Werner Menski, Pyare Shivpuri & why SOAS is crap for Law

Werner Menski is an emeritius Law Professor at SOAS- in other words an utter cretin. Consider the following-

In desperate efforts to make sense of an allegedly glorious and certainly idealised past, encapsulated now in that dirty and polluting word hindutva (‘Hinduness’), reflecting efforts to make sense of one’s own roots in today’s often highly nationalistic contexts, many Indians and their more or less scholarly and highly politicised spokespersons simply like to believe today in certain myths.

Where are these Indians? I have never met any and I knew quite a few who, being too stupid to go to decent schools ended up at the toilet at which Menski taught. The one legal luminary, of Indian origin, it produced was Pyare Shivpuri- who was doing an MA in Law there when he was arrested for drug smuggling. The case of Regina vs Shivpuri was a landmark judgment proving that studying law at SOAS rots your brains. It causes you to forget the one legal principle every knuckle dragging Neanderthal has always known- viz. when arrested keep shtum. Demand a lawyer. Say, 'no comment' and 'allegedly' till you are blue in the face. Shivpuri didn't do any such thing, instead he sang like a canary and thus went to jail for trafficking in drugs even though he wasn't actually carrying any drugs.

Why does Menski- a 'son-in-law of Baroda'- say Hindutva is a 'dirty and polluting word'? Was Vajpayee a smelly homeless dude? Did Bush or Blair recoil from him? Did Navaz Sharif refuse to shake his hand? Was he or was he not the Prime Minister of India?

There is only one answer to this. Menski ability to think and to write English has been affected by that of his more mentally retarded students. He is concerned now only with outdoing their imbecility though he is a 'grandchild of the Nazis' and thus must have originally written in a stodgy Teutonic style.

That is of course much easier than textual excavation work. Hence many Hindus today assume that their law just fell from heaven one day into the lap of humanity, basically that this ‘law’ came from one big God at some point, as happened to other fortunate and/or chosen people, one believes.

'Chosen people'! Oh dear! The apple doesn't fall from the Nazi tree!

This early law was then remembered by some special holy men with long hair and funny clothes, often now depicted in films and other media in various shades of orange colours.

This idiot may think he is satirizing the Hindu haters but what he is actually doing is ascribing this mishegos to the 'many Hindus today' who, according to him, 'assume that their law just fell from heaven one day'.

Why won't this Professor read over his own work before sending it to the printer? Is he an eighteen year old in a hurry to turn in his assignment so as to go to the disco or mount his scooter to deliver pizza?

Such simple and convenient images serve to reflect the broadly familiar transition from somewhat divinely revealed knowledge or Truth (śruti) to humanly remembered knowledge or truth (smriti). The main trouble (or beauty, depending on the reader’s position) remains, however, that this entire process of genesis and reconstruction must be characterised as marked by deep  internal pluralities.

Why must it? It could be rendered univocal by harmonious construction. Indeed, this is the Hindu approach.

For Hindus as a whole there is neither one God in whom everyone has to believe nor one special human that received this Truth and passed it on to others.

So what? Having one God or one Prophet hasn't prevented Islam from having 'deep internal pluralities' has it?

In typical positivist lemming mentality, however, partly induced by colonial interventions, it is taught – most prominently by today’s telegurus and many others - that such ancient rules and their interpretations by special people (who tend to be men, of course) just need to be followed now by Hindu believers.

Which 'telegurus'? None at all. Positivism or 'law as command' does not necessarily involve a unitary conception of the State. No British positivist denied that Scottish law was different from English law.

Most Hindus are thus denying themselves the agency to think for themselves and to be creative makers of rules for their own lives.

Most Hindus are human beings. They have to think for themselves even if that thought is to outsource the remainder. One has to make one's own rules though those rules may consist of finding out and following rules made by some other body. This is simple delegation.

Mental dependency on gurus has become a common form of Hindu positivist infection and is glocally manifested all over the globe.

A positivist infection would involve a command of an external type having a cancerous hypertrophy. No such command arises in choosing a Guru or indeed preferring not to have one.
'Dependency on Gurus' is a feature of this cretin's acolytes- supposing he has any. Anyone whose word is taken for law is a Guru provided there is no compulsion to do so. It is foolish to think that using a Sanskrit word means that what one is saying is specially true of Hindus. If one were to say 'dependency on Quatschköpfe is a feature of Teutonic pedantry' there is a suggestio falsi, that non Teutonic pedants aren't equally dependent on blathershites of one description or another.

Dharma has become a symbol of obedience rather than a key to dynamic self-definition and creative self-realisation.

No it hasn't. Slavishness and sycophancy have this property. Willingness to violate dharma so as to please the Master is what symbolizes obedience. This 'grandchild of Nazis'- as he describes himself- knows this well enough.

Brahmins still claim to be in charge of everything.

How fucking ignorant is this cretinous Quatschköpf?

Positivised crowds of Indians and many foreign scholars let them get away with such assertions.

Where and when did any Brahman make any such claim? Does this cretin not understand that no two Brahmans agree on everything, and there is nothing all Brahmans agree on? It would be impossible for the class as a whole to be in charge of everything because they don't have a collective choice mechanism and, in any case, lack sufficient coercive or prescriptive power.

Among the latter, of course, those who argue against ‘tradition’ or ‘religion’ of any form find such images rather useful to simply uphold the dodgy construction of ancient threatening monsters with tentacles that reach deep into present times.

'dodgy'? What's next? Will Menski declare his 'kite theory' the dog's bollocks? How fucking Cockneyfied has this Quatschköpf become? Hopefully, Brexit will restore him to his original stodgy vocabulary before his idiolect begins to incorporate emojis or rhyming slang.             

Readers of this blog may imagine that I'm attacking Menski because he is against the BJP. This is not the case. I am merely marveling at SOAS's ability to turn even this German pedant's brains to shit. Consider another paper of his which juxtaposes Shah Bano & Narendra Modi. He writes-Both Shah Bano and Narendra Modi are used globally as iconic symbols to misrepresent and hide significant Indian legal developments.
What is he getting at? The Shah Bano case showed the Gandhi dynasty at its vote-bank cultivating worst. Modi represents the Developmental aspect of BJP meritocracy.
Menski, with a fatuity worthy of the College whose faculty he adorns writes-

Indian lawyers – and ultimately we all - should actually know that the heroic Shah Bano was not let down by the Indian state.

She sued and got maintenance. But Congress Muslims- like M.J Akbar, now with the BJP- worked with Rajiv Gandhi to pass a law annulling the Court's verdict. Shah Bano was let down by the Congress Raj- not by the Judiciary.

She won her case and then became a catalyst, an immensely useful tool, for the postmodern Indian state to engineer a radical social welfare system that cleverly exonerates the Indian state itself from direct responsibility for whole classes of destitute Indians.

This is sheer nonsense. The Bench has clarified that Rajiv Gandhi's law was unconstitutional. A woman does not lose her right to maintenance just because of her Religion.
The Indian state, like the British state or the American state, does not need 'exoneration' from providing for a divorced woman's maintenance if her husband can't be compelled to do so simply because it would be ludicrous to make the tax payer take up the burden. It is a separate matter that a State may, if it has the fiscal wherewithal, provide a Social Security safety net. However, this would apply equally to those who had never been married.

This, as far too few people realize, speaks loudly and clearly about the nature of the post-colonial Indian state as a highly sophisticated legal system with an ancient pedigree. The new balance between private and public ordering in relation to post-divorce maintenance for all Indian ex-wives today, and now maybe even former members of a person’s household, was achieved by shifting crucial social welfare burdens back to the realm of the family, and thus the interconnected collective primordial sphere, rather than privileging the enlightened autonomous individual as a citizen. India, this confirms, is clearly not America or Europe.

This guy lives in England. Does he really not know that if the Sultan of Multan or the Sheikh of Gimmeabreak divorces his wife and, because of sovereign immunity, can't be forced to pay millions in maintenance by a British Court, then the British taxpayer won't have to take up the burden. The ex-wife may however be eligible for Job Seeker's allowance or some such handout. India is like America or Europe in this respect. The State never assumes any responsibility to discharge purely private obligations. If your hubby won't give you a rim job, you can't get the Govt. to pay a prostitute to do it for him.

India’s highly sophisticated strategy of combining more state involvement (‘Verstaatlichung’) in some respects with less state involvement (‘Entstaatlichung’) in others, reflects and in turn reconstructs an ancient Indian skill of legal management that remains severely underrated and badly understood.

What ancient Indian skill is this idiot blathering about? If wifey refused to give hubby a golden shower in the Gupta Age, did the Maharani turn up to piss on the petitioner?

For, at the core of Indian laws lies the principle of self-controlled ordering, not top-down state-centric regulation.

That is the core of all legal systems. Those subject to the Law are, by definition, those capable of internalizing it and showing an appropriate standard of care in its application vis a vis third parties.
Legislation may be top-down and 'state-centric'. However, Courts interpret Legislation according to Constitutional principles such that Hohfeldian rights of a private nature correspond to obligations, again of a private nature, under a vinculum juris or bond of law. But these may not be enforceable. It is not the case that any deficit in performance must be made good by the State. The fact is, the Court can sanction State officials in a manner that is private to them but it lacks any similar sanction against the State itself.

Menski writes elsewhere about his SOAS's asinine 'pop paradigm' approach-

My published work (Menski, 2001, 2003; 2006) suggests throughout that, for early Hindu law as much as in modern Hindu family law and even in India’s constitutional law regulation today, the internalised expectation of self-controlled ordering among Hindus and today’s Indian citizens generally is a central ingredient of the phenomena we call ‘law’.

One can change the word Hindu to 'English' or 'Russian' with equal truth value. Why? These are geographical terms which however have a juristic acceptation with some degree of latitude such that protocol bound, buck stopped, intensionality can arise.

Consider Gandhi v Patel (2002) which Menski, writing for an Indian audience, pretends was a case of racist British judges holding a Hindu wedding performed properly by a Brahman priest to be 'no marriage at all'. The fact is that the Judge relied on the Priest's testimony that what occurred was a deliberate 'non-marriage' of a perfectly legal type. Indeed, in Tamil Nadu, we have the same concept such that 'temple marriage' can be a non-marriage for some purposes by mutual consent. Just as in the British case, if a dispute arises, what matters is whether the couple cohabited with the reputation of being husband and wife. In which case, though the marriage itself may be void or a nullity, a judicial remedy is available. In other words, there is a 'self-controlled ordering' such that all manner of consensual, non contested, relationships can constitute a contestable vinculum juris dependent on circumstances.

Whether this is a matter of religion or more of secular characteristics is actually not an either/or issue; there will always be elements of ‘religion’ and of ‘secular’ law in this pluralist bundle of interlinkages.

This is sheer nonsense. A 'pluralist bundle of inter-linkages' either yields a multi-dimensional juristic decision space- in which case there is path dependence or 'agenda control'- or it does not, in which case Law is univocal. Now, it is true there may be jurisdiction hopping such that in practice path dependence obtains in a particular case. However, no jurisdiction says that it itself suffers this infirmity. On the contrary, it points to its protocol bound, 'buck stopping' ability. If it did not do so it would be subject to concurrency livelock or deadlock. It would be highly gameable. Rational agents would not contract under its jurisdiction.

The cretins at SOAS- peopled by kids too lazy or stupid to go to the LSE or University College or even Kings- have a 'pop' paradigm. Thankfully, their motor skills aren't good enough for them to have a break-dancing 'rap' paradigm. Anyway, these guys are stuck in an early Seventies time-warp and probably haven't heard of hip-hop.

In our new ‘pop’ paradigm at SOAS, both ‘religious’ and ‘secular’ elements are always part of this internally plural structure of law.

No wonder Shivpuri got done for not smuggling drugs! Still, at least one SOAS law student's name has found a prominent place in the annals of British law- not as a judge, or barrister, it is true, but as the stupidest criminal ever.

Come to think of it, Shivpuri was a Brahman. Perhaps he shared the following view of Menski who must have been completing his Doctorate in Hindu Law in London around the time Shivpuri was doing his MA in Law at SOAS.

The Vedic expectation of dynamic alertness on the part of those ‘who know’, thus stereotypically essentially the Brahmins (and those that managed to act or think like them) in every moment of their existence, was supposed to stimulate and influence various patterns of ritual activity and socio-legal behaviour.

The auditor of a ritual, as the Brahman as designated by ritual, should be 'dynamically alert'. But so should the Ritvik & Udgatr & Ardhvaryu as well as the jajman. Otherwise their dhotis might catch fire or they may nod off and topple into the sacrificial flame.  But everybody, during their waking life, should be 'dynamically alert'. Otherwise a snake might bite you or a tiger might pounce on you and eat you. Furthermore, if you smell a SOAS Professor in the vicinity, you should immediately run away.

Why is this cretin pretending we don't all need to be 'dynamically alert' while we are awake? Does he really think the Vedic Rishis were utterly stupid?

It is surely a religious phenomenon,

Fuck off! Suppose you attend an atheist's rally. You still have to be 'dynamically alert' so as to shout 'Boo to Religion!' at the same time as everybody else. Furthermore, you should be aware that relaxing your sphincter and kakking your pants will draw adverse comment from other participants unless you explain tht you are shitting yourself, not because of a lack of alertness, but because you are protesting against the Papal sodomization of the sacred monkeys in the Vatican caves. Anyway, how come it's cool when Dawkins does it? Get with the program and let's all have a great big shit in to protest whatever.

but at the very same time it is also practical and secular; both these aspects are interconnected and both have legal implications. The Vedic ‘pop’ culture thus constantly jumps out of the analyst’s box, confounds restrictive analysis and would deeply irritate positivist efforts to rein it in.

You can irritate a positivist- Menski does it by talking shite- but you can't irritate efforts any more than you can sexually harass hopes or give despairs an inferiority complex by displaying your massive genitals.

Menski thinks Vedic pop culture was jumping around probably with a boombox because the fucker is German and probably thinks Abba is like totally hard core dude.

As we shall see below, this elusive evasion and dynamic boundary crossing occurs primarily in Vedic law because rita and satya co-exist from the start as two interconnected forms of Truth.

Nonsense! Rta could be said to be related to Riti, and Sat to both Truth and Being but neither is a hypostasis which co-exists or is consubstantial with anything else. Hinduism has plenty of Menons but no Hypokiemenon.  Our ontology wasn't fucked in the ass from the get go because we had no Socrates to talk a pederast out of writing a paean to a Lysis's ancestors. Thus our onto-theology is singularly crisis free.

This linguistically marked internal plurality of the most basic point of the entire structure then also impacts critically on how we deal with law and legal analysis in all other later respects.

No it doesn't. Don't be silly. The Law is an aspect of Oikonomia. It is defeasible precisely because Akrebia defeats the ends of Equity by its too great precision or generality. Aristotle fucking discussed this you big German dummkoff! 

Thus, for example, methods of informal dispute settlement, encapsulated eventually in the technical term vyavahāra, comprise any form of removal of doubt about dharma (Menski, 2007).

Rubbish! Vyavahara still has, as all protocol bound juristic reasoning must have, an extensional/intensional distinction resolvable only by a 'buck stopped' demarcation between what is law and what is fact. Jurisdiction hopping means that competitive 'buck stopping' converges on incentive compatible mechanisms which 'internalize externalities' in the manner investigated by the 'Law & Econ' school. This is the true source of defeasibility. Doubt must always exist because the fitness landscape is uncertain. The 'Dharma-Raja' in the Nalophkhyanam must learn Statistical Game Theory to overcome his 'vishada'. This is sophisticated stuff far beyond the ken of SOAS type cretins. On the other hand anybody of ordinary intelligence who has had the misfortune to work for a living at some point in her life understands all this perfectly well- though few can articulate this 'unthought known' in academic jargon. The fact I can do so does not mean I am smart. It suggests I was too stupid to be a Mathematician but not stupid or evil enough to devote myself to the sub-Humanities or the anti-Social Sciences.

It is quite true that Uncertainty diminishes when 'buck-stopped' juristic decisions are formed. But doubt does not disappear thereby because the future fitness landscape is unknown. Yuddhishtra does not gain omniscience. As Krishna tells him in the episode where he gets Arjuna to inflict 'social death' on his elder brother, as a substitute for killing him, Dharma is difficult to understand precisely for this reason. No one knows what is or isn't 'apadh dharma'.

But even the stupidest, most drunken Hindu- and, as an Iyer, I surely qualify for this title both on the grounds of heredity and habitus- knows all this. That's why we find the Mahabharata engrossing. It is the 'fifth Veda' specifically intended for fools, drunkards and social outcastes.

Removal of doubt re dharma never occurs by any form. There is reduced uncertainty about the Schelling focal solution to a coordination game involving notions of dharma, but- at the same time- one can hedge on discoordination games. The General Equilibrium is 'anything goes'.

Menski, the cretin, thinks doubt is resolved by 'any form' of decision procedure-

Any form, that means, from a mental process in one’s mind to a formal court hearing and probably even armed warfare.

This is crazy shit. No Christian or Jew's doubt that Hitler was an evil cunt could have been resolved by his winning the War. Still, for prudential reasons, everybody would say he was a fine chap. That's because there was less uncertainty about what would happen to people who expressed a different view.

Because this broad and internally plural term was generally but misleadingly translated as ‘dispute settlement’, even more narrowly as ‘judicial proceedings’ (Lariviere, 1989), we have simply become blindfolded by our own proclaimed expertise and have miserably failed to understand Vedic ‘pop’ culture.

Why? Because these cunts don't understand contemporary culture and mores. They have no frame of reference. As for Vedic pop- that's the Sama Veda, dude. I'm ancestrally an udgatr. Lord Krishna says among Vedas, he is the Sama and among the Upanishads, he is the Chandogya. But that's only coz he is an Agent, not a Principal, in the Bhagvad Gita. By contrast, the Vyadha is a Principal, not an Agent, just like Yuddhishtra, which is why he has to hear the Vyadha Gita to be cured of Vishada.

Stupid Hindus like me understand all this. This German dude- well, he may be British, like me, now, but, like me, he was born in Germany- has all sorts of fancy shmancy degrees but he understands shit about either the Law or Hinduism. Why? The fucker got stuck in the SOAS swamp of stupidity. Also, he didn't watch enough Ally McBeal. Was she hot or was she not? Even decades later, I can't make up my mind. Dharma is like that only. Mind it kindly. Aiyayo!

Notes
True meaning of Aiyayo is explicated in Chinese in the video below-