Daniel Imerwahr has an excellent book chapter here on the mutual influence between Gandhian nationalism and the struggle of the African American people. Reading it enables us to understand Shyamala Harris's thinking. She came to an America which she already saw through a particular lens. Her husband, however, being an economist, was willing to go in a somewhat more radical direction. It may be beneficial to Kamala to be considered as a votary of the Christian/Gandhian Dr. King rather than the more Socialist political thinker and strategist he was evolving into before his life was cut tragically short.
Dr. King's visit to India, it appears, was 'overdetermined'. There was a big 'Gandhian' pressure group within America eager to push Dr. King towards India as well as a big Indian desire to glom onto him so as to pretend Gandhian India wasn't a shithole and that it had something to teach the world.
The American side of things, being well financed and having the support of the State Department, went off without a hitch- though it took 3 years- but the Indian side was let down by the fact that Dr. King's party missed a connecting flight and thus landed in Bombay. Dr. King was exposed to the reality of Gandhian incompetence and stupidity before he could be taken in by Lutyen's Potemkin village on Raisina Hill which housed the Gandhian ruling class.
The journey itself got off to a rocky start. Scheduled to land in Delhi, India’s capital, where Congress ruled, King’s party missed a connecting flight from Zurich and were forced instead to take a later flight to Bombay, the capital of Maharashtra, Ambedkar’s home state.
Which Congress also mis-ruled. Ambedkar hadn't managed to get elected to anything.
There a very different sight greeted them than the planned welcoming party of five hundred well-wishers bearing garlands. “I will never forget it, that night,” King later preached, telling a story that he would find himself repeating often.
We got up early in the morning to take a plane for Delhi. And as we rode out of the airport we looked out on the street and saw people sleeping out on the sidewalks and out in the streets, and everywhere we went to. Walk through the train station, and you can’t hardly get to the train, because people are sleeping on the platforms of the train station.
In other words, India was as poor as shit. The caste Hindu might not want to get too close to the pariah, but both were starving, naked, and likely to drop dead at any moment of some easily curable disease. Why did King not get that what India needed was rapid Development based on imitating countries which were growing rapidly? How come he didn't tell Nehru to get those homeless people into factory dormitories? Make a profit off their labor and build more roads so those who were yet poorer in the countryside could get the luxury of a bit of pavement to sleep on.
Coretta Scott King also remembered it well. “We were appalled. When we asked why hundreds and thousands of people were stretched out on the dirty pavements, we were told that they had no other place to sleep: they had no homes... It was very hard for us to understand or accept this.”
African Americans were discriminated against, exploited, and oppressed. But their lives were better than the lives of most Indians. Why? They were more productive. Productivity has to rise before living standards can rise.
One can well imagine their surprise. Nothing could be further from the archetypal image of Indian poverty— the Gandhian peasant piously spinning khadi—than the sight of hundreds of thousands of urban homeless sleeping on the streets of Bombay. Shaken, the Kings continued on to Delhi, where they quickly rescheduled appointments with Nehru, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, and Rajendra Prasad, the prime minister, vice president, and president of India. It was “like meeting George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison in a single day,” King exclaimed.
But Washington, Jefferson and Madison had fought the British and chucked them out. Nehru, Radhakrishnan and Prasad had done no such thing. The British had initiated the process of handing over power to people like them. They had objected to the pace and scope of this handover. Under Gandhi's leadership, they had claimed a monopoly or representing all Indians. But Jinnah, on behalf of the Muslims, and Ambedkar on behalf of the 'untouchables', had objected. Then, the Brits decided to get out while the going was good. Jinnah got his Pakistan. Ambedkar had to settle for becoming a Boddhisattva. 'Free money' from the US meant Nehru & Co could postpone economic reform- i.e. letting homeless people into factory dormitories to slave away for evil Capitalist. India was so crazy it did not concentrate on textiles to begin its industrial revolution. Thanks must go to Gandhi's stupidity for this outcome. But then, the Leftists were just as foolish. It is only now, in 2021, that we have a popular Indian Communist leader- 'Captain' Vijayan- who is proud, not humiliated, to be known as the Deng Xiaoping of India. 50 years after the Vietnam War was lost and won, we finally have a few Leftists ready to accept that it is more important to grow the economy than to combat American Imperialism.
His audience with Nehru proved particularly fruitful; the two talked for four hours “comparing the Indian struggle for freedom with that of American blacks for civil rights.”
African Americans are less than 15 percent of the American population. The Brits weren't even 0.1 percent of the Indian population. They were just better at making India productive which in turn meant they could finance an administration in India which enabled India to project force in its neighborhood. Indeed, by 1914, for the first time in global history, Indian soldiers were changing the global balance of power by fighting in Europe and the Far East. Thankfully, Mahatma Gandhi rose up to turn India, for the first time in its history, into one vast, naked, hungry, begging bowl. Truman hadn't been able to understand why a big agricultural country which had been unscathed by the War would need Food Aid. Eisenhower, however was happy to give India free money and free food. This is why Indian Communists are still so keen to fight American Imperialism.
King was fascinated to hear of India’s success in combating untouchability.
Those successes were the result of British policies- which, no doubt, had a divide et impera aspect. That is why Dr. Ambedkar opposed Gandhi and feared Indian independence. He believed that the 'untouchables' in a free India would suffer the same fate as the African Americans after 'Reconstruction' came to an end and 'Jim Crow' returned to the South. He wrote he would ' “let Swaraj perish if the cost of it is the political freedom of the Untouchables”. Foolishly, Ambedkar's pal, J.N Mandal, sided with Pakistan- becoming their first Law Minister. But he and many of his people had to flee to India. Thus, it was in Muslim Pakistan, not Hindu India, that Ambedkar's nightmare came true. However, in India, 'Dalits' only gained reservations if they remained Hindu. Muslim Dalits were stripped of this entitlement. In other words, Religion had trumped caste which- it turned out- didn't really mean very much. Ambedkar himself decided, as the Moses of his people, to lead then into a new type of Buddhism- though that religion had broadcast 'untouchability' all the way to Japan. By contrast, in Hindu Bali, you have Brahmins but no Dalits.
Nehru told King of the anti-untouchability provisions that Ambedkar had written into the Constitution,
Ambedkar was a voice in the wilderness by the time the 1955 Act punishing the preaching or practice of untouchability was promulgated.
and of the government’s policy of spending millions of rupees toward developing housing and job opportunities for ex-untouchables. “Isn’t that discrimination?” asked Lawrence Reddick, King’s traveling companion. “Well, it may be,” answered Nehru. “But this is our way of atoning for the centuries of injustices we have inflicted upon these people.” Clearly impressed, King repeated the story four years later in his 'Why We Can’t Wait'.
Nehru was happy to receive American 'free money' (as his cousin described US Aid) and to dole out money. What he wasn't happy to do was his job- viz. make India richer and more secure.
Upon his return to the United States, King’s views on the subcontinent shifted. Now, India was not only the land that threw off the British through civil disobedience, but also the greatest extant example of a country that fought poverty and discrimination through massive state intervention.
based on asking Uncle Sam to hand over cash
As Reddick put it, the trip “made him see that ‘Love’ alone will not cure poverty and degradation.”
Why settle for Love when you can demand money? This was around the time that Eisenhower doubled US aid to India. Sadly, this permitted India to put off needful reform with the result that things got worse- not better.
Incidentally, it appears nobody called Dr. King an untouchable-
The most startling statement of King’s new view on India came in a sermon that he delivered on 4 July 1965. In it, King recalled visiting a school of ex-untouchables in Trivandrum, Kerala: The principal introduced me and then as he came to the conclusion of his introduction, he says, “Young people, I would like to present to you a fellow untouchable from the United States of America.” And for a moment I was a bit shocked and peeved that I would be referred to as an untouchable ...I started thinking about the fact: twenty million of my brothers and sisters were still smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in an affluent society. I started thinking about the fact: these twenty million brothers and sisters were still by and large housed in rat-infested, unendurable slums in the big cities of our nation, still attending inadequate schools faced with improper recreational facilities. And I said to myself, “Yes, I am an untouchable, and every Negro in the United States of America is an untouchable.”87 This anecdote, replacing the race–colony analogy that had been foundational to the importation of Gandhism to the United States with the race–caste analogy, is all the more remarkable because it is very likely that it never happened to King.
Of course it didn't! The guy was a VVIP from the land of milk and honey and 'free money'. Back in 1937 or 1938, when Benjamin E Mays was touring South India, it would have been okay to say a distinguished American visitor was an 'untouchable' in some respect. One could even refer to German Jews as a 'pariah class'. But the Second World War had changed things fundamentally.
King’s mentor, told the following story of his own visit to a school in southern India: When [the principal] introduced me he made it clear that I was a Christian, from Christian America; yet he emphasized at the same time that I was an “untouchable” in America— ”an untouchable like us,” he emphasized. I was dazed, puzzled, a bit peeved. But instantly I recognized that there was an element of truth in what he said. As long as Negroes are treated as second and third class citizens, whether in the North where segregation and discrimination are spreading, where Negroes are frequently denied the privileges of eating in restaurants and denied occupancy in hotels, where discrimination against them in employment and civic life is rampant; or whether in the South, where segregation and discrimination exist by law and where gross inequalities exist in education, politics and work opportunities, they are the “untouchables” of America.
African American sociologists like E.F Frazier & O.C Cox opposed the tendency to substitute 'caste' as a euphemism for 'race' in the Thirties and Forties. The exotic word- redolent of timeless antiquity- was designed to paper over an atrocious, very modern, reality.
Dr. King, after getting his Nobel, went in a radical direction seeking to unite poor Whites with African Americans in a classic class struggle of a 'Keynesian' type- i.e. one requiring massive State intervention and an expansionary fiscal policy. This could be financed entirely by not doing stupid shit- e.g. shipping off nineteen year old kids to go die or turn into drug addicts in Vietnam.
Untouchability, which had formerly interested King only insomuch as it figured into Gandhian myth, quickly rose in King’s estimation to become India’s central problem. Less than a month after his return, King asked William Stuart Nelson to send him some books or pamphlets on the subject, claiming that he was “in the process of making a study of untouchability” and needed material.
There was some good Japanese Sociological work on their untouchable class which was being translated around this time. There was an important lesson for India in that literature. Sadly, by then, Dr. Ambedkar had attained parinirvana. Essentially, the lesson was that the Government needed to get behind Dalit entrepreneurs in traditionally Dalit occupations- like leather goods- so that Ambedkar's Jatav 'Kanpur Millionaires' could grow their industries, take export markets, and provide the entire Dalit community with Tardean 'mimetic targets'. This is the more recent project of creating Dalit billionaires instead of, like the silly Dalit Panthers, fulmining against 'the hideous plot of American imperialism' on behalf of 'the Third Dalit World, that is, oppressed nations'. Sadly, once Government or Quaker or Episcopalian or Ford Foundation money was on the table for stupid shit, only stupid shit burgeoned. Ambedkar had no successors- but then he himself had lost the plot. He should have been looking at Japan- which till very recently had been a caste society, had banned not just beef but all meat from four legged animals, and still had untouchables. India needed to imitate Japan to get ahead, not look at America which, like India, had had African slaves who, however, were so productively employed that their proportion of the population grew. In India however, descendants of African slaves were similar to the local population and had been absorbed into either the Islamic or Hindu caste system and many had lost their distinctive identity. I believe there is only one African origin legislator in India- he is with the BJP. Japan, by contrast, hadn't had slavery since 1590 and was untouched by Islam. It was more purely a caste society. Its path to modernization was the correct 'Tardean' mimetic target for India.
Sociological literature, translated in the Fifties and Sixties, regarding what was happening to untouchability in Japan should have been compulsory reading for Indians. The fact was that untouchability got perpetuated because these people were excluded from the industrialization of their traditional occupations. They were further marginalized by the freezing up of mobility by the grant of small doles from the Government. Later, you had a 'Dalit Panther' type movement in Japan which seems to have done no good whatsoever because it was about taking money from the government and beating its own people to raise 'consciousness'.
Whether he read the books Nelson sent or not, the importance of India and untouchability in King’s later political and economic thought cannot be denied. In 1960 King demanded that the federal government “carry on an active program of propaganda to promote the idea of integration” and “seriously consider making federal funds available to do the tremendous job of lifting the standards of a people too long ignored by America’s conscience.” These ideas, he explained, were “based on some recent insights that I gained while traveling in India,” where the government had not only made discrimination illegal but had spent “millions of dollars a year in scholarships, housing, and community development to lift the standards of the untouchables.”
America justified giving money to India on the grounds that this was a cheap way of keeping Communism at bay. But, surely, there was an internal problem in America? John Kenneth Galbraith, Kennedy's Ambassador to India, pointed out that the Punjabi peasant was better off, in some respects, than the poor White in the Appalachians. Clearly, tax cuts- as a Keynesian panacea- weren't enough. Government spending was required to break cycles of deprivation. Sadly, the type of Tardean mimetic process which Ambedkar- and the older Sociological tradition- had valorized was neglected. Instead, you had people like Moynihan talking shite about 'the Negro family'. The free market solution was to build up African American entrepreneurs and then tax them so everybody ended up better off. Owning property and rising up in commerce is what changes your 'caste', 'class', and ka ka so yore shit don't stink no more.
By contrast, as Immerwahr showed in his book 'Thinking Small' doing 'community development' was often a waste of time and money both abroad and at home. This was not obvious when a 'community organizer' got into the White House. But it is obvious today. Prosperity and Security are gained when there is division of labour and specialization and economies of scope and scale and the dissolution of maladaptive 'moral economies' and the atomization of cultures of stoic deprivation. Development should be powered by mimetics, not community cohesion. Otherwise the thing is captured by rent-seeking cliques and virtue signaling cretins.
The next year, in another push to expand the government’s scope, King again cited India, claiming that his trip had “revealed to me the vast opportunities open to a government determined to end discrimination.”
There was a big difference between India and America. The fact is our ideas re. the 'touchable' was linked to the same type of primitive pathogen avoidance theory as other superstitious beliefs like belief in the 'evil eye' or witches casting hexes. The only way to uproot these ideas was through mass access to effective allopathic medicine- not Gandhian shite. Once illiterate grannies saw that Doctors could cure typhoid and cholera etc. they cheerfully accepted the germ theory of disease and lost their fear of 'pollution' by infidels and people of other castes. Gandhi's failure in this respect could be blamed on his pal Dr. Pranjivan Mehta who denied the germ theory of disease and who regarded vaccinations and quarantines etc as a hoax perpetrated by the Imperialists.
Indian untouchability was mutual not hierarchical. The Brahmin is as inauspicious for the Pariah as vice versa- one reason why Ambedkar's widow (a Brahmin Doctor) was shunned by the Dalits and thus couldn't have a political career. In the Nineteenth Century, British administrators, noticed that Scheduled Tribes in Bengal refused famine relief food if cooked by Brahmins. It may be that 'untouchability' was invented by indigenous peoples who discovered, to their cost, that intermingling with pastoralists could lead to pandemics which hurt them disproportionately and resulted in demographic replacement. This is because groups who live close to particular animals will have better antibodies against viruses which jump from those animals to humans. Interestingly, the only pure 'Ancestral South Indian' strain is to be found in the Andaman islands. This is because, very sensibly, these people simply kill any stranger who approaches them.
Although there is no indication that King was familiar with Ambedkar, his model for positive governmental action, which he advanced most forcefully in his planned Poor People’s Campaign and Bill of Rights for the Disadvantaged, was the very model that Ambedkar had fought so hard to bring into existence—and that Gandhi had fought so hard against.
I think this is a little unfair. Gandhi only fought hard against anything that would help the country. Poor People's Campaigns and Bills of Rights for every sort of animal don't help anybody. They are a fucking waste of time. Gandhi did not oppose any type of stupidity. The fact is Dalit reservations have to be renewed by Parliament every ten years. If the thing actually made any difference, it would have disappeared long ago. Still, if Dalits rise above Muslims, as appears to be the case, in some parts of India, then the Hindus are happy for a purely chauvinistic reason. As for 'untouchability', fuck it and the horse it rode in on. We want lots of hospitals with plenty of oxygen cylinders and ventilators and so forth. Sadly, in some rural areas, this means not allowing the local hooligans to tie up Doctors and make them watch their wives and daughters being gang-raped. On the other hand, in big Cities, beating Junior Doctors should be tolerated as a healthful recreation. At least, this is what we should conclude, from Mamta Di's recent landslide victory.
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