Pankaj Mishra, Gyan Prakash & the Emergency era

Gyan Prakash leveraged an MA in JNU to escape from India long ago. He has written a silly book about the Emergency. Pankaj Mishra wrote a couple of silly books about how awful it was to be a backward bhaiyya from the cow belt,  and, on that basis, managed to escape India less long ago. Now the younger expat has written a silly article in the NYRB about Prakash's book.

Why?

Some silly people compare Modi to Indira and pretend that there is a second Emergency in operation in India which nobody except these stupid expats has noticed.

Why did Indira declare Emergency? She should simply have put Jagjivan Ram in charge, dissolved Parliament and stormed back to power. The answer is she didn't trust any of her Cabinet colleagues. Furthermore, her younger son and daughter-in-law were corrupt and could have been prosecuted. Anyway, if the people wanted 'sampoorna kranti'- Total Revolution- she could deliver it better than the cretinous JP.  Indira knew that Revolution means beating the shite out of people and jailing everybody who might wag their tail. The problem with Revolutions is that the original leader tends to die mysteriously to be replaced by a more vicious sociopath. In this case, the sociopath in waiting was her own younger son. Thus, she called elections and spent a couple of years in the wilderness before her Opponents' cobbled together coalition imploded. Then she took back power with her younger son's help. His thugishness had mellowed into Machiavellian corruption and, it is believed, she sincerely mourned his death in a glider accident.

The reason Modi, or, more generally, the BJP, doesn't want or need to impose an Emergency, is because Cabinets are well disciplined and efficient. There is no atmosphere of intrigue nor widespread corruption. Democracy and the Rule of Law are good for the Party to flourish and the Prime Minister to work effectively.

Dynasts turn into despots when they fear intrigue. Genuine political parties, which reward merit, have no such proclivity.

Mishra admits that this is the conventional view.

He writes-

Prakash is skeptical of conventional accounts of the Emergency, which focus on Indira Gandhi and her son Sanjay—her paranoia and megalomania, and his arrogance and recklessness—and which also blame her political opponents for intoxicating the masses with fantasies of an unachievable revolution.

Revolutions are achievable but they tend to be utterly shite. Indira gently reminded North Indian people of this fact by posing a clear and present danger to their testicles- this was the 'forced sterilization' campaign which so quieted opposition to her that she thought she'd win- and the upshot was that Indians stopped thinking kranti was cool.

Gyan Prakash, however, was doing a PhD in, that well known redoubt of Revolutionary praxis, the University of Pennsylvania. As a brown man, he gained intellectual affirmative action and posed as a spokesman for Ind's revolting masses.

Mishra, with unconscious humor, writes-

Prakash offers a more disquieting analysis, linking the Emergency to both India’s supposedly pathbreaking constitution and its present state of moral and political debility.

How was India's constitution 'path-breaking'? Ambedkar rightly dismissed his contribution to it as 'hackwork'.  The fact is, if the Communists had played up, the Constitution could have been easily amended to make the country a One Party State.

What 'moral and political debility' does India now exhibit? The Left has been decimated- but it was always shite.  Rahul has taken a beating- but his incompetence and stupidity have long been apparent and it is time someone else stepped up to head the Opposition. No doubt, there is an 'anti-appeasement' sentiment targeting Muslims- but that is true of Europe and America. India has done nothing as extreme as ban the burqa, like France, or 're-educate' Muslims as Communist China has done.

Gyan Prakash, cretin that he is, thinks the Constitution was important. This was not the case because the 24th amendment had nullified the Golaknath judgment. The  Kesavananda Bharati case was narrowly decided in 1973 but the 'basic structure' ratio only became effective after- and partly as a reaction to- the Emergency. Thus, there was no 'careful cloaking' of anything in 'constitutional dress'. The existing MISA law was used and then beefed up more as a signal of intent than as an instrument. Like the Press, the Judiciary too, 'crawled when they had only been asked to bend.'

Fascinated by the fact that the Emergency was carefully “cloaked in a constitutional dress,” he goes back to examine the making of the constitution, and the fear of “anarchy” that made its Hindu, largely upper-caste authors—Ambedkar was an exception—vest the state with coercive authority over society.

This is very foolish. Pakistan is Muslim, Sri Lanka is majority Buddhist. Yet their original Constitutions were similar to India's- except Ceylon's had stronger minority protection which is why they got universal suffrage in 1931. Pakistan did not have a democratic trajectory for one simple reason. Its more populous and cohesive East Wing was politically more developed but lagged behind in terms of participation in the Military. Once proper elections were held, the country broke in two after a bloody genocide in the East carried out by soldiers from the West.  It is true that, unlike Sri Lanka or Pakistan, India hasn't abrogated its first Constitution. But this is because India is a largely Hindu country which has faced no major insurrection or widespread separatist movement. It is Democratic because Hindus want Hindus to compete for their votes. This does mean that some minorities- Muslims in particular- have gotten short shrift. In the Sixties many better off Muslims faced harassment by the 'Custodian of Enemy Property'- and people like Salman Rushdie's father were forced to emigrate. Those who remained worked hard and, where competition was on the basis of genuine merit, did make a prominent place for themselves. However, the idiocy of Al Qaeeda has caused trouble for Indian Muslims in the same way that it has caused trouble for Muslims in many other parts of the world. Thankfully, India can always shift blame to the lunatics in the Pakistani ISI whose latest own-goal is to have gotten Modi re-elected with a bigger majority. I suppose, it could be argued, that the ISI wanted to keep Indian P.Ms from getting chummy with their Pakistani counterparts. However, so long as Imran Khan is in office, no Indian P.M in his right mind will go near the fellow. Why? The Indian will look dowdy and provincial by contrast.

He describes how the constitution of free India preserved provisions of British-ruled India that had previously incited the freedom movement, such as preventive detention (which, as a United Nations report documented last year, is now used even against children in Indian-ruled Kashmir). Furthermore, as Prakash points out, the Indian constitution allowed the prime minister as sovereign authority to legally impose a state of emergency.

Thus, the Constitution did not matter at all. India needed to be administered in the only way it could provably be administered- i.e. on the basis of its history of administration. The British had ruled India based on how it was ruled before- as had the Mughals and so forth.

Incidentally, kids should be detained if they are a danger to themselves or others. It is not the case that India is targeting kids for 're-education' like China.

At the same time, it deprived the courts of their authority to check the prime minister’s power. In Prakash’s resonant judgment, the Emergency was a “lawful suspension of the law.”

No. It was an unlawful suspension of certain provisions of the law. Indira was lying when she claimed that there was any real possibility of the Army or Policy mutinying just because JP- that senile dotard- had babbled some nonsense in a speech.

Prakash, like Mishra, is a cretin. It is no accident that the Left supported Indira save when it was opposing that portion of the Left which supported Indira. However, that portion of the Left later supported Sonia till it screwed the pooch so royally that Manmohan could rule without it. Now many of their erstwhile goons are voting for Modi because they are tired of Mamta's goons beating the crap out of them.

Mrs. Gandhi’s power-grab was validated by the parliament, which barred “judicial review of the emergency proclamations and ordinances suspending fundamental rights.”

Why was it validated? It's because Indira had struck terror into the hearts of the intriguers. The very people who would have deserted her- and subsequently did so- had to turn into her most servile sycophants. But this is the problem of dynastic parties. They turn to despotism because of the 'internal' enemy of intrigue. Proper political parties don't do any such thing.

Many of Mrs. Gandhi’s arbitrarily detained victims had filed habeas corpus petitions under Article 226 of the constitution, claiming their fundamental rights, and nine high courts across the country had ruled in their favor. But the Supreme Court notoriously upheld the government’s position by a vote of 4–1.

The lone dissenting judge, who was in line to become chief justice but was later vengefully denied that position by Mrs. Gandhi, quoted from Wolfgang Friedmann’s Law in a Changing Society(1959): “In a purely formal sense, any system of norms based on a hierarchy of orders, even the organised mass murders of Nazi regime, qualify as law.” In other words, the Emergency, however abominable, was not illegal. Nor was it seen as such by the craven Indian media, which, as one politician imprisoned by Mrs. Gandhi famously charged, “was asked to bend…and…chose to crawl.”

Mishra does not mention that the dissenting judge was H.R Khanna. He paid the price by being superseded. It is noteworthy that Chief Justice A.N Ray had been promoted out of turn and his attitude to Indira was adulatory.

However, the fact remains, the Left- which was intellectually in the ascendant back then- considered the Judiciary to be 'reactionary' and Constitutions to be merely wastepaper. Amartya Sen's 'Idea of Justice' is in this tradition which dismisses 'Due process of Law' as 'Niti', when what truly matters is 'Nyaya'- arbitrary actions of a supposedly re-distributive type.

Mishra writes-

Prakash goes on to establish that other much-denounced features of the Emergency were not aberrations.

This is blatantly false. Prakash can't establish anything because he is a cretin. Forced sterilization was not possible before or after the Emergency. It represents an aberration made possible by the Emergency. Extra-judicial killing, by contrast, is always possible. It's just interfering with people's testicles which is aberrant.

For instance, the compulsory sterilization drive of the mid-1970s, the signature program of Sanjay Gandhi, had its origins in a program of population control aggressively promoted in the 1960s by the Ford Foundation, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund; the Ford Foundation gave grants to the Indian government, provided consultants, and prescribed policies.

The Ford Foundation did not prescribe the forcible sterilization of all and sundry- including elderly people and kids. Why? Coz it wasn't utterly stupid.

The Indian government’s coercive modernization schemes were on display well before they were sped up during the Emergency, when more than six million men were sterilized in India in a year.

Where was the coercion prior to, or subsequent to, the Emergency? India was not Sweden where eugenic forcible sterilization, promoted by people like Nobel laureate Alva Myrdal, only ended in 1975.

As Mara Hvistendahl documented in Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men (2011), “Widespread sterilization was an idea that had been introduced to India by Western advisers, but Sanjay Gandhi ratcheted it up to an unprecedented scale.” His demands were so extreme that “local officials could meet them only by dragging men to the operating room—typically a makeshift camp that had sprung up practically overnight.” Hundreds of men died as a result of botched operations.

The reason the Ford Foundation, World Bank and so forth did not advocate forced sterilization was because it was bound to lead to a backlash- at least in what the Myrdals' called 'soft states' like India.

Visiting a terrorized India in 1976, the World Bank’s president, Robert McNamara, hailed the Gandhis’ “disciplined, realistic approach” to family planning and the general junking of “socialist ideologies.”

McNamara was a Kennedy appointee who shat the bed on Vietnam and went to the World Bank as a form of penance. He was himself considered a socialist by Dubya's neocon henchmen.

Prakash demonstrates that the demolition of slums, another exercise of arbitrary power blamed on Indira and Sanjay Gandhi, was also an aspect of “the state’s modernization project from above.”

It was a corrupt land grab. If Indira and Sanjay wanted 'modernization' they'd have liberalized the economy.  Slum clearance only occurred where the underlying real estate was valuable. It did not occur where the slum-lord provided money or goons for the Congress party. Only cretins like Prakash and Mishra think that the World Bank and the Bilderbergers and the Elders of Zion are all conspiring to 'modernize' shithole countries and seeking to chop off our goolies so as to bathe in our semen.

In escalating that project “with wanton force, Indira, with Sanjay and his coterie, sought to accomplish what they could not achieve ‘normally.’”

Why was the project escalated? It was to strike terror into the hearts of people and disrupt the conventional politics of intrigue and hypocritical protest. That strategy worked a little too well. North India appeared entirely docile. Kao, Indira's Intelligence Chief, was widely believed to have given the all clear for elections to be called. The fact is most people in Lutyen's Delhi believed Indira would squeak through with the support of regional parties and the CPI.

Mishra & Prakash think the Emergency was some cunning Capitalist scheme to raise Indian living standards. They are utter fools subscribing to the very same Socialist ideology which Indira used to justify her reign of terror.

Similar improvisations by a panicky ruling class were underway in many postcolonial countries. In neighboring Pakistan, Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto moved from promoting a populist variant of socialism to appeasing Islamic fundamentalists, inadvertently setting the stage for the military despot who executed him and inaugurated breakneck Islamization.

Bhutto used the excuse of Socialism to destroy the political influence of the Industrialists (he himself was a feudal landlord). He did not appease Islamic fundamentalism. He targeted the Ahmediyas because they were middle class Punjabi speakers. In any case, after the oil shock, everybody was sucking up to the Saudis. Bhutto's mistake was to rig the elections. This destroyed his legitimacy. He compounded this error by abusing the Generals who hanged him rather than wait for him to get back in power to take his revenge.

It is ludicrous to paint Bhutto or Bandarnaike or Indira or Idi Amin as 'Socialists' who started appeasing either Capitalism or Islam or anything else. These were shitheads leading shithole countries who, however, had their sycophants amongst the Socialist 'intelligentsia'.

Indira Gandhi herself followed this trajectory of the failed third-world modernizer when, after her triumphant return to power in 1980, she began to stoke Hindu nationalism, enabling Modi’s Hindu-supremacist party to move from the fringes of Indian political life to the center.

Rubbish! Congress was a Hindu dominated party which established Hindu hegemony, banned cow slaughter in many states,  and completely marginalized Muslims while coopting the more docile type of Dalit. Compared to the Congress Seva Dal, the RSS were pussycats. Jagdish Tytler was a former head of the Dal. What he and his chums did in Delhi to the Sikhs in '84 explains why Congress, not the Mahasabha, was considered the muscular wing of Hinduism.

Atal Behari Vajpayee did well as External Affairs Minister in the post- Emergency Janata coalition. His party showed cohesiveness while the other constituents of Janata were dynastic personality cults. Thus it was his 'Bharatiya Janata Party' which became the legitimate successor of  the Janata Morcha. However, this was not obvious back in the early Eighties.

Indira did not move to the Right because of Atal- a meat eating, wine bibbing Liberal- but because she herself was deeply religious and had a more intense personal spiritual dimension than any previous or subsequent Indian leader. In this she was Kamala, nor Jawaharlal's, daughter. Sanjay had no time for Socialist shitheads while Rajiv was most at home with Dosco boxwallahs.  There was lip-service to Socialism but it was about as convincing as Rahul's claim to be fighting for 'workers and peasants'. Sonia, it seems, genuinely respected Leftist intellectuals. But Manmohan didn't. It is now apparent that his administration was more, not less, 'neoliberal' than Modi's.

Cretins like Mishra believe that 'political legitimacy' involves the sort of shite they view with paranoid suspicion because they never outgrew an adolescent type of Left infantilism.

They babble nonsense about 'crises of governance' which arise from the paranoid fantasies of antisemitic shitheads like Marx and Hobson.

Modi also derives political legitimacy from his oft-proclaimed mission of national modernization but seeks, more explicitly than his predecessors, Prakash writes, “to resolve the crisis of governance by building a Hindu nation with a ressentiment-driven majoritarian politics that reduces the minorities to second-class citizens.”

Minorities became second-class citizen at Partition. Millions were ethnically cleansed. Muslims were still being forced out of India in the Sixties. Socialism failed almost immediately. After that there was a hypocritical vote bank politics by dynasts on the one side and, on the other, the growth of a genuine political party with a meritocratic element. Rahul wanted to make the Congress party a similar outfit. He has failed. But, sooner or later, some other outfit will succeed in the task. Some hoped it would be the Aam Aadmi Party. Perhaps some similar 'Morcha' might be sparked by some future scandal. However, the 'Muslim appeasement' charge has little mileage left. Attacks on Hinduism by Hindu Leftists are declining, or failing to get publicity. Thus, Hindu resentment is disappearing.

The afterlife of the Emergency has turned out to be long and rich. There have been nine non–Congress Party governments in Delhi in the forty-two years since the Emergency ended. Yet antiquated laws on sedition and preventive detention are still on the books and are frequently deployed. A prime minister can still easily impose “a state of exception” through the “sovereign” exercise of “extraordinary constitutional powers.”

These laws aren't antiquated in the least. They permit organs of the State to make contingency plans and maintain a type of executive capacity which, by itself, has a countervailing power. However, in the mid Eighties and Nineties, as in the late Sixties in connection with Naxalbari, there was widespread extra-judicial killing to which everybody turned a blind eye. This severely undermined 'Command Responsibility' and the justiciability of essentially political wrongs.

Prakash could have argued his case about the unexceptional nature of the Emergency with more detailed examples of how representative democracy in India always enjoyed an apparatus of perfectly legal oppression.

As has every representative democracy in history. This proves that there is a giant conspiracy which stretches from the caves underneath the Vatican where Chtulhu is worshiped,  to the garden shed behind my bedroom from whose rooftop the neighbor's cat keeps me under illegal surveillance.

For instance, politicians in power in New Delhi frequently—forty times by 1977—were equipped by the constitution to get rid of state governments they did not like.

But they only did so if the dismissed administration could not get re-elected or else if it was seditious.

In 1959 Indira Gandhi, then freshly appointed to the presidency of the Congress Party, stoked protests against the progressive reforms of the Communist government in the state of Kerala—the first elected Communist government anywhere in the world—and persuaded Nehru, her father and then prime minister, to dismiss the Communists and impose central rule.

The Communists lost the subsequent election and learned their lesson- don't fuck with the Church. Do something useful for the people and you will get reelected. The Communists could have become a National Party like Congress or the BJP. However, the stupidity of their various gerontocratic politburos prevented this outcome. What great ideological crime would have been committed if Jyoti Basu had been allowed to become P.M? I suppose, the answer is that Basu would have been flattered and cajoled into following the Chinese path. Indians would have been better off. Mishra and Prakash would have felt anally violated. Their privilege as 'native informants' regarding a shithole country would have been undermined.

In common with other viable states, India kills or otherwise neutralizes people who try to destroy its territorial integrity. Mishra thinks this is very naughty. But he has moved to a country which has done the same thing far more effectively for hundreds of years.

Nehru had some practice in this regard in Kashmir, where he first abandoned his 1947 promise to organize a referendum to decide the contested region’s political status and then, in 1953, deposed a popular Kashmiri politician and imprisoned him.

Actually it was Rafi Ahmed Kidwai who ran with that particular ball. Kidwai realized that if the Kashmir valley seceded then there would be large scale ethnic cleansing of Muslims in India on the Pakistani pattern. Sheikh Abdullah, like his son and grandson, remained emotionally close to Nehru and his dynastic successors.

The valley erupted in a militant insurgency in 1989, which the Indian government met with a ferocious counterinsurgency, flooding the region with more than half a million soldiers. Nearly 80,000 people have died in a place that remains the most dangerous on earth, an eternal flashpoint, as events of late February reminded us, for a war between two nuclear-armed nations.

Rajiv Gandhi rigged an election in Kashmir in favor of fellow dynast, Farooq Abdullah. Thus he was able to rival his mother's cretinism in creating a terrible insurgency in Punjab. The fact that these insurgencies had an anti-Hindu ethnic cleansing aspect was supposed to bolster the Dynasty. Perhaps it would have done but for Rajiv's assassination because of his stupid meddling in Sri Lanka. Of course, it must be said, there was plenty of stupidity amongst high officials and 'darbari intellectuals' in New Delhi.

At the same time, India’s military occupation of Kashmir has also profoundly corrupted Indian institutions—the legal system as well as the security forces, the media, and the larger public sphere.

Nonsense. It has had zero impact outside the State just as actions in Nagaland had zero impact on the rest of India. Similarly, British operations in Northern Ireland had no impact on English institutions. That is why Mishra moved to Britain.

In 2013, the year before Modi came to power, the Supreme Court dispatched a Kashmiri to the gallows on flimsy circumstantial evidence, arguing that the terrorist attack in 2001 on the Indian parliament that he had allegedly been involved with had shaken the entire nation and that he had to be hanged in order to satisfy the “collective conscience of its society.”

And Obama had Osama killed. There is a define pattern here- a big Conspiracy which stretches all the way from the Vatican catacombs to the roof of the garden shed upon which my neighbor's cat lies basking in the Sun and ILLEGALLY SURVEILLING ME. Why? Because of NEO-LIBERAL CAPITALISM!  I have proof. My Dyson vacuum cleaner malfunctioned while under warranty. Dyson is a billionaire. Neighbor's cat observed my doing something to the hose of that vacuum cleaner which WAS NOT EROTIC IN ANY WAY! But, clearly, many people would have believed its TOTALLY FALSE TESTIMONY that I was using the Dyson to pleasure myself thus invalidating the warranty. This is just a small example of the way in which the military occupation of Aldershot has totally corrupted and subverted every institution in the country- including that of the supposed neutrality of neighbors' cats in commercial disputes with Vacuum cleaner companies.

If the situation in India seems bleaker today than it was during the Emergency, it is because,

the Left has been utterly routed. Thus Mishra and Prakash look foolish.

as Prakash points out, “the social and political crises that it unsuccessfully sought to resolve with shadow laws and authority” have intensified.

Unfortunately, the Marxist notion of crisis has faded out of current Indian politics. There is zero 'Revolutionary potential'. Mishra and Prakash are as foolish as Niradh Chaudhri who, in 'Autobiography of an unknown Indian' expressed the hope that the White man would come back to rule India.

India’s rapid but highly uneven economic growth in recent decades always seemed politically as well as environmentally unsustainable. It was predictable that disappointed business leaders, together with frustrated masses, would abandon the Congress Party’s corrupt and inefficient ancien régime and lift Hindu nationalists to power.1
Prakash is alert to the social and historical setting in which democracy lives—or grows infirm, and quietly dies:

But Prakash lives in America. How 'alert' can he be? India has a young demography. It has no choice but to be democratic. Its democratic and legal institutions have grown more robust. The only senility and brain death in evidence is that of expat, armchair, Leftists like Prakash and Mishra.

In today’s India,

as opposed to what? yesterday's India? the day before's India?

as in many other places, power and money define the context. Those who enjoy social and economic privileges, and can summon powerful political influence, play by different rules. Vast quantities of unregulated capital let loose by the neoliberal economy

with THE DIRECT COMPLICITY OF MY NEIGHBOR'S CAT

slosh around to twist the machinery of laws and administration. An army of fixers and middlemen operate at every level to distort and corrupt the everyday experience of democracy, turning it into “a feast of vultures.”
Modi promised a clean and impartial administration, but under him the “influence-peddlers” first introduced into Indian politics by Sanjay Gandhi

Such peddlers were always there.

have burrowed deep into the country’s major institutions, including the Supreme Court. In an unprecedented move last year, four senior judges held a press conference to warn that democracy in general as well as the integrity of the country’s highest court was in peril.

They were being silly. They gambled that Modi would lose. Instead he won. The current CJI was one of the 4 judges protesting against the CJI's preeminence and his privileges as Master of the Rolls. Gogoi has not reduced these privileges once he himself got the top job. Two of the four Judges have turned on Gogoi for the manner in which a sexual harassment charge against him was handled.  What was the upshot of all these shenanigans? Indians no longer believe that Judges aren't a bunch of bitchy 'mean girls' constantly turning on each other biting and scratching. The complaint of the original 4 had to do with the Loya case- one which only needed to be investigated if Judges are in the habit of murdering each other simply so as to eliminate non-corrupt comrades.

This is not to say that Democracy is not in danger. The neighbor's cat is like totally imperilling democracy. So is the person wot steals my lunch from the fridge replacing it something which appears identical but doesn't taste as nice.

Modi commands a committed ideological cadre of Hindu nationalists

like whom? Nirmila Sitharaman? Subhramanyam Jaishankar? Both have been promoted on merit. What about Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi or Syed Shahnawaz Hussain? They are Nationalists, certainly, but are they Hindu?

that is rapidly taking over the military and the bureaucracy, the universities, and the media

and taking orders from my neighbor's cat.

And Modi himself looms as large in India as Indira did.

How shameful! A Prime Minister should try to be faceless and anonymous.

“His photographs, slogans, and programs appear everywhere as hers once did,” Prakash writes. “He does not hold press conferences and subject himself to questioning; he prefers to speak directly to the people with his weekly radio address and, like Donald Trump, frequent tweets.”

Lal Bahadur Shastri did not hold press conferences. So what? A number of other P.Ms followed his example. So what?

The expectations generated by consumer capitalism among a predominantly young population have raced far ahead of any actual material progress achieved by India.

Prakash and Mishra's expectations, generated by consumer capitalism, caused them to emigrate from India. They can earn a little money writing this type of tripe. Good luck to them. They have found a niche- albeit of a repugnant sort- in the globalized market for stupidity. But this has nothing to do with politics or, indeed, India.