If something works in practice but is forbidden by your theory, then your theory is wrong. Tharoor, being a professional blatershite, takes the opposite view. He incarnates the utter futility and fatuousness of Rahul's 'vichardhara'- the Dynasty's ideology.
Consider this following excerpt from Tharoor's latest book which was published by Print.in. Is there a single sentence in it which isn't foolish?
The India that was born in 1947 was in a very real sense a new creation:
No. It was the promised second, 'Federal', stage of the India created by the 1935 Act- the longest passed by the British Parliament. In no sense was it a new creation. The Viceroy was now called 'Governor General' but this was a purely nominal change. True, the Muslim majority areas had broken away but we now know that Muslim majorities tend to ethnically cleanse non-Muslims no matter what Laws or Constitutions prevail.
a state that made fellow citizens of the Ladakhi and the Laccadivian for the first time,
Nonsense! The Ladakhi remained a subject of the Maharaja of Kashmir who didn't accede to India till the Pakistanis invaded. Why does Tharoor not know this? How fucking ignorant is he?
divided Punjabi from Punjabi for the first time,
the first time? Punjabis were always divided save under Ranjit Singh. A subject of the Maharajah of Patiala was divided from one who was a subject of Nabha or Kapurthala.
and asked a Keralite peasant to feel allegiance to a Kashmiri Pandit ruling in Delhi, also for the first time.
No. Allegiance remained to the King Emperor till India became a Republic.
This is why I felt emboldened to subtitle my 2003 biography of Nehru The Invention of India.
Because Nehru had written a book called 'the discovery of India'.
In India: From Midnight to the Millennium, I illustrated what this meant with a simple story. When India celebrated the forty-ninth anniversary of its independence from British rule in 1996, our then prime minister, H. D. Deve Gowda, stood on the ramparts of Delhi’s seventeenth-century Red Fort and delivered the traditional Independence Day address to the nation in Hindi, one of India’s official languages, and its most widely spoken one. Ten other prime ministers had done exactly the same thing forty-eight times before him, but what was unusual this time was that Deve Gowda, a southerner from the state of Karnataka, spoke to the country in a language of which he did not know a word. Tradition and politics required a speech in Hindi, so he gave one—the words having been written out for him in his native Kannada script, in which they, of course, made no sense.
What does this 'simple story' illustrate? Nothing at all. Rajiv Gandhi read out Hindi speeches written out for him in Roman Script. Did he understand every word of what he was reading out? I sure didn't. But most 'Hindi speakers' didn't understand the official version of their language. The joke was that when the Akashvani announcer said 'and now for the news in Hindi' what they should have said was 'and now for some Hindi in the news'.
Such an episode is almost inconceivable elsewhere, but it represents the best of the oddities that help make India what it is.
Fuck off! It is highly conceivable in many multi-lingual countries- more particularly underdeveloped ex-colonies.
It is impossible to conceive of a Frenchman who does not speak French,
Nonsense! In 1789, only half of France's population could speak French. If almost every Frenchmen born in France and not subject to some developmental or neurological disorder can speak French today it is because France has progressed economically.
but India has no equivalent assumption: nearly half the country does not speak or understand Hindi.
Whereas in Pakistan, only 8 percent spoke Urdu. Even now, half the population in rural areas can't understand the Urdu of the officials. What is a gashti marasala? Some kind of rotating prostitute- right? Wrong. It is an official circular.
Only in India could a nation be ruled by a man who did not understand its dominant language;
But India had been ruled by Viceroys who did not understand any of its languages. The British set things up in such a way that even a nonentities like Gujral or Gowda could hold office for a spell without any great calamity being precipitated.
only in India, for that matter, is the principal language one that half the population does not understand;
Because of the way Britain set things up. India exists because it is predominantly Hindu. It so happens that Hindus aint fashed about what language you speak at home. Priests chant a Sanskrit they may not understand. But they do it well enough for any sacerdotal purpose.
and only in India could this particular solution have been found to enable the prime minister to address his people.
only because that's how the Brits set things up. Pakistan need not have broken up. Bhutto & Yahya Khan, between them, broke up that country. A sensible man would have managed things with diplomacy. In that case, the vast majority of Pakistan's population would have been wholly ignorant of its official language.
Nor was the phenomenon exclusive to one prime minister. I have sat in the row behind the podium in the Red Fort as a junior colleague of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and observed him turning the pages of his text from right to left, since—born as he was in what is today Pakistan—he had learned Hindustani in the Urdu script, rather than the Devanagari. Deve Gowda reading Hindi in Kannada, Manmohan Singh in Urdu—
why does Tharoor not mention Rajiv reading in Roman script?
seeing these practices during the prime ministerial address on Independence Day was a startling affirmation of Indian pluralism.
Or it was a confirmation that the Brits did a great job at setting things up so Government could survive charisma bereft nincompoops holding the top job. Hopefully, the same is true of their own country. We all have our fingers crossed that the United Kingdom can survive bumbling Boris.
For, as I have often argued, we are all minorities in India.
No. Hindus aren't. However they do get ethnically cleansed if they live in Muslim majority areas.
A typical Indian stepping off a train, say, a Hindi-speaking Hindu male from the Gangetic plain state of Uttar Pradesh (UP), might cherish the illusion that he represents the ‘majority community’, to use an expression much favoured by the less industrious of our journalists. But he, literally, does not.
No. He literally does represent 80 percent of the population.
As a Hindi-speaking Hindu he belongs to the faith adhered to by some 80 per cent of the population, but a majority of the country does not speak Hindi;
So what? India is like Pakistan except in that it doesn't have crazy Generals who indulge in genocide till India steps in and slaps them silly.
a majority does not hail from Uttar Pradesh; and if he were visiting, say, Kerala, he would discover that a majority there is not even male.
And many who are male don't look it. On the other hand, the girls are gorgeous.
Even more tellingly, our archetypal UP Hindi-speaking Hindu has only to mingle with the polyglot, multihued crowds thronging any of India’s major railway stations to realize how much of a minority he really is.
Not if he mingles with crowds in major UP railway stations.
Even his Hinduism is no guarantee of majority-hood, because his caste automatically places him in a minority as well: if he is a Brahmin, 90 per cent of his fellow Indians are not; if he is a Yadav, a ‘backward class’, 85 per cent of Indians are not, and so on.
But all that is irrelevant. If the fellow is Hindu he wants to preserve the territorial integrity of India. If he isn't, he may not. Tharoor himself hasn't yet come out of the closet as a 'tukde tukde' type.
As an English speaking British citizen I belong to the majority community. As a cat-fancying, Beyonce impersonator, I belong to a rapidly growing minority.
Greek philosophy understood that 'belonging'- oikeiosis- involves widening or diminishing circles initially based on self-interest and something like the Price equation. But the fact that oikeiosis is plural is simply a fact about all mereology or category theory. India isn't special in any sense. The same rules of logic apply to any Indian issue. Tharoor doesn't get this. He thinks India is a magical place where everything will be fine provided the Dynasty clings on to power and rewards sycophants like him with 'sweat equity' of various dubious sorts.
Or take language. As I have stated earlier, the Constitution of India recognizes twenty-two today—our rupee notes proclaim their value in fifteen languages—but, in fact, there are twenty-three major Indian languages (if you include English), and thirty-five which are spoken by more than a million people (and these are languages, with their own scripts, grammatical structures, and cultural assumptions, not just dialects—if we were to count dialects, there are more than 20,000). Each of the native speakers of these languages is in a linguistic minority, for none enjoys majority status in India. Thanks in part to the popularity of Bombay’s Hindi cinema, Hindi is understood, if not always well spoken, by about half the population of India, but it is in no sense the language of the majority; indeed, its locutions, gender rules, and script are unfamiliar to most Indians in the South or Northeast.
So what? The British Empire contained hundreds of languages. Indeed, the Primary School down the road from me proudly states that it has taught kids with 182 different mother tongues.
Ethnicity further complicates the notion of a majority community.
But anything at all can complicate the notions in the head of a blathershite. Skill at Beyonce impersonation is one such factor. Can you really put your hand on your heart and say you are a proud Britisher if you can't out-twerk me? That's right, Boris! I'm calling you out for a dance off!
Most of the time, an Indian’s name immediately reveals where he is from,
unlike England where a guy called Jock McKenzie might be of Welsh origin.
and what his mother tongue is; when we introduce ourselves, we are advertising our origins. Despite some intermarriage at the elite levels in the cities, Indians still largely remain endogamous, and a Bengali is easily distinguished from a Punjabi. The difference this reflects is often more apparent than the elements of commonality. A Karnataka Brahmin shares his Hindu faith with a Bihari Kurmi, but feels little identity with him in respect of appearance, dress, customs, tastes, language, or political objectives. At the same time a Tamil Hindu would feel that he has far more in common with a Tamil Christian or Muslim than with, say, a Haryanvi Jat with whom he formally shares a religion.
Yet, thanks to the Brits, everybody rubs along pretty well with each other- though non-Hindu sects sometimes run amok.
Why do I harp on these differences?
Because you are a cretin.
Only to make the point that Indian nationalism is a rare animal indeed.
Despite being exactly like Pakistani or Sri Lankan or Nepalese nationalism.
This land imposes no narrow conformities on its citizens: you can be many things and one thing.
Unlike those lands where you are not allowed to be a cat fancying Beyonce impersonator.
You can be a good Muslim, a good Keralite, and a good Indian all at once.
But you can do this, if not more comfortably, then more profitably, in Dubai.
This means that the basis of Indian nationhood is unusual in today’s world.
No. It is usual for its part of the world and its level of economic development. True the Buddhist Burmese and the Muslim Pakistanis split off but what remained was the Hindu majority portion of the British Indian Empire which the Brits themselves had chivvied along the road, first to Provincial autonomy and then (because the Muslim demand for a loose Federation was denied by the Hindus) a Unitary Government.
Talking about Indian nationalism reminds me of the probably apocryphal story of two law professors arguing about a problem. When one suggests a practical solution to the dilemma, the other counters: ‘It may work in practice, but will it work in theory?’
Law professors don't matter. Actual lawyers do. If a thing works in practice, that's what lawyers will find a way of associating with Hohfeldian rights and obligations so that the thing can become more certain and more justiciable.
Indian nationalism has worked in practice,
because it kept and modified British best practice
but it does not stand up very well in theory.
Only the theory of a blathershite with a PhD in bombast. Otherwise, mathematical economics has a perfectly good theory of all mechanisms relevant to 'oikeiosis'. It also explains why 'Cheap Talk' blathershites like Tharoor can make a living- but only if they have elastic views on 'sweat equity'.
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