In an opinion piece for Print, she writes
The exit of Jitin Prasada from the Congress instructs the old party to
do something splashy to attract the Brahmin vote in the upcoming UP elections?
That's what everybody else is saying. Shruti, however, asks it to slash its own throat.
take the initiative and split to save itself.
Wow! Sonia should split from her dear baby Rahul! What wonderful advise! For a split to occur there have to be two candidates for the job of party leader. But, because Congress is dynastic, this can only be a Gandhi. Priyanka has ruled herself out. Sonia may not be in good health and certainly does not want to stand in her son's way. Maybe Rahul should split with himself. Shruti is training to be a Lacanian psychotherapist. Perhaps she can coach him in 'refente'- i.e. splitting into two personalities- Raul Vinci, who is Christian, & Rahul Gandhi who is a janeodhari Brahmin. Vinci should slap Gandhi silly and launch his own Catholic Congress dedicating to turning India into Italy.
Prasada joins Jyotiraditya Scindia, scion of an erstwhile royal house, who a year ago too left the Congress to join the family of Hindutva. Both should be congratulated for coming clean and joining the Bharatiya Janata Party. They have shown the path to other individuals, family firms and even larger factions within the Indian National Congress.
But Menaka and her son Varun, the other Gandhi scion, joined the BJP long ago.
Hindutva remains the defining division of India today and each political actor, especially within the Congress fold, needs to be entirely honest on this potent question.
No. RSS membership was a 'defining division' during the last days of the Janata Morcha. But once Atal, and Atal alone out of the Janata ragtag and bobtail, showed he could form a stable Government, the issue of RSS membership disappeared. Turncoat RSS types- like Shankarsinh Vaghela= were promoted by Congress to battle the authentic article.
Congress lost big in 2014 because it didn't have a PM candidate and had acquired an anti-Hindu reputation. Later Rahul adopted Hindutva-lite and did say he'd become PM but this was too little too late. Now, Priyanka has tweeted delight at the consecration of the Ram Mandir and so, if Congress can get Prashant Kishor's services, they may be able to slowly rebuild. Meanwhile, astute politicians like Gehlot have placated the VHP by setting up things like the Vedic Education and Rites Board, while Mamta is giving stipends to Hindu priests. KCR, in Telengana, has gone the extra mile and has nothing to fear from the BJP. That's the sort of guy Congress should be courting. It is easy enough for Hindu CMs to outflank Hindutva by developing their own region's Hindu heritage in a manner which uses their superior local knowledge.
The latest exit offers the perfect opportunity to the abandoned Congress party to clearly set out its stall on Hindutva.
There's nothing wrong with a soft Hindutva stall. Gehlot's Vedic Board should be plugged. Mamta's stipend scheme can be held out as a carrot. In some states, promises of 'minority status' for local sects could be a game changer. This is a stall which could easily be made to look very attractive.
Shruti proposes that Congress set up a stall and then split it into two so one side of the stall can accuse the other of being cheats and the other side can respond in kind.
Flirting with varying shades of Hindu nationalism, as the Congress is prone to doing, will only strengthen the BJP. The Congress must split in order to weaken the BJP.
Shruti must split in two in order to weaken her opponents by rendering them helpless with laughter. The left side of her should be a Lacanian psychoanalyst while the right side of her should be a follower of Melanie Klein. The right side of her should slap the left side silly and vice versa. In this way, her students will be kept entertained. She herself will enter the annals of Medical Science. There will be a Shruti Syndrome which psychiatrists will puzzle over.
A rethinking and clarity on direction or the Left and Right and even the complacent centre of politics is essential to the survival of the Congress.
What does this sentence mean? Damned if I know. Perhaps it is Lacanian.
In varying degrees, Prime Minister Modi has captured and shaped the entire political spectrum causing directional confusion and even an identity crisis for the Opposition.
But Kejriwal and Mamta increased their majorities- at the expense of Congress and the Left. Gehlot is doing fine. Amarinder may yet prevail- the BJP has dwindled in Punjab. The Shiv Sena is holding its own with Congress and Pawar's support. It is clear that smart politicians are suffering no 'directional confusion' or 'identity crisis'. What on earth is Shruti babbling on about?
In shedding its flab and sloth, the Congress needs to abandon old ways of imagining political positioning.
Rubbish! It has to tell the anti-Hindu and anti-National nutjobs to fuck off while getting on with soft Hindutva and good old fashioned caste arithmetic based populist politics. If Rahul shapes up- well and good. If not, let Modi rule the center while Congress concentrates on what really matters- viz. the States.
Associated with the Right, Hindutva and Hindu nationalism, has always been more than any ordinary force of conservatism.
In the same way that being English has always been more than any ordinary force of conservatism. The 'Red Wall' turned Blue because Labor appeared more interested in Palestine and Kashmir than White people in this country. Shruti may not like it, but it is Priti Patel- not some Cambridge educated toff- who is Home Secretary. That lady may be from Gujarat, but she comes across as the product of a marriage between Mrs. Thatcher and a Rottweiler. How sad for Shruti, that both in India and here in the UK, relatively uneducated Gujjus are delivering what the people want! The fact that both are Hindus just rubs salt in the wound.
Chauvinism and violent identity-staging of its Hindu-first politics made the BJP a national party via the Mandir movement.
Shruti is displaying chauvinism in this article. She is 'identity-staging'- probably because this helps her on her campus. But her campus is far away from India. She is merely showing Indians that Professors at Cambridge are as stupid as shit- more particularly if they are brown and teach a worthless subject. This is just 'intellectual affirmative action' is all. Suppose Shruti were smart. Then she would be as greatly courted as Prashant Kishor. But Shruti isn't smart. She is a fit subject for Lacanian psychoanalysis- i.e. worthless verbiage with zero therapeutic content.
Hindutva under Modi now has welded itself to the new millennium’s global fixation on populism.
Why is this cretin babbling about the 'new millennium'? Even senile old farts like me stopped doing so ten years ago. As for 'populism'- Trump is gone. Get some new material!
Populism, with its close association with ‘the people’,
an apercu worthy of Lacan. Shruti graduated from a Punjabi College.
has of late swung popular democracies across the world.
swung them where?
Populism forges through by causing a wedge in well drawn-out lines and directions of the Left and the Right.
'wedge issues' are something else entirely. You don't 'cause' a wedge. You drive it in. This woman's English is terrible. But the bigger problem is that her brain is made of shit.
An obvious example would be the big spending on public goods by conservative or Right-wing governments, a policy direction that is normally associated with Left-leaning or socialist parties.
Defense is a public good. This cretin means big spending on welfare programs- i.e. transfers.
Occupying the so-called ‘centre’, populist regimes deploy the damaging canard that any opposition to it comes from the Left and by extension, is out of place and time, or simply outdated and well past its sell-by date.
Only if the Left has shat the bed would this be a canard.
Modi has aced all the populist tricks:
You can ace a test. You can pull off a trick. You can't ace a trick. What is the point of studying in England, if you won't learn to speak the language properly?
big personality, targeted big spending on public goods
on transfers. Public goods are defined as non-rival and non-excludable. Did this woman not learn any Econ?
and an effective campaign that renders Congress as a spent force
an effective campaign may depict X as a spent force, it can't 'render' it so.
or a party from the bad old days of socialist India that only the well-heeled can truly afford to align with. Just as White supremacy was the base for a populist like Donald Trump, it is Hindutva that truly gives Modi’s populism any teeth.
The majority of Americans are White and, yes, they have dominated that country. The majority of British people are White and they too dominate their country. India is majority Hindu. Even if Congress splits and splits again, it can't change this brute fact of life.
Rather than Left or Right, or even populism, India is witnessing the complete capture of the centre or of all institutional power by forces of extremism. The name of extremism is Hindutva.
The name of stupidity is Shruti Kapila.
The immobilising confusion of directions of Left or Right surely must be replaced with the clear reckoning of extremism that is stalking the Indian political landscape.
This should read 'replaced with a clear reckoning of the extremism that is '. What this cretin has written means 'we must adopt the clear reckoning of extremism'- i.e only the Hindutva brigade see things clearly.
Hindutva’s extremism, combined with its brute majority in the Lok Sabha, blinds the vision as it effectively misdirects the opposition.
Shruti has been rendered stupid and ignorant by her expensive education. Meanwhile a guy who was compiling health statistics for the UN in Chad has turned into the king-maker of Indian politics. Hard work, it seems, is better than a Harvard education. One reason for this is that people who teach Poli Sci at top Universities are now as bigoted and blind as Shruti.
A new wave of defections from India’s oldest party, nevertheless, points to a historic role reversal. The BJP now has to deal with ex-Congress leaders who either out of conviction, self-interest, or the need for personal power feel attracted to it. A hundred years ago, members of the BJP’s predecessor the Hindu Mahasabha, whether it was K.M. Munshi or Madan Mohan Malaviya, pursued their political careers within the broad tent that the Congress had become. Scale afforded compromise and, arguably, made the Congress ideologically unclear.
Motilal Nehru was on the Committee which selected delegates for the first Mahasabha meeting at Hardwar in 1915. He later split from Gandhi's Congress to form the Swaraj Party but most Congress members moved towards it in the Twenties and at a later point Motilal himself moved in the more radical direction of his son. It is notable that the Nehru report became the basis of the official Congress Platform and thus, arguably, the INC had become Nehruvian in 1930.
However, after Independence, it is notable that the three crucial demands of the Mahasabha were met
1) Hindi in the Nagari script to be promoted
2) Directive principle re. cow slaughter
3) Reservations only for Hindus (and later Sikhs) with pre-existing concessions to Dalit Muslims being scrapped.
In the Nehru years, despite a socialist mien, Congress conservatives held sway on the big-ticket reforms, notably the Hindu Code Bill and the still-born Zamindari abolition bills.
This is incredibly ignorant. Conservatives had prevented Ambedkar and Nehru getting the reforms they wanted. Only after Nehru won by a landslide did he get them through. But they were pure 'Hindutva'- i.e. tending to create a homogenous Hindu 'essence'- and this service to Hinduism certainly stood the dynasty in good stead- at least amongst Brahmins and Kayasthas.
Zamindari was a State Subject. What mattered was which community controlled the land registration system.
Given the extreme ideology, it is unlikely that a Scindia or a Prasada will have any moderating influence on the BJP’s Hindutva-driven agenda.
Given Shruti's extreme stupidity it is is unlikely that she understands why a Scindia or Prasad dilutes RSS influence within the party in specific regions.
As it stands, there is only one party that is fully associated with Hindutva, namely the BJP, now that the Shiv Sena has ostensibly taken a pragmatic approach to power.
The Sena hasn't changed its spots. It stands for the Hindu Marathas and, thanks to Pawar and Congress, will have the numbers to rule.
By contrast, there are 50-odd parties that have not signed up to Hindutva. The Congress may have only a handful of MPs but barring the BJP, it is the only party with a considerable voter base in several states and has a total share of over a third of all MLAs in the country.
Congress can provide CM candidates but doesn't have a credible PM candidate. That is the reason for its decline at the center.
Split and save
The Congress today, though spread across the nation, is not a big tent of power.
It is a very big tent. Amarinder Singh has nothing in common with Gehlot who in turn faces very different problems from Bhupesh Baghel. Congress should recognize that it can't compete with Mamta or Naveen or YSR. It should simply accept them as paramount satraps with substantial veto powers over the 'High Command'. Then it will go back to being what it was under Nehru.
There can be no compromise, not only because there is very little to bargain within the Congress fold but primarily because the edge of extreme Hindutva cannot be moderated.
There must be compromise with regional leaders. You can't have a situation where a future CM is kept waiting by the moon-calf Rahul and then offered biscuits from the same plate that Rahul's dog ate from.
If a CM thinks doubling down on Hindu piety is beneficial- let him do so. Look at Kerala. Within the State, Congress is against Sabarimala temple entry for women while, at the center, they are for it. That's the sort of pragmatism that is needed. Otherwise Rahul will be unelectable even in Kerala.
The Congress needs to become leaner and meaner in its ideological stance with a piercing clarity.
Nonsense! Nobody wants Rahul to display his 6 pack but then babble on about 'Vichardhara'. The guy is 50 years old!
To do so, it will, in the first instance, need to renounce its now revived habits honed first in the Rajiv Gandhi era and finessed under Narasimha Rao — of flirting with and conveying a ‘softer’ and ‘milder’ version of Hindu nationalism.
Has this woman been living under a rock for the last seven years? Does she really not know that Rahul is now janeodhari?
These only allowed for the BJP to become a national party. It was the worst kind of pragmatism as it has proved to be entirely pyrrhic.
Indira was more religious than Atal or Advani. Rao was yet more superstitious and was attached to an even more bogus Swami. But Indira won in 1980 because Janata fell apart on the RSS dual membership issue. Rao did not win re-election. Where there is no victory, the word 'pyrrhic' can't be applied.
Second, the Congress needs to aggressively posit India’s multi-culturalism in a new powerful vocabulary and campaign.
Rahul should wear mundu and dance Kathakali. Cool. But for God's sake, don't let anyone put a prayer cap on him. Keep him away from Iftar parties.
Secularism may have become ‘sickularism’, but the lessons of friendship of fraternity across religions must be conveyed in a language distinct from Nehruvian niceties and mounted as urgent and central to India’s survival.
If this is not done, Congress may win a seat in the next Delhi or West Bengal elections. This stupid woman may gain by being seen on her campus as a doughty battler against Hinduism, but her campus is not located in India. It is located in a country where Priti Patel is Home Secretary. Patel gains when woke nutters like Shruti foul their Oxbridge nests.
In reviving its Gandhian legacy, Hindutva extremism should be identified as the only political issue.
Congress should become a Muslim party.
It is neither Left, Right nor indeed the Centre or even Modi that is at stake.
The only thing that matters is that Shruti gets to virtue signal.
Finally, factional conflict between generations or otherwise, the group-23 and the rest should be recognised as mind-numbing distractions. Holding on and sending emissaries to conflict-ridden party units is a displacement activity that neither behoves a politics of conviction nor the pursuit of power.
Writing nonsense behooves this cretin because she is only concerned that she gain kudos for being anti-Hindu- in the UK.
In fact, the door should be held wide open to those who want to leave out of personal ambition or otherwise politically unconvinced of the reality of multi-cultural India.
The door to the UK was not wide open for this silly moo. Still, she managed to squeeze through that door and thus escape 'multi-cultural India'. Why is she not demanding that India hand over Kashmir to Pakistan and Arunachal to China? The answer is that she is too stupid to understand that this is the next step she needs to take so as to get promoted by India's enemies. There may be anti-national elements in Congress, but they have to live in India. So even they won't warm to this cretin's warmed up sick.
The ability to decide, then prosecute that decision to split, even at the cost of a dilution of some numbers in Parliament or legislatures, will alone guarantee the remaking of the Congress and any possible return to power.
The ability of this lady to split it into two people- who can take turns administering Lacanian psychoanalysis to each other- will alone guarantee that her next book will be even crazier and more ignorant than her last.
Time is running out. A new nationhood is being actively fashioned.
A Hindu majority country in South Asia is on the brink of- what being what it has been for over 70 years. How terrible!
In 2025, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh will celebrate 100 years of existence. The Modi government’s prioritising of the Central Vista project over the brutalising deaths and devastation of the Covid-19 pandemic in India must be firmly placed within this imminent centenary.
She means 'must be firmly placed within the context of this imminent centenary' What she has said is 'the work must be finished in time for the centenary.'
As the oldest organisation of the Hindutva family,
But this cretin has already mentioned the Mahasabha which is 10 years older. Gandhi and Motilal Nehru were present when it was formed.
this potent but largely fringe force over most of its long life became a mainstream political force only with Modi.
Atal and Advani were RSS members. Atal became PM and only then did Modi get to hold elected office.
Crucial new legislations together with a new architectural symbolism seek to anoint and make Hindutva synonymous with India.
This is welcomed by the vast majority of Indians- because they are Hindus.
This is why the leader who has the courage to split the Congress now on the question of Hindutva alone will be its true leader.
Congress is dynastic. Only if Sonia splits from her janeodhari son and creates a shuddh Catholic Congress dedicated to making Delhi look like Rome will Shruti's dream be fulfilled.
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