Is Jonah Blank the stupidest anthropologist ever?

Jonah Blank wrote a couple of books about India some years ago. Sadly, because he trained as an anthropologist, he is as stupid as shit. Consider the following article of his in the Atlantic-

When the G7 group of rich democracies assembles this weekend in southwest England, it will discuss issues including COVID-19, taxes, and climate change.

This is because people who didn't study anthropology tend to talk about stuff which matters.

 One item overhanging the formal agenda, however, will be the global deterioration of democracy itself, '

This is simply untrue. Trump has demitted office without the Army having to be called in. Brexit has not caused the outbreak of widespread cannibalism in Great Britain or even Northern Island. Macron has not taken refuge on a NATO airbase while Yellow Vests run amok in Paris.

and the nation on which this question may hinge won’t be any of the hosts, but a guest invited to this year’s confab: India. 

South Africa was also invited. The situation there might be a bit troubling, but India's position isn't troubling at all. Russia used to be part of the G8 but was suspended after the invasion of Crimea. India has attended these conferences as a guest of the presiding nation for some years now.

Democracy’s fate there may determine its fate throughout the world.

Nonsense! The Americans aren't suddenly going to demand to become a colony again if the Indians decide to become a monarchy. 

 At the moment, the signs aren’t looking good—and that should be a flashing-red warning beacon for the rest of us.

Coz America may decide to become a Hindu Rashtra if India does. 


Why is India the hinge point?

It isn't.  Blank is pretending otherwise because he has written a couple of books about India and is trying to make out that they may be worth reading. 

 The most obvious answer is the optics: When propagandists in Beijing describe democracy as a Western ideal unsuited to non-Western peoples, having a standard-bearer from the formerly colonized rather than the former colonizers is vital.

That was Kennedy's idea. But it failed almost immediately. After 1962, the newly independent countries of Africa drew the conclusion that a One Party State was preferable- if you could get away with it. Authoritarian 'tiger economies' did well economically. So did Franco's Spain. On the other hand, some polities had no alternative but to be multi-party democracies because the Army couldn't or wouldn't grab power or prop up a dictator. India fell into this category. 

 But India’s importance goes far beyond narrative.

For Indians- sure. Nobody else greatly cares. Look what happened when credentialized nutters like Blank got Modi banned from entering the USA. Modi's stature grew. The Indian Security Establishment cooled towards the US because, as Obama said, its foreign policy consisted of doing stupid shit. Sadly, Obama's new foreign policy of trying do less stupid shit did not succeed. Then came Trump and now we have Biden who has basically given up on Diplomacy. His big aim is not to let China overtake the US on his watch...which, given his age, can't be very long. 

The world’s most successful democracies are mostly small, wealthy, and homogenous. 

India is a successful democracy because Hindus, who are the majority, want to hang together because experience has taught them that they soon hang separately if they don't unite. I hate to say this, but Hindus are pretty homogeneous. We may try to pretend otherwise to make ourselves seem interesting but we are all a much of a muchness. 

If Islam hadn't posed an existential threat, it is possible that Hindus would have preferred to have lots of small states- some monarchical, some not- and thus gained the benefit of 'Tiebout sorting'- i.e. mobility between localized regimes with different fiscal and external economy mixes. 

As Gandhi said in 1939, Congress was a Hindu party and feared domination by the more aggressive Muslims and Punjabis (including Hindu Punjabis who would throw in their lot with their Muslims and Sikh brethren. Gandhi was a deeply silly man but many 'forward caste' Hindus shared his fears.)

 In any case, India couldn't maintain territorial integrity while being anything else because the Army won't back up a dictator and no party is cohesive enough, or free enough of virtue signaling blathershites, to create a 'Liberation Army' of its own. An anthropologist might add that 'segmentary societies' tend to have more factionalism- e.g. in India there were a number of different Congress parties and Janata parties and Communist parties and Samajvadi parties and Dravidian parties and so on. Often these coalesce around a particular individual or 'caste' interest.

 The US too is a successful democracy- a big one. Why isn't it a bunch of small democracies? The answer is that the US fought a Civil War, in which more Americans died than during both World Wars, to preserve and extend its territorial integrity. 

Is America homogenous? I'd say- sure. All Americans are insufferable in exactly the same way. Americans may disagree.

The European Union may evolve into a single country. This would mean lots of small democracies becoming one big democracy. There can only be a few big countries. There will always be lots more small countries. Blank is a cretin. He has never heard of Pareto power laws. 

Any list you might consult will highlight nations such as Denmark, the Netherlands, and Norway.

This cretin is supposed to be a 'foreign policy expert'. Yet he consults lists. What will his next big revelation be- that he looks up countries in an Atlas before giving his sage advise to the 'Council on Foreign Relations'? Why not simply consult the kids at the local Elementary School playing 'Model U.N'?

 The Economist Intelligence Unit gives all of the top 10 spots in its annual Democracy Index to rich Western nations—most of which have populations smaller than that of Maryland. But these nations look nothing like the places where the mass of humanity lives.

What a profound observation! What's next? Will Blank discover that poor countries have more poor people while rich countries tend to look kind of affluent?

Of the world’s 10 most populous nations, only the United States and India are long-established democracies. Two (China and Russia) are undisguised autocracies, and the other six can be charitably described as “democracies in progress.” That a political system works for Iceland—which has 341,000 residents, almost all of them practically relatives—means little to Brazil, Indonesia, or Nigeria. 

Blank's writings mean nothing to everybody.

A real proof of concept can be found only in a nation that is big, low-income, and abundantly diverse—in ethnicity, language, religion, and every other way a society can be divided.

This cretin does not get that 'proof of concept' relates to things which don't currently exist but which may be feasible. 


That’s India. If democracy can make it there, it can make it anywhere.

No. It is obvious that India can't be anything other than a democracy. The Emergency might be said to be an experiment in Dictatorship. But it was a disproof of concept. The problem with autocracy is that it is vulnerable to assassination. What India does not offer is an example of a political party which is cohesive. The fact is people denied a seat by one party go to the other party. Thus, one of Indira Gandhi's grandsons is with the BJP while the other is with Congress. In bigger families, we often find cousins belonging to four or five different parties. 

Until recently, democracy clearly could make it there.

What was the alternative? The Army was too narrowly recruited, geographically speaking, to make a bid for power while the Communist parties were too factionalized. Typically, in India, you vote for one party in the municipal or panchayat elections, a different party for the State Legislature and a third party for the Central Parliament. That trend has been reinforced over the last few decades. 

 Upon gaining independence in 1947, India established a parliamentary system and enacted a liberal, far-reaching constitution.

So did everybody else- then the Army took over or the Commies grabbed power or there was Civil War as happened in Sri Lanka.

 Its sole deviation from the democratic path was a period of “Emergency” (1975 to 1977), which stemmed more from then–Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s paranoia than any challenge to her party’s rule.

Sheer nonsense! Indira had split the Congress and her faction was challenged by the older generation of leaders. The 'Janata Morcha' did displace her but proved incompetent. 

 With this and several other notable exceptions (periods of insurgency in Kashmir and Punjab, too-frequent local injustices against marginalized communities), rule of law has done better in India than in most other nations.

India uses extra judicial methods against insurgents as well as criminal gangs if their activities get out of hand. Speaking generally, Voters deeply approve.

But India’s democracy has seen worrisome erosion. On The Economist’s list, the country has slid from No. 35 in 2006 to No. 53 today. 

In 2006, the Economist listed India as a flawed democracy. By 2020, France and the US too were listed as flawed democracies. Nobody noticed. The ranking system is garbage and, anyway, the thing has no commercial implications.

And the ways in which democracy is being undermined there provide a wake-up call to those watching from afar—including in the United States.

Sadly, nothing can 'wake-up' the brain dead.

At the root of the backsliding, in India as elsewhere, 

e.g. France or Italy which are both listed as 'flawed democracies'.

is a rejection of the core democratic principle that all citizens are equal. 

So, Britain is not a democracy coz I have inferior rights and prerogatives compared to the Queen Gor' bless 'er. 

India’s governing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) champions Hindutva, an ideology that privileges the Hindu majority over religious minorities. 

The UK is listed as a full democracy. It has an Established Church. The Head of State must belong to it. Only Christianity, not any other religion, is protected by blasphemy laws. Norway too has a State Church, though- since 2017- priests aren't state employees. 

First articulated a century ago, Hindutva has grown from a fringe movement into the focus of national politics. Its immediate target has been the country’s Muslims, who represent 14 percent of the population.

Really? Then how come there are Muslim Ministers belonging to the BJP?

 If India transforms itself from a secular democracy (as is mandated by its constitution)

by an amendment made by Indira 

 into an avowedly Hindu nation, 276 million non-Hindus will become second-class citizens.

Just like non-Anglicans in England or non-Lutherans in Norway- two countries long recognized as full democracies. India could change its constitution to declare itself a Hindu nation or a Scientological nation but, so long as the thing is done as by law established, it would not cease to be a Democracy. 


Sectarian tensions flared throughout the BJP’s rise to power, and the flames were often fanned by the party itself. In 2014, Narendra Modi supplanted a generation of soft-edged figures and led the party to electoral victory.

Why? Because Rahul refused to run for the top job. Had he done so, Advani would have been the BJP pick. They'd have kept Modi in reserve till Rahul fucked up like his dad fucked up in his first term. But Rahul was, quite understandably, gun-shy because granny and daddy had both been killed. 

 Although the only previous BJP prime minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, had downplayed Hindutva in favor of less divisive center-right policies, Modi has made it the centerpiece of his governing strategy.

Nope. He made governance the centerpiece of his governing strategy. Since voters prefer governance to a greedy grabbing of as much money as you can while in office, he grew stronger in office. Meanwhile the Left  committed suicide by championing jihadi terrorists and opposition to the Ram mandir. The only Indian this cretin quotes in this essay is a Lefty who left India long ago and who now teaches some shite at Princeton or somewhere of that sort.

The first illiberal thrust was launched not against the hardware of democracy (the electoral system) but the software that enables it to operate—that is, an apolitical judiciary, a free press, and other elements of civil society.

Indira demanded, and got, a 'committed' Judiciary when I was in short pants. 

Some Indian politicians and public intellectuals kept did babble nonsense about 'Civil Society' and 'illiberalism' till they stopped being politicians or found they had resigned from any University that would take them and thus weren't intellectuals anymore- just unemployed academics. Meanwhile Prashant Kishore- an engineer who can crunch numbers- has become the king-maker of Indian politics. Nobody listens to Anthropologists or Sociologists or Political Scientists because they have all proven to be ignorant and stupid.

India’s judicial system has bent to the wishes of politicians since 2014. 

No. The Supreme court has imposed its will on the Government. They decided the three big issues which, it must be said, Modi has taken advantage of.

1) The Bench carried out the Nationality Register exercise in Assam. They threw a grenade into the lap of the Government. Shah brought in the CAA to save face and, thankfully, the Left rose to the bait. Elderly Muslim women protesting against non-Muslims being able to escape forcible conversion, helped Modi consolidate the Hindu vote.

2) The Bench decided Kashmir did not have 'even a shred of sovereignty', which then meant Shah could scrap its 'special status'.

3) The Bench awarded the Ram Mandir site to the Hindus. The BJP was somehow able to prevent the various Hindu sects from quarrelling over the spoils and so the thing has been a big success for them. 

In the early years of Modi’s premiership, Uttar Pradesh, India’s biggest state, whose population is larger than all but four of the world’s nations, saw dozens of murderous attacks on Muslims by Hindu mobs, who accused their victims (in almost all cases falsely) of cow slaughter. 

But UP was not ruled by the BJP at that time. Draconian laws relating to beef were brought in by Congress, not the BJP. However, what the UP voter wants is the extra judicial murder of gangsters. They seem to be getting it under Yogi Adityanath. 

The BJP sided with the killers: 

In UP you side with your side. If a Brahmin gangster is killed, Brahmins are miffed. It must be said that when Muslims are being killed- if they are the minority- everybody joins in. Mahatma Gandhi noticed that people from his party were very vigorous in killing innocent Muslims. Indeed, Nehru presided over the biggest mass-murder of Muslims the sub-continent has ever seen. Congress, it must be said, was always the muscular Hindu party. The RSS was the weak and provincial sister of the Congress Seva Dal. When you needed Muslims killed, you didn't go to Shyam Prasad Mukherjee, of the Hindu Mahasabha; you went to Gandhi's Marwari financiers who ensured that tough Biharis and Punjabis would turn out to do the needful.

When the party won state elections in 2017, it appointed as chief minister a firebrand Hindu cleric who had promoted this vigilante action.

He is doing very well. But, as I said, killing gangsters is what will get him re-elected. 

 Since then, the state’s judicial system has declined to punish most of the offenders—and the nation’s Supreme Court has contented itself with issuing only tsk-tsks.

Tushar Gandhi's petition was too vague for any other result. Virtue signaling PILs are a nuisance which should be curbed.

Likewise, attacks on India’s press have grown brazen. Of the past decade’s 405 cases filed against journalists under a colonial-era sedition law, all but a few have been registered since Modi took office.

Those laws were beefed up after Independence. Fucking up journalists is popular with voters because journalists are now seen as fearless seekers after hush money. Blank may not be aware that India's First Amendment is exactly opposite to America's. 

 The Caravan, an outlet known for its dogged investigation of the BJP, has been singled out for special harassment. 

And nobody gives a shit. Caravan was crazy enough to claim that a Judge had been killed by fellow Judges who were angry that he was not taking a big bribe from the Chief Justice of the State. This defies logic. Judges don't kill people- they get killers to kill people. They may fall out over the division of bribe money- they don't the one or two non-corrupt judges within their ranks because they benefit by being able to overturn their judgments, for much larger consideration, on appeal.

 Junior judges have to bribe senior judges so as to be assigned lucrative cases. Caravan should simply have said that the Judge who died of a heart-attack had been viciously raped to death by his fellow judges because he had excited their lust by impersonating Rahul Baba. This is plausible- at least compared to the yarn they were spinning. 

Still, rags like Caravan help Modi because they incarnates everything Anglophone Indians hate about the Left. 

Less than a month ago, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram acceded to government demands to block some journalists’ posts. The bans are under review by the platforms, but they have achieved their purpose. Many feisty Indian journalists now choose their words carefully.

Unless they are paid to be careless. Being feisty is so not worth it if you don't get paid. 

Weakening these civil-society foundations enabled the next stage of Modi’s program: the use of democracy’s mechanisms to undermine democracy’s core.

This is utterly mad. The vast majority of India's voters have zero interaction with Anglophone journalism or the higher ranks of the judiciary. TV anchors can have an influence but some are pro BJP and some aren't. 

The Bench can't enforce its orders- e.g. water sharing between States- where the thing is politically infeasible and knows this very well. Its activism was a function of policy paralysis- successive Administrations kicking the can down the road by referring the matter to the Courts. 

In 2019, Modi returned to office with an absolute parliamentary majority. Shortly after, he abrogated the special status written into the constitution for Jammu and Kashmir (India’s sole Muslim-majority state). Protests in Kashmir were met with a months-long clampdown. Modi followed up with actions that officially and unofficially advantaged Hindus over Muslims nationwide. Demonstrations against these moves peaked in December 2019, and were extinguished only by a COVID-19 lockdown three months later.

The minority protested against being a minority. Sadly, this did not turn it into a majority. It was hoped that the Left-Liberals would be able to create a 'rainbow coalition'. But they were useless. Meanwhile every Indian politician is desperate to get Prashant Kishore to work for them. 

All of these moves would have been anathema to the drafters of India’s constitution.

Really? The guys who deprived Dalit Muslims of affirmative action, which they had previously enjoyed, and made Hindi in the devanagari script the official language, and put Cow Protection into the Constitution would have had a problem with Modi? Are you kidding me? These guys changed the law so that Muslims who had fled in panic could not return to their property. Nehru, in Delhi, presided over a plummeting of its Muslim population and the deliberate ghettoization of the small fraction who remained. In the Fifties and Sixties, the Custodian of Evacuee Property kept harassing wealthy Muslims till they were forced to emigrate. Has Blank never read Midnight's Children? That's what happened to Salman Rushdie's daddy. 

 Yet all were within the technical limits of the law, and none has been seriously challenged in the nation’s now-quiescent courts. 

Hold the front page! The legal Government does legal things. What a shocker!

The fecklessness of opposition parties made the BJP’s task easier, but the tools were provided by the governing system itself: The BJP has never earned anything close to a majority of the popular vote, but because of India’s first-past-the-post electoral system,

like America's or Britain's first past the post system

 its lock on power is firm.

To the same extent that the Democratic party's lock on the White House is firm

 In 2019, 37.4 percent of the vote (the BJP’s highest total ever) translated into 55.8 percent of the seats in Parliament.

No party has ever won 50 percent or more of the vote- even Rajiv Gandhi in 1984 who got almost 80 percent of the seats.


Gyan Prakash, a scholar of the Emergency,

a stupid Leftist whom nobody bothers with in India.

 sees the greatest threat to democracy in this “shadow legality”: the use of lawfare to subvert the foundation of constitutional government. 

But Indians see him as a cretin. Which Indian politician is saying 'guys, what does Gyan Prakash think about this?' None at all. Prashant Kishore- on the other hand- they will always take a call from. 

And he sees India’s example as having global implications. “Modi is part of a much larger phenomenon,” he told me. “This is a project to mobilize all state institutions, and change India’s democratic and plural politics and culture.”

Who in their right mind would listen to Gyan Prakash or Vivek Chibber? You may as well talk to the cat about quantum mechanics.

Do constitutional questions matter to a farmer scraping by on $4 a day (the national average)? They should. As the Nobel laureate Amartya Sen once noted, “No famine has ever taken place in the history of the world in a functioning democracy.” 

Sen was from East Bengal. There were two big famines there under popular, elected, Muslim leaders. Sen was lying. Indians now consider him a fool and blame him for the Nalanda fiasco.

India is now facing its most serious natural disaster since independence, in the coronavirus pandemic. Even by official figures (which significantly undercount the victims), India is the world’s coronavirus epicenter: 29 million sickened, more than 350,000 dead, and no end in sight.

But the US has twice the number of deaths with a much smaller population! The Spanish flu killed 14 million Indians when the population was about a quarter of what it is now. 

 A great many of these cases were preventable. Modi’s response to the pandemic has swung from oppressive lockdown to maskless political rallies and the encouragement of a super-spreader Hindu pilgrimage with 9 million attendees. A political system in which the government could be held accountable might have yielded a different outcome.

Not if people refuse to comply. You can't jail the majority. 

All of this may sound familiar to American ears. 

Because it is written by an American. The problem is that once Americans understand that many Indians earn just 4 dollars a day, they realize that it is very foolish to compare Indian politics with American politics. 

President Donald Trump labeled the press the “enemy of the people” and attempted to intimidate sitting judges.

But he wasn't re-elected. Modi was. But Modi knows very well that he owes his ascent entirely to the Left Liberal media. They insulted Gujarat when they calumnied Modi and so the Gujaratis rallied behind Modi giving him an unprecedented longevity as Chief Minister. The same thing is happening again with Modi as PM. His rival- Rahul Gandhi- is believed to be so stupid and ignorant that he thinks Amartya Sen, not Prashant Kishore, is worth listening to.

 A critical mass of the Republican Party is at least as motivated by white grievance as the BJP base is by Hindutva. And laws recently passed in Georgia and proposed elsewhere would let partisan state officials rather than voters determine elections. This might be technically in accord with the Constitution, but would be at odds with—well, democracy.

No. A democracy can decide to disenfranchise or even to ethnically cleanse a minority. America has plenty of experience with such things.

Perhaps the most dangerous threat of all is complacency. Whether doomscrolling Twitter or ignoring politics completely, most Americans share a baseline confidence that democracy will endure. But will it? American democracy isn’t nearly as deeply rooted as we like to believe. Half of the population (that is: the female half) weren’t generally permitted to vote until 1920. Black Americans in Jim Crow states (that is, most of them) had to wait nearly another half century. If measured by universal suffrage, how long has America been a true democracy? For less time than the Rolling Stones have been touring.

So India was a true democracy before America. Big whoop. 

This is why Americans should be paying close attention to the politics of India. The U.S. is not Iceland; it’s huge, diverse, and tough to govern. Only one other country with comparable size and complexity has given democracy a sustained, multigenerational shot. If the system fails in India, it can certainly fail closer to home.

This guy has a PhD from Harvard. Sadly, it was in Anthropology. He has advised the Senate on Foreign Relations and is high up with the RAND Corporation. No wonder China is eating America's lunch. 

Are there any other Americans who believe that if a poor country far far away decides to elect some guy Jonah does not like then the Red States will secede and reintroduce Slavery and strip Women of the Vote and force them all to have babies incessantly? Sure- because it has already happened. Trump modelled himself on Modi! If you listen carefully to his speeches, you will find he is actually speaking Gujerati! Not that Joe Biden (real name Jodhabhai Patel) is any different. On the other hand, Kamala Harris is the King of Norway- which isn't yet a flawed democracy (according to the Economist) and thus is superior to the USA or India. America must become a Monarchy like Norway, with a State Church, if it is to rise up in The Economist's rankings from being a 'flawed democracy' to join Denmark and Sweden as a proper Democracy with a crowned head of state.