Atrocity suffered by Salik Ahmad in Modi's India

In February 2020, US Dictator, Donal Trump came to India to persuade Modi to tear up and destroy Indian Constitution. Fearless editor, Fearless Editorji, called his top reporter- Salik Ahmad- into his office. 'Indian Constitution is in danger' Fearlessji said, 'We have obtained original copy. It must be hidden from Modi's goons. If necessary, it should be smuggled out of the country. I call upon you, Salik Bahadur, to perform this heroic feat! Will you accept?' 

'Fearlessji, it would be my honor', Salik replied dropping his trousers and presenting his anus for insertion of sacred Constitution. Sadly Fearlessji turned out to be 'footloose' in his ideology.  Instead of tenderly and respectfully inserting Indian Constitution into a place of safety, Fearlessji shoved his dick up Salik's rectum. What was the result of this horrible action? Only two years later are we able to judge...

The India Forum is funded by a charity whose chairman is also the chairman of the Raza Foundation. It published the following cri de coeur by a young Muslim 'independent journalist' which was republished by Scroll.in. which received funding from Omidyar and is registered in Delaware.

The Shattering of the Muslim Hope in India
A young Muslim reflects on the collapse of constitutional promises and on the everyday fears and dilemmas faced by the minorities.

SALIK AHMAD

What is noteworthy here is that the editor is not saying this is one young Muslim's opinion. Rather, this is the situation of all Muslims. Apparently they used to have hope. Now that hope has shattered. Why? Because of the collapse of 'constitutional promises' and 'everyday fears and dilemmas'. 

This is surprising. The Constitution stripped Muslims of all previous reservations and even caste based affirmative action. Muslim refugees who had crossed the border in panic were stripped of Citizenship. Non Muslim refugees were assured of it. The Custodian of Evacuee (later 'Enemy') property was empowered to harass Muslim property owners. The proportion of Muslims in India went down. Why on earth would Salik Ahmad pin any hope on the Constitution? It can be amended any which way. It has been amended every which way.  Extra judicial killing on an industrial scale has been the method of choice for tackling any large scale insurgency. For smaller 'law and order' problems, majoritarian retaliation followed by one-sided curfews and patterns of arrest have been the norm since 1937. Why is this 'independent journalist' so fucking ignorant and stupid? Perhaps the answer is that he is being paid. What he writes is aimed at grant-renewal from entities registered, for Tax purposes, in Delaware.

There are 200 million Muslims in India. What percentage of them is Salik speaking for? Let us see

A few days ago, a friend and I were sitting on my terrace’s moss-blackened floor, having stolen an evening from Delhi life, looking at the fractals of a bare tree against an anaemic sky. He worked in one of those menacingly big MNCs, and was talking about how, as a Muslim, the office felt so alien to him.

Less than one percent of Indians work for 'menacingly big MNCs' in any capacity, let alone the management cadre. Though upper class Muslims may be well represented in the upper echelons, historically that anglophile upper class represented an ever tinier fraction of the Muslim population than the anglophile Hindu class did (at least in some parts of India). 

Indeed, a Hindu from a small town or from a 'backward caste' would find a big MNC office even more alien than this Muslim.

“Everybody is so oblivious to the persecution of Muslims.

or persecution of Hindus from such and such caste- e.g. anti Brahmin sentiment in Tamil Nadu which some Iyers- who grew up in Delhi or Bombay- are oblivious of.  

I wake up to a new video of lynching,

Murder of Brahmin priest by dominant caste people miffed that the fellow had been pre-booked for another marriage. 'Poonal snatching', verbal and physical abuse, incessant denunciation of Brahmins by senior politicians, discriminatory quotas etc, etc. 

Obviously, if some rustic Iyer who got into an MNC office because of his IT skills, made any such remarks other more sophisticated Iyers would tell him to shut the fuck up. Concentrate on getting posted to San Fran, so as to get rid of your desi accent, or Frankfurt, if you don't want to work your ass off and prefer quality of life. India is a shithole. Leave. Do it for your kids, if not for yourself. 

or another hate speech,

plenty of 'hate speeches' against Brahmins in T.N. Indeed, plenty of denunciations of 'Brahmin patriarchy' at J.N.U.  

or a genocide-enabling cartoon,

But only Muslims in India, in recent years, have done ethnic cleansing. Hindus haven't. Genocide is a Muslim specialty though, no doubt, the War on Terror killed 1.3 millions, according to American sources. Why don't Omidyar and Soros and so forth publicize that fact?  

but I go to office and find people discussing what place makes the best sushis

200 million Indian Muslims hopes have been shattered because Hindus keep talking about sushi.  U.N must take action!

and what place makes the best cheesecakes.

Cheesecake is Hindu conspiracy to suppress Muslims. 

There’s Secret Santa

Secret Santa is RSS trojan horse. The paak Mussulman's spiritual and moral integrity is being subverted by evil Hindu sushi and cheesecake and secret Santa! Jihad those infidels! Jihad them but good! 

happening and there are people chalking out their growth trajectories, and I just look around the office, wondering what this place is, or if I’ve come to a different age,” he said.

Indeed. Where are the camels? How come the boss isn't telling us which idolatrous temple to attack?  

But then we worried about other friends who worked in outright communal workspaces, with colleagues needling them every now and then over their religious beliefs,

Which atheists consider a cool thing to do. Religious folk should not engage in such foolishness. Everybody's beliefs appear bizarre from some other perspective. Attack the shibboleth of another Faith and you have forged a weapon of scepticism against your own Credo.  

and deduced that even an apathetic space was a privilege. And of course, we shuddered at the thought of what Muslims, especially the ones visibly so, in the informal sector—street vendors, rickshaw-pullers, etc.—might be facing every day.

This 'independent journalist' does not bother finding out what problems such Muslims actually face. This would not be difficult. Just talk to rickshaw-wallahs etc. There are many more of them in Delhi than there are guys working in MNC offices.  

Being a print journalist who has worked in English newsrooms, I have been largely saved from such experiences.

Because the guy didn't do what journalists are supposed to do- viz. talk to the rickshaw puller.  

I worked under some truly secular editors, and others, who, I later realised, were secular only because of the prevailing office culture—they turned out to be surprisingly footloose in terms of ideology.

How shocking! Did you know that editors were prostitutes? Oh. The term 'presstitute' is Indglish. Why did nobody tell poor, innocent, wide-eyed, Salik? He may well have yielded his virginity to some such 'footloose' person. 

As the skies turned dark and the chatter of kids from the streets below petered out, my friend and I got up to take a walk. The conversation then turned towards what has become the staple of every conversation between young, privileged Muslims: Should we leave India?

Yes. It is a shithole. Get out while you can. But this is true for Hindus, Parsis, Christians...everybody. Seriously, Delhi's air will soon be completely toxic.  

There was a time when I believed in the promises of the Indian state, but over the years and many painful reckonings later I began to see it for what it was.

See India for what it is- a Malthusian shithole. Very very poor countries aint gonna have wonderful State apparati. True, patriotic people may want to stay on to make the country richer and more secure. But these guys aint patriotic. They are whiners. They should emigrate, if only for the sake of their kids.  

Even as I begin to write my thoughts, I feel a gush of anger, closely followed by an impulse to moderate my expression.

When a journalist begins to write his thoughts, he feels a gush of uncertainty- does he have enough facts? is his account fair and balanced?- and this motivates further investigation and getting better sources to confirm the gravamen of the article.  

This is exerted either by a fear of the law or the anxiety to express an ‘acceptable’ shade of opinion.

So, the guy has no journalistic ethics. That's another reason to get the fuck out of India. Its journalistic standards have turned to shit.  

This is the first mark of control and oppression, for it limits my voice, pre-setting the range of my vocabulary, and, thus, diminishes upon its very birth, the cry for my rights.

This fucker thinks he is Anna Akhamatova under Stalin. Perhaps some 'footloose' editor sodomized him. Or perhaps his Ammi put her boot up his ass because she wanted him to stop hanging out with friends on terraces and just get married already.  

It is almost incredible how the law and the discourse-setters work together to sanitise testimonies and, subsequently, erode justice.

Worse still, they conspire together to shove 'footloose' editorial dick up Salik's ass. That is the real story here. You have to read between the lines. The law and discourse-setters have sanitized Salik's testimony. The fact is he was held down by Sushi eating MNC employees while various footloose editors, lacking sound ideological moorings, robbed him of his anal cherry. Either that or his Ammijaan shoved her boot up his ass. In either case the guy has a prolapsed rectum. This is eroding justice too much. Constitution is in peril! 

There was a time when I believed in the promises of the Indian state, but over the years and many painful reckonings later

them 'footloose' editors sure are randy little buggers 

I began to see it for what it was. When it came into being, it was certainly a child with considerable potential.

It stripped Muslim refugees of citizenship, got rid of reserved seats for Muslims, and took away affirmative action for Muslim Dalits.  

But what it allowed itself to become, a lot of times with wilful transgressions, pausing but never really atoning for its crimes, only suggested that the initial assessments were erroneous and premised perhaps on an unfounded optimism.

Smart Muslims emigrated. So did smart Hindus. This was even before Sushi eating MNC employees started holding down wide-eyed believers in the Constitution while 'footloose' editors went to town on their anal cherries.  

Despite the progressive Constitution giving it nearly all the thrust it needed to become a secular state,

but not as much thrust as that of 'footloose' editors 

it could never become that. On the contrary, it has now become quite a majoritarian state.

It always was a majoritarian state. However, Pakistan and India agreed to halt exchange of population. Why did they do so? Because both sides wanted an underclass to provide cheap labor. But then the West too permitted immigration of South Asians for the same reason. The point about being as poor as shit is that rich people want to exploit your labor power. On the other hand, they may pay a little money to hear you whine about how shitty your natal shithole really was. Obviously, this is funnier if you are still living in that shithole. On the other hand, this may be because you have grown fond of the attentions of 'footloose' editors. 

I see and remember ... the faces of the Muslims who have spent their entire youth in prison because of wrongful incarceration.

This never happens to Hindus- right?  Still, it's good to know that Americans funded 'India forum' and 'Scroll.in' because it drew attention away from Guantanamo Bay. Salik is fighting the good fight for Uncle Sam by distracting attention from the 1.3 million Muslims killed in a War against Terror which ended terribly for everybody except Iran and the Taliban. 

If there was a metaphor for what the Indian state does to its Muslim citizens, it is that of the police torturing the 23-year-old Faizan during the violence that broke out in Delhi in February 2020.

But, this metaphor is predicated on the notion that Muslims will attack policemen and Hindus- just because the American President is visiting India- even though, within a day, the Hindus will massively retaliate and then even the Police got in on the action. 

The man is lying on the ground, along with other Muslim men, writhing in pain, and the cops are forcing him to sing the national anthem while prodding him with sticks.

But, if the Police Commissioner hadn't been a pussy and if the police had opened fire immediately the first time one of their own got knifed, there would have been no riots. Muslims would have been safer. Why did Delhi not see any post-Babri violence? It is because an IPS officer gave shoot to kill orders the moment one of his men was stabbed. The result was that Delhi remained trouble free while Bombay went up in flames.  

Faizan dies later, quite apparently killed by the state.

Whereas policemen were killed by Muslims and therefore, by Salik's logic- by Islam.  

More than two years later, there is not a flower of justice on his grave.

Nor has Islam been punished for killing policemen during the Delhi riots. On the other hand, the flower of Salik's anal virginity may well have been plucked by 'footloose' editors.  

Writing in 1962 for The New Yorker, in an essay titled “Letter From a Region in My Mind”, the Black American writer James Baldwin noted, “They had the judges, the juries, the shotguns, the law—in a word, power. But it was criminal power, to be feared, but not respected, and to be outwitted in any way whatever.”

Were Muslims brought to India as slaves? No. They came as conquerors who enslaved Hindus. Strangely, Hindus did not appreciate this at all. Sad.

I see and remember the face of Faizan’s mother.

Did she see and remember Salik's face as one of the people who came forward to comfort her? 

I see and remember the horror and the plea for mercy in the eyes of Qutbuddin Ansari from 2002; the tears in the eyes of the lady in Karnataka, who was forced to take off her burqa to enter the school where she had been teaching for years;

she was teaching in a girl's school. In Islam, women must take off their veil when in a space reserved for women. This is because boys might put on a burqa to sneak in. 

the faces of the Muslims who have spent their entire youth in prison because of wrongful incarceration; and the pain in the eyes of fellow Muslims, every time I see them raise their hands in supplication.

But does Salik remember his own anal violation at the hands of footloose editors? I do even though I wasn't there. Yet the image is growing more and more vivid to my mind's eye. 

Salik raised his hands in supplication but Footloose editors did not care. They continued to thrust away at his pink, puckered, asshole laughing heartily. Some even forced the fellow to sing National Anthem so as to increase their perverse pleasure. Others were cramming Sushi and Cheesecake down his throat which they then used as a repository for their sperm. Such is the fate of innocents Muslim in Modi's India.  They may spread hands in supplication for insertion of Constitution as a suppository. What they are getting is anal intrusion by ideologically footloose editors. As James Baldwin, who was homosexual, said 'First they come for our assholes but nobody says anything because that would be like homophobia right? Then they force us to write worthless shite but nobody says anything coz that would be like against the Freedom of the Press, right? Then they turn out never to have existed because we made them up and everybody just gets on with their life as though nothing happened!'

Chidambaram as andolanjeevi

P. Chidambaram was born into the purple of commerce. He was bright- returning to India with a Harvard MBA in 1968. Sadly, he didn't use his inheritance and his education to make the country richer by creating jobs and finding export markets. Instead, having inherited wealth, he became a woke virtue signaling cunt.

In fairness, as a member of Manmohan's cabinet, Chidu did take a dim view of foreign funded NGOs and the various agitations they sponsor. His endorsement of draconian action against the anti Nuclear movement in his native Tamil Nadu is still remembered. 

Strangely, he is now pretending that agitations are a good thing no matter how much they are against the National interest. 

Writing in the Indian Express, he tells us-

On the day in 1970 when the Supreme Court struck down the Executive Order withdrawing privy purses given to former rulers of princely states, another young advocate and I ‘joined’ the Youth Congress in Tamil Nadu.

It was not yet wholly dynastic. 

We joined by being part of a Youth Congress-organised protest against the judgment near the statue of Lord Munro in Chennai. We were arrested and released shortly afterwards. When privy purses were finally abolished by an amendment to the Constitution, we believed that our protest (and arrest) had led to the amendment and we had been vindicated!

This is utterly mad! Indira issued the Executive Order and then amended the Constitution. Why? It was a populist measure in keeping with her lurch to the left. Chidu asks us to believe that a smart guy with a Harvard MBA thought that his shouting slogans caused the hereditary privilege of the Princes to disappear! How stupid and ignorant does he think we are?  

Our protest was a dissent to the judgment of the Supreme Court.

No. It was something organized by the Youth Congress so that a couple of people could get to say they 'courted arrest' and that 'Madam' had responded to their anguish by changing the Constitution.  

There were similar protests at many places in the country. The Supreme Court did not haul us for contempt of court;

Hilarious! The Bench was groveling at Indira's feet!  

no one labelled us as anti-national; and no police agency charged us with sedition. Bless them.

Because that is what Madam wanted. She would later suspend all Constitutional rights and jail and torture anyone she pleased. Chidu, however, had ensured his own safety. But Stalin Karunanidhi was tortured.  

A dissenting mind belongs to a thinking person.

Only to the extent that an assenting or cowardly mind does so too.  

Great judges have been great dissenters: Justice Frankfurter, Justice Subba Rao, Justice H R Khanna and others.

A Judge who has a 'dissenting opinion' in a particular case is not a dissenter. Only if a Judge resigns because he or she feels the Basic Structure of the Constitution has been tampered with could such a person be called a dissident or a dissenter. 

Frankfurter was called a radical, not a dissenter. It is true he wrote more dissenting opinions than concurring opinions but this was because he was generally concurring and someone else was writing the opinion. 

Subba Rao wasn't on the Bench long. He resigned to run for the Presidency on a united Opposition ticket. Indira got rid of his pesky Golaknath decision soon afterwards. It is not clear why Chidu, who was against Privy Purses, brackets Subba Rao with Frankfurter. H.R Khanna is a different kettle of fish. But he resigned on being superseded rather than supinely hanging on while Sanjay and his Youth Congress thugs ran amok.

The dissenting judge, sometimes joined by other judges on the Bench, writes a minority judgment that was described as “an appeal to the brooding spirit of the law, to the intelligence of a future day”.

Or the reverse. Dissenting opinions can be very stupid indeed.  

In the field of sports, dissent is expressed by raising a clenched fist.

No. It is represented by beating the shit out of the umpire and any one else who gets in your way. 

In a business enterprise, dissent takes the form of work-to-rule or a strike.

Nonsense! It takes the form of a law suit or a demerger. A strike is not dissent. It is a threat point in a bargaining game.  

In politics and public life, dissent is expressed as a protest.

Not necessarily. Dissidents may simply retreat from public life and refuse to serve the Administration. By contrast, as in India, 'protests' may be orchestrated by the ruling party for a cosmetic purpose. Chidu protesting re. Privy Purses is a classic example. It wasn't dissent. It was sycophancy or careerism.  

Some protests garner widespread support and become an agitation, sometimes drawing thousands into the agitation. All ‘agitationists’ are passionate about the ‘cause’, many are willing to suffer and make sacrifices, few are selfish, and only a handful formulate the strategy. The last-named are the andolanjeevis, christened as such and denounced by the Prime Minister on February 8 while speaking in the Rajya Sabha.

The PM's political career began with the Nav Nirman agitation. The destruction of the Babri Masjid too was 'agitational'. These are the things which enabled the BJP to come to power. But both agitations happened long ago. The BJP saw that 'andolans' aren't popular. Good governance is what wins votes. Modi is saying Congress can't govern for shit. All it can do is sponsor 'andolans' which, however, cause them to lose votes. 

The Great Agitator

The quintessential andolanjeevi in the first half of the 20th century was, without question, Mahatma Gandhi.

Every single andolan of his- unless it was cosmetic, as in Champaran, and intended to draw attention away from what was really happening - failed completely and utterly. That was a remarkable outcome. After Independence, the Indian State didn't think it worthwhile to save him from an Assassin's bullet. Indeed, Godse is now more popular in some circles than Gandhi.  

He instinctively picked the right causes — indigo cultivation and salt tax.

But indigo cultivation would have collapsed anyway. It couldn't pay for itself. Still, the real reason Gandhi was in Bihar was so as to disguise the fact that the Hindus were attacking the Muslims and forcing them to give up cow slaughter.

The salt tax, as Chidu knows, is still with us. Clearly Gandhi picked the wrong causes. 

He was a wordsmith and invested words with powerful messages — satyagraha and Quit India.

But the Brits didn't quit India till America refused to finance the Raj. Still, Nehru begged Mountbatten to stay on for at least another 6 months. As for 'satyagraha'- everybody could see it was based on stupid lies- e.g. the notion that Hindus would die in the cause of Khilafat. 

He believed in the power of symbols — a fistful of salt and khadi (hand-spun and hand-woven) clothing.

But the salt tax remains. Khadi of Gandhi's sort has disappeared. He objected to handloom weavers producing luxury items they couldn't wear themselves. But that is the only kind which is economically viable.  

He forged new weapons in the struggle for Independence — indefinite fasting and Dandi Yatra.

But fasting did not influence the Brits at all. They had already shown they could use forcible feeding and 'cat and mouse' tactics to defeat hunger strikes by Suffragettes. Gandhi used fasting only against Indians- e.g Ambedkar- who had reason to fear evil consequences if that old hypocrite died. Anyway, Godse got rid of that nuisance and thus has earned a place in the pantheon of Indian nationalism. 

Chidu could have abolished the salt tax when he was Finance Minister. Why did he not honor 'Dandi Yatra' then?  

He used soft power — bhajans and prayer meetings.

He was shot at one such. The assassin was captured by an American. It seems the Indian Government was not greatly concerned with protecting the life of that old coot. Interestingly, 3 people with the surname Gandhi have been assassinated despite being entitled to high level security. No wonder Rahul doesn't want to step up to the plate.  

A lot of thought must have gone into crafting and leading the struggle for Independence.

But that thought must have been very stupid indeed if India did not get in 1922 what Ireland and Egypt and Afghanistan got.  

He was the original andolanjeevi; we are proud to call him the Father of the Nation.

To be fair, Gandhi's salience was as much associated with his ability to call off andolans and to surrender unconditionally as it was to doom them from the start by his stupidity. 

On the other hand, Gandhi was very good at begging for money and posing as a holier than thou cunt. India under Nehru adopted begging bowl diplomacy and a defeatist military doctrine. Blaming Bapu for this was a sound move.  

Dissent has shaped the history of nations, dissent has given birth to new religions, dissent has liberated millions of people.

No. History features dissent and assent and absence of mind and everything else. New Religions pop up because some guys get to thinking God is talking to them. Liberation is about the cost and benefit of Coercion. Often, it is merely cosmetic.  

Lenin revolted against the provisional government installed after Tsar Nicholas II had abdicated, and the first Communist nation was born.

Because Lenin, whom the Germans had sent to Russia to undermine the Allied War effort, promised peace and land. He broke both promises. Lies, not dissent, birthed the first Communist nation.  

Siddhartha Gautama, Martin Luther and Guru Nanak dissented from the religious order in which they were born and founded a new reformist religious order.

Nonsense! Gautama was a student of Kapila. What he dissented from was the 'Sangha' of his Tribe. Briefly, he didn't want to fight in a war against a stronger tribe. So he promised he wouldn't aid the enemy but just get on with attaining Moksha or whatever. He was not dissenting against Brahminism. On the contrary, one particular sect of Brahmins were admitted to his Sangha purely by virtue of birth. What he did repudiate was a particular type of Shramanic ascesis which he considered too harsh. 

Luther could be said to be a dissident. He could also be said to be an antisemite and a guy who wanted the Princes to crush the peasantry. Still, he had a point. Monks should marry Nuns and leave the buttocks of little boys alone. 

Nanak lived under Muslim occupation. His importance lies in the fact that the sect he created took up arms against Muslim rulers and established their own Empire. 

To them we owe the birth of Buddhism, Protestantism and Sikhism.

Buddhism spread untouchability to Japan. By contrast, Bali has Brahmins but no untouchables. 

 Buddhist 'dissent' is based on the notion that Buddhist monks are superior to all other beings. We have no reason to give credence to this view.

Protestants have persecuted both Catholics as well as other Protestants. In English the word 'Dissenter' originally meant a Protestant whose form of worship was not acceptable to the Established, Anglican, Church. 

Sikhism too has a history of factional violence and ethnic cleansing.  

Martin Luther King Jr’s dissent on the prevailing social order — and the movement that sprung from his dissent — liberated millions of black Americans, something that a civil war could not do. His passionate cry “I have a dream” was an appeal to the conscience of Americans.

But MLK was supporting, not dissenting, from the existing tendency of Federal Legislation. Malcolm X could be said to have been a dissenter. Then he was killed by members of a rival faction.

There were at least three watershed years in India in the first half of the twentieth century: 1920, 1930 and 1942.

And in each case there was a big andolan which back-fired completely. It was left to the Brits to decide the pace and shape of reform.  

Each one of the years was marked by a nationwide agitation that seamlessly became a movement and transformed into a struggle for freedom.

But which fell apart and increased communalism and reduced the role of the Indian National Congress.  

The non-cooperation movement evolved into the civil disobedience movement and culminated in the Quit India movement, which was the final blow to the imperial power of Britain.

But Britain survived that blow. It beat the Japanese with American help. Had Truman been willing to finance the Raj, they'd have stayed till the Seventies- as Nehru predicted. 

On the other hand, mutinies in the Armed forces did concentrate British minds. However, if they could have raised the pay of Naval ratings etc- i.e. if Uncle Sam stumped up cash- then they could have ridden out the problem.  

The true meaning of andolan is not ‘agitation’ but ‘movement’.

Like a bowel movement.  

There are examples of agitations evolving into people’s movements in other countries as well. The anti-Vietnam war protests that exploded on university campuses across the United States (1968) exposed the lies of the US government and, in a few years, the US beat a humiliating retreat from South Vietnam, that led to a united Vietnam.

Why? Because the North Vietnamese were better fighters and had Chinese and Soviet support. There would have been no anti-Vietnam protest if there had been no draft. Indeed, if Irma Adelman's advise had been heeded- i.e. if America had financed land-reform so the peasants wouldn't have needed the Viet Cong to scare landlords away- South Vietnam could have prospered and arrived at a modus vivendi with the North. But South Vietnam's leadership was as corrupt and incompetent as Chidu's Congress Party. 

Some movements — the Velvet Revolution and the Romanian Revolution (both 1989) — succeeded in overthrowing longstanding authoritarian regimes (Czechoslovakia, Romania).

But all those regimes fell because Gorbachev listened to some silly mathematical economists and surrendered Party control of the Economy. This led to a scissors crisis. Soviet clients had to go it alone economically speaking. Only Cuba and North Korea held firm- though at the price of famine.

Some like Arab Spring in Egypt failed (2011). The enduring lesson of these movements is that the human spirit that seeks a change for the better can never be suppressed forever.

Does this man read over what he writes? He just said 'sometimes movements fail'. He could have added that often things get better without any movement whatsoever. Thus the 'enduring lesson' is 'movements in the human spirit' may or not be suppressed forever. What matters is whether a change is feasible. The Human Spirit has yearned for super powers since time began. There have been all sorts of crazy movements- e.g. the Boxer rebellion, or Maji Maji rebellion- where indigenous  people believed they could become invulnerable to Western bullets- but which failed in precisely the way Gandhian satyagraha failed. Magic does not work. 

There is an interesting correlation between citizens’ political rights/civil liberties and press freedom.

This has not been India's experience. The Press got freer while ethnic cleansing mounted. If you don't even have the right to life and property and must run away, how does it help you if you can publish an article critical of the powers that be?  

A country that ranks higher in terms of citizens’ rights will also have a better press freedom score.

No it won't. Rights are linked to remedies under a vinculum juris- a bond of law. If going to court for remedies to rights violations involves nothing but expense and delay and then, finally, a completely unenforceable judgment, we can't say citizens have effective rights. But the press may be completely free. Indeed, if the population is largely illiterate or has come to despair of the political process, why bother with it anyway?  

The conclusion is logical because it is the media that reflects and amplifies (or distorts and diminishes) the assertion of rights by citizens.

Not in a country with a lot of functional illiteracy and little purchasing power. 

Finland and several European countries are on the top in both scorecards.

But Jamaica scores high on press freedom while being the murder capital of the world.  

Near the bottom is China.

Because it is lifting hundreds of millions out of poverty and becoming a Global Super Power 

India is somewhere in the middle.

Because it is nowhere near as successful. 

The hope is India’s score will rise, the fear is it will slide.

Nonsense! Nobody gives a fuck.  

Ask the Editors’ Guild or the Press Club of India.

Why? They are a bunch of crooked tossers.  

Every 15 days or thereabouts they complain bitterly about accusations against or the arrest of a journalist or a raid on a media organisation but, in the end, they meekly surrender or become His Master’s Voice. Ramnath Goenka was the last fearless owner of a newspaper and an andolanjeevi.

He was a Marwari. Those guys did well out of their association with Gandhi, Nehru etc. But India did not. We'd have been better off either getting Independence in 1922 or keeping the Brits around till the Seventies so as to develop lots of Hong Kong type industrial centers.  

Andolanjeevis will ultimately prevail over those who will suppress speech, writing, expression, dissent, protests, agitations or movements

Only if poverty and economic stagnation prevails. Otherwise there is a trade-off between jailing nutters now and getting richer quickly as opposed to letting nutters roam free till we too have nothing else to do but join one such movement and go sleep on some road while being fed at a langar in return for feebly mouthing stupid slogans. 

China has already prevailed, though- no doubt- under Modi, India gave quite a good account of itself. This is not to the taste of the andolanjeevis whom, quite naturally, China is ready to finance.  

Apoorvanand's big poo re. Sharjeel Usmani

In medieval Germany, as elsewhere, a stigma attached to the job of the Executioner. Thus both the job and the tools of that trade were markers of 'untouchability'. It is interesting that Scroll.In has published an article about Elgar Parishad- which was supposed to be a 'Dalit' platform- with the title- Why we need to remind the hangman of his noose. The meaning is that a feat of military valor on the part of Mahars (an educated Dalit sub caste) must be put on the footing of an activity of the 'Mang' (a more stigmatized caste some members of whom were occasionaly  obliged to take the role of executioner) so that the Dalit aspect of Elgar Parishad is covered over and people Apoorvanand may believe to be darker in skin tone than himself are, in a subtle manner, told not to get uppity but stay silent at the bottom of the ladder. 

Apoorvanand's skill in Hindi, and his sly invocation of the racist, Adorno, allows him to write a seemingly inoffensive English article whose effect, nevertheless, is that Dalit Agency is denied. The anti-Caste Agenda which can unite all Faiths and all parts of India is buried . Instead, everything is made to focus on 'Ashraf' or 'Aryan' people from the Gangetic plains with the latter patronizing the former in a purely hypocritical spirit.

Apoorvanand Jha (referred to as a big jar of poo by his numerous detractors) , who teaches Hindi, and thus is permitted to write more or less correct English despite being a Professor, begins his essay with a quotation from Adorno even though Adorno has been scorned for his racism since before either I or big jar of poo got to School. 

Is this Maithili Brahmin merely stupid- or is he, in a suave and subtle manner, merely pretending to be stupid, so as to work his Casteist mischief? 

“Totalitarian regimes are …paradoxically pluralistic. This permits the masses to identify with or distance from the regime as needed. However when a totalitarian regime breaks apart, the majority can then shuffle the atrocities off themselves as what ‘they’ committed and by renouncing horror and bad conscience, while it is much easier for them to keep faith with the advantages the regime offered.
— Theodore Adorno in 'Guilt and Defense'.

The problem with this quote is that all regimes- or none at all- are paradoxically monistic or pluralistic or anything else you care to assert. When any sort of regime 'breaks apart', everybody- not just the majority- says 'those shitheads fucked up. That was nothing to do with us.' On the other hand, nobody acknowledges or 'keeps faith' with any 'advantages' the previous regime offered. This is sensible. It is better to believe that the good things you have came to you by your own efforts, not the benevolence of some fucking broken-down regime. 

Will we listen to a young fellow Indian patiently

No! The guy is young- i.e. ignorant- and Indian- i.e. as poor as shit and with shit for brains. Even if he weren't either of those two things, why listen to anyone at all patiently? How would it benefit us?  

as he asks us an uncomfortable question with care or will we hound him to death for his audacity?

We won't give a toss either way.  

I am assailed by this question as I see that Hindtuva leaders have invented a new villain for Hindus.

Muslims who believe they are at war with Hindu society are old villains from the Hindu point of view. 

After demonising student leaders Umar Khalid and Sharjeel Imam,

and Apoorvanand whom the Police thinks played a criminal role in the Delhi riots 

Hindutva leaders are now after another youth campaigner, Sharjeel Usmani.

The police are after him in the same manner they were after Apoorvanand.

They claim that he insulted Hindus in his speech at the Elgar Parishad event in Pune on January 30.

I think, the claim is that he broke the law by indulging in a particular type of hate speech aimed at promoting enmity between people of different religions. However, more significant is his contention that India is in a state of war- i.e. is dar ul harb- against Islam. 

Before going into the details of the case, it would be correct to say that they are assuming (or hoping) that Hindu sentiments will be hurt by his remarks.

I don't think this is the case. Nobody thinks that a person of another religion is obliged to harbor sentiments of respect for one's Faith or for the conduct of one's co-religionists. It would scarcely be news that a Muslim dislikes idol worshipping Hindus. On the other hand, the Sangh Parvivar ought to highlight remarks by political opponents who claim to be Hindus but who say things which are defamatory about Hinduism. In this way, the BJP gains support from Hindus who might otherwise have voted for another Party. Currently, any time a TMC goon says something nasty about Lord Ram, the 'bakhts' will tweet about it. But there is no point drawing attention to a Muslim or a Christian who says 'Hindus are following a satanic religion. That is why they behave in a horrible manner. They should convert to my religion so as to be able to join me in Paradise.' After all, there are some Hindus who say to us 'my dear, you are following a satanic path. Kindly give up such and such irreligious practice and convert to my Sect. Then you and I will enjoy Moksha together.'

What is alarming about Usmani's speech is that he is saying a section of the Indian population will support him in the War he believes is already being waged. 

First, a criminal case was registered against Usmani in Maharashtra, which is ruled by the Shiv Sena, the Congress and the Nationalist Congress Party. After an appeal by Bharatiya Janata Party leaders to their Uttar Pradesh counterparts to put Usmani behind bars, another case has been lodged in Lucknow.

This is rather strange. UP is ruled by the BJP. Nobody thinks Yogi Adityanath is a 'dove' who needs to be prodded by anybody else to take this sort of action. 

The question is, why did Maharashtra launch a police case? The answer is that the BJP had threatened to launch an agitation on this issue.

Some Muslim leaders have already distanced themselves from Usmani, lamenting that fact that he has allowed himself to be pushed to an extremist position by fascist forces.

His dad is a Professor of Geography at Aligarh Muslim University- where he studied. It may be that the author thinks the boy's daddy and his Professors were 'fascist forces' who pushed him or prodded him or interfered with him in some other way.

It is becoming clear that the young man will have to fight a lonely battle in the coming days.

But his jail cell won't be lonely. Overcrowding is a major problem in Indian prisons. The senile nutters who organized the Elgar Parishad gave a silly young man enough rope to hang himself. He says India is at war. He does not trust the police or the judiciary. This means that from being externed from his District under the 'Goonda' Act- i.e. being treated as a campus ruffian or hothead- he will get the tag of seditionist at war with the Government of India and 'Hindu Society' which he describes as 'rotten'. 

At this point, anyone with a heart would help get the kid out of India. Let him go be a 'dissident' in Europe- the Saudis and Emiratis won't have him- or Amrika, or better still- Canada. Meanwhile, in India, Owaisi will build a pan Muslim party.

What exactly did Usmani say that caused Hindutva leaders to be so outraged? He said that a rot has set in India’s Hindu society. He explained his disappointment with this society. How could a crowd stab a 14-year-old child 31 times? What do people do after lynching someone? They go back to their usual business, do their daily chores. Do they use some purifier, something to wash their hands? How do they eat peacefully, love their near ones, touch the feet of their elders? How do they comfortably move from one lynching to another? This is the part of Sharjeel Usmani’s speech making the rounds.

Usmani says he is at war with India- more particularly its 'Hindu Society'. Killing those at war with you may involve lynching if the police or armed forces can't get to the spot fast enough. This guy just justified the practice.  

Should these words be an occasion for the BJP leaders, or for us, the Hindus they claim to represent, to take offence?

Yes. Why? Because we kill people who try to kill us. We aren't really non-violent at all. By taking offense at 'fighting words' we send an eusocial signal. Suppose you are in the habit of coming up to me and telling me I'm a rotten fellow and that you are at war with me. One day you try to stick a knife in me. But I smash your head in first. Your friends might, with justice, reproach me for not having let you understand the consequences of your threatening behavior. It is sensible to take offense at a guy talking shit about you if you will in fact beat him to death the moment he has worked himself up sufficiently to try to knife you.

Shouldn’t we pause to ask what makes a young, educated fellow Indian who happens to be a Muslim say this?

Stupidity and hunger for publicity. The kid is just 23 years old. Give him a break. But what happens when we pause to ask why big jar of poo- a Maithili Brahmin whose own OBC colleagues find his arrogance enraging- is writing this? The answer is the bigot is an upholder of his imaginary Caste privilege. He hates Modi and Yogi because they are 'lower caste'. He waxes poetic about Muslims because his people were too cowardly to either harm or protect Muslims. Mithila's Dalits, however, may tell another story. 

This is the clash between Hinduism and Hindutva. The former is about preserving anachronistic distinctions by cunning hypocrisy. The latter is about getting rid of hereditary entitlement and embracing meritocracy so that the country can rise up. But, if that happens, people like big jar of poo will have to admit that only the genuinely productive- not the cunning, not the mischievous, not the cowardly- should be honored and rewarded regardless of birth or some soi disant 'education'.

Before going further, let us ask those who want Usmani jailed if the reason for their anger is solely the religious identity of the questioner or the actual content of his question.

It is solely his religious identity because, experience has taught us, Hindus who talk that stripe of shite are merely virtue signaling cretins or mischief-mongers like this big jar of poo. 

When a young Muslim talks of India being at war with Islam- and hence a dar ul harb- he is under pressure to match his deeds to his words. In this case, the guy was already facing criminal charges albeit under a less serious Act relating to hooliganism. Now he will be under the radar for seditious conspiracy or waging war against the State. 

You'd really have to hate young people- which, I suppose, many professors do- to want to make trouble for a 23 year old hot-head who comes, after all, from a good family and who hasn't actually killed anybody- yet. 

Isn’t the question relevant? Usmani was forced to ask it because we never cared to ask ourselves how a society could be at peace with itself after the mass killing of Sikhs in 1984.

We don't care to ask ourselves stupid questions about shite which only exists in the wooly head of a guy who teaches Hindi for a living. On the other hand, we do ask ourselves 'does my ass look fat in these jeans?'  

Why didn’t we as Hindus demand that the people responsible for the murders to be brought to book?

For the same reason we don't, as Hindus, demand that our own heads be chopped off and shoved up our pooper. To be clear, that reason is that it is not in our interest. 

How is it that justice for the victims of 1984 has remained a concern only for Sikhs?

Because Sikhs were killed. Hindus weren't. So, quite sensibly, Hindus don't really give a toss about this issue- though no doubt a few may pretend otherwise for some more or less transparent reason.  

Why aren’t we alarmed that the murderers and those complicit in the mass killing are living as honourable fellow citizens?

Because they didn't kill Hindus. This is an 'uncorrelated asymmetry'.  

They could be our uncles, neighbors, colleagues.

or catamites 

Were there no Hindu witnesses to the killings? 

After that Bhagalpur. And before that Nellie. Many more. How can we forget Gujarat of 2002?

We haven't. But that was a case where Hindu blood was avenged and then some. Guess who is P.M of India today?  

In the uprising of the farmers in the Western Uttar Pradesh, the painful memory of the mass killing and displacement of Muslims in 2013 has resurfaced. Can you have farmers’ unity without assuring justice for Muslims who were wronged by their Hindu neighbors?

Of course you can! Rakesh Tikait is going great guns precisely because, as we all learned in 2013, Jats like killing lower caste agricultural workers- more particularly those of a different Sect. Also they want more money. Money is cool. 

The souls of Mohammed Akhlaq, Pehlu Khan, Tabrez Ansari, Afrazul Khan, Junaid and scores like them who were lynched ask how is it that their killers are enjoying their lives after depriving them of the gift of life that was bestowed on them by the Almighty. Why should it not be a debate for Hindus? Weren’t the killers from within Hindu society?

But the victims weren't. Does this cretin really not get that shit that happens to others because they are different from us is shit we don't give a toss about?  

The rot to which Usmani referred runs deep in our society. It is not confined just to killing Muslims or persecuting Christians. We have turned the invocation “Jai Shri Ram” into a slogan that is shouted when Muslim localities are ravaged. Should not we think about it?

No. Hinduism has been at the receiving end of Muslim and Christian violence. That sucked ass big time. By contrast, killing Muslims is correlated with better, not worse, life-chances for Hindus. Don't kill Christians, though. Their Schools and Colleges are great. Also the nicest countries to immigrate to tend to be deeply Christian.

It was only after the defeat of Hitler that the question of the complicity of ordinary Germans in the genocide was asked seriously.

Because Germany was shorn of a lot of territory and forcibly occupied by the victors. By contrast, Portugal and Spain were admitted to the UN. Nobody asked about the 'complicity' of Franco's or Salazar's people in any type of crime.

The message is simple. Only if you are being held down by your enemy do you need to start soul-searching and pretending to repent.  

Should they have felt offended when Jewish people asked them, even if you did not kill us, why did you allow us to be killed?

The Germans had spent a lot of time explaining to the Jews that they were hateful. Smart Jews got the fuck out of Germany. Some Germans may have realized that getting rid of Jews is a bad idea coz Jews be hella smart. But nobody has ever suggested anything similar about Indians of any description.  

As a study by the philosopher Adorno demonstrates, when confronted with questions about their role in the preparations for the Holocaust, the majority of Germans tried to shrug off any responsibility.

To be fair, the vast majority succeeded in shrugging off any responsibility. Also, under 'Operation Paper-clip' any Nazi with useful scientific knowledge got a wonderful new life working for NASA or whatever.  

Adorno persisted with his interrogation.

He was as stupid as shit. That's why the US didn't want to keep him- unlike the Nazi scientists they recruited in droves. So Adorno went back to Germany- till the radical students made his life miserable. Apoorvanand may be hoping his own female students will bear their breasts in rage at his bourgeois tendencies. I may be wrong. What the guy may really relish is golden showers galore from hunky students with or without circumcised cocks.  

When victims find the tormenter brushing aside the issue of murder, they want to shake him into consciousness. It is a desperate attempt.

It is an impossible attempt. Victims of murder can't shake shit.  

Yes, Hindus do need to get hurt by Usmani’s question.

in the same sense that they need to give Apoorvanand golden showers galore while he writhes in ecstasy 

We need to hang our heads in shame

to auto-fellate? 

that a young member of a community that has lived side by side with us for centuries now looks at us as potential murderers.

Potentially, everybody is a murderer who will give Apoorvanand golden showers galore 

We know that Sharjeel Usmani will be scolded for using the term “Hindu society”.

I think the guy faces something worse than a scolding.  

He could have been more circumspective by saying “some Hindus” or he could have avoided the word “Hindu” altogether, those criticising him will say. Was not he blaming all Hindus for the foul act of some elements?

He said he was at war with India. That was clear enough.  

Another objection will be that a Muslim does not have the right to criticise Hindus.

A Muslim Health Specialist is welcome to criticize Hindu practices from a Scientific point of view. We won't praise him but will quietly steal his ideas and then claim that we found them in some Brahmana or Aranyaka.  

It is alright if a Hindu does it. Muslims should mind their business, worry about the ills that plague Muslim society and not pontificate to Hindus.

But there is a problem with this demand.

Apoorvanand won't get golden showers galore. 

Muslims have every reason to question Hindus because those persecuting Muslims come from their fold.

Unless they live in a Christian country which Islamic terrorists have attacked. Then they have to show loyalty and a willingness to abide by the law. Questioning shit won't help. 

Because Hindus have elected a party that has made it very clear that Muslims hold a secondary status in the national life.

To have a reason to do a thing is to get a reward for doing it. Nobody has any reason to do stupid shit. Muslims got a second class status wherever they did not get a first class status. This outcome could be overturned by war. Usmani has stated that this war now prevails in India, as far as he is concerned. The problem with wars is that some people end up incarcerated without firing a single shot. It is enough to be identified as a hostile combatant to be put behind bars. If you aren't an actual soldier, your treatment will be worse, not better. 

Hindus seem obsessed with Muslims and their lives.

Nonsense! We are obsessed with the Kardashians or other smart, rich, cool people.  

We want to protect Muslim women,

No we don't.  

we want to drag them out of backwardness,

Why? We're pretty damn backward ourselves.  

we want to modernise them, we want to school them about nationalism. We want to choose for them their food, their attire, their ways of greeting so that they look agreeable to Hindu eyes.

Sheer nonsense! We don't give a toss about people as stupid and backward as ourselves. We are interested in richer countries with better looking people and a more sophisticated porn industry.  

It is not that Hindus are indifferent to Muslims. It is this that gives Sharjeel Usmani the right to lament the corrosion of the soul of Hindu society.

Is that what he was doing? Perhaps, but only in the sense that he was actually giving Apoorvanand a golden shower. 

Similarly, Umar Khalid has every right to ask Hindu journalists about the lies that they spread about him and ruined his life.

His lawyers can certainly subpoena whom they like. I suggest they start with Siddhartha Varadarajan.  

The students of the Jamia Millia Islamia and Aligarh Muslim University have every right to ask the policemen who came from Hindu society why they used communal slurs while attacking them.

Presumably, Apoorvanand accords equal importance to the right of a person being raped to ask the rapist why they keep using homophobic slurs while sodomizing them. 

The dead Faizan has a right to ask the chief of the Delhi Police why he was humiliated and assaulted by his men, all Hindus, for his crime of being Muslim.

This is where I part company with Apoorvanand. It may be that in Hindi literature, dead people routinely exercise their right to ask questions but, in English literature- or at least Agatha Christie novels- no such right obtains. Why? Rights are linked to remedies under a vinculum juris- a bond of law. Unless Apoorvanand knows of a way to bring a corpse back to life, that corpse has no right to ask questions since the remedy- viz. being brought back to life- does not exist.  

Of course, it may be that this big poo is speaking rhetorically.

These are not rhetorical questions.

In which case this big poo is a cretin.  

We should not complain that by doing this, Hindus are being forced into a state of guilt and that such an expression of guilt is unhealthy. We should not ask why the multitude of Hindus should feel guilty for the acts of a minuscule, wayward section.

But we should listen to a cretin who thinks dead people can exercise a right to ask questions of all and sundry.

We need an Adorno to examine the collective mind of the Hindus

Why? Adorno failed in Germany. Anyway, collective minds don't exist. Adorno didn't have much of a mind. But, like Apoorvanand- who thinks Elgar Parishad is only important in the context of 'Aryan' v 'Ashraf', with himself as the former hypocritically patronizing the latter- Adorno did have a mental block against seeing darker skinned people as being as creative and as important as people like himself- or rather, the sort of person he imagines himself to be. 

that identifies with the regime, enjoys the advantages it gives them and yet does not own up to the atrocities that are being committed under its watch and in the name of Hindus.

Apoorvanand identifies as a teacher of Hindi. He enjoys the advantages this gives him yet he does not up to the atrocities committed by Hindi teachers both now and in the past. 

One atrocity he is himself testimony to- viz. the turning to shit of the brains of those who study Hindi at University- unless, of course, they are Russian or Chinese rather than Indian. Of course, the same thing could be said about any native English speaker studying Eng Lit at Uni. 

The angry reaction of the Hindus demanding criminal cases against Sharjeel Usmani is in fact an expression of the defensiveness of the Hindus about the question he has put before them.

No. Hindus want not just terrorists, but Muslim nutters working themselves up to become terrorists, to be locked up forthwith. Funnily enough a lot of Muslims- indeed some Islamic regimes- feel the same way. 

Any reference to the crime is seen as an attempt to defame the criminal.

Interestingly, this big poo has not referred to the other criminal charges facing Usmani. 

Again, to use Adorno, the hangman gets upset when reminded in his own home of the noose.

He also gets upset if you shit on the dining table. Indeed, everybody does- whether or not they are a hangman. The fact is, nobody likes being treated in an insulting fashion in their own home. Big Poo may be an exception. He may express great delight if I barge into his home and start making fun of him for being a fucking cretin teaching an utterly worthless subject to people who should already be able to study Hindi quite sufficiently just by reading books and using dictionaries.  

It would be good for our collective health

on the assumption that getting golden showers galore is good for our health 

that we listen to Sharjeel Usmani instead of being defensive. We must effect an urgent course correction to save ourselves and the nation from a greater tragedy.

What greater tragedy? The fact is Hindus benefit economically if the non-Hindu population is reduced and vice versa. This is the law of diminishing returns at work. Overpopulation, sadly, is associated with ethnic cleansing. Once that starts, nobody has any choice but to support their own group and to run away from where the other group has the upper hand. This, at any rate, is the lesson taught by, if not Hindi Literature, then actual Indian History. Shame, but there it is.

On the other hand, India gains if Dalit and other productive communities rise up. That is something we can all get behind. Virtue signalers, however, can go fuck themselves. They bring nothing to the table. 

Pratap Bhanu Mehta as cop-killing rap artist

Pratap Bhanu Mehta writes in the Indian Express. 

 Delhi’s Police’s investigation against students and activists in connection with the Delhi riots is pushing the Indian state into a long dark night of tyranny.

The Delhi Police, which initially took a battering during the riots, needs to burnish its image and regain salience. Otherwise it will be disintermediated by local politician/gangsters in working class areas. The question is, does it have the political nous to assert itself? Will the Union Home Ministry back it up?  

Mehta's 'students' and 'activists' are a tiny minority of paranoid nutters whom the BJP have managed to pass off as Congress proxies. They have served their purpose by burying Congress & the Left.

The sad truth is, nutters of this sort will be killed by the majority if they continue to make a nuisance of themselves. Mehta & Co. are ruining the life-chances of their students by lying to them about 'tyranny' and how to fight it. The fact is, the anti-CAA agitation was useful to the Ruling Party which got a few more seats in Delhi. The big question is whether the Delhi Police can assert itself or whether power will slip away to local politicians. It is probable that the Home Ministry will back the police- as will the Courts, initially- because of Delhi's significance as the National Capital. On the other hand, riots in Delhi harm Kejriwal and make Yogi Adityanath look good by comparison.  Thus, long term, this initiative will backfire.

Still, this is 'silly season' journalism. The country is facing an unprecedented crisis. The BJP has to be left on to get on with the dirty work of pushing through long overdue reforms.

The riots are a serious matter. All perpetrators must be credibly identified and subject to the law.

Not in this instance. The Police lost control. They have to tread carefully to regain credibility. Mehta & Co. can help them a little by painting them in diabolical colors. But only if they write in Hindi or other vernacular languages.

But instead, we are witnessing a project designed to crush civil society.

Mehta's type of civil society- i.e. paying 20 per cent commission to advocates for the poor rather than just transferring cash to them and cutting out the middle-man- turned out to be a noisome luxury. Crush it by all means. India needs a genuine opposition party at the Center. Virtue signalling cretins have accomplished nothing. Ten years ago, some may have thought India would be safely 'middle income' and so the tax base would be big enough to support a Welfare State with all the trimmings. Sadly, that turned out to be a pipe dream. But then, America and Britain and the EU now look very different. Majority appeasement is necessary to keep the wheels from falling off Democracy. 

If our freedom is to be saved, we need to understand what is at stake in what is happening in Delhi.

I think senile academics will be free to go on recycling nonsense. But the State will cut back on subsidies to their students. 'Activists' will disappear from campuses where caste based politics of the provincial type will entrench itself.  

Normally, in a society constituted by the rule of law, we should let the investigation run its course before pronouncing judgment.

No society is 'constituted by the rule of law'. Mehta has been living in a fool's paradise. That was cool twenty years ago when India was pretending it would soon be rich and property rights and contract enforcement and so forth would be world class. But why bother keeping up that pretence now? One might as well speak of the inevitable victory of the Proletariat.  

But we are living in a world where the state, in partnership with the media, does not subscribe to this restraint.

India is a very poor country where the State can't do much and the Media scarcely matters. Still, both can survive by going with the flow or retreating to an ivory tower when that flow becomes too turbulent.  

In case after case, it runs nightly media trials, destroying people’s lives and reputations.

Modi too was given a media trial and pronounced guilty. The trouble was that voters like the type of crime he was accused of. 

The state uses investigations, leaked evidence, chargesheets as pretexts for establishing narrative dominance and to intimidate.

Indeed. The problem is that people the Government locks up become popular provided they are accused of things the voters want. Digvijay Singh, a veteran politician, was beaten on his home turf in the last election by a Hindu nun accused of anti-Islamic terrorism. 

A young politician- like Hardik Patel- should be delighted to be locked up on charges which appeal to a particular vote block. 

It is not interested in guilt or innocence. It is interested in demonstrating that it can destroy your life with impunity.

The one lesson Indian politics of the Twentieth Century taught politicians was that a spell of porridge is the best thing you can have on your CV. 

It can declare you a terrorist, it can declare you a drug lord, and it can charge you under UAPA.

Having a number of murder and rape charges hanging over your head is a great qualification for getting elected. Jayalaitha was jailed for corruption. She would still be CM of Tamil Nadu if she hadn't passed away for medical reasons.  

In the Delhi chargesheets, dozens and dozens of students and distinguished academics are facing exactly this prospect.

The cases will either be dismissed or drag on for decades. If these guys are serious about electoral politics, it boosts their credibility. On the other hand, because they are stupid, they will be used to split caste vote-banks in the manner of Kanhaiya Kumar in Begusarai. Interestingly, he is keeping his distance from Umar Khalid because Bihari Assembly elections are in the offing.  

“The law will take its own course”, the state wants to say. But, in the meanwhile, let us show you what we can do to you.

This is better done by beating people to death. 

How we can make an example of you so other intellectuals dare not speak.

This is silly. Plenty of intellectuals are NRIs. Okay, the small fry may not want the nuisance of attending Court, but for serious players the thing is a godsend.  

The law should take its own course when the state is interested in law.

No. The opposite is the case. The Judiciary is supposed to be a check on the Executive.  

But when the state is using law as an instrument of ideological and physical intimidation,

The State is supposed to physically intimidate criminals and would be criminals. It is perfectly proper for the Executive to have a political ideology. 

Mehta's stupidity causes him to put forward a wholly paranoid thesis- 

the phrase “let the law take its own course” becomes a cover to subvert our constitutional values.

Paranoia of this type subverts not just constitutional but also fundamental epistemic values. Mehta is unfit to teach even in a kindergarten.

What does the pattern of filing chargesheets suggest?

It suggests that the Police believe- or want the Court to believe- that there was a conspiracy to instigate riots in which policemen were killed.  

It is following a script.

Mehta is following a script- but it is a paranoid one. It features abstractions- 'tyranny'- and is based on a false view of reality- 'Society is constituted by the Law'- whereas the police have a narrative involving actual human beings who may or may not have been in touch with each other. Thus the thing is justiciable. Paranoid nonsense, however, is not justiciable. It is useless.  

The whole purpose is to argue that there is a liberal, left, Islamist conspiracy to embarrass and subvert the Indian state.

and kill police-men and innocent non-Muslims- that is why this case is important. Either the police get back in the driving seat or, the next time there is trouble in some working class area, the police will be disintermediated. The minority may take the initiative but, soon enough, the force of numbers will prevail.  

The political class repeats this, the media parrots this and the police, as if on cue, frames the issues this way.

Which planet is Mehta living on? Politicians compete with each other. So do media parrots. Even Law Enforcement professionals compete with each other.  

Tenured Professors, it is true, may go on repeating each others' paranoid lies. This is because they is less competition in their line of work. 

Mehta & Co pretended that India wasn't a very poor country with an utterly shite intelligentsia. The spoke darkly of 'tyranny'. Students and Activists were supposed to run around shouting silly slogans to prevent Fascism from taking route. 

The truth is India's economic future looks dire. Either Modi pushes through the needed reforms now or the thing will happen by default. 'Civil Society' will be fractionalised. The Administrative State will be disintermediated. Courts will be ignored. 

The idea is not just to deflect attention from violence and discrimination, it is to declare any critic of the government a potential subversive.

Mehta & Co mistook anti-nationalism for a democratic protest.  

It is to invent an enemy of the people, in students and intellectuals.

They are a nuisance certainly. The bigger problem is that they have shit for brains. India is very poor. It needs to raise productivity. But intellectuals like Mehta and their equally gormless students reduce productivity. Moreover, they harm the causes they espouse. 

The state has diabolically shifted the emphasis away from investigation of the riots to delegitimising the anti-CAA protest.

Those protests were not legitimate. They were based on stupid lies. They helped the BJP and hurt Congress and the Left. Woke activism diabolically delegitimized the police. Then police men were killed. The majority showed it would slaughter the minority if it ran amok. Either the State can put the fear of God into the woke nutters or it gets disintermediated. The sort of ethnic cleansing which occurred when Nehru came to power in Delhi might recur. In 1992, what killed off the riots was the police opening fire. Either the State takes the lead in killing nutters or it will become irrelevant.

The Indian police has, in the past, a patchy record in riot investigations.

Fuck 'investigation'. Its job is to stop them happening. This is best done by shooting people and locking up the nutters preemptively.  

Just think of 1984.

Do. Guess who won the biggest Lok Sabha majority in history? Killing aggressive minorities is what the vast majority of voters approves of.  Extra-judicial slaughter in the Punjab is what contained the separatist threat. Civil Society and impartial 'Investigations' played zero part in restoring the status quo. 

But there is something distinctive about the current conjuncture.

The Police have to re-establish their own credibility. That means credibility with the majority- not the minority. The problem it faces is that it may once again get a pusillanimous Police Chief who lets lawyers beat policemen with impunity. The next step is thugs shooting them. Then the majority slaughters the minority and chases it away. Local people can always be found to enter the University campuses and beat 'students' and 'intellectuals'. Chairman Mao brought the workers in from the factories to chase the University students into the countryside. 

Usually, the police botch up investigations to protect powerful perpetrators.

The investigation does not matter. The thing will drag through the Courts for decades. Witnesses will turn hostile. If 'powerful perpetrators' kill police-men, however, they may themselves be shot while grabbing a gun from a policemen as is by law required. 

This was often the pattern during Congress times.

The Courts are shite. The police have to choose sides. The convention is that it is the gangster who got elected who is supported against the one who didn't get as many votes. 

Sometimes there is pressure to produce results. In the process, the police can sometimes round up some usual suspects. But what is happening in Delhi is of a different order.

Indeed it is. The police saw that they had been turned into an Aunt Sally by a cowardly Police Chief who was scared of the Media and was thinking of his post-retirement sinecures with Human Rights NGOs or whatever. Thus the police are going after both the local hoodlums as well as the high profile cunts who instigated the thing. Will they succeed? No. The Courts will ensure that nothing happens for the next three decades. So the police need to shoot a few people who supposedly grab guns off police-officers as is required by the law.  

It is the use of police to round up or send signals to critics of the government.

Both the Ruling Party and Kejriwal benefit from these woke nutters running amok. The question is whether the Delhi Police can reassert itself. It is acting in a self-interested manner.  

It is an ideological witch hunt.

It is the Police reasserting themselves against nutters who tried to use them as a punching bag.  

This is being done by erasing the distinction between ideological positions and conspirators.

It is being done by fucking up those who fucked with the Police. That's how the coppers work. They may not prevail. After all, everyone hates them for good reason. 

The general trend now seems to be that mere thought, or a speech advocating a position, can make you part of a conspiracy to incite.

This nutter has been denouncing anyone who is pro-Hindu, pro-India or even pro-good Governance. He is a worthless pile of shit. But he is not part of a conspiracy. I'm not saying that beating him viciously might not be satisfying. But it would be illegal. Also, why bother? His function is to show that Professors of useless subjects are useless. 

This modus operandi was perfected in the Bhima Koregaon cases. There also the focus became not on the event, but targeting alleged ideological foes like Anand Teltumbde or Sudha Bharadwaj.

This silly man does not understand that the Maharashtrian Police is pro-Maratha. They can't be overtly anti-Mahar so they shift the focus onto senile Reds. They found a good way to curry favor with the majority community but, ultimately, will jump whichever way the State Government tells them.  The Delhi Police, under the Union Home Minister, are politically orphaned. Can they assert themselves without IPS leadership? Or will they keep getting beaten up by lawyers- and then shot by the clients of those lawyers while their Commanders stand idly by? My guess is that the Courts will do what Indian Courts normally do- fuck things up for everybody. 

The second is to erase the distinction between legitimate protest and conspiracy against the state.

This stupid cunt is pretending that things like the farmer's protests has been equated with sedition or terrorism. Mehta & Co have done a great job fucking up the electoral prospects of Congress & the Left. But this means no one- not even Kanhaiya Kumar- will speak up for the 'urban naxal' or 'anti-national' now. In other words, these 'useful idiots' are now considered useless by even the most cretinous of dynastic politicians or casteist parties. NGO funding too is drying up. Campuses are no longer safe spaces. 

Any democratic society allows for peaceful protest.

But cracks down on nuisances.  

You can also, at the margins, disagree about particular tactics. But the act of organising and coordinating a protest does not amount to subversion of the state.

Till policemen get killed. Once the majority is targeted, the minority is slaughtered in retaliation.  

In the Delhi case, democratic protest is being deliberately confused with riots and subversion of the state.

Because policemen were killed. Non-Muslims were attacked but then retaliated massively. When a minority protests against the majority being more numerous, they get fucked up. That's how democracy works. It may pretend to be under the Rule of Law or it may denounce Judges as incompetent, corrupt, cretins. In India, we know that periodic ethnic cleansing and industrial scale extra-judicial killing is what keeps the show on the road.  

Organising a protest is being confused with organising a riot.

Says a nutter who can't organize shit. What the Police are doing is self-interested. They were humiliated and killed. Either they get some measure of revenge or they lose salience- i.e. rents. 

Third, there is a novel theory of instigation at work.

No there isn't. The Police- who aren't geniuses- see a link between the anti-Police atmosphere created by the woke nutters and the thugs who killed policemen. Since voters want to see the woke nutters get a bumboo up their butt, the police are on to a good thing. But they know they have to choose sides- which means smaller rents.  

If you strongly argue that a particular policy was a subversion of constitutional values,

which is what Mehta is doing here 

and some incident carried out by someone else follows, you are responsible.

So Mehta is responsible... for what? The fucker is completely useless yet is responsible for something or the other. 

But if ministers and politicians instigate a chorus of “goli maaro saalon ko” it is some kind of allegorical defence of the rule of law. The definition of incitement is partisan beyond belief.

Beyond Mehta's belief, sure. But then the guy is a cretin. The fact is India spends money killing those who attack the Indian nation. 'Shoot the fuckers' is not 'an allegorical defence', it is what soldiers and cops get paid to do.  

If you read the alleged confessions of students and unidentified witnesses, it will remind you more of Mao’s China than a democratic republic.

What about Xi's China? That's a good role model for India- at least for those of the majority community. 

There is pressure on students to name and denounce their supposed ideological inspiration so that it can be presented to the world that the violence was the product of an ideological cabal.

Mehta thought India's hate-speech laws would only be used against those he disliked. But that's not how the Law works. Where there is violence, there is a prima facie case against instigators named by the guilty.

It is to deflect attention from the direct incitement provided by several BJP politicians.

No. It is in the interest of the BJP to highlight the direct role of its politicians in promoting a spirit of self-defence and resistance to an evil, murderous, anti-national minority. That's how politics work. Your side eulogises as inspirational those the other side castigates as instigators. 

Think of the appalling human costs. Dozens of young people, whose politics you may not agree with, but whose only crime was to believe that this country could be better and risk something for that belief, will now be charged as if they were terrorists.

That's good for them if they are serious about electoral politics. It shows they put 'skin in the game'. Like Sadhvi Pragya, they may end up in Parliament.  

It does not matter whether it is Sharjeel Imam or Umar Khalid or Devangana Kalita.

Yes it does. Imam and Khalid could get a career out of this more splendid by far than that enjoyed by either's father. Kalita was part of 'Pinjra Tod'- break the cage- and, obviously, the Laws of Comedy prescribe a jail cell as the funniest place for that parrot. 

It is a trap to think about the differences between them at this point,

For genuine thinkers, thinking about empirical differences is not a 'trap'. It is the high road to utility.  

when the state has declared that thought is a crime, protest is subversion.

and the year is 1984 and your TV screen is watching you.  

The point is to send every young person a message: Choose between democratic protest, thinking or your life. The message is chilling.

But no such message exists. Young Indians know that jail time- or at least a half dozen murder or other such criminal cases- is a good thing for politicians. Look at Hardik Patel! 

I happened to be reading Professor Apoorvanand’s incandescently brilliant forthcoming book on Prem Chand, a deep meditation on the meaning of being human, when I heard he has been named in the chargesheet. He is one of India’s finest scholars of literature. He has been associated with the Left, but is a deeply Gandhian figure. His politics has been devoted to the pacification of violence. He also has a kind of absolute unconditional concern for others that Gandhi demonstrated. In a climate where even decent liberals run away from Muslim political figures, contortedly trying to find the right kind of Muslim to assuage their conscience, he openly embraced Umar Khalid as someone who was like his son. His concern for students is exemplary.

The guy is a Bihari Hindi speaker. These charges could be the making of him. On the other hand, if he'd killed or raped a few people of a different caste, he'd already be a Minister.  Like Yogendra Yadav, Apoorvanand needs to be built up a little to split AAP votes in select Delhi wards. The Delhi Police aren't geniuses but they aren't completely stupid. 

The idea that he can be interrogated by Delhi Police, named in a riots chargesheet and the shadow of UAPA hangs over him (like many others) should disconcert you.

No it shouldn't- unless you are in the same line of work, in which case you need to distribute bottles of whiskey to SHOs till you can figure out a way to get charge-sheeted yourself.  

It should disconcert you that Kapil Mishra can tweet “In Delhi Umar Khalid, Tahir Hussain, Khalid Saifi, Safoora Zargar, Apoorvanand type people planned and murdered. They engaged in a 26/11 type terrorist attack. These terrorists, killers, should be hanged. Congratulations to Delhi Police.”

Mishra, a typical professional agitator of the 'Civil Society' type, was with AAP. He joined the BJP after falling out with Kejriwal.  He probably has inherited beef, from his Mum- Dr. Annapurna Mishra- with Apoorvanand. The caste-region dynamics in North East Delhi is pretty complicated. 

Whose script is being followed? And congratulations indeed, Delhi police. Those who really incite roam free. But all of us who saw the Constitution as a site of hope are potential terrorists now.

Will Mehta be charge-sheeted? No. He must up his game. Start tweeting in Hindi. Maybe come out with a cop-killer rap video. That would be cool.  

Kasturi & Gomes scratching Kaul's eyes out

Malavika Kasturi, an Associate Professor of History in Toronto & Mekhola Gomes a Postdoctoral Fellow, attacked and tried to scratch out the eyes of a JNU historian for daring to suggest that, for Hindus, India has been a nation for thousands of years.

They write in the Wire-

At a time when history has become an ideological site for the redrawing of the idea of India, we write with the conviction that as professional historians we must be responsible in the interpretations of facts and arguments, especially when writing for the wider public.

Professional historians aren't responsible for shit. This is because they are stupid and ignorant. Smart people don't study History. 

The idea of India is, quite simply, that it is a nation which is overwhelmingly Hindus whose borders, where non-Hindu, are contested.  Ten years ago, this may not have been obvious because, for the first time since Independence, a non-Hindu was in charge. But, it is now clear, that non-Hindu was merely the Regent for a self-confessed janeodhari Saivite Hindu Brahmin who visits Temples. Thus, whereas Politics may be an 'ideological site', Indian History is merely an idiotic site where shitheads from Toronto can pretend to know something about a country they feel fortunate to have left. 

It is with the same conviction that we responded to Shonaleeka Kaul’s “The Idea of India: A Historical Corrective” published in The New Indian Express. In this reply to her rejoinder, “The Empire Strikes Back: Ad Hominem as History” we restate the fallacies and inaccuracies in Kaul’s articles which suggest that the idea of India is based on an “ethnic” and geographical unity that can be traced back to the 5th century BCE.

Kaul is correct. She, like Rahul Baba, is a Brahmin. Her religion does indeed prevail from Kashmir to Kanya Kumari. No doubt, the pale of settlement, beyond which caste would be lost, has expanded. But by the time of Ashoka, over two thousand years ago, Brahmins were found all over what is now India. True, Muslim majorities have ejected them from ancestral land. But India itself has a massive Hindu majority. Stupid people, like the authors, thought Sonia's Congress was anti-Hindu. Perhaps it was. But it has bitten the dust and will only rise from it by embracing 'Hindutva'. These two sad losers haven't got the memo. 

Kaul notes historians, geographers, and political scientists distinguish between the idea of a nation and nation-state.

But does not go on to say that historians and political scientists are as stupid as shit. Geography isn't real high I.Q but it is an idiographic discipline and has no business talking nomothetic shite. There is no single 'idea of a nation'. In America, there is a 'Nation of Islam'. Its idea of Nation is different from that of the 'idea of Britain'- which, it seems, is currently fraying. A particular person may have multiple conflicting 'ideas' of what a Nation means. By contrast 'nation-state' is an abstraction which could be considered a 'term of art' for a particular, shite, type of discipline. But, as a concept, it is essentially contested. 

These two Toronto desis don't have the I.Q to grasp these sorts of distinctions. 

However, the creation of India as a distinct geo-body, as “national space,” and its cultural and territorial configuration as Bharat is very much a product of the 19th century.

No it isn't. These two shitheads haven't noticed that Pakistan and Bangladesh and Burma went their separate ways. What is left is Hindu majority Indians 'idea of India' which corresponds to Kaul's conception. The Brits found they had to administer India along its own historical joints and ligatures. Ceylon was separate because it was Buddhist. Burma separated because it was Buddhist. Pakistan separated because it was Muslim. What was left was either Hindu majority or not sufficiently non-Hindu to go its own way.  

According to Kaul, a nation is defined as “a notion consisting of a jointly held sense of belonging to a common territorial and cultural entity.”

Hindus have that. They are an overwhelming majority. So India exists. 

Further she claims that her article “goes on to demonstrate concrete examples of such an understanding of India in history.” Yet, it is disingenuous for Kaul to argue that she is speaking of an idea of India that is merely cultural when she emphasises the importance of its presumed territorial unity.

Territorial unity arises if one can cross jurisdictions and settle elsewhere without loss of identity- which, in India, means caste identity. Germany had lots of princes and Bishoprics and so forth. But it was defined as a Nation long before it was united by the sword. 

Kaul claims that the idea of contemporary India rests on imaginations of geography and space as spelt out in several ancient texts.

No. She isn't a fool. She knows very well that other Hindus like herself know that the idea of India is based on the zone of permissible settlement without loss of caste. Within her own sub-caste, or mine for that matter, it was only four generations ago that caste ceased to be extinguished by 'crossing the black water'. But people like Motilal Nehru, who helped break that taboo, compensated by devoting them to the Nationalist cause.  

She suggests that the Indian nation has had geographical coherence and meaning since ancient times.

This is quite true. Indian Kings dreamed of themselves reuniting the entire territory under their own Rule. No doubt, the margin advanced or retreated but there was a large, diverse, stable core which persists to this day.  

However, B.D. Chattopadhaya

who actually knew some History, unlike these two cretins, but who didn't know shit about Game Theory and coordination problems and Schelling focality and thus was helpless as a babe in explaining the 'reverse Game theory' which is State ideation and formation. 

has ably cautioned us against making such anachronistic connections between early representations of space, geographical imaginations, and the modern nation.

But the fellow was wrong. He didn't know Economics and thus had a shit theory of history.  Hindu India is like Han China but with castes rather than clans. No doubt, its National identity suffered much more from Turkic invaders. But it reasserted itself- thanks in part, to the Brits who did see themselves, on the prayer of people like Raja Ram Mohun Roy, as protecting the feeble, and feebler minded, Hindu from the aggressive Muslims- and it is now clear that there was never a Secular interregnum, there was simply a Brahmin dynasty and a competing, largely non-Brahmin, Hindu National Party. Socialisms would come and go, but they were caste based. 

In other words, it is ahistorical to seamlessly project categories and concepts of the present (nation) onto older cultural categories like Bharatavarsha.

It is ahistorical to seamlessly project categories and concepts from the shitty little brains of Leftist cretins onto anything at all. The fact is, we have reason to believe that the guys who run things overwhelmingly believe in Bharatvarsha and Jambudvipa and so forth. By contrast, their mouthing of Commie bullshit or Ivy League bullshit was merely a case of monkey see, monkey do.  

All students of history are taught that we must strive to grasp the past on its own terms and not reduce it to the present.

That is because students of history are as stupid as shit. They must be taught not to masturbate in class. Non history students don't have to be told that the pizza they ate yesterday must be grasped on its own terms. You must not 'reduce it to the present', in the form of a turd, which you try to grasp and lovingly hand to your Professor in lieu of your homework assignment. 

Undoubtedly, the idea of a modern Indian nation has been a contentious one.

Coz non-Hindus didn't like it.  

While some made a case for envisioning India as a composite nation of many cultures,

but one majority Religion which considered that nation to be unitary 

others including Muhammad Ali Jinnah and V.D. Savarkar held the view that nations were based on religious communities.

Jinnah proved his point. Pakistan and Bangladesh exist. That's not contentious at all.  

The ideas of citizenship and the nation-state based on Savarkar’s understanding of the nation are especially pertinent in India today.

No. They were enshrined in the Constitution. Non-Muslim Refugees got Citizenship. Muslims who had fled across the border weren't allowed to return. Indeed, the Custodian of Evacuee (later Enemy) Property harassed some Muslims till they emigrated in the Fifties or Sixties.  

Such religious nationalism in India, based on unequal citizenship rights, is connected to exclusionary laws and processes like the Citizenship (Amendment) Act and National Register of Citizens.

The first confirms the status quo. The second was pushed through by the Supreme Court in fulfilment of promises made 35 years ago which, however, had legislative form from the early Fifties itself. In other words, nothing changed. These two cretins don't know enough history to distort it. They can merely repeat lies.  

Thus, it is the ethical responsibility of historians to guard against anachronisms and abuses of history to justify notions that exclude any group on the basis of language, religion, or ethnicity.

The ethical responsibility of shite historians is to fuck off to Toronto where they may receive intellectual affirmative action and be nurtured as victims of horrendous epistemic self-abuse.  

What these losers are trying to do, in essence, is try to sound smart without actually fooling anybody so Whitey will feel sorry for them and give them tenure so that they can minister, in their turn, to equally abject cretins.

In essence, in the attempt to link a reductionist and simplified understanding of geographical imaginations to contemporary ideas of national space and the nation-state, Kaul does a hop-and-skip citation of the Mahabharata, Vishnu Purana, and Xuanzang’s travel accounts before taking a giant leap to incorporate the philosopher Shankaracharya.

She could have quoted B.D Choothopadhyaya quoting the Raghuvamsa etc. to fill in those gaps.  

Throughout the broad period she covers, from the ancient past to the present, there were many conflicting geo-bodies,

Nonsense! 'Geo-body' is a term coined by a Thai Professor. But Thailand is nothing like India. It is not the case that Sanskrit would have been displaced even if a Dravidian King had united the country.  

spatial practices and political formations, spanning the shifting borders of empires and sultanates. In her rejoinder, when questioned, Kaul adds uncontextualised references to al-Biruni and Abul Fazl to argue that all these imaginations of space are “nonetheless hardly distinguishable.”

In Thai history, we can distinguish 'geo-bodies' which had practical effects- e.g. whether Khmer or Thai would be spoken. In India such effects are hardly distinguishable. Biruni & Abul Fazl had access to Hindu scholarship. They were reporting the Hindu communis opinio. But that hasn't changed very greatly. Kasturi might try asking her Granny. Gomes may not have this option. 

However it is important to note who Kaul cites, how she cites them, and more importantly who she leaves out.

These cretins cited some Thai guy. What's next? Will they quote a Cambodian chick with a dick?  

In her original piece, there was no room for spatial imaginations from the cosmopolitan world of the Delhi Sultanate and the Mughal empire or other genres of writing in Persian, Arabic, Sanskrit, or regional languages.

Why? Because it was short. These two cretins give no space for spatial imaginations from the cosmopolitan world of the Toronto Sultanate or Montreal's empire or other genres of writing in various comic books.  

For example, there is little space for the cultural imagination embedded in the hagiographies of Sufi saints about travel and space studied to such good effect by Simon Digby in this framework.

Digby was a nice guy. But he was utterly unpretentious. He understood very well that Pakistan meant to stamp out the collectives defined by vernacular Sufi Saints precisely because they represented recalcitrant territorial formations of a 'Zomia' type. In other words, the Sufi inhabited the 'shatter zone' of Empire. This tensions exist even in the Iqbal of asrar-e-khuddi. Data Ganj Baksh reproves Aurangazeb for 'zamin-bhook'- land hunger. 

Digby could be considered an 'old India hand'. He was certainly treated that way by 'Native Chieftains'- or their no good sons whom I used to drink with. Those old Raj families knew everybody who was anybody in the sub-continent either directly or though one of their matrimonially allied branches. You dared not put on side when talking to one of those broken down old sticks. He's be able to tell your Grandfather was a tehsildar not a Nawab. But they were good sports and kept quiet about it. I once told some elderly dowager that, as an Iyer, I am the hereditary Grand Duke of Ireland. Sadly, we were chased out by the leprechauns. Still, I was organizing an Iyerish Restoration Army- the IRA which she might have heard- and if she'd like to donate the price of a Guinness to the good cause I'd be sure to make her a Countess once restored to my proper sphere in life. She refused to make a donation but did put away the Sherry and made me drink a strong cup of tea to help the scones go down. Good people, as I said, but sadly lacking in 'cultural' or 'spatial' imagination. I suppose that is why they ruled over such a large proportion of the globe. 

Despite her subsequent references to al-Biruni and Abul Fazl, in Kaul’s arguments the Sanskritic “tradition” appears as the glue binding Indian culture and the nation together.

Why the scare quotes? Kaul is Hindu- like 80 per cent of the population. Sanskrit is the glue which binds her to me and most of the bits of India together. Persian may hold Iran together. Arabic may hold Arabs together. In India it is Sanskrit loan-words which makes Malyalam almost intelligible to the Garwalhi.  

This vast corpus of texts cannot be read in a linear fashion to fit into a preordained idea of India from the ancient past.

Nonsense! There is a way to do it and Hindus have been using that way of doing it for two thousand years.  

We should also not be surprised that complex notions of the spatial organisation of the world existed in pre-modern India.

Nor that the simple ideas that Hindus still have were shared by their forebears. It has always been helpful for Hindu to say 'these are regions where the language is strange, the dress is different, the cuisine is different, but which are still sufficiently like our natal place such that we can settle there without loss of caste- i.e. ability to retain membership in an endogamous grouping sharing the same religion and customs. ' 

While cosmological and spatial imaginations certainly exist in these texts, Kaul reads into these imaginations “ethnic” and “geographic” criteria to serve as the basis for the nation.

While these cretins refuse to do so despite the fact that those 'cosmological' and 'spatial' imaginations were directly and continuously invoked in the creation and preservation of the Republic of India. 

Yet making ancient “ethnic” categories into a basis for belonging

is what actually happens all over the world. No doubt, there are immigrants. But they are minorities. Consider Britain. Priti Patel may be of immigrant parentage but, like Bhownagree, the first Indian Tory MP, she identifies so much with the dominant ethnicity that she comes across as a British chauvinist unsympathetic to asylum seekers. In the US, Bobby Jindal or Nikki Haley exemplify this sort of assimilation.

introduces the fundamental question

which is answered by the Price Equation as modified by customary law

of who gets to belong to the nation and who is to be excluded.

Those descended from nationals and those who assimilate and become nationals are included. Everybody else is excluded. This is as true of Canada as India- though, no doubt, both countries take in a few refugees. 

While there were different evocations of community and selfhood, to suggest that these were subsumed into a unified geo-cultural space since the 5th century BCE is not substantiated by the vast and rich body of interdisciplinary work by scholars of Persian, Sanskrit and regional language texts.

These politically correct cretins mention Persian before Sanskrit!But then they speak of 'regional languages'. This means they admit Sanskrit wasn't regional. What could it be other than National? 

DNA studies shows a lot of intermingling till the caste system became endogamous some 2000 year ago. That is an ancient enough date for any Nation to be getting on with. No doubt, some territory was lost and some territory was gained. However, many Pakistanis and Bangladeshis don't consider themselves to be of a fundamentally different stock than Indians. Yet, they are separate nations. Do any 'Persian, Sanskrit and regional language texts' explains why this is so? No. The fact is non-Hindus have good reason to be wary of Muslim majorities. This is not to say that Hindus can't do ethnic cleansing. It's just that they aren't as keen on forcible conversion. 

Our two cretins are troublingly selective in their choice of targets for attack. 

Kaul is troublingly also selective in her deployment of the work of scholars including Diana Eck and Sheldon Pollock. She relies on Eck’s assertion that India is a sacred geography forged by pilgrimage over centuries. This is a shaky pedestal upon which to build an argument about the nation. Sacred space is not the same as national political space.

Unless, it has actually become so.  

Similarly, when Pollock writes of a South Asian cosmopolis bound by Sanskrit, his writings are clear that this Sanskrit cosmopolis does not map onto modern-day India either culturally or territorially.

Yet, this is what we see. It is not the case that Pakistanis or Bangladeshis study much Sanskrit in school.  

Pollock in fact highlights the instability of geographical imaginations of Bharatavarsha (The Language of the Gods in the World of Men, 2006, p. 193).

So what? There has been no instability in the geographical actuality of Bharat, that is India.  

To tie this idea of a Sanskrit cosmopolis stretching across South, Central, and Southeast Asia to the cartography of Indian nationhood is further evidence of the kinds of selective reading we highlighted in our rejoinder.

But it is these cretins who are doing the tieing! Indians would have no objection in a greater 'Akhand Bharat' coming into existence. The fact that Muslims don't want anything to do with the scheme is the fly in the ointment. A Nation may want more expansive borders but must make do with what it can defend.  

In fact, Kaul’s The Making of Early Kashmir (2018) has been subject to extensive criticism for its de-contextualised and anachronistic use of sources.

In other words, Hinduphobic cretins tried to scratch her eyes out. But those cretins get dumped on in their turn and thus hightail it to Toronto. 

There is a lack of clarity in these cretin's writing about their argument's relationship to India. It sounds like the sort of shite you are safer peddling in Canada so as to come across as a refugee from Fascism with complex educational needs due to a deprived childhood and being subjected to incessant epistemic self-abuse. 

There is a lack of clarity in Kaul’s writing about her argument’s relationship to the Nehruvian “idea of India” – cultural unity produced by diversity.

No there isn't. Nehru was a Kaul. His vacuity was of a similar stripe. Apparently, his brother-in-law had some knowledge of Kashmir's ancient history. Kaul is probably related to the Nehrus in multiple ways going back centuries. 

The idea of India is multiple, for civilisational narratives are part of modern national projects.

But cretins holed up in Toronto can contribute nothing in terms of ideas or narratives. Their job is to display an abject imbecility such as can only arise by reason of mental retardation and horrendous epistemic self-abuse in a backward part of the world.  

If Kaul wishes to speak of unity in diversity, as she does in her rejoinder, then she seems to be in agreement with the Nehruvian idea of India as enunciated in the Discovery of India (1946). But, this is not at all what her original article suggested. Why write a “corrective” if Kaul is merely trying to reinvent the wheel?

Why do these cretins write at all? Let them buy an air-ticket and come to India and catch hold of Kaul and scratch her eyes out. 

It would be disingenuous to believe that historical debates in public forums are not shaped by their contexts, just like the “cultural” texts and connections Kaul discusses.

Fair point. But, the historical context is- you cretins fucked up big time. Your side lost. Why? You didn't give a toss about India. You were just trying to get to Canada- or anywhere Whitey might take pity on you and offer you tenure on the basis of intellectual affirmative action and the terrifying type of intersectionality that your epistemic self-abuse represents.  

We are concerned about the world that Kaul’s conception of the past is taking us towards at a time when the “new republic” of Hindutva has been announced.

So, these cretins aren't worried about Modi. They are worried about Kaul. Why? Fuck is wrong with them? Will they be able to escape Canada and get to California by bashing Kaul? Let us hope so.  

In a moment when history is being used to aid and enable majoritarian nationalism,

Fuck off! Majoritarianism is kicking cretinous Historians in the goolies and telling them to fuck off to Toronto pronto. But this is a universal trend.  

it is more incumbent than ever that historians become part of these debates and intervene in ethical and responsible ways.

In other words, lie their asses off.