Pratap Bhanu Mehta, for some bizarre reason, chooses to describe Modi and the BJP as 'reactionary'. But Communism- outside Kerala, where it is meritocratic and caste based- is dead. Nobody had considered it 'progressive' for decades. It was provincial at best and utterly senile at worst. Congress was scarcely progressive. It was corrupt, incompetent and dynastic. But Rahul wouldn't step up to the plate- because Daddy and Granny were killed and... urm ... you can connect the dots for yourself as Mehta is wont to say to his students.
Mehta wrote the following about three years ago- i.e before Modi's re-election. I can only marvel at his complete ignorance of Indian politics.
The Institutional Politics of Reaction
There is good reason to think that the cultural grounds for reactionary politics will outlast this government.
In other words, other parties will stop shitting incessantly on Hinduism.
The task of moral repair will not be easy.
True enough. It will be difficult to get Congress-wallahs to shit on Hinduism now Rahul has declared himself a janeodhari Saivite Brahmin and Priyanka tweets delight at the Ram Mandir consecration ceremony.
But the politics of reaction also has other dimensions that will make it hard to roll back. First, the unexpected scale of the BJP victory in 2014 enshrined a new style of politics.
No. It was an extension of a strategy which had previously worked in Gujarat.
That victory itself took place against an overwhelming concern with plutocracy.
No. Corruption was the concern. Not plutocracy.
The tumult of the last four years may have dimmed memories, but in 2014, the fear of plutocracy was one of the dominant themes of Indian politics. Plutocracy presented such a disfiguring spectre, with almost a free-for-all where Congressmen were not only cheating the public but undermining their own party as well.
That is corruption, not plutocracy- which means the rule of the Ambanis, Adanis etc.
It led to fears of economic paralysis and a crisis in the banking system from which we have not recovered.
Again, this is about a corrupt 'intermediate' class of fixers and bureaucrats and politicians entrenching themselves anywhere money was to be made.
It was a plutocracy with a great sense of entitlement,
It was not a plutocracy. It was an 'intermediate' class entrenching corruption and incompetence at every level of Governance. Its public face was Suresh Kalmadi- an ex Air Force pilot who joined the Youth Congress. He was of a professional middle class, not a plutocratic, background.
so much so that it did not take criticism seriously. It was so insidious and spread across so many institutions, from the judiciary to the universities, that when the BJP arrived in power those institutions were already hollowed out from within. An honest introspection requires us to concede that the Left was right in pointing out the destruction Modi could bring.
There was no Left in 2014. Who was their P.M candidate? Nobody. They had ceased to matter.
Anyway, Modi brought no 'destruction' at all. The Left was already dead. Congress was already paralyzed because Rahul, quite understandably, was gun-shy.
But, equally, it must be conceded that India’s ancien régime
which ceased to exist in 1950, though, no doubt, some Princes got Privy Purses and Diplomatic passports for the next 20 years
had also been so delegitimised that it was bound to collapse.
It collapsed almost 20 years before Mehta was born.
Its refusal to embark on a course of self-correction only gave people the sense that it was a party that had lost the will to govern.
Fuck off! Had Rahul pushed Manmohan aside and assumed the PM's office and ordered a few arrests and then gone into the Election with a script about 'Youth ki awaaz' he'd have won. Modi probably wouldn't have thrown his cap into the ring. Advani would have been easily trounced.
The anti- corruption movement of the preceding years discredited the UPA Government, and the BJP stepped into the breach.
Gujarat had better law & order, better 'bijli, pani, sadak, better economic growth, and- in Modi- a better Hindi orator. Still, Rahul would have been given a chance if he'd stood as an incumbent P.M with big plans for 'parivartan'. Modi would have had to wait till 2019 to make a bid for the top job.
But the BJP’s victory was accompanied by three elements of a politics of reaction. The first was a belief that India had become a plutocracy, with a government unwilling to take action against its own, in part because of weak leadership.
What is Mehta saying? That Manmohan was weak and so the fat cat Corporates ruled the roost? But, nobody has a problem with Tatas or Birlas or Ambanis or Adanis. They produce useful stuff. The problem was with the Suresh Kalmadis on high as well as the beat cop extorting money from cyclists on the ground.
It is precisely the fragmentation of institutions and the dispersal of political power that had produced the fatal combination of plutocracy and paralysis.
Nonsense! There was no 'paralysis'. The economy was growing. Plutocrats were cheered on to new heights because Billionaires are a good thing. Indeed, we want Dalit Billionaires and Working Class origin Billionaires- like they have in China.
Institutions are not 'fragmented' in India. The may be bureaucratic and stupid and slow but there are clear chains of command. The Executive is not at war with the Bench. However, the Bench accepts that some of its orders will be ignored. But then, so does the Executive.
Electoral victories are a combination of many different factors.
In 2014, there was only one factor because there was only one Prime Ministerial candidate. Rahul refused to step up to the plate. Nobody saw that coming. Only Mulayam Singh Yadav put his own name forward. But his reasoning was that since UP had chosen his son over himself, he needed to be PM so as to sustain his patriarchal authority. People laughed at the old coot. He should have kept sonny boy barefoot in the Dangal, not sent him off to Australia to get an Masters degree.
But the yearning for institutional simplification, the idea that power needs to be concentrated for reform and quick decision-making, caught hold of the public imagination.
No it didn't. Modi explained that simply by delegating power and merely doing complaint based follow-up and progress chasing, good Governance was possible and had already been implemented in Gujarat. He said he'd give us his mobile number. We could text him if we weren't getting our entitlements. His people would progress-chase and get us the outcome we needed. This whole approach came to be called 'last mile delivery'. By disintermediating the corrupt 'intermediate' class, more money was available to fix problems. Even Mamta adopted this approach much to the discontent of her goons.
This did three things to our institutional imagination.
Our? No. It was just Mehta and one or two other such cretins.
First, it made for a politics that was more inherently contemptuous of checks and balances.
Fuck off! If you have ever worked for a commercial enterprise, you know 'checks and balances' increase efficiency. But you should set them up yourself not wait till the Government does so.
Mehta uses the word 'contemptuous' because, it is true, we all started showing great contempt for him and his ilk. But the fucker is not an 'institution'. He merely represents a joyless type of prostitution.
This theme has continued for much of the four years since. The idea of ‘one nation, one election’, for example, as a necessary condition for progress is just a rerun of this idea that politicians are held accountable too frequently, that the flow of power remains obstructed by a set of overlapping institutions.
Nonsense! It reflects the fact that the Center would destabilize States in the belief that what happened in the National elections would be reflected in State elections. Thankfully, everybody now understands that it is perfectly rational to vote one way in National elections and another way in State elections.
The Government also quickly realised that the range of ‘independent’ institutions—from the judiciary to the auditor general—needed to be reined in so as not to risk a repeat of what happened under the UPA, where unelected institutions became so large they could diminish the authority of an elected government.
Both the CAG and the Bench realized they had bitten off more than they could chew. So both started to rein themselves in. Anyway, these guys need post-retirement sinecures so they have an interest in appeasing a leader who looks like he might be around for a long time.
And other institutions of law enforcement, always working at the discretion of the Government, could be useful pawns in a game of political skullduggery against opponents. So the will to institutional simplification, that power is best concentrated, became the default common sense of Indian politics.
This has been the case since 1946. Things started to loosen up from the Eighties onward.
Total institutional control is now thought of as a panacea, not as something we should fear.
No. That was the dominant theory in the early Seventies. After that '77 it has tended to diminish.
It gave the politics of reaction a decidedly authoritarian turn, one with great resonance in politics.
Only in the imagination of a cretin. The fact is Indians have come to realize that autocracy is tempered by assassination. Authoritarianism gets fucked in the ass at the ballot box.
But the second implication of the desire for institutional control is a politics centred on personality.
As opposed to what? A politics centered on an impersonal bureaucracy? India rejected the rule of 'Heaven Born' ICS officials long ago.
For, in an era impatient with institutions,
there is no such era. People are impatient with crap institutions. They have no problem with one's which do their job well.
salvation had to be found in charismatic individuals who could stamp their destiny on the nation.
Soteriology is concerned with 'salvation'. Charisma is a Soteriological notion. It represents a 'gift' and is associated with Divine Grace. Nations, since the time of the ancient Egyptians and Hebrews and so forth, have been united by soteriological ideas and charismatic individuals.
Here Narendra Modi had, and despite the sheen wearing off, continues to have a decisive advantage.
The sheen has since increased. The guy now has a truly splendid beard.
In an age where the collapse of partisanship and analysis is so complete, opponents have always underestimated his political appeal.
Nonsense! Opponents have kept their head down when he is around. Rahul made the mistake of trying to attack him for being 'suited booted'. That backfired.
To even suggest that it is foolish to deny Modi’s political appeal is to risk being complicit in what he does with his political power.
I don't risk being complicit with Al Qaeda if I deny its political appeal. The fact is the vast majority of Muslims are law abiding and know their own religion better than those crazy nutjobs.
To be complicit, you have to actually do something overt which helps the commission or concealment of a crime. Mehta does not understand ordinary English words- let alone Hellenized Hebrew concepts like charisma.
But one cannot understand the power of reactionary politics if one does not bring the sheer distinctiveness of Modi into the picture. He shook up Indian politics by appearing to empower new constituencies, converting a parliamentary election into a presidential one,
like Indira and Jawaharlal and Rajiv and even poor old Atal- who was way too old to get a second term.
and promising to destroy an ancien régime that was imploding.
Does this cretin really not know that Atal had been PM?
The first element he displayed, like all authoritarian characters, was the sheer will to power.
Those who gain power by some overt act of their own have a 'will to power'. They may or may not be authoritarian. Some extreme authoritarians had no 'will to power' at all. They suddenly acceded to the throne because their elder brother died suddenly and without issue. Dr. Assad is a contemporary example.
He came across as effective for the sheer energy and single-mindedness he put into his political pursuits.
Nonsense! Plenty of Indians- like Agnivesh- had 'energy and single-mindedness'. But they were as stupid as shit. So their 'political pursuits' were fruitless.
Confronted with opponents who had, it seems, almost lost the will to pursue power, his Will stood out.
I suppose Mehta means gun-shy Rahul. But Congress could have got behind some replacement for the elderly Manmohan. I'd have voted for Montek. He was a virile and handsome Manmohan who, being Sikh, couldn't become a rival to the dynasty.
The second was his ability to produce affective identification. He managed to portray himself as India’s success story, the everyman who could fight adversity and rise to the top on his own effort.
Why say he 'managed to portray' something which, very evidently, was blindingly obvious to everyone? When has a guy too poor to even go to College become a C.M and then a P.M ?
He had a visceral dislike of the Gandhi dynasty,
we don't know that. Menaka and Varun are equally part of the Gandhi dynasty.
but in the critique of dynastic politics, he positioned himself against a corrupt and entitled order. The more moral and intellectual contempt that was heaped on him,
by whom? Cunts like Mani Shankar Aiyar? Tambrams hate him.
the easier that identification became. Third, he positioned himself as a moral paragon—in whom self-interest was not even possible. In India, it is very common for kinship relations to override any conception of public and private. But paradoxically, it makes the appeal of someone who stands apart from kinship—and who thereby claims to have no self-interest, only a concern for the general good—all the more resonant. This is not simply the virtue of the allegedly celibate pracharak, it is the virtue of a leader who did not inherit a family mantle and will not leave one.
Interestingly, Rahul has declared himself to be similarly celibate. Good for him. Wives want not just sex- which leaves you kind of drained and less in the mood to work on your six pack- but they are also constantly cooking up tasty treats which soon turn you into a great big fatty. I myself would have the body of a Salman Khan if I'd remained a Brahmachari. Anyway, that's my story and I'm sticking to it.
Fourth, this was a speaker for whom identification was created by his perlocutionary campaign.
This sentence is meant to look smart. But it is a tautology. If a speaker causes you to identify with her then her utterance had a 'perlocutionary' effect. But this is also true of a cat which says miaow in a plaintive way till you give it some thing nice to eat. All Mehta is saying is 'Modi said 'I'm like you' and most Indian people were persuaded of this because...urm... he actually was like them. He'd been poor. He'd worked as a 'chai-wallah'. But, because he was smart and worked hard, he'd risen greatly by his own merit. But this was bleeding obvious! There is no need to use long words like 'perlocutionary' to hint at some occult conspiracy.
The truth is made through the act of speaking; it is not an independent test of veracity.
This is nonsense. Truth-makers are independent of 'the act of speaking'. No doubt, such an act may have an illocutionary force which arises purely by what is said. For example if I say 'I offer you this cake in return for the can of beer you are holding' then it is true that there is an offer simply because what I said constituted an offer. However, the 'perlocutionary' force of this utterance may be quite different. You are the host of a birthday party. I don't have to trade cake for beer. You want me to have both in unlimited quantities. You smile at my faux-naif way of asking for beer. You get up and mix me a cocktail because you know I am too much of a pansy to drink any manly, blue-collar, beverage.
Why has Mehta chosen to parade his ignorance of modern semantics and linguistic philosophy in this manner? The answer is, he is writing for desis, yaar. Why you are nit-picking? Don't you know Indians are as thick as shit?
The very thing that commentators find a weakness, the refusal to answer questions or seriously face a press conference, was the very thing that shored up his power.
The press had shat the bed. They had been disintermediated. They complained about this but everybody said 'shut your fucking hole you stupid presstitute' so they went back to writing about Fascism and Nazism and the fucking Spanish Inquisition till Nidhi Razdan was conned by some scammer who told her Harvard wanted to give her a Professorship!
To acknowledge someone else’s questions is to cede possibility to the idea that someone else might have the truth.
No it isn't. Either they are asking a genuine question coz they don't know the truth or they are practicing 'gotcha' journalism or just trying to make you look bad.
To listen to someone else's answer to a question means, provided you are acting in good faith and not doing so just to laugh at them, that you are ceding the possibility that they might have the truth.
Mehta is incapable of writing a single logically coherent sentence.
The fusion of truth and conviction is the hallmark of reactionary politics:
No it isn't. Reactionary politics is convinced that what truly and genuinely obtains ought not to obtain. But many types of 'conviction' politics are 'ontologically dysphoric' or dialethic.
the perfect antidote to liberals who cannot take their own side in an argument.
Liberals can and do take their own side in an argument. Self-interested actions are counselled, not derided, by Liberal Political Philosophy. Indeed, strategic 'preference revelation problems' represents a scandal for its theory of Social Choice.
And finally, there was at least in 2014 the ability to cleverly craft messages, the ability to tell different audiences that he was speaking to them.
When has this not happened? Everybody speaks differently to their Mummy, their wife, or the cook when asking for the same thing- viz. something nice to eat.
He made himself the Representative of the Nation,
No. He made himself its Chief Executive.
with all his contradictions enfolded within him.
as opposed to gushing out of his every orifice a la Mehta
His followers made him the ultimate apotheosis of the Indian nation.
No. They would first have had to make him the incarnation of the will of the Indian nation and then apotheosized him- i.e. turned him into a God.
By contrast, the notion of Russia as a 'Christ bearing Nation' is an example of collective Theosis- a doctrine affirmed by the Orthodox, but not the Catholic or Reformed Church.
SEVEN MONTHS IS a long time in Indian politics. But in effect, 2019 will be a test of two things. First, is India ready to put up with a messy—but perhaps safe—dispersal of power? Can it overcome its own will to political simplification? Second, is the sheen beginning to wear off Modi’s persona as a representative individual who transcends our petty contradictions, lifts us out of our banal ambitions, and has the power of communication to even make a lamp-post win in Uttar Pradesh? There is some reason to be optimistic on the second score. While the extent of personal identification with Modi remains high, and he has been given an unusually long leash by the electorate, the mystical identification of him as the Saviour of the Nation is wearing thin.
Till the Pakistanis attacked Pulwama and Modi responded with Balakot. Of course, it is possible Modi would have won any way.
But it is still an important political factor. On the first score, however, there is some reason to be a little cautious. Of course, much depends on alliances, whether the opposition can actually form a front that, if not coherent, at least displays a minimal ability to work together in ways that overcome the spectre of paralysis. In the two states that matter most, UP and Bihar, there is a possibility that this could happen. So, Indian politics looks a lot more competitive than before. But it would be premature to conclude that the fear of fragmentation and the personality cult that drive the politics of reaction have been entirely overcome.
So, Mehta was shite at analyzing Indian politics. Still, that is generally true of academics. What gets him into trouble is his illiterate Drama Queen behavior.
It is the third dimension of the institutional politics of reaction that will have the most far-reaching effects. Modi is one of the few leaders who have managed to combine centralisation and a personality cult with a veritable social movement.
Nonsense! Every leader with a 'personality cult' has done precisely the same thing to a greater or lesser extent. Look at Trump. But so have leaders who had no personality to speak of. Look at Merkel.
To some extent, a shake-up of India’s power structure—the media, intellectual class, organisational street power—was inevitable with the change of regime. But the scale of Modi’s victory, his willingness to commandeer civil society till it came to heel has meant that India is witnessing the closest alignment of the state and civil society in a long time.
Why? Because India is overwhelmingly poor and overwhelmingly Hindu. For the first time in its history it has a poor, OBC, Hindu leading it. Moreover, the guy is doing a good job- standing up to China and kicking Pakistan in the goolies. Now even Mehta type shitheads are resigning and running for cover.
There are three key institutions in this alignment: the institutions of propaganda, the foot soldiers of violence, and the ideological apparatus of education.
Nonsense! It is enough if the overwhelming majority of the population has confidence in the leadership. Propaganda is a two edged sword. 'India shining' was a fucking disaster. The Left Front had plenty of 'foot soldiers of violence' and controlled a vast 'ideological apparatus of education'. Where are they now? Cowering from Mamta's goons and quietly voting BJP.
Much has been written about the third: the state’s desire to make the education system, particularly public education, an appendage of the state.
Fuck off! Teachers in Government Schools won't show up for work saying they are on election duty or erection duty or whatever. Public education is so shit nobody wants any part of it. As for Government Colleges- don't get me started. That's why, sooner or later, Ashoka type Universities will be the rule just as private schools have become the rule in large parts of India.
But this does not elicit much comment, in part because that has, alas, been the default DNA of the Indian State when it comes to education.
Default DNA? Fuck is that? You can say 'default state' or 'DNA', you can't combine both together. This sort of Babu English won't do when Mehta gets to Amrika. Well, no, scratch that. After all, the fellow is 'colored'. All dem darkies got shit for brains. Be polite. Offer it a banana.
The old cabals had so delegitimised themselves that the wholescale destruction of the freedom of public universities is passed over in silence.
Because it didn't happen.
The politics of education in the reactionary imagination would require a whole essay in its own right. But what is new is that private capital has been enlisted in a project of aligning the media with the ideological purposes of the state.
Three years later, Mehta would discover that 'private capital has been enlisted in a project of aligning Universities with the ideological purposes of the State'.
Suppose some pimps offer him a Professorship of Liberal Anal Sex in a Brothel. He accepts their assurance that it is a safe space from which to practice parrhesia- i.e. speak truth to the power that is Modi. After three years of incessant sodomy the fellow will suddenly realize that 'private capital has been enlisted in the project of my getting reamed incessantly in the ideological interests of the state.'
It often has to mobilise its resources in alignment with state goals and policies.
It would be acting ultra vires- not to say irrationally- if this were not the case. What is the point of writing such a vacuous sentence? Is it to show 'India pherry hot'?
But most importantly, can you think of any liberal democracy where so much private capital has been enlisted in not just supporting the Government, but also its whole ideological agenda?
Yes. Every single one. Mehta himself was recruited because he wasn't a Leftist. He talked Liberal bollocks not Marxist bollocks. Now, belatedly, he is having his adolescent rebellion. He is babbling about 'super-heroes' while shitting himself from fear of what Modi might do to him.
The state-capital nexus is not so much a matter of secret deals, hidden money trails or transactional bargains. It is hidden in plain sight in the Indian media,
he would now add, Academia- at least of the private variety
where corporatisation and privatisation have not brought more variety or competition.
Yes they have. That's how come almost everybody has a phone. Back in the Eighties even senior Army officers didn't have one at home- that too in Delhi's Chanakyapuri.
Nor have they particularly brought a concern for intelligent thinking about markets.
Yes they have. Mehta doesn't know about it because he didn't do mathsy stuff as an undergrad. That's why he is now a useless tosser who babbles about 'super-heroes' who must go fight 'reactionaries'.
There are some exceptions. But a shockingly large section of the private media is now the ideological vanguard of the state, its rhetorical storm-troopers in a politics of communalism, polarisation, distraction, anti-intellectualism, mendacity and hate.
What type of storm trooper was Mehta himself? We all know the answer to that now. He fights Modi by leaving his students in the lurch while shitting copiously on their alma mater.
This, the enlistment of private capital in an attempt to totally capture public discourse, is a new dimension of state-capital relations that a future historian will have to unpack.
Nonsense! The thing happened in the Nineteenth Century when 'private capital' took education away from the Church- though, no doubt, the Church fought back by promoting STEM subjects and Competitive Sports and professional training in the Law and Accountancy and so forth.
In an extraordinary inversion, the state has shown that the private media is, in some senses, more effectively manipulated, cajoled and coerced than even the state media.
But the state media is shite. As for the private media, they gain market share by backing popular leaders though, no doubt, a few can get subsidies to go in the other direction. That's not necessarily a bad thing.
The relentless focus on hypocrisy creates a moral coarseness in its own right. In its will to take off our masks, it ends up scratching our faces as well
Nobody wants to take off Mehta's mask or his underpants because shit constantly bubbles forth from both his mouth and his anus.
God alone knows who has been scratching his face. Maybe it was the cat- on orders from Modi. CBI should investigate!
But one development with the more far-reaching effect will be the empowering of new and institutionalised forms of violence. In the 70s and 80s, towns and cities used to have what Paul Brass had termed ‘institutionalised riot systems’, structures that were activated to foment politically useful violence.
Then Modi sent in the army to shoot rioters- even if they were Hindu. The thing is easy to suppress.
These structures often had state support. It is hard to quantify the extent to which its modern equivalent, controlled vigilantism designed to teach minorities a lesson and polarise politics, has now taken institutional roots. But the sheer geographic spread of new forms of violence—lynchings across at least nine states, artists threatened, journalists murdered—suggests a new machinery waiting to be deployed.
Mehta won't take back his resignation because 'new machinery is waiting to be deployed' to deprive him of his anal cherry.
Young super-heroes should have protected his backside better. Their failure to do so has caused him to shit on their alma mater and flee none knows whither.
There is a diabolical political imagination in how this violence is used. It is mindful of the fact that a large-scale riot may recoil on the governance record of the Government. It wants to be able to plead a statistical innocence (‘Oh, the numbers are not bad’). So this violence is like a burner in a kitchen, slowly turned up when needed to send multiple messages. The first is to emphasise that the cultural norms of majoritarianism are inviolable; the second is to create a fear that shock troops are available in case anyone steps out of line; and the third is to convince the base that the mission of an ideological takeover of civil society is on, with violence if necessary. But this form of violence does not just happen: it is now routinely legitimised by the highest functionaries of the state, by omission or commission. It’s a form of violence in which cretinism is on full display: the victim is guilty, the Government’s heart bleeds for the perpetrator, and the argument of culture immobilises all human sympathies. It should worry us how easily this—and so many other forms of violence—are available. But the question is: has this form of violence now penetrated Indian society deeply enough that it can even survive a BJP electoral defeat? To be sure, other political formations like the Left and Trinamool in West Bengal have also produced their share of political violence. But the endurance of those institutionalised systems should not be a pretext for whataboutery: they are a salutary lesson in how difficult it is to dislodge entrenched violence. These foot soldiers of political violence are not easy to decommission. Now that they have tasted the elixir of political legitimacy, the genie will not go back into the bottle. In that sense, the triumph of reactionary politics should not be measured only by its electoral victories or entrenchment in the state. It should be measured by the fact that wherever it has gone, it is breaking apart whatever modest social capital India had.
Consider the riots in Delhi at the time of Trump's visit. What lesson do they teach? The answer is that if you have a supine Police Commissioner who won't protect cops when they are beaten by lawyers or, later on, shot by Muslim mobs, then the minority is 'taught a lesson' by the majority. At that point the National Security adviser has to come in and sort things out. The morale of the Police must be raised by putting a few stupid students and other nutters in jail.
This is how 'social capital' is maintained. Nutters and hooligans are either judicially incarcerated or killed extra-judicially. Mehta choses to believe this is a new development. But then, he may also believe 'political interference' with his anal cherry is on the cards unless he shits himself incessantly and flees none know wither.
What Wittgenstein once said of tradition
he wasn't talking of tradition. He was talking of what happens to ordinary, everyday, language when we- like Mehta- begin babbling metaphysical nonsense. If we try to get back to sensible thinking, we find it as difficult as repairing a spider's web with our human hands. In other words, don't talk metaphysical bullshit. Don't 'shit higher than your arsehole'. If you do, you will become Mehta level stupid and incapable of ordinary sensible thought or speech.
applies equally to social institutions: Once they are broken, the task of reviving them is akin to repairing a spider’s web with one’s own hands.
This is completely false. Wittgenstein's Austria repaired its social institutions quickly enough as did West Germany. Traditions can be broken and then revived. Anything human can be easily repaired by humans. A spider's web is not human. Humans can't repair it. Metaphysical bullshit is not human- it is infrahuman. It is like making a practice of shitting into your hands and eating your own feces while saying 'yummy, yummy chocolate cake'. Once you get habituated to doing things of that sort, you will find it difficult to re-enter polite society. People will give you a wide berth. If you try offering your 'chocolate cake' to the Prime Minister, you will be arrested and locked up in a padded cell. Alternatively, you could just resign from Ashoka and flee none know whither.
The biggest threat of reactionary politics is that it does not understand the central insight of conservatism: societies are fragile and interconnected webs.
This is not the central insight of anything. Societies are anti-fragile because of the redundancy built into their interconnections. Reactionary politics can succeed in restoring a conservative regime. Franco and Salazar were very successful and died in their own beds. Mehta is talking nonsense.
They cannot survive a politics of Will and Violence, even if carried out in the name of the Nation.
Yes they can. Has this cunt never heard of the Bourbon restoration? It is a different matter that stupidity on a big enough scale gets you the order of the boot. But then Mehta himself, he tells us, was effectively sacked.
Does Modi’s triumph signify an emerging new social order? Is its fate tied solely to his electoral fortunes or will it prove more enduring?
The Social Order changed and threw up new leaders. This is an ongoing process. Politicians age. They die. Speaking generally, every life in politics ends in failure in some more or less poignant sense.
The Economics of Reaction
Surely, it could be argued, the underlying malaise that facilitates the politics of reaction is economic in character. Surely, it was the fear of an economic slowdown that created the conditions that propelled the rise of Modi.
No. Rahul refused to step up to the plate. That was unexpected.
If faith in technology was one aspect of reactionary modernism, the promise of economic deliverance was another. But here is the dilemma for Indian politics. Modi has neither turned out to be the Saviour he presented himself as, nor is he such a disaster that economics alone can defeat him. In many ways, in economics he represents more continuity than change. Most Indian governments since the first NDA Government have tried to avoid too much macroeconomic volatility; they do a couple of big things right, do a couple of welfare schemes, progress incrementally on a few others, and pray that the things they leave undone do not come to haunt them. The UPA-II, especially during Pranab Mukherjee’s disastrous stint as Finance Minister, was an exception in being wilfully irresponsible, and it paid the price for it.
Not really. The only thing we remember against him was the retrospective tax stunt.
This is not a place to go into a detailed assessment of Modi’s economic performance,
which Mehta is not qualified to do
but it is worth focusing on a couple of things that matter to the politics of reaction.
WHEN MODI CAME TO power, state-capital relations were the central pivot around which his economic agenda revolved. The relationship between state and capital is an important capillary of power in a modern democracy.
Not a capillary, it is an artery.
This relationship is governed by many contradictory impulses.
No. There is a single contract curve.
In a democracy, politicians need capital for elections and for sustaining politics as a career choice.
No. They need liquidity. That is not the same thing as 'Capital'.
But politics also has to be responsive to the demands of social legitimation.
Nonsense! This shit about 'legitimization' only exists in brains of shitheads. Voters have repeatedly shown that they don't care about 'vertical equity'. They just want more club goods for the same price in terms of taxes.
There is a second issue: there is often a tension between seeking policies that favour particular businesses and policies that favour a level-playing field based on principles that produce growth.
Nobody gives a shit. Those who bang about Ambani or Bill Gates or whatever end up with egg on their face. Voters assume they are engaged in a crude attempt at blackmail or else that these guys have lost their marbles and believe in a secret alliance between the Illuminati and the Lizard People from Planet X.
The third tension is between the imperatives of looking business-friendly on one hand, and incorporating genuine public goods into regulation on the other—like environmental and human rights. These tensions are perennial in any democracy.
Rights are meaningless unless linked to incentive compatible remedies under a bond of law. Ordinary folk are swayed only be 'last mile delivery' though, no doubt, there is a mimetic aspect to expectations- i.e. if people believe folk in the next state over are getting a better deal then they turn anti-incumbent.
The UPA badly mismanaged these tensions.
But would have still got re-elected if Rahul had pushed Manmohan aside in 2014 and started shouting about being a 'Mr. Clean' and 'Youth ki awaaz'' etc.
Corruption had reached a point where the demands of social legitimation had become nearly impossible to meet.
Fuck does this mean? Why not say 'People fucking me in the ass had reached a point where the demands of socially legitimizing my asshole as a place for one-way traffic had become impossible to meet'.
This spawned not just an anti-corruption movement that delegitimised the Congress at the time, it led to a whole series of hit-and-miss judicial interventions. The inability to meet the demands of legitimation produced a policy paralysis of sorts.
In the Defense Ministry- certainly. Elsewhere- not so much.
The second tension was manifest largely in the way the Government doled out credit. The exercise of discretionary power in this area brought the banking system to its knees.
No it didn't. I wish it had though. It is time the bankers sucked off all and sundry.
It produced a protracted crisis that still continues: private investment is still tepid.
Because of Supply Side factors.
And third, on labour and the environment, the Government doled out symbolic protections, but by and large, capital always had the upper hand.
No. It had the upper hand only in those islands of prosperity which, by reason of inward migration, soon looked as shitty as everywhere else.
The BJP therefore had the task of re-managing these tensions. The jury is still out on whether India is less plutocratic than before. But the BJP has sought to manage the tensions by three devices. The first lesson it learnt from the Congress debacle was this. Under Congress rule, individual Congressmen were benefitting from the use of state power, but the party was losing. This was double jeopardy for the Congress. On one hand, it meant lots of Congress leaders were exercising their individual channels of influence without the benefit accruing to the party. The result was individual Congressmen are rich but the party is poor.
Actually, the party was rich but didn't want to spend any money because Rahul would not be the beneficiary. That's also why they ignored some promising younger people he recruited.
This still haunts it. On the other hand, the system created a free-for-all which magnified popular perceptions of corruption. The BJP has the advantage that its state-capital dealings are more centralised, so while benefits accrue to the party and its centralised leadership, it also has the advantage of reducing the appearance of transactional corruption—since, if the party has an efficient resource mobilisation strategy, it can often afford to rein in transactional corruption by individual leaders.
That's a long-winded way of saying some BJP leaders are patriots, not corrupt sycophants.
The second device was to create new instruments like electoral bonds that are opaque to the public but provide a new channel of funding.
The econ behind this is actually quite interesting. But Mehta is too stupid to understand why. I omit the rest of the essay where Mehta makes trite remarks on things which are fresh in our memory. What he fails to do is to provide any evidence that Modi is either 'reactionary' or 'authoritarian'. I'd have thought he have highlighted demonetization as other economists had done. But he ducked that issue because he lacks the analytical savvy. Instead he merely virtue signals- e.g mentioning 'mombatti' vs 'agarbatti' Dalits- a collocation which failed to take off with the Dalit masses- at any rate, nobody now remembers it. Still, Mehta's mention of it highlights his great failing. The guy wasn't cool at Skool or Collidge. Now he's mixing with kids- 'super-heroes' as he calls them- and desperately wants to look cool. But how does a pompous asshole with a half-baked Eurocentric paideia get to act cool? Well, back in '68, elderly pedants pretended they were Maoists. So that's the direction in which this cretin is heading. But he won't get arrested as an 'Urban Naxal'. The guy is merely a Bania of ideas who has now given up on his little kirana shop in rural Haryana. That's a shame. A good kirana shop located there could be the next Walmart.
In the end Ashoka may indeed, as Mehta says, thrive because it has got rid of this moral cretin. But that depends on its students. They should not try to be 'super-heroes'. They should concentrate on being team players. Build yourself up as you build up your team-mates. Then make money together and create jobs for your less fortunate brothers and sisters. Don't become a fucking andlolanjivi. Even worse, don't become the sort of shite Professor whose midlife crisis involves the morally cretinous task of talking illiterate nonsense about moral cretinism.
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