Rudrangshu Mukhurjee's illiterate cri de coeur

The historian, Rudrangshu Mukhurjee, Chancellor of Ashoka University- writes in a new book of his

India today, seventy years after Independence, is facing a situation where some of the fundamental features of democracy are under serious threat. 

This is a remarkable claim. Fundamental features of Democracy have justiciable remedies if threatened or curtailed in any manner. Indira Gandhi abused her power. Raj Narain took her to court. The Court decreed against her. She then suspended the Rule of Law in the name of Democracy and changed the Constitution. Can Mukhurjee point to anything similar happening now? Is there a dynasty being established? If so, where is the equivalent of Sanjay Gandhi riding roughshod over Ministers and Civil Servants? Are opposition leaders being incarcerated without due process? Has Censorship been imposed?

The answer to all these questions is no. What then is it that worries our historian?

The threat emanates from the ideological orientation of the present prime minister and of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party.

No ideology represents a threat to any fundamental feature of Democracy. That is why Democracies don't ban ideologies.

Mrs Gandhi may or may not have had an ideology. She established a Dynasty. That is a fundamental threat to Democracy. The BJP has done nothing similar.

There are two aspects of this ideology that need to be noted here. One is the assertion that India is a country of the Hindus and that the true future of India lies in making a Hindu Rashtra.

Where has that assertion been made? From the ramparts of Red Fort on Independence Day? Nope. Modi talks about the need to build Toilets so as to end open defecation. He never speaks of Akhand Bharat or Hindu Rashtra.

People of a particular Religion may wish their creed to be embraced by everyone and that this outcome will be attained in the fullness of time. Such a belief is not a threat to Democracy. Mitt Romney, as a Mormon, may have believed that America, and the World's, destiny was to embrace his own Religion. The Mormons are very active proselytisers. They baptize dead people into their faith. But, Romney did not represent a threat to Democracy.

Other religious groups — Muslims, Sikhs, Christians, Jains and so on — will have to live in India on terms determined and dictated by the Hindus, the people who can project what is truly Indian.

After Independence, Muslims in Hindu majority areas had to live on terms determined and dictated by Hindus. The mention of cow protection in the Constitution is evidence of this. The suppression of Urdu in favour of Hindi, the loss of reserved seats, and a great decline in the proportion of Muslims in Legislatures and the Civil Service, occurred while Nehru was Prime Minister. That is why many Muslims migrated to Pakistan in the Fifties. The 1965 War marked the apogee of insecurity for the Indian Muslim. Salman Rushdie's father- a Cambridge Graduate, barrister and successful businessman, felt he had to up-sticks and get out of the country because the 'Custodian of Enemy Property' was persecuting him.

Nothing similar is happening now.

These views are not confined to the world of ideas. They have become a part of the grim reality of the daily lives of ordinary people, who have become perpetrators of intimidation and violence, as well as its victims.

Mukhurjee knows full well that communalisation, which was declining in the early Seventies, re-emerged during the Emergency when Muslims were victimized by the administration- most blatantly in Old Delhi as part of Sanjay Gandhi's 'Civic Beautification' campaign. After Mrs. Gandhi returned to power, the condition of Muslims deteriorated markedly. Sikhs too were targeted. Nothing similar is happening now.

Ordinary individuals pursuing their trade and professions have begun to group themselves in localities to preserve and protect what they think, following the Sangh Parivar, as Hindu and truly Indian. Perceived threats to this Hindu India are then made targets of violence. The targets are always ordinary Muslims, who are attacked and lynched.

Always? Mukhurjee Sahib, you are departing from the script. You must include Dalits. Presumably what you are getting at is the beef issue. But cow protection laws were brought in by Congress and other political parties.

In the name of Hindutva and Hindu Rashtra, the rule of law is made to disappear and mob violence prevails. And because perpetrators of this kind of violence are always supporters of the ruling political dispensation, the police become bystanders and no action is taken against the inciters and the executors of violence. Lynching and mob violence, on the rise in many parts of India, began almost as soon as Narendra Modi came to power. In 2016, a student was arrested from Jawaharlal Nehru University and was beaten up by lawyers while the police remained passive bystanders. None of the offenders — those who took the law into their own hands — was charged or arrested.

Between 2013 and 2016 there was a decline in lynchings. Social Scientists link this sort of mob violence to the health of the agricultural sector. Farmers' distress has increased. Dominant castes are demanding reservations.

The ruling party needs to preserve Law & Order and deliver cash based transfers so as to defuse a potentially explosive situation. India is already a Hindu Rashtra in all but name. Rahul Gandhi is now saying he is a Shaivite, sacred thread wearing, Temple visiting, Brahmin. Hindus have been appeased. Now they will cast their votes on the basis of how much better Governance can ameliorate conditions for themselves and their caste fellows.

Since then the list of such incidents has grown at an alarming rate. And increasingly, almost always, the victims of the violence are Muslims who are suspected of eating beef, selling beef and so on. The actual reason is that they are Muslims and therefore are seen as enemies. Bigotry nurtured by a political ideology has made people, as it always does, blind and intolerant. There is one associated feature of this violence to which attention needs to be drawn. In every case, the prime minister and his close associates and leaders of the Sangh Parivar have failed to or refused to condemn the violence. Murder in the name of Hindu Rashtra is fast becoming a way of life in democratic India.

Nonsense! If the majority wants to slaughter the minority they can do so. The vast majority of the army, the paramilitaries and the police are Hindu. Most Judges and Civil Servants are Hindus. If the thing were popular, it would have been done already. If it isn't popular, it will be curbed when it is expedient to do so.

These events, where supporters of the Sangh Parivar in parts of India have used violence, boasted about using violence and incited violence, reveal an ominous political trend in India. It is significant that there are groups of people, supported by political leaders, who are unashamed — on the contrary proud — of their use and advocacy of violence against individuals and groups who do not share their views.

So what?  The Communists were the worst offenders in this regard. That did not mean that Democracy couldn't turf them out when their hoodlums went too far.

The counterpart of this kind of exhibition of intolerance of dissent is authoritarianism. 

Which is why Mukhurjee is now in Tihar jail and Ashoka University has been reduced to a pile of rubble.

Why is Mukhurjee using the word 'authoritarianism' as if it has a pejorative meaning in India? He should use words like tyranny or misrule.

A political party and its various wings, because they enjoy a popular mandate, are assuming that they have the right to impose their views on people who disagree with them.

Everybody has the right to impose their views on everybody else as well as to resist any such thing happening to themselves. Thus, if a Christian Missionary knocks on my door and begins haranguing me to come to Jesus, it is not the case that Theresa May, a Vicar's daughter, has licensed them to do so.They may believe otherwise but it still isn't true.

The first step is to label the dissenters with epithets that incite passion — “anti-national”, “Maoists”, “terrorists”, “perpetrators of sedition”, “beef eaters” are some of the common labels being used for anyone who dares to criticise.

A better first step would be to use epithets like 'senile old windbag' or 'ignorant shithead'. However, the best first step of all would be to ignore critics unless they say something useful in which case you steal their suggestion without acknowledging it.

These epithets are then being used as an excuse for state action — arrests, humiliation, denial of bail.

The epithets are not an excuse they correspond to cognizable offences. However charges can only be sustained if there is verifiable evidence.

The state action is being bolstered by actions of party cadre and party loyalists who are rushing in to harangue, abuse and beat up so called “offenders”. The abuse continues on social media. An ambience of terror and intimidation is thus generated.

No such ambience has been generated. That is why opposition parties are experiencing resurgence. Because of the worsening outlook for India on virtually every front, the BJP may well decide to give up on Governance the way everybody else has and simply concentrate on feathering the nests of its careerists. However, the RSS, being at arms length, will be able to continue to burgeon precisely for this reason.

The targets of this terror are two predictable groups. One is made up of the secular, anti-Hindutva, pro-democratic sections of the population; India’s most endangered species — the secular intelligentsia.

A ridiculous suggestion. These jokers drummed up support, even amongst anglophone NRIs for Modi. Previously we were afraid these dhoti wearing Hindi speakers would make us look bad in the eyes of the world. Then people with high caste Hindu names and Doctorates from Oxbridge or Ivy League started writing of Hindus as bestial terrorists who would outdo the idiocy of the Muslims. At that point, we voted for Modi because at least he dressed well and didn't talk nonsense.

What is also alarming is that attacks against this group are tapping into a pool of public opinion which believes that India should be a strong state, that tolerance is not a virtue, that nationalism is an unalloyed virtue, and that universities should have no autonomy.

So, this was written a couple of years ago, when people like Mukherjee didn't get that 'autonomy' means market oriented reform. That's why the lecturers are up in arms against autonomy. They want the State to continue to pay for everything in return for worthless Degrees. The problem here is that not even the most benighted dehati wants a PhD from JNU in Gramscian gobshittery.  They do want to learn good enough English to at least work in a call center.

And in the second group are Muslims who, it is averred, “should be taught a lesson” for no other reason save that from 1206 to the coming of British rule Muslim dynasties ruled India.

This may be the Congress view because Congress sees the Muslims as a cowed and despondent vote-bank for whom the BJP is a bogey man.

However, for the BJP, people like Abdul Kalam are inspiring figures whom Indians should learn from. There are countless such Muslims. In some cases, their religious faith is directly responsible for their achievements. I may be too lazy to pray even once a day and may consider the ban on alcohol to be unreasonable, but I have to admit that spiritual exercises and flawless sobriety are very helpful in carrying out great tasks.

Muslims are assumed to be anti-Indian/Hindu.

Muslims who say kaffirs should be killed and India should be dismembered are anti-Indian. Indian Muslims, in the main, feel that these crazy killers are not Muslims. They refused to give Islamic burial to the terrorists who attacked the Taj Hotel.

It would be simplistic and erroneous to believe that only the ignorant and the obscurantists hold such outlandish views. These views are held by educated people, seen and heard in clubs and cocktail parties, people whom one would expect to be upholders of the rule of law and the Indian Constitution. This pool of support and the popular mandate provide the sanction for the slide towards authoritarianism.

So Mukherjee is the sort of person people come up at cocktail parties in order to regale him with hate speech. Why is that? How come it doesn't happen to me? Does the fucker have a Hitler 'tache? Or does he just give off a rapey vibe?

It might be asked: how there can be a slide towards authoritarianism when Parliament still exists and is functioning to the extent that the Opposition is voicing its concern on the floors of the two Houses of Parliament?

'how there can be' is Babu English. The correct form is 'how can there be'. The answer is there can be a slide to authoritarianism if the PM doesn't trust members of the cabinet not to mount a coup or else considers them to be useless. This was a feature of Indira Gandhi's paranoid style of exercising power. It is not a feature of Modi Sarkar.

The authoritarianism is manifest in a different, but not an irrelevant, theatre. This is at the street level — the way supporters and party loyalists are mobilising themselves to suppress dissent and the articulation of criticism.

It is Mamta's goons who are doing so in this cretin's native province. Why pretend otherwise? Whom does this buddhijivi think he is fooling?

They are also choosing their own ways of punishing those who differ with them — smearing them with ink, humiliating them, beating them up, lynching them and so on. In other words, through mob violence.

This fucker studied at Oxford. Why can't he write grammatical English? 'In other words, through mob violence' is not a well formed sentence.

This is not to suggest that Modi is ordering or directing the violence, the intolerance and the suppression of dissent.
These are acts akin to those the Stormtroopers and the Hitler Youth carried out in Nazi Germany.

But Hitler directly ordered those acts. He killed, in the 'night of the long knives', those who acted independently.

What is decisive here is not the rule of law, not democracy and certainly not the Constitution, but the brutal use of muscle power to impose one particular ideological view — Hindutva. Such actions have the consent of ideological and the political leaders.

The brutal use of muscle power was a feature of the Communists and then the TMC in Bengal. Gujarat is not a place where 'muscle power' is respected. The RSS has risen there because of its record of social and educational work. Modi's own success had to do with suppressing criminality and corruption. In Bengal, businesses and households are extorted by Mamta's goons to donate money for Durga Puja pandals. Nothing similar happens where genuine Hindu values are respected. 

Many people of Rudy's own class are now voting BJP in Bengal because they are sick and tired of 'goonda Raj'.

This is not to suggest that Modi is ordering or directing the violence, the intolerance and the suppression of dissent. He does not need to. His supporters are second-guessing him and carrying out actions that they know will win his approval. Modi does not need to implement his own ideological agenda; there are people — many of them physically far away from him, ordinary cadre of the Sangh Parivar — who are doing that job of implementation and doing it mercilessly. They are working towards Hindutva and therefore towards Modi’s core beliefs.

The problem here is that Modi knows he has to uphold the Rule of Law if his reforms are to succeed. If others break the law, they must be prosecuted. Civil Society has an interest in seeing that this done. Gassing on about some imaginary 'authoritarianism' does no good at all, more especially if it is admitted that Modi is not authoritarian. He commands nothing which is against the law. 

The emergence of Narendra Modi as the undisputed and the unchallenged leader of the BJP has brought greater clarity to the ideological aims of the Sangh Parivar.

This is nonsense. The RSS is wholly independent. It is suspicious of some aspects of Modi's agenda. Modi is not in a similar position to Mamta or Rahul or Mayawati or even Stalin, now that his brother is keeping shtum.

Modi, like Thatcher, can fall if he makes a mis-step. Demonetization could have done for him as the Poll tax did for Thatcher. Even Nehru wasn't safe after the Chinese debacle.

The velvet glove of moderate Hindutva has been removed to reveal the mailed fist.

When Rudy type cretins railed against Vajpayee and Advani they made no mention of any 'velvet glove'. Why do so now?

This ideological direction has no particular respect for, and interest in, preserving the fabric of the Constitution, the principles of parliamentary democracy and the features of a cabinet form of government.

Nonsense! The Indian Constitution is unitary and gives greater scope to the Center. It is in Modi's interest to work within it. Having a majority in both Houses means a greater commitment to parliamentary democracy. A united and increasingly meritocratic cabinet strengthens that form of government.

Modi, much like Indira Gandhi in her prime in the early 1970s, has fashioned a personalised form of governance by eroding all forms of collective decision-making.

Rubbish! Indira appointed a Bengali Chief Justice out of turn while employing a Bengali philosopher as Minister of Industry and a Bengali mathematical economist as Planning Chief. These sycophants let her son Sanjay run amok. Modi is not appointing Bengali shitheads so as to concentrate power in his own hands. 

Everyone at every level of political power knows where the real power lies — with the prime minister, and its implementation resides in the hands of a few handpicked bureaucrats in the prime minister’s office.

When has the PMO not been the real power-center? Under Manmohan? The PMO would fight public turf battles with whichever Ministry was under Pranab Mukherjee. On the other hand, corrupt Ministers would ignore the PMO trusting to the pusillanimity of Manmohan.

The politics of religious hatred at the street level created by a pernicious ideology that sees Muslims as enemies and anti-Indian, the pandering to this kind of hatred by political leaders, the growing spirit of irrationality in the intellectual space, the diminishing of dissent of all forms, the creeping erosion of democratic and civil society institutions and the deification of the prime minister — all these features are not only threats to democracy, but also to all forms of civilised existence.

But Rudy and his ilk have been spreading hatred of the RSS and the BJP for thirty years in exactly the same way. These cunts even pretended there was a 'Hindu terrorism' which was as great a threat as Islamic terror. Modi was the only person given a visa ban by the US. The Congress administration pretended India was a failed state and thus the Indian judiciary could not bring Modi to justice. Thus the US had to take action under a Law which had previously only been applied to Vietnam.

Was life under Sonia's corrupt and incompetent cabal really such a bed of roses? When the Nirbhaya atrocity occurred, Shiela Dixit, Delhi's CM, confessed that her own daughter could not safely go out at night. Yet, on TV, we could see that girls in Modi's Ahmedabad were perfectly safe to go to a movie or meet their friends even at eleven o'clock in the night!

They define a form of rule in which only hatred and brutality will prevail. These features came together in Europe in the 1930s to create a form of rule which caused the eclipse of liberalism.

But liberalism has never existed in India. It can't be eclipsed. Governance still has many rungs to climb before Liberalism can be established, let alone eclipsed. Under Modi, there is some prospect of this happening. Under dynastic rule, none at all.