Anthropomorphizing Amitav Ghosh

Brewer's dictionary, states that the 'biggest bores are of the Brahmaputra'. Of those tidal bores, none exceed Amitva Ghosh in boringness. This is this because this tidal bore professes Social Anthropology. What happens when we anthropomorphize Amitav Ghosh and pretend its tidal bore of vacuity emanates from a human source?

Consider the following article he wrote 5 years back-

Back in March 2013, when I received and accepted an invitation to visit Bogazici University,[1] I did not for a moment imagine that my arrival in Turkey would follow hot on the heels of a historic election in India. But so it did: I landed in Istanbul on June 1, 2014, five days after the swearing-in of India’s new Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

If this tidal bore is a human being, then it is an incredibly stupid human being. Most Indians imagined that Modi would be the next PM.

For the Indian National Congress, which has long carried the banner of secular nationalism in India, the election was a humiliation – an unprecedented defeat, at the hands of an organization that is closely associated with Hindu-nationalist groups, some of which, like the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), have even been banned in the past.

The RSS was set up a year after the Congress Seva Dal and was modeled on it. The Seva Dal was banned in West Bengal after Independence but Nehru got the ban lifted. Jagdish Tytler was head of the Seva Dal. His role in the anti-Sikh pogrom is notorious.

Congress was a Hindu nationalist organization with a few 'show pony' Muslims just as the RSS is a Hindu nationalist organization with a few Muslim members. Some Congress 'show pony' Muslims cross over to the BJP. But then, the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty is itself divided between these two parties. Sonia and Rahul are Congress. Menaka and Varun are BJP.

The outcome of the election, while not a surprise,

if it wasn't a surprise, why couldn't Amitav imagine it would happen? Does the answer have to do with the Navier-Stokes equation in so far as it constrains the phenomenology of tidal bores?

was still a moment of reckoning for those such as myself, whose revulsion at the dynasticism and corruption of the Congress was outweighed by concerns about the BJP’s right-wing economic program and its espousal of majoritarian politics.

Ghosh voluntarily chose to migrate to America- a country well known for its left-wing economic programs and minoritarian politics.

The prime ministerial candidate’s record during his tenure as Chief Minister of Gujarat was itself the greatest of these concerns, especially in relation to his conduct during the anti-Muslim violence that had convulsed his state in 2002.

Ghosh was writing this after the Supreme Court had failed to find any evidence against Modi. Another BJP Minister was convicted but has since won on appeal and been released. Why? It turned out this lady Doctor was working in a hospital not 'handing out swords' to all and sundry. A little later, a Hindu nun was convicted of terrorism because she 'lent her gold motorcycle' to some supposed miscreants. That nun has defeated the senior politician who tried to frame her by a huge majority on his own native turf. Why? Indian voters don't believe that lady Doctors have any swords to hand out nor that Nuns habitually ride around on gold motorcycles.

Ghosh's fiction is deeply boring and sedate. Yet he believes that, in the real world, Gynaecologists own a lot of swords and Nuns ride gold motorbikes when they are not lending them to terrorists.

Before 2014, no Hindu-nationalist party had ever won an outright majority of seats in India’s legislature.

Nonsense! The Indian National Congress won many outright majorities. Indira Gandhi split the I.N.C and what now obtains is the dynastic vehicle she created. Was Indira secular? No. She was a deeply religious Hindu who maintained close relationships with 'Brahmacharee' Yogis and Gurus and Acharyas. She fought a court case against her half Sikh daughter-in-law to prove her sons were pure Hindus and thus she was entitled to inherit from them under Hindu law.

This does not mean Hindu Indians give a rat's fart for the religion of their ruler. That's why the Brits could rule India for so long at so little cost in terms of 'blood and treasure'. The truth is they protected all the various religions of India. Not just that, they raised the prestige of vernacular languages and promoted their use. It was only after they left that 'Midnight's children' disdained those languages and chose to advertise their ignorance and stupidity in English so as to benefit from intellectual or aesthetic 'affirmative action'.

That the BJP had now come to power with a mandate far larger than predicted was clearly a sign of an upheaval in the country’s political firmament. How had this come about? What did it portend for the future?

We know the answer to that now. Better governance. Less corruption. Promotion by merit in the Cabinet.

It was only when I arrived in Istanbul that it struck me that Turkey had been through a similar moment eleven years before, in March 2003, when an election had brought in a new Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the founder of the Justice and Development Party (AKP).

This idiot thinks there was or is some similarity between Turkey- which thanks to Ataturk was never conquered or humiliated- and India where defeat and humiliation is something we inflict on each other, and our own selves, in a fractal manner.

He too was heir to a long tradition of opposition to his country’s dominant secular-nationalist order;

Anti-clericalism is not the same thing as what Indians call Secularism. Ataturk was anti-clerical. He was not 'secular' in the Indian sense. He pushed for Romanization of the alphabet while India went in the opposite direction favouring 'the script of the Gods'. He forced people to wear hats and ties and skirts while we made a fetish out of dhotis and Gandhi caps.

 Apart from being a 'Ghazi'- i.e. victorious Islamic warrior- he was a great peacemaker precisely because he always kept his word. After his death, however, there was the Varlık Vergisi in 1942 and then the Istanbul pogroms in 1955 which resulted in a 98 percent drop in the Greek population of Turkey.

 Pakistan and Bangladesh- both Muslim countries like Turkey- show similar demographic trends. Hindu India does not show anything similar. The proportion of Muslims tends to mount- indeed, Ghosh's West Bengal now features Muslim majority areas as does Assam.

Ghosh thinks Erdogan is like Modi because

 his party had also been closely linked with formerly-banned religious organizations. He had himself been accused of inciting religious hatred and had even served a brief term in prison.[2]

Erdogan was jailed for reciting this poem-
The mosques are our barracks,
the domes our helmets,
the minarets our bayonets,
and the believers our soldiers. 

The context was the Army's dismissal of the elected Government. Ghosh should have said 'Erdogan was jailed for opposing the Military coup'. Instead he pretends that Erdogan was jailed for inciting hatred against non-Muslims.

Does Ghosh believe there is a thriving non-Muslim community anywhere in Turkey? Does he really not know that, like Pakistan, Turkey has continually reduced the number of non Hanafi Muslims? Why is he so reckless with the truth?

The margins of victory too were oddly similar:

Oddly? This fucker is a Professor of a fucking Social Science.  He ought to know better than to write shite like this-

in 2003 Prime Minister Erdogan came to power with 32.26% of the popular vote and 363 of 550 seats in Parliament.[3] In 2014 the coalition of parties headed by Prime Minister Modi won 336 of 543 parliamentary seats; his own party’s share of the vote was 31%.

Ghosh is Indian. He knows that India has a lot of different languages. Its population is gigantic compared to Turkey. Modi's party did not even contest a lot of seats but had local allies. This was also true of every other Party. This stupid shithead may not have known how Turkey's election system differs from the Indian or British system. But he did know, mendacious, meretricious, shithead that he is, that this paranoid suspicion of his involves a suggestio falsi. 

The parallels are striking. In both cases an entrenched secular-nationalist elite had been dislodged by a coalition that explicitly embraced the religion of a demographic majority.

Very true! The Greeks and Armenians who were part of the 'entrenched secular-nationalist elite' were... killed or ethnically cleansed a long long time ago!

There may have been an anticlerical elite. But it was concerned with perpetuating its own power.

Secularism was itself a point of hot dispute in both elections, with the insurgent parties seeking to present the concept as a thinly-veiled means for monopolizing power and discriminating against the majority. But the ideological tussle over secularism and religion was a secondary matter: the winning candidates had both campaigned primarily on issues related to the economy and governance, promising to clean up corruption and create rapid economic growth.

Erdogan's party was not 'insurgent'. It already held power. In 2014, Erdogan took over the Presidency from a loyalist of his. Prior to 2007, there was a 'secular' President but he had been routed at the polls.

By contrast, Congress had been in power in India for a decade. Still, the BJP was well established. It was by no means an 'insurgent'.

The parallels extend even to biographical details. Recep Tayyip Erdogan was raised in straitened circumstances in a poor part of Istanbul; his parents were immigrants from the small town of Rize, on the Black Sea, and he had earned money in his childhood by selling ‘lemonade and pastry on the streets’.[4] Narendra Modi was born in the small town of Vadnagar, in Gujarat, and as a child he had helped his father sell tea at the local railway station. Later, he and his brother had run a tea-stall of their own. Both men have been associated with religious groups since their early youth and both profess a deep personal piety. Both also have claims to physical prowess: Recep Tayyip Erdogan was a semi-professional footballer, and Narendra Modi has been known to boast of his 56-inch chest. Both leaders are powerful orators;[5] both exert a charismatic sway over their followers and maintain an unchallenged grip on their party machinery.

There are no parallels here. Erdogan was from a big City. Modi was from a small town. Both, like the majority of their countrymen were from modest backgrounds. Erdogan was a sportsman. Modi was not. Erdogan, in 2014, did have an unchallenged grip on his party. Modi did not. It was his track-record as Chief Minister which made him popular.  Charisma and oratory can't get you very far in a country with many languages.

This is by no means the first time that political developments in India and Turkey have mirrored each other.

Political developments in the subcontinent mirrored the Treaty of Lausanne in the sense that Religion trumped Language in determining Nationality. One may certainly speak of Pakistan as emulating Turkey- two of its military dictators professed admiration for Ataturk. However, the Army has played no role whatsoever in India. There are no parallels between Muslim Turkey and Hindu India.

In the late 1960s and early ‘70s both countries were shaken by left-wing student radicalism and trade union unrest.

All countries were shaken by such unrest but in India, it was the ABVP which caused the biggest headache to Indira. 

The next decade, similarly, was a time of deepening conflict between the state and minority groups: Kurds and Alevis in the case of Turkey; and Sikhs, Kashmiris, Nagas, Mizos and a host of others in India.

Ghosh names non Hindu communities in the case of India. The Kurds however are of the same faith as the majority of Turks. Why does Hinduism have a unifying power such that it trumps differences in language, whereas Islam does not?

Between the years 1975-77 India went through a period of brutal repression under a State of Emergency imposed by Indira Gandhi; in Turkey the coup of 12^th September, 1980, led to mass imprisonments, torture and killings.[6]In both countries the violence reached a climax in 1984: in Turkey an all-out war broke out between the army and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK); it was in this year too that the Indian army stormed the Golden Temple in Amritsar, which was followed by the assassination of Indira Gandhi and the massacre of thousands of Sikhs.

So, India had only a brief, never to be repeated, period of 'brutal repression'. Unlike Turkey there was no 'all out war'. Sikh Punjab has never had a separatist majority. This is not the case with the Kurdish areas of Turkey. There are no parallels here whatsoever.

The parallels continue into the 1990s. In December 1992, an agitation launched by the BJP and its allies culminated in the tearing down of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, by a mob of Hindu activists; this in turn led to months of rioting and thousands of deaths. In Turkey, in July 1993, a gathering of prominent Alevis, was attacked by an Islamist mob in the town of Sivas: dozens of men and women were killed. In both cases it was the inaction of the authorities that permitted the violence to escalate.

Ghosh is misrepresenting the facts. The Sivas arson attack was a purely local affair aimed at a Sunni writer who had translated and published excerpts from Rushdie's Satanic Verses. Those responsible were small fry without any political standing who were given draconian prison sentences. By contrast, the demolition of the Babri Masjid was directly sponsored by senior politicians and resulted in no arrests or trials though some people were taken into custody briefly. Ludicrously, a CBI court finally framed charges against Advani, Murli Manohar, Uma Bharti etc. in 2017!

The ‘liberalization’ of the Turkish and Indian economies also occurred in tandem, in the 1980s and ‘90s. It was in these decades too that the secular-nationalist establishment of both countries began to suffer major setbacks, with religious parties steadily gaining ground.

In the eighties, Indira and Rajiv were projecting themselves as the protectors of Hindus. They had stolen the clothes of the BJP. The destruction of the Babri Masjid occurred under the rule of pious and devious Brahman who was well versed in Sanskrit and who relied on crazy Godmen like Chandraswami. Why is Ghosh pretending that Rao was part of a 'secular-nationalist' establishment? The fact is, it was Rajiv who had re-opened the Ramjanmabhumi for Hindu worship.

That political developments in India and Turkey have occasionally mirrored each other is in some ways surprising, since the historical trajectories of the two republics have little in common.

There is no mirroring precisely because Turkey and India are completely different from each other.

Unlike India, Turkey was never colonized; to the contrary it was itself a major imperial power until the First World War. In the second half of the 20^th century, Turkey’s politics differed from India’s in that they were dominated by the army. As a close ally of the United States, Turkey’s international alignments were also different from India’s through those decades. Perhaps more significantly, in material terms Turkey is (and has long been) far better off than India: its people are more prosperous and better educated, and its infrastructure is more ‘advanced’ in almost every respect. Indeed Turkey is effectively a First World country while India ranks in the lower levels of almost every index of ‘development’. Moreover India, with more than a billion people, is vastly larger than Turkey with its population of 77 million.
Yet the two countries do have at least one very important commonality: both are multi-ethnic and multi-religious, with very marked differences between regions.

Kurdish is not taught in public schools. Only since 2013 can it be taught in private institutions. Now Erdogan says it can be an elective subject. Compare this to India. Every State has its own language and script.

It is for this reason perhaps that the transition to nationhood was accompanied by similar traumas in both India and Turkey: indeed it could be said that it is in their dreams and nightmares, their anxieties and aspirations, that their commonalities find their most eloquent expression.[8]

This is nonsense. The transition to nationhood was prolonged for India. It happened very quickly for Turkey. In both cases, Religion trumped Linguistic affiliation. However Hindus did not expel Muslims to the same extent as Muslims expelled Hindus from the areas where they were a majority.

Turkey, being a Muslim, Hanafi, country, is similar to Pakistan and has a history of separatism violently dealt with by an Army dominated Administration.

Both republics were born amidst civil conflict, war and massive exchanges of population.

Turkey was born amidst military conflict. India and Pakistan were not. The Muslims initiated ethnic cleansing as did Sikhs and Dogras. This caused the 'massive exchange of population'. However, Ghosh's own West Bengal did not symmetrically expel Muslims. According to a Bangladeshi writer, whose article was published in the NYT, Muslims who migrated to East Pakistan did so for purely economic motives.

In no small part was it due to these experiences that secularism came to attain an unusual salience in the two countries:

Sheer nonsense! The Caliph had sentenced Ataturk to death. An Indian Khilafati turned up to try to kill Ataturk. That's why he abolished the Caliphate and suppressed the Mullahs with an iron hand. He introduced the Roman script so as to tackle widespread illiteracy. There were similar 'secularizing'- i.e. Westernizing- attempts in Iran and (briefly) Afghanistan.

Indian 'secularism' did not mean wearing trousers and hats and using the Roman script. It meant the reverse. Back in the Fifties, it was possible to believe that Socialism- i.e. 5 year plans- would transform the country into a modern industrialized economy. But, it soon became obvious that this was a pipe dream. Communism proved to be even more gerontocratic and out of touch with reality than the Congress party. Its 'popular front' collaboration with Congress showed its irrelevance. Now Congress has as many MPs as the Communists did in 2004. Out of the 5 seats the Communists currently have, 4 are a gift from the DMK.

it was considered indispensable for the maintenance of peace and equity within diverse populations. But secularism was thought to be indispensable also to the aspirations for material advancement that lay at the heart of the Kemalist and Nehruvian projects.[9] For the elites of both countries there was little difference between ‘secularism’ and ‘secularization’: the ultimate aspiration was for a general progression towards what Nehru liked to call the ‘scientific temper’.

Nehru tried to create a Technological cadre within the Government. The I.A.S strangled this initiative of his. His successors were more likely to listen to astrologers than engineers.

This was thought to be essential to the attainment of modern ways of living, as exemplified by the West. But since religion plays an important role in the lives of the vast majority of Indians and Turks, secularism was always an embattled aspiration, in both countries.

Misrule and bad Governance caused ruling parties to be 'embattled' in both countries. Islam, however, has far greater political potential than Hinduism- because of the caste system. Thus, Islamist parties have formed the kernel of opposition to despotic Military based regimes in countries like Algeria, Syria, Turkey, Egypt etc. In Pakistan, the Army attempted to co-opt or create an Islamic counterweight to 'Awami' Socialist parties.

By contrast, India has seen competition between two middle of the road Hindu dominated parties. The BJP got the upper hand because it is less corrupt and has a meritocratic, not dynastic, leadership. There was a brief period when Congress appeared anti-Hindu. That was simply a mistake.

Yet, through the latter decades of the 20^th century, even as the banners of secular-nationalism were beginning to look increasingly tattered, their bearers somehow managed to retain their hold on power in both Turkey and India.

There is no similarity between Turkey, whose constitution permitted its Army to topple any Government it considered to be compromising 'secularism', and India where there has never been a military coup.

This does not mean, of course, that religious parties never had any taste of power before the ascent of Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Narendra Modi. Just as Erdogan’s advent was presaged by two former Prime Ministers, Turgut Özal and Necmettin Erbakan, so too was Narendra Modi preceded as PM by another leader of the BJP: Atal Bihari Vajpayee.

Congress was a Religious party. India's first President- Rajendra Prasad was profoundly Religious. The Deputy Prime Minister, Sardar Patel, was and is popular with the RSS and the Sangh Parivar. Lal Bahadur Shastri was religious. During his rule, Muslims were persecuted by the Custodian of Enemy property. Laws banning cow protection were 'beefed up'. Indira Gandhi was initially a Socialist. However, when she returned to power, she was deeply religious and presided over massacres of Muslims and the military assault on the Sikh Golden Temple. Rajiv Gandhi was even more pro-Hindu. He permitted the massacre of Sikhs and fixed elections in Kashmir thus causing an insurgency. Sonia, by contrast, was more even-handed. However, she put up an RSS man, Shankarsinh Vagela, as her CM candidate in Gujarat. The BJP returned the favour by poaching Congress Muslims like Dr. Najma Heptulla and MJ Akbar.

Vajpayee's period in office dispelled the impression that the BJP was vastly different from Congress. If anything, the party seemed too Nehruvian- i.e. addicted to high flown rhetoric.

Why then did the elections that brought Erdogan and Modi to power seem so pivotal?

They did not seem pivotal but rather inevitable to voters simply because Governance was expected to improve under both.

In part it was because these elections had each been preceded by a tectonic shift in the political landscape; a development that was most notably evident, in both cases, in the collapse of the traditional left.

I don't know about the Turkish left. The Indian left lost salience because it lived in a fantasy world where the RSS was actually Hitler's SS. Thus it needed to follow the Comintern's 'Popular Front' strategy. But that strategy had failed in the Thirties! In West Bengal, the Communists destroyed their own support base by unleashing their hoodlums on the peasants so as to acquire land for crony capitalists. A former Congress leader, the fearless Mamta Bannerjee, beat them at the ballot box and then her goons beat the Communists in the streets until they piped small. Now many of them vote for the BJP.

In Turkey this collapse came about well before the election of 2003. This is how Jenny White, an anthropologist, puts it: ‘In previous decades, the Turkish left had carried the banner of ideological resistance to economic injustice. But the left had fallen victim to a double knockout punch: the post coup military crackdown and the global decline of socialism. Both left- and right-of-center parties abandoned the terrain of economic justice for more global issues. Islamist institutions and party platforms took over the role of the left as champions of economic justice…’^[10]A similar dynamic was at work in India ten years later, most notably in my home state, West Bengal, where a Left Front, led by the Communist Party of India (Marxist), had been dominant for more than three decades. But in the latter years of its rule the Left Front had come to be seen as corrupt and subservient to moneyed interests. Its rupture with the class that had brought it to power – small and marginal farmers – was set in motion by an effort to bring heavy industries into the state. This resulted in a series of land disputes between small farmers and corporations: by intervening on behalf of the latter, the Left Front sealed its own fate. In the election of 2014 the left parties suffered a defeat so catastrophic as to all but eliminate them as a major factor in national politics. This is undoubtedly a radical break for a country where the left has often held the balance of power.

The Communists had previously shat the bed by opposing the Nuclear deal with America for purely ideological reasons. The Left refused to step up to the plate, in the mid Nineties, and form a coalition government with Jyoti Basu as P.M. This showed it was more concerned with ideological purity than doing anything for the Nation. One factor in Mamta's rise is that she has cultivated the Namasudras, whom the Communists had massacred.

But there was a break also in the nature of the support that Erdogan and Modi were able to mobilize: they both succeeded in extending their bases beyond traditional religious groupings. Erdogan, for example, was able to draw on the resources of the vast network of educational, social and media-related organizations created by Fethullah Gülen, a religious figure who is in many respects quite different from traditional Islamist leaders.[11] So too was Modi able to enlist not just the old Hindu-nationalist organizations like the RSS, but also a number of gurus, godmen and pundits who have recently risen to prominence. Among them are some who have created new constituencies of Hindu activists in universities, tech companies and the like. This enabled the BJP to counter some of the charges that had proved most effective against religious conservatives in the past: that they are obscurantist and old fashioned; that they are a hindrance in the march to modernity; and so on.

Ghosh is being silly. Nobody cares about godmen and pandits. Modi won because of his track-record in Gujarat. High growth and good governance was what voters wanted. Rahul refused to step up to the plate and promise to deliver these things as P.M. Thus, Modi and Modi alone was saying 'Give me the top job. I can deliver what you want.'

Instead, the BJP (like the AKP before it),[12] was able to turn the tables on the secularists: it succeeded in presenting itself as more modern than its opponent, being less statist, less corrupt and less tainted by the past. That the BJP’s Prime Ministerial candidate was a self-made man, not a dynastic scion, was frequently cited to suggest that he would bring a new dynamism to the country’s politics.

Modi had dramatically sidelined the old men in his party- Advani, Murli Manohar and so on- which is why he was taken at his word. Moreover, he ran an effective, tech-savvy, campaign.

The similarities in these two political careers are such as to suggest that something more than coincidence is at work here, something systemic.

There are no similarities here whatsoever. Erdogan prevailed against the Army because to join Europe required Democracy. He seemed the man who could deliver this prize. By contrast, Indian politics is completely unaffected by anything from outside- save perhaps Islamic terrorism.

Erdogan and Modi are men of their time

Just as Ghosh is a man of his time. All people are people of their time.

and have both come to power by riding a wave of neo-liberal globalization:

That wave began in the Eighties. China rode that wave. Its politics are very different from India's.

their rise is proof that an economic ideology, when wrapped in a packaging of religious symbols and gestures, can have a tremendous electoral allure.

But Congress had exactly the same ideology. It could have done a similar type of 'packaging'- indeed, it embraced 'soft Hindutva' in the recent elections- but it would still have lost because its Crown Prince was reluctant to come forward. Indeed, he has now disappeared to America leaving his party to flounder in hopeless confusion.

The process by which the neo-liberal program was sacralized in Turkey has been described thus by the scholar Cihan Tugal: ‘Starting with its establishment in 2001, the AKP’s ideologues presented it as the expression of an economic shift, but they did so using a quite spiritual language. Nazif Gurdogan, a conservative ideologue and a member of a predominantly elite religious order, interpreted this party (in Sufi language) as the representative of the ‘forces of light’ against the ‘forces of darkness’.

Which party says it represents 'the forces of darkness'? Why mention 'Sufi language'? Every single language in the world thinks light is good and darkness is bad.

He further defined the latter as proponents of centralized, hierarchical, and rigid organizations based on trust, transparency, and distribution of authority. In political economic language he saw the party as the agent of flexible capitalism against organized capitalism represented by the nationalized sectors of the bourgeoisie. Religious civil society… combined its forces to sacralize the AKP’s economic program. Without this spiritualization, neoliberalism could not be sustained.’[13]

 I don't know Turkish but am willing to believe that there are crap Turkish journalists who write nonsense. Spiritualization is not needed to sustain any purely economic process or mechanism. Ghosh may believe otherwise, but then he is a cretin teaching a worthless, wholly discredited, subject.

Or, as another student of Turkish politics has put it: ‘… greater access to global resources, wealth accumulation, and communication technologies has redirected ‘political Islam’ toward an increasingly rationalized, post-political manifestation of something that might be termed ‘market Islam’.’[14]

It may be termed 'market Islam' if it purports to sell Salvation or remission of Sins. If not, it should not be termed anything so derogatory.

That this shift took longer in India than in Turkey is perhaps partly attributable to Hinduism itself: it is no easy matter, after all, to superimpose an ideology of ‘growth’ and consumerism upon a religion in which asceticism and renunciation are foundational values.

Sheer nonsense! Every religion says that asceticism and renunciation are good things. Neither Lord Jesus Christ, nor Prophet Muhammad, nor Lord Buddha lived lives of luxury while the masses starved.

On the other hand, no Government in India has ever said- 'Everybody should eat less. They should own fewer clothes. They must not have a roof over their head.' On the contrary, all promise to deliver 'roti, kapada, makan' and 'bijli, pani, sadak'.

But over the last two decades an emergent alliance of right-wing economists, revisionist thinkers and electorally savvy politicians and strategists has pulled off the seemingly impossible.

Ghosh has a conspiracy theory about why Turkey and India and China and so forth want to get richer. It is because of an 'emergent alliance'. Sadly the left-wing economists, progressive thinkers and electorally shite politicians were not able to form an 'emergent alliance'. Instead they shat the bed in impotent frustration. That is why whole world is now so evil and nice Begali buddhijivis like Ghosh have to double down on writing stupid articles like this. Meanwhile, in Ghosh's own country of domicile, Trump rules the roost.

Through a re-branding exercise of the sort that contemporary corporations are so adept at, they have successfully invented and sold a new product – ‘Market Hinduism’.

Where? On Ebay? On Amazon? Or merely in the fevered imagination of a stupid 'Social Anthropologist'?

Ghosh himself is selling shite books on Amazon. Why? There is a globalized niche market for stupid shite.

As with many other re-branded products the goods are actually rather shop-soiled.

Like Ghosh's own oeuvre. Why is this idiot pretending that markets are bad things? If he really believed any such thing, he would not sell his worthless books. He could just e-publish them for free.

They consist of pretty much the same set of ideas that motivated 19^th century opium traders, many of whom were devout evangelical Protestants, to claim that by smuggling drugs into China they were merely upholding the divinely-ordained laws of Free Trade, and thereby doing God’s work.

Evangelicals opposed the Opium trade. Missionary Societies did want free entry into China for the purpose of proselytisation- not some sinister form of unjust enrichment. Some Parsis and other Indian merchants benefited by the trade as did local Chinese compradors. The Chinese developed a taste for opium in the early eighteenth century whereas the East India Company became the biggest supplier- albeit indirectly- some 50 years later.  Opium smoking was legal in China till 1813. It is utterly false to say that Christians forced opium on China because they believed 'Free Trade was divinely ordained'. This is a highly repugnant, false, and racist statement tending to sow seeds of hatred between people of different religions and ethnicities.

The irony – a terrible one for people of a genuinely spiritual bent – is that this ideology has the power to impoverish the religions that it touches, emptying them of all that is distinctive in their traditions.[15] 

There is no irony here. There is simply a brazen lie. Gladstone condemned the Opium Wars in ringing terms. ‘A war more unjust in its origin, a war more calculated … to cover this country in permanent disgrace, I do not know, and I have not read of'. Gladstone embraced Free Trade- which only really triumphed with his first Chancellorship- but his condemnation of the Opium wars was wholly unequivocal. Christians in the UK campaigned against this despicable trade.

Instead it infects those religions with ideas that are not only ‘secularized’ but are also directly opposed to many of the values that have historically been cherished by every religion.

Ghosh is wrong about British Christianity. It has no truck with such repugnant types of commerce. Did he learn nothing at Oxford?

Are there any portents for India in Turkey’s experience of AKP rule?

With hindsight, no- none at all. There was no attempted coup. Nothing in India corresponds to the Gulenist movement.

I believe there are.

Because you are a cretin.

The first lesson is that the Narendra Modi’s tenure is likely to pose many surprises for liberals, left-wingers and others opposed to the BJP. As Cihan Tugal writes: ‘The first three years of AKP rule were a liberal’s dream. The party passed many democratic reforms, recognized the existence of minorities hitherto rejected by official discourse, and liberalized the political system.’

Because Turkey wanted to get into the EU.

Just as Erdogan was able to distance himself from his predecessors’ posture in relation to minority groups, it is perfectly possible that Modi too will take a different stance towards some of India’s troubled regions.[16]Equally, there may be some surprises ahead for New Delhi’s security hawks. Just as the AKP’s former Foreign Affairs Minister (and current PM), Ahmet Davutoglu, was able to engineer some significant changes in Turkey’s relationship with its neighbours, Narendra Modi too may be able to alter the regional dynamic in southern and eastern Asia. There are signs already that under his leadership India’s relations with China and Bangladesh will take a different tack.

Ghosh was wrong. India's diplomatic relations are not a political football. Modi was more assertive because he was in a stronger position. It may be a decrepit Congress coalition would have been defeatist. But that's the reason Congress was decimated in the elections.

In matters of governance, it is generally accepted that Erdogan has been more efficient and effective than his immediate predecessors. It is quite likely that this will be the case with Modi as well.
But what of Narendra Modi’s core promises: growth and economic expansion? Here the eleven-year time lag between Erdogan’s election and Modi’s may be of critical importance. Through Erdogan’s first term as Prime Minister, Turkey’s Gross Domestic Product grew at an average rate of 7.2%.[17] But this probably came about because of  a global upswing that happened to occur at a time when ‘emerging’ economies abounded in low-hanging fruit. [18] In India too the economy was expanding at similar rates in that period, under a Congress-led government. But after the global economic downturn, there has been a marked slowing of growth in both India and Turkey. It would seem that unlike Prime Minister Erdogan, who had the good fortune to come to power with a favorable economic wind behind him, Narendra Modi’s ascent has coincided instead with a strengthening downdraft.
What will happen if expanding expectations of growth are hemmed in by a tightening horizon of possibility?

The answer is that there has to be greater efficiency in 'last mile delivery'. Even Mamta has had to disintermediate her party apparatchiks from this, preferring to let the buck stop with Government officials. In Bengal, this has meant more gangsterism. Not so in BJP ruled states.

If the Turkish experience is any indication, the likelihood is that the attempt to pursue old strategies of ‘growth’ will become increasingly frenzied. More malls will be built and more public lands will be sold off; real-estate bubbles will proliferate, accompanied by revelations of corruption; the privatization of natural resources will accelerate, perhaps even leading to the sale of rights to rivers.[19] 

This had already happened and the BJP was left holding the baby.

At the same time, grass-roots opposition will be suppressed and every effort will be made to silence environmentalists.

In Bengali, the word 'grass-roots' translates as 'Trinamool'. Mamta's Trinamool Congress swept away the Communist despotism though, no doubt, the Left tried to suppress it. Genuine 'grass-roots' movements can't be suppressed in India. Environmentalists can be silenced because they don't have grass-roots support and rely instead on foreign money.

But only for a brief period will it be possible to get away with this. At a certain point people will push back, as they did in Turkey, during the Gezi Park protests of 2013.[20]Indeed the one area in which there is certain to be headlong growth is that of protest – a whiplash effect, ironically, of the same neo-liberal wave that has brought the AKP and the BJP to power.[21] 

Five years later, can we find any evidence for a 'whiplash effect' in India? No. None at all.

For it is now evident that the very currents that send tsunamis of capital and information hurtling around the world also have the effect of throwing up sand-bars of protest, many of which self-consciously mimic each other.

The reverse is evident. There are no 'tsunamis of capital and information'. Economists speak of 'turbulent flow' but acknowledge that 'contagion effects' can be quickly curbed. Sandbars are powerless against tsunamis. They are a natural, not a mimetic, phenomenon.

But governments have also been quick to learn: from Hong Kong to Seattle, Istanbul to London, the powers-that-be have found ways to contain and ultimately disperse these movements.

'Powers-that-be'! How very sinister! All Ghosh is saying is 'silly protest movements run out of steam. They can create a backlash in favor of the incumbent administration.' This is what is happening to the 'yellow vests' in France.

As a result their principal effect is often merely to bruise the egos of whichever leaders they happen to be directed against.
When protests break out in India, as they surely will, how will Narendra Modi respond? Will he take a leaf out of Erdogan’s book and become more authoritarian and repressive? Will he retreat into Sultan-ish isolation? Will political pressures ultimately lead to a break between him and some of the organizations that helped to bring him to power (as has been the case with Erdogan and the Gülenists)? Only time will tell.

Time has told all. Modi faced no mass protests. He was a sensible man who did sensible things. Also he worked very hard indeed. Ghosh and his ilk ranted and raved about Fascism to no effect whatsoever.

No matter what Modi’s response, the contradictions between neo-liberal promises of growth and the constraints of the environment will not go away. Not only will they cause domestic disruptions, they will also impinge, with increasing insistence, on matters deemed to be ‘external’. Thus has the AKP’s ambitious foreign policy been disastrously waylaid by events beyond its borders, most notably by a conflict that has, to a significant degree, been shaped by climate-change: the civil war in Syria, which was triggered by the catastrophic drought that began in 2008.[22]India, like Turkey, happens to be located in a region that is exceptionally turbulent, both politically and climatically. It is more than likely that the BJP’s foreign policy will also be susceptible to similar disruptions.

But it hasn't happened. Ghosh's Manichaean world-view corresponds not at all to Reality.

Indeed perhaps the most important lesson of the Turkey’s recent past is that the world is now entering a period of extreme volatility, when governments will be so overwhelmed by crises and firefighting requirements that they will be less and less able to implement coherent programs and policies.

Amitav Ghosh
November 24, 2014

It is sad to think of Ghosh, slavering at the mouth and rubbing his hands with glee in anticipation of a catastrophe befalling the people of his ancestral homeland, still doing the same thing five years later. How long must his fruitless vigil continue? Why can't the people of the sub-continent start massacring each other already, so that this cretin is proved right? As a person of Indian origin myself, I feel deeply ashamed at the manner in which we have let down our great buddhijivi who watches our doings from an Ivy League Ivory tower.