Aishwary Kumar on Ambedkar- Part II

Aishwary Kumar, who did a Masters at JNU, has a book on Gandhi and Ambedkar  of which he says-

“Here, I only want to re-emphasize that Radical Equality is neither a study of an important figure and his corpus in its integrity nor is it a social and historical biography of an encounter between two thinkers at war.  It is a history of an antinomy in anticolonial political thought, a history that seeks to consider Ambedkar and Gandhi together as exemplars of a shared philosophical conviction that was as radically new in its prescriptions as it was classical in its problematic.  This conviction … was a shared and strained conviction that was locked in a ceaseless struggle to formulate a new political and moral ontology” 

Antinomy means two laws or beliefs are incompatible. Kant thought that antinomies exist. They don't. Once an astronomical observation proved that Einstein's General Theory of Relativity was correct, Kant's antinomies disappeared from the history of thought- as opposed to mental masturbation.

Doxastic logic deals with beliefs. Because Ambedkar stipulated that nothing supernatural, magical, oracular, or Divine, occurs, then it must be the case that his 'moral and political ontology' was naturalistic and compatible with the discoveries of Natural Science.
Thus, any Doxastic logic which consistently represents Ambedkar's thought must have a model in the shape of a Smullyvan 'accurate reasoner' because it is not the case that belief is constrained for a Supernatural reason. Furthermore, we are confident on the basis of recent developments in Meta-mathematics- e.g. Voevodsky's 'univalent foundations'- that there is always an 'accurate reasoner' for any doxastic logic whose model is the real world. It may be that the computing power needed by that reasoner is vastly beyond our reach, but of her possible existence, if not constructibility, we can not reasonably doubt.

Suppose even the best version of Ambedkar's thought involves having a false belief. Then Ambedkar was not just an inaccurate reasoner because he was human and it human to err, but it was also the case that he- by reason of inherent vice-  was incapable of being 'corrected' and rendered an accurate reasoner.

This is to maintain, despite all evidence to the contrary, that Ambedkar, for some essentialist reason, was a shit lawyer, a shit economist and ought never to have been given scholarships- or indeed the time of day by smart people. This is an extreme claim. Because it is essentialist, it is racist and casteist. It is deeply repugnant and very far from the truth. Nobody in India or elsewhere has ever made such a despicable claim. Of course, we can say Ambedkar was wrong about x, just as we say Keynes was wrong about that same x, as were other economists of that time. But we have a corrected Keynesian theory and, truth be told, a corrected Ambedkarite theory would be far more valuable to not just Indian people but perhaps as much as an additional billion souls alive today.

Like many people much older, fatter and much much more deeply boring and charmless than Prof. Kumar, I know way more than he does about 'anti-colonial political thought'. Some of my fellow students at the LSE were born under a far more racist type of Colonialism than India ever experienced and had themselves taken a role in their country's liberation struggles. Some of my South African friends would have to wait a decade for the end of Apartheid. Thus, from the age of 16, I had access to a sort of time-travel machine enabling me to better understand my alma mater's greatest alumnus. It was at this time that I met Barrister Khobargarde and gained an 'emic' perspective of one aspect of Dalit politics. Since I looked like and had the epistemic sophistication of , at least to the eyes of Bombay, a Dharavi thug, it was widely assumed I would return to India and launch my political career by taking up residence in a Student Hostel and beating people with hockey sticks while supposedly doing a PhD. Then my sister got into the IFS. Dad put his foot down. No politics for me. I'd have to drudge for my living- preferably in some mouffusil town- not go around cracking skulls with agricultural implements like the more distinguished of my Vadadesi Vadama ancestors. With hindsight, Dad did the right thing. If I'd joined the Youth Congress I'd have Sikh blood on my hands.  Thus I returned to London to drink the sort of whiskey no self respecting champion of the under class would soil her lips with.

There was no 'antinomy in anti-colonial political thought'. There was a stupid assertion that only the Colonizer could do what the Colonizer did or that maybe it was wrong to imitate the Colonizer and beat him at his own game. But this was merely a stupid assertion. Japan beat Tzarist Russia in 1905. Only some Tolstoy type nutters thought that the Colonized had to double down on being shite so as to preven their natal shit-holes rising up.

Gandhi is internationally recognized as the supreme Tolstoy type nutter. Anyway, there is a substantial Western availability cascade, featuring luminaries like Romain Rolland and Marin Luther King, credentializing Gandhian cretinism.

By contrast, Ambedkar was an Economist and a barrister who is an icon of a purely Indian type of casteist politics, consistently found nowhere else in the world. There is no point comparing Gandhi and Ambedkar. One may as well contrast Mother Theresa- whom everybody has heard of- with Nexhmije Hoxha. One was married to the Church. The other was married to a Communist dictator. Together they represent an antimony in the history of Albanian anti-masturbation eschatological thought. Mother Theresa was against wanking coz it will cause you to burn in Hell Fire. Nexhimje protested loudly every time her hubby started playing with himself in prefererence to fucking over the Albanian people in the ideologically correct manner so as to usher in the Marxist 'kingdom of ends.'

Aishwary Kumar, presumably for Foucauldianly fucked-in-the-head reasons, has an obsession with 'force'- a word which means that whose application changes the trajectory or velocity of something else.

Sadly, his intellect can exert no force whatsoever. Thus his oeuvre represents not a genealogy of force but a mimetics of farce.

Consider the following- how could it not be Sokol type satire?

Now, one could posit this force – a force that stays truthful to the principle of nonforce, a mastery that is committed to the principle of nonmastery – only when one keeps the faith that neither real force nor real nonforce (nor, above all, the idealistic distinction between them) exists.

What is 'nonforce'? Inertia or conatus. That which causes a thing to maintain direction and velocity. I suppose one could say Kant's 'Kingdom of Ends' would feature agents who exert force only in such a way that the enlightened 'conatus' of the other is maintained and vice versa. This would be a 'reflective equilibrium' of a certain sort. So far so good. We can conceive of social forces as operating in this manner. What follows however is pure farce. Kumar says one can posit the sort of force which operates in the Kantian Kingdom of Ends only if one believes that that which one posits does not exist. But to posit something one is sure does not exist is to tell a lie. Ex Falso Quodlibet- from falsehood anything and everything logically follows. So what Kumar is really saying is 'I can say this in good faith because I am lying. Since you haven't called me on my lie I can now logically deduce anything I like and you have to play along.' Kumar is displaying the wholly farcical nature of his Scholarship. This is cool if his point is that a JNU education rots your brain and that Whitey in shite nonSTEM Departments is too stupid to notice. Good look to this young scoundrel. He has out-Sokaled Sokal.

But why the fuck is Navayana Press promoting this farcical pedantry? Do they really think Ambedkar was a cretin?

What exists is only the action of its truthful bearer.

Either an action exerts some force on something else or it isn't an action. That's the truth. No doubt, in kshanikavada world, there is only cetana or intention. But some intentions are untruthful and exist in an equal degree. Thus this sentence is either ignorant or mendacious or merely a farcical display of Academic imbecility.

Here, by putting the emphasis on action over belief, truth over ideality, Ambedkar posits a new, noninstrumental realism, one whose ends is to be found in its very means; that is, in dissidence.15 “I regard my feelings of hatred as a real force,” he writes in his 1943 essay, “Ranade, Gandhi, and Jinnah.” “They are only the reflex of the love I bear.”

Ambedkar was a politician and a lawyer. He was paid, not for his beliefs but his actions. His clients and constituents wanted him to hate somethings though overall his motivation was love.

Why pretend Ambedkar was a nitwit who 'posited' absurd shite?

It is in such love, which can be posited only in the act of its own denegation, that the insurgent minor appears; a minor whose love of truth exists in the annulment of liberal interest, whose inappropriable passion is anchored in the refusal of nationalist affection, whose irreducible “right to justice” begins by defaulting on the majoritarian economy of debt (even in throes of death).

Sadly,  the only thing which can be posited- i.e. affirmed to exist- only if it can't exist- is a lie. Thus Kumar is saying 'since anything that can be posited can't only be posited by some act which isn't necessarily positing, unless it is a lie; let me now tell you the lie that an insurgent minor appears and then Mrs Thatcher sodomizes him and so the insurgent minor grows up to become Arthur Scargill the leader of the insurgent miners but Mrs. Thatcher fucks him over so badly that he ends up making a big profit on his fraudulent 'right to buy' London flat.'

“I will not die a Hindu,” Ambedkar elsewhere declares, two decades before his conversion.

Because Ambedkar wasn't a liar.

This principle of annulment – annihilation – cannot be tethered to the sovereignty of self-knowledge, belief, or even learning.

Sure it can.

On the contrary, in embracing the ineluctable finitude of existence, the minor affirms a fearless survival beyond all interest in infinitude and mastery.

No it doesn't. Mrs Thatcher fucks it to death and squeals piteously. This is because it was posited to exist only as a lie and from a lie any and every lie follows.

Having emptied out from the heart of sovereignty the mortal fear of debt and death – the fear that gives the majority its power – the minor does not simply turn away in ascetic withdrawal from community.

No. It runs around naked screaming horribly as cum drips from its anus.

On the contrary, in exiting the majoritarian measure politically, as an equal, it embraces the place of emptiness as the place of action – emptiness as the conversion of the political – as such. In his unfinished autobiography Waiting for a Visa, Ambedkar calls this tragic and creative emptiness, this unavoidable void of dalit identity, this abyssal place in the heartlands of India – where a war for survival is waged on the streets (and sometimes under them) every day – the “dungeon” of untouchable experience. It is a place where the will to knowledge, sovereignty, and identity of the self – the quasi-transcendental stability of the concept of the self itself – reaches its limit, its breaking point. A place where one simply waits in faith, where one waits to leave for a place whose only attribute is that it might be the other of where one already is, that it might be outside of the mythic dimensions – “length and breadth” – of politics as such.

Fuck does all this mean? Ambedkar waited for a Visa to America where a Prince had paid for him to study. He got a PhD in Econ from Columbia and his research work was useful to a British parliamentary committee. Ambedkar was an over-achiever. He had established himself as an authority on Fiscal policy at a young age. Next he got a Doctorate in Monetary Economics from the LSE. He also qualified as a barrister.

The Princely State of Baroda had a history of bringing in well qualified people from other parts of India to reform its finances and administration. Naturally, there was resistance to this by those who had captured rents. In Ambedkar's case, the excuse of his 'untouchability' was used to drive him out of the high position in the administration of Baroda that its ruler had awarded him. Still, the Prince had made his point. Ambedkar had served his purpose and went on to a successful career as a 'barristocrat' politician in British India.

How did he achieve success? By not being a dissident. By allying with established force and challenging the upstart force of the Gandhian Congress Party. Wearing a three piece suit is never the action of a dissident. A rebel may wander around in a diaper and babble about nonforce and 'the truth of faith' and so on. Ambedkar took the opposite path. From the age of 34, he was a member of the Bombay Legislative Council which became a Legislative Assembly where he was leader of the Opposition. After independence, he was nominated to the Upper House of the Indian Parliament. The sort of 'force' that he applied was precisely the same as that applied by any other politician in a parliamentary democracy. This was not the case with Gandhi. The nonsense Kumar has attributed to Ambedkar might be applied to Aurobindo or Gandhi. But it can no more be applied to Ambedkar than it could to Churchill.

What, after all, forces an outnumbered, antiviolent Siddhartha to renounce his republic or a fearless Socrates to exit the polis is precisely this axiomatic – even founding – tragedy of politics: that the principle of equality does not belong to it.16

Fuck off. Ambedkar lays stress on the fact that the Buddha got his tribal 'Sangha'- which was about to go to war over access to river water- to release him from his duty of loyalty. Buddha did this by convincing them that his defection would not increase the power of the other side. There was an obvious political motive for Ambedkar to make this point. By converting to Buddhism, he wasn't weakening the Hindu Dalits. This was true enough.

Socrates could have 'exited the Polis'. He didn't. He chose to stay and die. This had nothing to do with equality. Socrates had previously jeered at a guy who was prosecuting his own father for complicity in the death of a slave. It seems Socrates had no problem with inequality. He thought the Jury should give him a reward, not hemlock.

An axiom is something posited. Axiomatic tragedy of politics means you posit that politics will fall short of the mark in some manner which inspires pity and terror. But, for those who hate equality- this may be because politics leads to equality- like everybody being equally poor or equally dead.  If the inevitable result of the workings of politics is that there will be inequality- for example between a newborn baby and a successful heavyweight boxer- then that isn't a tragic outcome at all- unless you have shit for brains.

And, therefore, it must be found elsewhere. That “elsewhere” of equality – which is so axiomatically, and yet so obliquely, invoked in the outcaste’s wait for a visa – is not another mythic territory, a safer and immunized homeland. Instead, it is another imagination of place as such. It is the making political of the very void of dalit placelessness.17 To look for one’s faith in this void, to look for one’s identity in a radical nonidentity, to seek refuge in placelessness: this is the fundamental conversion inscribed at the heart of political action, one that requires not simply a critique of pure religion, Ambedkar insists, but a critique of critiques of religion too.

When Kumar says 'Ambedkar insists' what he means is 'I am lying. Ambedkar said nothing like this at all.'
What is interesting about 'Waiting for a Visa' is that Parsis and Muslims and Indian Christians are shown to be virulently anti-Dalit- much more so than the caste Hindus who ensured Ambedkar had a shining academic career. Very few people at that time had Doctorates from both Colombia and the LSE as well as a practice as a Barrister and a seat on the Legislative Council all by the age of 35.

It requires not the easy grammar of secularity but the resolute, risky courage to atheism, a renunciation of the tempting mystery of sovereignty itself.

Sovereignty is not a 'tempting mystery'. George Washington was not tempted by three Witches. Perhaps this cretin has been watching 'Sleepy Hollow' on Netflix.

The responsibility of becoming-minor in the throes of nonbeing – in the contingency of an inappropriable, insurgent act of nowness that revolts against the teleology of civilizational plenitude and debt – institutes the minority’s passion for freedom from the majoritarian injunction of staying minor forever. “Impermanence of the living individual,” states that Nietzschean formulation in The Buddha and His Dhamma, “is best described by the formula: Being is becoming.”

This Deleuzian lucubration was not empty when it came to New Delhi or other such cultural desert Capital Cities. It described an antinomian, 'malamati', version of the dominant ideology which was purveyed to impressionable young diplomats and antagonomic 'useful idiots'. My Dad was a diplomat, as was my sister- so I am thoroughly familiar with the phenomenon. I recall getting drunk with a couple of Pakistani diplomats who were celebrating completing a course at SOAS some 30 years ago. The big Pathan, who had been posted in Delhi, kept burbling about Tantric Sex. The slim, very bright, Mujahir was embarrassed because he had spotted me as declasse. For my part, because I liked these guys, I explained that this wasn't a 'honey-trap'. Rather it was a nuisance of a particularly Gandhian sort. The fact is an Ashramite lady from the Tyabbji family- who are very respectable- had turned Tantric in her dotage in the most acceptable Upper Class way. What I mean is she wouldn't fuck your Khansamah senseless. Anyway, this had become a traditional sport- like polo- but for Chanakyapuri women of a certain class. The thing was meaningless. Anyway, a Pakistani Pathan wasn't going to blackmail the poor dear, or try to marry her to grab her voting shares in the Family firm.  It was the fucking Hindu Punjabis you had to watch out for.  Pakistani Diplomats are welcome to waste their 'substance' ploughing our fields so we, by putrika-putra, gain sons without even having to pay dowry!

What Deleuze is describing is antagonomic preferences- i.e. being against what others are for just coz... But this is to trespass on the territory of Queer Theory. It's not enough to create a line of flight outside molar configurations, dude, you gotta give amazing parties featuring the sorts of 'smarties' which sap all the calcium out of your teeth.

Sunnyata is the void where the minor – in its very finitude and emptiness – breaks from the infinite foreverness to which the majority condemns it, exiting the transcendental stricture of time itself. Sunnyata is the becoming-political of force in the very search of freedom from it.

For sure. Like in 'Dog Day Afternoon', right?  I myself have been frequently arrested and have shouted 'Attica!' coz like I need to pay for sexual reassignment surgery so I can first go to a nice women's prison- Orange is the new Black, y'all!-  and then fulfill my dream of becoming a House Mistress at Roedean.

The only reason I've never been actually sentenced on any charge is that my g.f turns up and explains my dick is so tiny and infrequently erect as to constitute a clitoris. As for a vagina, the fact is, as the police officers can see for themselves, I am obviously an utter cunt.

As a young Ambedkar, at once possessed by this inexhaustible force and seized by his own nonforce, concedes in his precocious 1916 essay “Castes in India,” “I may seem hard on Manu, but I am sure my force is not strong enough to kill his ghost. He lives, like a disembodied spirit and is appealed to, and,” warns the student prophetically, “I am afraid will yet live long.”19

Sure. America was very racist then. Woodrow Wilson was chucking Blacks out of Federal Employment. The Nietzche who was fashionable was the one who shot his jizz at the thought of Chandalas being forced to drink water out of muddy puddles.

Manu- Nietzhe's, but also Emerson's- does still live in America. This Kumar dude is paid to shit on Ambedkar. Why? Some Brown people may be okay. They run Google or Apple or Pepsi or whatever. But they are High Caste see? On the other hand there was this low caste guy called Ambedkar who, despite PhDs in Econ from Columbia and the LSE was as crazy as a bed bug.

Kumar sent this shit to the press a few years ago. Meanwhile, Sujatha Gidla- who had been to an IIT and studied a STEM subject- published a book despite being just a ticket-checker on the New York subway. The world took notice of Gidla's book. What happened to Kumar's? It evoked no enthusiasm even in India. It displays an impartial ignorance of Deleuze- who was wrong, not stupid- and Ambedkar- who, unlike Deleuze, genuinely knew what he was talking about.