.P in the Fifties and Sixties is a Muslim- a patriotic Muslim, who avenged Shayama Prasad Mukherjee  by getting Sheikh Abdullah arrested thus rendering Kashmir's special status a dead letter- who is indifferent to the Byzantine goings on at the Center. Lower castes and weaker sections trust him because, as a Muslim, his own community is vulnerable. Yet, equally, because of the Aristocratic ethos of that erstwhile ruling class, the Muslim C.M has the social and diplomatic skills to flatter and win over the High Castes.
Suppose strong Muslim Regional C.Ms had emerged after Independence- this would only have happened if the Siren Song of Intrigue at the Center had been resisted- then, the Indian Muslim would never have gone through a period of doubt and insecurity. Why? Strong Regional leaders, who deal with bread and butter issues and who remain indifferent to the attractions of Palace intrigue, are the only people who can deliver Security with Development to Vulnerable sections and Minorities. Having a Muslim President or Chief Justice doesn't cut it. What could Zail Singh do for the Sikhs of Delhi in 1984?
Previously, some analysts suggested that Muslims needed to find a protector from the majority community. But, what could Akhilesh do for the poor Muslims of Muzaffarnagar? In any case, if a Dalit woman, like Mayawati, can take power and do a fairly good job of providing security, then the question arises, why not a Muslim C.M taking support from Dalits? Why should the Muslim be the subaltern in a KHAM type caste equation?  Come to that, why can't there be Muslim leadership for AJGAR castes? There is a saying 'Ayaz should remember his origin' but when were the Indian Muslims conquered by some Hindu version of Mahmud of Ghazni? Look back at the story of Rafi Ahmed Kidwai. Was he really just a 'chamcha' of Nehru? Ignorant people might think so. The Muslim political class of U.P is scarcely ignorant.
What about this Modi wave? It seems to have united Hindus and rendered the caste-equations of the vaunted protectors of Muslims a fantasy. Does this mean Muslims now must be the humble Ayaz of the new Mahmud who comes from Somnath? Anyone who suggests this is a traitor to India. History shows that if a community bends its neck then its doom is sealed. Furthermore, the real meaning of the Modi wave is that India expects every person coming into the political arena to do so with a will to win, a determination to excel, and the drive and ambition to wish for elevation from M.LA to Minister to C.M to Central Cabinet to the Prime Minister's chair.
We don't want a guy on our Cricket Team just because he is a nice guy or friends with the Captain. We want a guy who says 'I want to be Captain in a couple of years time. I want to beat Australia.'
Modi says 'I'm the first Prime Minister to be born after Independence'. Muslim leaders must recognize that they were born as citizens of independent India. They have to compete on the basis of ability and charisma and that spirit of competition must be unbridled. 'Chai-wallah to P.M' is a message of reassurance to vulnerable sections of Society. In future, let every Muslim entering the Political arena declare that he or she has his sights set on nothing less than the Prime Ministership. Unless Muslims can internalize and articulate this sense of unbridled ambition, people will suspect that they will compromise and sell their birth-right for a mess of pottage. 'After all,' we suspect of them saying to themselves, 'as a Muslim how high can I climb? Better I just take this nice sinecure or that fat bribe and go and sit quietly in my Z security bungalow while the country goes up in flames.'
If fear of Modi leads Muslims to think big and put themselves forward for the highest offices, then, paradoxically, Modi Sarkar will prove the turning point in the fortunes of a community which is in danger of falling behind.

Pankaj Mishra on Narendra Modi.

Pankaj Mishra is an angry man. Rightly so. His people back home have let him down big time. They went and voted for Narendra Modi even though he told them not to.
Fortunately, the Guardian newspaper has given him space to vent his spleen.
Some of his more egregious points are-
' India's 16th general election this month... tainted by the nastiest campaign yet, announces a new turbulent phase for the country – arguably, the most sinister since its independence from British rule in 1947.
Is Mishra right? Surely the most turbulent phase for the country was in the Nineteen Seventies? By comparison, the recent poll was a tea-party- actually, it was a tea-party held after Rahul gave Modi a walk-over. What were the worst accusations made during this election? Did anyone say that Rahul was sleeping with his own mother? They certainly  said that about Sanjay but all Rahul got was the tag of 'Amul Baby'.
As for Modi- from being a 'Merchant of Death' he was downgraded, by 'Snoopgate' to just some elderly Uncle perving on a pretty young architect.
Mishra says-' Back then, *in 1951) it would have been inconceivable that a figure such as Narendra Modi, the Hindu nationalist chief minister of Gujarat accused, along with his closest aides, of complicity in crimes ranging from an anti-Muslim pogrom in his state in 2002to extrajudicial killings, and barred from entering the US, may occupy India's highest political office.
Is Mishra right? Take Shaheed Shurawardy who presided over Direct Action Day in which thousands of people lost their lives. Was it 'unthinkable' for him to aspire to the Prime Ministership of Bengal? If so, how come, Sharat Chandra Bose was still talking to him?
Was it inconceivable that Muhammad Ali Jinnah, whose Muslim League presided over ethnic cleaning on an enormous scale, become Governor General of a successor state to the Raj?
Reality check- according to Wikipedia, that's actually what happened.
Perhaps Mishra means that it is inconceivable that a Hindu, not a Muslim, become Head of State in a Hindu majority area because...urm... Hindus are just different from Muslims, okay? 

Mishra writes- Modi is a lifelong member of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a paramilitary Hindu nationalist organisation inspired by the fascist movements of Europe, whose founder's belief that Nazi Germany had manifested "race pride at its highest" by purging the Jews is by no means unexceptional among the votaries of Hindutva, or "Hinduness".

Mishra is wrong about the RSS. Its origins pre-date the Nazi party. It wasn't anti-semitic. There was an actual Indian Nazi Party run by the husband of Savitri Devi but this had nothing to do with the RSS. Now, it is quite true that the 'Two nation theory' wasn't confined to the Muslim League. Savarkar wanted India to be known as Hindustan and so did Jinnah. However, whereas the Muslim League was very successful in carrying out Ethnic Cleansing (as were various Sikh groups) the RSS, by itself, has no similar track-record. 

Mishra continues- ; In 1948, a former member of the RSS murdered Gandhi for being too soft on Muslims. The outfit, traditionally dominated by upper-caste Hindus, has led many vicious assaults on minorities. A notorious executioner of dozens of Muslims in Gujarat in 2002 crowedthat he had slashed open with his sword the womb of a heavily pregnant woman and extracted her foetus. Modi himself described the relief camps housing tens of thousands of displaced Muslims as "child-breeding centres".

Such rhetoric has helped Modi sweep one election after another in Gujarat. A senior American diplomat described him, in cables disclosed by WikiLeaks, as an "insular, distrustful person" who "reigns by fear and intimidation"; his neo-Hindu devotees on Facebook and Twitter continue to render the air mephitic with hate and malice, populating the paranoid world of both have-nots and haves with fresh enemies – "terrorists", "jihadis", "Pakistani agents", "pseudo-secularists", "sickulars", "socialists" and "commies". Modi's own electoral strategy as prime ministerial candidate, however, has been more polished, despite his appeals, both dog-whistled and overt, to Hindu solidarity against menacing aliens and outsiders, such as the Italian-born leader of the Congress party, Sonia Gandhi, Bangladeshi "infiltrators" and those who eat the holy cow.

Okay, suppose all of the above is true. Then, why doesn't every politician use the same method to win elections? After all, there's a lot of money to be made in politics. All one needs to do is to recruit a bunch of psychopaths and get them to start stabbing pregnant women. One needn't even pay them very much money to do it. Indeed, the whole thing can be just a one-off expense. After having established your credibility by killing a few innocents, you can rely simply on rhetoric to keep getting re-elected. Why? Indian people are evil bastards. They hear you once killed some pregnant women and immediately think to themselves- 'gotta vote for this dude. He's too cool for school! What's that? His twitter followers are all paranoid hate-mongers? Well, that seals the deal! I mean, obviously, guys who spend their time stabbing pregnant women are gonna do a great job representing us in Parliament because...urm...well, it's something to do with like Capitalism and Globalization and stuff.

 long after India's first full-scale pogrom in 2002, leading corporate bosses, ranging from the suave Ratan Tata to Mukesh Ambani, the owner of a 27-storey residence, began to pave Modi's ascent to respectability and power. The stars of Bollywood fell (literally) at the feet of Modi. In recent months, liberal-minded columnists and journalists have joined their logrolling rightwing compatriots in certifying Modi as a "moderate" developmentalist. The Columbia University economist Jagdish Bhagwati, who insists that he intellectually fathered India's economic reforms in 1991, and Gurcharan Das, author of India Unbound, have volunteered passionate exonerations of the man they consider India's saviour.

Bhagwati, once a fervent supporter of outgoing prime minister Manmohan Singh, has even publicly applied for anadvisory position with Modi's government. It may be because the nearly double-digit economic growth of recent years that Ivy League economists like him – India's own version of Chile's Chicago Boys and Russia's Harvard Boys– instigated and championed turns out to have been based primarily on extraction of natural resources, cheap labour and foreign capital inflows rather than high productivity and innovation, or indeed the brick-and-mortar ventures that fuelled China's rise as a manufacturing powerhouse. "The bulk of India's aggregate growth," the World Bank's chief economist Kaushik Basu warns, "is occurring through a disproportionate rise in the incomes at the upper end of the income ladder." Thus, it has left largely undisturbed the country's shameful ratios – 43% of all Indian children below the age of five are undernourished, and 48% stunted; nearly half of Indian women of childbearing age are anaemic, and more than half of all Indians still defecate in the open.

Absurdly uneven and jobless economic growth has led to what Amartya Sen and Jean Dreze call "islands of California in a sea of sub-Saharan Africa". The failure to generate stable employment – 1m new jobs are required every month – for an increasingly urban and atomised population, or to allay the severe inequalities of opportunity as well as income, created, well before the recent economic setbacks, a large simmering reservoir of rage and frustration. Many Indians, neglected by the state, which spends less proportionately on health and education than Malawi, and spurned by private industry, which prefers cheap contract labour, invest their hopes in notions of free enterprise and individual initiative. However, old and new hierarchies of class, caste and education restrict most of them to the ranks of the unwashed. As the Wall Street Journal admitted, India is not "overflowing with Horatio Alger stories". Balram Halwai, the entrepreneur from rural India in Aravind Adiga's Man Booker-winning novel The White Tiger, who finds in murder and theft the quickest route to business success and self-confidence in the metropolis, and Mumbai's social-Darwinist slum-dwellers in Katherine Boo's Behind the Beautiful Forevers point to an intensified dialectic in India today: cruel exclusion and even more brutal self-empowerment.

So there you have it. A guy who gets people to stab pregnant ladies is the man to vote for because then them Evil Capitalists will all come crawling to him and open factories in his Province and deliver Electricity and generate Tax Revenues for redistribution because...urm...dunno, there's just something about stabbing pregnant ladies which just naturally attracts Right Wing Capitalists and Technocrats and such like. The only reason Manmohan Singh failed was because he neglected to have his goons go out and stab some pregnant ladies in the belly. I'm not saying 1984 didn't happen- just that the stabbing pregnant ladies bit should have got more air-time so that UPA 2 could attract enough Investment to enable us to muddle through a little longer.

Such extensive moral squalor may bewilder those who expected India to conform, however gradually and imperfectly, to a western ideal of liberal democracy and capitalism.

What's this Mishra Sahib? Are you denying that one billion Muslims have been killed by Western powers sine 2001? What about the London riots a couple of years ago? Are you denying that fourteen trillion pregnant women were beaten to death by drunken Merchant Bankers while David Cameron, wearing a top hat, looked on smiling benignly? Mishra Sahib, how you can be so naive? Every High School boy in your old Mohalla knows these things. You must return to your native land to find out the truth of what all is going on in so called 'liberal' democracies of the West.

 But those scandalised by the lure of an indigenised fascism in the country billed as the "world's largest democracy" should know: this was not the work of a day, or of a few "extremists". It has been in the making for years. "Democracy in India," BR Ambedkar, the main framer of India's constitution, warned in the 1950s, "is only a top dressing on an Indian soil, which is essentially undemocratic." Ambedkar saw democracy in India as a promise of justice and dignity to the country's despised and impoverished millions, which could only be realised through intense political struggle. For more than two decades that possibility has faced a pincer movement: a form of global capitalism that can only enrich a small minority and a xenophobic nationalism that handily identifies fresh scapegoats for large-scale socio-economic failure and frustration.

So, Mishra says Democracy can't work in India because it is alien to the soil. Okay maybe 'intense political struggle' can enable it to survive some 'pincer movement' involving powerful international and national forces. However, the moment some guy gets some other guys to go stab pregnant women that 'intense political struggle' is powerless. So why bother with it? Now you may reply- 'well, if we have the Rule of Law, then a guy who gets other guys to stab pregnant women is hanged and that's an end to the matter.' But, in that case, it is 'the Rule of Law' and not 'intense political struggle' which can rescue Democracy. Of course, if the pregnant women being stabbed are imaginary, then the 'Rule of Law' can do nothing. But, neither can 'intense Political Struggle'. According to Mishra, people are voting for Modi not because they have seen him egging on people to stab pregnant women with their own eyes but because they have heard allegations of that nature. Modi denies it. He says he is a 'Rule of Law' man, but- Mishra believes- the voter is not so easily hoodwinked. They have voted for Modi because he's the guy who gets pregnant women stabbed and that's a good thing because Capital and Enterprise just naturally gravitate to locations where pregnant women have been stabbed. Nothing to do with Good Governance at all. Why would you think it?

In many ways, Modi and his rabble – tycoons, neo-Hindu techies, and outright fanatics – are perfect mascots for the changes that have transformed India since the early 1990s: why does a 'change' need a 'mascot'? Are structural socio-economic 'changes' actually like Sports Teams? Do they have a Team Captain and a Marketing Manager and a Mascot? 

 the liberalisation of the country's economy, and the destruction by Modi's compatriots Mishra was Modi's compatriot at the time of the 16th-century Babri mosque in Ayodhya. Long before the killings in Gujarat, Indian security forces enjoyed what amounted to a licence to kill, torture and rape in the border regions of Kashmir and the north-east; a similar infrastructure of repression was installed in central India after forest-dwelling tribal peoples revolted against the nexus of mining corporations and the state. The government's plan to spy on internet and phone connections makes the NSA's surveillance look highly responsible. Muslims have been imprisoned for years without trial on the flimsiest suspicion of "terrorism"; one of them, a Kashmiri, who had only circumstantial evidence against him, was rushed to the gallows last year, denied even the customary last meeting with his kin, in order to satisfy, as the supreme court put it, "the collective conscience of the people".

So, Mishra is now telling us that the Indian State was very evil and genocidal and constantly stabbing pregnant ladies long before Modi. Indeed, the foetus torn out at sword-point meme has been with us since the Moplah uprising.

What he doesn't explain is why the Indian Economy didn't boom even despite all this blood-shed? What makes Modi different? 

The answer, for Mishra, is that India is hurtling over a cliff-face- like the Austrian Empire in 1914.

"People who were not born then," Robert Musil wrote in The Man Without Qualities of the period before another apparently abrupt collapse of liberal values, "will find it difficult to believe, but the fact is that even then time was moving faster than a cavalry camel … But in those days, no one knew what it was moving towards. Nor could anyone quite distinguish between what was above and what was below, between what was moving forward and what backward." One symptom of this widespread confusion in Musil's novel is the Viennese elite's weird ambivalence about the crimes of a brutal murderer called Moosbrugger.'

Why is Mishra mentioning Musil? Is India a member of a military alliance which will soon drag into a World War it can't hope to win? No. Is the Indian Parliament really a hopelessly divided Bear-garden like the Viennese Parliament? Not under Modi- he's got a convincing majority. So what deep point is Mishra making? The answer I think has to do with his stabbing-pregnant-women theory of Indian politics. 'At night we all dream Moosbrugger'- i.e. one fine day everyone in India will wake up and go out and start stabbing pregnant women so as to rise up the way Modi has done because that's the only explanation of Modi's success, ins't it?

 Certainly, figuring out what was above and what was below is harder for the parachuting foreign journalists who alighted upon a new idea of India as an economic "powerhouse" and the many "rising" Indians in a generation born after economic liberalisation in 1991,surely Narasimha Rao and Manmohan Singh get the credit for that? who are seduced by Modi's promise of the utopia of consumerism – one in which skyscrapers, expressways, bullet trains and shopping malls proliferate (and from which such eyesores as the poor are excluded).who were born before 1991, and did not know what time was moving towards, might be forgiven for feeling nostalgia for the simpler days of postcolonial idealism and hopefulness – those that Seth evokes in A Suitable Boy which neither Seth nor Mishra has personal experience of. Set in the 1950s, the novel brims with optimism about the world's most audacious experiment in democracy, endorsing the Nehruvian "idea of India" that seems flexible enough to accommodate formerly untouchable Hindus (Dalits) and Muslims as well as the middle-class intelligentsia. Rubbish! In Seth's book the 'secular' liberal Hindu Minister loses out because his son goes and stabs his former lover, a Muslim, because he thinks his old boy-friend is trying to sleep with his mistress, whereas in fact the fellow was trying to get it on with the daughter of the mistress who was actually his own half sister because his father, the Nawab, had raped the courtesan in question when she was just a little girl. The novel's affable anglophone characters radiate the assumption that the sectarian passions that blighted India during its partition in 1947 will be defused, secular progress through science and reason will eventually manifest itself, and an enlightened leadership will usher a near-destitute people into active citizenship and economic prosperity. This is pure hogwash. The one ray of hope for India is the young Bata executive who can make a shoe with his own hands and thus win the respect of the workers.  But, this young executive is more at home in Hindi than English and only represents progress because he incarnates American style 'know-how'.

 By contrast, the 'box wallah' is a sham- we know he will 'lock out' labour in the Sixties, like a character in a Satyajit Ray film- while his IAS officer brother is a drunken buffoon with a chip on his shoulder which, under license permit Raj, he will have ample opportunity to indulge. There is also an ineffectual poet but least said about him the better. As for the old landed elites, it is clear that their horizon is one of communal politics punctuated by Grace and Favour appointments abroad or at the Center.

India's first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, appears in the novel as an effective one-man buffer against Hindu chauvinism. Actually, the novel highlights the role of Rafi Ahmed Kidwai."The thought of India as a Hindu state, with its minorities treated as second-class citizens, sickened him." In Nehru's own vision, grand projects such as big dams and factories would bring India's superstitious masses out of their benighted rural habitats and propel them into first-world affluence and rationality. The Harrow- and Cambridge-educated Indian leader had inherited from British colonials at least part of their civilising mission, turning it into a national project to catch up with the industrialised west. "I was eager and anxious," Nehru wrote of India, "to change her outlook and appearance and give her the garb of modernity." Even the "uninteresting" peasant, whose "limited outlook" induced in him a "feeling of overwhelming pity and a sense of ever-impending tragedy" was to be present at what he called India's "tryst with destiny". 

Okay, we get it. Nehru was a fuckwit who wrote worhless tripe. So what? That's what politicians do. The truth of the matter is that Resource Constraints in the early years of Independence were such that Nehru himself wore a frayed jacket- he couldn't dress himself let alone the country in the livery of modernity.

That long attempt by India's ruling class to give the country the "garb of modernity" has produced, in its sixth decade, effects entirely unanticipated by Nehru or anyone else: intense politicisation and fierce contests for power together with violence, fragmentation and chaos, and a concomitant longing for authoritarian control.

Is Mishra mad? We have just witnessed an election where only one man said 'I want the job of P.M'. He won a landslide because India really does want a PM who actually wants the job and feels he'll be good at it and can this to the voters. Yes, there has been violence- in Congress controlled Assam where a coalition partner unleashed an anti-Muslim pogrom to signal displeasure at Police activism- but that had nothing to do with 'fierce contests for power'. Similarly, Trinamool violence against Left Front candidates was simply a matter of pay-back and demonstrating ascendancy. The truth is Narendra Modi had a walk-over. Everyone seems to believe that only he can get the Economy back on track and so the patriotic thing is to do a Rahul and give Modi the majority he needs.

 Modi's image as an exponent of discipline and order is built on both the successes and failures of the ancien regime. He offers top-down modernisation, but without modernity: bullet trains without the culture of criticism, managerial efficiency without the guarantee of equal rights. The problem with Mishra's fine phrases is that Hindi speakers can simply go on YouTube and listen to Modi and decide for themselves.  As a matter of fact, that is what Indian voters have done. Modi says 'I don't do any work. I organised the Teams and Delegated. Yes, if anyone has a problem they can ring me and we will sort it out quickly.'

Perhaps, Mishra means by the word 'Modernity' some super-rational Weberian construction. If so, nobody wants it. What people want is a guy you can call when things go wrong and have him call you back in a couple of days explaining how he's fixed things or offering you a refund or something of that sort. We call this 'customer service'. It existed in ancient times, it exists now and we want it to be ubiquitous. How does it benefit anybody to replace a feudal, Thymotic, type of regime with some pseudo-Marxist ideology of 'intense political struggle'? In the old days, if I get robbed and the Police say 'sorry, the other guy is an Aristo, you are just a pleb- so we can do nothing'- fair enough, I have to pocket the insult- but what great benefit is it to me if, instead, the Police say to me- 'Due to the dialectics of Political Struggle, though subjectively you feel you have been robbed, still, from the point of view of Transcendental Objectivity, what really happened was you raped the other guy and then stabbed his belly and dragged a fetus out of his womb at the point of a sword while simultaneously sowing BT cotton and making disparaging remarks about Gramsci.'

Mishra, like Rahul, seems to have bought into the 'Rights based approach'. Nothing wrong with that- so long as Customer Service then becomes the Govt's raison d'etre. However, like Rahul, Mishra doesn't think Governments need to deliver on Customer Service. Why? It's because he has a paranoid fantasy about evil Indians who are all very rich and who look down on ordinary people and who want to ethnically cleanse India to turn it into Singapore.

And this streamlined design for a new India immediately entices those well-off Indians who have long regarded democracy as a nuisance, recoiled from the destitute masses, and idolised technocratic, if despotic, "doers" like the first prime minister of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew. 

But then the Nehruvian assumption that economic growth plotted and supervised by a wise technocracy (sic!) would also bring about social change was also profoundly undemocratic and self-serving. Seth's novel, along with much anglophone literature, seems, in retrospect, to have uncritically reproduced the establishment ideology of English-speaking and overwhelmingly upper-caste Hindus who gained most from state-planned economic growth: the Indian middle class employed in the public sector, civil servants, scientists and monopolist industrialists. This ruling class's rhetoric of socialism disguised its nearly complete monopoly of power. As DR Nagaraj, one of postcolonial India's finest minds, pointed out, "the institutions of capitalism, science and technology were taken over by the upper castes". Even today, businessmen, bureaucrats, scientists, writers in English, academics, thinktankers, newspaper editors, columnists and TV anchors are disproportionately drawn from among the Hindu upper-castes. And, as Sen has often lamented, their "breathtakingly conservative" outlook is to be blamed for the meagre investment in health and education – essential requirements for an equitable society as well as sustained economic growth – that put India behind even disaster-prone China in human development indexes, and now makes it trail Bangladesh.

Needless to say, Pankaj Mishra is a High Caste English speaking Hindu. Modi is a backward caste Gujerati speaker. Amartya Sen himself knows the answer to the question 'Why is investment in Education meager?'' The answer is Govt. School teachers play truant.  Voters don't want more money being handed over to truant teachers- they want teachers held to account first. But since teachers count votes at Elections so the political will to do a deal with them is lacking. Sen's own suggestion- ban private tuition- needless to say, would kill off Education once and for all as a potential avenue of advancement for the least well off.

Dynastic politics froze the Congress party into a network of patronage, delaying the empowerment of the underprivileged Indians who routinely gave it landslide victories. Congress, like other parties, was a Patronage machine in the Nineteen thirties. Nothing to do with dynasties. Nehru may have thought of political power as a function of moral responsibility. Or he may not. He said contrary things. But his insecure daughter, Indira Gandhi, consumed by Nixon-calibre paranoia, turned politics into a game of self-aggrandisement, arresting opposition leaders and suspending fundamental rights in 1975 during a nationwide "state of emergency". She supported Sikh fundamentalists in Punjab (who eventually turned against her) and rigged elections in Muslim-majority Kashmir. In the 1980s, the Congress party, facing a fragmenting voter base, cynically resorted to stoking Hindu nationalism. After Indira Gandhi's assassination by her bodyguards in 1984, Congress politicians led lynch mobs against Sikhs, killing more than 3,000 civilians. Three months later, her son Rajiv Gandhi won elections with a landslide. Then, in another eerie prefiguring of Modi's methods, Gandhi, a former pilot obsessed with computers, tried to combine technocratic rule with soft Hindutva.

Urm...I don't get it Mishra Sahib. I thought you said Modi becoming P.M was like some wholly unprecedented disaster. Now you are saying Rajiv and indira where his forerunners. Of course they killed a lot more people. Still, why stop there? Why not blame Nehru for the killing of Rezakars and the suppression of the Telengana insurgency and so on? Actually, you probably have blamed Nehru for these things in the course of your article. Still, this begs the question, what's so special about Modi? What urgent message are you sending us?
Breaking news- Nothing has changed in India for sixty years- the Prime Minister is a blood soaked tyrant and this will always be the case. Why? It's because Indians are very evil and wicked. Instead of 'intense political struggle' they want to buy stuff- like a cup of tea, or a chocolate biscuit, or a mobile phone- which may sound innocent and harmless but is actually CONSUMERISM and that's totally evil coz it plays into the hands of Globalized Capital and that's very bad coz the big Capitalist countries tend to be Liberal Democracies and India isn't really a Liberal Democracy because Modi doesn't speak posh English and kills babies and so it's like miscegenation- I mean a pure blooded Liberal Democracy shouldn't share a meal with a low caste Illiberal Democracy because ... I mean, what if they have a baby together? How are we to classify the baby? Is it a half Liberal Democracy or a half Illiberal Democracy? Anyway, why risk? Better we just keep separate, I say. That's why Visa ban on Modi should stay in place. What if he gets jiggy with David Cameron? What would Queen, God bless her, say? Anyway, I hope all you illiterate desis have taken my words to heart. Kindly go and do prayaschitam and purify yourself with cow dung for the 'maha-paap' of voting for some Ghanchi fellow what is not even knowing English good. Mind it kindly.

How Martha Nussbaum helped Narendra Modi

The prominent American philosopher, Martha Nussbaum, along with Amartya Sen, has done much to promote the Rights Based approach to Development. More recently, her focus has shifted to the role of 'Public Emotions' in improving outcomes.
 Rahul Gandhi, the best educated member of his dynasty, appears to be deeply invested in this approach.

 His pitch for the 2014 elections was as follows- 'Mummy has already passed Laws like Right to Education, Information, Food etc. Furthermore, we have taken power away from the Ministers and M.Ps and MLAs and vested it in local communities directly answerable to local people. So Effective Capabilities for even the most vulnerable sections of Society already exist. It is literally the case that the poor woman starving in her little hut already has all the Rights and Capabilities she requires so as to 'become the change she wants to see in the world'.  In other words, the job of the Prime Minister is merely ceremonial. If anyone comes to him and says 'I need help' all the P.M can do is reply 'you already have the power and the legal right to get relief. Why are you bothering me? My only possible role is that of displaying some appropriate Public Emotion. Nothing more.'

From the philosophical point of view, this may be all very well and good. But, it gave rise to a bizarre situation where, in 2014, there was only one candidate for the P.M's job who said 'I want the job.I can do it well. What's more, if you have any problem, just drop me a line and I'll sort things out'.
Surely, that's what needs to hear from an applicant for the country's top job?

By contrast, Rahul wasn't just saying he didn't want the job- that could be taken as humility- he was saying that the job wasn't worth having because his Mummy had already waved a magic wand and vested Power in the People- indeed, poor Women living in little huts were already effecting some great revolution and doing amazing things and the C.E.O's of big companies ought to go and learn Management skills from them if they hoped to survive in the new Utopia.

This begs the question, if Rahul didn't want to be P.M- if the job wasn't worth having- what was he campaigning for? The answer, once again, involves  Nussbaum/Sen type philosophy which seeks to put Value Judgments back at the center of Social Choice. Thus, Nussbaum tells us, Modi's speeches, at one time, pandered to feelings of fear and shame. That's bad. So Modi is a bad man. Bad men should lose elections because Democracy is actually nice and shouldn't let nasty men pander to fear and shame coz Martha reckons that's like totally not cool, dude.
Talking ignorant ultracrepidarian nonsense, however, is a good thing because that's what Philosophy is about.
But, is Rahul actually a philosopher?
After all, Rahul ought to have realized that since poor women living in little huts had already been empowered, the onus of defeating Modi fell upon them. No doubt he had a duty to display some 'Public Emotion' from time to time but surely he could do that simply by altering the length of his beard stubble? What more could possibly be required of him? Indeed, even pointing out that poor women living in little huts now have all the power is unnecessary. People could find out this fact for themselves through Right to Information. Thus, had Rahul been consistent in his Philosophy, he shouldn't have gone negative on Modi because if Modi really was a bad man the safest place for him to be bad would be as P.M. because that office now has no power. Suppose it does have some power, then Rahul needed to present himself as a serious rival for the job Modi was angling for. The fact that he didn't bother to do so proves this to be the case.  The fact that Rahul did go negative shows either that he was inconsistent or else had embraced Nussbaum's Public Emotion theory along with Rights based shite. So he was saying 'boo to Modi' not so as to prevent him from becoming PM- which might have forced Rahul himself to take that worthless office- but just coz saying 'boo to Modi' is what Rights based Philosophers- like Nussbaum- do for 'time pass'.

In this way Martha's well publicized displays of Public Emotion with respect to Modi, have ended up helping him to an unprecedented landslide victory. But only because Rahul Baba is so well educated. Had he been stupid, Congress might well have muddled through.

Narendra Modi & the Indian Liberal- part II

Indian 'Classical' Liberalism has a long and distinguished pedigree. It has existed almost as long as English Liberalism has existed. Indeed, historically, there has been a symbiotic relationship between the two.

This is because the East India Company was a typical Tudor monopoly- one created by the Monarch rather than something arising out of the operation of the mercantile capitalism of the City of London.
Pym and Hampden, in protesting Ship Money were also protesting against a method by which the Monarch could make himself financially independent of Parliament and usurp Absolute Power. This would happen if the Monarch had the right to finance the Navy, which in turn would be used to garner vast wealth for him from 'the Indies' which he could use to maintain a standing army.
The position of the Indians under British rule was similar. The taxes they paid for their own defense enabled a foreign Court to prosper by expanding its hegemony which then made it less and less dependent on the goodwill of its subjects and thus less inclined to rule those subjects according to their customary laws.
Pym, it must be mentioned, considered the right of the King even to levy a tax on imported goods- currants, if memory serves- which the Judges had approved, to be a mischievous innovation and a dangerous departure from what obtained under good Queen Bess. In other words, Pym is articulating the central grievance of the class which was to become the mainstay of Indian Liberal Opinion in the second half of the Nineteenth Century.
Bacon and Wentworth might be considered to be forerunners of the sort of Benthamite Imperialism which dominated the High Victorian Raj. True, Bacon had been compelled- 'coward conquest of a wretch's knife'- to shut the gate of Equity- which is why, under the Raj, customary Law, as approved by Shastras, took precedence- but equally true, if unacknowledged, is the fact that Britain, unlike America, eventually took Wentworth's course- and a 'Doctrine of Necessity', or Schmittian 'State of Exception'- is in fact hardwired in the DNA of  South Asian Jurisprudence.
In other words, Indian Liberalism's inability to commit to Legalism has to do with its historical co-evolution, as opposed to Colonial encounter, with the British Constitution's unwritten and unthought known.
Seventeenth Century England- like my Indglish Delhi of the Ninety Seventies- had more words than things- more Hermetic Correlations than Concrete Universals. Its Shakespearean sufflaminandus erat and meretricious Miltonic bombast expended itself in the sort of internecine hollowing out of ethos which, alone, can enslave a People, a Polis, to the project of Empire.
Indian Liberalism- that impossibilist project by which Hearts and Minds continually and ever more egregiously redact their own foundational act of Chrematistic Panic and Capital Flight- is the not Marxian mirror but Occassionalist and impotent image of shite that happened here in England when us filthy beef-eating Mlecchas were still Thymotically poor, Technologically primitive and, in consequence, vastly more Metaphysically Mannerist in prosody and phrenes splittingly precious in prose.
After the Glorious Revolution, more especially under the corrupt Walpole administration, things change.  Whether it is the posterity of the interloper Thomas Pitt or, that scion of an usurper, Tipu Sultan- we see Liberalism, Narcissus like, lose itself in a French mirror- the dubash Ananda Ranga Pillai gives way to that General of Tipu's who, in our Vernacular textbooks, is celebrated for saying Namaz in French.
For Burke, for the Anglo-Irish, for Joyce, ultimately, Parisian synoecism defeats England with its Manchesters and Bradfords in advance.
What of Ind- with its Presidencies and Princedoms and tropical luxuriance of secretive systems of sclerotic Punditry and erotic Purdah?
Cornelia Sorabjee was a shriller Sarojini and both as ultimately ludicrous as Pandita Ramabhai.
Sharada dies- driven out, in the name of Political Correctness, from the highly Politic Charity named for her- eleven days after delivering.  Her child is the Alamma Prabhu- not dead, not alive- of Indian Liberalism.
There is another child- the child the very beautiful Jashodaben could have had- and that is Liberal India's true shehzada.

Razborov-Rudich proves Tejpal was raped

Tarun Tejpal- a fat, fifty year old, fucking horrible Indglish novelist, same as wot I am- was raped in an elevator by Hindutva hooligans working hand in glove with the Feminist Taliban. Yet, irony of ironies!, it is Tejpal who is being pilloried!
What makes it all the more unfair is the universal derision which greeted his assertion that ' CCTV will prove I did nothing wrong in the lift' (i.e. the elevator- you say tomato, we say tamattar) because, as he well knew, there was no camera there.
Surely, as responsible Secularists, we have a duty to find a more charitable interpretation of Tejpal's enigmatic statement?
But how are we to proceed?
The answer, of course, as so often happens on this blog, is by taking recourse to the theory of computational complexity.
Briefly, the character string 'CT,' in Tejpal's reference to CCTV, refers to the Church Turing Thesis- i.e. Tejpal was giving an informal proof of a purely mathematical, not empirical type. Thus, the absence of a camera in the lift is NOT AT ALL germane.

 The fact is, as Wikipedia says (hat tip to ex Chief Justice Katju) 'Proofs in computability theory often invoke^[43] the Church–Turing thesis in an informal way to establish the computability of functions while avoiding the (often very long) details which would be involved in a rigorous, formal proof. To establish that a function is computable by Turing machine, it is usually considered sufficient to give an informal English description of how the function can be effectively computed, and then conclude "By the Church–Turing thesis" that the function is Turing computable (equivalently partial recursive).

Now, it is a well known axiom of Modern Indglish Secular Socialistic Mathematics, that Narendra Modi is constantly prowling around raping everybody and then slitting open their bellies to tear a fetus out of their womb so as to rape that fetus and slit its belly open etc, OBVIOUSLY that's what happened to Tejpal by Church Turing, at least once you take into account the underlying Lyapunov candidate function- conventionally represented as 'V' (Lyapunov functions are useful because they make a Schelling focal point (like Modi's endlessly increasing degree of guilt) a stable solution to the underlying Co-ordination problem in a manner that is robust to empirical refutation). Thus, Tejpal is saying 'See, by Church Turing, the existence conditions for a Lyapunov candidate function proves I was raped by a Feminist Taliban/Hindutva Hooligan of a Madhu Kishwar type ACTING ON ORDERS OF NARENDRA MODI.
"BTW & FYKI all this is explained on page 2 of my 'Alchemy of Desire'- which isn't a totally crap book by a worthless needle-dick rug-muncher at all- but you didn't bother to read it, did you? Just skipped through to the dirty bits except you didn't even persevere with those sections coz the only purple and engorged thing that therein arises is my own insufferable ego plowing my spinchterless colon of prose.
' But enough literary chit-chat. Look, just fucking face facts why don't you? Either Narendra Modi is a Machiavellian monster orchestrating every verifiable Evil or else everything us Indglish 'intellectuals' have been banging on about post Godhra has been just meretricious, mendacious shite.

'Now, by Razborov-Rudich, we know that, since we can't prove Modi's guilt (because the psuedorandom generators used by Modi to cloak his Satanic conspiracy are indistinguishable from the real thing) it follows that our 'natural proofs' of Modi's guilt can't decide PvNP. This is important because, though bilaterality (as for example between me and my rapist in the lift) is in complexity class P, the 'alchemy of Desire' is not. Why? Alchemy is not algorithmically verifiable. This is shown by the fact that whereas what actually happened was Modi's minions totally ass raped me, still I go down in history as a creepy Uncleji type going down on all and sundry whereas, since my English and Punjabi and Inglish novels are way better than Vivek Iyer's, I am not the least cunning linguist ever. Also I've made a lot of money peddling my trash. Iyer is just sad.'
Q.E.D

Tarun Tejpal was raped by BJP goons.

I am not saying Narendra Modi personally molested Tarun in a lift. Nor is Tejpal- yet. What is undeniable is that the hydra headed monster of Hindutva, allied with the Feminist Taliban, raped Tejpal and sent him into a 'shame spiral' such that he started to blame himself and began Emailing all and sundry apologizing for his provocative pony tail and beard which caused a young journalist to force him to perform oral sex upon her in a lift.
In the old days, the khap panchayat would have compelled her to marry her victim so as to restore his 'izzat' and it was probably only to arrange something of that sort that his people contacted her family. But, nowadays, us middle aged men are considered as just 'piece of meat', nothing more. Nobody has even mentioned that it is a violation of mandatory Health and Safety procedures, if not International Human Rights, that Tejpal was raped by Hindutva Feminists who also cut open his belly and dragged out a fetus and then raped the fetus before ripping open its belly and raping its fetus.
I have conducted a sting operation which proves this to the hilt.
Here is the transcript-
Vivek Iyer- Some call you Babu Bajrang, others refer to you as the Hindu Hitler- why did you rape and cut open the belly of Tarun Tejpal, dragging out a fetus which you also raped and then cut a fetus out of? Say Miaow if your answer is 'Modi ordered me to do it. President Obama and his bibi Netanyahu were also present and laughing evilly and making snide remarks about how Secularism is like totally gay.'
Neighbor's cat- Miaow
Vivek Iyer- Okay. Have some milk. Tomorrow, Asaram.

Narendra Modi & Exclusive Jurisdiction

What would happen if Narendra Modi were arrested in London and put on trial for the post Godhra riots?
The BJP win big in 2014 on an anti-British ticket. All the streets and buildings currently named after Gandhi or Nehru get renamed for Savarkar and Dhingra and Bhagat Singh.
That's not a good thing.  It would confuse the fuck out of elderly people like me who still demand the auto driver take us to Curzon Road and Connaught Place as opposed to Kasturba Gandhi ki Bakri ki Marg, and Rajiv ki gandi chaddi ki Chowk or whatever the fuck such places are now called.

In keeping with its long tradition of being behind the times, Kafila, the favorite forum for jhollawallah circle jerks, has a foolish article by Subash Gatade, quoting the no less foolish N. Jayaram, regarding the possibility of arresting Modi in London for human rights violation
Gatade writes-
It may be recalled that for more than eleven years Modi has been yearning to visit the UK, but because of a consistent opposition put up by the secular forces there exposing his alleged role in the 2002 ‘riots’ and with the British government denying any guarantee for his security the plan could never materialise. In fact, he had to cancel his last planned visit to the UK looking at the massive protests which awaited him there accompanied by the inability shown by the British police to defend him as he was to go on a private visit. (2005)And since the families of two British Muslim citizens who had been killed by the frenzied mobs in Gujarat in 2002 were thinking of filing a case against Modi in a British court then, it was considered risky for him to travel there.
...In an important write-up, ‘Narendra Modi, British Invitation and Universal Jurisdiction’ (http://www. countercurrents.org / jayaram160813.htm), a leading journalist N Jayaram tells us why ‘for human rights groups, the prospect of Modi’s London visit is not a crisis but an opportunity.’
According to him
“Should he take up the invitation, they could move courts for his arrest and trial under the principle of Universal Jurisdiction for crimes against humanity.(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_jurisdiction) Although Universal Jurisdiction was not invoked in the 1998 arrest of Chile’s former dictator Augusto Pinochet in London, it put worldwide focus on the principle. Judge Baltasar Garzon in Spain called for his arrest on the ground that some of the thousands of victims of human rights abuses in Chile after the 1973 coup were Spanish citizens. Britain’s Law Lords ruled that Pinochet could not cite diplomatic immunity as certain crimes were too serious for that international arrangement to be invoked. Pinochet spent nearly a year and a half under mostly house arrest.
It may be mentioned here that Pinochet had to spend more than one and half years in London effectively under house arrest and his supporters in the western world like Margaret Thatcher – who had supported Pinochet’s coup against the elected government of Salvador Allende and the bloodbath that followed and the then US President George Bush had to lobby hard for his release. He was ‘freed on health grounds’ despite protests from Jurists and medical experts. This incident was ‘one of the greatest episodes in international legal history’ and ‘the words Universal Jurisdiction gained currency beyond the groves of academe.’
The author discusses other examples of leading personalities or army commanders who had to cancel their trips abroad for similar fear of litigation. He talks about the cancellation of former US president George W, Bush’s trip to Switzerland (2011) in view of the threat of large scale protests. “Amnesty International had asked the Swiss authorities to investigate his role in torture. Amnesty was told that the authorities had no plans to prosecute Bush. But there have been rumblings in other countries, including Spain and Germany, with threats of investigations against leading US officials for torture and other crimes against humanity.”
It was in 2005 that Doron Almog, a former Israeli army commander, had to literally fly back from London without getting down from his aircraft as he was told that some Palestinian groups had moved a court to charge him with crimes against humanity. (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/7251954.stm). Similarly, Tzipi Livni, former foreign minister of Israel, cancelled her proposed trip to Britain (2009) when reports came in that an arrest warrant was out for her role in alleged war crimes in Gaza. The author adds:
She was invited back by Foreign Secretary William Hague in 2011 after an amendment that prevents private individuals from seeking such arrests. The Police Reform and Social Responsibility Act 2011 might make it difficult for private individuals to call for Modi’s arrest should he visit Britain. But nothing prevents foreign governments and judges from issuing warrants to be acted upon by the British authorities.
Definitely Modi is not the only Indian politician whose visits elsewhere have become subjects of controversy. Jagdish Tytler, a senior Congress leader, who has been under the scanner for his alleged role in the anti-Sikh pogrom of 1984, was similarly dropped from a delegation (2009) which was to visit Britain following protests.
The author concludes with this observation:
“India has not signed the Rome Statute that established the International Criminal Court in 2002. China, the United States and Israel are among a number of countries that have chosen to stay out. Thus far the ICC, which has 122 members, has only been able to net perpetrators of mass crimes in Africa. The idea that crimes against humanity such as those that occurred in New Delhi in 1984 or Gujarat in 2002 need to be investigated and punished has yet to catch on in India. But it is an idea whose time may yet come.” 


My comment on this egregious nonsense will of course not be shown by Kafila's, oh! so democratic, editors but I make it available here out a spirit of genuine sadism towards all Humanity.

Gatade''s article, by reason of its reliance on Jayaram's misleading article, is disingenuous in the following respects

1) A British Muslim did not just think of bringing a case against Narendra Modi under International Law, he actually did help Suresh Grover, Prof. Gautam Appa & Jagdish Patel bring such a case. A British judge dismissed it because it lacked substance- i.e no evidence, as opposed to paranoid lies, was presented to the court despite the sedulous 'research' of Indian ex-Judge H. Suresh. That same British Muslim has returned to India, relinquished his British residency, grown rich and is now a fervent acolyte of Narendra Modi. His name is Zafar Sareshwala and he is prime witness for the defense in Madhu Kishwar's 'Modinama''.

2) Britain changed the law in Sept 2011 such that prosecutions in cases of this sort require the permission of the Director of Public Prosecutions.

3) Suppose an International Arrest Warrant is sought from a Universal Jurisdiction country like Spain. Witnesses will still be required to tell the truth. They will face jail time if they tell stupid, self-serving lies. Their character and criminal record will come under scrutiny. Still, let us suppose for a moment that a foreign court grants an International Warrant for Modi, can a U.K judge enforce it? Remember, Judges in this country aren't stupid. They don't cite Wikipedia in their judgments. Still, they are fearless. So what stands in their way? The answer is Modi, as the current Chief Minister of an Indian State, visiting London in his official capacity and with the complaisance of the Govt., enjoys not just clear functional immunity- because, as the Judge said in the Barak arrest warrant case,  “under customary international law, he has immunity from prosecution as he would not be able to perform his functions efficiently if he were the subject of criminal proceedings in this jurisdiction.”- but also, more equivocally, immunity rationae personae. This is because, if the proposed grounds for Modi's indictment comes under the rubric of Command Responsibility, then, clearly, his current position is similar to that of a Head of State or head of Government and thus the action fails. Only if Modi doesn't have Command Responsibility and he is charged with specific acts does the question of jurisdiction arises. By Act of Parliament, Britain recognizes India as a Sovereign Republic with exclusive jurisdiction- this means that whereas a British Court can proceed in the matter, the British Govt. either has to procure a nolle prosequi to stop the proceedings or else risk the ire not just of the Indian Executive but also the Indian Supreme Court. I will return to this point in a moment.
Suppose Modi held no official position and was visiting the U.K in a private capacity. The Court may still prima facie conclude he enjoys immunity rationae materiae. One reason militating for this conclusion is the widespread belief in judicial circles in Britain that India is under the rule of Law. Indian Courts have jurisdiction. To enforce an International Arrest Warrant- for example one issued by Pakistan- against an Indian citizen for a crime committed in India would be an affront to the dignity of the Indian bench.

This brings me to the crux of my complaint against Gatade and Jayaram

4) Jayaram believes Indians are horrible and inhumane people. They commit heinous atrocities against cows by stealing their milk and drinking it or putting it in their coffee. Menaka Gandhi has spoken out on this issue. She tells us her son, Varun, has never had dairy products in his life. No wonder that fat fuck is such a lovable guy.

No doubt Jayaram is entirely correct in saying that Indians are heartless monsters who torture animals. But is he also correct in saying that Indians have not yet caught on to the idea that crimes against human beings, not cats or cows, need to be investigated and punished? Let us suppose he is right. In that case India, from the judicial point of view, is a terra nullis. Indian courts do not have jurisdiction over crimes against humanity- e.g. rape and murder- committed on Indian soil because Indians lack the concept that killing or raping people is wrong. That is why such acts are not illegal in India. This means India is not a country under the rule of Law. Can such a country be sovereign? Yes. Sovereignty is a function of power. As a matter of fact, not conjecture, the Indian Supreme Court has asserted its jurisdiction over crimes committed in India or (in the Enrica Lexie case) on board Indian registered ships. Italy sought to defy the Indian Supreme Court. The Supreme Court cancelled the Italian envoy's diplomatic immunity and was preparing further draconian action. Italy made an ignominious volte face.

Suppose a Spanish Court tries to play a monkey-trick on India by claiming jurisdiction over crimes committed on Indian territory. Would the Indian Supreme Court suffer this insult to its puissance? First the diplomatic envoys of Spain would be placed in jeopardy, secondly Spanish assets would be sequestered, third, Spain would face the treat of War. India is not Liberia. It is not a failed State. It is a nuclear power.

Still, suppose Jayaram and Gatade are right. Suppose India is a country of savages. Suppose the Indian Supreme Court is incapable of punishing crimes like rape and murder because Indians still have not caught on to the idea that these are crimes against human beings and therefore crimes against humanity. In that case, even though the Supreme Court can- as a matter of proven fact, not conjecture- prevail over countries like Italy and Spain, even so, from the moral point of view, should we say 'Foreign Courts should fearlessly take jurisdiction over crimes committed in India'?

What are the logical consequences of our making this demand?

1) We admit that Indian courts suffer some infirmity such that they have no effective jurisdiction over certain types of crimes.

2) By admitting (1) we admit that India is not properly under the rule of law

3) Since a key element of sovereignty in a legalistic sense is that of exclusivity of jurisdiction- by admitting (2) we admit that, de jure, India is not fully Sovereign

4) By admitting (3) we have no prima facie way of rejecting territorial claims by other nations against India. This is because we admit that India's Sovereignty is de jure imperfect, even if de facto it is absolute

5) By admitting (4) we class any and all Indian combatants who forcefully resist the invasion of India as no different from terrorists and thus not protected by the Geneva Convention.

6) By admitting (5) all Indian citizens are de jure guilty of financing and supporting Terrorism. India isn't just a failed state, it is a pariah nation which deserves to be wiped off the face of the Earth.


The fuckwits who write for Kafila are, no doubt, very proud and happy to advocate treason. But, they are not doing so on this occasion. They are merely being stupid and illiterate. So don't start popping the Champagne yet. They will have to work a little harder to be sure of getting the Magsaysay Award .

Madhu Kishwar's Modinama

 On 30th May 2008, Delhi Metropolitan Magistrate Manish Yaduvanshi passed an order that an FIR be registered against notorious Feminist Academic, Prof. Madhu Kishwar for attempting to murder members of the Basoya crime family. However, Kishwar- who terrorized senior political leaders like Kapil Sibal, L.K Advani, and even Prime Minister Manmohan Singh into supporting her- has not spent even a day in jail. 

Little surprise that Kishwar- who is widely rumored to be the lynchpin of the dreaded 'Manushi Sangathan' - a secretive cabal of social workers- is now brazenly flaunting her immunity from the law by freely publicizing and distributing an 'e-book' celebrating the most evil man in History- Narendra Modi.

We asked our intrepid roving reporter- Shree Vivek Iyer- to interview this sadistic harridan and pull no punches in exposing her vileness and genocidal tendencies.

Vivek Iyer- Madam, some have called you Durga Ma, because of your habit of wearing a necklace of skulls around your neck, others call you Hilary Clinton, for the same reason. Is it true that you carved the following highly incendiary words into the torso of Teesta Setalvad while laughing maniacally and massacring the Basoya crime family- wait, don't answer- I haven't yet read out the stuff you carved into Teesta Setalvad's living flesh as she writhed in hideous agony- no, I still haven't finished, please don't interrupt me- here it comes- I will read out your words in a hilarious Bengali accent- like the one Arnab Goswami secretly uses when off camera- while my own more measured and mellifluous comments will be voiced in bold by Shahrukh Khan doing his Rajnikanth imitation-

'The Englishmen who came as traders in the 17th century were befuddled at the vast diversity and complexity of Indian society. Englishmen were not fuddled save by drink. They were traders. Diversity and Complexity create arbitrage opportunities. Thus, rather than being befuddled, English traders made money because that's what traders do. Having come from a culture where many aspects of family and community affairs came under the jurisdiction of canonical law, they looked for similar sources of authority in India. After the Reformation, not canon but Common law and King's Equity was what obtained in England. The same was true in each part of India whose administration they took over. They assumed, for example, that just as the European marriage laws were based in part on systematic constructions derived from church interpretations of Biblical tenets, so must the personal laws of various Indian communities similarly draw their legitimacy from some priestly interpretations of fundamental religious texts. Rubbish. If they could turn a profit administering laws, that's what they did. They followed customary law and codified it in a manner that preserved distinctions just the same as what was happening back at home because there was a market for Law and that was the oligopolistic solution that maximized their rent. It is not the case that these Traders had a mania for homogeneity or that they could enforce it even if they wished.

 Scotland had a different law and still does. Similarly in India, some followed Dayabhaga, others Mitakshara and so on. Some non Church forms of marriage were upheld as part of Common Law in England, some were not or fell into desuetude.

In the late 18th century, the British began to study the ancient shastras to develop a set of legal principles that would assist them in adjudicating disputes within Indian civil society. In fact, they found there was no single body of canonical law, no Hindu Pope to legitimize a uniform legal code for all the diverse communities of India, no Shankaracharya whose writ reigned all over the country. Even religious interpretations of popular epics like the Ramayana failed to fit the bill because every community and every age exercised the freedom to recite and write its own version. We have inherited hundreds of recognised and respected versions of this text, and many are still being created. The flourishing of such variation and diversity, however, did not prevent the British from searching for a definitive canon of Hindu law.

To search for something is not the same thing as finding something or imposing it. What you are suggesting- viz. stupid Brits invented Hindu fundamentalism or Manusmriti or whatever- is nonsense. It didn't happen in Britain. It didn't happen in India. Though it is true that in both countries there was a secular trend towards Codification for reasons of Schelling salience.

Perhaps more egregiously, in their search, the British took no steps to understand local or jati based customary law or the way in which every community - no matter how wealthy or poor - regulated its own internal affairs through jati or biradari panchayats, without seeking permission or validation from any higher authority. Nonsense the Brits justified their 'nightwatchman state' by saying the villages and jaat/biradaris were all self-regulating and perfectly harmonious. Thus, for example, collective fines for individual failure to pay the land-tax wasn't a recipe for disaster. The power to introduce a new custom, or change existing practices, rested in large part within each community. Any individual or group respected within that biradari could initiate reforms. This tradition of self-governance is what accounts for the vast diversity of cultural practices within the subcontinent. What fucking diversity? It's the same shite wherever you turn. For example, some communities observe strict purdah for women, whereas others have inherited matrilineal family structures in which women exercise a great deal of freedom and social clout.  Some disapprove of widow remarriage, while others attach no stigma to widowhood and allow women recourse to easy divorce and remarriage. That's because women don't matter unless they stop having babies in which case you get a new evolutionarily stable equilibrium which itself doesn't matter because the stuff that matters- migration and technology- doesn't necessarily change.

You see, Madhjuji, all your writing and campaigning over the last thirty years has been sheer idiocy and a waste of time. First you are against dowry they you see there was an economic rationale for it and backtrack- but the damage has been done. The Black Economy has taken yet stronger root. First you needed black money to buy property, now you also need black money to get a son-in-law. Bravo!
 How does it matter whether Brits understood or did not understand India? A guy selling T.Vs does not need to know how the thing works. He just needs to know it works and sell at a higher price than he buys. Writing articles and getting worked up on T.V programs serves no fucking purpose at all.

Just recently, you've suddenly come out for Modi. Why? You were fed up with the hypocrisy of the anit-Modi camp. But they are getting paid. If they didn't do it, someone else will. Actually, it's a game with homothetic preferences- Modi needed to be painted as a Muslim killer to rein in his own lunatic fringe.

Everyone in India knows that talking nonsense won't change anything. Nor will pointing out that other liars are lying because the money is in preference falsification and Credentialism.

Anyway, I must say, I'm quite surprised that you haven't interrupted me even once or tried to slit my throat or carry out genocide against people of my caste. Are you sure you are a Professor? I mean a proper Indian Professor like Amaresh Mishra who would at least have tweeted some death threats against my mother and rape threats against my father while listening to me. Look, I only agreed to talk to you because I thought you were a genuine Indian academic with a long history sheet and a talent for extortion. The truth is I want some cousins of mine killed. I already asked Prof. Akeel Bilgrami but you know what those Muslims are like- lazy duffers I tell you always pleading excuse of Namaz or Ramadan or Hajj or Burqa Dutt to get out of a spot of work. Anyway, Madhu...OMG!...is that a huge beard sprouting on your face?....you aren't Prof. Kishwar at all are you...Aiyayo!

Sanjay Subhramaniyam- Ha ha ha ha, I am the ghost of Vasco da Gama, ha ha ha ha, come to kill you by order of President Obama, ha ha ha ha, that's right dude, your cousins are indeed cunningly disguised as Michelle and Barak, ha ha ha ha