Shruti Kapila writes in Print
As this column is on the Congress party, I offer first and foremost a trigger warning: it is not going to be about what ails it and the usual litany of complaints against it or its leadership.
Its going to be about what all Shruti's columns are about- viz. the crazy shit inside her brain. Since she is a Professor at Oxford, we read her columns so as to have a good laugh at them posh peeps wot went to Collidge.
You can save the next five minutes of your life if that’s what you are expecting and stop reading right here. The Congress party has had a rather good week of mobilised action combined with combative words and images, which indicates that it is gearing up for a fight.
The problem is that what they are 'combating' is serious charges of financial fraud on the part of the dynasty.
Is this a new Congress in the making?
No. Courting arrest because your boss may be arrested for fraud anyway is not what Gandhian satyagraha was about.
Before I hazard a guess, I am going to offer two main provocations as to why many Indians love to hate the Congress and even obsessively so sometimes.
Indians expected Rahul to take charge of the Commonwealth Games- as his Dad had taken charge of the Asian Games- and then to rudely shoulder aside Manmohan so as to lead his party into the elections. He'd have won though, like his Dad, he might have been brought down by a V.P Singh/Arun Nehru type Cabinet colleague because of the dynasty's corruption. Still, he'd have done his job and fulfilled his Party's raison d'etre by giving the country a plausible PM candidate. Rahul wouldn't step up to the plate and wouldn't let any one else do the job either. Worse, his interference in the politics of Congress ruled States turned out to be disastrous. Alienating Himanta Biswas Sarma in Assam was just the start. Congress was soon wiped out in all the Seven Sisters. Snubbing Scindia brought down Kamal Nath. Another Royal whose nose was put out of joint was Amarinder thus wiping out Congress in Punjab. Even Chattisgarh may be lost as Rahul fails to get Baghel and Singhdeo to play nice.
On top of Rahul's inability to manage infighting in the State units, he has now turned anti-national. He says India is not a nation- in which case there should be no Indian National Congress- it is like the European Union from which Britain just exited. This endorses secessionist claims.
I have in mind especially those vociferous haters of the Congress party who belong to the once old but ever-expanding establishment of the educated, English-speaking, metropolitan or city dwelling elite.
Rahul was our man. But he shirked his duty and then turned anti-national.
They may or may not have become full-fledged devotees of Hindutva. Some of them are now captivated by Arvind Kejriwal’s Aam Aadmi Party (AAP).
Rahul & his chums brought down Congress rule in Shruti's native Punjab. Kejriwal, not Modi, benefited from the chaos Rahul sowed there.
As a once-dominant party, the Congress has always had its critics and opponents but this ‘love to hate the Congress’ routine is only a decade-old trend.
Because it was only a decade ago that Rahul began shitting the bed in earnest. If his Mummy didn't want him to risk getting assassinated why didn't she put in some one else to lead the party into the elections? Why was it a case of Modi vs Nobody?
At that very moment, I started to observe the Congress party seriously and really for the first time.
Bizarre! The lady had studied at JNU. How do you remain unaware of Congress politics while doing a post-grad degree on that campus?
My interest remains on political ideas, both old and new,
Shruti is too stupid to understand political ideas.
and the promise and perils they offer. There is a lot that can be said about ideological wars currently raging in India and across the globe.
No there isn't. Ideology does not matter. Effective administration and 'deliverables' decide electoral outcomes.
But I want to capture today, however crassly,
crass means 'showing no intelligence or sensitivity'. Shruti seems remarkably self-aware. On the other hand she may have confused 'crudely' with 'crassly'. An intelligent person may put matters in a crude way. A stupid person can only speak in a crass manner.
some prevailing sentiments and the psychic life of politics they are fuelling.
Shruti will now proceed to attribute utterly bizarre sentiments to Indians.
In his remarkable book Age of Anger: A History of the Present, essayist and novelist Pankaj Mishra singles out the power of political sentiments.
But Mishra has zero knowledge of, or influence on, Indian politics. Prashant Kishore is the 'king-maker'. He's the guy Shruti should be emulating.
The ace sentiment underlying the anger of our age is resentment. You don’t have to know your Nietzsche—who first wrote about it—
Kierkegaard preceded Nietzsche in this respect. But the concept was familiar to the ancient Greeks and Indians. Upanaha is the Sanskrit term. It was the tragic flaw of some of our ancient Emperors. The 'Ajatashatru complex', according to a Japanese psychoanalyst, arises from a perceived failure or withholding of maternal care which causes life-long resentment and political dysfunction.
to recognise resentment. It is a toxic, if potent, combination of both desiring and despising that you wish to emulate or even become.
That is simply envy or mimetic rivalry. Ressentiment includes a notion of blaming the other for one's own deficiency. Rahul displays this to Modi.
Politically and socially, it has been associated as a syndrome of a rising elite.
by whom? Those who rise have no need for it. Envious scribblers may well scribble about hostility, or inferiority complexes, or anything else which can earn them a couple of bob.
Often this is amped up as a struggle against the old, fake, decadent and the tired by the new, young, brave and above all, real.
Only by those who have nothing sensible to say. In India, Rahul could have played the 'youth' card in the same manner as Akhilesh. Instead he played the 'I'm a big baby' card. Instead of 'being the change' youth 'wants to see in the world', Rahul presented himself as the nappy the Dynasty needed to be changed.
Or westernism against nativism.
Rahul could have represented westernism. Instead he started babbling about being a janeodhari Lingayat or whatever.
Or the metropolitan against the provincial.
But 'Khan market gang' aint 'metropolitan'. It is the embodiment of a useless nomenklatura.
And so on.
As Edward Gibbon used to say.
This has indeed been the storyline in India for the last ten years.
No it hasn't. First there was the anti-corruption campaign. Then everybody- except Congress and the Left- started talking about 'governance' and 'last mile delivery'. When that faltered, Modi could fall back on good old fashioned Hindu Nationalism which Congress and the Left opposed with the result that they were wiped out in Delhi, UP, Bihar, even Bengal.
The clash between the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Indian National Congress (INC) was initially staged as a clash between the old and the new.
No. It was staged as a clash between good governance and a bunch of corrupt, incompetent, fossils.
Critically, it was not staged as a contest between Hindutva and liberal-socialism,
because 'liberal-socialism' does not exist.
in the years leading up to 2014.
there was Coalgate and 2G and innumerable other such scams. Then came Anna Hazare and the Lok Pal agitation. The Nirbhaya rape showed that Sheila Dixit could not protect her own daughter in Delhi after dark, though she was the CM. Meanwhile in Modi's Ahmedabad, we saw girls coming out of cinema halls at eleven o'clock at night.
Resentment effectively erases and replaces underlying clashes of political ideas with an emotional vocabulary of competitive envy.
Not in India. Everybody resented the fuck out of the Brits but they hated and distrusted each other even more.
Corruption thus unsurprisingly became the clarion call of the so-called new era, because it captured both old-world decadence and up-to-date financial scamming.
There was an easy remedy. Rahul could have said he was having to take over from the decrepit Manmohan because the latter could not put a lid on corruption. Like Rajiv in 1984, he would be the new 'Mr. Clean'
As widely noted, corruption is the classic anti-political cause
anti-ideological cause maybe, but not 'anti-political'. Ask Kejriwal. That's how he got his start.
because no individual let alone party will argue for it.
Nor will they argue for compulsory sodomy for senior citizens. However, some parties will do more to block anti-corruption campaigns than others. That's all that matters.
In the end, it didn’t matter whether the centrepiece of that campaign or the notorious 2G ‘scam’ figure was real.
Yes it did. Had the Congress not been rudderless, it could have put up a better defense. At the time, we thought the Congress strategy was for Rahul to appear to be rebelling against 'the old guard' and leading his party into the election as 'Mr. Clean' or 'the voice of youth' or something of that sort. But Rahul was gun-shy. Thus the election was a contest between Modi and Nobody.
It was as real a metaphor as they get.
Metaphors aren't real at all. So, Shruti is saying there was no real corruption. She is wrong.
Corruption crucially captured resentment as both disgust and envy,
No. We are angry with a mugger or a guy who extorts a bribe from us. We want the fucker to be punished. This has nothing to do with 'disgust' or 'envy' or 'violent fraternity'.
and that made people’s minds all too quickly against the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government.
Shruti wrote this all too quickly which is why it is ungrammatical. The plain fact is, it is difficult for your side to win a boxing match if your side doesn't have a boxer in the ring. Congress, despite being a dynastic party, went into the election without a PM candidate.
I am not saying that there were no financial irregularities. Rather, the charge of corruption ensured that Hindutva was disguised as populism.
There is no need to disguise Hindutva in a country where Hindus are the overwhelming majority.
It certainly disallowed the Congress party to lay any claims to its record on governance, especially the economy,
but Congress bleeding hearts had already cut off Manmohan at the knees and thus further reform was off the table. At the time, people thought that Congress wanted a weak NDA coalition to push through these unpopular measures. The truth was simpler. Congress's raison d'etre was put to Rahul in the PM's chair. But he wouldn't sit in it and wouldn't let anybody else sit in it. Thus Congress would have to remain in opposition at the Center.
communal amity, or fundamental rights that it had all enhanced.
but only in its own imagination. The fact is Congress had taken to attacking Hinduism and jailing Hindu nuns and monks on false terrorism charges.
Inciting rage, the issue of corruption gave the softest landing to the newly formed AAP, mainly due to the unconditional love it got from a then all-powerful and entirely uncritical media. [In full disclosure I wrote my first op-ed in 2013 and was one of its few if any critics then.]
She babbled in an illiterate manner about Lohia who inspired the Samajwadi caste-based parties but was not against corruption because, back then, there was none at the higher levels of Indian politics. Indeed, even dynasticism had not raised its ugly head.
The near-obsessive focus on the Congress’ leadership in this ‘love to hate the Congress’ syndrome is because it fulfils a major psychic need.
No. We may 'love to hate' the 'moral inversion' of the librards but Congress does not need to be libtard and anti-national. It could be efficient and effective. Rahul should just have hired Prashant Kishore and spent more time on holiday. Also he should get married. Dynasties need heirs.
The beating of the dynasty drum allows for the displacement and purging of guilt.
How? I feel guilty for eating all the chocolate eclairs. How would 'beating the dynasty drum' help me?
This especially holds true for the ‘middle classes’: most widely and broadly defined from the lower-end salariat to middle and high income and the plain ugly rich in India.
No it doesn't. Shruti may be speaking of Punjabi Hindus like herself who were too stupid to do STEM subjects and become 'plain ugly rich' but that is a tiny sliver of the Indian population. Lots of people come from States where neither Congress nor the BJP has much presence.
Historically opposed to any form of land or income distribution,
she means redistribution. They don't teech Inglis gud in Punjab.
and largely ‘upper’ caste and hostile to affirmative action or reservation, this stratum has loudly aced the dumping of its own responsibility in this convenient manner.
aced? Is that a Punjabi expression? In normal English, aced means to get a perfect score. Maybe aced means acclaimed in the Pind.
The aggressive hostility noticed in regular rants and taunts against the Congress, and especially Rahul Gandhi, testifies this all too visibly.
She means audibly. Oxbridge must be laughing its collective head of at this soni kudi's malapropism
India’s social fabric, to say nothing of caste, is equal to family.
Families are part of every country's 'social fabric'. Shruti thinks India is different from Britain where there is an actual Royal Family.
Look no farther than your local grocery store, or to any lawyer’s or even dentist’s chambers, small or posh, or film, media, academia: name any profession or business, the Indian family rules.
Lots of country's have Mom & Pop stores. It was quite common, fifty year ago, in this country to find family firms in the service sector. It was only in the eighties that the mania for mergers overran this green and pleasant land. India is a bit different because there are significant advantages of being the karta of a Hindu undivided family. But India is similar to other countries in the region whether or not they have a caste system. Shruti is too stupid to understand the economics behind this.
Strict lines of descent define both direct and indirect lines of patronage and the lateral flow of prestige, money, and social network.
No. Lines of descent are not strict because of adoption, endogamy and changing inheritance laws and customs. Client-patron networks have always been fluid. Incidentally, there can be lateral flow within a network. The network can't itself flow laterally. Shruti is shit at English. Oxbridge is laughing heartily.
Social mobility in these consortia of families is marked by routines of sucking up and pushing down, and social cohesion is equally policed by strict codes of insiders and outsiders.
Maybe in Punjab. But Hindus in Punjab have little power. I suspect that Shruti is an outsider. Her English is totes dehati- right?
But in singling out and making Rahul Gandhi a punching bag
we put our finger on the sole cause for Congress's decline and the lack of a credible opposition candidate for the top job.
allows you to forget, if not atone, your complicity
if you forget something how the fuck can you atone for it? She means 'allows you to forget your complicity rather than seek to atone for it'.
What complicity do we have in Rahul being a cretin? Did we drop him on his head when he was a baby?
and at the same time enables you to virtue-signal and espouse ‘merit’ and competition.
Shruti is still very upset that a 'tribal' has become President. Yet Shrimati Murmu has merit. She competed and won. Good for her.
Perhaps no one is more guilty of this displacement than the media.
Only if a sin or a crime has been committed is there any occasion for guilt. Rahul is shit. The media didn't make him shit. They can try to build him but then he says and does really stupid shit. The thing is hopeless.
On the other hand, Shruti did interview Rahul. She is stupider than him, yet it was he whom the media shat upon. Why? Shruti went to JNU. Rahul didn't. He hasn't her excuse.
Simply put, the mainstream as well as most regional media goes after Rahul Gandhi now, aggressively and frontally with the same-old tired tropes, mainly because it must deploy its considerable powers of criticism somewhere.
No. Rahul is the worst national politician in India. This is the man who could have become PM in 2012 or 2013 but who refuses to even be President of his own party. He has a deer-in-the-headlights look about him. If he had simply stuck to reading out speeches, he'd have been fine. Just being Prime Minister is enough to look Prime Ministerial. But he has chosen to appear, as Obama said, 'nervous and unformed'- a man-child of 50 who still shows zero 'passion' or 'aptitude' for the job he has inherited. Compare him to Bilawal- whose Urdu is poor but who seems to be doing okay as Foreign Minister- and the contrast is stark. Bilawal is self-assured. Rahul, who is 18 years older, behaves like a sophomore discovering campus politics after a strict Catholic boarding school education.
Benched by the ruling dispensation, the Indian media vents in this manner simply because it can do to the Congress what it can’t do elsewhere.
Congress has done this to itself. It could have put up Montek or some other technocrat to take on Modi in parliament while Rahul and Priyanka and Sonia make appearances on the campaign trail. Sonia showed that 'back seat driving' is perfectly feasible in the Indian political setup. Had Prashant Kishore replaced Ahmed Patel, Congress could have taken advantage of the deteriorating economy. Indeed, in 2018, some were optimistic about its chances. But 'chowkidar chor hai' (the watchman is the thief) backfired. Most Indians would be glad of a regular salary as a chowkidar. But Modi was in the same position as them. People of Rahul's class are quick to accuse the chowkidar of theft when they misplace things by their own carelessness. Rahul had struck exactly the wrong note. Now he and his mother are under the ED scanner. Where did they get so much wealth from? If anybody has stolen money, it is them. Rajiv was toppled for Bofors corruption. Rahul and Sonia may end up in jail for tax evasion and money laundering. True, Motilal and Jawaharlal and Indira had done jail time. But it wasn't for fraud or corrupt practices.
If populism cloaked Hindutva,
There was no cloaking. To be frank, Modi greatly benefitted by the attempt to paint him as a Hitlerite Hindu chauvinist.
then the drum of dynasty hides the true work of authority now.
is this a Punjabi idiom? Nothing wrong with the Scindia dynasty or that of Amarinder. Come to think of it, Varun has acquired an intellectual gravitas sadly missing in his older cousin. He can't be happy in the BJP. Why not bring him into the family business?
Since it is a political party and not a social media influencer, the under-attack Congress cannot take any solace in the influencer’s mantra of ‘haters gonna hate’ or keep calm and just carry on!
Congress is losing states. In Kerala, in the Assembly polls, Rahul campaigned hard but factionalism took its toll. The bigger problem has to do with Religions. The Marxists have managed to coax away some Christians who ought to see Sonia's son as one of their own. Now it looks as though the Muslim League too might join hands with Vijayan. The Nair vote is going to the BJP. It is likely that Rahul won't be electable in Wayanad. Indeed, the tally of Congress MPs from Kerala may go down from 16 to 4 or 5. This is a far cry from the triumphalism of 2019.
The big question now has to do whether Rahul becoming a Lingayat will backfire in Karnataka in the same way that his contesting from Wayanad backfired in Kerala. What about Tamil Nadu? Will the DMK continue to accommodate Congress? Perhaps. But ED is a powerful weapon. The two southernmost States may prefer a mutually beneficial deal with the center so as to get on with economic growth. Indeed, popular Chief Ministers in other States may, like Nitish Kumar, alternate between partnering with the BJP and allying with their regional rival. This is like the 'dominant firm, competitive fringe' model in economics. But there can only be one dominant firm. Few can doubt that it is Modi's leadership that gives the BJP dominance. But it is unlikely that Modi would have run against Prime Minister Rahul in 2014. Advani would have had his last hurrah and gone in defeat. But Rahul would soon have been brought down by a V.P Singh type cabinet colleague. Still, Congress would have remained the dominant firm.
Last week’s public protest by the Congress party looks like it is not labouring under the old attitude of noblesse oblige to simply carry on.
It was a protest against being investigated and sent to jail for fraud. That has nothing to do with noblesse oblige. Why pretend that these guys are courting arrest because they care about farmer suicides or Rohingya refugees or some noble cause of that sort?
Sharp words and strategic action are now staging its new political rhetoric.
Because Rahul baby doesn't want to go to jail though maybe his Mummy will have to.
To be sure, it ain’t the agitprop antics of the AAP.
i.e. stuff which wins elections
In squaring up the harsh reality of the economy against the passions of identity,
the harsh reality of going to jail for economic crimes even though one has a very passionate identity as a big cry-baby
Rahul Gandhi seeks new forms of political identification.
as opposed to criminal identification.
In being fearless against the divisive, if powerful, politics of hate while aligning with the weak and vulnerable in an unforgiving economy, the Congress seems to return to its founding political principles.
Very true. Gandhis are enriching themselves only because they are very very poor and starving peeps innit? Just because they belong to Parsi-Catholic-Lingayat religious minority everybody is hating them. Founding political principle of Congress is claiming that going to jail represents a big sacrifice for the nation. So is being as corrupt and incompetent as fuck.
The party will need to charge its first political principles and virtues with the power of new sentiments of attachment.
Attachment to money and to Mummy. Mummy should remain President so I can have plenty of money even if this means she has to do some jail time.
The two fake storylines of corruption and dynasty, which speak entirely as self-descriptions of those who deploy them,
coz everybody who does so had a granny who was PM right?
can now no longer be cloaked in the cruel realities of staggering inequality and charged communal relations.
These staggering realities have existed since the time of Aurangazeb.
Cosplays
like Rahul posing as a Lingayat?
and violent spectacles of identity hatred
as opposed to non-violent spectacles which you can buy from Specsavers
that increasingly resemble bad B-grade Hindi films from the last century will be no match for the hunger games of the new global economy.
but will they be suitable match for Shruti's home made chole bhatore?
By embracing his lineage, nay dynasty and as a family of sacrifice,
what sacrifice? They did some jail time along with their pals and then the Brits turned over the government to them. That was 75 years ago. The plain fact is, Sonia married into a rich family. She became a shareholder in Maruti. Rajiv and his pals enriched themselves like nobody's business. The Vadras and the Gandhis are now very very rich. The question is whether they can find a scapegoat to get the ED off their back.
Rahul Gandhi has called out and named our current moment after its true ideological nature.
What ideological nature? Mrs Gandhi was killed- sure. But she was killed by Sikhs. Is Rahul's ideology one which insists on bombarding the Golden Temple? Does it involve the massacre of innocent Sikhs by Congress workers? Rajiv Gandhi too was killed. But he was killed by Sri Lankan Tamils. What fucking ideology was involved in that shit show? The plain fact is that autocracy is tempered by assassination. Nobody will bother to kill Rahul because he can't do shit and doesn't do shit and will never achieve anything at all except destroy the Congress party.
The gloves are off! The psychodramas of guilt and resentment are finally meeting their long-awaited match in politics.
This stupid lady wants to a Lacanian psychoanalyst. But even Rahul won't get on the couch for her. Sad.
Rahul may feel guilt because of all the money his family has stolen. He may resent the success of people like Modi and Yogi. But his guilt and resentment won't alter anything political. He may go to jail. He may not. Much depends on whether he can prove that he is not competent to stand trial for economic crimes because his mental age is eight. Shruti can be of no help to him there. Her mental age is seven. Why the two of them are not meeting and matching while drum of dynasty is doing cosplay with ideology due to violent fraternity.
No comments:
Post a Comment