Fareed Zakaria on Modi

Zakaria comes from an important Congress political family. He was a student of Huntington- indeed he commissioned the famous 'Clash of Civilizations' article from Huntington for 'Foreign Affairs' of which he became the editor at the very young age of 28. Had he remained in Academia, he would, no doubt, be an Ivy League Professor. 

Still, even without a berth in Academia, such was Zakaria's brilliance that, some 20 years ago, people spoke of Zakaria as a future Secretary of State- i.e. the Kissinger of the Twenty First Century. Sadly, America thought it could export democracy and 'the new world order' by slaughtering Muslims in remote deserts and mountains. Zakaria did well to keep out of that shit-show.

Turning to India, Zakaria says some odd things- e.g. to Tyler Cowan

If you’re speaking one of the languages (Hindi or Urdu), there’s a way to alternate between both, which a lot of Indian politicians used to do as a way of signaling a broad embrace of both the Hindu and the Muslim communities.

Zakaria did not notice that under Nehru, millions of Muslims were slaughtered or had to leave India. The last thing on their minds was whether they were addressed in Hindi or Urdu.

 Moreover, Muslim League Mullahs, when addressing the common folk, had to use both the Islamic origin word as well as the ordinary Indic word in their discourse. Thus they might say 'munafiqat yani pakhand' or even 'shab yani raath'. Muhammad Ali Jinnah himself spoke very good Kutchi but had not received much instruction in Farsi and Urdu. This did not matter in the slightest. People understood he wanted Muslims to have a separate state even if it meant that 20 million Muslims in the Hindu majority areas were abandoned to a grisly fate.

Nehru, India’s first prime minister, used to often do that. He would say, “I am delighted to be coming here to your home.” He’d repeat the word home, first in Urdu, then in Hindi, so that in effect, both constituencies were covered.

Home is 'ghar' in both Hindi and Urdu. Nehru didn't say 'nivas'. He'd have looked a fool.  

Modi, by contrast, India’s current prime minister, is a great Hindu nationalist. He takes pains almost never to use an Urdu word when he speaks.

Zakaria, who has interviewed Modi on TV and heard him speak Hindi, clearly thinks that, as a Yalie 'native informant', Whitey will take him at his word, while his own brown brethren don't matter at all.

The fact is Modi  mixes Urdu and English just like everybody else though, as a politician, he does have a perfect command of bureaucratic Hindi. But so do I. So does anyone who ever prepared for the IAS exams. In any case, once he became CM or PM he'd have had good speech writers. Being a good orator, he probably polishes these up by replacing recondite words with the 'mot juste' which, itself, has to do with popular trends. 

He speaks in a kind of highly Sanskritized Hindi that most Indians actually find hard to understand because the everyday language, Bollywood Hindi, is a mixture of Hindi words and Urdu words, so there are Persian and Sanskrit origins.

Modi gained national attention as a spokesperson for the BJP of which he had become a national general secretary in 1998-99. He used the same Urdu terms e.g. 'aham mudda' as everybody else and peppered his discourse with English phrases- e.g. how instead of 'vote to defeat', there would be 'vote to punish', those who had brought down Vajpayee's government in 1999. 

But for Modi and for people of his ilk in the BJP — his party — it’s very important to “cleanse the language Hindi from foreign influences.” That is why they will speak a very Sanskritized Hindi.

Nonsense! Brahmins like Vajpayee or Murli Manohar may have been expected to do so. But they too understood the need to appeal to the youth. The plain fact is, it was under Nehru that 'Hindization' on the basis of Sanskrit was pushed forward. This was because of a promise that had been made at the time when the Constitution was being drafted that Hindi would be made the national language by 1965. The problem was that nobody knew what was correct Hindi. The joke was that the thing the Government had concocted- and this was Nehru's government, nobody else's- was incomprehensible. Thus when the Radio announcer said 'now listen to the news in Hindi', what actually happened was you heard some Hindi in the news. But the same thing was happening in Pakistan. Words of Arabic and Persian origin were replacing those of indigenous origin. I may mention, in Tamil Nadu, Tamil too was being 'purified'. So what? By the Eighties, nobody gave a toss for those linguistic shibboleths.  

When did Modi begin his rise as a popular icon? I think an interview he gave in December 1998 to Zee TV was the turning point. The big question then was whether the RSS was interfering with the BJP. Were they trying to pull down Vajpayee? Were they adamant on the imposition of a Hindutva agenda even if this meant that the BJP could not lead a coalition? What about losses in Haryana and Delhi? Were they not self-inflicted wounds? 

The truth was that the RSS had its doubts about Vajpayee. They feared that a BJP government would become just as corrupt and complacent as a Congress administration. Could Modi- a hard-core RSS worker from a very modest background- dispel the doubts of the TV audience? Could he withstand a grilling by the urbane and very well-spoken TV anchor? The answer was yes. Modi spoke sensibly with a touch of humor. He said Hindutva 'is an article of faith'- he used that English phrase. Faith can't be imposed. Hindus know this is the teaching of all of their own sects. One can pray to God for the gift of Faith. One can't hire a guy to beat it into you. The RSS wants to revitalize and raise up every branch of national life. But, in politics, this can only be done by establishing 'credibility' through 'transparency' and improving 'coordination'. Modi sometimes supplies the Hindi equivalent of the English words he is using, but sometimes he does not bother to do so. What matters is that he has got his point across. Governance can't be on the basis of slogans or some magical ideology. It is a practical, wholly pragmatic, enterprise. 

Modi tackles the allegation that the BJP was trying to impose Hindu worship by pointing out that a previous PM- I.K Gujral- had the same Hindu prayer at a function. No one batted an eyelid then. It was the height of 'hypocrisy' to raise the matter now so as to pander to vote-bank politics. 

 Modi was able to win over the audience because he could admit that the BJP had made mistakes. It was a case of 'self-out' in Delhi. This raised a laugh. Modi admitted there had been coordination failures. In Haryana, the mood of the people had not been adequately prepared for the idea of prohibition. Modi explains that all parties need to re-establish credibility and improve coordination. True, he uses English words- and this can be a magical substitute for thinking- but he is choosing to fully answer the question as stated. He is candid. He can be quite humorous but one can see he is a serious man. But, he knows the existential threats facing the country can only be overcome by everybody working together. There is no 'top-down' solution. That is why he is speaking in a natural, not an oracular or obscurantist, manner. He is not repeating slogans. He is not ducking questions. He is saying 'I'm an RSS man. We want to revitalize every area of National life. But, Politics must be transparent (he adds the shuddh Hindi word for this) it must be focused on governance which is not a matter of Faith, it is a matter of learning to face new circumstances. In other words, the RSS did not think it had some magical remedy for what ailed India. It understood that governance was the same type of work as is done by any commercial enterprise. The public, too, Modi said, understands this. A true article of faith is not a playing card you can throw down to win the electoral jackpot. What was required was hard work, willingness to learn and adapt, and coordination and the maintenance of credibility through transparent processes. Modi himself, by speaking sensibly and admitting the shortcomings of his party, was contributing to this. 

It is odd that Indian intellectuals decided, against all the evidence, that Modi was a semi-literate Hitler who shouted slogans in shuddh Hindi. Zakaria says Modi is both the 'outsider' and the 'insider'. This is not true as far as Delhi is concerned. People who watched the Zee TV interview understood that Modi, as a general secretary of the ruling party, was an insider. Moreover, he showed he could disagree with senior people like Sushma Swaraj. True, he might be dropped by the High Command or sent back to his own Home State (which is what happened in 2001) but he was an accomplished professional and could choose the degree to which he wanted to be inside or outside the circles of power in Delhi. 

Zakaria repeats the canard that Modi is like Orban or Erdogan. What he does not get that is Modi rose in a professional, cadre based, political party. He is like Clinton- a successful Governor who became a successful President. He isn't like Trump or Orban or Erdogan who were ab ovo sui generis politicians or have become so. Ask the question, what happens if Modi drops dead? The answer is Shah takes over though they may pick a different figure going into a General Election. There are plenty of people of all sorts who have risen from the ranks of the RSS pracharak. Some are senior lawyers or engineers or educationists etc. I have no idea whom they will bring forward but I do know that, they will drop the fellow like a hot potato if he doesn't click with the voters. That is where Dynastic parties fall down. 

Zakaria is unusual in that he is a cheerleader for India- more particularly an India that goes much further down the path of reform. What he doesn't get is that Modi's 'viksit bharat sankalp yatra' is meant to provide a Social minimum or safety net such that factor mobility can improve, female participation can rise, and thus India can tackle existential environmental and other threats without losing its ethos as a Democracy under the Rule of Law. But, for transparent politics, you have to get rid of Dynasticism. For transparent Capital markets, you have to tackle the problem of the Joint Family enterprise where there is great opacity if not succession battles which can sink the entire conglomerate. 

Zakaria does not mention India's true 'man of Destiny'- Rahul Gandhi- but for whose reluctance to take the job which got his granny and daddy shot- Modi would never have been the PM candidate in 2014. What type of language does Rahul speak? In Hindi, he is staccato when he isn't just shrill. In English, he is vacuous. In both, he is unelectable. That is why only the rustics of Wayanad- who understand neither English nor Hindi- will vote for him. Unless, they too are tired of his antics and switch to voting for Annie Raja, the wife of the Communist Party General Secretary. 

Fareed's latest book 'Age of Revolutions' warns that 'liberalism’s great strength has been freeing people from arbitrary constraints

This is nonsense. Either productivity was rising, which meant 'arbitrary constraints' were already being evaded or eroded, or else liberalism was shit. Consider the overthrow of the Portuguese monarchy in 1910. You had 'Liberal', anti-clerical, Republican administrations for 16 years. There were eight presidents and 45 ministries during that period. But productivity didn't rise. None shed a tear when those useless shitheads were kicked out by the Army. An economist, Salazar, was installed but productivity didn't rise much. It was only after another Revolution in the Seventies that Portugal could securely lodge itself on the path to affluence. 

—but its great weakness has been leaving individuals isolated, to figure out for themselves what makes for a good life. 

Liberalism says what makes for a good life is your rising in productivity and thus opulence. You can't be generous- i.e. liberal- if you are as poor as shit. True, if a bunch of Liberals take over a Malthusian shithole, there will be no 'Tardean mimetic effect' whereby ordinary people have a path to rise into opulence and political correctness by getting richer through higher productivity. But, in this case, sooner or later, either the Army or a peasant jacquerie will kick out those Liberals, or else slit their throats.  

Still, Zakaria is right. A true Liberal should be constantly interfering with people rather than letting them figure out for themselves whether they want some bien pensant Yalie to instruct them in the splendors of sodomy or the glories of gender reassignment surgery. 

This void – the hole in the heart – can all too easily be filled by tribalism, populism, and identity politics.

Only in the sense that the void in your rectum- the asshole in your buttocks- can all to easily be filled with various root vegetables and common household objects. A true Liberal would interfere actively in the lives of the population to prevent them shoving the vacuum cleaner up their arse or else filling their hearts with tribalism.  

Today’s revolutions in technology and culture can even leave people so adrift that they turn against modernity itself.

I live in a part of London where lots of the artists and intellectuals 'turned against modernity itself'. There was William Morris, there were the Pre-Raphelites, there was G.K Chesterton, there was Yeats- indeed, both M.K Gandhi and Shri Aurobindo once lived down the road from me. So what? We don't care if Liberals ponce around in khadi dhotis or Morris's handloom garments or pretend they are medieval knights and speak to each other in Wardour Street English. All that matters is productivity. Is it rising? If so, well and good. Otherwise there will be tears before bedtime. 

Revolutions don't greatly matter. Wars- total Wars- do. Why? Failure to raise productivity directly gives rise to an existential threat. Stop doing stupid shit. Stop talking bollocks. Engage in Tardean mimetics- i.e. look around and see who has highest productivity in a particular sector and try to imitate them. If you can't, try to find some remunerative activity you have a comparative advantage in and double down on it. Don't listen to guys with PhDs in useless shite. 

Consider the following excerpt from Zakaria's vacuous tome- 

A Multitude of Revolutions

The comedian Robin Williams sometimes talked about politics in his stand-up routines. He would begin by reminding people of the origins of the word. "Politics," he would explain, comes from " 'Poli,' a Latin word meaning many, and 'tics' meaning bloodsucking creatures." He always got a big laugh.

Even in the time of Aristophanes, it was common knowledge that some demagogues, in the pay of tax-farmers, were dangerous parasites of this sort. Thus the guy who stands up in the Agora and makes an impassioned speech about how we have to conquer such and such island because its people are in league with the Persians, may be in the pay of the guy who hopes to get the contract for disposing of the slaves we will gain. Slaves and metics were important because productivity was important. But if you grow wealthy you also have to worry about being invaded. Public policy involved trade-offs between security and opulence. Moreover, where there was a particular 'Pareto improvement' there was still the question as to who would capture those gains. Thus Political Economy has always been about productivity. Without it, you lose any type of freedom unless you are willing to live like the Scythians.  

In fact, alas, the word derives from ancient Greek, from polites, which means citizen and itself comes from polis, meaning city or community.

This was irrelevant. There already were ideas about 'Nations' and 'tribes'. Particular cities may have originally been settled by different tribes or else such tribal identities were subsequently imposed. What mattered was the tradeoff between productivity and security.  

Aristotle's Politics, written in the fourth century BC, is a book about the ways to govern communities, and it discusses all the elements of politics that we would find familiar today—the nature of power, types of political systems, causes of revolutions, and so on.

Aristotle had shit for brains. His student, Alexander, was doing the opposite of everything he suggested. 'Homonoia'- i.e. universal norms and laws- is cool if the Stationary Bandit has economies of scope and scale and can become a 'natural' monopolist of coercive power. This is what the US thought it had after Yeltsin got drunk and shat the bed. But, the West frittered away its Hegemonic power by wasting a lot of money killing Muslims in far off places. The problem here is that Muslims believe in God. Moreover, their God will grant them victory eventually. Since Muslims are smart and not continually drunk, the sensible thing is not to piss them off. Why not just transact business with them in a polite manner?  That's what the Chinese do. 

Politics is one of those rare human enterprises that hasn't changed that much over the millennia.

No. It has changed greatly because technology, and thus productivity, has changed greatly. Zakaria is a cretin. He thinks America didn't have a big Army because the Federal Government could not raise money for it. He forgets that the first modern 'total' war was the Civil War. If America didn't have a big army after that, it was because it was so fucking powerful nobody messed with it. Napoleon III's foray into Mexico collapsed of its own accord. At a later point, the Germans and Japs were stupid enough to think they could fuck with America. America actually grew richer swatting them down like flies. But it was raising productivity in all fields, including the field of military conquest (nuclear bombs are labour saving devices) and paying for it through taxation till the Vietnam war hotted up. After that, as Obama said, American foreign policy consisted of doing stupid shit. Still, at least Reagan had the sense to run away from shit-shows like Lebanon. Gorby had become aware of the productivity gap. He was such a fool that he thought the solution was to relinquish Party control of the economy without realizing this would immediately precipitate a 'scissors crisis'- i.e. different sectors would lose the incentive to supply each other unless existing 'shadow prices' equaled or exceeded 'spot prices'. Mathematical economists helped make this clear to the nomenklatura. Kantorovich, hilariously, thought he had found the correct theory of value. He hadn't. He had concentrated the minds of apparatchiks on the fact that the spot market price for Soviet oil was much higher than what it was getting for it from places like Cuba or North Korea. Fuck Communism. Let's all just get very rich and buy super-yachts in the same way the Arab Sheikhs do. 

Its outward forms have shifted, but its core concern remains the same: the struggle for power and what to do with it.

People may struggle for power within their own family or place of work. Political Economy is about raising productivity without endangering internal or external security. Zakaria wasted his time studying stupid shit.  

In 64 BC, Rome's greatest orator, Cicero,

who was Epicurean in Economics and Stoic in Jurisprudence. He understood money. Sadly, he was a bit of a blathershite.  

ran for the office of consul. His younger brother decided to write for him a guide of sorts to winning elections, a set of practical lessons for his sometimes too idealistic sibling.

Nonsense! That brother was considered a bit cracked in the head and prone to the use of cruel and unusual punishments. The 'Commentariolum' may have been written later by some pedagogue as a rhetorical exercise. Cicero and his brother were well educated but the family was clearly on the make. Still, a lawyer may well want to appear idealistic or moral or religious or as possessing good taste. But, if he and his family were worth killing, it is clear that they were part of the power-games of the period. 

Among his suggestions: promise everything to everyone, always be seen in public surrounded by your most passionate supporters, and remind voters of your opponents' sex scandals. More than two thousand years later, political consultants charge hefty fees to dispense the same advice.

This is like saying Doctors charge hefty fees for saying 'you should improve your health'. The truth is we pay for prescriptions only from those with superior domain-expertise or scientific knowledge. 

Despite these constants, in recent centuries, politics has taken on a particular ideological shape that would have been alien to those living in the ancient or medieval world.

Not really. All we can say is that at a certain point, political economy became philosophy while, at some other point, it became theology after which it could become ideology. Yet there were underlying continuities.  

Modern politics around the world has been characterized as a contest between the Left and the Right.

By guys like Zakaria- sure. But we didn't say 'Blair is to the Left of Major' and we don't say 'Starmer is to the Left of Sunak'. We said Blair can be an effective PM as we now say 'Starmer might be able to defeat his enemies in his own party. Sunak is bound to get knifed in the back by a colleague who in turn will soon be knifed in the back by his closest supporter'.  

The simple demarcation of Left and Right has traditionally said a lot about where someone stands, whether in Brazil, the United States, Germany, or India: on the left, a stronger state with more economic regulation and redistribution;

the left is associated with weaker states with more corruption. There can only be redistribution from immobile factors- but that tends to be the elderly or the stupid.  

on the right, a freer market with less governmental intervention.

Not necessarily. If less intervention is needed for productivity gains without which the state will collapse, a sensible politician will take that road no matter what ideological bollocks he spouts.  

This left-right divide had long dominated the political landscape of the world,

In England, my generation considered it meaningless. Why? In the Seventies, the academic Left doubled down on Prices and Incomes Policy, even though Callaghan & Healey knew it didn't work. But, in the US, it was Nixon who had introduced that policy. He truly was the last Keynesian. What Zakaria may not know is that the traditional Right was committed to the Bretton Woods straitjacket and embraced Exchange Controls and so forth whereas the upstart 'Hayekian' neo-Liberals were ready to abandon the traditional 'Corporatist' interest groups to their fate. In the Tory party, the 'Old Etonians' were wets who were wary of 'Big Bang' and deregulation while the 'Old Estonians'- i.e. Jews who remained such no matter where they went to School- were for Thatcher, Tebbit and 'Dagenham man'. Harold McMillan was the voice of the traditional Tory party denouncing the selling of the family silver- i.e. Privatization. 

defining elections, public debates, and policies, even provoking violence and revolution. But these days, this fundamental ideological division has broken down.

It broke down long ago. Essentially, the upper working class in OECD countries was voting against 'redistribution' at the end of the Sixties. By the end of the Seventies, they had turned against the Teamsters and 'Corporate Welfare'- i.e. paying big Companies to featherbed Unionized workers. 

Consider Donald Trump and his run for the presidency in 2016.

He could have been a Ross Perot type fizzle-out but he could monopolize a key issue- viz. immigration. What no one predicted was that the professional politicians were tender little flowers who would weep copiously and shit themselves if he tweeted something mean about them. 

Trump was a departure from the past in so many ways—his bizarre personality,

which suited a real-estate mogul who was also a Reality TV star 

his ignorance of public policy,

Reagan and Dubya were probably just as ignorant. So what?

and his flouting of democratic norms.

No such things exist.  

But perhaps the most significant sense in which Trump was different was ideological.

He was different because he had never taken a Government pay-check.  

For decades, the Republican Party had espoused a set of ideas that could be described as the Reagan formula.

The Republican party had various wings. I suppose Zakaria sees Reagan as in the Goldwater mold. However, the 'Reagan coalition' crucially involved disgruntled white blue-collar workers who felt abandoned by the Democrats. 

Ronald Reagan became an extraordinarily popular Republican by advocating limited government,

just like Carter.  

low taxes, cuts to government spending, a muscular military, and the promotion of democracy abroad. He also ran on a platform that was socially conservative

the key to his successive victories.  

—in favor of banning abortion, for instance—but he often downplayed these parts of the program, particularly once in office. To his many fans, Reagan was a sunny, optimistic figure who celebrated America's free markets, openness to trade, and generous immigration policies and wanted to spread its democratic model to the rest of the world.

'Star Wars' was the idea that Americans didn't need to maintain bases in far off countries so as to protect their Homeland from missiles.   

Trump argued against most elements of the Reagan formula.

NAFTA? 

While he did advocate some of the same policies—low taxes and limits on abortions—he devoted the vast majority of his time and energy to a very different agenda. Trump's hour-long campaign speeches could be boiled down to four lines: The Chinese are taking away your factories. The Mexicans are taking away your jobs. The Muslims are trying to kill you. I will beat them all up and make America great again.

The problem here is that it really was true that Companies had shut down factories on US soil and opened them in China. Mexicans really were competing for various types of jobs- and getting them because they worked harder or were more skilled. Jihadi Muslims did show up to blow up planes or just shoot up random strangers. What is bizarre is why Americans didn't vote for someone who promised to make their country utterly shit.

It was a message of nationalism, chauvinism, protectionism, and isolationism.

No. The message was- Hilary is shit. This is now conventional wisdom but it wasn't at that time.  

Trump broke with many core elements of Republican economic orthodoxy,

no such thing existed. Bush called Reaganomics 'Voodoo', but became his Veep happily enough.  

promising to never cut entitlements like Social Security and Medicare, which reversed decades of Republican fiscal conservatism.

This is one reason the Republicans need Trump. He can tell the budget hawks in Congress to shut the fuck up. If they don't, he will give them a mean nickname and broadcast it on Social Media.  

He denounced George W. Bush's military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq and condemned his geopolitical project of spreading democracy.

Who will stand up for Dubya? No one has heard from him since... what was it, 2006? Perhaps he is being held hostage by the Taliban. 

In fact, Trump savaged nearly every Republican standard-nearer in recent memory, and all the party's living presidents and almost all the living nominees rejected him.

None are worth shit.  

And while genuflecting before the Reagan myth, Trump could not have been more different—an angry, pessimistic figure who warned that America was doomed and promised a return to a mythic past.

Trump was like Reagan in that he got elected. He was unlike him in that he didn't get re-elected because he mishandled COVID. Also Biden might lose his temper and punch that fat fuck on live TV. Still, we can't be sure Biden will win again. 

Trump is not alone as a man of the right in breaking with traditional right-wing ideology. In fact, he's part of a global trend.

Of what? Billionaires getting elected despite having no political experience or solid party affiliations? Where else is this happening?  According to available research, billionaire political participation is well above the global average (which is 11 percent) in Russia, Hong Kong and Singapore where it is about 30 or 35 percent. In America it is about 4 percent. 

It should also be remembered that Trump has changed his party affiliation 5 times since 1987. For Zakaria that makes him a 'man of the right'. For us, it makes Zakaria an over-educated fool.