Friday 1 November 2024

Hafsa Kanjwal & the Kashmiri Colonization of Kamala's colon

A colony is a territory occupied and administered by people who originated from some other territory and who lack sovereignty (if they have this, they are a 'Dominion' not a 'Colony') even if they enjoy autonomy . Conquest of contiguous territory is not Colonialism. It is mere territorial expansion. The same is true regarding demographic change brought on by peaceful, even if illegal, immigration. 

A country or territory which is occupied and administered by another is not necessarily a colony. The US and its allies occupied, and later maintained garrisons, in Germany and Japan- and more recently Afghanistan and Iraq- but this did not mean any of those countries were colonized. It did mean that they had done evil shit which really pissed off a much stronger power which was now systematically kicking their collective ass and taking names. 

It is perfectly possible for stupid shitheads to describe something as colonialism even if isn't colonialism. Suppose a lot of immigrants move into your neighbourhood. Bigots may say 'we are being colonized by those savages. Did you know they eat puppy dogs and pussy cats?' However, we are not obliged to accept such testimony. We are welcome to tell such bigots to fuck the fuck off.

Equally, people in a portion of a country- e.g. a resource rich province or one which objects to liberal immigration laws- may think they would be better off if they separated from the rest of the nation. Such 'separatists' may claim that their province is being 'colonized' or 'plundered' or that vicious immigrants are eating their puppy dogs. But Separatism has nothing to do with Colonialism.  

Back in the Nineties, a pair of Kashmiri Doctors invaded the USA as part of the colonization of that once great country by evil Islamic fanatics. Hafsa Kanjwal, though only 6 years old at that time, was a member of the Islamic Occupation Army in America which triumphed when an Islamist born in Nairobi- Barack Hussein Osama- became POTUS. Hafsa was notorious for beating, sodomizing, decapitating and committing genocide on trillions of innocent, Christian, Americans. Also, she ate their puppy dogs. 

 To distract attention from her own Colonialist project of subjugating Christian America, Hafsa pretends that the Kashmir her parents fled- because of a rise in Islamist terror in the region subsequent on the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan- is a colony of India. This is not the case. There may be separatism there but there was no Colonialism. Consider the American Civil War. The South was separatist. It didn't say it was a colony of the North. It said the North wanted to get rid of its 'peculiar institution'- viz. slavery. Similarly, the Islamic fanatics of Kashmir- like the Islamic fanatics in America- were attached to their own 'peculiar institution' viz. jihad against kaffirs- and display hostility to democratic institutions as well as to alethic research programs in Higher Education. Towards this end, they publish stupid, mischievous, lies so as to gain influence over bien pensant shitheads. 

Hafsa Kanjwal, a Professor of stupid shite, writes in Aeon-

Colonies of former colonies
India’s ongoing subjugation of Kashmir holds portentous lessons about the nature of contemporary colonialism

But Pakistan's ongoing subjugation of Balochistan is worse as was their previous subjugation of East Bengal. If Hafsa's parents had to flee it was because Pakistan was backing Islamic terrorists in the Kashmir Valley. Sadly, they were not able to conquer it and impose Taliban rule. Hafsa was denied the opportunity to grow up illiterate. Unlike Malala Yousafzai, she was not shot in the head for the crime of going to school.

Though Islamist terrorism created a big problem in Kashmir valley, it was nothing the Indian Army could not handle. Thus Islamic terrorism has had a far more devastating impact on large swathes of Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran and Iraq and... actually, this problem exists even for UK and the US. But no 'portentous' lesson can be learnt from India or China in this regard. Why? They have unlimited military man-power to deal with a demographically very small threat.  The plain fact is, over the last 25 years, Pakistan, with a much smaller population has taken about 80 or 90000 deaths from Islamist violence- whereas India may have taken about about 20,000. Last year, Pakistan had 1438 fatalities from Terrorism. India had 84. 

In April 1955, at a closed session of the Asian-African Conference in Bandung, Indonesia,

which followed the Baghdad pact where Pakistan signed up with the 'Imperial' powers- i.e. Jim Crow America and a Britain which would soon launch, in partnership with the French and Israelis, an unprovoked attack on Egypt. 

India’s prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru

a blathershite 

spoke forcefully about the need for countries in Asia and Africa to refuse to join either of the two great powers – the United States and the Soviet Union – and to remain unaligned. Arguing that alignment with either power during the Cold War would degrade or humiliate those countries that had ‘come out of bondage into freedom’, Nehru maintained that the moral force of postcolonial nations should serve as a counter to the military force of the great powers. At one point, Nehru chided the Iraqi and Turkish delegates at the conference who had simultaneously spoken favourably about the Western bloc and the formation of NATO while lamenting the continued French colonisation of North Africa. Nehru said:
We must take a complete view of the situation and not be contradictory ourselves when we talk about colonialism, when we say ‘colonialism must go’, and in the same voice say that we support every policy or some policies that confirm colonialism. It is an extraordinary attitude to take up.

Nehru was as stupid as shit. Still, his pal Kidwai had pulled the rug under his other great pal- Sheikh Abdullah in Kashmir.  


A few years later, in 1961, along with Josip Broz Tito of Yugoslavia, Sukarno of Indonesia, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana

who wrote to the Brits asking them not to help India against China in 1962 

and Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, Nehru became one of the founders of the non-aligned movement. Having lifted the yoke of British colonialism,

Churchill was very evil. Did you know he prevented the Japanese from conquering India? What a bastard! 

India presented itself as poised to take on the moral and political leadership of the decolonising world.

It could show them how to become incapable of feeding or defending yourself. Also, how come Eisenhower is wiping his own bum but refusing to come and wipe Nkrumah or Nehru's bum? Is it due to Eisenhower is RACIST?  

This was perhaps to be expected, especially given that India was the largest and most populous country to become independent from European colonial rule.

It was the largest and most populous territory to prefer British to Indian masters. Sadly, the Brits slyly fucked off because the place couldn't turn a profit.  

The story of India’s anticolonial struggle, too, had been mythologised by the nonviolent resistance offered by Indian figures such as Mahatma (‘great soul’) Gandhi. Nehru, too, was perceived as a charismatic and well-read leader who spoke for the people of Asia and Africa, and attempted to find what the scholar Ian Hall has called a ‘different way to conduct international relations’. The stature of both men played a critical role in establishing Indian dominance in the Third World order, and also in establishing ‘the idea of India’ as a secular liberal democracy that was built on the foundational idea of unity in diversity.

Nonsense! India had refused a seat on the Security Council and a larger role in world affairs. It doubled down on begging for food and 'free money' from Uncle Sam. However, it was very careful to keep biting the hand that fed it.  

Even as Nehru proclaimed the moral superiority of India for taking a stance against colonialism in all forms, he oversaw India’s colonial occupation of Kashmir.

Nope. Back in 1932, at the time of the Second Round Table Conference, there was a revolt against the Maharaja of Kashmir in the North West portion of the Kingdom. The Maharaja got help from the Viceroy but that area was subsequently garrisoned by British, not Dogra, officers. At the time of Partition, the British officers were content that the territory go to Pakistan and there was also a tribal invasion assisted by Pakistani army officers. The Maharaja acceded to India and India sent troops to save the Valley whose people didn't want to be raped and massacred by the invader. The problem was that the Muslim majority of the Valley wanted to dominate Hindu majority Jammu (actually there was some ethnic cleansing there) and Buddhist majority Ladakh. Sadly, Sheikh Abdullah got a bit too big for his boots and was replaced by a capable administrator under whom Kashmir made good progress. That is why there were no support there for the Pakistani infiltrators who turned up in 1965. Meanwhile Pakistan's colonial policies towards East Bengal would lead to the partition of that country.  

In the middle of the 20th century, a wave of anticolonial and national liberation movements gained independence from European powers, by exercising their right to self-determination.

No. They got freedom because the colonial power felt the game was not worth the candle. Sometimes this was because of the high cost of defeating a native insurrection. At other times, it was because the place was a shithole.  

Nationalist leaders of the former colonies, however, remained committed to the ideals of the nation-state and its territorial sovereignty that derived from European modernity.

No. Nationalist leaders came in all shapes and sizes. Some were Communists. Others were theocratic. Yet others just wanted to get rich through corruption.  

Independence, it was widely accepted, came in the form of the nation-state,

No. You could have a multi-ethnic empire or confederation or collection of 'Soviets' or what have you.  

which outshone other forms of political organisation or possibilities.

No. Malaysia was a Federation where the Presidency rotated amongst various royal houses while Indonesia (which claimed Malaysia) went in a different, initially crazier, direction. Iran and Ethiopia had Emperors while, in some other countries, military dictators replaced monarchs.  

The borders of the nation-state became contested,

like the border between France and Germany of Austria-Hungary and Italy.  

as European powers often imposed boundaries that ill suited visions of what constituted the political community.

This was certainly true of inter-war Europe.  

This would have deleterious consequences for places where geography, demographics, history or political aspirations posed serious challenges to nationality.

e.g. Europe.  

In turn, newly formed nation-states asserted their newfound sovereignty through violence and coercion,

just as in Europe where newly formed nation-states- e.g. France- asserted their newfound sovereignty by chopping off the heads of lots of people and fighting a war in the Vendee.  

which had implications for Indigenous and stateless peoples within their borders

like the Romani in Europe or the Sami in Scandinavia.  

whose parallel movements for self-determination were depicted as illegitimate to the sovereign nation-state order.

Just like in Europe.  

Mona Bhan and Haley Duschinski call this process ‘Third World imperialism’.

Those two shitheads don't get that a lot of 'Third World' countries had Emperors before they were colonized.  Still, it is a fact that after independence, people in many African and Asian countries displayed flatulence. This highlights the paradox that decolonization did not lead, as many have claimed, to the disappearance of the colon or intestines or anal sphincter. Consider what Nehru said in a closed session of the Bandung Conference 'I did not fart just now. Evil Viceroys were causing Indians to fart. Even now, Baghdad Pact is trying to get our Iraqi friends to fart. Only through Non-Alignment based on Secular, Socialist, Sententiousness sans Sexy Shenanigans can we preserve our new found freedom from flatulence. Don't point your finger at me and hold your nose! If anyone farted it was the fucking Turkish delegate. Did you know Turkey is a member of NATO? Fuck you Turkey! Fuck you very much!' 

Some anticolonial nationalists were real nationalists,

while others were pretending to come from the planet Uranus 

that is, they saw claims of self-determination within their imagined community of a nation as ‘separatist’, ‘secessionist’, ‘ethnonationalist insurgencies’ or ‘terrorism’.

Why America got so angry when some nice Arab peeps came to their country and killed lots of infidels on 9/11?  

Such framings, rife in Indian discourses on Kashmir, are ahistorical and dehumanising.

It is very ahistorical and dehumanising to protest against nice Muslim peeps putting kaffirs out of their misery.  

When we move beyond seeing these regions from the perspective of the dominant nation-state, we come to see how they are places with their own histories, imaginaries and political aspirations –

e.g the desire to kill kaffirs. Why can't Kamala Harris just stab her Jewish husband repeatedly? Is it because she is Islamophobic?  

some of which may reinscribe the nation, while others seek to move beyond it through understandings of other forms of sovereignty.

or lunacy. Still, this lady will get some nice reward for anti-India propaganda. But why bother? India is out of Quad in all but name.  The danger that India might ally with America has been averted. 

In popular and even scholarly discourses, colonialism is often seen as happening ‘overseas’ – from Europe to somewhere in the Global South.

No. It is not seen as happening at all. It isn't the case that people are upping sticks to go to some new continent currently only inhabited by penguins or guys with sticks through their noses.  

Many people see colonialism as something that we are past temporally, despite acknowledgement of its ongoing legacies.

Which only stupid academics teaching worthless shite whine about 

Forms of colonialism within the Global South remain more difficult for many to see because many of these regions are geographically contiguous to one another and, thus, seen as having some form of cultural or racial unity that would form a nation.

Colonialism and Emperors who wanted more and more territory ended a long time ago. You may as well gas on about the Spanish Inquisition. Did you know that many so called 'Protestants' nevertheless burn heretics at the stake? Look at Mike Pence.  

This results in what Goldie Osuri

a Telugu Christian and anti-India hack. She is also involved in 'Whiteness studies'.  

calls a ‘structural concealment of the relationship between postcolonial nation-states and their [own colonies],’ as well as the concealment of ‘the manner in which postcolonial nationalism is also an expansionist project.’ Contemporary colonies – like

Balochistan?  

Kashmir,  Western Sahara, Puerto Rico, Palestine, East Turkestan, among others

Puerto Rico? Why not Scotland? How about Wales?  

show the porous boundary between colonialism and postcolonialism, raising some difficult questions about the current global order.

No they show people who teach stupid shit are stupid shitheads. 


The Himalayan region of Kashmir, at the northernmost tip of the subcontinent, is surrounded by India, Pakistan, China and Afghanistan. Kashmir had long been a separate kingdom,

it was part of the Mughal and then the Sikh Empire. It was a British protectorate before the Maharaja acceded to India.  

at the confluence of Persian and Indic spheres – hard to simply mark into the Persianate or the Indic (themselves, as Mana Kia points out, somewhat amorphous descriptions). Starting in the 16th century, Kashmir came to be ruled as a province by the Mughal, Afghan, and Sikh empires. When the British ruled the subcontinent, they sold Kashmir to the Dogras, Hindu chiefs from the nearby region of Jammu, in the aftermath of the first Anglo-Sikh War in 1846. Under the Dogras, the newly constituted Jammu and Kashmir was

slightly less shite than previously. But it was plenty shite.  

one of the larger princely states within the broader ambit of British colonial rule. Its strategic significance in the north of the subcontinent was important for the British, especially during political competition with Russia for influence in Central Asia, known as the Great Game.

Not really. The place was very poor. Still, the Summers there were less horrible than on the Indian plains.  


Unlike most princely states, Jammu and Kashmir was one of the few where the religious identity of its ruler was different from those of the majority of its subjects.

There were about 24 non-Muslim majority states ruled by Muslims. There were two or three non-Muslim ruled states with a Muslim majority- e.g. J&K and Kapurthala.  

The Dogras were Hindu, while more than three-quarters of the people in the state were Muslim. This perhaps would not have been so significant had the Dogras not effectively run what the historian Mridu Rai has called ‘a Hindu state’, whereby the rulers privileged the Hindu minority and excluded ‘Muslims in the contest for the symbolic, political and economic resources of the state’. Kashmiri Muslims faced immense repression.

As they had from Afghan and other Muslim overlords 

Most of them were peasants or artisans, forced to pay high taxes to the Dogra authorities. While an anticolonial movement against the British spread across British India, in Jammu and Kashmir, an anti-Dogra freedom movement gained traction in the 1930s and ’40s, only to be sidelined by the sweeping events across the subcontinent.

Nope. It came to power when Sheikh Abdullah became Premier.  


During the Partition of 1947, the territories that the British directly (British India) or indirectly (princely states) governed in the subcontinent became the two new nation-states of India and Pakistan. Independence, and partition, ended nearly two centuries of British colonial rule. Partition was far from inevitable. Leaders of the Muslim League, such as Muhammad Iqbal and Muhammad Ali Jinnah, discussed a large federation with largely self-governing autonomous provinces to address the concerns of communities, especially Muslims of the subcontinent, who feared Hindu domination in a democratic India.

The problem was that Muslims liked killing kaffirs. Sadly, Islamists also like killing 'kufr' Muslims who aren't killing kufr Muslims because, obviously, they themselves are fucking kuffar! Kill them! As for the Shias, don't get me started mate.  

In 1947, when the British hastily drew the lines that established India and Pakistan, nearly 1 million people were killed and another 15 million displaced in the ensuing violence.

Sadly, Kashmir Valley was not turned over to the tender mercies of tribals who would have raped everybody to death- including the goats.  

However, the consolidation of India’s other territorial boundaries was not without incident. Junagadh, a princely state in what is today Gujarat, which had a Muslim ruler but a majority Hindu population, was annexed in February 1948; here, a plebiscite was held and an overwhelming majority voted for India. In September 1948, Nehru violently annexed the princely state of Hyderabad during what was called Operation Polo. Nehru crushed movements for self-determination in Northeastern India, in Nagaland

whose charming inhabitants liked head hunting 

and Manipur.

the insurrection began in 1964. Nehru was dead by then.  

In mid-1947, in the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir, Hari Singh, the last Dogra ruler, brutally crushed a local Muslim anti-Dogra rebellion. The rebels wanted Jammu and Kashmir to join Pakistan and were afraid that the Hindu ruler would opt for India. The height of the violence became known as the Jammu Massacre and lasted from October to November 1947.

Hindus and Sikhs ethnically cleansed Muslims so Jammu remained part of India.  

The Dogras, supported by Right-wing forces in India, including the RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh or the ‘National Volunteer Organisation’) ethnically cleansed Muslims from Jammu, changing the demographics of the region from a Muslim to a Hindu majority in a matter of weeks.

Dogras are smart. M.K Rasgotra was a Dogra Brahmin.  

After Pathan Muslims from northwest Pakistan joined their coreligionists in the rebellion against the Dogras and were threatening to take over Kashmir, Singh signed a contested Treaty of Accession with the Indian government. By the terms of the treaty, India sent its army into Kashmir in late October 1947. India and Pakistan subsequently went to war and, in January 1948, India took the Kashmir issue to the United Nations. The UN called for a plebiscite or referendum to be held in the region once hostilities ceased (with the options being India or Pakistan). In 1949, the UN brokered a ceasefire line, later renamed the Line of Control, that divided the region between the two countries.

The UN was as useless then as it is now. At the time the US thought Abdullah might be a Commie in disguise. That's one reason the rug was pulled from underneath him. Still, he had pushed through land reform. The Valley began to prosper.  

At first, Nehru agreed to the plebiscite, confident that the people of the region would vote for India. Yet, as it became clear that a plebiscite would not go in India’s favour, his commitment to it waned.

No. The Resolution was fatally flawed because it required Pakistan to remove 'tribesmen and Pakistani nationals not normally resident therein who have entered the State for the purposes of fighting, and to prevent any intrusion into the State of such elements and any furnishing of material aid to those fighting in the State.' No government in Pakistan, then or now, could stop tribals rampaging. 

While he ostensibly viewed the UN as an important international body tasked with promoting world peace, Nehru resisted a number of UN resolutions. He declared that Pakistan had joined military alliances with the US which made the plebiscite moot.

He was posturing for the benefit of the Indian Left. Still, Abdullah's supporters had started up a Plebiscite front in 1955.  

India used other justifications for its opposition to a referendum, asserting that Pakistan had not removed its army from Kashmir, which the UN had called for, and arguing that local elections to the Jammu and Kashmir Constituent Assembly served in lieu of the plebiscite and proved that Kashmiris had opted for India. Nehru maintained that these local elections made a plebiscite redundant. In fact, UN resolutions had called for both countries to remove their troops, but there was no agreement about the manner of troop removal, or their number, nor about the entity that would oversee the plebiscite.

In other words, the resolution was worthless. Why not ask Cows to stop saying 'moo'? That would be cool.  

In 1951, the US also stated that local elections in Kashmir were not a substitute for a plebiscite.

Nor was sodomizing goats. But you can't prevent tribal militias from doing so any chance they get. 

Within the part of Kashmir that it controlled, the Indian government put client regimes in power that were in support of accession to India, promising them greater autonomy within the Indian union. This autonomy was enshrined in Article 370 of the Indian constitution, which gave the Jammu and Kashmir state ‘special status’ within the Indian Union.

In other words, it would have lower rights. Sheikh Abdullah was cool with that because it meant, when he returned to power, he could push through draconian legislation to incarcerate his opponents.  

It ‘allowed’ the state its own constitution, flag and legislative assembly; in addition, the head of the state was called a prime minister, unlike Indian states where the head was a chief minister.

Under Provincial Autonomy, they were 'Prime Ministers'.  J&K's Premier turned into a Chief Minister after 1965. 

India was supposed to be responsible for defence, foreign affairs and communication. While India argued that Kashmir’s client regimes and local political leaders were ‘democratically elected’, this was not the case. The first election in 1951 for the local assembly was rigged as the pro-accession National Conference ran unopposed in 73 out of 75 seats. Those who opposed Kashmir’s accession to India were not allowed to run.

Pakistan did get around to holding a free and fair general election some twenty years later. It promptly broke in two. Incidentally, Pak occupied Kashmir is supposedly independent.  

Pakistan resisting its troop removal from Kashmir was also based on the argument that a plebiscite could not take place under a local government that was effectively put in power by the Indian state as that would influence the outcome.

Within a few years, India moved beyond the restricted mandate of Article 370, and started to intervene in Kashmir’s internal affairs. Kashmir’s first prime minister and client politician, Sheikh Abdullah, offered some resistance.

His grandson just won the assembly election. It looks as though statehood will be restored next month.  

A 1953 coup replaced him with his deputy, Bakshi Ghulam Mohammad. The Indian government would replace him with the next prime minister, G M Sadiq. Meanwhile, Kashmiri resistance to Indian rule grew, as Kashmiris demanded the plebiscite

Abdullah's supporters did that.  

recommended by the UN and agreed upon by India and Pakistan.

Not really. There was some talk of Nehru letting go of Kashmir, but that ended when he died. Ayub Khan thought the people of the Valley would welcome Pakistan's army in '65. But they hated Pakistan even more than they hated kaffirs.  

In the 1960s, some organised political mobilisations began to speak of a third option – complete independence from both India and Pakistan. Eventually, in the late 1980s, a rigged election and the impact of international developments – including the first Intifada in Palestine and the Afghan defeat of the Soviet Union – sparked an armed rebellion against Indian rule, supported by Pakistan.

Which failed miserably. Pak sponsored terrorists decided killing Pakistanis was safer and more profitable than going across the border and getting slaughtered by the Indian army. Shooting Malala Yousafzai is just so much more satisfying than having some Indian interrogator shove a bumboo up your bum.  

India militarised Kashmir at this time, making it the most militarised region in the world.

Both countries need a place to park their soldiers.  

The 1990s were a harrowing period in Kashmir, with daily news of killings, massacres, enforced disappearances, sexual violence, torture, crackdowns and arrests.

People in Delhi or Islamabad laughed heartily at such news. But, the problem with terrorism is that spill over into your own backyard. Hindu India had less to fear in this regard. Islamic Pakistan has suffered greatly. It can't even protect Chinese nationals. the danger is that Chairman Xi will abandon that bankrupt failed state while forming an alliance with India. After all, Xi wrote the book on how to re-educate Muslim separatists.  I suppose after the Dalai Lama pops his clogs, Nehru's China alliance will be revived. 

Protected by draconian laws like the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, the Indian army had (and still has) impunity in its control and governing of Kashmir.

Just like Pakistani army in Azad Kashmir or Balochistan.  

As Amnesty International reported in 1995, and the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights confirmed in 2018 and 2019, there is a ‘consistent pattern of gross violations of human rights in Jammu and Kashmir’.

Scrapping statehood- thus bringing the police under the central government- turned out to be a great idea. The contrast between the freedom and security on the Indian side of the border and terrorism afflicted Islamic Pakistan has become stark indeed. Still, no doubt, this lady wants Kashmir valley can come under the Taliban so that people without penises are confined to their own homes.

Kashmir is India’s colony.

No. It is an integral part of the Indian Union. Pakistan occupied Kashmir is a colony.  

The exercise and expansion of Indian territorial sovereignty, especially in Kashmir, is a colonial exercise.

Only if Texas is a colony of the US and Fort Cavazos hosts an army of occupation. 

The exercise of Indian power in Kashmir is coercive, lacks a democratic basis, denies a people self-determination, and is buttressed by an intermediary class of local elites or compradors.

Only in the sense that the exercise of US power in Texas is coercive. Did you know that Islam is not the State religion of Texas? Women there don't even have to wear burqa! How can you say such a place is not the colony of the Satanic kuffar government of Amrika?  

But it is also colonial because India’s rule in Kashmir relies on logics of more ‘classical’ forms of colonialism from Europe to the Global South:

just like Joe Biden is relying on Jewish logic to befool the innocent Muslims of America so that they are not even knowing they are Muslim!  

civilisational discourses, saviourism, mythologies, economic extraction and racialisation. As with all imperial or colonial forces, India has sought to rule over Kashmir through subjugating its people and trampling their rights.

Just as Sir Keir Starmer is presiding over genocide of trillions of Muslims in UK while Joe Biden is personally sodomizing trillions of Netan-Yahoos just because this irks Hamas. 

India’s status as a leader of a global anticolonial order

is like Britain's status as a leader of opposition to the Spanish Inquisition.  

has made it difficult for the world to see Kashmiris as colonised.

Just as it has become difficult to see that Britain is colonized by Sir Keir Starmer who is busy exterminating trillions of indigenous Muslims.  

It has obscured the anticolonial struggle of Kashmiris against India.

Which, sadly, isn't as lucrative as the struggle against the kuffar of Pakistan.  

So, there has not been much support for Kashmir’s anticolonial struggle among various solidarity and anticolonial movements around the world.

Support for the Tibetans was and is useless. The same goes for support for Baloch or Ahmadiyas or non-Muslim minorities in Pakistan.  

For decades, India insisted that the ‘Kashmir conflict’ was a territorial dispute to be solved between India and Pakistan; in recent years, it has denied that there even is a dispute or conflict in Kashmir. India instead maintains that Pakistan is interfering in India’s ‘internal affairs’.

It claims PoK. Pakistan may realize it was a mistake to pretend the place was independent.  

This claim completely erases the agency of Kashmiris who have been demanding their right to self-determination for more than seven decades.

Sadly, this lady's claims don't erase shit.  

Today, from Indian leaders on international forums to the BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) IT Cell accounts on social media, you will hear that Kashmir is ‘an integral part of India’. The repetition is often supplemented by narratives of a 5,000-year-old Indian civilisation featuring a prominent role for Kashmir or claims that Kashmir simply belongs to Hindus.

How can anything belong to kaffirs? Next you will be saying that Biden has the right to rule US even though he does not have long beard and an Islamic name! Also, why hasn't he forced Kamala to wear burqa and to stab her Jewish husband repeatedly?  

In reality, Kashmir’s history is far more vibrant than that conceived of by exclusionary Indian nationalist history;

Sadly, because of the Indian army, its vibrant history could not end with everybody- including the goats- getting raped to death by Afghans 

Kashmir defies easy civilisational binaries.

Just like America which is actually contiguous to Mecca Sharif. Yet Joe Biden is pretending it is not now nor has always been an integral part of the Caliphate.  

Through the Silk Road, Kashmir was a pivotal part of East and Central Asia.

Nope. It didn't matter in the slightest. The place was very poor. Still, it could provide a refuge from Mongol or other invaders from time to time.  

Kashmiri traders and travellers journeyed from Srinagar to Samarkand, Bukhara, Kashgar and Tibet.

Also goats used to visit. This was very very important because vibrant goats were embracing Islam and saying 'death to kaffirs!' and 'USA is the Great Satan!'  

Just as Kashmir was home to vibrant Sanskrit literature like the Rajatarangini, it was also home to Persian literature, like the Waqiat-i-Kashmir

a chronicle of famine and death 

and the Baharistan-i-Shahi.

which was popular amongst goats.  

Kashmir does not exclusively belong to any community – it has been home to Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims (including Sunnis and Shias) and Sikhs.

What about goats? Were they not very vibrant?  

Many Indian scholars, too, replicate the notion that Kashmir is ‘integral’ to India. Viewing Kashmir’s history only from the prism of Indian nationalist frameworks, scholars like Sumit Ganguly and Sumantra Bose are unable to move beyond the need to situate Kashmir firmly within the Indian nation-state.

Which is where it has remained for 75 years.  

Even the postcolonial scholar Partha Chatterjee, who, while critical of nationalism and a founder of the field of subaltern studies, conceptualises Kashmir entirely within an Indian constitutional or national framework.

Because Pak army is shit.  

Mainly focusing on the events surrounding 1947 in Kashmir, as well as the decades after the armed rebellion of the 1980s, an earlier generation of Indian scholars tried to find answers to the ‘failures’ of Indian democracy to better accommodate Kashmir within its federal structure, refusing to acknowledge the denial of self-determination and imposition of a colonial occupation.

Just like Joe Biden who won't even admit that US troops are forcefully subjugating trillions of Texan Muslim goats.  

More recently, the field of Critical Kashmir Studies has emerged to contest these statist framings, placing the study of Kashmir more firmly into anticolonial and anti-occupation epistemologies.

Sadly, the field of Critical Texan Studies has, as yet, failed to place the study of Tacos on a firmly anti-Biden footing. This is because relevant goats are lacking in vibrancy probably because they are not playing pivotal role in the Silk road.  

Scholars of Critical Kashmir Studies

are less vibrant than goats. Sad. 

examine how colonialism, settler-colonialism and occupation are all important aspects of India’s relationship with Kashmir, elements of which India has used to fortify its rule in Kashmir over time, and to manage Kashmiri resistance.

Just like the illegal American occupation of Texas.  


In truth, Kashmir was made integral to India in the aftermath of Partition.

India has a unitary constitution. There is no 'dual sovereignty' such as is enjoyed by Texas.  

Through Kashmir’s client regimes, as well as the type of state-building that occurred under those regimes, India was able to further legally, economically and politically integrate Kashmir into the Indian Union. In my book Colonizing Kashmir (2023), I examine the decade that Bakshi Ghulam Mohammad, the second prime minister of the state of Jammu and Kashmir, was in power, from 1953-63. As a client politician, he was tasked with confirming the state’s contested accession to India, but also with ensuring that Kashmiris realised that being under Indian rule would benefit them.

He was a good administrator. The stupid Kamraj plan ousted him.  

The Indian government and Kashmir’s client regimes initially supposed that, if Kashmiris were to see the benefits of Indian rule, alternative political aspirations, such as independence or merging with Pakistan, could be kept at bay. As Nehru is reported to have told his predecessor, Sheikh Abdullah: ‘India would bind Kashmir in golden chains.’

Reported by a liar. India had no fucking gold.  

I argue that Bakshi did this by utilising the politics of life, in which the Indian government and Kashmir’s client regimes propagated development, empowerment and progress to secure the wellbeing of Kashmir’s population and to normalise the occupation for multiple audiences.

This proves he was very evil.  

In an attempt to secure the livelihoods of Kashmiris, the politics of life entailed foregrounding the day-to-day concerns of employment, food, education and provision of basic services. At the same time, demands for self-determination were heavily repressed.

Not really. Kashmiris are a sensible people.  

Policies focused on land reform, building schools and increasing employment opportunities.

Bakshi was acutely invested in financially integrating Kashmir to India. He differed from Abdullah in seeing financial integration as important to development. Between 1953-1954, Bakshi renegotiated Kashmir’s financial relationship with the Indian government, placing certain fiscal demands on the Indian state with regards to grants and agricultural subsidies. The new arrangement also undermined Kashmir’s autonomy, ensuring that it would not be self-sufficient.

i.e. less reliant on medical and educational services provided by goats. 

In this way, Kashmir grew dependent on the Indian state,

i.e. it stopped being as poor as shit 

which gave the Indian government great leverage. Bakshi’s example is important to understand that colonial occupations are not a one-way process.

Similarly, the fact that Texans have a good standard of living doesn't mean they aren't actually starving Muslims who have been befooled by Biden into thinking they are kaffirs of some disgusting sort.  

They require native enablers, local collaborators who have agency in determining its contours.

and are respectably married to other goats 

In the 1950s and ’60s, India also turned to film and tourism in order to further India’s colonial occupation of Kashmir, especially for Indian audiences.

The TV series 'Dallas' furthered America's colonial occupation of Muslim majority Texas- especially for audiences made up of kuffar goats.  

Dozens of Indian films, including most of the leading blockbusters like Kashmir Ki Kali (1964) or Jab Jab Phool Khile (1965), were made in Kashmir during this time, and middle- and upper-class Indian tourists flocked to Kashmir throughout the year for fun and adventure.

Pakistan was much nicer that India in that it sent terrorists not tourists.  

Through their personal or cinematic experiences of Kashmir’s beautiful landscape – its rivers, lakes, forests and mountains – Kashmir became what Ananya Jahanara Kabir calls a ‘territory of desire’ for the Indian imaginary, consolidating colonial claims.

Just as 'Dallas' consolidated Kuffar colonial claims on the purely Islamic lands of Texas.  

Kashmir was also a place of religious attachment for Indian Hindus,

which is why Kashmiris like killing Hindus. Sadly, two can play at that game.  

and cultivation of Kashmir’s links with Hinduism was important to the early Indian colonial project.

Whereas killing Hindus and Sikhs was important to the early Pakistani colonial project. Sadly, they eventually had to settle for killing Bengalis, Baloch, Ahmadiyas and each other.  

Nehru and other Indian leaders would say that India’s secular ideals (as opposed to Pakistan’s religious ones) were proven superior through its only Muslim-majority state ‘choosing’ India.

Abdullah and his son and his grandson have chosen India. The last named is back in office as Chief Minister.  

Despite exploiting Kashmir’s ‘secular credentials’ for international audiences,

which is what America did when it represented pious Texan Muslims as 'cowboys' in films like 'Stagecoach' and 'Red River'.  

for domestic ones, India largely presented Kashmir as a Hindu place

Texans were presented as speaking English and going to Church whereas the fact is 1.5 trillion Texans are Arabic speaking Muslims.  

and the heart of Indian civilisation from ancient to present times. Muslim monuments, mosques, figures and histories were erased or toned down in tourism materials for Indian travellers.

Who were escaping from supposedly Texan 'cowboys'.  

In the dozens of Indian films made in Kashmir

they were typical rich girl loves poor boy or, more complicatedly, poor girl is actually rich girls who loves rich boy who is actually very poor because two babies were swapped at birth or some such hooey.  

during this time, it was rare to find a Muslim character, astounding given its Muslim-majority status.

Not astounding given the nature of the films. If the characters involved were Muslim rich girl can have temporary marriage with poor boy or, if things are the other way around, rich dude can have 4 poor wives and just keep divorcing them as fresh goods enter the market.  

Through educational institutions, school curricula and cultural reform, the Indian government and Kashmir’s client regimes have attempted to produce certain kinds of Kashmiris, in particular, good Kashmiri secular subjects.

Why not concentrate on churning out terrorists who will force women to stay at home?  

Yet, as a part of this secularism, historical and literary works have foregrounded Hindu geographies, imaginaries and histories, relying on British colonial and Brahmanical understandings of Kashmir’s history. For example, the ‘origin’ story of Kashmir (basically, how the region came to be) used in history curricula and tourism manuals relied on mythological Sanskrit texts like the Rajatarangini. It portrayed Hindus as indigenous or aboriginal to Kashmir, and Kashmir being a place of ancient Hindu learning.

Whereas, as with Texas, Kashmir was actually contiguous with Mecca Sharif. Its original inhabitants spoke Arabic till subjugated by Joe Biden.  

Muslims were depicted as ‘invaders’.

Whereas they were actually indigenous terrorists.  

Accounts of Kashmir’s past rely on Sanskrit texts (and also conflate mythology with history) while erasing other works in Persian that offer different narratives of history and belonging by drawing upon Kashmir’s significance for the Islamic world.

Sadly, that significance now lies in the fact that if you do terrorism there, your life will be very brief.  

In short, Indian nationalist history has relied on Orientalist and Brahmanical renderings of history to help enable anti-Muslim history.

Whereas this lady's history relies on stupidity and ignorance.  

This has then furthered the idea that Kashmir is ‘integral’ to India.

Not to mention a place that is lethal for Islamist terrorists.  

Bakshi’s decade in power consolidated India’s colonial occupation of Kashmir, but it still did not result in emotionally integrating Kashmiris to the Indian union. The year 1963, when Bakshi was ousted from power, saw the flourishing of large movements for self-determination in Kashmir.

If so, why were Pakistanis not welcomed in 1965? 

After the Indian government massively rigged a local election in 1987,

The Nehru dynasty and the Abdullah dynasty were playing silly games. Sadly, both dynasties have grown stronger over the past couple of years. 

Kashmiris took up armed resistance.

Nafsa and her parents invaded the US towards this end.  

The Indian state resorted to killings, torture and disappearances.

Nafsa and her parents became US citizens. Their taxes helped pay for the slaughter of 1.3 million Muslims and the displacement of tens of millions more in the so called 'war on terror'. No doubt, Nafsa is delighted that the Taliban is back in power in Afghanistan. If only India could be defeated militarily so Kashmiri girls can enjoy the benefits of Sharia law! 

This does not mean that the decades prior were peaceful –

It did mean the Kashmir Valley didn't turn into a Taliban training camp and US drones didn't keep slaughtering its people. Evil Indian Army was responsible for this tragic outcome.

state repression was high – but that various strategies were foregrounded in different moments, especially in response to Kashmiri resistance and international developments.

In August 2019, India revoked Kashmir’s semi-autonomous status,

thus greatly curbing terrorism and corruption. Now the Abdullahs are back in charge, things will worsen.  

fully annexing the region, and advancing its settler-colonial ambitions.

Only in the sense that Nafsa is advancing her settler-colonial ambition to turn the US into an terrorist training camp.  

The government revoked laws that had previously restricted land, property and employment rights to Kashmir’s permanent residents.

They remain. Sadly, the Kashimri Muslims colonial-settler desire to dominate Ladakh has been frustrated. Will Jammu be split off or will it be left to the tender mercies of the corrupt Abdullah clan?  

These restrictions had been insisted upon by Kashmir’s earlier client regimes to protect the demographics of the Muslim-majority state. Jammu and Kashmir’s Muslims now fear demographic change and an accelerated settler-colonial agenda by which Indian (Hindus) can now buy land and property and settle in the region, undermining the movement for self-determination. Indian officials are already on the record calling for ‘Israeli-like’ settlements to be built in Kashmir for Hindus.

Christian Americans may equally fear Islamist settler-colonialism. Did you know Muslims are buying property in your neighbourhood? This is because they plan to eat your puppy dog.  

The Modi government’s removal of Article 370 was based on a

decision by the Supreme Court which said the place had 'no shred of sovereignty'. 

long-standing demand by Hindu nationalists

those evil bastards don't want Muslim girls to be shot in the head if they have the temerity to go to shcool 

who felt unhappy that the Indian state under the Indian National Congress was trying to appease Kashmir’s Muslims with promises of autonomy.

Indira Gandhi didn't offer anyone autonomy. She offered them forced sterilization. Still, it must be said, had she been alive, there would have been no ethnic cleansing of Kashmiri Pandits.  

This decision was immensely popular in India.

though the biggest beneficiary was the Kashmir Valley.  

Today, India is again using the politics of life, or the idea that it is benefiting Kashmiris through development and better opportunity to justify the abrogation, while also using film and tourism to declare normalcy.

India just keeps winning. Evil Indians in America may also prevent Islamist Colonialist in that country from properly slaughtering kaffirs there. Also, did you know many American girls go to school? Why is Biden not arranging for them to be shot in the head?  

In the current phase of Indian control, the Indian state has completely undermined civil society.

i.e. shooting school girls in the head.  

All possible modes of dissent – from pro-freedom groups

shooting shooting-girls in the head 

to journalism,

praising bearded dudes who shoot school-girls in the head 

academia and human rights organisations

shitty blathershites. 

– have been clinically silenced.

Not, sadly, with bullets in the head. Even evil Indian bastards understand that only school-girls deserve  this benefit.  

From internet shutdowns, to the arrests of journalists or human rights defenders, to the surveilling of social media sites and restricting movement by suspending passports, India has left no stone unturned to criminalise

terrorism. Indeed, they are even cracking down on corruption. Who will shoot school-girls in the head if this terrorism continues?  

political speech and project normalcy to domestic or international audiences. A new description of ‘white-collar terrorist’ is given to anyone who contests Indian sovereignty, and anti-terror legislation is used against all forms of expression, including for example, against students cheering for the Pakistani cricket team, as happened last year.

Cricket is un-Islamic. Shoot them in the back of the head- more particularly if they are female.  

Because Kashmiri Muslims fear losing their livelihoods or property, many have been forced to resort to self-censorship.

Whereas, in America, Nafsa's family didn't need to self-censor. They loudly condemned America's war on terror. Sadly they failed to shoot their daughter in the head even though she went to school.  

The United Arab Emirates and Israel have signed agreements with the Indian government, ensuring foreign investment for Kashmir. India has long exploited Kashmir’s natural resources, including water. During the cold winter months, Kashmiris face electricity scarcity and loadshedding. Yet India sells Kashmir’s hydroelectric power to Rajasthan and other states.

Sadly, it is refusing to shoot Kashmiri school-girls in the head. 

Kashmir could see escalating climate disaster; experts have long warned about its receding glaciers and other ecological fragilities, exacerbated by decades of military occupation.

by Pakistan and China. Incidentally Pak handed over some of its captured Kashmiri territory to China. 

With the Indian government giving contracts to Indian companies to mine for minerals,

like Pakistan, it should be giving contracts to Chinese companies. Also, why did India not host Osama bin Laden? Why is Pakistan alone having to provide hospitality to all sorts of Islamist nutjobs? Where is the Indian Malala Yousafzai? Why are Indians not shooting school-girls in the head? It is because they have 'settler-colonial' mentality just like Americans or Britishers.  

Kashmir is further vulnerable as these companies do not adhere to environmental regulations, nor do they have knowledge of the local ecology.

Islamists adhere to environmental regulations. To promote sustainability they shoot school-girls in the head. 

India’s contemporary colonisation is defined by surveillance technology, the arms trade, neoliberal resource extraction, criminalisation of all forms of dissent, and climate change.

All that is well and good but what about shooting school-girl's in the head? How is it that only Islamist nutters are bothering with this vital activity?

Many countries around the world have their own Kashmirs,

some do have budding Islamic terrorists who want to kill kaffirs. However, many Muslim countries don't tolerate any such people and kill them before they can start killing. 

places they have subjugated either through overt forms of violence or through assimilating forms of control, and at times both.

Hafsa and family were eager to emigrate and take citizenship in the country which, in this century, has killed more Muslims than any other non-Muslim power. Perhaps, she like Dr. Ghulam Nabi Fai gets some cash from the Pakistanis. If so she needs to register as a foreign agent. Otherwise she may go to jail. 

Contemporary forms of colonialism exist across authoritarian and democratic governments.

No. The age of slavery and colonies and empires has passed. It was succeeded by an age of immigration from shithole countries to places still ruled by White peeps. If Kamala Harris becomes POTUS, she will be the first President both of whose parents were immigrants. This may cause some bigots to say that America has been colonized by puppy dog devouring invaders. Otherwise, such outcome would be impossible in a genuine democracy.

In the case of India, they exist in a country that claims to be the largest democracy in the world.

It is a democracy. Abdullah's grandson is back in power as Chief Minister in Srinagar. Perhaps Nehru's great-grandson will achieve something similar in Delhi. But this will only happen if his party gets more votes. As for terrorists or nutters like Hafsa, nobody gives a shit about them. If they kill, they are quickly killed. If they tell stupid lies, we denounce them as stupid liars who have invaded America and eaten everybody's pussy. 

The case of Kashmir not only challenges this claim but contests the idea of India altogether.

Thursday 31 October 2024

Merin Simi Raj, Shahid Amin & the British freedom struggle

 IITs must get rid of their 'Humanities' Departments. Just hire guys who can teach good spoken English and run courses in how to write about popular science for magazines. 

If you hire stupid nutters to teach worthless shite, you are bound to end up with pseudo-scholarship like the following- 

Revisiting Nationalist Historiography through the Narrativization of Past Events: Reading Shahid Amin’s Reconstruction of Chauri Chaura Merin Simi Raj Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay

Indians know 'Nationalist Historiography' is a pack of stupid lies justifying worship of the Dynasty. Chauri Chaura is in Bihar. Everybody knows Biharis are little better than beasts. That's it. That's all that can be said about relevant 'narrativization'.  

'There can be no untold stories at all, just as there can be no unknown knowledge.

Sure there can. I've never told anybody the story of how I shat myself in Swahili class in 1973. As for any piece of knowledge, there is at least one person for whom it is unknown.  

'There can be only past facts not yet described in a context of narrative form (Louis Mink)

But stories are not concerned with fact. History is greatly concerned with counterfactuals. So is Econ. Mink was stoooopid.  

The preoccupation with knowledge/power in historiography and the politics of knowledge creation and its legitimization have always had an uneven and problematic history.

Who cares about the history of a useless type of historiography? Shit is shit. There is nothing 'problematic' about saying so.  

This paper highlights the importance of revisiting the past through the narrativization of events, in the context of historiographical studies in India.

Did the Left gain anything by 're-narrating' Chauri Chaura as an OBC/Dalit/Muslim rebellion against upper castes? Maybe in some shitty Bihari shithole. But who actually gives a fuck?  

The struggle between official narrative and the “subjugated narrative,” if one may call it so, has been the area of interest in a number of disciplines, including history, jurisprudence, sociology, anthropology and literary studies, for the past few decades.

Because useless tossers engage in useless struggles.  

It has only gained prominence since the recent “narrative turn,” which dates from the late 1960s,

when everybody on Campus started tripping 

and more emphasis has been placed on it since the subaltern studies initiatives from the 1980s onwards.

At one time, studying that shite seemed a path to a Green Card. Sadly, this lady is stuck in Chennai.  

The present study is part of an attempt to explore the narrative web of Indian nationalist historiography, within which a number of stories and subjugated characters are embedded. Through a re-reading of two essays by Shahid Amin which claim to “retrieve” or “redeem” the event of Chauri Chaura from the web of official narratives, this paper shows that the ubiquitous presence of the discourses generated by the State or Law or the Samaj (as projected through cultural, traditional, religious laws and value systems) have been instrumental in transforming the participants of history into mere subjects.

Back then, all them Bihari dudes were either British subjects or British protected subjects. That was what they were objecting to.  

The historical narratives, in any discipline, which are available for public consumption, do carry the authoritative mediation of dominant institutions like the State, the Law or civil society.

Nonsense! Plenty of 'historical narratives' are fantasies which lack any alethic content. Since this lady is not a historian, she can't provide any such thing herself.  

For the same reason these narratives—handed down to posterity—have been invariably accompanied by strategic aporias which were lopsided in their perspective of what was understood as reality. As Romila Thapar puts it, there is now a “growing recognition that the past had to be explained, understood, reinterpreted. . . and that such explanations could also help us understand the present in more focused ways than before” (Thapar 1443).

Historians had been doing this for thousands of years. What we now understand is that Thapar and her ilk were shit at history. Also by saying 'there is no proof there was ever a Ram temple' they opened the door to the Court deciding there was no proof there was a Waqf created by Babur. In other words, Leftist historians helped secure the Janmabhoomi for the Hindus. No wonder they hate Chandrachud- a Harvard alum.  

This “critical enquiry,” as it is called by Thapar, calls for a fresh perception of the ways in which narratives were constructed and legitimized through various authoritative mediations.

At one time Leftist historians were doing the 'authoritative mediations'. But this caused a backlash. Telling stupid lies only causes people to think you are a stupid liar. +- 

Historians and sociologists are now realizing the need to move towards the recognition of the possibility of many narratives or histories, rather than a unitary perception of truth and reality.

Why? The answer is that you need to simultaneously argue that Biden's hatred of Hamas is dictated by his homophobia while affirming that his failure too undergo gender reassignment surgery is part and parcel of his identity as Narendra Modi the supposed leader of 'independent' India.

This possibility of plurality in narratives can be identified and explored only when the past gets reconstructed from a different perspective,

by telling stupid lies 

with greater perceptiveness.

Nope. Stupidity is what is required.


I recall being puzzled by Shahid Amin's work on Chauri Chaura when it first appeared. 'Nationalist historiography' had always seen the rioters as nationalists who were goaded by the police and who retaliated. Most agreed with Nehru that Gandhi overreacted because of his own religious beliefs. Still, this was just a case of Biharis being Biharis though it might be wiser not to say so because Biharis are hefty fellows and one slap from them might kill us puny folk from the big metros.
Amin’s work on Chauri Chaura is significant

it was stupid. Everybody knew what had happened- viz. Biharis behaved like Biharis even before Lalu Prasad became CM. Truly, beasts are only capable of sustaining 'Jungle Raj'.  

as it is one of the pioneer works in historiographical studies in India, which adopted the narrative technique

No. It is quite a painstaking study which draws on the testimony of the approver and others involved in the subsequent court cases. Still, it elides other things which were 'common knowledge' but which nobody talked about. The fact is Gandhi in Champaran had been used as a smokescreen to hide the anti-cow slaughter riots going on there. Similarly, Chauri Chaura had a lot to do with Muslims and OBCs resenting the Sikh zamindar- or rather, his minions.  

to contextualize and retell an event recorded in official history from a different vantage point. It is also seen as a major challenge to nationalist historiography, and we need to understand how. At one level Amin’s analyses draw attention to the imbrications of elite and subaltern politics in the context of the anti-colonial nationalist movement.

Why draw attention to the obvious? At one time elites either backed the Brits or ceased to be elite. By 1922, the time was ripe to get rid of the Brits. Sadly, Gandhi decided India would turn to shit if the Brits fucked off. We all understand this, but we don't say it for the same reason that we all have a wank now and then but pretend we only put out to super-models.  

The analysis of peasant insurgency in colonial India and of subaltern participation in nationalist politics by the historians of ‘subaltern studies’ has amounted to a strong critique of bourgeois-nationalist politics and of the postcolonial state.

But critiques made by powerless pedants are as weak as piss.  

Through a reconstruction of the Chauri Chaura event, Amin is trying to show how the powerful strand of anti-colonial politics, launched independently of bourgeois-nationalist leaders, had been denied its place in established historiography.

This is also true of Gandhi's farts or Lord Reading getting the trots. Why has established historiography ignored the shitting and pissing and farting that occurred at that crucial period in Indian history? The answer, obviously, is that Joe Biden is a homophobe who pretends to be Narendra Modi though he is himself sodomizing trillions of Netan-Yahoos to the great indignation of Hamas. 

In India, there was a time when 'nationalist historiography' mattered because you had to mug it up to get into the Civil Service. But with the rise of the BJP as well as the OBC dynastic politicians, you no longer had to pretend to believe that shite. You were welcome to say- Brahmins like Nehru and Banias like Gandhi befooled the bahishkrit community. Mayawatiji will raise India up above Yurop-Amrika!

Nationalist historiography, which narrated the nation into being,

It did no such thing. India, as a nation, acquired legal and diplomatic recognition thanks to the actions of the East India Company. Deeds not stories were involved.  

has been re-read, critiqued and re-written

by stupid and powerless pedants 

in an attempt to highlight the multiplicity of narratives and to foreground the marginalized and the forgotten.

Sadly, those guys were becoming Chief Ministers and getting very very rich. But they sent their kids abroad to study Engineering or to do MBA. They didn't waste their time with history. Sonia, because she hadn't been to Collidge and was a foreigner, was foolish enough to appoint Romila Thapar as her advisor.  

This nationalist historiography has been viewed as elitist,

though the guys forced to do it were middle class drudges.  

false and insensitive to regional variations (Aloysius 6),

This may have been true of sycophants of the Dynasty who, truth be told, were as parochial and Provincial as shit. 

thereby opening up new debates to help reconstruct the past and render new insights into the blind spots. In the last few decades the critical debates on nationalist historiography have led to the breakdown of the boundaries of disciplines such as history, sociology, literature, law and anthropology.

Why maintain boundaries between shit and shit?  

The subjugation of knowledge

its absence 

is employed and is visible at various levels in different realms of scholarship, especially in the body of scholarship that enables the understanding of the marginalized and the historically forgotten sections of society. These interdisciplinary approaches have enabled the production of new forms of knowledge which

are shit 

were earlier lost in the monolith of rigid disciplines and canons.

previously, different types of shit were segregated in various shitty University Departments. Now, there is just shit.  

Consider the following- 

The Narrative Turn in Historiography Because the emphasis of this paper is on the narrative approach towards the representation of events

which is what History has always done 

and how past events have been narrativised in historiography, it would be appropriate to begin with the status ascribed to narrative within professional studies.

Narratives have the status of narratives even in 'professional studies'.  

Etymological studies claim that the term narrative derives from
the Latin narrativus ‘telling a story'
the Greek verb gnarus (meaning to know),

There is no such word in Greek. Gnarus is Latin and Italic. Gnous or Gignosko is Greek.  

the signifier associated with the passing on of knowledge.

Or just the telling of an entertaining story.  

Interestingly recent trends in historiographical and sociological studies also point to the study of the past which informs the present as a system of knowledge rather than as a mere chronological description of the past.

There can be a 'Structural Causal Model' of the economy or polity whose parameters can be altered on the basis of historic data sets. Sadly, these nutters have no such thing.  

Structuralist theorists such as Roland Barthes argued explicitly for a crossdisciplinary approach to the analysis of stories

not history 

—an approach in which stories can be viewed as supporting a variety of cognitive and communicative activities, from spontaneous conversations and courtroom testimony to visual art, dance, and mythic and literary traditions.

anything at all can be so visualized. The cat's farts embody the Hegelian dialectic of Uranus. 

In the following decades, by the 1950s and the 1960s, strong arguments against the attack on the narrative conception of history were launched by the historian J.H. Hexter

a decent scholar whose big mistake was to think the English Civil War wasn't about Religion. Still, he was American and so allowances should be made.  

and the philosopher Louis Mink.

for whom history was like Finnegan's Wake- i.e. anything goes.  

However, there was not much dialogue between the philosophy of history and narrative theory until the publication of Hayden White’s Metahistory in 1970.

This is the 'linguistic turn' which released History students from doing boring research in the archives- unless they actually wanted to make something of themselves rather than just get a credential and then a job as a sort of glorified child-minder to drug-addled imbeciles.  

Hayden White, an advocate of narrativization in historiography, has explored the relationship between narrative and historical representation thus coaxing fellow scholars as well as readers to reconsider traditionally accepted distinctions between literary and historical discourse.

E.g. a Bugs Bunny cartoon as opposed to the Treaty of fucking Versailles. Did you know that nine out of ten students prefer watching the former as opposed to reading the latter?  

This multidisciplinary approach to the narrative element captured the attention of scholars by the end of the 1970s.

Shit scholars- maybe.  

Margaret Somers categorically stated, “Social scientists must assume that social reality itself has a narrative structure and that we must attempt to recapture those narratives by narrative means”.

E.g. Samuelson was sodomized by Elmer Fudd. This caused him to reject the Marxian Transformation Problem as gibberish. Bugs Bunny should have kept Fudd on a shorter leash.  

However, many continued to be skeptical about the scientific objectivity of the narrative approach.

E.g. my account of Joe Biden's sodomization of trillions of Netan-Yahoos.  

The skeptics treated narrative as inherently fictitious and imaginative, as that which lacked any trace of reality or real life. Real events were not readily available to be narrativised in a coherent manner without ambiguities regarding their structure and order.

Judges and Juries have found the opposite is the case. I am accused of a crime I did not commit. I go on the stand and give a coherent account of what I was doing and where I was. The prosecutor tries to find gaps or inconsistencies in my statement. But whatever trap he lays, I am able to steer clear of it by recalling to mind the events of that fatal day and giving a more and more fine-grained account of my actions. Meanwhile my lawyers are able to get corroborative  testimony.  On the other hand, supposed I told a story featuring Elmer Fudd sodomizing Samuelson, people would have thought I was a lunatic who probably did commit the crime or else that I was pretending to be a lunatic so as to get sent to the nut-house rather than the electric chair. 

Hence Genette and Levonas, trying to solve this difficulty, pointed out, “[i]f the narrative is rigorously faithful to historical events, the historian-narrator must be very sensitive to the changing of orders when he goes from the narrative work of telling the completed acts to the mechanical transcription of the spoken words” (Genette and Levonas 4).

Fist you do 'transcription' then you fill in the gaps with 'narrative work'.  

The event had to be translated into meaningful signifiers.

i.e. words.  

The trajectory of narration was rather different from that of description.

Because it featured motives and counterfactual contingencies which have to be inferred 

Genette tried to explain how narrative language was seen as different from descriptive language,

there is no need to explain what was explained to us as kids in primary school where we are told that when we are asked to describe our cat we need to mention its colour, size, type of fur etc. However, when asked to tell a story in which our cat is the hero, we may omit any such details and describe the time the cat woke us up by licking our face so that we were able to get ready in time to go to school.  

that the most significant difference between the two may possibly be that the narration, by the temporal succession of its discourse,

a narrative can begin 'in medias res' and then go back and forth in time. 

restores the equally temporal succession of the events, while the description must successively modulate the representation of objects simultaneously juxtaposed in space.

There is no such requirement. We may describe the cat without specifying where it is now.  

Thapar even justifies the element of speculation and imagination which may come into play during the critical analysis of a historical narrative: 'Even where the explanation requires a small leap of the imagination, the leap takes off from critical enquiry.

It may 'take off' from a contemporary event. You may be able to better understand the past when something about the present becomes clearer to you.  

This is the historian’s contribution to knowledge but it is also an essential process in human sciences. And in making this contribution the historian is aware that other evidence may surface, fresh generalisations may emerge and knowledge be further advanced.' 

Not in her own case. She was useless.                      

Engaging with these ambiguities associated with narrativization, Jay Clayton points out that skepticism against the narrative approach and its authenticity stems from its “association with unauthorized forms of knowledge” such as folklores, myths, legends and oral histories or “the less privileged written genres—diaries, letters, criminal confessions, slave narratives” (Clayton 378-9).

Not in History. We are skeptical about the account a politician or party hack gives of a particular period because it is likely to be self-serving. It is unlikely to feature ghosts or dragons or Elmer Fudd sodomizing Samuelson. Moreover, those writing it are unlikely to be either Jack the Ripper or Sojourner Truth.  

He supports his argument with Michel Foucault’s observation that narrative is one of the “naive knowledges, located low down on the hierarchy, beneath the required level of cognition or scientificity” (Foucault qtd Clayton 378).

Foucault was wrong. If you claim to have made a great scientific discovery you also have to give an account of how you came to make it. Had Einstein just presented us with a bunch of equations few would have grasped the essence of his theory. It was because he could give us a credible narrative of how he, a young patent clerk travelling by tram, came to his great 'gedanken' or thought experiment that he rose to become the most revered and influential scientist of his century. 

Clayton takes his argument a little further and points out that most engagements with minority writing constitute a “rich mixture of traditional narrative forms and contemporary political concerns” (Clayton 379).

Smart white peeps are a very small minority. Our engagement with their writing is about our wanting to get a little smarter.  

Unearthing the plurality of narratives and exploding the assumption of a unitary narrative would definitely be met with resistance and hurdles and hence may seem chaotic.

Unless it is done by smart peeps. These nutters weren't smart.  

Ranajit Guha points out, “‘[i]f the small voice of history gets a hearing at all in some revised account … it will do so only by interrupting the telling of the dominant version, breaking up its storyline and making a mess of its plot”.

He made a mess alright- but only in his pants. Still, he was considerate enough to do it on foreign campuses.  

Notably, only the narrative form effectively allows as well as supports the text’s engagement with contemporary socio-political concerns.

No. A purely economic or military description of current events is more 'engaging'. We don't care about Hamas's narratives. We care about their military resources and ability to keep up their armed struggle.  

This, rather sudden engagement with the narrative approach across disciplines can be read along with the emergence of minority literature, subaltern studies, feminist literature, African American literature and Dalit Studies.

All of which have proven to be shit even if one or two imbeciles got tenure thereby. Why be content with a Professor's wage when, if you study STEM subjects, you can be as rich as Elon Musk and have as great an impact on the world?  

In his introduction to Event, Metaphor and Memory, Amin says, “[p]easants do not write, they are written about . . . their speech . . . is not normally recorded for posterity, it is wrenched from them in courtrooms and inquisitorial trials”.

Amin is lying. Plenty of Indian peasants gained sufficient literacy to write 'narratives'. Nehru mentions Baba Ramchandra, who had been an indentured labourer in Fiji till he got into trouble with the authorities there because of the articles he wrote which were published back in India. I suppose his literacy was because he was Brahmin. But plenty of Brahmins are peasant cultivators in the Doab. Incidentally, the first Hindi newspaper from Gorakpur started to appear in 1854. Some people who worked on the land, started getting published and thus could devote themselves to journalism and politics.  

Amin also identifies contradictory constructions of the events by local nationalists and, later, by the relatives of the participants as well. Amin’s multiple sources of information converge not to produce a simple explanation of why “Chauri Chaura” happened, but rather, to display the complexity of the event, its metaphorical power as a two-sided image of criminality and patriotism, and its persistence in local and familial memory even after it is “largely forgotten in nationalist lore” (Amin 1987: 176).

What happened was 'common knowledge'. Some of the agitators were peaceful Gandhians. Others weren't. Biharis will be Bihari you know. The problem was that the police were going after the guys who had signed the pledge. They would be tempted to turn approver. Gandhi lowered the temperature by calling off the saytagraha and going meekly to jail. That's it. That's the whole story.  

Mir Shikari, the approver, is a twenty-seven-year-old cultivator and hideseller from Chotki Dumri. According to legal discourse, “an approver should be examined first and not after all the witnesses who are supposed to corroborate his evidence are examined” .

No. A person may turn approver after other testimony has been taken. What is required is corroboration.  

Shikari was accordingly arrested on 16 March

whereas Gandhi's famous plea of guilt to a charge of sedition was made on 18 March.  

and he made his “confession” before the Deputy Collector.

Who knew that the Govt. was not interested in prosecuting the Congress bigwigs for 'waging war on the King Emperor'.  

Later in the course of the trial he provided his testimony quite extensively, with graphic details of the people as well as the incidents. Amin draws our attention to how Shikari was used as an instrument in the judicial process—

all approvers are used thus 

how the Prosecution converts the renegade into an approver.

The police, not the prosecution, did that.  

Amin quotes Paul Ricoeur: “Testimony signifies something other than a simple narration of things seen” (Amin 1987: 172).

It may do. It may not. In this case, it signified things seen and heard.  

The appropriation of Mir Shikari and his testimony has larger implications than Shikari’s desperation to save his own life.

Not for him. He genuinely didn't want to be hanged. Still, he would have been aware that he might become the victim of vendetta. 

Shikari just happens to be a tool through which the colonial government gets to easily manipulate and appropriate the event;

Why the fuck would they want to 'appropriate' the killing of policemen? They wanted to punish those responsible. True, if the police extorted money or beat or raped some people in the area, that was just a perk of office for them.  

to make things easier, the nationalist leaders were not under any pressure to claim the event as their own either.

They were under great pressure to disavow and condemn it. Otherwise they might lose all their property and end up in the Andamans.  

The responses of the other accused were varied and interesting; while some claimed that Shikari had some old enmity with them and was trying to frame them, some others like Abdullah were poignant in pointing out, “Shikari knows me from before. He has turned an approver and if he did not name a number of accused persons, how could he get off”.

This happens in almost all criminal cases.  

Though apparently it comes across as “blame,” it is quite clear that the judiciary has appropriated the approver’s testimony.

No. The Judge decided that the approver's testimony had been corroborated as was required by the 1872 Act.  

Though there are law books which warn Judges to be careful about the testimonies provided by accomplices, in Chauri Chaura the context of the relationship between the Approver’s Testimony and the judgment is fixed by the politics of the trial.

No. There was no flaw in the trial. That's why nobody bothered to appeal the judgment. Instead, Gandhi's son rushed to the spot and, on 11 February, proposed the raising of a vast relief fund for the families of the policemen who were killed. Each district in the province was required to raise 2000 rupees for this purpose, but Gorakhpur district, because of its greater guilt, was required to produce 10,000 Rs! In a letter to Nehru, Gandhi sought to deflect blame from his son. He wrote- 'Let us not be obsessed by Devidas's youthful indiscretions. It is quite possible that the poor boy has been swept off his feet and that he has lost his balance...' I should explain Devdas did not have any authority to act as he had done. Still, his father was backing his course of action. Why? He already felt that things were getting out of hand. There would be more violence unless he surrendered unilaterally. But this just meant that the Brits must stay on until all Indians become very peaceful because they are either dead or on the point of death or able to achieve some higher brain function than is required for the turning of a spinning wheel. 

One final point. British officials in India had no vested interest in the zamindari system. They were quite prepared to see incidents like the Moplah uprising, or the Chauri Chaura riot, as instances of an emaciated agricultural class trying to rid itself of its, wholly indigenous, oppressors. This is why Nehru- though he does no say so in plain words- opposed the immediate redistribution of land. He knew this is what ICS officers like A.O Hume- who founded the INC- had always wanted. The ryots would have paid a lot less to the Sarkar than they did to the Zamindar and his intermediaries, but the State would have got more money in total. Moreover, the ryot would be see it was in his own interests to pay local cesses for irrigation, schools, roads etc. In other words, India need not remain as poor as shit. It could become increasingly self-administering and self-garrisoning. English officials could focus on more 'value adding' tasks and, after retirement, could get lucrative consultancy work or seats on the boards of Indian companies with offices in London. Manchester would be happy because it could export more to an affluent India. Britain's idle shipyards could re-open to equip a new indigenous Indian Navy. 

But if the peasants got what they really wanted, the barristocrats of the INC would be disintermediated. Nehru sought to avert this outcome and thus had to play second fiddle to the Maha-crackpot. 

: “This violent event with its iconic status in the history of the Indian nation and Gandhi’s career, equally affords insights into the ways of nationalist historiography” (Amin 1996: xix).

At the time Amin was writing this, Indians thought Chauri Chaura was about Biharis being bestial and only interested in 'Jungle Raj'. Why did Amin not say so bluntly? The answer is obvious. He was doing an elite type of historiography which pretended that a PhD from Oxbridge brought you closer to smelly 'subalterns' (e.g. people like Winston Churchill who came to India as a subaltern or second lieutenant).  Inspired by his work, I wrote a history of the British Independence Struggle which featured Adivasi women like Mrs. Thatcher and starving untouchables like Tony Benn who opposed joining the Common Market. Back in 2011, I wrote a blogpost warning the Brits that unless they adopted purely Gandhian methods, they would revert to cannibalism if they threw off the yoke of Brussels. You would once again have Cornish pasties made out of the meat of innocent Cornish men and women. Yorkshire pudding would be made out of the flesh and bones of Geoff Boycott. Welsh rarebit would once again feature the dangly bits of Neil Kinnock. Fortunately, Rishi Sunak read my blogpost and was able to persuade Boris Johnson to achieve Brexit by fasting to death while cramming pork pies into his mouth. Sadly, elite 'nationalist' historiography in Britain has completely failed to mention my crucial role in the British Freedom Struggle. 


Nishant Batsha's Lacanian shite

 In February 1921, Mahatma Gandhi had visited Gorakhpur, briefly stopping at Chauri Chaura station, and had received a rapturous welcome. Over the next few months there appeared to be a veritable cult of this semi-divine figure who was credited with all sorts of miracles. The British owned Pioneer newspaper spoke disapprovingly of this 'canonization'. However, it initially strengthened the hand of the Congress/Khilafat combine. 'Authority' could no longer claim that these elite barristers did not speak for the Indian masses. The reverse side of the coin only became apparent a year later with the Chauri Chaura riots where policemen were killed by a rampaging mob. This led Gandhi, who had visited the area two weeks previously, to call off the Non Cooperation Movement and go meekly to jail. One reason for this is that the police had raided the Congress/Khilafat office in Gorakhpur and thus got their hands on the 'pledge forms'. It was from this that the drew up a list of likely rioters whom they planned to prosecute to the hilt. Had there been no signed pledge forms, Congress could have pleaded ignorance and attributed the violence to hooligans or those with a personal grudge against the Police sub-inspector most concerned in the events. However, because Gandhi had visited the area and some of those arrested would be bound to implicate him, rightly or wrongly, he had no alternative but to surrender unilaterally and go to jail on the lesser charge of sedition rather than be sent to the Andamans for waging war on the King Emperor. 

Nishant Batsha, an American novelist, gives a Lacanian interpretation of these events in an essay he wrote as an undergraduate- 

 A Hegelian account of Gandhi's importance would view his ability to halt an entire national movement as proof of his status as a World-Historical individual.

No. It would prove he wasn't a World-Historical individual. India did not get what Ireland and Egypt and Afghanistan at around this time. Gandhi, clearly, didn't want India to become independent because he thought Indians were not ready for independence. This meant that the Labour party, which came to power in 1924, had to change its policy towards India.   

However, I use an analytic framework based upon the Lacanian notion of the imaginary and symbolic orders in order to reinterpret Gandhi's position within the nationalistic framework as a construct of the peasant imaginary.

The problem here is that the leaders of the satyagraha procession in Chauri Chaura had paid their dues and become members of the Indian National Congress.  However, the Left contends that the rioters were mainly lower caste and their real grievance was with the local Zamindar family (of the Majithia family. The elder son being the father of Amrita Shergil) who were backed by senior police officers in the area, some of whom were Sikh and who had business interests there. In other words, there was a complex local dynamic to the events. Had some 'construct of the peasant imaginary' been at work, there should have been a thousand Chauri Chauras. The fact is there was only one Sikh zamindari in the area. This had been awarded by the British in return for loyalty in 1857. 

This is not to say that Gandhi was not a central figure in the Indian nationalist movement. Rather, his centrality was not a function of his own status as an elite nationalist

if he hadn't been a great fund-raiser supported by Indian industrialists, nobody in Gorakhpur would have known his name. 

— it was a direct result of a mass imaginary of Gandhi that rested within peasant populations. 

If this were the case, peasants in other parts of the Doab would have been acting in a similar fashion. Also, the peasants would have refused to believe the divine Mahatma had withdrawn the agitation. They would have said 'Mahatama is in occultation. British, use Black Magic, to put a 'Maya' Mahatma (i.e. a magical double) in prison. Once we have killed the evil doers, Mahatma will return to us. 

 In January 1921, during this campaign for mass enlistment, a local unit of the movement was established in Chotki Dumri, which was one mile west of Chauri Chaura. An official was dispatched to Chauri Chaura, who elected a few satyagrahi-officers and distributed pledge forms.

This is why Gandhi and Co. could be tried for 'waging war against the King Emperor' and sent off to the Andamans. By comparison, being jailed for sedition was a piece of cake.  

Interestingly, local volunteers, in addition to pledging to uphold the values within the pledge, also agreed to the extension of abstaining from meat and liquor. A few days before February 4th , volunteers demonstrated for a fair price of meat,

This bit tends to be left out by Nationalist historians. Still, it was nice of the rioters not to eat the policemen they had roasted nicely. 

 Ranajit Guha noted at the dawn of the Subaltern Studies movement, ―the historiography of Indian nationalism has for a long time been dominated by elitism

Because only elite is literate. Non-elite is illiterate and likes roasting, if not eating, policemen. Still, Guha is wrong. The elites in India at that time were guys like the uncle of Amrita Shergil who was also a successful industrialist and was knighted by the British. The 'barristocrats'- i.e. guys like Nehru, Gandhi, Patel- weren't elite. They were upper middle class. Nationalist history is written from their perspective. It is a different matter that the Nehru's established an Imperial dynasty. 

– colonialist elitism and bourgeois nationalist elitism.

There was a circulation of elites. Currently, we have Backward Caste, Dalit and Adivasi Dynasties which have their own sycophantic historians. Sadly, the Subaltern Studies group were 'for export only'. They played no role in the shift in power to the OBCs or Scheduled Castes and Tribes which occurred from the late Sixties onward.  

The ability to see Gandhi as nationalist figure who paternally led and controlled an entire nationalist movement and additionally view him as imminent in each individual during an action that was physically separated from him, is a primarily elitist position which needs to be questioned.

No. It was the position of khadi clad 'netas' who had started off as moffusil vakils. True, some of their kids may have gone to English medium schools and thus were able to join the urban upper middle class.  

Additionally, it has been noted that political mobilization within subaltern groups has often been dismissed as a purely spontaneous act; when in actuality, subalterns often had far too much at stake in the institutions of power that situated their daily lives and would not engage in an act of insurgency except in a deliberate and premeditated manner.

This is misleading. Poor people may be paid to act as policemen, jailors, executioners etc. If other poor people run riot, they may gain nothing in the medium term whereas some of them may be hanged or incarcerated. The Cost is high relative to the Benefit. This does not mean they have a stake in existing power structures. It merely means there is little they can grab which won't be grabbed from them almost immediately. On the other hand, mass movements among share-croppers can be very effective but only if the peasant gains enough to feed his family. If this isn't the case, the thing is not worth it.  

Hence I adopt the subaltern perspective by questioning the elite status of Gandhi

he wasn't elite. Aristocrats were elite. Still, his financiers had become rich and through Gandhi they were able to get political influence and social prestige. Moreover, some would become very much richer thanks to their backing of the INC.  

in an attempt to transcend the notion of high-level elite politics.

Yet, Princes and Viceroys continued to decide important questions. True, elections were held, but under 'Dyarchy', middle class politicians didn't have much power- which is why Gandhi regained salience because he had opposed entry into the Assemblies.  

I wish to ponder how the idea of Gandhi functioned within a peasant imaginary

the answer has to do with Ram Rajya. Did Lord Ram levy taxes? I suppose so but the peasant preferred to believe otherwise. Also, the dude got rid of his wife- who was from Mithila. You know what the women from there are like.  

and how said population simply did not act in a paroxysm of violence.

The Moplahs had acted 'in a paroxysm of violence'. The lesson here was that Muslims be kray kray. As Gandhi would say in 1939, the Brits must not slyly fuck off before handing over the Army to the INC. Otherwise Muslims and Punjabis (irrespective of creed) would grab everything. Hopefully, the high caste Hindus would be able to protect their anal cherries by muttering 'Ahimsa! Ahimsa!'. But they wouldn't have a pot to piss in.  

However, one may simply be wondering, why take contention with Hegel?

Why indeed? He wasn't a historian. Also, he was as stupid as shit.  

My response to this criticism is that, in many historical narratives that are encountered on a day-to-day basis, Hegel looms invisibly in the background. By ―day-to-day,‖ I am referring here to the ubiquity of historical narratives wherein the crux of history occurs on the shoulders of the world-historical. In these accounts, one is sincerely left believing that history can only occur when ―great men take action.

Collective action problems are linked to coordination problems. 'Great men' are focal solutions to such problems. Why is Mohammad Yunus heading the interim Government in Bangladesh? The answer is he is a very eminent man. Also, he is as old as fuck and thus can be a smokescreen behind which a massive reallocation of rents occurs.  

By extension, these individuals are the driving force behind history and remain its true agents.

An agent is merely the tool of his 'Principal'. Napoleon was important because he secured the title in land which had been wrenched from the Aristocracy.  

However, as subaltern histories have shown, agency and subjectivity are not limited to a small stratum of community.

In other words, the 'great unwashed' have brains of their own and a separate economic and social agenda- e.g. taking land from Aristocrats and refusing to let the cunt exercise droit du seigneur.  

While they may be important, it must be realized that agency is not a nodal apparatus, but extends in all directions.

This is why if I want a glass of water, I don't have to get up and go fetch it. My agency will extend to the tap and the glass which will fill itself and then come wafting towards me.  

At this juncture, however, it may be fruitful to expound upon the meaning of Chauri Chaura from an Hegelian standpoint.

It showed India wasn't ready for independence. Its politicians didn't know how to solve the problem of land ownership and taxation. Also, they were stupid and useless. Gandhi had said 'I will deliver Independence in 18 months'. Then he said 'India is not ready. Still, I had a moral obligation to do crazy shit because I'm really really stupid. Please lock me up.'  

When analyzing Gandhi as a historical figure in this vein, one must see how he fits into the model of the WorldHistorical Individual.

The answer is simple. He was saying to the Brits- don't fuck off without handing over the Army to us otherwise Muslims and Punjabis (and maybe the Gurkhas) will grab everything.' He only changed his tune when it appeared that the Japanese Emperor would replace the House of Windsor.  

Hegel states in The philosophy of history that there exists a ―universal concept [that] is a moving force of the productive Idea, an element of truth that is forever striving towards itself.

Sadly, that 'truth' turned out to be that Germans are shit at politics. They should stick to making nice cars while letting their Army train with broomstick handles painted black. American troops were welcome to protect the country. 

The World-Historical Individual takes this universal conception and embodies it:

Hegel embodied the stupidity and mischievousness of the German pedant.  

―the historical men, are those whose aims embody a universal concept of this kind.

Hitler certainly embodied evil of an utterly crazy kind. Gandhi was merely stupid and useless.  

Furthermore, these individuals eventually harmonize the ideal of World Spirit – which seeks to attain the consciousness of its own freedom

which anybody not in jail already has. It isn't true that you are 'un-free' because Mummy is making you do the washing-up. You are 45 years old. You could get married and move out.  

– with the particularities of situations on the ground. That is to say, the passion of the World-Historical Individual within its contextualized moment ―is thus inseparable from the actualization of the universal principle; for the universal is the outcome of the particular and determinate, and from its negation.

You could say the same about hurrying to the toilet and taking a shit because you are turtling.  

Now, individuals ―on the ground‖ find an intense affinity for the individual because of the omnipresence of the universal world spirit as previously mentioned: ―this is why the others follow these soulleaders; for they feel the irresistible force of their own spirit coming out in the heroes.

Sadly, for Germans, that 'force' turned out to be highly resistible. Gandhi's acolytes were smarter. They preferred to sulk in jail from time to time rather than 'fight' for freedom. This is because they understood that an independent India would neither be able to feed or defend itself. Also, there would be partition because Muslims hate kaffirs. 

 would a Hegelian analysis apply to Chauri Chaura?

Yes. India wasn't ready for independence. Chauri Chaura showed that. Gandhi called off the movement and went meekly to jail. Even in 1947, India wasn't ready. But Britain was in a hurry to get out. Still, Mountbatten remained one of Nehru's closest advisers till the latter died. Indeed, India had a British admiral till 1958. It could neither feed nor defend itself nor keep minorities safe. That's it. That's the whole story. 

The answer to this question is a resounding ‗no‘. The difficulty with a Hegelian analysis is that it fails to capture how Gandhi functioned within the imaginary of the peasantry, wherein a large part of his following was found.

No. The peasants understood that Gandhi didn't want them to roast policemen even if they refrained from eating them.  

This analytical framework would posit that there existed a consistent Gandhian image which resonated within the minds of all individuals.

Actually, such an image did exist. Gandhi wants you to do stupid shit- e.g. burn cloth and give up eating nice food or having sex or killing policemen or grabbing land from absentee landlords.  

The actualization of universal principle is predicated upon a notion of attaining freedom wherein agency is a nexus between the WorldHistorical Individual and the World Spirit;

No. The universal principle being 'actualized' at that time was Racism. The Christian White is the natural ruler of the Black or Muslim.  Even in the Soviet Union, the White ex-Christian Marxist was the natural ruler of the backward 'Asiatic'. 

the peasantry would merely be a localization of the ideals that occur within these two groups.

Not if they were White- e.g. the Irish peasants who got Independence at that time.  

If this were true, then one would posit that each manifestation of non-cooperation within a rural setting would never exist as a Chauri Chaura;

Most villages had no violence. The fact is, even back then, Gujaratis took a dim view of Biharis. At a later point, its main industry would be kidnapping. It is still one of the poorest and most backward parts of India. Sadly Modi is now dependent on Nitish and so his administration won't last very long as the veteran turncoat once again turns his coat.  

each individual would harmonize personal passion with the universal principle in such a way that would always find itself in line with the doctrine on the Pledge Form.

Gujaratis were not roasting and eating policemen. Biharis- well, Biharis will be Biharis you know. Nothing can be done about it.  

Though this has been explored in depth, it must be repeated: peasant nationalism was not simply a derivative discourse of elitist nationalism; though the two were intimately connected with each other, peasant nationalism utilized its own lexical functionaries.

Nehru, in his autobiography, points out that the peasants in the Hindu belt had Hindu leaders who urged them to grab land from Muslim land-owners.  In Muslim majority areas, the reverse was the case. Moplah Muslim tenants had slaughtered their Hindu landlords and declared a 'jihad'. The barristocrats would be disintermediated in the country-side. That was okay because what they really wanted to do was to move into the big bungalows and Gubernatorial mansions of the Brits. When a Bihari moved into the Viceregal palace, his women-folk had the place cleaned with cow-dung. Lee Kuan Yew records his dismay at having to eat with his fingers at Nehru's dinner table. He writes of the dilapidated state of Rashtrapati Bhavan when he first visited in the Sixties.  

It was sad to see the gradual rundown of the country, visible even in the Rashtrapati Bhavan. The crockery and cutlery were dreadful- at dinner one knife literally snapped in my hand and nearly bounced into my face. Air conditioners, which India had been manufacturing for many years, rumbled noisily and ineffectively. The servants, liveried in dingy white and red uniforms, removed hospitality liquor from the side tables in our rooms. Delhi was “dry” most days of the week. On one occasion, returning to the Rashtrapati Bhavan after a reception given by our high commissioner, my two Indian ADCs in resplendent uniforms entered the elevator with me with their hands behind their backs. As I got out, I noticed they were holding some bottles. I asked my secretary who explained that they were bottles of Scotch. It was the practice at our high commission’s diplomatic receptions to give bottles of Johnnie Walker Scotch whisky to deserving guests, and each ADC received two. They were not obtainable in India because they could not be imported. There was a hypocritical pretense at public egalitarianism, with political leaders wearing homespun clothes to identify themselves with their poor, while they quietly amassed wealth. This undermined the morale of the elite officers, civil and military.

Yew correctly notes that the Congress-wallahs were not 'elite'. Even the Nehrus ate with their hands. There were plenty of actual Princes- i.e. people of the elite- in the Civil and Military administration. The Singapore Embassy identified such 'deserving' people and quietly supplied them with drinkable Whiskey. 

Ranajit Guha left India before power passed from the upper caste middle class to people like Lalu Prasad Yadav. The former weren't elite but weren't as entirely rustic and retarded as the latter. 

Nishant, having pretended guys who clean their houses with cow-dung are 'elite', proceeds to give an account of his framework of analysis

Two structures within Lacanian psychoanalysis are central to this analysis: the imaginary

in this case, the fantasy that in an independent India, there would be no taxes because public goods- e.g. Defence, Law and Order- would magically appear by themselves 

and symbolic order.

i.e. people talking bollocks. 

I suppose a psychiatrist treating a nutter may want to distinguish between his delusions and the schizophrenic word-salad with which he expresses those delusions. Thus a guy who thinks the cat is spying on him might say 'Snowy the dog is sodomizing Tintin because I failed Calculus'. Here Lacanian analysis can clarify that what is meant is that the mirroring of the catachresis of the mise en abyme of the constipation of the irreducible is the irreducible of the effigy of the scotomization of the mise en abyme of its own catachresis. Either that or the other way around. 

Within the imaginary order, one must consider the relevancy of the development of the subjectivity of language and ideal-ego formation during the mirror stage.

If you are dealing with an itty baby- maybe. The fact is all sorts of silly thoughts go through your head when you are cuddling a little bundle of joy.  

When describing the subjectivity of language, Lacan utilizes the notion of the imperative (the call). When describing how this grammatical mood functions in terms of the imaginary, Lacan notes that ―at the level of the statement, from its style to its very intonation, everything we learn bears on the nature of the subject.

If this is learning, what is stupidity?  

Lacan further explicates that the imperative is a ―question of the tone in which the imperative is uttered.

Thus when a girl tells you to 'fuck off', her angry tone suggests that what she really wants to do is to suck you off. That is why she kneed you in the groin. Why is it so many girls want to suck me off? Also, why don't they just do it instead of sending me to the hospital with a ruptured testicle?  

The same text can have completely different imports depending on the tone,

What an amazing discovery! 

however, one must also consider ―what is at issue, and its reference to the totality of the situation. Thus, one can reduce the call to two planar categories: the tonality and the subjectivity of the statement.

Which is why you can believe that being told to fuck off and being kneed in the groin actually means the girl in question wants to suck you off.  

However, what one can garner from this information is that language processing is an entirely subjective experience.

Only if you really can't take a fucking hint- not to mention a knee in the groin.  

To borrow from Ferdinand de Saussure, the imaginary is the realm of the signified.

It isn't. There is no signifier which captures stuff we imagine- till some great poet or novelist, like JK Rowling comes along. Consider the notion that a thing might be part of the soul of some wholly distinct being. Prior to Harry Potter, this vague intuition of ours had no 'signifier'. It now does- viz. horcrux. This doesn't mean there weren't already stories which featured things of that sort. Come to think of it, I remember reading that, in Byzantium, this belief was quite common. There probably was some Greek name for the thing.  

What this implies is that language gains meaning and signification through an interpretive process that is within the contexts of the imaginary order.

Only because everything is. We may equally say that farts gain meaning- e.g. you need to shit- and signification only because you can imagine what will happen if you don't take a dump in the toilet. To be clear, you can imagine shitting your pants and thus hurry to the toilet before this can happen. No doubt, babies don't bother probably because of something to do with 'the mirror stage'. 

A second structure within the imaginary that one must be aware of

when discussing Bihari peasants 

is the development of the ideal-ego during the mirror stage.

Biharis are not having mirrors. That is why they are so rustic and retarded.  

The Lacanian mirror stage is referential to the formative moment within the development of the ego when a child begins to recognize him or herself in the mirror. The representation of the self in the mirror becomes the ideal-ego, a term that represents the idealized notion of a self that one can construe from the reflection in the mirror;

Lalu should have looked in a mirror. Maybe this would have scared him straight.  

this self is idealized not only because it exists in the imaginary (rather than the symbolic),

Baby already exists in the symbolic because it answers to endearments directed at it. Indeed, it says cute things like Ma Ma & Baa Boo for which it is rewarded with plenty of kisses. 

but because is bounded nature within the mirror allows for complete vision of the self; this is opposed to the chaotic reality seen around the viewer on the level of the symbolic;

People keep shouting rude things at Nishant. He looks in the mirror for reassurance that he isn't a stupid cunt.  

Lacan states that the ―ideal-ego is now the target of the self-love which was enjoyed in childhood by the true ego.

Unless you are Bihari.  

The ego-ideal, in turn, is the realization that occurs when one has the opportunity to view himself from the point of view of the ideal-ego

Bihari ideal-ego is as a kidnapper or corrupt politician or both. 

– at this juncture the viewer is disgusted by the fact that his actual self is far from the perfection he imagined via the ideal-ego.

Unless he is Bihari and has made a lot of money out of crime or politics or both crime and politics.  

Finally, while the symbolic order is a nuanced and far-reaching construct within Lacanian psychoanalysis, this paper will only consider the nature of signified notions of language.

In other words, the sort of stuff ordinary folk mean by the signifier 'language'.  

In short, within the symbolic order, language is only the signifier – interpretive actions are made on the basis of individuals via the imaginary apparatus. Thus, the symbolic is what binds ―subjects together in one action.

In other words, different people do different things though they all may use the same word for what they are doing. Thus, for example, this cretin might have said 'I'm a research scholar at Columbia' and people might have thought he was a smart dude studying something alethic. He wasn't. He was reading and writing stupid shit.  

The human action par excellence is originally founded on the existence of the world of the symbol, namely on laws and contracts.

There are plenty of unwritten laws and contracts. The 'signifiers' may only come into existence at a much later date when a Court 'reads them in'. 

One needs to note the lack of subjectivity in this order: the symbolic simply acts as a presentation of the binding force of language between individuals

there is no such 'binding force'. A husband may think 'fidelity' means fucking anything in a skirt. His wife may disagree.  

– the actuality behind this force always rests in the imaginary.

It may not. Unimaginative people may decisively change the course of history. There was an East German apparatchik whose job was to go on TV and issue public statements. He often said his job was easy. His bosses told him what to say and he just went on TV and said it. Sadly, he had popped out for a smoke just when his bosses were saying 'tell everybody we will close the gates at the Berlin wall. We will shoot anyone who tries to flee.' This cretin, who had zero imagination, went on TV and said 'the gates remain open'. Soldiers who watched this thought the policy had changed. Meanwhile hundreds of thousands thronged to the gates so as to get out while the going was good. The regime promptly collapsed.  

But how do these structures translate into political analysis?

They don't because there are no such 'structures'.  

One must consider national politics as operating within the symbolic.

Nope. Politics features a lot of 'unspoken' deals or arrangements. There is nothing in the 'symbolic order'- i.e. there is no document in the archives- to show exactly what happened and why it happened. In the case of Günter Schabowski, the guy whose stupidity and lack of imagination brought down the East German regime, we have his own account of how the live-TV debacle had come about. Had he kept mum, we would still be guessing. 

The nationalist figure is a synchronic symbol of the the national movement

Nope. The guy could be dead or held incommunicado in exile. Equally, it may be that the dude did not approve of what was being done in his name. There are questions about whether Kenyatta really supported the Mau Mau.  

within any political situation. In the relationship between nationalist and individual, the individual's imaginary holds the nationalist figure as the ideal-ego –

very true. Many Spanish men wanted to have a vagina just like La Pasionaria.  

a manifestation of the self's political desires on the political/national stage.

We may have the political desire not to pay any fucking taxes but then back down when we realize this will mean internal insurrection and external invasion because there is no money to pay the police or the Army.  

This is extrapolated from the idea that, the nationalist represents a stable, coherent, unified, and whole vision of the political self that the individual cannot attain in his everyday existence.

This was the problem with Gandhi. He said everybody should give up sex. But even his own sons refused to do so.  

In short, due to limitations of subjectivity the peasant cannot simultaneously be a peasant and Gandhi.

No. He could stop doing anything useful and fuck off to Jail and then some fucking Ashram.  

Instead, the self is displaced into Gandhi. Therefore, political action is an interplay between the realization of the self as the ego-ideal – the fact that one's political self is not a coherent plan as created within a nationalist framework (the fact that one is a peasant and not an elite political figure) – and the ideal-ego of the nationalist.

Nonsense! The peasant could go to jail and then rise in the Congress party while running a khaddar shop or something of that sort.  

This tension between the ideal-ego and the ego-ideal is drawn from the idea that the imaginary is where signified notions of language are present.

But un-signified notions- e.g. who the fuck will defend the country if Gandhian nutters come to power- may be more important. 

However, the ―language, here is not limited to a linguistic system of signs or speech, but rather encapsulates the notion of a language within politics itself.

It is called political language.  

Now, the tension between egos is resolved when the individual utilizes one's own subjective interpretation to re-seek national politics in the self, and the subjectivity of political discourse is taken up in the imaginary to become an individuated and subjective notion of interpretation.

Till people understand that the thing is bollocks. Can you make a living out of this shite? Some could and did. Others gave up this foolish play-acting.  

It must be noted that these notions of tension between the symbolic-nationalist and the individual are completely contextualized.

No. Nutters who talk this type of bollocks are wholly ignorant of actual contexts.  

One cannot enter into the subject's internal discursive apparatus to determine how linguistic or symbolic gestures, such as clothing, tonality, or language functioned within a personalized imaginary.

Sure one can. Get talking to the dude wearing a Palestinian keffiyeh and holding a 'Fuck Netanyahu' placard, and he will explain everything to you. True, he may start backing away from you if you tell him that Nostradamus had predicted all this centuries ago. The true story- as explained by Divine Mother, Janet O'Flaherty,  is that Joe Biden- whose number is of the Beast- incessantly sodomizes Netan-Yahoos and this has irked the homophobic Hamas organization. 

However, it is from this vantage point, agency begins its shift down from the top and back into the masses.

So the vantage point of Lacan and dudes who got PhDs from Columbia is what helped Lalu Prasad Yadav and Nitish Kumar to rise. Good to know. 

Now, how can one reapproach Chauri Chaura through the use of a Lacanian psychoanalytic structure?

In the same way that you can reproach Neanderthals for not making cat like noises in a sufficiently avant garde manner.  No wonder they went extinct! 

When using this analytic approach, it becomes clear why the peasants yelled ―victory to Mahatma Gandhi‖ as they burnt down the police station, even after they had signed the Pledge Form.

They had been shouting that slogan before and after that event. Why? That was the slogan of the Congress party. If, as Gandhi promised, he delivered Independence by the end of the year, then all the guys who had paid their dues and joined the INC would get land and positions of power under the new rulers. The minions of the Majithia zamindar, who had gained by supporting the Brits in 1857, would be told to fuck the fuck off back to Punjab.  

Sadly, Gandhi surrendered unilaterally. Many of the rioters were incarcerated. Some were hanged. No doubt, families who lost land or breadwinners were full of 'reproach' regarding this outcome. 

As previously stated, the symbolic order within political discourse is the nationalist figure; thus in this situation, the symbolic is Gandhi.

& the Ali brothers. There was a Congress/Khilafat combine. Gandhi put an end to Hindu/Muslim unity by surrendering unilaterally.  

If Gandhi acted within the purview of the symbolic order,

as opposed to the smelly order of flatulence 

then the signifier within nationalist politics was Gandhi

this 'signifier' signifies 'Gandhi' as signified. OMG! What an amazing discovery! You are totes blowing my mind, Nishant dude! 

as a nationalist figure in that he represented a readily available differentiation of ideals. This may have come from the fact that he not only was a figure who was not British,

Another amazing discovery! What's next? The discovery that he wasn't a French can can dancer?  

but also from the fact that he literally did not fashion himself as an elite – he was known to don the dhoti. 

Back then, Hindus donned dhoti when they returned from Court, even if they were Judges. Princes, too, wore dhoti when relaxing in the bosom of their families. Even the British Viceroy had adopted the Islamic pyjama and given up the European night-shirt.  

As previously stated, the signifier is based upon a use of language that is binds individuals within a given structural unit.

Language has been a very divisive issue in India.  

Perhaps it was also Gandhi's literal use of language – his stress upon Gujarati, Hindi, and Urdu – that acted as a signifier to present him as readily available to the peasantry.

British officials were obliged to pass exams in the vernacular language in addition to Hindustani and at least one classical language. Gandhi was unusual in that he had not learned Sanskrit properly- because he was too lazy and stupid. Also, as a British barrister with right of audience, he didn't know Hindu or Islamic law.  

Nationalist politics tended to be elitist in terms of language choice:

Nonsense! Bengali nationalists spoke and wrote in Bengali. Tamil nationalists- like Rajaji- wrote and spoke in Tamil. Radhakrishnan, who wanted Madras for a separate 'Andhra' Pradesh, championed Telugu. In the Doab- khadi boli (which literally means 'upright speech') was replacing the more fluid and feminine Braj Bhasha. There was a Persianized version and a Sanskritized version. But what was actually spoken by political leaders was Hindustani. 

it was conducted in English, or in distinct versions of Hindi or Urdu; that is to say that the Hindi or Urdu used by nationalist figures tended to be overly Sanksritized or Persianized

only if they were Pundits or Ulema 

in order to accomplish a certain resonance within a specific population within India (an example of this would be Dayanand Saraswati's Satyarth prakash).

He was the founder of a Hindu sect. It is obvious that religious leaders will use a diction which borrows more from Sacred Scripture.  

Thus, Gandhi's choice of language (the language of speech or presentation)

he spoke a lower class, urban, type of Hindustani 

– as language is all that binds the signifier within the symbolic – presents him as a readily available nationalist figure to enter the peasant imaginary.

but he exited that 'imaginary' soon enough. As Nehru noted, the Hindu peasant wanted to take land from the Muslim landowner and to get rid of Muslim dominance in the administration.  

However, Gandhi within the symbolic goes beyond a notion of language.

Because everything goes beyond it- even grammar.  

If one is to consider Gandhi a manifestation of national politics which was readily available to the peasantry,

which hadn't needed a fucking Gujju in 1857 

then he already begins to lose status as a World-Historical Figure wherein all agency within a nationalist movement is predicated upon him.

I suppose you could say Gandhi did represent the World-Historical shittiness of the darky at a time when 'Scientific Racism' ruled the roost. That's why American Whites were anxious that African Americans adopt a Gandhian course. After all, that nutter began his career in South Africa which then went more and more in the direction of Apartheid.  

It is likely that a peasant population would look to Gandhi as a signifier of nationalism that could be manipulated to accomplish their own goals.

Nope. In his native Gujarat, Gandhi was chased away when he tried to get peasants to join the Indian Army and go get killed in Flanders or Mesopotamia.  

Only four years prior to the non-cooperation movement were the Kheda and Champaran satyagraha campaigns.

Both of which did deliver for more prosperous peasants or- in the case of Champaran- wealthy money-lenders like the dude who invited Gandhi there. It was Rajendra Prasad who did best out of that bit of business just as it was Sardar Patel who benefitted from Kheda &c.  

Within these campaigns, certain figures within the peasant and working-class communities approached Gandhi to act as a figurehead in order to accomplish their goals to battle what they deemed as the oppressive structures of land tenure or working conditions.

This also happened in many other 'struggles'- e.g. Chirala Pirala. Even British bastards were setting up elected Municipal Corporations and threatening to tax the people so as to pay for sewers and schools. But Indians want to shit all over the place and, though they don't mind getting a diploma, don't want to study anything. The good folk of Chirala appealed to Gandhi who counselled 'desh tyaag'- i.e. abandoning your house and going to live in the jungle. Sadly, this involved dying of malaria or typhoid. The Chirala Pirala agitation soon collapsed just as had the Salt agitation and various other such foolish enterprises.  

At the time (and also today), a popular communicative device was rumor: it was often used to spread information about Gandhi through India. As previously mentioned, the idea of Gandhi as a Mahatma was spread through the use of rumor – it can only be inferred from this that the idea of Gandhi as nationalist figurehead for the peasantry was also spread through the use of rumor. Combining both Gandhi's use of language as well as the rumor lends credence to the idea that Gandhi was not necessarily a figure that could be considered to be bounded within him.

This can be said of any politician. The rumour is that Trump will send all Blacks, Jews, Hispanics, Homosexuals, Democrats, and ladies of child bearing age to death camps. Vote for Kamala! Rumour has it she is actually a Communist who will enable America to rise in the manner that Chairman Xi has enabled China to rise. 

The pledge form, ahimsa, and satyagraha are merely extensions of the symbolic form of Gandhi;

No. They were material things. The 'symbolic form' was not material.  

while these symbols come from Gandhi, they dually represent and signify a manipulated nationalism within the peasantry.

which was like the manipulated nationalism within the British Cabinet.  

Although Gandhi is the signifier, he is also the ideal-ego.

for dudes who gave up fucking- maybe.  

Individuals displace political idealism into nationalist figures because the nationalist is a bounded, coherent individual;

Nope. That figure may be wholly mythical- e.g. Sebastianism in Portugal or my own belief that Robin Hood will rise up from the dead to strike down Sir Keir Starmer.  

that is to say, the nationalist is what one would imagine the self to be if one were to only focus upon his or her political desires.

Few wanted to be like Gandhi. Still, if he had delivered what he promised then- as he had demanded- members of the INC would control the new administration and thus reward themselves with the spoils of office.  

However, due to the demands of everyday life, the political self is often unstable or incomplete.

Not in this case. The executioner's demand that you stand quietly while he puts a noose around your neck is what made the 'political self' unstable and incomplete. 

Of course, it was possible that Gandhi would stand firm- indeed, he had previously told the Viceroy that he would not call off the agitation even if there was violence- then, though some locals might be killed and Gandhi himself may have been transported, still, sooner or later, Congress would come to power and the families of those involved in the riot would have been richly rewarded.  Indeed, in one or two cases, rioters did gain substantially some twenty five years later. 

Why did Gandhi call off Non-Cooperation? The answer is simple. Peasants wanted land. This was also the message of the Bolshevik revolution. But, if the peasants took the land, they would have no need for lawyers. Also, they might kill money-lenders or, at the very least, repudiate their debts. Thus Congress, in its moment of triumph, would be disintermediated and would disappear. What would replace it? The answer is that the Princes and Zamindars would bide their time before, hiring European mercenaries and purchasing left over arms and munitions from the Great War, re-establish the War Lordism that had preceded British rule. Sadly, there was no Prussia or Savoy whose monarch might unite India and restore order. Congress would have to sulk in jail, leaving the Brits to unilaterally decide the scale and pace of reform. 

However, what makes my analysis any less elitist than a Hegelian interpretation?

Nishant offers no analysis. He merely states that a 'symbolic-imaginary apparatus began to crumble'. He does not say that what crumbled was a stupid fantasy that the Zamindar and the Moneylender would disappear without Anarchy supervening. Still, the fact is, if the Brits were planning to fuck off, then, in the ensuing anarchy, smart peeps might be able to grab something for themselves. The problem was that those with money and muscle-men might then gobble up these 'small fish'. 

 Nishant does not seem to understand that if a thing is dismantled, that means it failed. Dismantlement does not explain failure. It failure. He writes '... through this dismantlement wherein non-cooperation failed: one cannot place importance on either Gandhi or the peasantry, as it was both working simultaneously within the purview of the political imaginary-symbolic nexus that brought the event to a close.' One may as well say of a group of guys who jump of a cliff in the belief that God will grant them the power of levitation that 'through the dismantlement of the apparatus of levitation, those who jumped off the cliff failed to fly. One cannot place the importance on either the leader of those nutters nor on those nutters themselves because both were simultaneously working within the purview of the rubric of the catachresis of the mise en aybme of the scotomization of socio-political imaginary-symbolic which perpetually shoves its head up its own rectum.' 

A possible critique of this paper would perhaps address the idea that this seemingly structuralist application of Lacanian psychoanalysis cannot apply to an undeniably dynamic subaltern community.

Whereas it can to Nishant himself who dismantled his own brain apparatus by studying stupid shit at Collidge. Vivek Ramaswamy didn't do so and thus now is genuinely elite.  

To answer this criticism, I return back to Lacan, who wisely stated that ―one of the things we must guard most against is to understand too much, to understand more than what is in the discourse of the subject.

Whereas there is no need to guard against talking bollocks.  

I cannot stress the importance of the contextuality of my argument.

Because it isn't important. I suppose the nutter means 'I cannot sufficiently stress...' This is a good example of a Freudian slip. 

Perhaps the usage of the symbolic and imaginary may stretch beyond Chauri Chaura,

it obviously did because Gandhi cited it as the reason he called off the Non Cooperation Movement because, he now realized, India was not ready for Independence.  

but we must not assume that this is so. I must remain staunch in the idea that this analysis does not extend beyond the limits of these moments in the historical record.

But 'this analysis' did not extend to the actual fucking historical record. That would involve reading a lot of documents in various archives and getting access to unpublished diaries and other records kept by concerned people at that time.  

This analysis simply returns to the Chauri Chaura and uses the fragments of discourse that remains from those peasants to rightfully recast them from rabble-rousers to political actors and insurgents.

Though all they did was to rabble-rouse and then either run away or end up in jail or with the hangman's noose around their neck. 

What I find sad about this essay is that if some kind soul had pointed out to Nishant that it was puerile, paranoid, nonsense, he might have switched to Law School or Business School or just quit the Academy to start up a business. Instead, he wasted his time doing a PhD in garbage.