Pranab Bardhan writing for the oxymoronic 'New Left Review' writes of some soi disant 'the 'New' India' by recycling false and foolish tropes which are almost as old as I am.
The preamble to the Constitution of India affirms the solemn resolve of its people to found a ‘socialist, secular, democratic republic’.
Mrs/ Gandhi, suspended the Constitution and jailed her opponents. She rammed through this amendment so as to send a clear signal- India would be dynastic. Previously, Hindus wanted democracy so that different leaders from different castes and regions of India could take turns holding power. Mrs. Gandhi reverted to the Dynastic, Imperial, model where her family would remain in power in saecula saeculorum- i.e. for ever and ever.
Today, on the 75th anniversary of the country’s Independence, it is plainly neither socialist nor secular—nor, one could well argue, democratic.
Nonsense! Only in a democracy can a 'chai-wallah' become PM. We don't know who will replace him but can be sure it won't be his son or daughter or nephew or niece. As for 'Socialism', Hindus don't want it. India is a Hindu country. The Muslims split off and there is are secessionist movements wherever Hindus are not in the majority. Hindutva or Ram Rajya is fine. Anything foreign isn't- unless it actually makes the country richer or more secure.
Indeed, contrary to journalistic wisdom, India has never been ‘socialist’, unless one confuses the term with statism.
And confuses 'statism' with the rule, or misrule, of a corrupt, incompetent, Dynasty. Bardhan comes from a state which was ruled by Communists till about a dozen years ago. Now the Left has disappeared. Mamta rules and after her, her nephew will rule. This isn't 'statism'. It is 'thugocracy'.
The concept of secularism is contested,
It is meaningless.
but if we use the political theorist Rajeev Bhargava’s thoughtful interpretation of it as entailing a ‘principled distance’ between religion and the state,
then it has never obtained. Worship of a dynasty is itself a Religion- a hypocritical one. Did you know that to be a member of the Congress, you must spin and wear khaddar? The thing is a cult founded by a Mahacrackpot who anointed Nehru as Prime Minister. Congress remains the personal property of Nehru's heir by primogeniture. His other great-grandson is with the BJP- for the moment. His cousin won't let him back into Congress because he says Varun has not kept faith with the family ideology. This is hilarious because Rahul's maternal grandfather was an actual Italian Fascist who volunteered to go fight the Commies in Russia.
then it certainly does not exist in India any more,
Because Hindus have realized that Socialism is stupid shite. So has everybody else.
going by the practice and utterings of its current leaders.
Its previous leader wore a turban. Why? It was because he was a religious Sikh. His wife sang kirtans.
India’s democratic institutions have been on the decline for decades,
No democratic country is ruled by a dynasty.
but this has accelerated so much in the last few years that Sweden’s V-Dem Institute
which does not contain a single person knowledgeable about India.
has authoritatively described it as an electoral autocracy.
It was a dynastic autocracy. It is now a democratic country. Modi won't get re-elected in 2024 if a better candidate is offered by the opposition. But this means the cretin Rahul must exit politics.
In a negative sense this helps to define some key aspects of the ‘new’ India.
Says a senile nutter.
1. obstacles
Since many may find this diagnosis rather grim, let me state right away that India has unquestionably made tremendous strides since
the loosening of the grip of the dynasty- assassination tempers autocracy, right?
Independence in income, life expectancy, literacy, transport, road networks, communications and other aspects of economic integration; there is no doubting the vibrancy of private entrepreneurship and technological advance—notably the digitalization of the national identification and payment systems—or the general social awakening and upward trends in other socio-economic indicators.
India had a better administrative and political structure and, aside from the blot of dynasticism and the Fata Morgana of Socialism, has built on those strengths. The fact is Hindus genuinely want democracy and so that is what they have got. Islam has an alternative type of leader- a 'Ghazi' or war hero who will defeat the 'Crusaders' and 'Kaffirs'. However, it must be said, there are some very successful and smart Islamic Monarchs and Emirs.
The disappointments are mostly with regard to India’s unrealized potential, all the more striking in comparison to some other developing countries. By conventional measures, economic performance was notably buoyant in the early 2000s. Although the 2010s were largely disappointing, growth fundamentals are still potentially strong: the majority of the population is relatively young, there is a vigorous entrepreneurial spirit in all corners of the economy and there has been a remarkably fast spread of connectivity through roads, mobile phones and digital technology.
Entrepreneurial spirit is a good thing but surely the Left is against it? The other point is that a lot of the infrastructure building has been done by entrepreneurs like Adani.
But major structural and institutional problems are blocking the full realization of these growth fundamentals. Focusing on long-term issues, rather than the immediate overwhelming problems caused by the pandemic,
which, with hindsight, we realize should have been allowed to sweep through the population till herd immunity was reached
for example, we could single out the following.
Infrastructure. The Indian economy has suffered from a substantial infrastructural deficit—railways, roads, power, irrigation, ports, airports; now broadband connectivity, etc—for many decades.
Because the dynasty killed off the managing agency system, subordinated the indigenous industrialists to a license permit Raj, and profited from massive corruption involving f.d.i- e.g Quatrocchi taking a big cut on every new fertilizer plant. By the mid-eighties, it was a question of, as Zail Singh wryly observed, 'andar Italian, bahar battalion'. Inside the Prime Minister's residence was the Italian Quatrocchi looting India, while outside the residence was a battalion of armed guards to keep the half Italian dynasty safe.
There have been creeping improvements but nowhere near what is needed for a sturdy growth process in the economy as a whole, and nothing compared to China’s dazzling achievements in this field.
Because India didn't shoot the 'activists' who prevented World Bank funded infrastructural Development back in the Nineties. This also meant that the initiative passed to Ambanis, Adanis etc.
Logistics problems and creaking infrastructure keep Indian goods uncompetitive in world markets. Public budgets have long been so laden with subsidies, salaries and debt servicing
i.e. transfers which get in the way of other transfers which can buy more votes
that relatively little is left for investment in infrastructure.
but the voter expects such infrastructure projects to be looted and thus rendered negative value adding. V.S Naipaul described this before I was born. Come to think of it, so did Kipling in 'the bridge builders'. The plain fact is that voters don't want Public Education, Health or Infrastructure because experience tells them they will be shitty White Elephants.
Modi showed this needn't be the case. That is why he will get re-elected in 2024.
Most tellingly, the central government’s fiscal deficit is overwhelmingly a revenue deficit (some 70 per cent), another indicator of its shrunk capacity for public investment.
Nirmala says she will halve that in the current financial year. We are skeptical because the election cycle doesn't work that way.
For a time, this deficiency of public funds for infrastructure was supplemented by public-private partnerships (ppps). But, as elsewhere, these were often saddled with problems of mismanagement, high debt-equity ratios, regulatory capture, opportunistic renegotiation, non-transparent regulations, corruption and cronyism, leaving a mountain of bad loans on the books of public banks, often underwritten by an unholy nexus between defaulters, bankers and politicians. Yet ppps are still very important for India’s roads and ports, and the private sector now owns almost all the country’s renewable-energy capacity and about 40 per cent of its thermal power, although the financing depends more on the banks than on the capital markets.
India's economists proved useless in fighting back against the 'activists' who, Edwin Lim of the World Bank tells us, prevented Development back in the Nineties. It was politicians- most prominently Chimanbhai Patel- who led the backlash against Medha Patkar. Still, it is only now that she can be labeled an 'urban Naxal'. Indeed, she has become radio-active. The BJP tried to smear Kejriwal by suggesting she was his CM pick for Gujarat!
Education and vocational training. Although secondary education is a minimum qualification for many good non-farm jobs, the children from poor families overwhelmingly drop out before entering or completing secondary school, on account of economic and—particularly in the case of girls—social compulsions
Bardhan won't address the elephant in the room- viz. illiterate teachers who buy their appointments but don't turn up for work. Dr. Jack Prager pointed out that something similar happened in the Public Health system in West Bengal. Economists like Sen and Bardhan ignored him. That is why their babbling on about 'state capacity' is wholly foolish.
2. state capacity
All these problems—infrastructure, education, public health, environment—involve issues of government effectiveness in the delivery of public goods and services, which is very low in India.
Because the 'buddhijivis' refuse to recognize reality- viz. Public servants- Government teachers and doctors, nurses etc.- don't serve the public. They may give kickbacks so as not to show up for work. But if they do, they may be beaten or kidnapped- at least in Didi's Bengal.
This can be analysed in terms of four inter-related kinds of state capacity—organizational, technical, financial and political.
Nonsense! It can be analyzed only as fraud and criminal behavior. Like Yogi Adityanath, you have to kill the big gangsters and bulldoze their houses. Only after that can you crack down on the truant teacher or the Doctor who doesn't show up work. Perhaps, if the Judiciary wasn't such a shit-show, such extra-constitutional measures wouldn't be needed.
Why is it that-
'in such essential ongoing activities as the cost-effective pricing and distribution of electricity, (India's) capacity is very poor.
The answer is that if the guys at the top are corrupt then they don't have the moral authority to enforce the rules. That's why leaders like Modi and Yogi can succeed where others fail.
This is partly because local political considerations interfere in matters like cost recovery (or under-recovery) from a large and politically sensitive customer base; here, organizational and political capacities are inter-related.
Modi was able to do a deal with farmers such that they gave up 'free' but shitty electricity supply precisely because he was neither corrupt nor the puppet of a dynasty.
Why are Bardhan & Co so utterly shite? The answer is that they don't understand that the US is rich. India is very very poor. It isn't the case that being a 'Democracy' automatically raises your per capita Income to first World levels. Poor countries can't afford high Income elasticity services.
The financial capacity of the Indian state is extremely weak
because India is very poor. However, low factor mobility means some rent can be extracted. But this keeps the country poor.
and as a result—and contrary to widespread perceptions—the state itself is relatively small.
But still bigger than it should be for any good it does.
Tax revenue as a proportion of gdp was only 17 per cent in 2019–20, which is unusually low for a democracy,
unless the country is very poor and most people are at a bare subsistence level. You can't extract blood from a stone.
and represents a slight decline in fiscal capacity from thirty years ago.
because factor mobility has increased. You can't extract rent from that which is elastic in supply.
This means the state not only has a very low proportion of civil servants relative to the size of its population, but
also employs the unemployable to do useless shite.
lacks the resources to fund many of the posts it has sanctioned. In 2014, the number of civilian employees per thousand of population in India was less than half that of the US, not to speak of Europe.
Because India is as poor as shit. The problem is that the perks of Government employment are vital to the social mobility of poor families and thus they still want quotas for useless Government jobs. This also means you have to pay pensions to people who were useless while in work and who spend all their time demanding increases in pensions after they retire.
In the us, the proportion of the total work force in the public sector is about 7 per cent, in the uk around 18 per cent and in India barely 2 per cent.
India should never have pretended it could have the same sort of Welfare State as rich countries with highly educated and productive populations.
India could have transferred rural girls into giant factory dormitories so as to get demographic transition and higher productivity. Bien pensant nutters like Bardhan forbade that course. They demanded crazy labor and land laws and created a huge compliance burden for the private sector. Criminals and the corrupt could ignore this creating a black economy. Now the silly man is complaining that
One reason why the tax–gdp ratio is particularly low in India is the enormous informal sector, which employs nearly three-quarters of non-agricultural workers and is largely beyond the bounds of direct taxation.
Because it is beyond the bounds of regulations of any type. If you treat property as a type of theft, theft becomes the title to property.
But even in the formal sector, tax rates on long-term capital gains in individual incomes are much lower than in Brazil, China or South Africa; about 60 per cent of declared long-term capital gains are from those earning over Rs. 10 million in annual capital gains.
Because the Indian capitalist had learnt to be wary of the Stationary Bandit. They use the funds of the Nationalized Banks to expand operations in India while offshoring their own assets. There is a bubble here such that Capital Gains can always turn into Capital Losses for the Public Sector lender.
The deductibility of investments from individual income taxes also helps the rich.
Who would otherwise show themselves to be the disabled beneficiaries of foreign trusts.
Wealth and inheritance taxes are zero, even though there has been a sharp increase in the asset holdings of the wealthy—and in the number of dollar billionaires—in recent decades.
That bubble could easily burst. But everybody has an elder brother with a Swiss passport who is domiciled in Dubai. The family office, however, is in Singapore because who knows when the Gulf will undergo its own Arab Spring?
The proportion of indirect taxes in total revenue has been rising steadily, with regressive social effect. The tax exemptions, concessions and unwarranted subsidies enjoyed by the better-off sections of the population come to nearly 8 per cent of gdp. As a sop to ‘middle’ classes, the income-tax exemption limit was doubled in 2019, thus shrinking India’s already small income-tax paying base. In September 2019, the Modi government drastically reduced the corporate tax rate, which at a stroke resulted in a loss of revenue amounting to nearly half the total health budget. Ultimately, the financial capacity of the state is constrained by the disproportionate political influence and lobbying power of the wealthy—which brings us to the problem of state political capacity.
This may be true of America. It isn't true of India. The State knows that it can raise taxes and get rid of a visible billionaire class. Tax revenue will collapse while Mauritius and Dubai and Singapore profit by hosting a larger and larger proportion of the activities family offices.
State capacity in political terms entails the ability to resist pressure from interest groups
like farmers? That doesn't exist in India. But anybody can go after Adanis or Ambanis. They will simply restructure their operations or expand in other markets.
and to maintain a credible commitment to long-term goals. India’s long-standing inability to reduce its massive subsidies for fertilizer
coz of the farmers
or energy,
farmers and those with illegal connections to the grid
not to speak of zero tax on the largest agricultural income-earners,
everybody is a farmer- Rahul Gandhi was described as one such when he first entered politics. Amitabh Bacchan was another hayseed.
is a clear sign of weak political capacity in face of the vested interests of rich farmers
who are still as poor as shit compared to the average American farmer
and fertilizer companies. (There is evidence that in Uttar Pradesh, India’s largest regional state, transmission losses in electricity from public utilities—mainly through theft—rise sharply before state assembly elections
Because in a poor country, those poor enough to steal electricity are the majority of voters
. Similarly, the inability to raise taxes on capital or wealth shows weak political capacity vis-à-vis the rich.
No. You could raise taxes on the rich but revenue would collapse as would electricity generation etc. Indian Socialism meant providing the capital for Adanis to become billionaires.
The official class itself, including top politicians and bureaucrats, forms another vested-interest group.
They are nepotistic and dynastic. Will Bardhan berate Mamta who is grooming her nephew? Nope. The guy doesn't want to have his head kicked in the next time he visits Kolkata.
Bardhan is old enough to remember many refugee relatives sheltering with his family. He doesn't seem to understand why those Hindus had had to flee East Bengal. The answer is that the Brits had unilaterally devolved power to the Provinces in 1937. There was no Federal center to counterbalance this because the Muslim League refused to play ball. Thus, Delhi could not prevent the Muslim League government in Calcutta doing first famine and then ethnic cleansing. That is why India had to have a highly unitary Constitution. Hindus had to stick together or else succumb once again to Muslim salami tactics. Communists, too, needed to be beaten or killed.
Bardhan takes a different view-
There were two conflicting considerations in the minds of the framers of the Constitution.
There was only one. India needed a strong center so as to fight Muslims in Kashmir and Hyderabad and anywhere else they might cause problems. All the benefits previously gained by Muslims were to be annulled. India would protect cows and promote Hindi in Devanagari script. Urdu speaking Muslims were persecuted by the Custodian of Evacuee property when they weren't simply massacred or packed into trains to Pakistan.
One was that a large part of India’s society and economy was rural, diverse and informal,
which suited the Congress machine. This was the terrain in which it had risen and thrived.
and so devolution of power was the obvious democratic way to go,
This stupid cretin doesn't get that devolution had occurred under the 1935 Act to Direct ruled areas. Princely States had always been autonomous. The Constitution was about reversing this as much as possible.
It was obvious that feudalism, not democracy, would prevail unless there was massive centralization.
matching the desired autonomy of—and information available to—the local people in this vast country.
Sheer nonsense! Hindus ended up working for a uniform Civil Code for themselves. In practice, local customs were respected in the short run but the Hindu community as a whole was heading in the same direction.
At the same time, the framers were worried about the stark inequalities and injustices in local communities, where the oppressed might need central intervention and authority to get relief and redress. Above all, the immediate context of Partition and its attendant violence made the framers wary of centrifugal forces and divisive or fissiparous tendencies.
Muslims and Commies but not Communist Muslims who are always hilarious.
So they tried to strengthen the central government’s power over the regional states to a degree that is highly unusual for federated countries.
India is very big. There is no country like it.
In India, the Centre has the power to take over regional-state governments on a temporary basis, to redefine and reformulate the states themselves, to establish ‘concurrent’ jurisdictions with them and to wield far-reaching ‘residual’ and emergency powers.
Because, unlike the US, India does not have 'dual sovereignty'. The Union Government can do what it likes. But the same was true for Pakistan or Burma or Sri Lanka. Thus India was exactly similar to every country in the region.
Bardhan admits that Modi has pushed through a new Labor code. The problem is that Indian Labor is going to continue to be Indian- i.e averse to laboring.
the Modi government is in effect pushing the economy toward more distrust, labour unrest and stagnation in labour productivity. This is already apparent in some of the violent factory incidents that have attracted international attention, such as when workers ransacked Wistron’s iPhone assembly plant near Bangalore. The factory employed about 2,000 permanent workers and 7,000 ‘contract workers’, without any job security or benefits, with no labour union. The workers’ grievances included non-payment or delayed payment of wages,
delayed for 4 days
an extension of the workday to 12 hours with little notice or consultation and inadequate safety provisions for women workers on the night shift. The company, a Taiwanese assembler for Apple Corporation, has admitted its faults;
No it hasn't.
but this kind of backlash against unfair work conditions and arbitrary labour laws should not be unexpected.
A software glitch delays payment by 4 days and so the workers run riot breaking and stealing everything in sight. The Taiwanese company is now selling out to the Tatas. But this is a narrow profit margin business. Anyway, companies should relocate from relatively high wage Karnataka. Perhaps Yogi's UP will attract manufacturing jobs of this type.
Similarly, there has been substantial dilution, if not outright gutting, of workplace-safety regulations, and many attribute the recent rise in industrial accidents in India to this wanton deregulation.
Workers who run amok beating supervisors and setting fire to everything don't cause accidents. On the contrary, arson promotes work-place safety- right?
Companies and governments of this ilk do not realize that negotiating and co-managing job stability, welfare and training programmes with workers may be good for long-run productivity and profits.
Or it may not be worth the bother. Outsource the thing. Sooner or later you will get contractors who inspire terror in the workers. The problem here is that such contractors may prefer to take over the State. Why be a slave-driver when you can be Emperor? Equally, why be a Spartacus when you can pretend to be on the side of the slaves till you quietly establish your own dynastic rule?
Bardhan was born when the Windsor dynasty was paramount in India. Then he came under the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty. Assassination did temper this type of autocracy but it was only when Rahul proved gun-shy and refused to step up to the plate that the BJP became the de facto National party.
What does this cretin have to say about political legitimacy in the land of his birth? Let us see-
political legitimation of the system
Although India’s capitalist development has been lopsided,
because the Brits, in Bengal, weren't keen on encouraging competition and, later on, the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty cut off the balls of the Capitalists who had previously financed the freedom struggle lest they fund politicians who were genuinely interested in freeing India.
oligarchic
and dynastic
and deeply unequal,
Rahul is deeply unequal to cousin Varun. The Dynasty has embraced primogeniture as firmly as the Windsors.
the government
which was a Dynasty
presiding over it has not suffered from any lack of electoral or popular legitimacy, judging by its election victories and the popularity of its supreme leader.
The only reason Modi is PM is because Rahul has worked hard to make his party unelectable. The poor chap doesn't want to get shot or blown up. Say what you like about Italians, they have always understood that discretion is the better part of valor.
Continuous cheer-leading and open sycophancy by large sections of business
was the order of the day under the Dynasty. The CBI had to pretend that the moon-calf, Rahul, was a great Management Guru- like Dr. Porter of the Monitor Group for which Rahul 'worked'. This was around the time when the Monitor Group went bust.
and the media have created an atmosphere of triumphal acclaim, which in turn affects public perception and demoralizes the opposition.
This was the India or 'Indira is India' which Bardhan fled.
The leader’s oratorical skills,
or, in the case of Indira and Sanjay and Sonia and Rahul, were non-existent. Rajiv however could read out, in Roman script, decent enough speeches.
the massive cadre-based electoral machinery of the
Congress or the Commies or the various Caste based Socialist parties not to mention the
rss/bjp, the clever crafting of alliances with different castes and sub-castes in particular areas,
Indira perfected the votebank formula. Then she tried to divide Sikhs on Caste lines and got killed. Karma is a bitch.
access to disproportionately large corporate donations for election funds
under Indira, you could end up in jail on a terrorism charge if you funded the wrong party
and, relatedly, a brazenly biased media,
Indira controlled the air-waves.
as well as the disorganized nature of the opposition,
like in West Bengal- right?
have all helped in the electoral legitimation process.
Mamta's goons beat the fuck out of everybody who doubts her legitimacy.
But it is important to note that two further factors have worked in favour of the bjp.
It is less corrupt and nepotistic and casteist than its rivals- save in Kerala, TN etc.
First, the Modi government has introduced some new welfare schemes for the poor—of which the Ujjawala scheme for distributing cooking-gas cylinders and the Swachh Bharat toilet-building programme have had the greatest resonance—as well as continuing the most popular schemes of Manmohan Singh’s 2004–14 Congress-led governments for food distribution, rural employment and affordable housing (albeit with a substantial change in approach, from the earlier emphasis on citizens’ rights to their now being the Prime Minister’s ‘gifts’).
Citizens' rights are meaningless if remedies are not incentive compatible. A leader who gets re-elected may want to keep giving the same gifts.
The idea of a financial gift is enhanced by the direct transfer technology by which a cash amount is directly deposited into the bank account of the beneficiary. Some of the new schemes have not been very successful—for example, many poor households cannot afford the gas cylinders, once the initial financial support runs out, and for various reasons many do not use the new toilets—yet for electoral legitimacy what is important is that the bjp is in full control of the branding and the effusive narrative about the massively successful programmes, with Modi claiming full credit.
Which gives him an incentive to keep doing this type of 'last mile delivery'. Economists welcome this because voters who get stuff in return for their votes begin to vote in a more judicious fashion ignoring 'affiliative' factors like caste and religion.
Even when a particular programme does not quite deliver, the trick is to use a megaphone to talk about cases where it has worked, and to keep the public distracted by the announcement and hype of yet another spectacular roll-out.
Why oh why won't politicians simply say 'I am shit. I've fucked you guys over. Please don't vote for me.'? The answer is that politicians don't say they are useless turds for the same reason that economics professors don't confess to being stupid and mischievous.
In some cases, the full blare of the narrative has been more important than the programme itself. A recent parliamentary committee, headed by a ruling-party mp, revealed that in the first three years of the gender-equity programme, Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao, some 80 per cent of the budget had been spent on publicity alone.
Because it is a publicity program seeking to persuade parents to protect and educate daughters. Bardhan, no doubt, thinks the Government should confiscate girl babies from Indian parents and then educate them in concentration camps.
There is now also the widely publicized promise to supply electricity and piped drinking water to each household, which is paying political dividends long before any real progress has been made in implementation.
Bardhan gets very angry when he orders a Pizza and he is told that he can expect to get the Pizza within thirty minutes. Since no real progress has been made in preparing the Pizza, let alone dispatching it, what he should have been told was 'Fuck off! We have no Pizza for you here. Even if we start making such a Pizza that will happen in the future. Currently you are shit out of luck.'
Indeed, Bardhan would only be happy if the Pizza he wants is delivered to him without his having had to order it. Also, someone else should pay for it.
The poor care for such welfare schemes, and the stories of them reaching other people, if not yet themselves, indicate how much the leader cares for common people.
Hungry folks care about Pizza delivery. They become happy when they hear that other people are getting Pizzas within thirty minutes or less of ordering it. This shows the Pizza company cares deeply about common people.
They are certainly not too bothered about the government cozying up to crony oligarchs.
Voters know that oligarchs cozy up to anybody in power- not the other way round.
Meanwhile the Modi government’s centralization of welfare schemes and use of direct-transfer technology to deposit benefits in citizens’ bank accounts have successfully weakened the traditional intermediation by local caste leaders in the welfare-delivery process.
Even Mamta has disintermediated her goons from this. Their insistence on raping beneficiaries and retaining half of the money was proving a vote loser.
One interesting side effect of these centralized welfare schemes, bypassing the state governments and giving all credit to the Prime Minister, has also been to undermine or weaken state-level welfarist chief ministers—including those belonging to the bjp.
Mamta can't be undermined because her thugs will beat anyone who does. There are plenty of other Welfarist CMs some of whom actually do improve Welfare- e.g. Naveen Patnaik. But he has no problem with the BJP.
Secondly, when the ruling party cannot control the narrative about things that voters care about, like jobs—where its performance has been dismal—or food and fuel prices, then its non-economic narrative kicks in, amplified by WhatsApp, Facebook, political theatre and religious spectacle.
So, is the BJP is like other political parties in India and elsewhere. How deeply shocking!
Here the potent blend of nationalism and religion has been a powerful antidote to bad news on the economic front.
Indian nationalism is Hindu nationalism. Non-Hindus tend to be separatists unless they can see that that would be catastrophic.
‘You see, under our supreme leader,
who actually leads- unlike Rahul
we finally have a chance to be a super-power,
Bardhan thinks Indians should want to be a shitty power and take it up the ass from Pakistan- if not Bangladesh.
strong economically—
i.e. not having the IMF put a gun to your head. This has nothing to do with the Stock Exchange because except for Gujarat and parts of Maharashtra, share ownership is low.
don’t you see how the stock market has been booming and how many billion-dollar ‘unicorn’ start-ups are waiting for ipos—
Nehruvian India learnt to its cost that if you suppress defense spending to two percent then you get sodomized by the Chinese and have to raise it to six percent.
and militarily: don’t you see how valiantly our great helmsman is steering our ship in these treacherous waters, full of neighbouring enemy countries, Muslim terrorists, infiltrators and internal fifth columnists?
If Bardhan loves Muslim terrorists so much, why didn't he protest against Bush and Obama's war on terror? He lives in America, not India.
And yet how pious the leader is, busy rebuilding the great Ram temple,
Which is what Hindus want. This is because the worship Lord Ram. Bardhan may not do so but he lives in Berkeley.
reviving India’s ancient Hindu glory!’
As opposed to taking it up the ass from every and any invader.
Nevertheless it is not clear how long such forms of legitimation can last.
Yes it is. Hindu Nationalism will legitimate political power in India so long as Hindus are the overwhelming majority. Those who don't like it can leave though, to be frank, lots of those who like it leave to make more money elsewhere or, at the very least, to be ruled by nice White Christians- or, if that is not possible, at least an Old Etonian Hindu.
Ultimately the odds are against drastic homogenization, or the cramming of the manifold diversities of Hindu society into the Procrustean bed of an invented, artificial, poisonous, religious nationalism.
The nationalist movement in Bengal was almost entirely Hindu and only stopped being wholly religious after the Bolshevik revolution. But Communism is dead in Bengal. There is Didi and her thugs on the one hand and the BJP on the other with the Muslims (who are now thirty percent of the population) increasingly forming their own parties.
Historically, Hinduism has never been an organized or standardized religion
Yes it has. Brahminical Hinduism was organized, standardized, and supported by Indic Kings and Emperors. Catholicism and the National Churches that were its successors did have a centralized hierarchy but that was the exception, not the rule, and arose out of the political failure of the 'King of the Romans' to reduplicate the role of the Caesars.
and in a country of extreme linguistic, cultural and other diversities,
where everybody ends up eating spicy curry of one sort of the other and Brahmins are ubiquitous.
as well as powerful centrifugal forces that are bound to resist the ongoing assault on federalism, the project of ‘Hindi, Hindu, Hindustan’
doesn't exist. Amit Shah is making it easier for Karnataka to replace English with Kannada and Haryana to replace English with Hindi and so on. That is popular. Indians reject the term 'Hindustan' because it sounds like Pakistan. They don't mind the Sanskrit 'sthan' as in 'Rajasthan' but the name they have settler for is 'Bharat' and 'Bharatiya' not 'Hindustan' and 'Hindustani'.
and suppression of the civil rights and dignity of the world’s largest minority population (nearly 200 million Muslims, among other non-Hindus) is unlikely to be viable over a long period,
suppressing Hindus worked well for Pakistan and Bangladesh. Bardhan had plenty of refugee relatives. West Bengal might not be able to resist demographic replacement- indeed, it may do better economically under Sheikh Hasina- but other parts of Hindu India have a very different tradition. Muslims were a cowed minority and will remain so in most parts of the country. Sad, but inevitable. Minorities simply don't do well in South Asia- unless they concentrate on getting rich. But in that case, their share of the population plummets. Look at the Parsis.
without giving up all semblance of democracy.
If the same dynasty controls the Central Government for eighty percent of the time, then no semblance of democracy exists.
Besides, the social divisiveness that the ruling party is bringing about is likely to undermine the institutional basis of mutual trust and normative coordination
which is what exists amongst India's mercantile castes who have no problem with Modi because, in many cases, they literally speak the same language.
that capitalism ultimately depends upon. Nigeria and Ethiopia, two of the largest countries in Africa, provide stark examples of how
Muslims don't play nice with Kaffirs
distrust and disharmony generated by extreme social fragmentation can make it difficult for either capitalism or democracy to thrive.
The Brits shouldn't have soldered the Muslim North to the Christian South.
(Already some, including business magnates there,
virtue signaling billionaires one of whom is the father in law of the new British PM
have warned that the poisonous political divisions that the ruling party is promoting for electoral purposes in Karnataka have started affecting the thriving business atmosphere there.)
The Popular Front should be allowed to force Muslim girls to wear full hijab even within the classroom of a Girl's Junior College! The reason France has such a shitty business atmosphere is because wormen can't wear hijab- right?
A national-security alarm gave the bjp a major victory in the 2019 elections,
because the moon-calf Rahul was the alternative
even in the face of decelerating economic growth and declining job prospects for the youth.
RaGa is no longer young. His job prospects have certainly declined.
But ‘crying wolf’ may not work every time.
Cunts like Bardhan have been crying 'Nazi wolf' at Modi for 22 years. They have accused him of being pro-Hindu- which is why Hindus vote for him.
The ruling party has won some important regional elections, but has also been convincingly defeated in others, mainly in the south and the east of the country.
In a Democracy, the better party wins. Look at Himachal.
Farmers won a significant victory when Modi was forced to withdraw his arbitrarily formulated Farm Laws.
A Pyrrhic victory. Still, fucking over the environment is what Greta Thurnberg wants- right?
In future, civil-disobedience movements and regional resistance against poorly deliberated laws that seem to violate the spirit, if not always the letter, of the Constitution—and more generally violate the spirit of democratic culture and the principle of federalism that survive at ground level in many places—are likely to grow and may provide considerable opposition, although their effect on electoral outcomes may not be immediate.
It was Kejriwal who benefited from the farm protests. Few saw that coming.
There is no 'principle of Federalism'. It is simply a fact that you can't impose a law if enough people run riot. Mrs. Thatcher had to call off the poll tax and resign. Modi can call things off without resigning.
Digital technology which allows
this nutter to spread his lies
authoritarian governments to spread misinformation and snoop more easily, also enables people to unite and organize resistance.
to good governance- sure. The problem is that nobody will be left to resist Mafia Lords.
That way, going back to the Preamble of the Constitution,
as amended by Indira
India may not be socialist or secular soon,
she wanted India to be dynastic. Rahul is still Congress's PM candiddate.
but a complete obliteration of its already highly flawed democracy is somewhat less likely,
It isn't possible. Modi fought Indira's Emergency. He prevailed. The Dynasty is dying nasty.
as the country lurches on past its 75th anniversary, into the future.
The country isn't lurching. This old fool is.
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