Is Jonah Blank the stupidest anthropologist ever?

Jonah Blank wrote a couple of books about India some years ago. Sadly, because he trained as an anthropologist, he is as stupid as shit. Consider the following article of his in the Atlantic-

When the G7 group of rich democracies assembles this weekend in southwest England, it will discuss issues including COVID-19, taxes, and climate change.


This is because people who didn't study anthropology tend to talk about stuff which matters.


One item overhanging the formal agenda, however, will be the global deterioration of democracy itself, '


This is simply untrue. Trump has demitted office without the Army having to be called in. Brexit has not caused the outbreak of widespread cannibalism in Great Britain or even Northern Ireland. Macron has not taken refuge on a NATO airbase while Yellow Vests run amok in Paris.

and the nation on which this question may hinge won’t be any of the hosts, but a guest invited to this year’s confab: India.


South Africa was also invited. The situation there might be a bit troubling, but India's position isn't troubling at all. Russia used to be part of the G8 but was suspended after the invasion of Crimea. India has attended these conferences as a guest of the presiding nation for some years now.


Democracy’s fate there may determine its fate throughout the world.


Nonsense! The Americans aren't suddenly going to demand to become a colony again if the Indians decide to become a monarchy.


At the moment, the signs aren’t looking good—and that should be a flashing-red warning beacon for the rest of us.


Coz America may decide to become a Hindu Rashtra if India does.


Why is India the hinge point?


It isn't. Blank is pretending otherwise because he has written a couple of books about India and is trying to make out that they may be worth reading.


The most obvious answer is the optics: When propagandists in Beijing describe democracy as a Western ideal unsuited to non-Western peoples, having a standard-bearer from the formerly colonized rather than the former colonizers is vital.


That was Kennedy's idea. But it failed almost immediately. After 1962, the newly independent countries of Africa drew the conclusion that a One Party State was preferable- if you could get away with it. Authoritarian 'tiger economies' did well economically. So did Franco's Spain. On the other hand, some polities had no alternative but to be multi-party democracies because the Army couldn't or wouldn't grab power or prop up a dictator. India fell into this category once assassination tempered dynastic autocracy.

But India’s importance goes far beyond narrative.

For Indians- sure. Nobody else greatly cares. Look what happened when credentialized nutters like Blank got Modi banned from entering the USA. Modi's stature grew. The Indian Security Establishment cooled towards the US because, as Obama said, its foreign policy consisted of doing stupid shit. Sadly, Obama's new foreign policy of trying do less stupid shit did not succeed. Then came Trump and now we have Biden who has basically given up on Diplomacy. His big aim is not to let China overtake the US on his watch...which, given his age, can't be very long.

The world’s most successful democracies are mostly small, wealthy, and homogenous.

India is a successful democracy because Hindus, who are the majority, want to hang together because experience has taught them that they soon hang separately if they don't unite. I hate to say this, but Hindus are pretty homogeneous. We may try to pretend otherwise to make ourselves seem interesting but we are all a much of a muchness.

If Islam hadn't posed an existential threat, it is possible that Hindus would have preferred to have lots of small states- some monarchical, some not- and thus gained the benefit of 'Tiebout sorting'- i.e. mobility between localized regimes with different fiscal and external economy mixes.

As Gandhi said in 1939, Congress was a Hindu party and feared domination by the more aggressive Muslims and Punjabis (including Hindu Punjabis who, he believed, would throw in their lot with their Muslims and Sikh brethren. Gandhi was a deeply silly man but many 'forward caste' Hindus shared his fears.)

In any case, India couldn't maintain territorial integrity while being anything else because the Army won't back up a dictator and no party is cohesive enough, or free enough of virtue signalling blathershites, to create a 'Liberation Army' of its own. An anthropologist might add that 'segmentary societies' tend to have more factionalism- e.g. in India there were a number of different Congress parties and Janata parties and Communist parties and Samajvadi parties and Dravidian parties and so on. Often these coalesce around a particular individual or 'caste' interest.

The US too is a successful democracy- a big one. Why isn't it a bunch of small democracies? The answer is that the US fought a Civil War, in which more Americans died than during both World Wars, to preserve and extend its territorial integrity.

Is America homogenous? I'd say- sure. All Americans are insufferable in exactly the same way. Americans may disagree.

The European Union may evolve into a single country. This would mean lots of small democracies becoming one big democracy. There can only be a few big countries. There will always be lots more small countries. Blank is a cretin. He has never heard of Pareto power laws.

Any list you might consult will highlight nations such as Denmark, the Netherlands, and Norway.

This cretin is supposed to be a 'foreign policy expert'. Yet he consults lists. What will his next big revelation be- that he looks up countries in an Atlas before giving his sage advise to the 'Council on Foreign Relations'? Why not simply consult the kids at the local Elementary School playing 'Model U.N'?

The Economist Intelligence Unit gives all of the top 10 spots in its annual Democracy Index to rich Western nations—most of which have populations smaller than that of Maryland. But these nations look nothing like the places where the mass of humanity lives.

What a profound observation! What's next? Will Blank discover that poor countries have more poor people while rich countries tend to look kind of affluent?

Of the world’s 10 most populous nations, only the United States and India are long-established democracies. Two (China and Russia) are undisguised autocracies, and the other six can be charitably described as “democracies in progress.” That a political system works for Iceland—which has 341,000 residents, almost all of them practically relatives—means little to Brazil, Indonesia, or Nigeria.

Blank's writings mean nothing to everybody.

A real proof of concept can be found only in a nation that is big, low-income, and abundantly diverse—in ethnicity, language, religion, and every other way a society can be divided.


This cretin does not get that 'proof of concept' relates to things which don't currently exist but which may be feasible.


That’s India. If democracy can make it there, it can make it anywhere.


No. It is obvious that India can't be anything other than a democracy. The Emergency might be said to be an experiment in Dictatorship. But it was a disproof of concept. The problem with autocracy is that it is vulnerable to assassination. What India does not offer is an example of a political party which is cohesive. The fact is people denied a seat by one party go to the other party. Thus, one of Indira Gandhi's grandsons is with the BJP while the other is with Congress. In bigger families, we often find cousins belonging to four or five different parties.

Until recently, democracy clearly could make it there.


What was the alternative? The Army was too narrowly recruited, geographically speaking, to make a bid for power while the Communist parties were too factionalized. Typically, in India, you vote for one party in the municipal or panchayat elections, a different party for the State Legislature and a third party for the Central Parliament. That trend has been reinforced over the last few decades.


Upon gaining independence in 1947, India established a parliamentary system and enacted a liberal, far-reaching constitution.


So did everybody else- then the Army took over or the Commies grabbed power or there was Civil War as happened in Sri Lanka.


Its sole deviation from the democratic path was a period of “Emergency” (1975 to 1977), which stemmed more from then–Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s paranoia than any challenge to her party’s rule.


Sheer nonsense! Indira had split the Congress and her faction was challenged by the older generation of leaders. The 'Janata Morcha' did displace her but proved incompetent.


With this and several other notable exceptions (periods of insurgency in Kashmir and Punjab, too-frequent local injustices against marginalized communities), rule of law has done better in India than in most other nations.


India uses extra judicial methods against insurgents as well as criminal gangs if their activities get out of hand. Speaking generally, Voters deeply approve.

But India’s democracy has seen worrisome erosion. On The Economist’s list, the country has slid from No. 35 in 2006 to No. 53 today.


In 2006, the Economist listed India as a flawed democracy. By 2020, France and the US too were listed as flawed democracies. Nobody noticed. The ranking system is garbage and, anyway, the thing has no commercial implications.

And the ways in which democracy is being undermined there provide a wake-up call to those watching from afar—including in the United States.


Sadly, nothing can 'wake-up' the brain dead.

At the root of the backsliding, in India as elsewhere,

e.g. France or Italy which are both listed as 'flawed democracies'.


is a rejection of the core democratic principle that all citizens are equal.


So, Britain is not a democracy coz I have inferior rights and prerogatives compared to the Queen Gor' bless 'er.


India’s governing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) champions Hindutva, an ideology that privileges the Hindu majority over religious minorities.


The UK is listed as a full democracy. It has an Established Church. The Head of State must belong to it. Only Christianity, not any other religion, is protected by blasphemy laws. Norway too has a State Church, though- since 2017- priests aren't state employees.


First articulated a century ago, Hindutva has grown from a fringe movement into the focus of national politics. Its immediate target has been the country’s Muslims, who represent 14 percent of the population.


Really? Then how come there are Muslim Ministers belonging to the BJP?

If India transforms itself from a secular democracy (as is mandated by its constitution)

by an amendment made by Indira

into an avowedly Hindu nation, 276 million non-Hindus will become second-class citizens.

Just like non-Anglicans in England or non-Lutherans in Norway- two countries long recognized as full democracies. India could change its constitution to declare itself a Hindu nation or a Scientological nation but, so long as the thing is done as by law established, it would not cease to be a Democracy.


Sectarian tensions flared throughout the BJP’s rise to power, and the flames were often fanned by the party itself. In 2014, Narendra Modi supplanted a generation of soft-edged figures and led the party to electoral victory.


Why? Because Rahul refused to run for the top job. Had he done so, Advani would have been the BJP pick. They'd have kept Modi in reserve till Rahul fucked up like his dad fucked up in his first term. But Rahul was, quite understandably, gun-shy because granny and daddy had both been killed.


Although the only previous BJP prime minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, had downplayed Hindutva in favor of less divisive center-right policies, Modi has made it the centerpiece of his governing strategy.


Nope. He made governance the centerpiece of his governing strategy. Since voters prefer governance to a greedy grabbing of as much money as you can while in office, he grew stronger in office. Meanwhile the Left committed suicide by championing jihadi terrorists and opposition to the Ram mandir. The only Indian this cretin quotes in this essay is a Lefty who left India long ago and who now teaches some shite at Princeton or somewhere of that sort.

The first illiberal thrust was launched not against the hardware of democracy (the electoral system) but the software that enables it to operate—that is, an apolitical judiciary, a free press, and other elements of civil society.


Indira demanded, and got, a 'committed' Judiciary when I was in short pants.


Some Indian politicians and public intellectuals did babble nonsense about 'Civil Society' and 'illiberalism' till they stopped being politicians or found they had resigned from any University that would take them and thus weren't intellectuals anymore- just unemployed academics. Meanwhile Prashant Kishore- an engineer who can crunch numbers- has become the king-maker of Indian politics. Nobody listens to Anthropologists or Sociologists or Political Scientists because they have all proven to be ignorant and stupid.

India’s judicial system has bent to the wishes of politicians since 2014.


No. The Supreme court has imposed its will on the Government. They decided the three big issues which, it must be said, Modi has taken advantage of.
1) The Bench carried out the Nationality Register exercise in Assam. They threw a grenade into the lap of the Government. Shah brought in the CAA to save face and, thankfully, the Left rose to the bait. Elderly Muslim women protesting against non-Muslims being able to escape forcible conversion, helped Modi consolidate the Hindu vote.
2) The Bench decided Kashmir did not have 'even a shred of sovereignty', which then meant Shah could scrap its 'special status'.
3) The Bench awarded the Ram Mandir site to the Hindus. The BJP was somehow able to prevent the various Hindu sects from quarrelling over the spoils and so the thing has been a big success for them.


In the early years of Modi’s premiership, Uttar Pradesh, India’s biggest state, whose population is larger than all but four of the world’s nations, saw dozens of murderous attacks on Muslims by Hindu mobs, who accused their victims (in almost all cases falsely) of cow slaughter.


But UP was not ruled by the BJP at that time. Draconian laws relating to beef were brought in by Congress, not the BJP. However, what the UP voter wants is the extra judicial murder of gangsters. They seem to be getting it under Yogi Adityanath.


The BJP sided with the killers:


In UP you side with your side. If a Brahmin gangster is killed, Brahmins are miffed. It must be said that when Muslims are being killed- if they are the minority- everybody joins in. Mahatma Gandhi noticed that people from his party were very vigorous in killing innocent Muslims. Indeed, Nehru presided over the biggest mass-murder of Muslims the sub-continent has ever seen. Congress, it must be said, was always the muscular Hindu party. The RSS was the weak and provincial sister of the Congress Seva Dal. When you needed Muslims killed, you didn't go to Shyam Prasad Mukherjee, of the Hindu Mahasabha; you went to Gandhi's Marwari financiers who ensured that tough Biharis and Punjabis would turn out to do the needful.


When the party won state elections in 2017, it appointed as chief minister a firebrand Hindu cleric who had promoted this vigilante action.


He is doing very well. But, as I said, killing gangsters is what will get him re-elected.


Since then, the state’s judicial system has declined to punish most of the offenders—and the nation’s Supreme Court has contented itself with issuing only tsk-tsks.


Tushar Gandhi's petition was too vague for any other result. Virtue signalling PILs are a nuisance which should be curbed.

Likewise, attacks on India’s press have grown brazen. Of the past decade’s 405 cases filed against journalists under a colonial-era sedition law, all but a few have been registered since Modi took office.


Those laws were beefed up after Independence. Fucking up journalists is popular with voters because journalists are now seen as fearless seekers after hush money. Blank may not be aware that India's First Amendment is exactly opposite to America's.


The Caravan, an outlet known for its dogged investigation of the BJP, has been singled out for special harassment.


And nobody gives a shit. Caravan was crazy enough to claim that a Judge had been killed by fellow Judges who were angry that he was not taking a big bribe from the Chief Justice of the State. This defies logic. Judges don't kill people- they get killers to kill people. They may fall out over the division of bribe money- they don't kill the one or two non-corrupt judges within their ranks because they benefit by being able to overturn their judgments, for much larger consideration, on appeal.


Junior judges have to bribe senior judges so as to be assigned lucrative cases. Caravan should simply have said that the Judge who died of a heart-attack had been viciously raped to death by his fellow judges because he had excited their lust by impersonating Rahul Baba. This is plausible- at least compared to the yarn they were spinning.


Still, rags like Caravan help Modi because they incarnates everything Anglophone Indians hate about the Left.


Less than a month ago, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram acceded to government demands to block some journalists’ posts. The bans are under review by the platforms, but they have achieved their purpose. Many feisty Indian journalists now choose their words carefully.

Unless they are paid to be careless. Being feisty is so not worth it if you don't get paid.

Weakening these civil-society foundations enabled the next stage of Modi’s program: the use of democracy’s mechanisms to undermine democracy’s core.


This is utterly mad. The vast majority of India's voters have zero interaction with Anglophone journalism or the higher ranks of the judiciary. TV anchors can have an influence but some are pro BJP and some aren't.


The Bench can't enforce its orders- e.g. water sharing between States- where the thing is politically infeasible and knows this very well. Its activism was a function of policy paralysis- successive Administrations kicking the can down the road by referring the matter to the Courts.

In 2019, Modi returned to office with an absolute parliamentary majority. Shortly after, he abrogated the special status written into the constitution for Jammu and Kashmir (India’s sole Muslim-majority state). Protests in Kashmir were met with a months-long clampdown. Modi followed up with actions that officially and unofficially advantaged Hindus over Muslims nationwide. Demonstrations against these moves peaked in December 2019, and were extinguished only by a COVID-19 lockdown three months later.


The minority protested against being a minority. Sadly, this did not turn it into a majority. It was hoped that the Left-Liberals would be able to create a 'rainbow coalition'. But they were useless. Meanwhile every Indian politician is desperate to get Prashant Kishore to work for them.

All of these moves would have been anathema to the drafters of India’s constitution.


Really? The guys who deprived Dalit Muslims of affirmative action, which they had previously enjoyed, and made Hindi in the devanagari script the official language, and put Cow Protection into the Constitution would have had a problem with Modi? Are you kidding me? These guys changed the law so that Muslims who had fled in panic could not return to their property. Nehru, in Delhi, presided over a plummeting of its Muslim population and the deliberate ghettoization of the small fraction who remained. In the Fifties and Sixties, the Custodian of Evacuee Property kept harassing wealthy Muslims till they were forced to emigrate. Has Blank never read Midnight's Children? That's what happened to Salman Rushdie's daddy.


Yet all were within the technical limits of the law, and none has been seriously challenged in the nation’s now-quiescent courts.


Hold the front page! The legal Government does legal things. What a shocker!


The fecklessness of opposition parties made the BJP’s task easier, but the tools were provided by the governing system itself: The BJP has never earned anything close to a majority of the popular vote, but because of India’s first-past-the-post electoral system,


like America's or Britain's first past the post system


its lock on power is firm.


To the same extent that the Democratic party's lock on the White House is firm


In 2019, 37.4 percent of the vote (the BJP’s highest total ever) translated into 55.8 percent of the seats in Parliament.


No party has ever won 50 percent or more of the vote- even Rajiv Gandhi in 1984 who got almost 80 percent of the seats.


Gyan Prakash, a scholar of the Emergency,


a stupid Leftist whom nobody bothers with in India.


sees the greatest threat to democracy in this “shadow legality”: the use of lawfare to subvert the foundation of constitutional government.


But Indians see him as a cretin. Which Indian politician is saying 'guys, what does Gyan Prakash think about this?' None at all. Prashant Kishore- on the other hand- they will always take a call from.

And he sees India’s example as having global implications. “Modi is part of a much larger phenomenon,” he told me. “This is a project to mobilize all state institutions, and change India’s democratic and plural politics and culture.”


Who in their right mind would listen to Gyan Prakash or Vivek Chibber? You may as well talk to the cat about quantum mechanics.

Do constitutional questions matter to a farmer scraping by on $4 a day (the national average)? They should. As the Nobel laureate Amartya Sen once noted, “No famine has ever taken place in the history of the world in a functioning democracy.”

Sen was from East Bengal. There were two big famines there under popular, elected, Muslim leaders. Sen was lying. Indians now consider him a fool and blame him for the Nalanda fiasco.

India is now facing its most serious natural disaster since independence, in the coronavirus pandemic. Even by official figures (which significantly undercount the victims), India is the world’s coronavirus epicenter: 29 million sickened, more than 350,000 dead, and no end in sight.


But the US has twice the number of deaths with a much smaller population! The Spanish flu killed 14 million Indians when the population was about a quarter of what it is now.

A great many of these cases were preventable. Modi’s response to the pandemic has swung from oppressive lockdown to maskless political rallies and the encouragement of a super-spreader Hindu pilgrimage with 9 million attendees. A political system in which the government could be held accountable might have yielded a different outcome.


Not if people refuse to comply. You can't jail the majority.

All of this may sound familiar to American ears.


Because it is written by an American. The problem is that once Americans understand that many Indians earn just 4 dollars a day, they realize that it is very foolish to compare Indian politics with American politics.


President Donald Trump labeled the press the “enemy of the people” and attempted to intimidate sitting judges.


But he wasn't re-elected. Modi was. But Modi knows very well that he owes his ascent entirely to the Left Liberal media. They insulted Gujarat when they calumnied Modi and so the Gujaratis rallied behind Modi giving him an unprecedented longevity as Chief Minister. The same thing is happening again with Modi as PM. His rival- Rahul Gandhi- is believed to be so stupid and ignorant that he thinks Amartya Sen, not Prashant Kishore, is worth listening to.


A critical mass of the Republican Party is at least as motivated by white grievance as the BJP base is by Hindutva. And laws recently passed in Georgia and proposed elsewhere would let partisan state officials rather than voters determine elections. This might be technically in accord with the Constitution, but would be at odds with—well, democracy.

No. A democracy can decide to disenfranchise or even to ethnically cleanse a minority. America has plenty of experience with such things.

Perhaps the most dangerous threat of all is complacency. Whether doomscrolling Twitter or ignoring politics completely, most Americans share a baseline confidence that democracy will endure. But will it? American democracy isn’t nearly as deeply rooted as we like to believe. Half of the population (that is: the female half) weren’t generally permitted to vote until 1920. Black Americans in Jim Crow states (that is, most of them) had to wait nearly another half century. If measured by universal suffrage, how long has America been a true democracy? For less time than the Rolling Stones have been touring.


So India was a true democracy before America. Big whoop.

This is why Americans should be paying close attention to the politics of India. The U.S. is not Iceland; it’s huge, diverse, and tough to govern. Only one other country with comparable size and complexity has given democracy a sustained, multigenerational shot. If the system fails in India, it can certainly fail closer to home.


This guy has a PhD from Harvard. Sadly, it was in Anthropology. He has advised the Senate on Foreign Relations and is high up with the RAND Corporation. No wonder China is eating America's lunch.


Are there any other Americans who believe that if a poor country far far away decides to elect some guy Jonah does not like then the Red States will secede and reintroduce Slavery and strip Women of the Vote and force them all to have babies incessantly? Sure- because it has already happened. Trump modelled himself on Modi! If you listen carefully to his speeches, you will find he is actually speaking Gujerati! Not that Joe Biden (real name Jodhabhai Patel) is any different. On the other hand, Kamala Harris is the King of Norway- which isn't yet a flawed democracy (according to the Economist) and thus is superior to the USA or India. America must become a Monarchy like Norway, with a State Church, if it is to rise up in The Economist's rankings from being a 'flawed democracy' to join Denmark and Sweden as a proper Democracy with a crowned head of state.

Gyan Prakash on CAA as the new Khilafat

Muslims in India are a minority. What happens when the spearhead a national agitation- more particularly on a spurious issue or in furtherance of a cretinous demand? They suffer. The non-Muslim majority, rightly or wrongly, become fearful of Islamic militancy and there is a counter-mobilization. This was the outcome of the Khilafat movement. Ataturk abolished the Caliphate. It turned out the Turks didn't want it. Meanwhile, Hindus had got angry about atrocities carried out by the Moplahs and the 'Khilafat tax' levied in places like Barabanki and Malegoan. The militancy of the Muslim League led to Hindu votes getting consolidated under Congress even though it steadfastly refused to deliver 'Swaraj'. India was headed for a type of Congress Rule which would reduce Muslims to second class status. Many would end up as refugees in Pakistan.

Gyan Prakash has a bizarre article in the Times of India which compares the CAA agitation to the Khilafat movement. What is he trying to say? Indian Muslims are cretins? They are slitting their own throat merely to gratify the RSS?

India is astir with ground-level protests. With the Congress in deep slumber and the opposition political parties in disarray, what is remarkable about these protests is their organic nature. Muslim students took the lead. Having watched the government and Hindutva organisations push their divisive agenda since 2014, the CAA broke the dam of fear and intimidation. 

First at Aligarh Muslim University, then at Jamia Millia Islamia, they came out forcefully on the streets. They were not fooled by the explanation that the CAA was aimed only to provide relief to non-Muslim minorities, not to fundamentally change the basis for citizenship.

So, what they are doing is opposing giving citizenship to non Muslims fleeing Islamic persecution. This means Indian Muslims think non Muslim minorities should either convert or be slaves. How will this endear themselves to the non-Muslim majority in India? Just as Khilafat scared the pants off non Muslims who realized Islamic Caliphs fuck over non Muslims, so too will the anti CAA agitation convince non-Muslims in India that Muslim citizens are a fifth column.

They clearly not only recognised the communal meaning of CAA but also that its ominous linking with the NRC would make them second-class citizens. 

How? They don't speak the East Bengali dialect. There is no possibility that they can be mistaken for immigrants. On the other hand, if the aim is ethnic cleansing- voting lists are good enough. There is no need for a National Register.

The BJP government and the Hindutva forces have had a free reign. The anti-cow slaughter vigilantes went on a campaign of lynchings with impunity. Gauri Lankesh was murdered. The communalisation of educational and cultural institutions went unimpeded. The judiciary meekly succumbed to executive authority. The government paid no price for its disastrous demonetisation. The ruling party won election after election, and took no prisoners in its campaign to realise its vision of a Congress-mukt Bharat. After registering a thumping majority in the 2019 elections, it was emboldened to scrap Article 370 in Kashmir and impose a lockdown on the state. But when, in a fit of arrogance, the government introduced the CAA that communalises citizenship, it was the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back.

So Muslims don't object to being lynched on false charges of cow slaughter. But they get angry if non Muslim refugees get citizenship rather than being deported back to a place where they will be forced to convert. If this breaks the camel's back, the camel has got rabies. It must be put down.

The courageous initiatives at Aligarh and Jamia struck a chord beyond the Muslim community and spread at electric speed. Students and youth, the civil society, and even sections of Bollywood have joined the protest. Some have found the assertion of Muslim identity in the protests problematic. But this objection is misguided; how can the Muslims not assert their identity when it is precisely that identity which is under attack? How could they not miss the meaning of the Supreme Court’s Ayodhya decision?

So, Gyan Prakash is saying all the anti BJP political movements in India are nothing but an expression of Muslim rage that non Muslim refugees are not being repatriated so as to be forcibly converted. Even Modi and Amit Shah haven't gone as far as Gyan Prakash.

Faced with the RSS-inspired assault on their place in India, the Muslims are stoutly asserting that they are Muslims and Indians, not Muslims but Indians.

Who fucking hate non Muslim refugees from places where Muslims are not Indians but are Pakistanis or Bangladeshis and have done lots of ethnic cleansing.

This calls to mind what Mahatma Gandhi attempted in the Khilafat movement, which used a Muslim grievance to launch a nationalist movement against the British.

But Gandhi left the Muslims in the lurch. He said 'Swaraj' means that every 4 anna Congress member gets to elect a new Constituent Assembly which gets to write the Laws of Independent India. Since Congress was Hindu dominated this meant that the Khilafati Muslim, in return for Turkey's freedom, would become vassals in Hindu India. What was the outcome of the Congress-Khilafat combine? Nothing. The Turks freed themselves and got rid of the Caliphate. Hindus and Muslims went back to slaughtering each other. The Brits remained in charge.

That too was a conjoining of the Muslim and Indian.

In the cause of a Caliph whom the Turks did not want. The thing was pure idiocy. No Hindus actually gave up their life to fight for the Caliphate despite Gandhi & Rajaji and so on banging on about how this was a religious duty for Hindus coz...urm...it says so in the Bhagvad Gita?

In this light, the importance of the Muslim initiative sparking the current protest cannot be minimised.

Coz Muslims telling non Muslims to fuck off back where they came from so as to be forcibly converted is sure gonna make everybody else want to jump on the bandwagon.

The Constitution promised equal citizenship to minorities, but that promise was the product of a national struggle against colonial inequality, not due to a civil rights movement.

But so did the Pakistani Constitution. Indeed, Rwanda had several Constitutions. None of them mentioned genocide- but that was the outcome. Constitutions don't mean shit. Every shithole country has one.

In this sense, the current upsurge is an attempt to fulfil the promise.

Coz the Indian Constitution promises Muslims the right to prevent non Muslim refugees getting protection. Dr. Ambedkar insisted on a Directive Principle saying such people should be deported to where they can be expeditiously killed or forcibly converted. 

It has also broken the pall cast by authoritarian governance.

Very true! The Muslims will soon take the law into their own hands and deport those fucking refugees themselves.

People across India have begun speaking up fearlessly, enlivening the dead of winter with the springtime of dissent.

Why is nobody just killing those Refugees already?

Historians and political observers portray the Indian Constitution as a unique document and laud the far-reaching liberal-democratic visions of India’s nationalist leadership.

But 'historians and political observers' are notorious fuckwits. Gyan Prakash is one. All we ask if that they don't masturbate in public.

Anything contrary appears as a deviation from the trajectory of democracy set by the Constitution. This is why Indira Gandhi’s Emergency is regarded as an exception. In fact, Indira’s Emergency was no sudden irruption but a paradoxically lawful suspension of the law with roots in the provisions and practices authorised by the Constitution.

So, Gyan Prakash is aware that the Constitution means shit. It can be amended  any which way or simply ignored altogether.

After her defeat in 1977, some of the Emergency-era constitutional amendments were abolished, and the Emergency provision was modified. But preventive detention returned.
The colonial era Section 124A law against sedition is still on the books. Special laws like AFPSA continue to be used in Assam, Punjab, and Kashmir.

So, if the Muslims go too crazy they can be locked up. But, what Gyan Prakash is not telling us is that the Indian State has found extra judicial killing to be a faster and cheaper solution.

If the Constitution promised equality, yet to be realised, it also provided for a state with extraordinary powers — fully realised and practised before, during, and after the Emergency. The BJP government has not flinched from using the extraordinary powers of the state to intimidate and silence its critics. It has used lawful powers to target centres of dissent, such as JNU. In UP and Jamia, the police have followed well-established practices of repression. The wanton violence unleashed on JNU students by masked goons while the police stood by idly is yet another example of how lawful authorities can act unlawfully. The JNU attacks also highlight the danger posed to democracy by the authoritarian state’s coordination with storm troopers on the street.

What point is Gyan Prakash making? Is it that this Muslim protest against non Muslims gaining refuge from forcible conversion is bound to end in the Muslims being killed or incarcerated? But, it was always obvious that a Muslim minority which tries jihad gets slaughtered.  Why gloat about it?

What we are witnessing is a ground-level upsurge to realise the Constitution’s promise of equal citizenship and democratic governance.

Coz the Constitution says it is wrong to let non Muslims escape forcible conversion in Islamic Republics.

Ranged against it are the authoritarian laws and practices of the state toxically mixed with thugs on the street. How this contest plays out will have lasting meaning for Indian democracy.

Defined in these terms, the contest can only play out in only one way. Muslims get shot by the police or get stomped to death on the streets. Gyan Prakash may be jizzing in his pants at this outcome but ordinary people may take a different view. The anti-CAA protests may not really be about sending back non Muslim refugees. It could be an opportunity for a new generation of Muslim leaders to rise up. Why should there not be a Muslim Party, similar to the existing caste based dynastic parties, which could take a leadership role in cobbling together a coalition at the State level? Why should there not be a Muslim caucus at the Center?

CAA looks like an ideal candidate for Muslim vote consolidation because the Opposition parties have to pretend that Muslims face ethnic cleansing. This shows they are liars. Thus Muslims will feel they need their own party. Of course, the whole thing could fizzle out with the only beneficiary from the hoopla being the BJP which further consolidates the Hindu vote against an imaginary Muslim threat. After all, Khilafat consolidated the Congress hold on the Hindus while making it appear that Gandhi really wanted Independence but couldn't get it yet coz them Muslims be cray cray.

Perhaps Gyan Prakash harbors a Gandhi like fear of Muslims. He hopes they will open a can of jihadi whupass on the BJP's ass. But once they are triumphant what possible use could they have for the Left?

Pankaj Mishra, Gyan Prakash & the Emergency era

Gyan Prakash leveraged an MA in JNU to escape from India long ago. He has written a silly book about the Emergency. Pankaj Mishra wrote a couple of silly books about how awful it was to be a backward bhaiyya from the cow belt,  and, on that basis, managed to escape India less long ago. Now the younger expat has written a silly article in the NYRB about Prakash's book.

Why?

Some silly people compare Modi to Indira and pretend that there is a second Emergency in operation in India which nobody except these stupid expats has noticed.

Why did Indira declare Emergency? She should simply have put Jagjivan Ram in charge, dissolved Parliament and stormed back to power. The answer is she didn't trust any of her Cabinet colleagues. Furthermore, her younger son and daughter-in-law were corrupt and could have been prosecuted. Anyway, if the people wanted 'sampoorna kranti'- Total Revolution- she could deliver it better than the cretinous JP.  Indira knew that Revolution means beating the shite out of people and jailing everybody who might wag their tail. The problem with Revolutions is that the original leader tends to die mysteriously to be replaced by a more vicious sociopath. In this case, the sociopath in waiting was her own younger son. Thus, she called elections and spent a couple of years in the wilderness before her Opponents' cobbled together coalition imploded. Then she took back power with her younger son's help. His thugishness had mellowed into Machiavellian corruption and, it is believed, she sincerely mourned his death in a glider accident.

The reason Modi, or, more generally, the BJP, doesn't want or need to impose an Emergency, is because Cabinets are well disciplined and efficient. There is no atmosphere of intrigue nor widespread corruption. Democracy and the Rule of Law are good for the Party to flourish and the Prime Minister to work effectively.

Dynasts turn into despots when they fear intrigue. Genuine political parties, which reward merit, have no such proclivity.

Mishra admits that this is the conventional view.

He writes-

Prakash is skeptical of conventional accounts of the Emergency, which focus on Indira Gandhi and her son Sanjay—her paranoia and megalomania, and his arrogance and recklessness—and which also blame her political opponents for intoxicating the masses with fantasies of an unachievable revolution.

Revolutions are achievable but they tend to be utterly shite. Indira gently reminded North Indian people of this fact by posing a clear and present danger to their testicles- this was the 'forced sterilization' campaign which so quieted opposition to her that she thought she'd win- and the upshot was that Indians stopped thinking kranti was cool.

Gyan Prakash, however, was doing a PhD in, that well known redoubt of Revolutionary praxis, the University of Pennsylvania. As a brown man, he gained intellectual affirmative action and posed as a spokesman for Ind's revolting masses.

Mishra, with unconscious humor, writes-

Prakash offers a more disquieting analysis, linking the Emergency to both India’s supposedly pathbreaking constitution and its present state of moral and political debility.

How was India's constitution 'path-breaking'? Ambedkar rightly dismissed his contribution to it as 'hackwork'.  The fact is, if the Communists had played up, the Constitution could have been easily amended to make the country a One Party State.

What 'moral and political debility' does India now exhibit? The Left has been decimated- but it was always shite.  Rahul has taken a beating- but his incompetence and stupidity have long been apparent and it is time someone else stepped up to head the Opposition. No doubt, there is an 'anti-appeasement' sentiment targeting Muslims- but that is true of Europe and America. India has done nothing as extreme as ban the burqa, like France, or 're-educate' Muslims as Communist China has done.

Gyan Prakash, cretin that he is, thinks the Constitution was important. This was not the case because the 24th amendment had nullified the Golaknath judgment. The  Kesavananda Bharati case was narrowly decided in 1973 but the 'basic structure' ratio only became effective after- and partly as a reaction to- the Emergency. Thus, there was no 'careful cloaking' of anything in 'constitutional dress'. The existing MISA law was used and then beefed up more as a signal of intent than as an instrument. Like the Press, the Judiciary too, 'crawled when they had only been asked to bend.'

Fascinated by the fact that the Emergency was carefully “cloaked in a constitutional dress,” he goes back to examine the making of the constitution, and the fear of “anarchy” that made its Hindu, largely upper-caste authors—Ambedkar was an exception—vest the state with coercive authority over society.

This is very foolish. Pakistan is Muslim, Sri Lanka is majority Buddhist. Yet their original Constitutions were similar to India's- except Ceylon's had stronger minority protection which is why they got universal suffrage in 1931. Pakistan did not have a democratic trajectory for one simple reason. Its more populous and cohesive East Wing was politically more developed but lagged behind in terms of participation in the Military. Once proper elections were held, the country broke in two after a bloody genocide in the East carried out by soldiers from the West.  It is true that, unlike Sri Lanka or Pakistan, India hasn't abrogated its first Constitution. But this is because India is a largely Hindu country which has faced no major insurrection or widespread separatist movement. It is Democratic because Hindus want Hindus to compete for their votes. This does mean that some minorities- Muslims in particular- have gotten short shrift. In the Sixties many better off Muslims faced harassment by the 'Custodian of Enemy Property'- and people like Salman Rushdie's father were forced to emigrate. Those who remained worked hard and, where competition was on the basis of genuine merit, did make a prominent place for themselves. However, the idiocy of Al Qaeeda has caused trouble for Indian Muslims in the same way that it has caused trouble for Muslims in many other parts of the world. Thankfully, India can always shift blame to the lunatics in the Pakistani ISI whose latest own-goal is to have gotten Modi re-elected with a bigger majority. I suppose, it could be argued, that the ISI wanted to keep Indian P.Ms from getting chummy with their Pakistani counterparts. However, so long as Imran Khan is in office, no Indian P.M in his right mind will go near the fellow. Why? The Indian will look dowdy and provincial by contrast.

He describes how the constitution of free India preserved provisions of British-ruled India that had previously incited the freedom movement, such as preventive detention (which, as a United Nations report documented last year, is now used even against children in Indian-ruled Kashmir). Furthermore, as Prakash points out, the Indian constitution allowed the prime minister as sovereign authority to legally impose a state of emergency.

Thus, the Constitution did not matter at all. India needed to be administered in the only way it could provably be administered- i.e. on the basis of its history of administration. The British had ruled India based on how it was ruled before- as had the Mughals and so forth.

Incidentally, kids should be detained if they are a danger to themselves or others. It is not the case that India is targeting kids for 're-education' like China.

At the same time, it deprived the courts of their authority to check the prime minister’s power. In Prakash’s resonant judgment, the Emergency was a “lawful suspension of the law.”

No. It was an unlawful suspension of certain provisions of the law. Indira was lying when she claimed that there was any real possibility of the Army or Policy mutinying just because JP- that senile dotard- had babbled some nonsense in a speech.

Prakash, like Mishra, is a cretin. It is no accident that the Left supported Indira save when it was opposing that portion of the Left which supported Indira. However, that portion of the Left later supported Sonia till it screwed the pooch so royally that Manmohan could rule without it. Now many of their erstwhile goons are voting for Modi because they are tired of Mamta's goons beating the crap out of them.

Mrs. Gandhi’s power-grab was validated by the parliament, which barred “judicial review of the emergency proclamations and ordinances suspending fundamental rights.”

Why was it validated? It's because Indira had struck terror into the hearts of the intriguers. The very people who would have deserted her- and subsequently did so- had to turn into her most servile sycophants. But this is the problem of dynastic parties. They turn to despotism because of the 'internal' enemy of intrigue. Proper political parties don't do any such thing.

Many of Mrs. Gandhi’s arbitrarily detained victims had filed habeas corpus petitions under Article 226 of the constitution, claiming their fundamental rights, and nine high courts across the country had ruled in their favor. But the Supreme Court notoriously upheld the government’s position by a vote of 4–1.

The lone dissenting judge, who was in line to become chief justice but was later vengefully denied that position by Mrs. Gandhi, quoted from Wolfgang Friedmann’s Law in a Changing Society(1959): “In a purely formal sense, any system of norms based on a hierarchy of orders, even the organised mass murders of Nazi regime, qualify as law.” In other words, the Emergency, however abominable, was not illegal. Nor was it seen as such by the craven Indian media, which, as one politician imprisoned by Mrs. Gandhi famously charged, “was asked to bend…and…chose to crawl.”

Mishra does not mention that the dissenting judge was H.R Khanna. He paid the price by being superseded. It is noteworthy that Chief Justice A.N Ray had been promoted out of turn and his attitude to Indira was adulatory.

However, the fact remains, the Left- which was intellectually in the ascendant back then- considered the Judiciary to be 'reactionary' and Constitutions to be merely wastepaper. Amartya Sen's 'Idea of Justice' is in this tradition which dismisses 'Due process of Law' as 'Niti', when what truly matters is 'Nyaya'- arbitrary actions of a supposedly re-distributive type.

Mishra writes-

Prakash goes on to establish that other much-denounced features of the Emergency were not aberrations.

This is blatantly false. Prakash can't establish anything because he is a cretin. Forced sterilization was not possible before or after the Emergency. It represents an aberration made possible by the Emergency. Extra-judicial killing, by contrast, is always possible. It's just interfering with people's testicles which is aberrant.

For instance, the compulsory sterilization drive of the mid-1970s, the signature program of Sanjay Gandhi, had its origins in a program of population control aggressively promoted in the 1960s by the Ford Foundation, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund; the Ford Foundation gave grants to the Indian government, provided consultants, and prescribed policies.

The Ford Foundation did not prescribe the forcible sterilization of all and sundry- including elderly people and kids. Why? Coz it wasn't utterly stupid.

The Indian government’s coercive modernization schemes were on display well before they were sped up during the Emergency, when more than six million men were sterilized in India in a year.

Where was the coercion prior to, or subsequent to, the Emergency? India was not Sweden where eugenic forcible sterilization, promoted by people like Nobel laureate Alva Myrdal, only ended in 1975.

As Mara Hvistendahl documented in Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men (2011), “Widespread sterilization was an idea that had been introduced to India by Western advisers, but Sanjay Gandhi ratcheted it up to an unprecedented scale.” His demands were so extreme that “local officials could meet them only by dragging men to the operating room—typically a makeshift camp that had sprung up practically overnight.” Hundreds of men died as a result of botched operations.

The reason the Ford Foundation, World Bank and so forth did not advocate forced sterilization was because it was bound to lead to a backlash- at least in what the Myrdals' called 'soft states' like India.

Visiting a terrorized India in 1976, the World Bank’s president, Robert McNamara, hailed the Gandhis’ “disciplined, realistic approach” to family planning and the general junking of “socialist ideologies.”

McNamara was a Kennedy appointee who shat the bed on Vietnam and went to the World Bank as a form of penance. He was himself considered a socialist by Dubya's neocon henchmen.

Prakash demonstrates that the demolition of slums, another exercise of arbitrary power blamed on Indira and Sanjay Gandhi, was also an aspect of “the state’s modernization project from above.”

It was a corrupt land grab. If Indira and Sanjay wanted 'modernization' they'd have liberalized the economy.  Slum clearance only occurred where the underlying real estate was valuable. It did not occur where the slum-lord provided money or goons for the Congress party. Only cretins like Prakash and Mishra think that the World Bank and the Bilderbergers and the Elders of Zion are all conspiring to 'modernize' shithole countries and seeking to chop off our goolies so as to bathe in our semen.

In escalating that project “with wanton force, Indira, with Sanjay and his coterie, sought to accomplish what they could not achieve ‘normally.’”

Why was the project escalated? It was to strike terror into the hearts of people and disrupt the conventional politics of intrigue and hypocritical protest. That strategy worked a little too well. North India appeared entirely docile. Kao, Indira's Intelligence Chief, was widely believed to have given the all clear for elections to be called. The fact is most people in Lutyen's Delhi believed Indira would squeak through with the support of regional parties and the CPI.

Mishra & Prakash think the Emergency was some cunning Capitalist scheme to raise Indian living standards. They are utter fools subscribing to the very same Socialist ideology which Indira used to justify her reign of terror.

Similar improvisations by a panicky ruling class were underway in many postcolonial countries. In neighboring Pakistan, Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto moved from promoting a populist variant of socialism to appeasing Islamic fundamentalists, inadvertently setting the stage for the military despot who executed him and inaugurated breakneck Islamization.

Bhutto used the excuse of Socialism to destroy the political influence of the Industrialists (he himself was a feudal landlord). He did not appease Islamic fundamentalism. He targeted the Ahmediyas because they were middle class Punjabi speakers. In any case, after the oil shock, everybody was sucking up to the Saudis. Bhutto's mistake was to rig the elections. This destroyed his legitimacy. He compounded this error by abusing the Generals who hanged him rather than wait for him to get back in power to take his revenge.

It is ludicrous to paint Bhutto or Bandarnaike or Indira or Idi Amin as 'Socialists' who started appeasing either Capitalism or Islam or anything else. These were shitheads leading shithole countries who, however, had their sycophants amongst the Socialist 'intelligentsia'.

Indira Gandhi herself followed this trajectory of the failed third-world modernizer when, after her triumphant return to power in 1980, she began to stoke Hindu nationalism, enabling Modi’s Hindu-supremacist party to move from the fringes of Indian political life to the center.

Rubbish! Congress was a Hindu dominated party which established Hindu hegemony, banned cow slaughter in many states,  and completely marginalized Muslims while coopting the more docile type of Dalit. Compared to the Congress Seva Dal, the RSS were pussycats. Jagdish Tytler was a former head of the Dal. What he and his chums did in Delhi to the Sikhs in '84 explains why Congress, not the Mahasabha, was considered the muscular wing of Hinduism.

Atal Behari Vajpayee did well as External Affairs Minister in the post- Emergency Janata coalition. His party showed cohesiveness while the other constituents of Janata were dynastic personality cults. Thus it was his 'Bharatiya Janata Party' which became the legitimate successor of  the Janata Morcha. However, this was not obvious back in the early Eighties.

Indira did not move to the Right because of Atal- a meat eating, wine bibbing Liberal- but because she herself was deeply religious and had a more intense personal spiritual dimension than any previous or subsequent Indian leader. In this she was Kamala, nor Jawaharlal's, daughter. Sanjay had no time for Socialist shitheads while Rajiv was most at home with Dosco boxwallahs.  There was lip-service to Socialism but it was about as convincing as Rahul's claim to be fighting for 'workers and peasants'. Sonia, it seems, genuinely respected Leftist intellectuals. But Manmohan didn't. It is now apparent that his administration was more, not less, 'neoliberal' than Modi's.

Cretins like Mishra believe that 'political legitimacy' involves the sort of shite they view with paranoid suspicion because they never outgrew an adolescent type of Left infantilism.

They babble nonsense about 'crises of governance' which arise from the paranoid fantasies of antisemitic shitheads like Marx and Hobson.

Modi also derives political legitimacy from his oft-proclaimed mission of national modernization but seeks, more explicitly than his predecessors, Prakash writes, “to resolve the crisis of governance by building a Hindu nation with a ressentiment-driven majoritarian politics that reduces the minorities to second-class citizens.”

Minorities became second-class citizen at Partition. Millions were ethnically cleansed. Muslims were still being forced out of India in the Sixties. Socialism failed almost immediately. After that there was a hypocritical vote bank politics by dynasts on the one side and, on the other, the growth of a genuine political party with a meritocratic element. Rahul wanted to make the Congress party a similar outfit. He has failed. But, sooner or later, some other outfit will succeed in the task. Some hoped it would be the Aam Aadmi Party. Perhaps some similar 'Morcha' might be sparked by some future scandal. However, the 'Muslim appeasement' charge has little mileage left. Attacks on Hinduism by Hindu Leftists are declining, or failing to get publicity. Thus, Hindu resentment is disappearing.

The afterlife of the Emergency has turned out to be long and rich. There have been nine non–Congress Party governments in Delhi in the forty-two years since the Emergency ended. Yet antiquated laws on sedition and preventive detention are still on the books and are frequently deployed. A prime minister can still easily impose “a state of exception” through the “sovereign” exercise of “extraordinary constitutional powers.”

These laws aren't antiquated in the least. They permit organs of the State to make contingency plans and maintain a type of executive capacity which, by itself, has a countervailing power. However, in the mid Eighties and Nineties, as in the late Sixties in connection with Naxalbari, there was widespread extra-judicial killing to which everybody turned a blind eye. This severely undermined 'Command Responsibility' and the justiciability of essentially political wrongs.

Prakash could have argued his case about the unexceptional nature of the Emergency with more detailed examples of how representative democracy in India always enjoyed an apparatus of perfectly legal oppression.

As has every representative democracy in history. This proves that there is a giant conspiracy which stretches from the caves underneath the Vatican where Chtulhu is worshiped,  to the garden shed behind my bedroom from whose rooftop the neighbor's cat keeps me under illegal surveillance.

For instance, politicians in power in New Delhi frequently—forty times by 1977—were equipped by the constitution to get rid of state governments they did not like.

But they only did so if the dismissed administration could not get re-elected or else if it was seditious.

In 1959 Indira Gandhi, then freshly appointed to the presidency of the Congress Party, stoked protests against the progressive reforms of the Communist government in the state of Kerala—the first elected Communist government anywhere in the world—and persuaded Nehru, her father and then prime minister, to dismiss the Communists and impose central rule.

The Communists lost the subsequent election and learned their lesson- don't fuck with the Church. Do something useful for the people and you will get reelected. The Communists could have become a National Party like Congress or the BJP. However, the stupidity of their various gerontocratic politburos prevented this outcome. What great ideological crime would have been committed if Jyoti Basu had been allowed to become P.M? I suppose, the answer is that Basu would have been flattered and cajoled into following the Chinese path. Indians would have been better off. Mishra and Prakash would have felt anally violated. Their privilege as 'native informants' regarding a shithole country would have been undermined.

In common with other viable states, India kills or otherwise neutralizes people who try to destroy its territorial integrity. Mishra thinks this is very naughty. But he has moved to a country which has done the same thing far more effectively for hundreds of years.

Nehru had some practice in this regard in Kashmir, where he first abandoned his 1947 promise to organize a referendum to decide the contested region’s political status and then, in 1953, deposed a popular Kashmiri politician and imprisoned him.

Actually it was Rafi Ahmed Kidwai who ran with that particular ball. Kidwai realized that if the Kashmir valley seceded then there would be large scale ethnic cleansing of Muslims in India on the Pakistani pattern. Sheikh Abdullah, like his son and grandson, remained emotionally close to Nehru and his dynastic successors.

The valley erupted in a militant insurgency in 1989, which the Indian government met with a ferocious counterinsurgency, flooding the region with more than half a million soldiers. Nearly 80,000 people have died in a place that remains the most dangerous on earth, an eternal flashpoint, as events of late February reminded us, for a war between two nuclear-armed nations.

Rajiv Gandhi rigged an election in Kashmir in favor of fellow dynast, Farooq Abdullah. Thus he was able to rival his mother's cretinism in creating a terrible insurgency in Punjab. The fact that these insurgencies had an anti-Hindu ethnic cleansing aspect was supposed to bolster the Dynasty. Perhaps it would have done but for Rajiv's assassination because of his stupid meddling in Sri Lanka. Of course, it must be said, there was plenty of stupidity amongst high officials and 'darbari intellectuals' in New Delhi.

At the same time, India’s military occupation of Kashmir has also profoundly corrupted Indian institutions—the legal system as well as the security forces, the media, and the larger public sphere.

Nonsense. It has had zero impact outside the State just as actions in Nagaland had zero impact on the rest of India. Similarly, British operations in Northern Ireland had no impact on English institutions. That is why Mishra moved to Britain.

In 2013, the year before Modi came to power, the Supreme Court dispatched a Kashmiri to the gallows on flimsy circumstantial evidence, arguing that the terrorist attack in 2001 on the Indian parliament that he had allegedly been involved with had shaken the entire nation and that he had to be hanged in order to satisfy the “collective conscience of its society.”

And Obama had Osama killed. There is a define pattern here- a big Conspiracy which stretches all the way from the Vatican catacombs to the roof of the garden shed upon which my neighbor's cat lies basking in the Sun and ILLEGALLY SURVEILLING ME. Why? Because of NEO-LIBERAL CAPITALISM!  I have proof. My Dyson vacuum cleaner malfunctioned while under warranty. Dyson is a billionaire. Neighbor's cat observed my doing something to the hose of that vacuum cleaner which WAS NOT EROTIC IN ANY WAY! But, clearly, many people would have believed its TOTALLY FALSE TESTIMONY that I was using the Dyson to pleasure myself thus invalidating the warranty. This is just a small example of the way in which the military occupation of Aldershot has totally corrupted and subverted every institution in the country- including that of the supposed neutrality of neighbors' cats in commercial disputes with Vacuum cleaner companies.

If the situation in India seems bleaker today than it was during the Emergency, it is because,

the Left has been utterly routed. Thus Mishra and Prakash look foolish.

as Prakash points out, “the social and political crises that it unsuccessfully sought to resolve with shadow laws and authority” have intensified.

Unfortunately, the Marxist notion of crisis has faded out of current Indian politics. There is zero 'Revolutionary potential'. Mishra and Prakash are as foolish as Niradh Chaudhri who, in 'Autobiography of an unknown Indian' expressed the hope that the White man would come back to rule India.

India’s rapid but highly uneven economic growth in recent decades always seemed politically as well as environmentally unsustainable. It was predictable that disappointed business leaders, together with frustrated masses, would abandon the Congress Party’s corrupt and inefficient ancien régime and lift Hindu nationalists to power.1
Prakash is alert to the social and historical setting in which democracy lives—or grows infirm, and quietly dies:

But Prakash lives in America. How 'alert' can he be? India has a young demography. It has no choice but to be democratic. Its democratic and legal institutions have grown more robust. The only senility and brain death in evidence is that of expat, armchair, Leftists like Prakash and Mishra.

In today’s India,

as opposed to what? yesterday's India? the day before's India?

as in many other places, power and money define the context. Those who enjoy social and economic privileges, and can summon powerful political influence, play by different rules. Vast quantities of unregulated capital let loose by the neoliberal economy

with THE DIRECT COMPLICITY OF MY NEIGHBOR'S CAT

slosh around to twist the machinery of laws and administration. An army of fixers and middlemen operate at every level to distort and corrupt the everyday experience of democracy, turning it into “a feast of vultures.”
Modi promised a clean and impartial administration, but under him the “influence-peddlers” first introduced into Indian politics by Sanjay Gandhi

Such peddlers were always there.

have burrowed deep into the country’s major institutions, including the Supreme Court. In an unprecedented move last year, four senior judges held a press conference to warn that democracy in general as well as the integrity of the country’s highest court was in peril.

They were being silly. They gambled that Modi would lose. Instead he won. The current CJI was one of the 4 judges protesting against the CJI's preeminence and his privileges as Master of the Rolls. Gogoi has not reduced these privileges once he himself got the top job. Two of the four Judges have turned on Gogoi for the manner in which a sexual harassment charge against him was handled.  What was the upshot of all these shenanigans? Indians no longer believe that Judges aren't a bunch of bitchy 'mean girls' constantly turning on each other biting and scratching. The complaint of the original 4 had to do with the Loya case- one which only needed to be investigated if Judges are in the habit of murdering each other simply so as to eliminate non-corrupt comrades.

This is not to say that Democracy is not in danger. The neighbor's cat is like totally imperilling democracy. So is the person wot steals my lunch from the fridge replacing it something which appears identical but doesn't taste as nice.

Modi commands a committed ideological cadre of Hindu nationalists

like whom? Nirmila Sitharaman? Subhramanyam Jaishankar? Both have been promoted on merit. What about Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi or Syed Shahnawaz Hussain? They are Nationalists, certainly, but are they Hindu?

that is rapidly taking over the military and the bureaucracy, the universities, and the media

and taking orders from my neighbor's cat.

And Modi himself looms as large in India as Indira did.

How shameful! A Prime Minister should try to be faceless and anonymous.

“His photographs, slogans, and programs appear everywhere as hers once did,” Prakash writes. “He does not hold press conferences and subject himself to questioning; he prefers to speak directly to the people with his weekly radio address and, like Donald Trump, frequent tweets.”

Lal Bahadur Shastri did not hold press conferences. So what? A number of other P.Ms followed his example. So what?

The expectations generated by consumer capitalism among a predominantly young population have raced far ahead of any actual material progress achieved by India.

Prakash and Mishra's expectations, generated by consumer capitalism, caused them to emigrate from India. They can earn a little money writing this type of tripe. Good luck to them. They have found a niche- albeit of a repugnant sort- in the globalized market for stupidity. But this has nothing to do with politics or, indeed, India.