Prem Shankar Jha on Dharma & how Congress can revive its fortunes.

Jha was once quite highly regarded in India. Unfortunately, he like K.N Raj or the Patnaiks, had an elitist contempt of the Kaleckian 'intermediate class' which was vulgar and couldn't speak Englis gud and thus didn't understand why India should remain a shithole just because Maulana Azad had been a pal of Mahatma Gandhi or because Nehru, like Jha, had been to Oxbridge and thus had done India a great favor by fucking it up economically.

Jha is now explaining how Congress can make a comeback-

The Congress needs a long period of introspection on its own past errors, before it can even hope to make a comeback. If there is a single “good” outcome it can take away from its defeat, it is the realisation that there is no middle ground in the battle of ideas that lies ahead. To combat the poison of Hindutva, the Congress needs to stop parroting imported words like secularism and pluralism, both of which have clichés, and rediscover the guiding philosophy that has underpinned the practice of all religions in India over the past two-and-a-half millennia. This is ‘Dharma’.

So, Congress must combat the poison that is Hinduism by rediscovering the guiding philosophy that has underpinned its practice. Wonderful!

What is Dharma
Dharma is the original faith of Vedic India.

But the Vedas were the Scripture of only a small portion of India. Most of what is now Indo-European speaking India was specifically excluded from its area of operation in that caste was lost if those areas were settled. Why is this high caste buffoon pretending that the vast majority of Indians should care a flying fart about the beliefs of Vedic Aryans? It is a different matter that the Hindu Religion has given an honored place to its own interpretation of those Scriptures. But that is a feature of Hinduism- more especially in its Hindutva aspect in that the latter vigorously denounces racist and hereditary notions of caste.

Jha is welcome to go preach his Vedic Dharma to the Pakistanis and the Afghans. That may have been their original faith. By contrast, the greater part of Hindu India was not part of Vedic India. It is only the Hindu interpretation of the Vedas- which, no doubt, some Vedic peoples contributed to- which has been the 'original faith' of the subcontinent.

There is no reference in the Vedas to Hindu Dharma, because the word Hindu was brought to India from Persia more than a millennium later, ironically, by the Muslims.

Nonsense! The Greeks took up this word which is differently pronounced. The word Indu does feature in the Vedas.
Why does Jha think it 'ironic' that Muslims used the word? Is it because they have ethnically cleansed or forcibly converted Hindus in areas where they dominate?
But how is this a stick with which to beat Hindutva or the Hindu religion? Buddhism too was wiped out as was Zorastrianism. In recent years Christianity has become an endangered faith in the Middle East because of rising Islamic militancy.

Dharma was not a religion in the modern, contentious, sense of the word because the Messianic religions that now dominate discourses on religion had yet to be born.

The Messiah is a Zoroastrian concept- from Saoshyant. However, we know there were Priest-Kings and ethnic cleansing and mass enslavement on the basis of Religion before the Jews adopted the notion from the Persian. Jha is talking ignorant, outdated, bollocks.

Dharma defined the right way of living: it prescribed how people needed to relate to each other and to the wider world around them.

Dharma was translated by Greeks living in India as 'eusebia' which Romans who had studied in Greece translated as 'pietas'. Thus there is a Kripkean rigid designator here such that Dharma is piety. It does not 'prescribe how people need to relate to each other'. Nothing can do so because the future is unknown. Jha, cretin that he is, has a degree in Economics. Did nobody tell him about Knightian Uncertainty? What about Darwin's theory of Evolution? Surely he must have heard of it? Evolution occurs on a radically uncertain fitness landscape. Thus nothing and nobody can 'define the right way of living'. All that is possible is to counsel prudence and piety and ethical, 'regret minimizing', behavior.

Jha and his ilk were shite economists because they simply didn't get that Knightian Uncertainity militates for 'economia', not 'akrebia'. That means seeing some good in everything and working out a 'modus vivendi'. Talking bollocks about eusebia or dharma is foolish.

The Rig veda differentiates between different forms of dharma, such as prathamaDharma, Raj Dharma and Swadharma.

Nonsense. There is a prathama and sanatan notion of a Metaphysical sort and there is a notion of required rituals. However the modern notion of 'Raj Dharma'- as used by Vajpayee against Modi- does not exist. How could it? The legal and socio-economic background was quite different.

Purva Mimamsa does not insist on any sort of univocity with respect to ritua,l ethical or doxastic obligations.

But every one of these centers around the concept of human Duty, which was “to Uphold, to Support, to Nourish”.

Jha is saying that duty centers around the concept of human duty. What an amazing discovery!  However he is wrong to say that there is any human duty to uphold the Sun or nourish the Milky Way or support the Ocean. On the contrary, there may be a human duty to subvert and destroy enemies, to break and smash their defenses and to deny nourishment to parasites or predators.

Dharma is what became Karma Yoga in Hinduism during the classical period.

Rubbish! Dharma is not Karma. Duty is abstract. The deed is concrete. The former is about relations between beings across the horizontal dimension of space. The latter is about genidentity over the vertical axis of time.

“Dharma” was the word Gautama Buddha used to describe his sermons on the four noble truths and the eight-fold path. Western students of comparative religion, have done Buddhism a disservice by presenting it as a new religion, because this has made it one among several religions, including the three Messianic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

But it is the Indian Government which gave separate, minority, status to Buddhism and Jainism. Why blame 'Western students' for this? It is a different matter that Hindutva does not discriminate against the members of such religions.

Buddha’s use of the Vedic term suggests that he considered himself to be a social reformer and not a prophet.

Lord Buddha claimed a much higher status than a prophet. Like Lord Jesus Christ, according to the Bible, Lord Buddha, according to Buddhist Scripture, states that he, by himself, can bring even the worst sinner to ultimate salvation.

Incidentally he did not use a 'Vedic term'. He used a term current in the language of his milieu. In Buddhist philosophy it has a technical sense quite different to anything in Vedic Hinduism.

What he had rebelled against was the corruption of Dharma, and the growth of Adharma.

No. He sought ultimate Liberation from Nescience and the toils of rebirth. He wasn't going around critiquing political corruption or venal priests or rapacious merchants or anything of that sort.

These were caused by self-absorption, avarice, expensive and impoverishing ritual, and Brahminical control. Buddhism was, in fact, the first great recorded rebellion against organised religion in human history.

There was no hegemonic organized religion in North East India at that time. There were competing religious organizations of both 'Shramanic' and 'Bhramanic' sorts. There had been a formal State Religion in Egypt and we know that Pharoah Akhenaton led a rebellion against it long before the Buddha was born. Why is Jha writing this ignorant nonsense? How fucking senile is he?

Describing Buddhism as one of several prophetic religions has obscured a critical difference between Hinduism, Buddhism and other mystical religions, and the Messianic ones.

A prophet says 'God, or an Angel, has told me Humanity must do x'. Buddhism has never been called a 'prophetic religion' because Buddha was not claiming to be a Divine intermediary. On the contrary, he claimed a status higher than the Celestial Gods because he had achieved ultimate liberation.

This is that Messianic religions have to be professed.

So does Buddhism. You don't get Liberation if you say 'I won't take refuge in the Buddha'.

Belonging to one of them requires a profession of faith in it and a repudiation of other faiths.

When you take refuge in the Buddha, the Sangha, and the Dharma, you abjure all else. No doubt, in practice there were Hindu-Buddhists just as there were Hindu-Muslims or there now are people who dabble in Kabbalah and Zen Buddhism while remaining Catholics or Anglicans.

It is a surrender of oneself to the ‘true’ God, whose reward is the possibility of gaining absolution for one’s sins through repentance, in this life.

Repentance and seeking expiation is a feature not just of theistic religions but of human social life everywhere.

Dharma, by contrast, has to be lived.

Repentance is not enough. You've gotta straighten up and fly right. This is as true of an employee or an errant husband or a guy who is trying to stay sober. Why does Jha not understand this?

Only virtue in this life can gain the soul freedom from the chain of rebirth. It requires no profession of faith, no submission to a single prophet.

But, if you are a Buddhist, it does require taking refuge in the Buddha, the Sangha and Rules and Regulations of the Buddhist Religion. But the same is true of Christianity or Vaishnavism or Islam.

And it offers no easy absolution from sin.

Rubbish! There's always some priest or monk who will assure you of it for enough cash down.

It is the Hindu way of referring to Buddhism, as Bauddha Dharma, and the remark that Hindus frequently make even today – “yeh mera Dharma hai” – that capture its essence.

Jha thinks Buddhists don't have congregational worship and domestic rituals and 'prayaschitham' or 'pacittiya' rules of confession or expiation. He is wrong.

His article ends here. I suppose the fellow is quite senile and fell asleep. But what point is he making? It is that Congress should attack Hinduism because it is associated with Hindutva. Hinduism is very bad because...urm... it isn't Buddhism. Buddhism is very good because it isn't a religion at all- though all the evidence is against Jha on this point- but rather a purely individual praxis. Still, this idiot thinks that one can escape the toils of rebirth. I don't. Rebirth is just 'Maya'- an illusion. One needs to get rid of such silly illusions because they justify casteism. The idea is that if you were good in your last life then you are posh, like Jha, and get to spend your life writing well-paid bollocks and thus get to be reborn as a cockroach.