Badri Raina is 82. He thinks RaGa's Puja vs Tapasya syzygy is 'meaningful'. He writes in the Wire that
The puja paradigm of politics continues the colonial model.
Monarchies and Empires are indeed based on a worshipful reverence for the ruling dynasty. The 'last Englishman to rule India' founded a dynasty. RaGa, as he himself says, could have been PM at the age of 25. His party worships him as God's anointed. Voters, however, are not enthused. They have had enough of 'the colonial model'. Incidentally, Rahul has on one quarter Indian DNA. One quarter is Parsi- i.e. Iranian. One half is Italian.
Tapasya, as a collective plebeian movement, is the perfect antidote to that unthinking oppressive paradigm.
Modi didn't go to College. He was too poor. He probably did do tapasya in some Himalayan cave or ashram in the jungle. More importantly, he represents the, 'Garam Dal', Revolutionaries many of whom were inspired by Hindu sanyasis or who themselves became sanyasis or Yogis. RaGa represents the 'naram dal' anglophile 'barristocrats' who never risked the noose during the Freedom struggle but did put in some jail time on a voluntary basis.
Come to think of it, the formulation proffered by Rahul Gandhi about puja and tapasya is neither facetious nor simple-minded.
It is mad. Politics is about winning elections and providing better Governance than your rivals. It has nothing to do with worship or ascesis. The King Emperor may have been described as the 'Defender of the Faith' but had zero role in ruling India. The British Raj was not ended by either prayer or super-powers gained through self-mortification. Like other European empires in the East, it collapsed for economic and geopolitical reasons.
It encapsulates a rather profoundly instructive truth about correspondences between forms of religion and forms of politics.
There is no such truth. Every religion features both ritualistic devotion and ascesis to some degree or other. In the Hindu tradition, only a few do tapasya but they also engage in devotional practices. But this has nothing to do with gaining or wielding power.
Where puja (worship) is clearly a hierarchical concept, suggesting a supplicant and a deity,
Not in Hinduism. The Brahma Sutra says there is reciprocity between worshipper and worshiped. Gods worship each other. One may worship the Guru who may worship you under some other rubric- e.g as guest.
tapasya (meditation) involves an individual endeavour to subject oneself to levelling regimens calculated to erase hierarchical distinctions, and to raise the ordinary to the exalted.
This is nonsense. The purpose of tapasya is to rise above the common ruck. You are supposed to gain super-powers though you modestly assert that you won't actually use them because urm....you like being homeless an hungry.
Prison is a leveling regimen calculated to erase hierarchical distinctions and to raise the ordinary psychopath to the exalted status of 'shot-caller'. On the other hand it is true that the RSS has an egalitarian ethos. When engaged in voluntary work, the wealthy Seth may take orders from a poor cobbler.
If the first entrenches an unequal relation of power,
Not in Hinduism where everybody is always doing puja to everybody and everything. Money and physical coercion entrench unequal relations of power. The fact that an orthodox Hindu does 'puja' to you because you are a guest doesn't mean you have any power over the fucker.
the second seeks to forge a morally-inspired horizontal spontaneity of common humanity.
This is done by doing stuff which is useful to the community or having a swell personality and being able to inspire people. Tapasya is not useful. Still, it would be cool if you could get super-powers just by standing on one leg for ten years.
This may be one reason why in our “Indic” – a favourite Hindutva allusion – civilisation, across religions, the wandering mendicant, rishi or sufi, has always held a more venerated status than a Pandit or Mullah.
The cunt just mentioned Sufis and Mullahs who are part of Islamic, not Indic, civilization. However, even more venerated than the Rishi or Sufi is the guy who is genuinely venerable, not a fucking ponce.
It is a valid inference that in speaking of puja as he did, Rahul Gandhi had a pregnant, even epiphanic, pronouncement in mind –an epiphany being a moment of searing perception that illuminates past, present, and future.
He suddenly realized he was a tosser. Better late than never.
In his last speech to the Constituent Assembly, we may recall, Ambedkar had cannily observed that whereas bakhti (ergo, puja) in matters of religious faith can be understood to be normative, such a sentiment, if transferred to the political realm would verily see the end of constitutional democracy in favour of cult-worship.
Indira turned Congress into a dynastic personality cult. Ambedkar himself became a Boddhisattva- but only because he couldn't get elected rat-catcher. Mamta has turned him into a Hindu God. But his progeny can't get elected either. Still, nobody thinks they are as stupid as the Dynasty.
When that happens, the rational and analytic resource of the body politic gives way to uncritical devotion, as to a deity in religion, and thus to the closure of questionings without which only dictators flourish as new gods appended to the pantheon.
NaMo attracts devotion because he wins elections. Congress has had to double down on RaGa worship because he loses elections. It is perfectly rational to think of a team captain who always wins as a God of that Sport provided one stops thinking any such thing the moment age catches up with him and he can't deliver victories. Sachin was a God but nobody thinks he should be playing for the country now.
Since tapasya, on the other hand, searches after that within oneself which exposes the falsity of egotistic discriminations, regardless of the disequilibriums of power, Rahul Gandhi seems to want to express that recognition in his frequent interactions with ordinary women, men and children along the way as he trudges T-shirted in the freezing cold, and with the media in order to establish a distinctly different human/political template from what the nation has been subjected to for nearly a decade now.
Bad guys, like Ravana, gain super-powers through tapasya. Heroes can gain specific divine weapons to overcome particular super-powered bad buys. As for this business of overcoming ego etc., you don't need to mortify the flesh at all. Just get a job and play a useful role. Don't pose as a Messiah or Mahatma or other such tosser.
Do recall how Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi walked out of a high-falutin meeting of the then Congress to go travel third class to see for himself where the people of India lived and in what circumstances.
What is this shit? Gandhi, like other blokes born in India, didn't need to get on a fucking train. There was plenty of poverty within 100 yards of any 'high-falutin' meeting. But this was also true of London and New York at that time.
Rahul may be understood to be doing the same thing on foot.
The guy got an MPhil in Development Studies from Cambridge 25 years ago. He has been an MP for 18 years. Does he really have to go on a long walk to discover that India is a very very poor country? Perhaps.
Tapasya, most of all, imbues the subject with the urge not to use political language to deflect, deceive, or deride, but to embrace the imperatives that afflict the vast mass of people who neither have access to political puja, nor benefit from it despite repositing faith in self-designated godheads.
Tapasya existed long before there was any 'political language'. Shooting arrows faster and more accurately than the other guy was how you secured political power. 'Embracing the imperatives that afflict the vast mass of people' involves organization, articulation and, above all, charisma. RaGa is shit at all three.
Back when RaGa was studying in the UK, Mahesh Yogi- who taught 'yogic levitation'- launched a political party 'the Natural Law Party' which fought elections in 72 countries. Apparently, they did get a guy elected in Croatia. I suppose the thing paid for itself by generating publicity for the Yogi's brand of tapasya.
If the first part of his tapasya was to stand down as an entitled Gandhi
He stood down in 2019 to make way for his Mummy. She stood down for Gehlot who refused the seat. Kharge was roped in as punishment for failing to secure Gehlot.
and make way for Kharge to take over the reins of the oldest party, his subsequent effort clearly appears to be to let common rather than entrenched opinion to determine what his deserts and dues for the future are.
The common opinion is the entrenched opinion- the fellow is a mooncalf. His job is to get people to vote for Modi because the alternative is an Opposition coalition as unstable as that of Chandrashekhar or Gowda back in the Nineties.
The common Indian will also, justly, look to see what follows the Yatra.
RaGa will go on holiday.
If the participants in the Yatra come to see it as the crowning act of a once-in-a-lifetime grand historical project with nothing better or more arduous to follow, its moral and political charge may come to be quickly dissipated.
The Yatra is supposed to end hatred and unite India. Suppose, when it reaches Srinagar, Muslims there swear to protect returning Pundits, then it would end on a high note.
Tapasya in politics
Presumably, walking a lot is thought of as 'self mortification' and therefore 'tapasya'. But lots of people spend good money to go on walking holidays. Its not as though Rahul is sleeping in huts and sharing the meals of the destitute.
can indeed be more exacting than in personal life; no better lesson to draw here than from the career of those who fought for Independence form colonial rule.
Those who actually fought were hanged or transported to the Andamans or lived in exile. Sulking in jail signals opposition not fighting spirit.
If, however, the human and spiritual capital of the Bharat Jodo Yatra
Raina thinks spiritual capital is different from human capital. No doubt, he thinks ghosts and specters are savvy investors.
continues to be invested in a sustained democratic partnership
between a dynasty and its scyophants
in foregrounding and fighting for people’s common needs
for 'roti, kapada aur makan'- right? But didn't Indira promise to deliver all that 50 years ago?
without a hankering after the main chance,
This former English Professor is confusing two different idioms. One may have an eye for ( or to) the the main chance and one hanker after something but one can't hanker after the main chance. Why? The answer is that there is little point hankering for a chance to get cake rather than just hankering for cake itself.
the edifice of the politics of puja may find itself cracking ,
very true! The Pope has noticed that Indian Catholics are running away from Church because they are afraid the roof will collapse on them.
defeating top-down propaganda and demagoguery that finds refuge in unquestionable cult-worship.
Congress is a cult because it continues to worship a shithead. The TMC and the DMK and AAP and BJP are not cults because though they may worship their leaders, those leaders are very successful.
Whether or not the Yatra has established Rahul Gandhi as the primus
a primus is a type of stove or else a Bishop without a see.
to lead the charge on behalf of secular-constitutional democracy is a poser that is best left to the body politic to pronounce on; and be sure they will.
They have. Rahul was rejected in 2019. That's why he resigned as Congress President.
Those that have ears to hear and eyes to see probably already have the answer.
D'uh!
One other consideration attendant upon the odyssey of the Yatra in which the Indian National Congress has clearly sought to relive its forgotten legacies of public immersion.
This is not a complete sentence. This English Professor's English is shit.
A.K. Antony has once again advised that the grand old party should woo the “Hindu” constituency.
Because India is over eighty percent Hindu.
One would like to know from Antony if the 12 crore votes the Congress polled in 2019 had no Hindus among them.
Congress got some Hindu votes but the BJP got some Muslim votes. Antony was from Kerala. He was making the point that the CPM is wooing the Muslim vote- indeed, the CM's son-in-law is Muslim- and so, to survive in Kerala, Congress needs to secure the Nair and Latin Christian vote- which is what Tharoor is doing. But Tharoor is persona no grata with the High Command.
Clearly, there must have been a preponderance, if it be agreed that those born Hindu but not Brahmin, Thakur, or Bania are also kosher Hindus.
I suppose this senile cunt means people like Narendra Modi.
Not that the 12 crore did not include whole chunks of the latter as well.
Whole chunks- there speaks the lapidary wordsmith!
We wish to submit to Antony that this form of computation now has lived out its day for the Indian National Congress.
But it was this fool who brought up the matter.
Its new narrative must draw from the accumulated experiences of the Yatra, not from ossified forms of drawing -room configurations.
So, this senile coot's narratives should be ignored.
Given the record that the Congress vote does, in fact, include large chunks of Hindu vote, Antony’s articulation suggests that it is not the “Hindu” constituency he has in mind but the “Hindutva” one.
No. Antony is saying Congress needs to get back Hindu votes it has lost to the BJP. What he isn't saying is that this involves getting a decent Prime Ministerial candidate. Gehlot would have been good enough. But Kharge couldn't rope him in and now the Party is doubling down on the mooncalf.
We would like to say that going down that path will not but be both counter to the genius of the Bharat Jodo Yatra but electorally a self-defeating one as well.
Rahul's walkabout has only managed to kill one Congress MP. The genius of the Yatra is not getting enough scope is what the rest of us would like to say.
The way to best the politics of Hindutva is not to second-fiddle it but to show it up for what it is – an anti-people, vested stratagem of those who seek to appropriate the riches of the realm under the garb of “cultural nationalism.”
Why not just say 'Hinduism is very evil' ?
The idea, canny as it seems, should be seen as a non-starter, both morally and politically.
Because most voters are Hindu.
Indeed, visibly, the Yatra as a force for communal harmony can be seen to have made discernible penetrations in the common mind wherever it has reached,
It will cause Kashmiri Muslims to stop wanting to kill Hindus- right?
bringing back what has been grievously lost over the last decade.
Congress lost the ability to run the country. By 2012, it was clear that Manmohan was a Prone Minister not a Prime Minister. The country still doesn't have a rival candidate to NaMo. Going walkabout won't help.
Therefore, catering now to sectarian constituencies
like Muslim dominated Wayanad?
would not but be a gross betrayal of the mission with which the party is seeking to both re-establish itself and to retrieve the constitutional republic.
Coz constitutional republics are dynastic- right?
Let it be clearly seen that the puja-paradigm of politics is at bottom a continuation of the colonial model.
The Viceroy was theoretically merely the puppet of the King Emperor. The Congress President is actually the puppet of the Dynasty.
Tapasya as a collective plebeian movement is the perfect antidote to that unthinking oppressive paradigm.
Very true. Consider the American or French or Bolshevik Revolutions. All were achieved by the great mass of the people standing on one leg and hopping from one end of the country to the other. Walking is not enough. Hopping alone will defeat Hindutva. Mind it kindly. Aiyayo.
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