Guha hating on Chandrachud

Scroll.in has published an article by Ram Guha titled the  

The Chief Justice and the Father of the Nation
What would Gandhi have thought of a serving chief justice making public visits to temples and giving interviews about it?

Gandhi wanted Indians to abandon the British legal system and to create their own courts. Sinn Fein had actually achieved this but Gandhi's scheme was a failure. Gandhi also wanted 'all thinking Indians' to refrain from sex even within marriage. He would have approved of Modi. He would not have approved of Guha or Chandrachud.  

Would Gandhi have objected to a person attending the hallowed places of worship of his ancestors? No. An atheist or a communist may have objected to people going to temples or mosques. But Gandhi was not an atheist. Guha does not understand this. 

Like most of my readers, I begin the day by

taking a dump? 

reading the newspapers, in my case online and then in print.

so he is full of shit when perusing the papers. 

On Sunday, January 7, the first paper I read was the web edition of the Indian Express, and the first story I read was the lead for that morning, which reported on a visit by the chief justice of India, DY Chandrachud, to some Hindu temples in Gujarat, including the celebrated shrine in Somnath. The photograph accompanying the story captured the chief justice and his wife reverentially praying in an equally hallowed place of worship for Hindus, the Dwarkadwish temple.

The CJI is a Maharashtrian Brahmin. By going to famous temples in Gujarat he ingratiates himself with the Gujarati bar association and promotes the prestige of the Bench in that deeply religious state. I suppose Chandrachud's aim is to fend off an attempt by the Government- which is expected to return to power with an increased majority- to reform aspects of the Collegiate system of judicial selection and to introduce a doctrine of political question. 

Guha, being as stupid as shit, doesn't get the strategic aspect of Chandrachud's publicity stunt.  

The Indian Express story contained these lines: “Justice Chandrachud said that he had started visiting various states ‘inspired by the life and ideals of Mahatma Gandhi’

Gandhi was from Gujarat. Chandrachud praises Gandhi when in Gujarat and visits famous Gujarati temples. Guha does not understand this. What a plonker! 

to understand challenges facing the judiciary and to identify solutions, adding that his two-day Gujarat visit was part of the same effort.” The reference to Gandhi intrigued me, since – though I am not a lawyer, still less a judge or chief justice – I have spent many decades studying the life and legacy of the Mahatma.

Unlike Guha, Gandhi was a lawyer. He was from Gujarat. As a 'Mahatma', he was a leader of the Hindu community. Chandrachud is seeking to raise the prestige of the Bench and give the appearance of himself engaging in Judicial reform rather than leaving it to the Law Ministry. He speaks of the 'dhwaja' (flag) of Justice above the great temples of Gujarat and Odisha and associates this with the Constitution and Judiciary of India. This is a smart move. Gujarat has been voting for the BJP for many years. Chandrachud, though from a different State, is appealing to values Gujaratis have shown they like so as to draw attention to the new courthouse in Rajkot and the new use of computer technology to streamline judicial proceedings. Guha ignores what is newsworthy about Chandrachud's publicity stunt- viz. his seeking to pre-empt a resurgent Modi government clipping the wings of the Bench along the lines suggested by Sangma. Chandrachud will fail but he himself may gain something from this- e.g. a Rajya Sabha seat after he retires. 

Guha will now gas on about the cartoon of Gandhi that he has fabricated in his puerile books. 

As is well known, on his return from South Africa Gandhi spent a whole year travelling around the country by train, in a bid to get to know it adequately before commencing a public career.

Gandhi returned in January 9, 1915.  He had previously been visited by Bhai Parmanand of the Arya Samaj while in South Africa. He committed himself to celibacy in the cause of national service shortly after. On 13 February, Gandhi attended the Preparatory session of the All India Hindu Sabha were held at Haridwar. Mahatma Munshi Ram promoted himself and became Swamy Shraddhanand while Gandhi got the Mahatma title. Gokhale had sent Gandhi to travel across India to make these sorts of alliance. Meanwhile Gokhale's other acolyte, Jinnah who had represented Tilak in court, was brokering the alliance between the Muslim League and Congress. Later Gandhi was sent to Champaran to distract attention from the cow riots in Bihar which forced Muslims to abandon beef. 

Guha is blissfully unaware of all this. He thought Gandhi spent some time touring India as part of a fact finding mission. That's not how politics works. You have to have an agenda and an itinerary and introductions to other politicians looking to make a deal or to join a larger coalition. 

In later decades, while working as a social reformer and a politician, he continued to travel all across India – usually in a third-class railway compartment, but also by car, bullock-cart, and, not least, on foot.

He wasn't just wandering around aimlessly. He was raising money, promoting a particular agenda and doing organizational work. Chandrachud is visiting various states where he will try to appeal to regional sentiments and raise the prestige of the Bench. Will he also help catalyse the process of administrative reform in the judicial system? No. Don't be silly. Still, Chandrachud may do well, personally speaking, out of this sort of stunt.  

Gandhi would have approved of any Indian – rich or poor, famous or obscure, man or woman – seeking to get to know the country and its people better.

No he wouldn't. He would have reproved a young man who sought to do a comparative study of the rent boys of different parts of India. Guha does not get that though Gandhi was stupid, he wasn't Guha level ga ga.  

But what would he have thought of a serving chief justice making public visits to temples, and getting himself photographed and giving interviews about it in the process?

He would have been absolutely furious. Why is CJI not eating his own shit while muttering 'Ahimsa! Ahimsa!'? 

Gandhi himself virtually never went to a Hindu temple

He gave up sex. He was a Mahatma. If you yourself are God why go to Temples? Let the Temple come and bow down to you and give you money.  

– one of the very few exceptions he made was when he visited the Meenakshi temple in Madurai in 1946, after the shrine had finally, belatedly, allowed Dalits to enter its premises.

Nonsense! Nadars and Harijans, led by Vaidyanath Iyer, had entered the temple in June 1939. By September Rajaji had passed the Temple entry act. Gandhi had previously refused to enter the temple in 1934 though, since he opposed idol worship, it is difficult to see why he would want to. 

Though Gandhi described himself as a Hindu, his chosen mode of worship was the inter-faith meeting, held on open ground, where Hindus, Muslims, Parsis, Sikhs and Jains and Christians would pray together, with verses of all their scriptures being read. That was his original and deeply moving way of affirming the principle that India belonged to all faiths equally.

Also, if the Japs wanted it, they were welcome to have it. Gandhi suggested the Brits 'Quit India' so as to make things easier for Tojo. As he said in 1939, Congress is a Hindu party and Hindus are non-violent. Thus, if the Brits leave without handing over the Army to Congress, the Muslims and the Punjabis would grab everything. The man was a cowardly shithead.  

Gandhi may not have wished or expected the chief justice of India to follow him and hold inter-faith prayer meetings (whether in the grounds of the Supreme Court, or anywhere else).

But he would definitely have insisted that the CJI wander around wearing nothing but an adult diaper. Gandhi was a stickler for that sort of thing.  

And nor should we. One of the most devout Hindus I myself know is a former chief justice of India, who begins his day and ends it with prayer and meditation.

As opposed to beginning it with cocaine and ending it with a rim job.  

This he does, however, in a puja room in his own house.

He also sleeps in a bedroom in his own house. Chandrachud, on the other hand, is sleeping in Churches and worshipping in Temples. This is totally reprehensible.  

It is quite possible that, in his distinguished (and still admiringly spoken about) tenure, this former CJI occasionally visited temples, but surely never in a public manner, offering himself to be photographed.

He would have done so if it served his interest or that of the Bench.  

And he would certainly not have done it at a time like this, ten days before the inauguration of the new temple in Ayodhya, in a spectacular ceremony that shall be a mark not so much of Hindu piety, but of Hindutva majoritarianism.

He would have done so if this would have helped the Bench retain powers it has usurped over the last few decades. Suppose Modi returns with an increased majority. He may be under pressure to implement the sort of changes Sangma, as Law Minister, proposed. Chandrachud, a second generation CJI, may be trying to improve the image of the Bench more particularly in the eyes of the Sangh parivar.

The Indian Express story also contained some other remarks made by the chief justice, which bear thinking about. I quote: “Referring to the dhwaja [flag] atop Dwarka and Somnath temples which he visited during his two-day visit to Gujarat, the CJI said, ‘I was inspired this morning by the dhwaja at Dwarkadhish ji, very similar to the dhwaja, which I saw at Jagannath Puri. But look at this universality of the tradition in our nation, which binds all of us together. This dhwaja has a special meaning for us. And that meaning which the dhwaja gives us is – there is some unifying force above all of us, as lawyers, as judges, as citizens. And that unifying force is our humanity, which is governed by the rule of law and by the Constitution of India,’ he said.”

This is meaningless in itself but Chandrachud's intention is clear enough. He is a nice Brahmin boy who believes in Akhand Bharat and Hindutva and dhvaja and Bharadwaja and Yoga and Bhoga and everything else.  

I presume the chief justice has been accurately quoted. If he has, I must say, with due respect, that his interpretation of our ancient and modern history does not stand critical or indeed moral scrutiny.

Guha is a cretin. He can't do any sort of scrutiny.  

For it is emphatically not the case that the dhwaja which has traditionally flown above Hindu temples has served to bind “all of us together” in a common humanity.

How would Guha knows what binds Indian patriots together? He is a narcissistic anti-nationalist cunt. Chandrachud may not be.  

In fact, for the bulk of their existence these shrines have not even bound all Hindus together.

In the opinion of a hater of Hinduism.  

For, as the chief justice surely knows, for much of recorded history Hindu temples grievously discriminated against Dalits. The head priests of the most famous temples did not allow them to worship inside its premises. The Hindu religious tradition also discriminated against women, forbidding them from praying when menstruating. (Dalits and women were also discriminated against in many other ways – in terms of economic and political power for example.)

So what? The dhwaja wasn't inside the temple. It was visible from outside it. Thus it could have a unifying power without any one having to enter a temple or perform rituals there.  

The chief justice says he is inspired both by Mahatma Gandhi on the one hand and by the tradition represented by the temples in places like Dwarka and Puri on the other.

We don't have to believe him. It is enough that we understand he is trying to ingratiate himself with the religious folk of Gujarat who, we assume, have influence with Modi and Shah.  

I would like to remind him that when, after Gandhi’s anti-untouchability campaign, some nationalists proposed a Temple Entry Bill in the colonial legislature, the Sankaracharya of Puri himself wrote to the viceroy that allowing Dalits and Savarnas to pray together “will really mean the sounding of the Death-knell of all possibilities for Sanatanists to lead quiet and peaceful lives of Spirituality according to the dictates of their Religion and their Conscience”.

Guha is a Tambram. He must know that the Crown Prince of Tamil Nadu says he wants to eradicate Sanatan Dharma and Kharge's son agrees. Thus the Sankaracharya was correct. Nobody really wanted to enter temples to worship God. They just wanted to destroy the worship of others.  

Other influential Hindu priests organised a signature campaign to have Gandhi declared a “non-Hindu”.

A Hindu shot him. A public nuisance was curbed.  

Contrary to what the chief justice implies,

Fuck would this cretin know about what a CJI 'implies'? 

there is a vast gap between the ideals of the orthodox Hindu tradition and the ideals that undergird our Constitution.

So what? We are welcome to say nice things about both even if we think both are shit.  

Indeed, the Constitution is in good part a product of the tireless work of social reformers like Gandhi, Ambedkar, Savithri and Jotiba Phule, Gokhale, Ranade, and many others, to challenge forms of discrimination encoded in Hindu scripture, and practiced in everyday life.

No. The Constitution is in large part a continuation of the 1935 Act with features from the Nehru Report and the Irish constitution. It's innovation is that it removed affirmative action from Muslim Dalits which had been provided for in 1935.  

Notably, even after the Constitution abolished Untouchability, the most famous temples in the Hindu tradition, such as Badrinath and Puri, continued to practice it for decades afterwards.

So what? Who gives an actual fuck? Dalits, like non-Dalits, want reservations. Nobody gives a shit about going to a boring temple.  

As recently as July 2023, there were reports of several temples in Uttarakhand, Devbhoomi itself, denying entry to Dalits.

And there are reports of the son of the CM of Tamil Nadu demanding the eradication of Sanatan Dharma.  

The treatment of women as inferior to men was also doggedly held on to by the Hindu orthodoxy well after 1950.

We get it, Guha. You hate Hinduism. It must suck for you to live in India and to have to write about Hindu cunts.  

A report from as late as 1988 mentions the Puri Sankaracharya as defending the practice of sati and as saying that women and Dalits had no right to read or interpret the Vedas.

A report on this blog from 2011 mentions that Guha eats his own shit.  

It is true that no tradition is unchanging. However, it is quite likely that places like Puri and Dwarka would still have held on in toto to their anti-democratic and anti-egalitarian views had it not been for the Phules, Gandhi, Ambedkar, and the like, challenging caste discrimination on the ground – and had it not been for the Constituent Assembly of India, under Ambedkar’s direction, rejecting the Manu Smriti in favour of a democratic and egalitarian Constitution.

No. What mattered was the will of the Rulers. If they wanted Temples thrown open, that is what happened. In British areas, the status quo remained frozen till Provincial autonomy was established by the 1935 Act. Gandhi and Phule and Ambedkar didn't matter in the slightest because Temple entry did not matter. Reservations mattered. This cretin does not understand this. 

Therefore, for the chief justice of India to claim a congruence between the flag “that has traditionally flown above Hindu temples” and the modern text that is the Constitution of India is tendentious and misleading (to say the least).

So what? Chandrachud in a not too subtle way, is trying to raise the prestige of the Bench. He will fail.  

Let me remind him (and ourselves) of what the great historian of the Indian Constitution, Granville Austin said about it: namely, that the Constitution represented “a gigantic step for a people previously committed largely to irrational means of achieving otherworldly goals”.

Granville Austin had shit for brains which is why nobody in his own country rated him. Guha likes him because he says 'Hindoooos were doing Voodoo till they got a Constitution'. But, Constitutions don't matter in the slightest. 

I referred to the photograph accompanying the story in the Indian Express on the chief justice’s temple visits in Gujarat. This shows him dressed in a kurta coloured saffron. But even if his kurta was white or green, a serving chief justice making his temple visits so public at this particular juncture in our nation’s history, raise disturbing questions about his personal judgement.

Only in the disturbed mind or a shitty person. Guha thinks that because Hindus are in the majority in India, Hindus should not be Hindus because otherwise the minorities will start screaming and shitting themselves.  

Meanwhile, the remarks he offered to justify them, where he claimed a continuity, an equivalence even, between Hindu tradition and the Indian Constitution, raise questions about his intellectual acumen.

Guha has no fucking acumen. Chandrachud made money at the bar. He wasn't a fucking academic.  He has done himself some good and somewhat raised the prestige of the Bench by his trip to Gujarat. Let us see if he can score a similar success in his visit to other states.