Adeel Hussain & Tripudaman Singh's useful idiocy.

India in 1918 faced three problems

1) it was overpopulated. Peasants had intense 'land hunger'. The landlords were not enhancing productivity. The State's ability to increase farmland in a cost effective manner through irrigation or annexation of less densely populated territory- e.g. Burma- had declined. Canada refused to accept Punjabi soldiers for settlement while Gandhi and Andrews made it impossible for people to escape by becoming indentured laborers in South Africa, Fiji etc. What Iqbal called 'zamin bhook' (land hunger) meant that Caste and Creed would be instrumentalized against minority landowners.

2) Its traditional political structure- viz. Princedoms under an Emperor- wouldn't work anymore. Empires were doomed and 'Scientific' Racism meant that Commonwealth membership would not be on equal terms. Anyway, Indians didn't really want to fight in European or MENA wars. This created the problem that military leadership could not be combined with political leadership. 

3) The Justice system was shit. It was based on everybody lying their heads off under oath. Smart advocates no longer dreamt of elevation to the Bench. On the other hand, entrepreneurship was increasingly well rewarded. Look at Dr. Pranjivan Mehta. Originally a Doctor, he took the opportunity of a medical scholarship to Britain to qualify as a a barrister. But he made his money in the gem trade in Burma and campaigned hard for Burma's right to chuck out Indians like himself.

After 1937- when Provincial autonomy was achieved- Hindus came to realize that they needed a strong Government at the Centre free from the headache of the Muslim League. Thanks to Jinnah's stupidity, this is exactly what Nehru was able to deliver.

It must be said that solidarity between Judges- their threat to resign en masse- did mean that Nehru could not impose the Chief Justice he wanted. However, as time went on, the Judiciary lost salience. In 1973  Indira appointed Ray as CJI and when the three superseded judges resigned, she packed the Bench. In other words, the resignation threat was empty because it just meant 'in for a penny, in for a pound' as far as the PMO was concerned. 

Turning to the Brits, in 1918, we find that it wasn't India's poverty, or its complicated political structure or its shitty legal system which posed an existential threat to the Raj. The problem was military and financial exhaustion. Only the Indians could keep the Brits in India. But why would they want to? The fact was, as their Army Chief, Wilson, said, the UK did not have the troops to keep India. Indian troops were needed to keep Egypt, Iraq etc. Britain couldn't even keep Ireland. Worst of all, the Army would not be able to crush a Bolshevik insurrection in the home island itself. In India, it was obvious that White soldier morale had collapsed. Irish soldiers were mutinous. Even English and Scottish troops, weary of war, were refusing to come on Parade. Fortunately, people like Dyer were able to quickly suppress both Congress and the menace from Afghanistan. Still, Britain had no choice but to grant Irish, Afghan and Egyptian demands. India too could have got formal independence though it would have remained dependent on the UK for many things. It took Gandhi's genius to ensure India got nothing at all. Then Motilal's genius ensured it fucked up what it did get on the basis of what had been previously promised. Finally Jawaharlal ensured the country, after being divided, would become incapable of feeding or defending itself or even wiping its own bum. 

Why was this? India did not reform its Justice and Administrative system in a timely manner thought Gandhi had said he'd introduce a parallel Judicial system on the Irish pattern. But the Irish don't lie their heads off under oath. In India, courts are a tool for harassment. Politics is a tool for corruption and nepotism. In India, people join politics to spend more time with their families. If both the Law and Politics are shit, 'Constitutionality' doesn't matter at all. However, every new Republic had to have a Constitution, If they remained a Dominion, it was not necessary. Israel it is true, didn't get round to promulgating a written constitution. But Israelis don't lie their heads off under oath. The Indian constitution was about reassuring the Princes and British and other foreign business interests. But, it was soon made obvious, through the First Amendment, that it didn't mean anything at all. India was unitary, not Federal. Moreover, Parliament was supreme. It constitution was on the English, not the American pattern. 

Things may have improved for Indians in India since then. However, its NRI 'intellectuals' are now eating the shit of any senile Whitey they can find. 

I have previously written briefly of a stupid book by  Adeel Hussain and Tripurdaman Singh, titled “Nehru: The Debates That Defined India.”

This is them being interviewed by Shruti Rajagopalan as part of a series called 'Ideas for India' which proves only that Non Resident Indians have no idea whatsoever about what India is like or why it is the way it is.

Adeel is an assistant professor at Leiden University and a senior research affiliate at the Max Planck Institute for International Law in Heidelberg. Tripurdaman is a British Academy postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London.

In other words, both are utterly useless and teach worthless shite to people who have zero interest in India and will have zero impact on it.  

We talked about Nehru’s debates with Iqbal, Jinnah, Patel and Mukherjee;

there were no such debates. Nehru, son of Motilal, was a Hindi speaker who was bound to inherit power. Iqbal was a cretin who hated Hafiz and wrote sonnets to Mussolini's beautiful eyes. Jinnah was a cadaver who succeeded in slitting the throat of his own people- i.e. minority Muslims. Nehru loathed the fellow. Mukherjee was a Bengali. Nobody debates a Bengali. What would be the point? Patel, thank God, never pretended to be an intellectual.  

the Muslim identity and separate electorates; Carl Schmitt’s critique of democracy;

why Schmitt of all people? Nobody in India had heard of him. The man was some sort of spoiled Catholic, like Heidegger. Nehru didn't debate Nazi nutjobs and refused to meet Mussolini. He may have been a silly man but he wasn't utterly stupid and evil.  

if Nehru was a reluctant constitutionalist; the Indian and Pakistani Supreme Court and more.


Pursuing Homogeneity

RAJAGOPALAN: I recently read your book called “Nehru: The Debates That Defined India.” You’ve got Nehru debating various people—Iqbal, Jinnah, S.P. Mukherjee, Patel, so on. He was a prolific letter writer, of course, great at giving speeches and great at parliamentary debates.

No. He was vague and vacuous.  

One of the first sections that you deal with are the Nehru-Iqbal conversations.

There was only one. Iqbal sent for Nehru- both were descended from Kashmiri Pandits- and talked bollocks to him as was his wont. Nehru pitied the dying man and claimed that he said 'Jinnah is a politician. You are a patriot'. Iqbal's Pakistani supporters say that Iqbal explained this away by asserting that a politician is superior to a patriot. The fact remains that Iqbal was stupid and declasse- his Dad was a tailor. He went majnoon over Mussolini and repented his earlier adoration of Lenin as Lailah. Nehru wasn't going to debate a confused Punjabi who hadn't even done well at the bar.  

I want to go back a little bit—maybe, Adeel, also to some of your earlier work. One of Carl Schmitt’s observations or critiques of parliamentary democracy is that it requires a high degree of homogeneity to succeed.

But Nehru understood that a Democracy aint safe if the Army wants to take over and pursue a maximal program of conquest. Homogeneity does not matter if there's a General who thinks he can be the next Napoleon.  

To me, it seems like the Nehru-Iqbal debates capture that fundamental problem in some way.

How? Iqbal wanted Muslims to separate from India. Nehru didn't. He and his Dad were popular with Muslims. Indeed, they had served the Mughals since the eighteenth century and were accepted as part of the sophisticated Urdu culture which Iqbal so signally lacked. It is true that the latter wrote 'Sare jahan se accha' for Lala Hardayal but his Urdu was so terrible it had to be corrected in four different places! Later he went down an Islamist road and finally decided that the sun shone out of Mussolini's ass. 

Had Nehru's 'Mass contact' program worked, maybe there would have been no Pakistan. But then, maybe, the Congress grassroots in the Hindi belt didn't want it to succeed.

Of course, the main difference is that for Nehru, the homogeneity must be economic through a kind of socialism where we can get similar outcomes for everyone. For Iqbal, the homogeneity is religious or cultural in one sense. Is this a good way of thinking about their debate?

HUSSAIN: I think you’ve captured it almost fully with the reference to Carl Schmitt. Maybe for those listeners who are not aware of the political theorist Carl Schmitt—Carl Schmitt really comes into or gains academic notoriety really in the 1920s and ’30s as one of the key theoreticians of the Weimar Republic.

He was attacking it because it was crap- a Ponzi scheme kept alive by borrowing money and pretending that reparations would be paid. Weimar destroyed the middle class through hyper-inflation by paying Germans in the Rhineland not to cooperate with the French. This was as stupid as Gandhi paying lawyers not to practice law.  

The Weimar Republic was this thing that happened between the two wars. Germans came together and tried their first experiment in democracy.

Nope. The first experiment was the Frankfurt Parliament of 1848. After German unification, there was universal manhood suffrage for Reichstag elections though, no doubt, there were considerable constraints on what elected representatives could actually do.  

Carl Schmitt was the person who was pointing out the different flaws that he saw emerging in that.

The flaw was that the Government did crazy shit. The Army was doing its own deals with the Soviets and building up a 'force multiplier' through paramilitary outfits. Meanwhile there was hyperinflation and a rising Red Menace, though, it must be said, all the political parties had militarized cadres. The Social Democrats needed protection from both the Reds and the Brown shirt. Eventually their own internal divisions meant they had to vote to let Hindenburg rule by ordinance. One way of another, the Army would pursue its maximal plan. The surprise was that it was a Catholic Corporal, not a Junker General, who prevailed. 

One of the flaws, as you rightly pointed out, for him was the notion that liberalism—this new ideology that was taking more and more root within legal debates—was creating a subject that he felt could no longer be political.

i.e. conquer territory and loot wealth.  

Now, for him, it was really important to be political because he thought that a nation-state that doesn’t have a nation that can be political is going to be drowned in the global arena of the 20th century. He made a couple of big claims around how you can acquire that type of national homogeneity.

He talked Teutonic bollocks. Nehru didn't bother with that shite. 

In the case of Germany, of course, he did it through the exclusion of minorities.

That is the path Pakistan went down. Incidentally, Iqbal hated the Ahmadiyas. That's one of the things he clashed with Nehru about. What's the point of getting rid of the Brits if you can't also get rid of the Hindus, the Sikhs, the Qadianis, the Commies, the Liberals, the Sufis and women who are not purdah nashin and the men who look a bit girly... but not donkeys. Pakistan will get rich selling donkeys to China.  

That’s the nasty period in which Carl Schmitt dips in the 1930s and is actively trying to eradicate the influence of Jewish thinkers from German public law. He aligns himself with a political movement that is, at the time, garnering much public attention, which is the National Social Democratic Party that has taken root in Germany at the time.

Really? How amazing! This sure is one smart scholar to have found out so much about Germany! 

If we were to say that similar patterns also emerge around the globe, then Muhammad Iqbal would be somebody who makes a similar conceptual move like Carl Schmitt.

Except, he doesn't at all. Iqbal did not produce a work of 'political theology'. He wrote verse. But that verse went from bad to worse.  

You’ve put these two things together: That essentially he’s not that far apart from Nehru,

In the sense that Hitler was not that far apart from Einstein.  

who also sees the dire want of producing a nation.

This is silly. Nehru had been President of the INC. India already existed. It had a seat in the League of Nations. The nation had already been produced by History.  

For him, the national subject should primarily be defined through economic means, which means that the big question of the early 20th century, as it emerges in India, isn’t really the Hindu-Muslim question.

or the Muslim-Ahmadiya question or the Shia-Sunni question or the Deobandi-Bahrelvi question or the Punjabi v non Punjabi question.  

It isn’t really about religion as a solid source that can give you an identity and a political identity as such. But for Nehru, it’s really poverty that is uniting most Indians. It’s the economy that is producing that type of subjectivity.

The trouble with Nehru was that he was tied to the crackpot Mahatma and his stupid fads.  

Of course, Nehru would make that move because it also was a very prominent way of thinking about the individual at the time. He’s driven by a specific socialist agenda that isn’t limited to the nation-state. That goes well beyond the nation-state and his later adventures into internationalism. Once he becomes the prime minister of the Indian republic, he really goes in that same direction.

He liked giving speeches. Then the sterling balances ran out and he went in the direction of holding out a begging bowl in which the hole was its immortal Gandhian soul. The Chinese slapped him silly and then he died. Sad.  

But essentially the major conceptual disagreement that he really has is with Muhammad Iqbal, the great Muslim philosopher, who’s theorizing on how to bring Indian Muslims together, a community that is in itself deeply ruptured along the lines of language, ethnicity and all other aspects. Iqbal is trying to unite them around Islam,

by partitioning the country and laughing heartily at the majority of Muslims who are on the wrong side of the border and who will henceforth get short shrift.  

and Nehru is really saying that, “Hmm, does that really work?”

It worked for Iqbal. Once he was safely dead he could be hailed as the Poet-Prophet of a shithole.  Indeed, even those who thought Gandhi and Nerhu were crackpots, warmed to them after they were dead. The one thing you have to admit about poets and politicians of the subcontinent is that death improves their personality.  

RAJAGOPALAN: Sometimes I wonder if this extends even to what is happening in the Modi period, especially the current Hindutva umbrella.

Hindutva is basically trying to create a parliamentary democracy, now with a different kind of homogeneity, which is around the Hindu identity.

This silly woman does not realize that the INC was, as Gandhi said in 1939, a High Caste Hindu affair. .  In 1946 almost all Hindus voted for the INC while almost all Muslims voted for the League.  

They actually want to destroy or break down all the differences between caste and language and so on, and come up with a far less fractionalized, far more united Hindu identity.

That was Gandhi and Nehru and everybody else's aim.  

And that’s going to be the nation-building exercise. Or is this just too far a reach from the debate of that time?

SINGH: I think I’ll just sort of jump in a bit. I don’t think you’re entirely wrong. I do think there’s a lot of force to that argument, but there’s also divergence. And that is, A, a conception of sacred geography that Hindutva has that, for example, is not something that Iqbal is talking about—the conception that there is this sacred geography that’s just been divinely ordained, almost, of which there is a vivisection. There is historical revisionism.

No. History shows, that as Tagore said, Muslims and Christians are aggressive and hate Hindus. Hindus need to unite against them or risk repeating the disasters of the last thousand years. Nehru centralized power because Hindus wanted protection from Muslims. Gandhi said that the reason he kept demanding the Brits hand over control of the Army to the INC was because the Muslims and the Punjabis would ruthlessly conquer Hindu India all over again. This was in 1939.  

Then there’s also the crucial question of modernity. Hindutva and modernity share a very strange relationship because it’s a phenomenon that’s only made possible by modernity.

But everything that is modern is equally made possible by modernity. So the relationship aint very strange at all.  

But at the same time, it’s one of these ideologies that is seeking inspiration from the past. Here I’m thinking back to, for example, the concept of retrotopia that Bauman really fashioned.

Bauman was a Commie fanatic who killed plenty of Poles and Ukrainians for his Soviet masters. Then his daddy tried to emigrate to Israel and the Poles had an excuse to force him to go be a Sociologist. Finally, in 1968, the Poles got rid him and a bunch of other Jewish Communists and so he was forced to teach in Israel and then the Leeds where everybody laughed at him behind his back. The man lived too long and wrote utter garbage. He didn't get that Communism was about getting very rich and making sure your family would be very rich. Also, laughing your head off at folks in Gulags can sharpen your appetite for young flesh. 

It’s a phenomenon that modernity brings into being, but also modernity of the kind that the West has lost, but a force that is also exhausted. It doesn’t have a future point that these guys can look up to. I think these few factors—while there is something in common between the argument that Iqbal is making and the argument that Hindutva brings to the fore, there are also these crucial differences, which I don’t think we can overlook.

Especially if you are looking up Schmitt or Bauman's backside.  

Nehru and Modi

RAJAGOPALAN: Here I want to come to a common criticism that both Jinnah and Iqbal make of Nehru. Nehru’s view that holding onto the Muslim identity almost implies a certain anti-national tone, because here the Muslim identity sort of surpasses the nation-building project, whether it is participating in the 1928 Motilal Nehru-led report and constitutional project, or whether it’s a Round Table Conference and so on.

This is nonsense. Nehru got on well with people like Kidwai, Chaghla and, most importantly, Maulana Azad who actually knew Islam.  Pakistan had to import a Hungarian Jewish convert to learn a bit about that subject. 

Again, bringing this back to modern times, all the current discourse in India, if you’ve been following it, is about how Nehru and Modi are completely different.

Modi can't found a dynasty because he, unlike Nehru, was obedient to Gandhi's call to 'all thinking Indians' to abstain from marriage, or if marriage was unavoidable, then abstain from sex.  

You know what the association is in the whole Nehru and the current Modi debate. Now I feel almost like there is a similarity between the criticism of Nehru that Iqbal and Jinnah make, which is that holding onto the Muslim identity is essentially anti-national.

Iqbal was on the right side of the border. Jinnah lost valuable property. However, neither Iqbal nor Jinnah believed in a duty of 'hijrat' or that they should have to ally with any Islamic invader. Basically, these guys were barristers, not maulvis.  

The same thing is happening with the Hindutva movement, which is this idea that anyone who holds onto the Muslim identity in India is necessarily anti-national because the national identity somehow needs to be more important, or that’s the signal that needs to be made.

Is that why Arif Mohammad Khan has changed his name to Arun Kapoor?  

Therefore there needs to be a certain kind of erasure of the Muslim identity.

A kind of erasure that only exists in this nutter's head.  

Do you see that parallel? I know they have very different ways of going about this. But it seems to be an interesting critique of Nehru that I had never come across until I read your book.

HUSSAIN: Yes. It’s definitely one of the themes that we were playing with when we picked that specific debate. It’s really got to do with the utopian imagination that comes with both of these projects, be it the Hindutva project or the socialist project that Nehru had, which have a very distinct teleology, and they see history transforming in a very specific direction. For them, history has a purpose and a name, and every day we come a step closer to that history. Everybody who’s deviating from that path, who’s holding on to specific elements, cultural elements of their identity is stopping that progress and stopping the movement from reaching its aim in time.

This is true of any purposive, collective, activity. Whether you are playing football or working in a factory or preparing for a dinner party, there is someone who is in charge who says 'stop dawdling and get on with the job'. You may say 'but I'm doing Zen meditation. I can't kick the ball/ pull the lever/ set the table, until I have gained satori'.  These sorts of cultural elements of your identity can get you thrown off the football team, or get you fired from your job, or get you a bitch-slapping from your wife or Mummy. 

The point about projects of any type is that time-wasting or stupid elements of your identity will hold up its completion. 

It’s definitely something that Nehru was more or less making explicit when he was debating both Iqbal and Jinnah.

He didn't debate them. There was no point. What mattered was whether his Mass contact movement would succeed better than the League's incessant cries of 'Islam in danger'! Nehru failed. That was cool because Muslim majority places will do ethnic cleansing no matter what happens.  

He does it from a place where he assumes that he has the intellectual high ground—and the intellectual high ground because he has understood something about the historical unfolding of time through his careful reading of Karl Marx—

previously he had believed in the origami unfolding of time. Marx said 'dude, Time unfolds in a straight line. First there was olden times. Then came the middle ages. Now things have gotten all modern and shit. '

that he feels that these two figures have not. There’s a similar way in which we, again, see a specific intellectual superiority that is stemming from the Hindutva movement, which also believes that history is moving in a specific direction that sees the establishment of specific temples in specific places.

Only if that's what the Courts decide. What these nutters don't get that is the BJP has to be better at 'deliverables' than its nearest rival. That's also why Nehru was PM for so many years. He was a bit shit but others were shittier yet unless they had zero personality like Shastri. The truth is the Indian administration was pretty much idiot proof. Viceroys were chiefly chosen on the basis of their financial neediness or lethal combination of cretinism and halitosis. After India ran through its sterling balances America stepped in with 'free money'. Thus there could be an illusion of a Nehruvian Democratic Socialism before the Chinese burst the bubble. 

SINGH: I slightly disagree with Adeel. I agree with the broad point that you make that there is a lot of similarity. But I disagree with Adeel in that I don’t think it’s just to do with a belief in historical forces or in a utopian vision. There are also very personal things that bring the two together: That is the overwhelming presence, the desire to have around them quiet people who are in agreement with them.

As opposed to Cabinet colleagues who are noisy and who keep trying to stab you in the back. Nehru's and Modi's colleagues do crack on with their files and don't appear too corrupt. That's a welcome change.  

This overwhelming desire to refashion the nation.

As opposed to shitting on it.  

I should put it this way: There’s a very revealing quote that Sarvepalli Gopal has in his biography of Nehru, where he describes the Nehru cabinet as a group of “mouldering mediocrities.”

Who was the worst of Nehru's cabinet ministers?  Krishna Menon. But among Ministers of State the award must go to B.C Keskar who presided over I&B for the longest time. His goal was to make music on the radio as boring as possible while also trying to kill off cricket. India did have a dearth of ministerial talent because candidates with enough jail time tended to be joyless cunts. 

There are quite a few similarities. I don’t think they’re simply limited to ideology. There’s also similarities of, in a sense, personality. If you look at many of these debates—for example, you look at the debate with S.P. Mukherjee—Nehru is constantly alluding to the fact that the nation is under some sort of siege. There’s these unseen forces conspiring against the country.

Gandhi had been assassinated. Lots of people wanted Nehru dead too. Partition hadn't gone down too well with the refugees. Moreover, Gen. Carriappa had offered to take over the whole shooting match at the time of transfer of power. Armies can decide that they do a better job than civilians. Then there were the Commies and various other nutters. Liaquat had been assassinated. The main thing was to be more shit, from the point of view of his opponents, than any possible rival.  

There’s a lot of thematic, I’d say, overlap between Nehru and Modi. It’s a point that people don’t often make. There’s also this belief that the state is going to guide social progress. Look at something like the slogan of Atmanirbhar Bharat of self-reliant India. There is tremendous thematic overlap, I think.

Nehru passed a law preventing the return of refugees who had fled to Pakistan. All Modi has is a CAA bill which gives non Mulsims the same rights as Nehru gave them. The difference is Modi did not preside over a population exchange. Nehru did.  

Secularism and Religious Identity

RAJAGOPALAN: I think the idea of Nehru being a little bit paranoid about the nation under siege, you bring it out beautifully in your earlier book. This is on the First Amendment, “Sixteen Stormy Days.” For me, the part that I had never really thought of was the Muslim identity question because to everyone in at least the popular rhetoric that we’ve all grown up in—I grew up in a very Nehruvian curriculum being taught in India. The idea is Nehru’s secular. He’s inclusive.

But it was when he was Prime Minister that Muslims were ethnically cleansed even from Delhi, his own capital city.  

The more we start juxtaposing his views with Jinnah and Iqbal, now it starts bringing into very sharp contrast that there is, in the process of being secular and inclusive, there is also a demarcation of what is a valid identity of an individual or what is a valid religious belief of the individual and whether that can supersede other projects. That to me was quite fascinating in these debates.

If you want to kill non-Muslims it is safer to do so in Pakistan. What the Muslim League achieved was enmity between Hindus and Muslims. That's Carl Schmitt right there for you.  

SINGH: You could also flip that, as many people do, to say that actually Nehru had a change of heart after partition. And his quite strong secularism really went out of the window, and he, for the first time, is confronted with the true force of religious identity. And then he is forced to concede ground in the form of things like civil law, et cetera, et cetera. The point can be made both ways depending on how one really conceptualizes secularism.

Non-Muslims would be content with a secularism in which Muslims are not killing them.  

RAJAGOPALAN: Even that secularism is asymmetric in India, which has suddenly come back again in waves. The idea that you can modernize one religious grouping without needing to modernize another kind, which can still be rooted in its traditional practices or be highly decentralized and do whatever the local sects are recommending. But the personal law, when it comes to Hindus, everything needs to be modernized.

Not really. Customary law took precedence. Still, many of the concerns of the middle class Hindu were addressed. A page was turned.  

RAJAGOPALAN: I wanted to dig in a little bit on S.P. Mukherjee. I had never seen the parallels between S.P. Mukherjee and Iqbal.

There was none. Punjab and Bengal were Muslim majority. Iqbal wanted the whole of Punjab and Bengal for Pakistan. Mukherjee, as a Hindu, wanted partition of the provinces and an exchange of populations. He  fell out with Nehru over the Nehru- Liaqat pact and founded the Jan Sangh- the ancestor of the current ruling party. Iqbal, by contrast, was not a practicing politician. He might be compared to Tagore. 

This is the first time I saw that. Not just because it’s a debate in which the person on the opposite side is Nehru. These are the First Amendment debates that you have in the book between S.P. Mukherjee and Nehru, which are now stuff of legend.

There was no debate. There was an acrimonious exchange of insults. Then, Frank Anthony said Nehru was a dictator but India needed a dictator to save it from Communism. The mood of the House was  with him. If dictatorial powers were necessary to save the country, let them be in Nehru's hands. Indeed, Nehru would have more power than the last Viceroy. Why? When you came down to it, Nehru's people had done ethnic cleansing of Muslims. Mukherjee's hadn't. Indeed, the fact that Nehru lost control of his temper in Parliament suggested he might have some fight in him. It should be remembered that Hindus had a very poor opinion of their own martial qualities. If history repeated itself, such 'martial races' as the Hindus possessed might make common cause with the 'aggressive' Muslims.  

S.P. Mukherjee, also the founder of Jana Sangh—when we look at these debates, it seems like for him the power is rooted in the individual but within the framework of religious identity. To me it seems like Iqbal is the same.

No. Mukherjee had left the Mahasabha because they wouldn't admit Muslims. That's why he started the Jan Sangh.  

The idea of constitutionalism or civil association in a republic is very much rooted in the individual within the broader framework of religious identity.

No it isn't. That's not how America or France or any other Republic works. Hindus don't greatly care about religion though in some places they were wary of Muslims. But Shruti and I come from the South- Tamil Nadu to be precise- where there was anti-Brahmin sentiment but no anti-Muslim sentiment.  

For both of them, it doesn’t seem like the religious authorities (if any) that they acknowledge are going to be dictating in some top-down way what the rules are. It’s going to be a bottom-up change coming from the individual.

This is silly. Nobody in India thought that individuals could do shit. Jatis might start to become progressive. Panchayats might gradually see the light but individuals had little power even if they sat in Parliament.  

This is also quite different from the usual South Asian narrative, where any religious identity must be necessarily communal.

No. Social identity is communal. Religious identity can be anything you like. You are welcome to be a devotee of this Baba or that Acharya. Wives could have their own puja room to worship their own gods.  

It can’t be rooted in the individual. If it’s an individual constitutional identity, it has to be secular, and there’s no room for religion there.

Why not? Some silly girls recently approached the Court saying their right to education was being violated because girls are expected to take off burqa inside the classroom of a Girls' school.  But that happens in Saudi Arabia too! 

Or if it’s rooted in religion, then it must necessarily be an Islamic State or something else.

Nope. There is an absolute right to practice religion though there may be only a qualified right to express that identity in certain places.  

I find this quite interesting, this similarity between S.P. Mukherjee and Iqbal. Did they ever have a conversation about this? Was there some kind of association or coalition between people who believed in Hinduism and individuality and Islamic individuality?

This is crazy shit. Why would a Bengali want to talk to a Punjabi?  

HUSSAIN: I think it’s in very many ways a conservative reaction to modernity that is happening around the world in very different shapes and forms.

Yes, yes, everything is conservative reaction to modernity.  

The book that captures it really nicely is “Recovering Liberties” by C. Bayly, who really makes the argument that what happens in many parts of the world is that liberalism is absorbed in different ways.

Because conservatives are constantly reacting to modernity by pooping it out at which point some silly academic absorbs the poop in different ways.  

These ways may seem contradictory when we see liberal constitutionalism as this very straightforward project, where we have a secularization and then the rational individual subject that is trying to reassert itself legally within the political community.

If 'liberal constitutionalism' develops 'organically'- i.e. new classes and economic forces arise and then the Constitution is changed and things which are justiciable actually get judicial remedies, then one can have this sort of straightforward understanding. But if a newly independent country promulgates a state of the art constitution but does not have a sufficiently developed civil society and economy to make it meaningful then the thing is merely cosmetic.  

Against that, it’s very much that they’re using, for instance, spirituality, religion, in order to reconnect both to their own history,

which involved killing or being killed by people of another religion. 

so to not toss history entirely out of the window and say, “This is all a newfound rational project that we’re engaging in.” But they’re trying to preserve something, and at the same time, they’re profoundly modern subjects.

Who can be killed or ethnically cleansed in the same manner as Greeks or Armenians or Jews or Germans or whatever.  

Because both Iqbal’s position and Iqbal’s almost glorification of the individual is a profoundly modern, borderline liberal, glorification.

It is Nietzschean. Aurobindo too babbled about the Superman.  

Then again, they try to toy around with ideas of religion in a very similar way.

Similar way to what?  

We can go well beyond that. You mentioned Carl Schmitt right in the beginning. Carl Schmitt has a similar way of reengaging with Catholic thought.

Yup. Catholics were pretty anti-semitic back then. One way to reengage with Catholic thought is to kill Jews and Commies. 

I do think that it is a conservative to liberal constitutionalism as it emerges, that both tries to absorb and resist it at the same time.

In the same way that it tries to poop and pee at the same time.  

SINGH: I also think there’s a conscious effort to search for indigenous sources of whatever liberal concepts that they’re absorbing. I remember Sudipta Kaviraj once compared it to the process of really learning a language, and the way native accents continue to impact the way we absorb language and speak foreign languages—Indians speaking English being a good example. I think the process is very similar to that.

Why not speak of the way foreigners speak Hindi? They may not do so very well, but if they study the grammar their written Hindi may be better than ours. What matters about a process of absorption is whether it is done in a diligent and proper fashion. If the thing is well rewarded, this is a likely outcome.  

RAJAGOPALAN: I also found that it was almost like they were going to a different kind of founding moment. Think of the American founding moment; it’s not divorced from religion. Religion is truly an important part of both people settling in America and the American founding moment.

No. Religion was not the issue. The Americans fought a war so as to expel both the Brits and the Loyalists some of whom moved to Canada. Indians did not fight a war to get rid of the Brits.  

In that sense, it feels like the departure or the divorcing of religion from constitutional liberalism seems like a very 1950s project. That’s the departure. S.P. Mukherjee and Iqbal, in some sense, are the continuation of the orthodoxy.

No. They were from the educated middle class. There were Mullahs and Pandits and so forth who had the ear of some of the lawyer-politicians. But the religious leaders weren't pushing very hard in the Fifties. The second world war had scared them shitless. Now Whitey was gone they wanted some Brown peeps to at least appear to know how to run things properly.

Of course, they are not thought of as such because it’s South Asia and indigenous, and it doesn’t have this sort of long Anglo tradition backing it.

Both dudes had become barristers in England. Mukherjee's dad- a mathematician, Judge and V.C of Calcutta University- had been knighted. The truth is they knew more about the 'Anglo tradition' than most working or even middle class English men. 

To me, it almost seems like a continuation of other kinds of constitutional moments in other places.

It was a continuation of British reforms going back to the time of Lord Ripon. It should be compared to Ireland's 'constitutional moments'. The notion of Directive Principles and constitutional autochthony were directly taken over from the Irish.  

SINGH: I’d agree with that. I do think both of those figures are conscious of that as well. Even though there isn’t, as you say, an Anglo tradition backing it, both are well versed in the Anglo tradition.

So, there was an Anglo tradition. India was ruled by the Brits. That's plenty Anglo.  

They’re not unaware of it. They’re not absorbing these concepts of ab initio, one day having a eureka moment after reading a political treatise. I think that that does make a big difference.

Lahore University was more 'Orientalist' while Calcutta Uni was 'occidental'. Lahore was less westernized than the 'Second City of the Empire'.  

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes. Though one important distinction is there’s no specific book or manual that all Hindus automatically subscribe to.

But there is a specific scripture to which all Brahmins subscribe to.  

Whereas in Islam, there’s the question of, is there an authoritative text

Yes. The Holy Quran. 

or an authoritative group, a council, which will dictate what the rules of the game are in one sense?

There could be.  

Iqbal makes a departure from that too. For him it needs to, once again, come from the individual. Even among the people who are looking for a kind of Islamic constitutionalism, he is still different in that regard. I find that quite unique and interesting about him.

Unless you compare him to people like Alama Mashriqi  

HUSSAIN: Yes. That’s really what makes Iqbal a truly creative subject and such a rich subject to study. Whenever you think you have him in a specific frame, he just flips the frame and starts arguing from a different position. Quite a remarkable thinker.

Punjabi logic is a remarkable thing.  

RAJAGOPALAN: Also, there’s a dynamism in his thinking, which is lacking in many of the others who are involved in this nation-building process.

Mashriqi had his Khaksars. They seemed pretty dynamic at one time.  

There’s this idea that there is no one kind of individual. Even if there is, that’s going to change and morph based on the interaction with both spirituality and other people in society. To me, the only comparable Hindu conservative is C. Rajagopalachari, who’s like Iqbal in the sense that there is going to be an interaction and a dynamism in how people change and modernize themselves without being forced to do so with a colonial Western project. So that’s really lovely.

This is nonsense. Iqbal was a mystic with confused ideas. He was like Aurobindo. Rajaji wasn't an intellectual. Once he got over his infatuation with Gandhi, he could be quite sensible. But he was no philosopher. Radakrishnan and Hardayal were actual philosophers. Iqbal stands out because some of his poetry is still enjoyable- at least when sung by gifted qawwals on Coke Studio.  

SINGH: Again, I completely agree with you on that score, and that’s also what makes Rajagopalachari quite interesting, because even his thinking, I’d say, goes through this arc. And I had mentioned my previous book—there’s another revealing quote from him just as he’s vacating what was then Viceroy’s House because he was the last governor general. And he vacates it and he says, “What we want is, we want revival of ancient feudal manners, but in the language and garb of democracy.”

But the Tamil voters turned against him when he tried to impose caste based education (Kula Kalvi Thittam). Still, he was a sensible man in many ways. 

It’s something like that which I think revealed this sometimes contradictory, sometimes complementary idea that several of these figures had, where you could actually bring these two streams where you could find indigeneity or ideas rooted in South Asian concepts, but you could do that within the language that was being provided by modernity and the constitution. I think that’s what makes all of these figures particularly interesting.

These figures are interesting to Indians of a certain age because we know at least some of their descendants and enjoy chuckling over any hereditary imbecility they might evidence.  

Jinnah as a Constitutionalist

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes. In all of this, the one person I feel quite bad for is Jinnah.

His descendants are rich, but they are neither Muslim nor Pakistani. Nehru founded a dynasty.  

Adeel, I’m pretty sure this is not true of Pakistan, but when you are studying Jinnah and his works and his role in the Indian nationalist movement, it is almost always reduced to the Muslim question and the question of separate electorates. That’s the focal point or the anchor point.

Because he gained salience brokering a deal between the League and Congress. But Nehru wasn't interested in  such deals. Like Gandhi, he wanted to concentrate power in his own hands. Indians were cool with that because they thought Mussolini and, later on, Hitler, were doing a great job. Zail Singh was still praising Hitler in Parliament in 1982.

When I read his debates with Nehru, especially the ones in your book, to me it feels like he’s the Enlightenment-conception constitutionalist.

No. He's a lawyer trying to get a better deal for his client. But, Muslims like himself- those from Hindu majority areas- lost out.  

For him, interests are central.

No. Nationality is central. He said there were two Nations. Other parties- like the zamindar supported Unionists or the tenant supported Krishak Praja Party- were interest based. Fazl ul Haque and Shurawardy would probably have done better in a united Bengal. However, the 'feudal' Premiers in Sindh and Punjab did not have the mass following to stand up to the League. 

So, in one sense, this is the Adam Smith project of, how do we find institutions, including the market, where you can align self-interest and social interest, and that’s the project?

Jinnah's solution was to rig the game so Muslims could win. Ultimately, he made such a nuisance of himself that India was glad to solve its Muslim problem through Partition. Sadly, this meant losing smart and sensible people as well as some stupid politicians. 

In the conversations he’s having with Nehru, it’s almost like this Madisonian project, right? You need to align self-interest with social interest in society through constitutional checks and balances. A big part of that is checking democracy and protecting minority interests, in this case through separate electorates. At least that’s the way I read his idea of separate electorates in this particular debate that ambition must counteract ambition, and this is all going to come down to self-interested politicians or something like that.

Congress liked elections. Its candidates had done some jail time and liked reminding people about it. The Muslim League didn't like elections, which is why West Pakistan had its first proper election in 1971- after which it immediately split apart- though it showed it could win the 1946 election by a landslide. East Pakistan was more like India in this respect.  Perhaps the West Pakistani elites were less comfortable with the dust and the din of elections. It may be that more thymotic societies consider the loss of face involved in losing a vote to be worse than that arising from losing a battle. The other question would have to do with semi-nomadic tribes and mutual compacts of a defensive and offensive type. 

So to me that’s remarkable because we never think of Jinnah as a constitutionalist, at least in Indian thought. We always think of him as, “Oh, this is the person who wanted separate electorates.” And it was a Muslim question. It’s an identity question. It’s not a constitutional question. In your book, you almost flip it. I don’t know if that was intentional, but that’s what came across to me, that it’s actually a different constitutional question than the one that Nehru’s asking.

Jinnah was either an ambitious man determined to become the head of his own state however moth eaten or else he was a tactician who overplayed his hand.  

HUSSAIN: You’re correct in your reading regardless of how you read those debates because they can be interpreted in very many ways. I do think that the question of separate electorates is a profoundly constitutional question. That is the entirety of their question, is that it is a constitutional question about representation and how a specific liberal framework can accommodate minorities, when those minorities both weigh in such a way that European thought can no longer hold it, because the sheer numbers are so big that any type of European imagination could not have foreseen that liberalism would’ve branched out so widely in order to regulate that project.

Why this obsession with Europe? These guys are of sub-continental origin. They were born many decades after their countries became independent. Why is that they have no indigenous idea of India? The answer is that they are stupid. They earn a little money by providing useless credentials to foreigners. Smart people, like Prashant Kishore, can change the way Politics is done in India. 

What I do think—and that’s the argument that I make in my book, “Law and Muslim Political Thought in Late Colonial North India”—is that by the time the ’40s come around, the late 1930s, Jinnah is no longer the constitutionalist as we think of him generally. I would say that the general perception of Jinnah has always been one where he’s primarily constitutionally minded, and he argues the Muslim case as a constitutional lawyer. You pick up any biography of Jinnah that is written in the past 30 years, and there will be at least a somewhat lengthy exploration of how good a lawyer he was and how well he was in the courtroom, and how well he argued that Muslim case

It is foolish to speak of Indian lawyers of the period as being 'constitutional lawyers'. At best one could point at Sapru- but Sapru failed.  America may have had constitutional lawyers. SCOTUS sometimes appears more powerful than POTUS. But Britain had an unwritten constitution. Parliament is Supreme. The Govt. appoints the Chief Justice and the Lord Chancellor and the Privy Council and so forth. It was only a dozen years ago, on the EU's insistence, that we got a Supreme Court. 

The plain fact is that no Indian lawyer thought the Constitution was important till Palkhiwala- but he refused a seat on the Bench.  

What I really wanted to bring out here with this conversation is that Jinnah departs from the law and stops believing in the promise of liberalism that he had, for so long, defended both within the Congress Party.

He was not a member of the Indian Liberal Party.  

And later on, when in parallel he’s a member of the Muslim League and of the Congress Party at the same time. And then when he resigns his membership of the Congress Party and becomes solely a member of the Muslim League that his thought moves away from trying to find constitutional answers to trying to assert the Muslim presence politically.

Congress had gone down an atavistic Gandhian path. Once the Muslims got over Khilafat and younger more ambitious people like Liaquat and Shurawardy came to the fore, they brought Jinnah back. Previously, the Agha Khan was considered the most important 'Liberal' Muslim politician. Incidentally, the Muslims did offer joint electorate in return for 50 percent reserved seats.  

We see that most prominently, of course, coming to the forefront when he boycotts the Constituent Assembly of India,

Because he wanted Pakistan and got it. 

where he’s invited by Lord Wavell, the viceroy at the time, to participate. And he and all the other Muslim League members boycott and stop going into the Constituent Assembly because they no longer have trust in the constitutional project that the Indian republic seeks to implement.

Because they wanted a separate country. 

I do think that the one argument that has generally been made in regard to Jinnah, that he continued to remain a committed constitutionalist, is that he approves the Cabinet Mission Plan.

Which would have given India a very weak centre. So Muslims do ethnic cleansing where they are in the majority while building up their power so as to do ethnic cleansing even where they were not in the majority. These were 'salami tactics' expressed by the slogan, 'We fought and got Pakistan. Laughing, we will take India.' 

That the last constitutional solution that the British are proposing that will allow India to stay under a united political umbrella is something that Jinnah does accept, albeit for a very brief moment.

So did Maulana Azad. But he understood that he had no future in Pakistan because he was seen as a Congress 'show-boy'.  

Then Nehru is generally seen as the person who gives this famous press conference in 1946 in Bombay, where he says that he no longer feels bound by the promises that the Congress Party has made regarding that.

That's why he was seen as the muscular leader of the Hindus. Congress members ethnically cleansed Muslims in Bihar and Delhi with vim and vigor. The lady protested but did nothing.  

But he thinks that the Constituent Assembly can reinterpret it because sovereignty lies within the Constituent Assembly. It is not something that is transferred from the British, and therefore he cannot contractually limit the Constituent Assembly to hold itself to the promises that it had made to the Muslim League before the elected members have actually gone into the Constituent Assembly.

Nehru was following Rajaji and Gandhi in acknowledging that the Muslim majority areas would be ungovernable for Congress. There was no alternative but to fight them if they started anything.  

To me, it seems that Nehru is simply repeating a point that he has made over and over repeatedly and that many people in the Congress Party believe. Whereas Jinnah’s move of accepting the Cabinet Mission Plan is the true anomaly. Because for at least a decade, he’s been the person who said that I no longer believe in any type of constitutional solution that we can have as communities. Then suddenly he briefly comes to agree to that amendment.

For tactical reasons. The fact is Jinnah, on his return to Indian politics, used Congress tactics- viz. telling lies to whip up popular passions and entering the Administration so as to prevent its proper functioning. Liaquat, taking the Finance portfolio, used Muslim civil servants to frustrate Patel. He also threatened to tax Congress's financiers out of existence.  

Then I do think that the reason that he agreed wasn’t because he’s had a sudden reawakening, that he believed there is a constitutional solution to the problem. But just because Lord Wavell must have shown him, in very dramatic terms, what partition would look like. That the partition that he was looking at was a very truncated Pakistan, which he didn’t really want at that point.

But it was obvious that it was all he'd get. Jinnah's one achievement was to buy of the tribes on the Frontier. The Indians were hoping that Pakistan would be bled white by having to fight the Afghans.  

He felt that through the system of grouping, which is really what the Cabinet Mission Plan is—for the listeners who are not mapping these fine-grain differences of constitutional changes in India in the 1940s, the Cabinet Mission Plan really means that you can have groupings where Muslim-majority regions can group together. And Jinnah already reads this as a first step toward Pakistan.

This was always the Muslim plan. They wanted undivided Bengal and Punjab plus disproportionate power in the Hindu majority areas. Fortunately, for the Hindus, it turned out that the 'secular' Congress was anything but. They genuinely hated Muslims but lurved cows. On Independence, cows got protection, Muslim refugees were stripped of citizenship and property rights.  The Muslims had always known that once the Brits departed, they'd lose all the reservations and other concessions they had extracted. 

He doesn’t see the Cabinet Mission Plan as something that is going to be permanent and therefore get rid of the idea of Pakistan as a Muslim homeland on Indian soil. But he seems to see the Cabinet Mission Plan as the first step to Pakistan. That’s what he says in all of his speeches that follow his acceptance of the Cabinet Mission Plan, is that this is not a move away from Pakistan, but this is a step toward Pakistan.

Which is why Maulana Azad was bound to lose the argument within Congress.  

I do feel that a lot has been made of him accepting the plan, but that’s not his return as somebody who’s now going to lobby for constitutional safeguards from the Hindu majority. That project, he’s given up. I hope that the debate that he has with Nehru in the late ’30s shows that, to what extent he’s resigned of trying to push forward constitutional demands.

Why are these nutters so obsessed with the constitution? The subcontinent ignores that shite. Extrajudicial killing on an industrial scale is how it deals with any actual problem. 

RAJAGOPALAN: I have a follow-up question there. The switch from constitutionalism to a more identity politics in the ’30s,

There had been identity politics from the 1890s 

do you think this really stems from the Government of India Act [1935] and the fact that these guys need to get elected in provincial elections right after, and the debates on constitutionalism at the end of the day are just among the elite?

There were no debates on constitutionalism. There was a demand for the transfer of power as well as some hypocritical talk of sharing power which was obviously fraudulent. Sidney Webb was able to give the Ceylonese universal suffrage in exchange for strong minority protection but that was because Ceylonese elites were loyalist. Many didn't know whether they were Sinhala or Tamil because they had names like Wilmot Benson.  

The question of the Muslim identity is something that is going to have far more resonance when you have to go and give speeches and collect donations and stand for elections. Is it just a pragmatist move in one sense? That previously people in the Congress and Muslim League could have had these other debates in writing, and now you’ve just got to really nail down? It’s an electoral math that’s important?

This is foolish. There was nothing 'constitutional' about Khilafat or Non Cooperation or the Salt March. The Muslim League played the 'Islam in danger' card. They made out that Congress's 'Basic Education' scheme was Hindu brainwashing. Also the Indian flag represented idolatry.  Indeed, not killing Kaffirs pisses God off something chronic. 

HUSSAIN: I would say that, partially, the democratic logic that enters in the 1930s is responsible for the heightening of this move away from constitutionalism that we see. At the same time, it’s a democratization, so it’s bringing more people into the political fold. In general, it is a very progressive and wanted move that is happening in India. I do believe that if we were to say that it’s solely based on that, then we would also ignore many of the debates that are happening in the 1910s and the 1920s.

The Servants of India society may have gone in for debates but nobody noticed. The fact is the confrontation between the Naram Dal and Grama Dal was highly acrimonious. Indian politics has never been about constitutional debates. On the other hand, Trump and Biden often while away the hours by debating the scope of the First Amendment.  

The Hindu-Muslim question isn’t something that only springs to the forefront suddenly—that a higher percentage of Indians is allowed to vote. It’s something that is very much at the forefront. The very foundation of the Muslim League happens in the early 20th century,

But the project of Muslim rule over the Indian subcontinent is a lot older. 

but it’s very much a project that is already looming large, and not something that is just coming out of the moment that we are increasing the franchise when it comes to voting.
Nehru: A Reluctant Constitutionalist?

RAJAGOPALAN: Now I want to ask Tripurdaman about Nehru. I’ve always held that Nehru is a reluctant constitutionalist, but that’s because of my work on constitutional amendments. Anyone who has worked on constitutional amendments like yourself, Tripurdaman—it’s impossible to walk away from that sense that Nehru is, based on the First Amendment, a reluctant constitutionalist. There’s this tension between democracy and constitutionalism. There’s also tension, at least I have argued in my doctoral work, between the socialist project and constitutionalism when it comes to Nehru.

India was poor and diverse. Nehru had actually taken note of this. Socialism- in the sense of land to the tiller and strong Trade Unions and Public sector industries creating nice white collar jobs for Graduates- was popular. But it was unaffordable and unworkable. Constitutions, on the other hand, don't matter at all. Gandhi gained popularity because he described lawyers as parasites and Courts as fundamentally evil and un-Indian.  

Was Nehru ever a great constitutionalist, or not really?

You had to have a constitution to become a Republic. But the constitution could always be amended any which way. Burma got a more Socialist constitution.  

This was part of the nation-building project, and the only way to execute this in a bloodless way without a huge revolution was to do the transfer of power constitutionally as opposed to with an uprising? That’s why he goes along with it, but the idea was always to have this great socialist state. He just embraces constitutionalism to avoid bloodshed. Is that a good way of thinking about Nehru’s relationship with constitutionalism?

If there was bloodshed, he and his chums would have been slaughtered. Nehru weakened the Army just in case.  

SINGH: I disagree. I would frame it slightly differently. I don’t think he’s a reluctant constitutionalist because he very much believes in the constitution. At no point, even though it’s easy enough for him to do so, does he say, “Well, I look at sovereignty in myself,” or, “I look at sovereignty beyond the constitutional structures directly in the people. I’m the centurion, and here I am.” He never says that.

Because the constitution gave him power. Some Commies thought they could seize power in the Chinese manner. They were slaughtered.  

One could argue that he never has the need to say that because, generally, he gets what he wants within the constitutional framework. There is still something to be said on that score.

On the other hand, yes, he definitely sees the constitution as a vehicle for the socialist project. He never hides that. Even in the Constituent Assembly, he always says that this constitution is there because we have to feed the starving millions and clothe the naked masses and so on and so forth. Again, I go back to “Recovering Liberties,” where Chris Bayly describes Nehru as a communitarian liberal. And very much I think that’s quite a fitting description.

Precisely because it is meaningless.  

There’s a hierarchy of threads in the Indian Constitution. Granville Austin used to refer to it as this seamless web

Though webs have holes in them. The problem with talking about constitutions is that you soon start talking bollocks.  

with these three strands of the social revolution, the unity and integrity of nation and individual rights and so on. He thought of it as a seamless web where you couldn’t press down on one strand too hard. But I would argue actually there is a strand which is pressed hard, that there is a hierarchy of strands. For Nehru, that sort of the social revolutionary strand was very much something that threaded through the constitution.

You see it both in the argument in the First Amendment, where he bases most of his argument on the fact that there are these Directive Principles which his government is bound to obey.

Coz Nehru lurved cows- right? 

And there’s the greater socialist project for which the Congress [Party] has been agitating for the last 20 years.

Rahul may still be agitating himself over this bollocks. 

I think that’s a more productive way of looking at it, and thinking of him in terms of this communitarian liberal as Bayly describes him and as he undoubtedly was.

HUSSAIN: Maybe just to add what Tripurdaman just said, one can’t emphasize enough that for somebody in Nehru’s position and a leader of a postcolonial country, the other men that we have in power in the mid-20th century who are leading the nations—all or most of them outright abandon the constitutional project altogether. They toss the constitution in the bin and they say, “We’re going to go full-on authoritarianism now,” regardless of African countries or Southeast Asian countries. It’s the go-to pattern that we see in the mid-20th century.

Nehru got busy concentrating power in his own person. This meant Indira could do full-on authoritarianism.  

Nehru really breaks that in the sense that he stays within the framework of the constitution, changes it many times and may not always like what’s written there and may interpret it in his own ways. But he could have gone much further in moving away from the constitution, which he actively doesn’t do. I wouldn’t say that he’s reluctant, but he’s a constitutionalist in many ways.

SINGH: Actually, he’s fastidious. This is another thing that someone like Gopal notes, is that he is very fastidious about parliamentary procedure and making sure that everything goes through the committees that it’s supposed to, that cabinet meets as it’s supposed to, even though it’s never known whether the cabinet is really going to stand up and defy him. But everything is done in a very proper, fastidious manner. He sticks to procedure even though he could have short-circuited it quite easily.

Now, again, of course you can argue that he was getting what he wants, so the need to short-circuit procedure never arises. I think there is a lot of force in that argument as well, but it is a big tick as a favor that he never feels the need to short-circuit any procedure of democracy either.

This is foolish. The whole point of the planning commission was to bypass the Cabinet which, in any case, was a bit shit. 

HUSSAIN: It’s something we also see when he is debating Jinnah, is that—whereas we generally consider Jinnah to be this cold-blooded lawyer who’s trying to score a legal point in these debates—it’s really Nehru that is consistently reminding him that, what is it that we are discussing? Let’s create a systematic list with things that we can tick off, et cetera.

He’s thinking very much like somebody who’s trained primarily within political party structures, and that’s really the case because very much this political awakening happens within the Congress Party. That is what he does. Right from the beginning, from a very young age, he begins his political mission within party structures. Whereas Jinnah is really the person who thinks beyond the party structure.

In other words, Nehru was a dynastic politician whereas Jinnah was sui generis. Indeed, he had initially been a bigger figure than Motilal. However, Jinnah had come up in the 'Naram Dal' which did actually have debates and which did a lot of empirical research to back up its legislative proposals. Gandhi's advent put an end to that. Jinnah was brought back into politics once the Khilafatis and the Ulema were dead or taking a back seat. In a way, Jinnah presented 'watani' 'Islam in one country' as opposed to the universalist version which Congress could have accommodated. It is important to remember that the Muslim League wasn't particularly Islamist. 

RAJAGOPALAN: There’s no question that Nehru is a democrat in a way that virtually none of the other postcolonial leaders are.

Because he gained power through elections. This was because the Hindus wanted a strong center because they feared both the Commies and revived Muslim power. Indeed, the Commies- because of Stalin's 'Nationality policy', were for Pakistan and Dravidistan and so forth.  

He is very clearly against a dictatorship. He very much believes in the voting franchise and the project of democracy.

But voting was only possible because the inheritance from the Brits was so good. There was a 'steel frame'. Many other countries had no such thing.  

When it comes to the constitution, if we think of the constitution as a set of principles and a roadmap, then I think Nehru is certainly a constitutionalist. If we think about a constitution more in the American sense of the term, which is constraints, very seriously tying the hands of actors within the state machinery, then that case starts weakening. Because at any point in time when the constitution tries to constrain the actions of the union government or any of the actors in the state government, immediately it becomes a question of, “Oh, we need to relax these constraints.” And then starts the move to keep amending the constitution.

India followed the British pattern- Parliament was supreme. Then Parliament discovered it was more convenient to kick the can down the road into the Courts. Government departments keep suing each other because politicians don't want to take tough decisions.  

In one sense, I agree with you that amending the constitution seems like a far better project in hindsight than just abandoning it wholesale, which is what happened in many other South Asian and African countries.

No South Asian country abandoned its constitution. Though they may have run through two or three.  

I would not necessarily still couch Nehru as a constitutionalist because when push came to shove, he always picked the immediate politically expedient project over the larger constitutional principle, whether it’s property rights or free speech.

Nehru was not as stupid as these cunts. He was a barrister- not a good one- but a barrister all the same. He knew that Parliament can't bind itself. The Constituent Assembly was merely a Legislative Assembly. It did not have the status of the US Constitutional Assembly because India did not have dual sovereignty. It was not and is not a Federal Republic with elected Governors and separate courts at the State level.  

These are not trivial matters. That starts, I think in some sense, making me really rethink my view of Nehru as a great constitutionalist. Now, in hindsight, compared to many others, I guess you’re right, the situation he inherited is quite different.

SINGH: True, true, true. One has to remember that the Indian Constitution is already executive-heavy.

No. It makes the Legislature supreme. The question was whether the President- elected by Legislators- would have power on the French pattern or whether he'd be a figurehead. This wasn't immediately resolved. Nehru ensured that the President would be a figure head though Prasad put up a bit of a fight.  

There was already large consensus that actually there has to be some sort of executive despotism, almost. Look at something like the power that is granted to the Indian president, which is the Indian government to issue ordinances. Now, this is a very strange setting where it’s probably the only democratic constitution in the world which gives law-making powers to the executive in the presence of lawful legislation without the need for any sort of emergency. It’s a device that’s used routinely.

This is foolish. Every Head of Government has this power if the Head of State is ceremonial. In America the term is 'regulation', 'proclamation' or 'executive action'. France gives 'exceptional powers' to the President. The same is true of most Republics.

I think while Nehru was keen on this, I don’t think he was also the only one who was keen on this. There was quite bipartisan support within—you had outliers like Mukherjee et cetera. There’s quite bipartisan support for this executive despotism within the Indian establishment. That’s one.

So, there was continuity with what went before. The Indians had merely added yet more verbosity to what they had inherited. 

The Constitution as Pedagogical Project

SINGH: The second, of course, is that I do agree that there is a path dependency here. Because ultimately, the Westminster system very much relies on convention and precedent because there’s only so much that can be written. If you were to buy into the arguments made by someone like Madhav Khosla, which is that you had such great codification because they thought there was no experience of democracy, and so they had to really codify things in detail—the thing is, even despite all of that codification, it’s still dependent on precedent and convention.

The Indian Constitution was long because the 1935 Act was very long. Anyway, Indians are a verbose people. Why use one word when a dozen will do?  

Lacking that convention, I think Nehru fails to really appreciate or think through the consequences of his actions and that everything he does isn’t just done simply. It’s not just something in response to the events that he’s facing, but it’s going to become a precedent. He’s establishing instant precedents, instant conventions that are then going to hold good going forward. At least that’s the sense that I got reading the debates around First Amendment, is that he can’t seem to wrap his head around it, whether it’s intentional or whether it’s unintentional and he just doesn’t get it.

Nehru was not a clear thinker or speaker. He'd just rabbit on and on in an impressionistic manner. This particular debate was one where he looked a fool. He couldn't say 'the fucking Reds and the Muslims could team up to fuck us over. We've got to stomp them before they stomp us. Also Romesh Thapar is a fucking imbecile.' This is because Nehru was sweet on Reds and Muslims voted for him. Romesh was related by marriage to Nehru himself.  

RAJAGOPALAN: There’s another aspect in Madhav’s book where he talks about the Indian founding moment almost as a pedagogical project.

This is foolish. There was an official pedagogy but it featured Gandhi doing silly shit and everybody then going meekly to jail.  

This is norm-setting, and we’re really teaching the not-democratic, unread masses who are going to get universal franchise overnight how to be a constitutional republic.

Yeah, right! Illiterate peasants were lectured about the the doctrine of autochthony! On the other hand, some politicians said 'At last, 'Ram Rajya' is here. Brits ate beef. We have made cow protection the directing principle of our beloved Bharat. Where cow is worshipped, riches rain down.'   

SINGH: It’s not just a pedagogical project, right?

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes.

SINGH: He also makes the argument that it’s a pedagogical project, but he makes a quite almost anthropological argument, the kind that Warren Hastings made when talking about the Mughal constitution. Warren Hastings thought you could discover the Mughal constitution through looking at how people were practicing politics. In this case, people were really going to learn constitutionalism through the practice. They were going to educate themselves by doing. The reason that I would push back against it is that that is also equally applicable to the rulers, right?

This is crazy shit. Hastings said, to avoid famines and the collapse of tax revenue, we have to look at the old administration. Others Anglo-Indians of this period were making similar observations in Madras and Bombay Presidencies. It was important for the British collector to know about the maintenance of tanks and buffer stocks and their associated cesses. It is crazy to speak of a Mughal 'constitution'. Why not speak instead of their basketball skills or the type of rap music they favored? 

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes. Exactly.

SINGH: It’s not just something applicable to the masses, it’s also applicable to the rulers. If the rulers are learning by doing, then what exactly are they doing?

The same stuff they had been doing since 1937, just more so. The Brits had provided India with a political pedagogy. Olivier's complaint was that they were poor students. They could regurgitate tedious shite well enough. They just refused to do anything practical or useful.  

RAJAGOPALAN: Maybe I’ve steeped too much in public choice economics to think any other way. It seems like before we had to win elections and govern, we were doing the pedagogical project and all this norm-setting.

But there had been general elections since 1923! All the norm-setting had already been done.  

Then the moment we actually have to govern and win elections and so on, we don’t care about norm-setting much anymore.

Previously, the franchise had been restricted but only because the minorities would not agree to joint electorates. Otherwise India would have got universal franchise at the same time as Sri Lanka. It must be said that this meant that 'zamindar' parties disappeared though, no doubt, they reappeared in another guise.  

We’re just going to throw this out of the window. We’re going to make some politically expedient moves, not worry too much, as you said, Tripurdaman, about what it does for the future down the pipeline, what kind of precedent it sets, both within the party within parliament, but also in the entanglement between parliament and judiciary and so on.

Do these guys really not know that India does extra-judicial killing on an industrial scale when faced with any genuine threat? There is a bit of liberal play-acting which some anglophiles indulge in. But there is little reason to get high on your own supply unless you are an academic teaching stupid shite.  

They may have thought they were doing a pedagogical project,

These guys are pedagogue. Fuck would they know about politics? Prashant Kishore is the guy who makes big bucks advising Indian parties.  

but I think it didn’t quite turn out as that by their actions almost immediately. Within 18, 20 months of the constitution being written, it very quickly switches to a political project—one of governing, and one of interests, really.

Wow! These guys didn't know that the Constituent Assembly was itself a Parliament. It made laws. Some of its members held Ministerial office. The Muslim League withdrew from it but this interim government became the first legislature of Independent India. It was the government and thus was doing governing. Who the fuck do these cretins think were running India from August '47 to Jan '50? 

Role of the Judiciary

RAJAGOPALAN: Another thing that’s part of this constitution project is the independent judiciary. Of course, both Pakistan and India come from a British parliamentary tradition where there’s parliamentary sovereignty. But in India, there’s a break in that tradition because there’s independent judicial review right from the beginning. I think in Pakistan, with the 1973 constitution and the 18th and 19th Amendments and so on, you have this independent judicial review coming in.

However, this was merely empty talk. Indian judges want post-retirement sinecures. You have to have life-time tenure if you want judicial independence.  

Now, both of you have written about the entanglement with the judiciary in both countries. Tripurdaman, for you it’s in the First Amendment book. There’s literally a conversation happening between the legislature and the judiciary, which is getting resolved through an amendment in parliament. Adeel, you’ve written about this more recently in terms of the kinds of moves that the Pakistani Supreme Court’s been making against the military regime or different kinds of dictatorships and so on.

My broader question is, given the tradition that both these courts are coming from, how is it that both of them turned out to be these activist, interventionist supreme courts that they donned, though at different points in time? In the Indian court it comes post-Emergency, in the Pakistani court much more recently. But how is it that something that’s flowing from this very traditional British system goes rogue at some point—with good and bad consequences, depending on which year we’re talking about?

If Judges get a better offer- either foreign money or private sector money- they may stick their necks out. But judges can be killed same as anybody else. 

America is a different story. It may be that the Bench really can reverse Roe v Wade or Sullyvan vs NYT etc. But even in America, the President can pack the bench. Maybe not Biden, but sooner or later the thing can happen. Remember America had a Civil War in which they lost more people than in all their wars since. Constitutions have no magical powers.  

HUSSAIN: There’s a whole set of reasons why it really takes place. But I do think it boils down to the fact that very soon after the national project kickoff in both India and Pakistan, what happens is that many of the institutions that people look toward—be it parliament, be it the executive—gravely misuse specific powers that are given to them. And that the only institution that people consider to have a specific continuation from the colonial period and a reputation that is still intact are the courts.

This simply isn't true. Gandhi was a big success because he said lawyers and judges were evil bastards. Nobody respects either. Pakistan has the Army- which people do respect. India has some meritocratic, uncorrupt politicians. Modi is respected. Even Manmohan was initially quite popular as a man of integrity. However, for Hindus, India is itself a sacred land and has been so since the most ancient time. Artificial countries may need constitutions. But India is not artificial- at least for Hindus.  

The courts do take more risks because they believe and it very much shows that the public is supporting their specific rulings.

Stuff like Ram Janmabhoomi? Sure. If you do popular things you will be popular.  

And they’re looking toward the supreme court in order to find a direction. Both in the key moments of Pakistan, when state of emergencies are declared or governments are being set aside by the president in its early days, it is always the courts that people look toward in order to see if everything that took place was done in a specific legal manner. I do think that is the key reason as to why courts emerged.

If Imran returns to power, he will take an ample revenge on the Bench.  

But their reputation is also more or less tainted now in both of the countries. In India more recently, with the executive muscling in and, well, for the lack of any better framing, trying to bring cases in front of the court that are of a very specific political nature and that they want to see decided in a very specific manner. In this way, I do believe that both of the courts have lost some of that inherited reputation.

The Pakistani Bench did have its moment in the Sun but it frittered away that capital. The Indian Bench only has salience if Parliament wants to kick the can down the road. But it doesn't want to be seen as the bad guy. The bigger problem is that the private sector is increasingly disintermediating the Indian Courts. Essentially, the Courts might be restricted to nuisance suits. Indian lawyers will lose money. The profession will become even more criminalized. The plain fact is that the quality of Judicial candidates is dropping. So low is the public's opinion of the Courts that they were happy to put Judges under a Lok Pal. Something of the sort may still happen. If Courts are stripped of contempt powers, what sanction do they have? Already some States ignore their orders. The day may come when Civil Servants simply don't show up for hearings. The pack of cards collapses. 

SINGH: I completely agree with Adeel there. I don’t think there’s much that I would add to that. Again, as you mentioned, the First Amendment, I think, very quickly, in India, the tension between the legislation and the judiciary is kicked off.

There was no tension. No Judge resigned though they threatened to do so when Nehru opposed the appointment of Patanjali Sastri as CJI. Nehru hated Mehr Chand Mahajan even more but solidarity amongst Judges forced him to appoint him CJI. My point is that the Judiciary could fight its own corner but did not deny Parliamentary Supremacy.  

Yes, both countries have an inheritance of the British idea of parliamentary sovereignty, but crucially, unlike Britain, India has a written constitution. That constitution automatically limits what parliament can or cannot do.

No. There was an idea which took hold later that there was a 'Basic Structure' but even if the entire Bench resigns nobody will care. The situation was different in the Fifties when India was much more dependent on the UK and the US. Suppose Nehru had packed the Bench, would the UK still have released sterling balances? What of Naval defense. India had a British admiral till about '58. By then, the Second Plan was dependent on 'free money' from Uncle Sam.  

Of course, that tension itself is not really resolved until the basic structure doctrine comes into place in the ’70s because until then, sometimes the court rules this way and sometimes the court rules that way. Sometimes they let them legislate on whatever they want. Sometimes they push back and say, “Well, no legislation that circumscribes fundamental rights is possible.” That’s the famous I.C. Golak Nath case.

But, the Emergency showed the Judges had no power unless it was convenient for the PM to pretend otherwise. That remains true to this day.  

I think in India, there’s been the creative tension, but I wouldn’t really say that that’s been with the legislature. We frame it in the sense that it’s with the legislature. But actually, the legislature is the one that has a really, really poor record in India. It starts right at the outset, then progressively goes downhill to such an extent where now I would find it hard to even honestly say that the legislature has any independent presence as the third pillar of the democratic setup.

Because Modi is very evil. Why can't he simply convert to Islam and stop all this Hindutva nonsense?  

RAJAGOPALAN: Absolutely. I agree with you, especially after the 52nd Amendment. (in 1985) The moment you get this anti-defection kicking in, I feel like the legislature is basically where the drama unfolds. But all the debates have already happened in the backroom somewhere, if any. All the deals have been made in the backroom somewhere, and now we’re just going to put the show on for the kids who are watching television.

This is silly. Everybody knows that Rajiv was overthrown by his cousin Arun Nehru and the supposedly loyal V.P Singh. Defection is one thing, factionalism is another. It was factionalism that was Congress's Achilles heel.  But the boy Rajiv didn't get that. 

SINGH: An inordinate amount of power is handed over, A, to party bosses.

Which 'party bosses' had power in 1985? Rajiv had power, sure, but he was a political novice. You could say that Kamaraj had a lot of power and that he was a 'party boss'. But Kamaraj lost that power after making his party unelectable in his own home state.  

RAJAGOPALAN: Exactly.

SINGH: And, B, to a figure like the speaker, who has been granted the quasi-judicial authority but without any checks and balances because the speaker is not really answerable to anyone for his decisions. Of course, you can take it to court, et cetera.

Again, as I go back to the constitution and to the point about executive authority, that the executive has already been placed constitutionally in the driver’s seat of the legislature. I think it’s good that, when we say that there’s a tension between the legislature and the judiciary, to keep in mind that the legislature very rarely has had any independent functional ability in the Indian context.

MPs decide who will rule. They make the laws. Ministers have to be members of Parliament. What greater 'functional ability' could they have? The anti-defection law was perfectly sensible though, obviously, just arresting people for taking a suitcase full of cash would have worked just as well. Moreover, anti-defection was helpful to Janata administrations. They didn't have to spend all their time putting phone taps on their own legislators.  

RAJAGOPALAN: Absolutely. One, it’s the executive all the way, and as you said, instead of even providing a weak check—parliamentary democracies already have a weaker version of separation of powers than nonparliamentary democracies. But in this, forget the fact that it needs to provide a check; it’s almost as if the legislature is in service of the executive, right?

Very true. The local MLA trembles in front of the District Collector or Superintendent of Police. It isn't the case that he can get the fellow transferred if he belongs to the ruling party. Under the Raj there was a strong Executive- ICS officers held a lot of power. After Independence, power shifted from the Executive to the Legislature. Singapore has a strong Executive. India does not. It has a strong PMO. But the PM is answerable to Parliament. He has to focus on getting re-elected. If he isn't a 'vote-catcher', then- like Manmohan- he becomes a lame duck.  

The job seems to be, “Oh, we need to make sure that we are in the running to be chosen to occupy positions of the executive”—which is also ever increasing and has very little to do with holding the executive accountable. I guess because there’s no benefit from doing so anymore. I think that breakdown has been probably the most unfortunate and the least intended when we think of the constitutional framers in one sense.

These guys don't get the Constitution was created by a Legislature. They think it was the work of a bunch of Professors.  

Courts vs. Prime Ministers

RAJAGOPALAN: Coming back to the judiciary, both the courts have had an interesting moment, both India and Pakistan, in their battle with the prime minister, right?

The Courts didn't battle shit in India. Justice Sinha was a bit silly and the Bench didn't know which way to jump till Indira showed everybody who was boss. Then the judiciary crawled when it was asked to bend. At a later point, it was convenient to pretend that the Courts would safeguard fdi investors. But this didn't prevent retroactive taxation or, more egregiously yet, the Bench deciding that diplomats could void their own immunity.  

In the case of the Indian courts, of course, this was the famous Indira Gandhi vs Raj Narain case. Indira Gandhi’s election, of course, is voided because of corrupt election processes or for using “official machinery,” as they call it. On a corruption charge, her election is thrown out.

Till she changed the laws. Sinha little thought that his fit of pique would have such a disastrous result.  

In the case of the Pakistani Constitution, the famous, almost lifelong impeachment of Nawaz Sharif. This is post-Panama corruption charges. Now, if I’m not wrong, I believe he can never hold public office for the rest of his life.

HUSSAIN: Yes, the supreme court ruled that he was not sadiq, which means that he wasn’t honorable enough in order to hold the highest office in the land.

But his brother could coz he was plenty 'sadiq' right?  

RAJAGOPALAN: One of the things I find interesting is the very different reactions to both these rulings. In India it’s almost seen as this very—one, the consequence of the ruling is the Indian Emergency, which is this horrible break from democratic and constitutional practices, for the first and hopefully the last time in India. But in the Pakistani context, it’s almost like the judiciary gained in stature because of it, right? It comes into its own in a new way in modern-day Pakistan because it gets into this battle with the prime minister and impeaches him.

Has this lady never heard of the Pakistani Army?  

What is the reason for these two different reactions? Is it just that these are different times, they’re 50 years apart? That could possibly be one. Or is it because Indira Gandhi’s corruption in some sense is quite different than Nawaz Sharif’s corruption? Or Indira Gandhi was just more popular and the courts at that time weren’t populist, but the move against Nawaz Sharif was very, very popular and giving voice to people’s anger against corruption? What is going on with these cases, and why such dramatically different responses to the court?

HUSSAIN: There’s a couple of things that one really needs to bring into this conversation. The first one is the history of the Pakistani Supreme Court. The Pakistani Supreme Court has had a very different history from the Indian Supreme Court. We spoke earlier about the pedagogical and the political performative elements that constitute the postcolonial subject.

Pakistan had an explicit 'doctrine of necessity'. India didn't. Basically, the Army always acts out of 'necessity'. In India, the Army is not political.  

If we start from that imagining, the few high court (and, later on, supreme court) justices, earlier the justices of the federal court, were the ones that the British had handpicked in order to allow them a great amount of constitutional power that endowed them with a specific position to perform political action, or legal and political action that wasn’t given to most of the population before the foundational moment that took place with the republic. Here we have a group of people that is very much English-speaking, Anglophile. And culturally, many of them are trained in England. If not, they’ve done the equivalent training at Indian law schools.

These guys think the Brits ruled India because of the Constitution and some handpicked Judges. But they also think that Babur got his start in the same way. Sadly, Herr Hitler didn't have a nice Constitution and handpicked Judges. That's the only reason his thousand year Reich disappeared long ago.  

In Pakistan what happens rather quickly is that through a succession of military leaderships, the legal system creates a parallel within it.

No. Zia created a Sharia system. He was a General. He killed Bhutto. Killing people creates power. But killers can themselves be killed.  

We see the emergence of Sharia law as becoming more and more dominant, and we see a specific Shariatic jurisprudence and jurisdictional system that is implemented with Zia-ul-Haq in the 1980s. The very old imaginings that people came to the courts are no longer really holding true. With the specific rulings that we saw in the 1950s in Pakistan, the trust in the court was already severely damaged.

Despite the fact that Courts had prevented ethnic cleansing- right?  

People are not really looking to the court in the same manner as they still continue to do in India in the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s, where we have a string of rulings that, in fact, uphold the very principles that people do hold dear, and where there is a turn toward the constitutional courts.

I can think of no such rulings. Either the Courts supported the Government's position or the Law was changed and the Courts supported the Government's position. There was once a demand for a 'committed judiciary' which would anticipate what the Government wanted it to do. Then people remembered that judges are as stupid as shit. Nobody wanted to see them get naked and run around the Court with a pole up their butt and a great big Red Flag flapping from it. 

There’s multiple books on it, of why many common people turn toward the court and constantly keep petitioning them.

This is quite cheap to do and has nuisance value. I suppose some people do get bought off. Others are killed or beaten by goons. Judges themselves would use goons to get rid of tenants whom they couldn't legally evict in a timely anner.  

Because they see it as a continuation of the colonial system where the courts were a functioning institution. In Pakistan, that functioning institution is broken repeatedly.

The colonial system was based on military power. Pakistan's Army functions perfectly well.  

When we come to the Nawaz Sharif era, it’s really whenever the supreme court taps into a public opinion in such a way that there’s a great amount of support, then its rulings are seen as amazing and celebrated. If it does something that displeases the public at large, then it is seen as the political body that is making decisions because it’s been pressurized.

This is the liberal point of view. The truth is Pakistanis are proud of their Army. What nobody wants is for Generals to fall out with each other. So long as Bajwa is around, the Army will be popular. Musharaff, with hindsight, was a bad apple. Most Pakistani Generals are good enough eggs.  

I think we saw that in a really good way in a more recent decision, where the Pakistani Supreme Court ruled the no-confidence motion of Imran Khan, who was then prime minister—at least a couple of months ago he still was. Then we saw this outpouring in the public in support of Imran Khan where they said that, “Oh, the supreme court shouldn’t have ruled in that way, and it did so only because of political pressures.” I do think that there’s a great amount of that.

RAJAGOPALAN: It seems like at the end of the day, even though that’s the unelected branch of government, the populism that basically permeates the rest of the democratic institutions—it’s very hard to get away from that or protected from that in any kind of judiciary, especially in South Asia. That seems to be the threat that keeps coming up in all the different South Asian judicial projects.

Justice is a service industry. If it does not deliver value for money, it will be disntermediated.  

Is Postcolonial Constitutionalism Doomed From the Start?

RAJAGOPALAN: I want to ask a question more broadly about postcolonial politics. Is there a fundamental problem with the way all the postcolonial countries were born or their founding projects were framed, in the sense that most of them were born from a homegrown nationalist movement?

And the people who are involved in the nation-building project necessarily need to have enormous powers given to the state so that the nation-building project can succeed. Whereas constitutionalism requires that the powers of the state are dramatically rolled back. Is this the curse of the postcolonial constitutional project, that the nature of the founding in itself weakens the possibility of constitutionalism from the very beginning, and then it’s just downhill from there?

This is foolish. Power is expensive. Executive and Judicial power are dependent on State Capacity which in turn is dependent on cost of coercion or consensus building. Some Post Colonial states built on their inheritance and had increased power. Others became failed states even if- as in Lebanon- the people were hella smart. 

SINGH: I don’t think so. I think there is—if you, again, look at the moment of the founding of the Indian republic. Look at the speeches that India’s founding leaders give, look at what comes out in the press, look at what everyone is saying. Everyone is framing it as a charter of liberty, as a charter of republican freedom. Even those who believe otherwise—let’s look at Nehru as an example—frame it in those terms for public consumption.

Why bother looking at speeches? Every politician was saying all sorts of contradictory things.  

In a sense, they’re also almost forced to frame it in those terms for public consumption because people are not going to be very happy if you go and say, “Well, now we’ve designed this constitution, and we’ve taken all the power that the British gave, but we’ll use it for good.” No one actually goes and says that. It’s consistently framed as a thing which—to my mind, that is because they believe that there’s demand for this. They believe that it’s going to play well to the gallery.

And to the gallery, they’re not just looking at their former colonial overlords to say, “Well, we can do it as well as you.” But there’s also genuine public demand and genuine public sympathy with the constitutional project. Now, there’s no way of saying how much or whether this was just a manufactured elite consensus, elite sympathy, which was visible in the English-speaking press and legal circles and so on and so forth. To me, it is telling that there is this wave of public opinion.

Nobody else thought so at the time. There was Gandhian bullshit and there was Stalinist bullshit and plenty of hate speech against other religions or linguistic groups or castes.  

I don’t think there’s anything inevitable about postcolonial societies turning out this way. Again, I think of something that Sunil Khilnani wrote in his book “The Idea of India,” where he described India’s Constitution as an embarrassing monument just there because even though everything is just there, people aren’t really taking care of it or following it. I think that’s very much down to the way democracy has turned out in postcolonial societies.

Khilnani was and is khretin. The fact is, the Burmese were first out of the gate with a more Commie type of Constitution. India still faced the problem of integrating the Princely States and was anxious not to give the Brits an excuse to freeze up Sterling balances. The Constitution did not matter. What mattered was that the Constituent Assembly did a good enough job as an interim Government. It held elections and the outcome was everything Nehru could have desired. He indulged in a bit of hubris and did some stupid shit. But things could easily have been much much worse.  

There’s the pressures, of course, of democratic mobilization. In a sense, again, I’ll go back to Madhav Khosla because he mentions this in his book. I think he’s very right, that there are very few identities or very few axes along which you can have the public mobilization. In South Asia it tends to be along the lines of religion or caste, or language or these sorts of issues. There is very little choice-based or issue-based political mobilization for all sorts of reasons. I think that is what really harms pure constitutionalism, if you might call it that.

There was issue-based mobilization since the Thirties. There genuinely were zamindari and anti-zamindari parties. There genuinely were right wing people who wanted Labor leaders arrested and there were Socialists who were also Union organizers.  

There’s also another way of looking at it. I once alluded to it briefly in a newspaper article, which is to think of this as a more indigenous version of constitutionalism.

His article is foolish. The 1935 Act was very very fucking long. Thus the Constitution had to be very very fucking wrong as it was also incorporating the Nehru report. Furthermore it was incorporating Irish elements- e.g. Directive Principles- for complicated signalling reasons.  

To say that one of the things that happened when India’s Constitution came into force was, many people criticized it as a Western innovation which we were just wholesale transferring to a different context. Actually, it’s not.

Many of the points that we already run through, whether it’s the overbearing powers given to the executive, whether it’s ordinance, whether it’s the executive deciding when parliament is to be summoned and when it’s to be dismissed or paroled and so on and so forth, these are indigenous elements. They’re not really found in Westminster systems.

Everybody has ordinance or proclomation or executive action of some sort. Britain and Ireland and Canada and so on have the same rule re. dissolution. True, the Brits did have fixed terms for a decade but it has gone back to the old method. There are no wholly novel features of the Indian constitution. Da Valera had introduced Directive Principles. Affirmative action was already a feature though this was withdrawn from non-Hindus. Provisions re. Gazetted employment and specific statutory bodies might differ from those found in older Constitutions but did not represent any great novelty.  

These are indigenous elements that we’ve incorporated to ground the constitution in our context. It is possible to make the claim that this is, just as we have Indian secularism, perhaps we have Indian constitutionalism, and it’s not what we imagine constitutionalism to really be.

Very true. Indians have Indian food. It is not what we imagine food to really be- if we are deracinated cunts, that is. Also Indian moon is totally shit compared to American moon. That's why American landed on it while India landed on the Sun- or the Sun has landed on it. At least that's how it sometimes feels.  

RAJAGOPALAN: I think that’s a very helpful way of looking at it. The South Asian move, so to speak, comes in. Earlier you used the word liberty, which is central. I think the difference is that the South Asian project was liberty from the colonial masters and not necessarily liberty from the state, right?

Unlike America where you don't have to pay taxes if you don't want to and you can make as much alcohol or grow as much cannabis as you like.  

If it’s the colonial state, then there is this big fight for liberty.

Ireland and America fought for and gained independence from Britain. This did not mean that the Irish or the Americans no longer had to obey any law.  

If it’s not the colonial state, then liberty becomes sidelined for other, more important things, such as whether it’s an identity question or whether it’s a state-building exercise or something else.

America wanted to follow its own fiscal and monetary and defense and diplomatic policy. So did India. Liberty meant freedom from foreign rule. It didn't mean whatever stupid shit these nutters have in their brain.  

I think there’s a hierarchy there somewhere. Whether it’s intentional or not, I don’t know. This doesn’t happen in the postcolonial states that got dominion status for a long time and then became independent, or never became independent from dominion status, depending on which part of the world we’re talking about. There, you don’t need to make this move of liberty against the colonial state and then liberty against your own state. There, you’re just tying the hands of the state through this contract, so to speak, with the crown.

This is nonsense. Sri Lanka's trajectory was more not less majoritarian while it was still a Dominion. These guys must be utterly mad to think the hands of Dyer or O'Dwyer were tied by a 'contract with the crown'.  

I find that part very uniquely South Asian and quite interesting, in a way, trying to say that we have to be self-governing, purna swaraj [complete independence]. In some sense, did it weaken the idea of these democratic checks and balances because we only need to impose them on the foreigners, right? [chuckles] We never quite need to impose them on ourselves.

The checks and balances placed on South Asian states arise from the fact that they are as poor as shit. Economics matters. Productivity matters. Foreign exchange matters. Constitutions don't matter in the slightest.  

HUSSAIN: One of the things that we may want to keep in mind is that there’s also a profound transformation in the justification through which political power can articulate itself from the colonial to the postcolonial moment.

Nonsense! Political power articulated itself in exactly the same way- viz. beating and killing people or locking them up. Also bribing peeps or flattering them could work. But the main thing to do was tell lies and hope you could fake it till you made it.  

That is the pedagogical element, that the population needs to be trained before it’s ready to govern.

No. It is sufficient to train some of their representatives. The Brits had done this through dyarchy and then Provincial Autonomy.  

This capturing of an entire population within the waiting room of history is really no longer an argument that is made after 1947.

It was a silly argument because you had Indian Premiers in the Provinces and Indian Members of the Viceroy's Council and an increasingly Indianized Civil Service.  

Apart from the entire discussion on liberty, where you quite rightly point out that it is something that is consistently articulated against the colonial regime, but then no longer against people who do it in a state context, it’s the justification element that breaks away. That changes the entirety of the conceptual paradigm through which people ask for liberty. I do think, with that change, there’s also a crucial shift that people do see themselves as political activists. The reason that they no longer push for it is because they say now it is really us who are sitting in the driver’s seat.

Very true! Why did people stop campaigning for Independence after Independence? Was it because they'd have looked foolish?  

SINGH: Completely. Just a quick butting in. I think that is what makes India’s founding moment so transformational, is that no one makes a claim—of course, as the claim used to be made—that these people are going to be taught how to govern themselves, and then we’ll give government to them, is the idea.

But that was exactly what Olivier said in 1924 in Parliament! The Brits really did prepare the Indians with general elections from 1923 onwards (under dyarchy) and then full Provincial Autonomy under the 1935 Act. Westminster never again wanted to have to sit through such a long and boring and incomprehensible Bill. The Brits were sick and tired of having to distinguish between one type of wog or nigger and another. Let those savages run their own shitholes.  

And that’s why the granting of the franchise is such a big thing, is because you just see they’re going to figure it out. By doing they’ll learn.

Why didn't India get Universal Franchise like Ceylon in 1932? Gandhi succeeded in uniting all non High Caste Hindus against Congress. If Congress wanted something, there must be a good reason from not letting them get it. The truth is, High Caste Hindu males tend to be assholes to non High Caste Hindu males except when they are equal opportunity assholes in which case everybody hates them but may vote for them in the hope that others will find the fellow even more unbearable than they do themselves.  

That’s what gives Madhav Khosla’s argument such force.

Among cretins- sure.  

But that’s also what makes the actions of the leaders quite jarring in that there is an inherent tension that they’re unable to resolve.

Yes, yes. Inherent tension is causing too much problem nowadays. Army should take action.  

Debates, Then and Now

RAJAGOPALAN: Absolutely. I think that’s very well couched. Tripurdaman, you’ve read lots of debates for First Amendment and so on, as have I. Up to about even the end of the Emergency, I find the quality of [parliamentary] debates to be quite good. This is not the written word. It’s the spoken word. This is still before television, but you have newspapers carefully covering this stuff.

Lawmakers were a lot poorer then. They'd turn up for the subsidized canteen and hang around to shoot the breeze. There was literally nothing for them to do in Delhi. The place had no culture, no addas- forget salons.  

When I look at parliamentary debates today—I’m talking about something as important as the NJAC Amendment, which is changing the way we select our judiciary—it’s just a couple of pages long. The First Amendment debates, they run into hundreds of pages, right? Now, there’s hardly anything of meaning being said. The whole thing is a little bit procedural. It doesn’t feel like a genuine exchange of ideas.

Information is available on the web. There may have been a time when Parliament was a source of information and ideas.  

I’m not being posh and elitist. It’s not that you had to write letters and handwritten while sitting in jail, relying on your memory to quote Bertrand Russell or whoever Nehru quotes. It’s more that people seem to be listening to more television and radio and Twitter and everything else than ever before.

But is the exchange happening on big principles at all? Or do we have any evidence of that? Are there great speeches being given by Modi and his opposition in regional languages that I just haven’t found on YouTube or something like that? Where is this discourse taking place?

Everywhere except University Departments dedicated to shite subjects. Diminishing returns to non-STEM subject research set in very quickly. So these availability cascades and citation cartels become adversely selective of virtue signalling morons or paranoid cretins. 

SINGH: I’ll just start right from the beginning. I go back to my old supervisor Chris Bayly and his argument that India was not a literate society, but it was very much “literacy-aware society,” as he used to say.

No. It had a tradition of 'walking books'. An illiterate man who could repeat Scripture was respected. A guy who quoted Scripture in a written speech was just a copyist. If you write a book, there is always the suspicion that you plagiarized it.  

Ideas always had a life of their own in India, and there was always transmission of these ideas, and it wasn’t necessarily through the written word. I don’t think we should privilege the written word so much given, of course, the oral heritage of our culture as well.

The second is that I think one of the reasons why we feel this way is, of course, that these people had a lot of time on their hands when they were doing this. They were freed from the demands of government. Government itself was a lot less complex. There was a lot less scrutiny, so it was quite easy for you to get away with a lot of stuff. Plus, we also forget that there was a history that all of these people had of working alongside each other for a long period of time. Whether it was as colleagues, whether it was even Nehru and Jinnah who were competitors in a way.

There was memory of working together or working alongside each other, even for differing objectives in the national movement or in the anti-colonial mainstream. This was the political mainstream of anti-colonial politics, which doesn’t exist anymore. There’s no real memory current-day politicians have of working alongside each other, no real common objective that has really bound them together over a long period of time and so on and so forth. I think that’s, again, a very important reason.

Yes there is. During the Emergency, people bonded in jail just as they had under the Raj. Sadly the Janata Morcha was factionalized. Furthermore, since Morarji had been under solitary confinement, people had forgotten how fucking horrible he was.  

The third, of course, is as I mentioned, that there is this discourse happening now. Whether you assume that Twitter threads constitute a form of political discourse or not, or whether Facebook posts constitute a form of political discourse or not, I don’t know. I can’t really say, but even if you look at the history of Indian political thought, until a decade—10, 20 years ago—nobody really thought there was any Indian political thought. Nobody thought of Nehru, Patel and Mukherjee as thinkers. There are plenty of people who still don’t see them as thinkers.

But some people get paid a little money to pretend they were great philosophers. On the other hand, Ambedkar was always considered a thinker. JP was once considered a thinker. Indeed, at one time, Bhave's Bhoodan was thought to represent something quite marvelous. On the other hand, it must be admitted that Nehru's 'Discovery' went down well with the Americans. If you didn't know India, you might think he did. 

There is a dividing line between a thinker and a practitioner. India never really had a tradition of the theorization of thinkers writing political treatises or theorizing what’s going on.

Sure it did. People studied Political Science and read popular translations or summaries of various foreign and indigenous thinkers. However the very rapid changes the world experienced after 1917 meant that theory was playing catch up.  

It was very much these thinker-politicians who were writing and practicing. A lot of their writing was in engagement with each other. Hardly anyone starting ab initio pens a treatise of political theory. There are no Thomas Jeffersons and James Madisons here.

But Jefferson and Madison were part of a pre-existing tradition of the long eighteenth century. But they lost salience with the advent of Jackson.  

RAJAGOPALAN: Ambedkar, maybe.

SINGH: Ambedkar, maybe, but actually, I would say only Gandhi. Gandhi’s, also, political treatise—if you look at “Hind Swaraj,” well, it’s interesting, to say the least.

It is ignorant and stupid. Nehru told Gandhi this around 1930 but Gandhi threatened to publish their correspondence and Nehru had to back down. But fifteen years later, the tables were turned. Nehru bluntly told Gandhi that his book was stupid shite. However, Gandhi always did have Quaker and other backing. Schumacher was popular in the Seventies. He gassed on about 'Gandhian economics' and U Nu's equally stupid 'Buddhist Socialism'. Small isn't beautiful. It's just small.  

Twenty years ago, academics would have laughed at you to say, “Well, here’s India’s political theory, and I’m going to look at Nehru or Patel.”

Nehru had a political theory- Planning, Cooperatives, Non-Alignment, a middle road between Communism and Capitalism. Patel didn't have a political theory. Ambedkar just hated the High Castes but you could ascribe a mimetic type of 'Law & Econ' theory to him as well as a Pragmatic philosophy. Radhakrishnan was a celebrity philosopher in England in the Thirties- as Graves & Hodges disapprovingly recorded. But he wasn't Bertrand Russell level crazy.  

Today, we do, and we think of them as thinkers.

If paid to do so- sure. 

Perhaps there is someone 20 years down the line or 30 years down the line, 50 years down the line, will look back at Twitter threads, et cetera, and deduce that this is how political discourse is conducted.

Also, just a quick point around that argument is that it’s the same with government records, right? How are historians going to write history now that a lot of communication is happening on WhatsApp and on these encrypted networks, et cetera, and communication isn’t necessarily through telegrams or through letters? I don’t know. Maybe WhatsApp chats or maybe even TikTok, as I remember one of Adeel’s former colleagues used to look at, is a form of political communication and is a form of political discourse that people better than us or better-equipped to judge than us will make sense of that.

This is foolish. 20 years down the line, we'll be much better at data mining and analysis. Mathematical politics will have advanced greatly. You'd probably have very good cellular automata based simulations which might turn politics into a branch of biology. 

Coalition Building

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes. Actually, more generally, I think record keeping has become quite different. Of course, there are so many different kinds of media on which one must keep records. I was doing some research at the national archives a few years ago, and they were talking, lamenting how most parliamentarians don’t actually give their records or cabinet papers, all their personal files to the archives anymore. He said the last person who kept meticulous records through most of his career and handed them over was Somnath Chatterjee, I think, or that was happening at that time, if I remember. He says virtually no one else does that anymore.

We wouldn’t have much discourse on the Indian Constitution if we didn’t have Rajendra Prasad papers, right? The R.P. papers are the foundational primary material for—I think there is some of that, a question of, how are we keeping records and so on? I think it’s also a question of, is there any attempt to build a coalition? At the time of the nationalist movement, no matter how far apart people are in their political view or religious view or ideological view, you are still trying to build this huge coalition because the colonial government is this overwhelming global imperial power. You need all hands on deck.

This is silly. There was a grand coalition- viz. the Congress Khilafat combine. Then Gandhi lost his nerve. It collapsed. Indians could not agree till the Brits threatened to leave without an agreement.  

You need to find all the different strands on which people can agree so that they can maybe band together, or at least you need to know where people stand. We don’t need that kind of coalition to be built around anything anymore, right? There’s a very clear electoral math of 535 parliamentary seats, or whichever legislature we’re talking about. Then math turns out the way it needs to turn out, but the intellectual coalition is almost irrelevant within politics. It may have to be built outside politics, which is a separate question.

Apparently, these guys haven't heard of political parties which have policy committees and which put out ideological statements. True Indians may use words like 'vichardhara' for this which these coots don't understand because C.A Bayly didn't explain it to them.  

They’ve done this with the Hindutva project and the Gita Press project and things, trying to build this big cultural or intellectual coalition outside of politics. I feel like that might be another reason we are simply not going to get debates of this sort from current-day politicians. Why would they need to engage with each other in a meaningful way and try to find common ground? What’s there in it for them?

Politics is about horse trading. Parties want to increase 'deliverables' if they are in power or to find 'wedge issues' if they aren't. But even here there are gains from 'coordination' games.  

SINGH: You’re right. You’re absolutely right. There isn’t that much. Equally, I’d also step back a bit. There was engagement across the political spectrum, but partly, it was also driven by the fact that the political, constitutional and legal boundaries were still a bit fuzzy. No one knew what form the future India would take.

Which is why there was a 'hold out' problem. If the 'expected gain' is undefined, you could get a bigger pay out now. Lower Knightian uncertainty in this respect means better 'common knowledge' Shapley values.  

Look at something like the 1930s when the Round Table Conferences happen. There’s the idea of the federation. Indian princes are forced to negotiate with British Indian politicians. Ambedkar is forced to negotiate with Gandhi.

This is foolish. Ambedkar was taking a pro-British line but could be disintermediated by other, more popular, Dalit leaders. Gandhi was keen to keep Ambedkar in play for his own reasons. But the Rajah-Moonje pact was a done deal.  

There wasn’t a preexisting structure that could really contain these multitudes, so no one could say, “Well this is the structure and within which we have to function.”

The Brits had created a structure. Then they left. Indians built on what they inherited from the Brits. Sadly, they didn't pursue sensible economic or diplomatic policies and so a course correction had to be made. But, to some extent this was a choice. Nehru and others really did think India was shit. It ought to learn this lesson the hard way and thus come to accept that Indians could not have the nice shiny things other similar countries ended up possessing.  

There was a need to take everybody’s views on board because you never knew what shape the country was going to take.

This is foolish. The second Round Table Conference showed that everybody who wasn't a High Caste Hindu loathed Gandhi and his chums. There is no point taking on board the views of people who think you are shit and should just fuck off and die already.  

Now that there are a lot of things that are settled and there’s been experience of how electoral politics plays out, it’s quite right, there is no real need for that sort of engagement.

Because you can disregard the views of those who think you should fuck off and die if they represent a minority. Concentrate in majority consolidation.  

Also, equally, when that sort of need arises, Indian politicians have proven themselves quite adept at being able to engage with each other at building coalitions, at running coalitions, at keeping them going. NDA-1 and UPA-1 are both prime examples, or if you would go further back in time, the V.P. Singh government supported by the BJP and by the communist parties.

The Janata Morcha was a coalition.  

They have proven quite adept at coalition building in a way that I would argue someone like Nehru didn’t. Those who disagreed with Nehru or didn’t see eye to eye with him—whether it was Ambedkar, whether it was Mukherjee, whether it was John Matthai and so on, everybody—within two, three years, by the end of 1950 really, they’re all out.

They chose to quit.  

Who is more adept at political engagement? I don’t know.

RAJAGOPALAN: We’ll find out, I guess, in the future.

HUSSAIN: I was just thinking when we were talking about how these debates of the early 20th century create or have a specific intellectual heft that we see lacking. I was thinking about the first debate that Iqbal has with Nehru. It’s a debate that is very much rooted in what was then known as the “gutter press of the Punjab.”

The entire blasphemy issue that has become the key question of Pakistan constitutional politics, and of the precursors of the Indian Constitution, was very much something that people said should not be read—the Arya Samaj, Ahmadiyya controversies, the polemic, et cetera. Constitutionalism and politics unfold in very strange ways. That’s something that I would just like to say at the end. We never know.

This is foolish. Punjab dominates Pakistan. Punjabis are a tiny minority in India. Nobody gives a shit about them unless they run amok in which case they are slaughtered on an industrial scale.  

SINGH: That’s even the First Amendment, where actually a lot of pages of the debate are devoted to Nehru saying there are these one-penny, two-penny sheets that come out every week and write whatever they want, and they’re full of slander and gossip and fake news. Actually, this would be an interesting paper for someone to write as to how Indian constitutionalism and political thought has been influenced by the gutter press.

RAJAGOPALAN: You’re right.

So, these guys get their papers are on a level with the gutter press. Cool.  

HUSSAIN: To shamelessly plug my next book, which is “Revenge, Politics and Blasphemy,” which tries to map the constitutional debate around blasphemy in those very early debates of the late 19th century.

Fuck constitutional debates. You will be fucking killed if you do it or are accused of doing it in Pakistan.  Salman Taseer was killed by his own bodyguard. Adeel may be safe enough in Holland. Still, to be on the safe side, it is good that he is pretending to be a very stupid sort of lawyer. Why kill him? He may provide expert testimony of a garbled sort in favor of one of your terrorists at some future date.

There are three reasons why South Asian academics in shite subjects are so shite

1) Because they are stupid.

2) Because Whitey will give intellectual affirmative action to darkies who are demonstrably as stupid as shit.

3) Because nobody back home has an incentive to kill them because they are clearly gibbering idiots and thus may be Holy Fools.