Sadly, nobody explained this to Pratinav Anil, who teaches History at Oxford. He writes in Unherd
India’s entry into the ranks of the world’s surviving theocracies — Iran, Afghanistan, the Vatican City — arrived bathetically.
up Anil's arse- right? Sadly, it turned out not to be India, the country, but rather a dildo. Shit like that happens all the time to dons at Oxford. Us proles at the LSE often talked about this.
When the history of the nation’s descent from secularism to Hindu nationalism is written, it might end in Ayodhya.
The Brits were secular. Sadly, the people of the sub-continent kept telling them to fuck off so they could separate from each other on the basis of religion. Hindu nationalism, like Indian Muslim nationalism, triumphed in 1947.
Just after noon yesterday, the Ram Temple was consecrated, a stone’s throw from the ruins of Babur’s Mosque, which was demolished three decades ago by a Hindu mob. The climax was supposed to be the moment an idol was placed in the sanctum sanctorum of the imposing pink sandstone construction — 75 years after a similar idol “magically” appeared in Babur’s Mosque, giving fodder to the feverish Hindu fantasy that the birthplace of Ram lies underneath its foundations.
Whereas what gives fodder to Anil's feverish fantasy that India has entered the ranks of the surviving theocracies (which is how dons at Oxford refer to their rectums) is the fact that he constantly shoves everything he can get his hands on up his arse.
Millions watched the spectacle. A 30-metre priapic incense stick
which Anil feels ought to be up his own arse
made of 1,500kg of cow dung was lit for the occasion.
Anil has to be content with lighting his own farts.
Babies were prematurely induced so that they would be born on this holiest of days. Yet, for all the pomp, the pilgrims will doubtless be returning home disappointed.
That's not what they are saying on Social Media. Still, we understand what Anil is getting at. No very large incense stick was rudely shoved up his bum. What greater disappointment can be imagined?
For the Ram Temple, which is supposed to be the third-largest in the world, isn’t even close to completion.
So what? The pran pratishta ceremony is done once the garbha grha is complete. There will be other such ceremonies over the next few years.
Not even its first floor has been built: it is set to be inaugurated in December — too late for Narendra Modi, who is evidently a man in a terrific hurry.
But the damn fool is not hurrying to provide very large incense sticks for Anil to stick up his bum.
At the height of the pandemic, either conscious of his mortality or deliberately disregarding the convention of posthumous recognition, Modi had the Ahmedabad cricket stadium renamed after him.
No. The authorities in charge of the Sardar Patel sports complex requested permission to name the new stadium after the most popular man in India- one who has a 70 percent approval rating. Modi's name 'adds value'. Anil may object that what people really want to see is the new stadium being crammed up his own arse. But such is not actually the case.
This time around, there’s an inconvenient event just around the corner: a spring general election.
It was very convenient for Modi that the Temple trust was able to offer him a date for before the campaign officially commences. There can be no doubt that the BJPs prospects have improved.
And so, like the Italian umarell — the ubiquitous pensioners who have an inexplicable penchant for observing construction sites, and every so often proffering unwanted advice to workers — Modi’s fans have had to content themselves with what is essentially a work in progress.
The shilanyas ceremony went off with a bang in 2020. The pran prathishta was bigger, better and more beautiful. The kalash ceremony due in a few years time might be a bit of an anti-climax. Italy has a pleasant climate and its elderly people may like being out of doors. India has a fucking horrible climate and people avoid building sites like the plague.
Modi's fans like his speeches- he gave a good one yesterday- but don't necessarily appreciate Hindu rituals. Equally, plenty of Hindus aren't fans of Modi's party. Indians understand that it takes time to construct a building. Modi had constructed a new Parliament building in Delhi. It didn't spring up overnight. Similarly, the Ram Temple will take years to build. Anil, it is true, is in a tearing hurry- probably because he hopes it will be crammed up his bum.
To the bhakts — diehards — of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), there was the consolation prize of seeing their ruler lather mascara on the idol’s eyes.
He should have been shoving it up Anil's butt. Why is Modi being so mean? If the fellow objects to sticking Hindu temples up Anil's arsehole, surely he could spare the Qutub Minar?
Indian liberals, by contrast, observed the proceedings with obituarial gloom.
Plenty of Hindus are liberals. Anil means 'lib-tard'.
To them, this is the end of an era. The curtain has fallen on secularism — on the grand vision of the country’s founding fathers.
Secularism was what the East India Company brought to India. Indians told it to fuck off back where it came from.
The Fifties and Sixties, so the story goes, were a golden age of religious peace;
because both Muslims and Commies had been slaughtered on an industrial scale
the Congress Party that had ruled uninterruptedly since independence in 1947, we are told, not only protected minorities from the worst instincts of the Hindu majority
by killing them or chasing them away. The worst instincts of the Hindu majority would have been to shove Qutub Minars up their arses- or so Anil hopes and prays.
but also gave them considerable constitutional concessions.
Minorities could run their own educational institutions but were stripped of affirmative action.
Muslims, for instance, were allowed to conserve such folksy and innocent practices as polygamy, unilateral divorce without alimony (a male prerogative only, of course), and discriminatory inheritance (sons being entitled to twice the share of daughters). The meddlesome state was kept at bay.
In practice, Hindus could keep their customary law.
This arrangement was proof, apparently, of the genius of “Indian secularism”, which liberals saw as superior to French laïcité, with its unedifying principle of separating church and state.
There was no 'church' to merge the state with. Indian secularism was like Iraqi or Syrian secularism- i.e. a pretence that priests preyed vampire fashion upon the credulous peasant.
Such a severance would have resulted in monstrous godlessness, argued Indian liberals.
There can't be a severance if there was never a unity. The Brits had not established a State Religion in India.
Worse, the very idea stank of foreignness.
Which is also why Indians refused to learn English or to permit its use by the Administration or Judiciary- right?
Fortunately, though, India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, had no truck with such heresies. As the Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen has argued in The Argumentative Indian: he understood that only by making concessions to religion can religious passions be controlled.
Not even Sen said anything so foolish.
The political theorist Rajeev Bhargava, doyen of Delhi’s liberal intellectual aristocracy, made a similar case. Nehru had cracked the formula. His secularism did not disregard Hinduism and Islam; rather, it maintained a “principled distance” between the two.
Nope. Dalit Muslims were stripped off affirmative action. Muslims who had fled across the border in panic weren't allowed back. Urdu could go fuck itself.
Stanley Tambiah, anthropologist, also praised Nehru’s “large-hearted and genuinely accommodative” secularism, which — unlike laïcité — won over minorities. Or so he claimed.
Who the fuck gives a fuck about fucking Bhargava or Tambiah? We understand what Anil is getting at. Nehru, large-heartedly crammed various religions up their respective arseholes. Modi could at least shove some small religion- e.g. Ba'haism up Anil's rectum.
Try telling that to the Muslims who actually lived through the Nehruvian period.
Anil did. Sadly, those Muslims were too elderly to shove anything really sizable up his arsehole.
For all his secularist bravura, Nehru scarcely lifted a finger to stop the massacre of Muslims in Hyderabad in 1948.
The Muslim population of Delhi fell from one third to five percent.
Some 40,000 were killed, and another 13,000 imprisoned, as the kingdom was annexed to the republic. Further north, in Uttar Pradesh, Muslims were fired en masse from government after accusations that they were a fifth column in the pay of Pakistan. In the eastern borderlands, some 98,000 Indian Muslims were deported to East Pakistan. Meanwhile, influential Muslim leaders such as Sheikh Abdullah and Kasim Razvi were thrown in prison.
Azad and Kidwai were taken into the Cabinet. Nehru looked after his chums- unless, like Abdullah, they turned anti-national.
What’s more, the Congress Party singularly failed to tackle the scourge of interfaith riots — although “riots” doesn’t quite cut it. These were, in fact, pogroms.
No. There was instigation and then retaliation.
They claimed nearly 3,000 Muslim lives in the 10 years to 1963; at just under a tenth of the country’s population, they accounted for 82% of the fatalities in this era of violence.
The Commies claim that more of their number were killed than Muslims. To be fair, the Reds tried to kill Nehru in Calcutta.
The following year, in the wake of the theft of the moi muqaddas — a strand of hair that once nestled in the Prophet Muhammad’s beard — a few thousand Muslims were slaughtered in and around India’s eastern rustbelt. Many responded by giving up on the nation altogether: around 800,000 — one in 50 Indian Muslims — left for Pakistan.
Hindus and Sikhs retaliated. What's newsworthy about that?
All this in the golden age of Indian secularism.
The landmark event was the passing of 4 acts collectively known as the Hindu Code Bill in 1955/56. The principle was established that Parliament could change Hindu law regardless of Scripture or the opinions of the Acharyas of the Religion.
Yet half a century on, liberals remain in denial, forever regurgitating the sophistry of the secularists.
If Muslims or Commies are killed in retaliation, Secularism is not compromised. The question was whether Parliament- a secular body- would be supreme over Scriptural authority. The answer from 1955 onward was- yes. On the other hand, cow protection laws were passed in UP in 1955. But this was claimed to be necessary for scientific reasons. A.O Hume had endorsed this view in the 1880s.
The unthinking celebration of Indian secularism was in fact wishful thinking disguised as wisdom. In recent years, scores of revisionist studies have shown, with good old-fashioned empiricism, how Indian secularism appeased violent Hindu nationalism.
Killing people who try to kill you doesn't change your ideology. Secular authority triumphed over Scriptural injunction.
Sadly, these have been greeted with a deafening silence.
No. Stupidity was ignored.
Rather disingenuously, India’s liberals remain oblivious to the dangers of religious appeasement. Few recognise how, for instance, calls to introduce a ban on cow slaughter might alienate Muslims and low-caste Dalits, who see no reason to uphold the upper-caste Hindu injunction against consuming beef.
Cow-protection laws was a Directive Principle in the Constitution. But it was considered a scientific requirement. Enforcement is a separate issue. What Nehru showed was that an alienated Muslim who is killed is a Muslim who pretends he isn't alienated at all- till he gets to the border. As for the Ambedkarites, their only job is to act as spoilers in reserved seats.
Such concessions to Hindu majoritarian sentiment have been the cause of much grief and interfaith tension.
Nonsense! They may have been the cause of emigration but emigrants tend to do better than guys who stick around as a minority in a Turd World country.
Not that secularist liberals — many of them card-carrying Congress members — were over-bothered by such unpleasantries through the second half of the 20th century, when the party was in power for all but nine years.
Nonsense! I knew plenty of Congress-wallahs who were worried that Indira was losing the Muslim vote thus endangering the Brahmin-Muslim-Dalit formula.
Their attitudes began to change when the BJP, the Congress’s explicitly Hindu nationalist rival, came to power for the first time in 1996.
Fuck off! All they cared about in 1996 was getting rid of Kesari and getting Sonia to take the helm. She revived the party thanks to Priyanka and the fact that Rahul was not yet known to be a cretin.
Now that the Congress was in the opposition, it was fair game to fault Delhi’s rulers for failing to put a stop to Hindu violence against Muslims.
Nobody gave a shit about Muslims till 9/11. After that, it was hilarious to pretend that Modi was Hitler when actually NATO was slaughtering Muslims on an industrial scale. Bush & Blair invaded Afghanistan and Iraq. Cameron and Sarkozy pushed Obama to expand the devastation into Syria and Lebanon. 1.3 million Muslims were killed. Tens of millions were displaced.
The process accelerated under Modi in 2014 — the same Modi who as Chief Minister of Gujarat had been criminally negligent at best or complicit at worst in handling the riots of 2002, in which a thousand Muslims perished.
Modi gained by that- no question- but it was good governance that got him elected.
The liberal secularists, however, have been loath to admit that the Congress was just as nasty to minorities when it was in power as the BJP is today.
Nobody gives a shit about minorities. If they act up, they are stomped.
In fact, the BJP did not come out of nowhere. Both parties have shared a pensée unique: a commitment to caste and class hierarchy, coupled with an allergy to redistribution, sustained electorally by roaring appeals to Hindu tradition.
This nutter is a Commie. Sadly Comrade Vijayan is not shoving anything really substantial up Anil's arse.
This was the worldview that produced a Congress that murmured secular pieties, claiming that its ranks were a “mirror of the nation”, even though in the Thirties and Forties Muslims accounted for a mere 2 to 3% of its total membership — while making up 25% of India’s population.
If even 2 to 3 percent of all the minarets in India were shoved up Anil's arse, he might stop babbling brokenly about secularism.
In the provinces the Congress controlled, idol worship was forced down the throats of hapless Muslim students.
But what about their arses? Why were they neglected? True Secularism would shove large minarets up the arse of every student of history- regardless of religion.
Discriminatory licensing policies destroyed Muslim businesses. Cow slaughter bans bankrupted Muslim butchers. History textbooks were rewritten to heroise Hindus and malign Muslims. And so the path to Partition was laid. But no lessons were learnt.
The lesson was simple. Don't try to get on with a minority. Kill it if it acts up.
Indeed, scarcely any attempt was made at course correction after 1947. Very simply, the Congress needed religious appeals to win elections.
'Garibi hatao' is not a religious appeal. This man has shit for brains even though Modiji has adamantly refused to shove Qutub Minar up his arsehole.
This was true in the late-19th century:
there were no elections back then. True, the 1892 Councils Act meant that some 39 people were supposedly 'voted' onto an advisory committee, but there was no fucking devolution
when devolution and the extension of the franchise to the middling sort proved a challenge, religion had come to the rescue, with Congress leaders wrapping themselves in the saffron flag of Hinduism.
Actually, Congress only became a mass party after Gandhi became the standard bearer of Khilafat.
And it was true in the mid-20th century as well. In the absence of redistribution and land reform,
which began in earnest in 1937 with Provincial Autonomy. Land was a State subject.
Hinduism was the glue that held the orders together.
The Brits were the glue. After that, the Hindus decided to hang together because of the threat from Muslims and Commies.
Election campaigns began in temples.
As they had in the Thirties.
Religious festivals became indistinguishable from political rallies.
Ditto.
Still, before the century was out, it had become clear that the Congress was a spent force.
It returned to power in 2004.
Poor economic growth rates had steadily discredited it; staggering corruption in the Eighties and Nineties ultimately did for it.
No. Rahul's refusal to step up to the plate meant that Modi had a walk-over in 2014.
But the BJP was able to steal a march on the Congress not because it was radically different but because it was essentially the same — only less inhibited and more articulate in its majoritarianism. Indian secularism was the first step on a slippery slope to Hindu nationalism.
No. Hindu nationalism was the first step to Hindus using Parliament to change their personal laws.
We can now see that the Congress Party was simply BJP lite.
Anil can shove anything he likes up his arse except the Qutub Minar which is too heavy. Sadly, neither Modi nor Kharge is offering to help him out in this respect.
The modern history of Ayodhya illustrates this point rather well. When the idol of Ram magically appeared overnight at Babur’s Mosque in 1949, no doubt through the agency of local delinquents,
An ICS officer from Kerala was involved
the Congress took a rather indulgent view of the whole affair. The mosque was boarded up and the idol left inside, giving oxygen to Hindu zealots.
Hindu worship, once a year, was continued. There was supposed to be some amazing archaeological work at the site.
In 1985, their demands that the locks be opened were answered by the Congress, whose leader cynically launched his election campaign four years later at the site, amid raucous calls for Hindu renewal.
Rajiv should have said 'I will build the temple. VP Singh is sucking up to Pakistan and fishing for Muslim votes.' Instead he said he would do what the Court ordered. The crowd wanted stronger meat. Also they no longer believed in the Sikh bogeyman.
But it was the BJP that proved more adept at that game, demolishing the mosque completely in 1992. Predictably, riots ensued across the country, and the BJP rode to power four years later off the back of religious polarisation.
No. What helped the BJP was Mandal. The Ram Mandir was a way to unify Hindus rather than have them slaughter each other to secure bigger quotas for their own sub-castes.
By 2010, Hindu nationalists enjoyed a comfortable presence in all walks of life.
No. The Prime Minister was Sikh but real power was in the hands of a Roman Catholic whose closest adviser was Muslim.
That year, the Allahabad High Court pronounced Muslims “junior partners” in national life, dividing Babur’s Mosque into three tracts and pledging two to Hindus.
Which was the best deal they could get.
Then, 10 years later, with the BJP once again in power, the Supreme Court handed the entire plot to Hindus, to construct a temple on the ruins of the 16th-century mosque. Now, with the consecration of the Ram Temple, and by extension the effective inauguration of a new theocratic regime, I suspect we have finally heard the last about that spurious, self-congratulatory declension of laïcité that was Indian secularism.
This nutter doesn't get that Hindu judges and barristers wanted Parliamentary sovereignty so as to change Hindu personal law. Consider the Nehrus. Indira's marriage to Feroze was illegal. As Parsis pointed out, Indira was just Feroze's concubine. The Hindus suggested to the Parsis that they shut the fuck up. Feroze was merely a sperm donor.
Perhaps it is time liberals defended the real thing.
Anil means that liberals should very kindly shove Qutub Minar up his arse. How else can Secularists defend Islamic monuments? Suppose Babri Masjid had been expeditiously shoved up Anil's pooper. It would be safe from Hindutvadi hooligans. Mind it kindly.
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