Siddharth Varadarajan vs Billi the Cat

The Wire reports- 

New Delhi: The head of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s IT cell, Amit Malviya, said on Thursday that he would be filing civil and criminal cases against The Wire for allegedly “forging” documents to “tarnish [his] reputation.”

If an employee of the Wire forged documents to tarnish the reputation of a named person, then the Wire itself is guilty.  Moreover, in their response to the complaint, if the Wire admits this happened then it should apologize and try to settle out of court because the thing is no longer an allegation. It is a fact admitted by the guilty party. 

On October 10, The Wire had published the first of four articles (all now retracted) claiming that Meta, the parent company of Instagram, had granted Malviya the ability to take down posts he objected to by not subjecting complaints he filed to review by the company.

This was a prima facie absurd claim. Why would an international company give such power to someone in a distant land? Is the Wire aware of any person to whom Meta has given this power? Surely, if such a thing had happened, the American or European press would be all over the story? Why did the Wire, which has a vendetta against Amit Malviya, print such an absurd story and then back it up with fabrications written in Indian English yet supposedly sent by an American executive? Either the Wire ordered the forgery or it, very conveniently, employed a lunatic who would fabricate anything they needed to lend plausibility to a wholly ridiculous claim.  

The story was based on a purported Instagram incident report that Meta says “appears to have been fabricated”.

Because it was fabricated.  Moreover, the appearance alone was enough to show this must be the case. Suppose I believe Rishi Sunak is actually my long lost pet cat Billi. MI5 kidnapped Billi and have installed him in Number 10 Downing Street. The Police aren't taking my complaint seriously. I speak of my woes to a 'tech expert' who sits at his laptop for 5 minutes and then gives me a copy of an email sent by 'Billi the Cat who is pretending to be Rishi Sunak' which alerts the CIA to put me on a watchlist because I might give away the secret that Rishi is actually a cat. It turns out, Biden is going to use Billi to go sit on Putin's lap and urinate on him. Chairman Xi will think Putin has pissed himself. He will angrily order Putin to give up Ukraine.

Would I be justified in relying upon this 'tech expert' who so kindly confirmed my worst fears? If I were a lunatic- sure. But not if I were the editor of a magazine. No reasonable person would rely on fabrications provided by a lunatic which confirm a bizarre and outlandish theory. 

In its apology to readers on Wednesday night, The Wire acknowledged “that the internal editorial processes which preceded publication of its Meta stories did not meet the standards that we set for ourselves and our readers expect from us” but also noted that a member of its Meta investigation team had deceived the publication with inauthentic material.

So a member of the Wire's own staff, or a person they relied on for an 'in-house' service, deceitfully presented false material. The Wire isn't saying this deceiver fabricated it himself. But it is enough for there to be deceit on the part of an employee or a provider of an 'in-house' service, for both a criminal and civil suit to succeed against them. Why not come clean and apologize? If readers are owed an apology, surely the victim is owed one too? 

Malviya on October 27 released a statement o Twitter saying he will sue The Wire for allegedly “forging documents” for a story to “malign and tarnish my reputation”.

The Wire admits it has 'inauthentic' material. Such material must have been forged. It is not admitting that the person who deceived it, also did the forging. But that is irrelevant. It is unreasonable to entertain a prima facie absurd allegation and accept corroborative evidence which conveniently surfaces. The question is whether the forgery was suborned or otherwise expected of the employee or 'team-member'. The editor has to take responsibility for the wrong doing. It is not the case that material was received from a third party. It was received from a 'team-member'. Section 501 of the IPC applies.  

Asked for its reaction to Malviya’s tweet, The Wire issued a short statement, the text of which is appended below.


Statement by The Wire
October 27, 2022

“Journalists rely on sources for stories and do their best to verify material they receive.

The editor was involved in this. It was not reasonable to suppose that only one person in the world, that too a person you have a vendetta against, is provably invested with a power, that too by an international company, of a wholly unique and sinister kind.  The aim was to malign a stated individual for a partisan political purpose. Were forgeries suborned or otherwise elicited in a negligent manner from a 'team member'? Even if this were not the case, the Wire is pointing a finger at a team-member of its own. Thus, the editor has to take responsibility for the whole thing. The simplest solution is to apologize and clear the air. 

Technological evidence is more complicated and the usual due diligence may not always reveal the fraud perpetrated upon a publication.

No. Technological evidence is easier to fake. Anybody can print up something on the computer which looks like an email from 'Billi the cat currently pretending to be Rishi Sunak'. 

The fundamental problem here, as with Tek Fog, is that no reasonable person, let alone the editor of a magazine, would believe that, very conveniently, evidence exists that your enemies are receiving secret help from a global organization for some sinister reason. This is paranoia. It is not journalism.  

This is what happened to us.

What happened to Siddhartha Varadarajan was that he stopped wanting to do journalism. He lost interest in uncovering facts. He was fired from the Hindu because of his bigotry. He got money from various sources to pose as a champion of free speech in his own little outfit. But stupid lies, even if supplied for free, are counter-productive. We think the BJP must be clean and competent because the only thing that the Wire can accuse it of is having been given super-powers by Meta or some other such International Corporation. 

“In the life of any publication, an occasion may come when it is misinformed.

But the life of the Wire has consisted in nothing but bias and misinformation. It may be that there have been good articles uncovering corruption or malfeasance. But those are the cases on which the Wire does not double down because it simply doesn't have the bandwidth. Yet, it chose to double down on this issue and now its credibility is shot.

More importantly, Indians have turned against it. We don't care how much or how absurdly you slag off other Indians- everyone is at it. But, the Wire made us look like fools to the Americans. That's bad for us. Indians are supposed to be good at tech. We export IT services. Vardarajan, an American citizen, has let us down very badly.  

The moral test is whether the publication persists or speaks the truth.

The Wire lies. It is not interested in the truth. If it were, it would have a market. It would not need hand-outs.  

We chose the latter when we realised we had been given fraudulent information.

A member of the Wire's team had, by its own admission, a deceptive intent. Moreover, the content of the article was clearly defamatory. This means the Wire put out fraudulent information. The editor may say that he is not a reasonable person. He is too stupid to understand that what he had was an absurd allegation backed by forged evidence of very very poor quality. But who will believe him? If he was stupid, it was because it paid him to be stupid.  

“Whether the person who brought all the material to The Wire deceived us at anyone’ else’s behest or acted on his own is a matter that will be subjected to judicial process in due course.

But that person, by the Wire's own admission, was a 'team-member'. There have been previous press reports dating back to 2019 suggesting that the likely culprit was already wackadoodle.  Perhaps, that's why he was useful to Varadarajan. 

The malintent to discredit The Wire is obvious.

What is obvious is that the Wire has a shitty editor and a paranoid staff.  

“Other than this, we have nothing to say.”

So no apology then. Nothing is Varadarajan's fault. Billi the Cat, disguised as Rishi Sunak, is using Mind-Rays to control the Internet. High level CIA whistle-blowers have secretly given me a copy of an Email from President Biden to Prime Minister Modi where he explains the whole dastardly plan to entrap Varadarajan. Sadly, Billi the Cat pissed on it, mistaking it for Putin's lap. This shows how Hindutva is totally corrupting our society and turning pussy cats into pissy cats. Mind it kindly. Aiyayyo.  

Siddharth Varadarajan's latest scoop

 Siddhartha Varadarajan having withdrawn bizarre allegations against Meta, is intent on winning back his reputation as a serious journalist with an article on Kejriwal's clever demand for Lakshmi and Ganesha to be represented on Indian currency notes.

In the race to the bottom that now seems to define

the Wire's journalism? That's not exactly news. 

Indian politics, a new depth has been plumbed by the Aam Aadmi Party’s Arvind Kejriwal with his utterly cynical and bizarre assertion that the Indian economy can be made to prosper if the photos of Laxmi and Ganesh are added to currency notes.

This is smart. Kejriwal is reminding voters in Gujarat that he, not Modi, is a genuine Bania who understands money and can bring prosperity.  He mentions the other great Bania- Mahatma Gandhi- and says he should be depicted on the back side of the note. There is an element of satire here but also a reminder that Kejriwal started off as an anti-corruption campaigner. Demonetization broke the back of that particular bandwagon but Kejriwal is nimble enough to jump on  to any other 'rath' if that's what voters want. 

Since this irrational claim, presented in the form of a proposal, is calculated to annoy and embarrass the Bharatiya Janata Party which believes it alone has the right to flaunt ‘Hindu’ credentials’, BJP spokespersons have responded by telling people that Kejriwal is actually ‘anti-Hindu’.

Which gives him extra publicity. Win win. 

The evidence cited to back up this accusation does not speak well of the BJP. They say he sought to curb air pollution during Diwali by banning the use of firecrackers. Or that one of his ministers repeated the vows Dr Ambedkar took when he converted to Buddhism – the same Ambedkar that Narendra Modi claims to be a disciple of.

Kejriwal sacked the Minister who was vowing not to worship Ganesh and Hanuman- which was silly because they are Buddhist deities, worshipped in China and Japan, just as much as they are Hindu or Jain. Bringing up the currency note issue shows Kejriwal can think on his feet. 

The BJP has also accused AAP of being a “poor carbon copy of the original”, an accusation that does the original no credit.

Because the ruling party of a big country aint anything to be proud off. You should aim to having zero seats in Parliament.  

Meanwhile, India’s Hindus, most of whom have seen their personal economic fortunes plummet despite the multitude of gods and goddesses adorning their walls, should be forgiven for wondering who on earth they should trust the keys of the country with.

The Wire has secret emails sent by India's Hindus to their gods and goddesses which prove Sid's claim to the hilt. Meanwhile Modi still faces no challenger in 2024.  

The last time India witnessed a crazy proposal about money was in 2016, when Modi decided withdrawing 80% of the currency notes in circulation (that too without having new notes available as replenishment) would spur the Indian economy by ending black money and curbing corruption. Like Kejriwal, he too was hoping the blind faith of people would help him hoodwink them.

The BJP won big as a result. It appears that anything Sid thinks is stupid is actually clever while stuff that Sid swears is true and properly documented has been fabricated by a lunatic.

Just as Kejriwal’s followers insist in seeing virtue in his mad idea,

it's a smart move. I don't say it will sway voters but it shows Kejriwal is in it to win it.  

Modi’s bhakts desperately clutched at the fiction of the new Rs 2000 notes carrying embedded microchips which could communicate with satellites and reveal to the authorities any unauthorised horde that is not in a bank – even if buried 200 feet underground.

No doubt these rumors were fabricated by Wire staff.  

The end result was that the economy’s growth prospects got buried, while corruption never ended.

The economy grew. What was killed off was Anna Hazare type craziness. 

In introductory macroeconomics, we are taught that money is

Credit. Commodity money, on the other hand may be 

a store of value, a medium of transaction and a unit of account

but its intrinsic value may exceed its face value in which case it won't be used as a medium of exchange. 

Kejriwal has added a fourth function which central banks around the world may want to study: it can be a medium of benediction too, provided the Hindu goddess of wealth and Hinduism’s divine remover of obstacles are duly portrayed.

In which case there is lower velocity of circulation and hence higher seigniorage. That's good for the Government.  

Of course, monetary economists are bound to ask whether the quantum of benediction will be a function of the total money supply

only the proportion of the monetary stock which is replaced matters iff velocity of circulation changes. This is unlikely.  

(presumably the more photos of Lakshmi and Ganesh in circulation, the greater the blessings which will be showered),

Presumably, Sid received invisible emails from Meta confirming this view. 

 

in which case the Friedman-Schwarz Quantity Theory of Money, MV = PY,

PT. Y is substituted for convenience. But Friedman was wrong about super-neutrality with respect to velocity. So transactions aren't really independent. 

can be replaced with MV = ॐPY, where ॐ is the ‘blessings multiplier’ that boosts nominal GDP beyond what the money supply and velocity of circulation predict.

Expectations can boost T. Blessings could have that effect. One could bring in 'nudge' theory here.  

It would also be interesting to see how the Kejriwal Theory of Money will handle business cycles, where the economy goes into recession.

Have a short sharp shakeout- call it Shiva's tandava. Recessions are good if you get rid of shitty management and improve factor mobility.  Get all the 'divaliyas' (bankruptcies) over quickly so Divali represents the turning of a new leaf. 

Would the blessings multiplier be boosted above its normal value by divine intervention so that the Reserve Bank of India and the Department of Expenditure can sit back as Lakshmi and Ganesha work their magic and the economy revives?

Maybe. We don't know what would happen if a genuine Bania- not a Gandhian nutjob- ran the country.  

Kejriwal cites the presence of Ganesha on the (now withdrawn) 20,000 Indonesian rupiah note to argue that if a country where Hindus are barely 2% of the population can seek the elephant god’s blessings, why can’t India.



The last time I heard an Indian politician praise Indonesia’s money was when a BJP leader I know cited Ganesha and Garuda (the name of the country’s national airline) to me, to argue that Indonesia’s Muslims may have converted to Islam but they have ‘not forgotten their Hindu culture’ – unlike India’s Muslims, he added quickly.

What was cool about Indonesia was Hindus and Muslims working together to kill Communists.  Apparently the Indonesians put in the Ganesha symbol at the time of the 1997 devaluation crisis. It seemed to work. 

Perhaps Kejriwal met the same leader or has friends in the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (because the Indonesia obsession is a shakha staple) but had he looked into the actual effect of Ganesha’s blessings on the Indonesian economy, he may be disappointed. The fact is that there has been no Ganesha on any Indonesian currency note since 2008 and yet the Indonesians are twice as rich as the people of India.

Because they took the time and trouble to kill Commies in a methodical manner. Also IMF tough love worked a treat in 1998. The country got rid of Suharto, much to Stiglitz's discomfiture.  

Perhaps Ganesha’s blessings operate in the monetary sphere long after he’s gone. Or perhaps they do not operate at all.

Or perhaps Sid has been reading invisible emails from senior officials at Meta or Secret Capitalist HQ or Fascism Central.  

The BJP says Kejriwal’s proposal is a ploy to fool Hindus before the upcoming municipal elections in Delhi.

It would be better for the City to have the same party in power in both the Legislature and the Municipality. Delhi voters are smart- at least if they are poor.  

They may be right. He is be a “poor carbon copy”

So poor, he won Delhi and then Punjab. The guy is just 54 years old.  

but at least the BJP is tacitly admitting that the original Hindutva party uses Hinduism as a ploy at election time.

Whereas the Wire has been insisting Hinduism is actually Nazism and the BJP plans to set up Death Camps all over the place. 

And does a much better job at it.

Not really. Gehlot and KCR have shown that other parties can appeal directly to crucial 'high caste' vote banks and foster pride in regional variants of Hinduism. Hindutva's appeal fades when battles over reservations gain salience. More importantly, by 2026, when the 87th amendment runs out, there could be seat redistribution from the South to the North. That will concentrate minds. Still, Modi is safe enough for the moment. By 2029, Kejriwal will be ready to make his move. Meanwhile, the Wire might keep getting subsidized so as to come up with yet more scoops based on phantom emails from Nazi Central Office. 

Siddhartha Varadarajan & Nehru's naked butt

Siddhartha Varadarajan asks in the Wire 

Is it a crime to criticise Prime Minister Narendra Modi or Uttar Pradesh chief minister Adityanath?

No. It's what Siddhartha gets paid to do. The sad thing is the more he gets paid and the more he criticizes Modi and Yogi, the better they do.  

Article 19 of the Constitution of India guarantees freedom of expression, subject only to a narrow range of ‘reasonable restrictions’ which do not remotely apply to criticism or satire.

But they do apply to incitement to violence.  

Yet, two arrests over the past week from UP make it clear that this freedom no longer exists.

In which case Varadarajan would have returned to America- the country of which he is a citizen- so as to escape arrest. 

Or rather, as Idi Amin Dada infamously once said, “There is freedom of speech, but we cannot guarantee freedom after speech.”

 Fortunately Modi & Yogi are vegetarians. They won't eat Siddhartha after killing him. 

The police in Colonelganj last week arrested five men for the crime of putting up a hoarding that showed Modi offering a cooking gas cylinder for Rs 1,105, the highest it has been. The poster included the hashtag #ByeByeModi in large letters as well as other text attacking the government’s Agnipath recruitment scheme.

There's been plenty of violence over Agnipath. Colnoelganj has also seen communal rioting recently. The local authorities have acted prudently.  

Local BJP leaders who saw the poster immediately complained to the police and a case was registered under Sections 153B (imputations, assertions prejudicial to national integration) and 505(2) (statements creating or promoting enmity, hatred or ill-will between classes) of the Indian Penal Code.

Which is why there has been no rioting.  

The first IPC section is meant to criminalise the targeting of a group on the basis of their religion, language, caste etc and cannot be stretched to cover criticism of an individual, even if he is the prime minister.

But Siddhartha and his ilk have been accusing Modi & Yogi of being against a particular community. The hoarding is an incitement to violence given the context- viz. arson and rioting over Agnipath.  

The second section presupposes two or more “classes” between whom enmity is being promoted.

Hindus and Muslims, in this case. Hindus vote for Modi & Yogi. Muslims don't.  

No law degree or training is required to understand why these sections cannot possibly apply to the “crime” at hand.

That is for a court to decide. There is a prima facie case of incitement because riots over Agnipath have occurred very recently in some parts of the country while Colonelganj itself has seen recent arrests in connection with communal violence.  Maybe the accused have a defense in law. Maybe not. 

As if the police case were not bad enough, major media platforms helped sustain the ridiculous claim that an actual offence had been committed. “In a major breakthrough,” the Times of India reported breathlessly, “a team of Colonelganj police on Monday evening arrested five persons, including owner of a printing press, and an event organiser on the charges of installing controversial hoarding with the title #ByeByeModi near Reserve police lines on Beli road on Saturday.”

Is there a wider conspiracy to incite violence in the area? If so, who will benefit from that violence? The Muslims? No. They are a minority. They suffer disproportionately even if some hotheads or professional criminals on their side start the trouble. Meanwhile, Yogi benefits from 'Hindu consolidation'. But the BJP already has this particular Assembly seat. They will be rewarded for preventing blood-letting and putting gangsters behind bars.  

The second case from UP this week is equally ridiculous. An 18-year-old schoolboy in Kannauj,

a 20 year old, Class XII dropout 

Ashish Yadav was arrested by the police for posting an “offensive” image of Adityanath on social media. The image showed Adityanath with a milk bottle in his mouth and a shoe on his head. On the side were a series of laughing emojis.


On the left is Shankar’s famous cartoon from 1953 showing Nehru naked; on the right, Ashish Yadav’s caricature of Adityanath. Source: theheritagelab.in; Facebook

It is instructive to compare Yadav’s “offensive” image of Adityanath with Shankar’s celebrated 1953 cartoon of a naked Jawaharlal Nehru unsuccessfully imploring the United Nations.

Nehru liked it. He went to Harrow and had spent a lot of time in jail. You have to admit he has a sexy butt.  

If you are a humourless, intolerant politician or policemen, you would find the Nehru depiction far more “offensive” than the schoolboy’s somewhat amateurish exertions.

The police are obliged to respond to complaints. There are procedures to be followed. Come to think of it, proper journalists are supposed to do fact checking. But the Wire does not represent proper journalism.  

Far from filing a case against him, however, the then Prime Minister – who had famously said ‘Don’t spare me, Shankar’ – bore no grudge.

Coz, as Wolpert said, he was totes Gay when he wasn't boning the horse-faced Edwina or the zonked out Padmaja.  

In fact, he even “took [the cartoonist] with him on his visit to the USSR in 1955, marking his elevated stature in Nehru’s India,” Ritu Gairola Khanduri chronicles in her book, Caricaturing Culture in India,

Did he pose for more naked cartoons? Stalin had banned buggery so maybe not.  

But to come back to Yadav, his offence being even more heinous than the one in Colonelganj, the police in Kannauj booked him under additional IPC sections – apart from 153B and 505 (2), they also added 153A, 295A and section 66 of the Information Technology Act. Again, none of these sections apply even remotely.

That is a decision for a Court to make. The C.M of U.P is the head of a religious sect. The application of shoe leather to such a figure is considered a serious defilement and provocation in the Hindu religion. 

Prima facie, all the ingredients of Section 295-A apply. 

1) The accused must insult or attempt to insult the religion or religious beliefs of any class of citizens of India. 

The Yogi is the head of a religious sect. He was insulted by showing his face under shoe-leather. There is a defense in law that the insult was meant for the politician not the holy man. But the image shows the Yogi in his ceremonial attire. Leather shoes defile sacred spaces or personages.

2) The said insult must be with a deliberate and malicious intention of outraging the religious feelings of the said class of citizens. 

There is a defense in law that the accused had no such intention. Hopefully that is what he said to the senior people who came to interview him. 

 3) The said insult must be by words, either spoken or written, by signs or by visible representation or otherwise. 

This is clearly the case. Siddhartha may pretend he is a naive American who does not know about Hindu Holy men and the prohibition on shoe leather in sacred spaces. But he has been living in India for many many years. He is a journalist. He is only making himself look stupid or disingenuous. 

4)  The offence under Section 295-A is cognizable and a non-bailable and non-compoundable offence. 5) The police have a power under to arrest a person charged under Section 295-A without a warrant. 

Why is Siddhartha pretending that the police didn't have a duty to arrest the young man? A cognizable offence is one where the police have to take action even without any complaint. 

Yet, in a further sign of how seriously the poor boy’s ‘crime’ was being treated by the authorities, PTI quoted officials as saying “District Magistrate Rakesh Kumar Mishra and Superintendent of Police Rajesh Kumar Srivastava reached the Talgram police station and quizzed the student in a closed room.”

That was kind of them. Hopefully, he made a clean breast of things. He was just trying to raise a laugh. His didn't mean to break the law. He had no malicious or other motive.  

There are plenty of other examples of such brilliant “breakthroughs” and high-level interrogations, from Uttar Pradesh and elsewhere, which testify to the death of freedom of expression.

By beheading?  

And the rot runs deeper than the thin skins of politicians or the even thinner respect for the constitution that the police have.

The Indian First Amendment goes in the reverse direction to the American First Amendment. Siddhartha's may be confused about which country he lives in.  

Each of these arrests invariably receives the backing of the magistrates before whom the hapless ‘offenders’ are produced. Denial of bail in the first instance is more or less the norm, even in New Delhi, as Mohammed Zubair found out when first the duty magistrate and then the chief metropolitan magistrate insisted he be sent to custody for an innocuous tweet. By the time the sessions judge granted bail, the government had managed to rustle up half a dozen equally fraudulent cases and tasked a Special Investigation Team with prolonging his incarceration for as long as possible.

What is the upshot? Less communal violence. This breaks Siddhartha's heart.  

No matter how low down the judicial food chain she or he may be, a judge is the citizen’s first line of defence against the abuse of executive power.

There is no abuse of power here. The law has been correctly applied. Blame the Legislature or the basic structure of the Constitution by all means. If an offence cognizable and non-bailable the hands of police officers and magistrates are tied. 

Take that away and what you have left is punishment by process.

As intended by the Legislature. Nehru brought in the First Amendment. He may have liked cartoons of his naked bum but he was against freedom of expression on the American pattern. 

The abdication of judicial responsibility when fundamental rights are violated is the reason Indian democracy is withering on the vine.

The Left withered on the vine. Congress withered on the vine. Siddhartha's brain withered on the vine. Why? Because they did stupid shit. Democracy is about the majority getting to do stuff which is good for them. The role of the judiciary, as David Hume said, is to promote utility not pander to shitheads. Justice is a service industry. So is journalism. But foreigners can pay for anti-national Indian journalists. Indian judges, however, are paid by Indian people. They can't afford to be anti-national. 

Siddhartha Varadarajan turning to Holiness and Spirituality.

American citizen, Siddhartha Varadarajan, writes in the Wire (which is funded by not journalism but corporate charity)-

August 5 – the date chosen consciously by baleful men to humiliate the people of India whose independence on August 15 they never fought for – will go down in history as a day that celebrates the triumph of vandalism and destruction over renewal and regeneration, crime and illegality over law and justice, fiction and fabrication over reality and truth.

Why did Pakistan become independent on August 14 while India had to wait an extra day? There were two factors, Mountbatten, a Britisher, liked a certain date because it was the anniversary of the Japanese surrender. Hindu astrologers had some objection, so the country gained 'Freedom at Midnight'. In other words, India's Independence day was determined by a British man's preference as modified by Hindu Astrologers. Muslims were not consulted. They had gone their own way or else were subject to ethnic cleansing and a dramatic clawback of entitlements.

Hindus fought for their Independence. American citizens, like Varadarajan, were not involved- save for Satyananda Stokes, who converted to Hinduism. 

The vast majority of Indian people are not humiliated by the fulfilment of Manifesto pledges by their elected leaders. On the contrary they are jubilant. A minority may not like it, but then that minority, in 1946, overwhelmingly backed the Muslim League and its demand for partition, so that an Islamic State could be created.

Varadarajan liked Communism. But Communism has failed in India. Still, as an American, he stood in little danger even if it had triumphed in India.

On the appointed day, when India slept, the people of Kashmir awoke to curfew and unfreedom.

While those of Jammu and Ladakh woke to the opposite. What was the result? Terrorism declined. It seems unlikely that the good people of the Valley can once again ethnically cleanse their non-Muslim neighbors. The fact is August 15 commemorates the day the Japanese woke to occupation and subjugation. They could no longer kill and conquer their neighbors. Similarly, Nazi Germany woke to defeat and humiliation on 7th May 1945. In the medium to long term, this turned out to be salutary.

On the appointed day, a group of criminals – who should be in prison for having planned and orchestrated the demolition of a 450-year-old mosque – basked in the freedom they have to build a temple at the same spot.

Varadarajan knows very well that Gandhi and Nehru and Azad were 'criminals'. They courted arrest deliberately. Why? They believed right was on their side. It was their prison record which established their fitness to lead. Similarly, it was obvious, those who demolished the structure wanted to be arrested. The fact is two years previously, the police had shot some pilgrims and the Chief Minister who gave the orders had lost the elections. It was clear that the Indian voter would not stand for the Government killing people simply to protect bricks and mortar. Had prison sentences been imposed on those who razed the structure, they would then have swept the polls and altered the Constitution.

Varadarajan himself could raise his profile if he courted arrest by defying any law he considers unjust. But, as an American citizen, he can't stand for election. Even if he re-acquired Indian citizenship, the problem remains that the Indian people do not share his views on what is or isn't just. He began condemning Modi almost twenty years ago. But the more Varadarajan and his ilk attacked Modi the better Modi began to look to even Western educated, deracinated, Indians.

Had Varadarajan & Co done good investigative journalism we would now respect them. But they chose to double down on stupid lies and ended up hurting the Left. Consider the fate of Sharjeel Imam who wrote a couple of pieces for Varadarajan's 'the Wire'. The fellow is now in jail after calling for Muslims to cut off the Siliguri gap- leaving the Assamese free to conduct plenty of Nellie type massacres. Varadarajan himself got into trouble with the law for falsely claiming that U.P's Chief Minister was telling people they could not catch the virus if they participated in some religious ceremony.

Varadarajan, as a Communist, may well disapprove of Temples. He has a right to express his views. But in making the Wire a vehicle for his grievances he destroys its journalistic credibility. Just kidding. It has no credibility. 

Their temple, and not Rama’s and certainly not India’s.
With Prime Minister Narendra Modi supervising the obsequies, the wreckage of what remains of the Indian constitution has been interred in the foundations of the temple that his organisation, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, is building with the full backing of the ‘secular’ Indian state.

The problem here is that we believe that the Temple is being constructed by a Trust- not by the R.S.S. A good journalist needs to try to show that the Trustees are men of straw. Behind them is the RSS. Since Varadarajan is not doing so, we think the Trustees are independent. The silly man is simply telling stupid lies.

A better angle of attack would be to say 'why aren't RSS cadres building the Temple? Surely that would benefit them most? Is the reason because RSS cadres are not considered 'ritually pure'? In other words, enemies of the BJP should try to divide the Hindus by playing the caste card. They should hint that the Temple is being built in a manner the hyper-orthodox might think improper. Varadarajan, blinded by hate, misses a trick. On the other hand, the Wire does carry an article highlighting Orthodox objections to the timing and nature of the 'bhoomi puja' ceremony. But, it contradicts Varadarajan's assertions. It is apparent that the a scholarly Hindu body from the Prime Minister's constituency, not the RSS which is based elsewhere, which is running the show. They have controverted the allegations raised by a Shankaracharya- i.e. a upholder of Brahmanical orthodoxy- in a manner ordinary Hindus can easily understand.  Furthermore, the writer of the article has elsewhere highlighted the role of the 'Dalit'- who laid the first foundation stone more than 30 years ago- in the performance of this ritual.
The writer for the Wire, as may be expected, tells stupid lies. He says  (Modi)' was not only the chief guest but also the master of ceremonies and the official yajmaan (patron of a religious ritual) during the ceremony.' This is bizarre, the patron can't be the 'master of ceremonies' any more than a patient on the operating table can be the surgeon. The chief guest can't be the yajmaan host anymore than I can invite myself to dinner.
The Trust's tweet clarifies matters- “Shri Mahesh Bhagchandka and Shri Pawan Singhal from family of Shri Ashok ji Singhal will be Mukhya Yajman (main worshippers) in Bhumi Pujan. PM Shri @narendramodi, Shri Mohanji Bhagwat, Pujya Nritya Gopaldasji Maharaj, Governor Smt Anandiben Patel and CM Shri @myogiadityanath will be present on stage.

The fact is, the Trust as constituted by the Government did not include anyone with charges against them relating to the destruction of the disputed structure. Such people were brought in by the Trust afterwards. Furthermore, the ex Civil Servant who has a prominent role in the Trust was associated with other political parties and leaders earlier in his career. Thus, the expectation is, other Hindu leaders will be conciliated as time goes by. The truth is, things like this can be easily mismanaged. Indeed, many of us expected that there would be all sorts of internecine conflict re. guest lists and auspicious dates and the sequence of rituals and so forth. What the BJP Government has done is shown it can arrange things smoothly. This was unexpected. It is the reason that Hindu leaders are reconciled to what has happened. They imagined the BJP would be like a dog with a bone. It wouldn't play nice. This would backfire sooner or later. The 'Sadhu Sangh' would get split. The Hindu vote would get factionalized. This has not happened. Maybe the lockdown helped. Or maybe the BJP is just better at getting things done in a proper manner.

I say ‘what remains of the constitution’ because key sections of that document had already been waterboarded and drowned in the dark waters of Dal Lake – its pages torn and scattered in the days, weeks and months which followed the scrapping of Article 370 and 35A last August.

But the Supreme Court, which alone has the right to interpret the Constitution, has not taken this view. This is another example where the 'intellectuals' fell down. They needed to get really smart Constitutional lawyers to at least obfuscate the issue. They didn't bother, choosing to rely instead on the work of a 90 year old man whose assertions were controverted by a crucial 2016 judgment of the Court re. J&K having no 'vestige of sovereignty'.

Bad journalism and recycling failed arguments have contributed to the calamitous decline of the Left. Just ten years ago, these people were respected. Now look at them! They sound utterly senile!

Both these acts which help to define the ‘New India’ Modi is ushering in – of turning citizens (in Kashmir, but later elsewhere) into subjects without fundamental rights, of allowing Hindu chauvinist criminals to take control of the scene of their crime and present their factional project as a ‘national’ one – would not have been possible without the indulgence of the Supreme Court.

This is the crux of the matter. People like Varadarjan should have proactively recruited smart people to uncover new facts- or plausible new lies- and to come up with new arguments of an abstruse sort- so as to keep the Supreme Court occupied. Everybody expected these particular cans to be kicked down the road. But, the Left simply gave up. They concentrated on talking hysterical nonsense. So they have lost salience.

But as a journalist, I find the complicity of the media to be just as shocking.

Why is the Wire so shite? This is not complicity, it is complacency. Varadarjan and his ilk should have talent-spotted smarter, younger, people and given them space to raise new issues so as to keep the debate going. But these lazy sods did not bother to do any such thing. They don't want competition. So they just keep recycling their bogus cri de coeurs. After all, they don't have to compete in the market. They get charity from capitalists. 

A dominant section of India’s media has helped the ruling Bharatiya Janta Party market two enormous lies. First, that a temple of the Sangh, by the Sangh and for the Sangh is really a ‘Hindu’ temple or, even more fancifully, an ‘Indian’ temple.

Varadarajan may be a Communist who does not visit Temples but he must know that some of his relatives, who may be with Congress, will visit this particular Temple. Most Hindus, given the chance, will do so. But Hindus are 80 per cent of the population! The fact is, when Iyers first settled in New Delhi, we would go only to one or two South Indian temples. Then we started branching out as we became more familiar with the place. Consider the Swami Narayan temples. We didn't build them. We didn't know much about the sect which did build them. But once we started going to their Temples we felt that we belonged. The first time you eat 'dhokla' you are suspicious. But then you start to like it. You compare it favorably with Idli. Your Mummy starts cooking it for you. It has become part of your own cuisine though, no doubt, it is Gujerati, not Tamil.

And second, that the abolition of Article 370 and 35A of the constitution and the scrapping of statehood for Jammu and Kashmir was intended to help the fight against terrorism, promote economic development and make the people of the erstwhile state true Indians.
I don’t know what perverted axiom of astrology has linked both these big lies with the same date on the calendar but one can sense a desire on the part of the RSS to build a narrative around a chosen day which they can present as the marker of their ‘New India’.

A journalist's job is to find out, or at least speculate in a plausible manner, about why a particular date should become significant. That is 'news' not 'views'.  Varadarjan is proud of his ignorance. He says it must be for some astrological reason. But that is pure deracinated ignorance! Indian astrologers use a different calendar. Every Hindu knows their 'star birthday' is movable unlike their official birthday. Thus it can't be the case that a day in the solar calendar has a special astrological significance. Either it is a birth or death anniversary of some particular figure or it has just come to be seen as an 'auspicious' day. This is the sort of stuff journalists should try to figure out.

The campaign to demolish the Babri Masjid and replace it with a Ram temple was first and always an RSS-BJP campaign.

Is the BJP paying Varadarajan to say so? No. They know the fool will help them because he is too stupid to help himself or to help his own cause. There is no need for payment.

From the mid-1980s to the destruction of the mosque on December 6, 1992, the BJP used the RSS cadre base to launch a highly visible agitation. And though the resulting communal polarisation helped the BJP grow its presence in parliament from two seats in 1984 to 85 in 1989 and 182 a decade later, its vote share, even when Atal Bihari Vajpayee became prime minister in 1999, never exceeded 24%. A decade later, the party’s vote share had fallen to 18% and though Narendra Modi has increased the BJP’s votes, the 2019 election saw only 37% of Indians voting in an ‘either you’re with us or against us’ fight for the party whose manifesto promised a lot of things and also a Ram temple in Ayodhya.

The problem here is that 80 per cent approve the Temple and, if able to do so, would visit it. That is why other parties did not want to let the BJP build the Temple. Indeed, according to the letter of the law, they are not doing so- an independent Trust is. To give them all the credit if you oppose them is foolish.  Furthermore, saying the BJP has fulfilled 3 Manifesto promises does not hurt them even if you yourself opposed those pledges. On the contrary it makes that party seem more credible and fit to govern. To attack the BJP you need to say, 'only by accident have they achieved these Manifesto pledges. But luck can only get you so far. The voters can't be fooled. '

I mention vote shares here because that is the only observable metric we have to gauge the actual appeal of the temple.

Says a guy who went to the LSE! The fact is the extent of the 'revealed preference' of Indians for, first, the Ramayana TV serial and then the 'brick donation' and 'rath yatra', took Indian social scientists by surprise. It was clear that if the thing could be done without too much blowback, then 80 per cent wanted it done. What mattered was Muslim preference intensity in the opposite direction. That is what has changed. Consider what happened the first time an Israeli P.M came to India. The poor fellow couldn't even get to the Taj Mahal! Now Israeli Presidents and P.Ms come and go with nary a ripple of opposition.

Yet, today we are being told, by the RSS and BJP of course, but also by breathless television anchors, that the temple whose foundation stone Modi laid on August 5 represents the fulfilment of a long pent-up national demand. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

Varadarajan could not be further from the truth even if he had never returned from America in the first place. Hindus like Hindu temples. A Ram temple would be visited even by Sikhs and Jains and Buddhists. The vast majority of the country is Hindu. Even Communists go to Temples to pray for the overthrow of Capitalism!

“Centuries of struggle are coming to an end today,” the prime minister said, forgetting the fact that the Sangh’s “struggle” is barely 35 years old.

Varadarajan forgets that the dispute over the site, according to British records, stretches back to at least the Nineteenth Century.

Modi then added: “I’m sure scores of people can barely believe that they are alive to see this day.” What he did not say was that thousands more are indeed not alive to see this day – because the violence triggered by the Sangh’s temple agitation took their lives.

Yet a repetition of that violence is not feared. Why? Because the country is better run.

Modi fast-tracked the mandir project through the apex court even as he used his control over the Central Bureau of Investigation to ensure the criminal case against the conspirators who demolished the mosque made no progress.

This is the sort of charge which requires good investigative journalism in order to be sustained by a Court of Law. Varadarajan and his ilk fell down in this department. Consider the BOFORS or 'Coffingate' scandals. Clearly some Indian journalists could uncover damaging facts which changed the political landscape. Varadarajan seemed bright and well connected. We thought he'd prove his mettle sooner or later. But he turned out to be a maudlin cretin.

The Supreme Court’s verdict was perverse – it accepted that the Muslims had been illegally and forcibly dispossessed of their mosque and that the 1992 demolition was a crime, and yet allowed the site to be given to those who were still standing trial for that crime.

This is nonsense. The destruction of the mosque was illegal. But it was popular. That is why the State did not press charges. The site has been given to the deity of the shrine in accordance with Indian law.

What made this bizarre verdict possible was that very criminal act, without which the court would have had to order a historic mosque’s demolition in order to allow the Sangh parivar to have its way.

So what? It is not the case that the party which won the suit did not have 'clean hands'.

I like to believe our lordships would have baulked at delivering such an order.

Journalists should not tell us what they like to believe. They should try to uncover facts so that our beliefs can be corrected in a salutary manner.

After the verdict, the government promptly announced the establishment of a trust to oversee the temple. However, the pretence of this being a non-partisan project came to an end quickly when Nritya Gopal Das and Champat Rai – key figures in the Sangh’s temple agitation who have been indicted by the CBI for demolishing the Babri masjid and can still be imprisoned for the crime – emerged as president and secretary of the trust, respectively.

It was the Trust which brought in these two men. Why did they do so? Nritya Gopal Das is the head of an important temple and has built other temples in the area. He is innocent of any crime till proven guilty in a court of law. The same is true of Varadarajan himself. Champat Rai belongs to the VHP which is often at odds with the RSS. No doubt, it is convenient for the BJP to leave a sword dangling over both their heads.

Narendra Modi and Yogi Adityanath have used the temple event and its surrounding media hype to force-fit the Republic of India into a Hindu mould that its constitution would never have allowed.

Why not? There is a Directive Principle re. Cow Protection in it. Perhaps Varadarajan thinks Cows are sacred to some Religion other than Hinduism. The fact of the matter is that China had gone Communist by the time the Indian Constitution was published. Religion was in the dog house. Marxism was supposed to prevail. But, perhaps because of the low intellectual caliber of its recruits- e.g. Varadarajan himself- it began to sink, if not stink.

The August 5 event is the clearest sign yet that the Hindu rashtra project of the RSS is now in high gear and will gather even greater momentum in the months and years ahead.

Why concede this point? If you oppose the BJP you should point out that their gains have come more from luck than cunning. Their momentum is petering out.

Modi gave advance notice of this project during the 2019 Lok Sabha election, when he attacked the voters of Wayanad for belonging to a constituency where “the minority is the majority” and when he ridiculed the notion that Hindus could be terrorists and hand-picked Pragya Thakur as the BJP’s candidate for Bhopal.

 Is Varadarajan pleased that Rahul took a safe seat from the Left? Is he very happy to learn that Rahul wears the sacred thread, is a Saivite Brahmin, and likes visiting Temples? Does Varadarajan approve of Priyanka's tweet on the Temple? Look at what she wrote-' “Simplicity, courage, restraint, sacrifice, commitment, are the essence of the name Deenbandhu Lord Rama. Ram is in everyone, Ram is with everyone. With the message and blessings of Lord Ram and Mother Sita, the Bhoomipujan of Ramlalla's temple became an occasion for national unity, fraternity and cultural congregation,” Even the Communists in Kerala aren't making a fuss about this. They accept that Hindus- including Rahul- will go to that Temple if they are able to do so.

With hindsight, it was folly to jail a Hindu nun as a terrorist. The voters don't believe this sort of trumped up charge. That is why the heavyweight, Dinesh Singh, lost to Pragya Thakur on his own home turf.

His first major act in his second term as a prime minister, apart from the ‘triple talaq’ detour, was to take an axe to the constitutional arrangements with Jammu and Kashmir that had actually served the Indian state and its requirements perfectly well.

Nonsense! Kashmir was a shit-show. The police were terrified. That has changed. Imran Khan promised a blood bath. He was disappointed. Now he has formalized the annexation of PoK. 'Azad Kashmir' is off the table.

One year on, it is clear that ‘integration’ for the Kashmiris means being deprived of rights that the constitution of India gives all citizens.

This is certainly an issue which good investigative journalism can contribute to. But such journalism has to be credible. This is where Varadarajan and his ilk have fallen down. If you publish shite by a nutter like Sharjeel Imam, smart people won't want to write for you.

And since there is no one to speak up for the constitution anymore, people in the rest of India will slowly find themselves getting ‘integrated’ with the new reality that the Kashmiris have been dealing with – and they will find their own freedoms and right increasingly trampled underfoot.

If they wage war against the State- yes. But Indians consider that a good thing.

As the experience of Pakistan and Israel demonstrate, cultural-religious states that privilege identitarian values over citizenship are incompatible with democracy.

Yet Israel is a democracy. Pakistan has fallen behind Bangladesh in per capita Income. Yet, at the moment, it too is a Democracy. Imran may yet finish his term.

Given the current wave of right-wing populism, it has become something of a fashion to compare Modi with Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Jair Bolsonaro and Recip Erdogan. But the strongman in whose disastrous footsteps Modi appears to be dragging India is Slobodan Milosevic. Younger readers will be forgiven for asking ‘Who?’, for his country, the former Yugoslavia, no longer exists.

Very true! Uttar Pradesh is going to go to War with Bihar! Gujarat will declare U.D.I. Tamil Nadu will be broken up into cantons. How stupid is Varadarajan?

The UN’s long-standing ambassador in India in the late 1990s was a diplomat named Feodor Starcevic. He came to India as a citizen of Yugoslavia. But when he was leaving Delhi after retiring sometime around 2003, I remember him saying, ‘I don’t know which country I’m going back to’.

This is bizarre. Starcevic came to India, on a UN passport, though he had Serbian Citizenship, in 1995, three years after the breakup of that country. Starcevic went on to serve as a Serbian diplomat.

 Communism had failed to unite Yugoslavia. But India was not united by Communism. It was united by Hinduism. Our regional loyalties have shifted because States have been reorganized. Thus the Nation State of India is the locus of our patriotism.

Beginning in the early 1990s, Yugoslavia’s leaders decided to turn their back on the idea of a state that belonged equally to all its citizens, regardless of religion, ethnicity, language or script. So today, there are seven separate countries or entities, if we include Kosovo, where there was once one.

Why? Because Communism failed. The Soviet Union too broke up. But this is irrelevant to India. Communism never took power at the Center.

India was just emerging from the trauma of the Gujarat violence of 2002 when Starcevic was leaving. At a farewell speech, he urged his host country to look at Yugoslavia in order to learn what not to do.

The man was clearly a cretin. Most people who work for the UN are. I too recall being lectured by a Yugoslav- Dr. Borna Bebek, a friend of Rajiv Gandhi's- about the Yugoslav model of pluralistic democracy back in '82. The thing was all eye-wash. Communism was a sham.

No one could have foreseen at the time that the man whose stewardship had prompted that sage advice would eventually be at the helm of national affairs.

That is true. Modi seemed destined to be a scapegoat. But people like Varadarajan gave him prominence by telling stupid lies about Gujarat. What was the outcome? Gujarat prospered and then gave India a popular two term Prime Minister. Varadarajan, like Ashish Nandy, had met Modi briefly. Both of these patricians sneered at this low-born fellow. They thought they were on a safe wicket denouncing him. But their stupid lies repelled their own class. We started to say to ourselves- 'there must be another side to this story'. Then, people like Madhu Kishwar gave that side of the story to us. But this was not what clinched matters. 'Darbari intellectuals' of the Left, like Varadarjan himself, went too far in denouncing Hinduism. This damaged the Dynasty. Then Rahul failed to step up to the plate. In 2014, it was a case of Modi or Nobody. But Modi improved on his opportunities. I never thought he'd preside over a faction-free Cabinet. Nor did I think he'd do so well in International Diplomacy. But then, I must admit, my thinking is of a very low grade indeed. Modi's isn't. Nor is the thinking of those who vote for him. Varadarajan, on the other hand, is the one person I can still feel superior to. He listens to no one but himself. He keeps repeating the same tired, worn-out, lies. He has learnt nothing and forgotten nothing. Now I rate him lower than even Prem Shankar Jha.

But the RSS listens to no one but itself. On August 5, Modi laid the foundation stone for a structure conceived in the crucible of lies and deceit, violence and bloodshed. He can call it a temple, perhaps he can convince millions of people that it is a temple. But nothing spiritual or holy can ever emerge from a structure built by men who have spent their entire political career demolishing law, morality and the bonds of unity that unite Indians with each other.

It is a sad day when an American Communist with advanced degrees from prestigious Universities feels he has to start blathering about holiness and spirituality. Suddenly, it turns out, the guy is an expert in Temple building. He objects that the thing is not being done properly. He isn't yet saying that he could do a better job himself- perhaps because his ancestors were priests- but that is the road he is headed down. As Trump would say- sad!

Priyamvada Gopal's latest idiocy

When a lethal virus is spreading and the Government is seeking to enforce a lockdown, it is vital to lock up peddlers of fake news who want to advance a mischievous agenda.

Priyamvada Gopal doesn't get this. She thinks Governments should not enforce the law against writers and journalists during a lockdown though it is the one time when it is vital that all such people are made to feel vulnerable to the long arm of the law if they keep lying in their usual manner.

She writes in the Guardian-

As a lethal virus scorches its way across continents, the leftwing Indian rights campaigner Gautam Navlakha has been reminding us of the words of Leonard Cohen, urging people to speak up for the right things: “There is a crack/a crack in everything, that’s how light gets in.”

This suggests that Navlakha and Gopal are utterly deracinated. Few Indians know English. Even among English speaking Indians, only a tiny minority have heard of Leonard Cohen.

While many of us experience lockdown in varying degrees of constraint,

many of us? All of us.  Gopal is a cretin.

Navlakha – who cited Cohen’s lyrics in a recent statement – faces actual incarceration

because he is charged in a rioting case where there was loss of life

as does another high-profile Indian, the eminent academic and Dalit intellectual Prof Anand Teltumbde.

who is an accused in the same case.

Meanwhile, Siddharth Varadarajan, the well-known journalist and a founder-editor of the respected investigative online portal the Wire, faces prosecution in an unrelated case.

Because the Wire reported that the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh- who is widely respected by Hindus- had said that Hindus would be immune to the virus through the power of their faith. This was a highly mischievous act. The Wire published a retraction. That may be enough to get Varadarajan acquitted. But the law must be upheld. Had some religious nutjob made this false allegation, he would have been prosecuted. Varadarajan must be held equally accountable even if he is an American citizen.

While locking down its vast population from coronavirus, why is India seeking to lock up dissident intellectuals and intimidate journalists?

Because the lockdown can save lives. Professional liars must know that they will be held accountable for anything they publish.

The three men have been accused of outrages ranging from assassination plots to promoting “enmity, hatred or illwill among classes” — allegations that have been widely criticised as politically motivated.

These men, and Gopal herself, believe they should receive praise for promoting hatred of Modi and the BJP.  But, if they break the law, they must take the consequences.

But their apparent common crime is one that underlies the harassment and intimidation of scores of other journalists, writers, academics and human rights campaigners in India. They have criticised the actions of the hardline Hindu nationalist dispensation that rules India today, as well as the culture of divisive bigotry that it has fostered widely in civil society.

They can do this in perfect safety. But if they break the law, they may be prosecuted.

 The last six years of Modi’s government have seen an alarming crackdown on campus dissidents as well as journalists and writers

But 'campus dissidents' and 'journalists and writers' have no popular following. That is why they are generally ignored or else highlighted so as to attract support to the ruling party because the truth is they genuinely are anti-national.

Navlakha is a longstanding critic of state and army atrocities in the disputed region of Kashmir, which has faced a disgraceful lockdown since August last year and continues to experience unconstitutional — and, in corona-ridden times, dangerous — limits on internet access.

Yes. The previous administration too took a dim view of his anti-national activities. If the evidence against him holds up in Court, he can look forward to a long stretch of porridge.

He is accused, along with respected figures like the poet Varavara Rao

who is 80 and considered a senile Marxist nutter

and trade unionist Sudha Bharadwaj,

 a leftist Law Professor, not a trade unionist 

of allegedly conspiring in a plot against Prime Minister Narendra Modi in 2018.

So, these are serious charges. Since bail has been rejected, it seems there is a prima facie case against her.

Teltumbde, related by marriage to India’s towering Dalit leader and constitution-drafter, Babasaheb Ambedkar, has been remanded in custody in the context of violence in the town of Bhima Koregain in 2018.

I think he will get off. After all, he is a genuine Dalit. He has an excuse for being there. The others look like Marxist troublemakers.

Ironically, Teltumbde has written in the past about how the Indian state seeks to “discredit and eliminate individuals it deems a threat to its apparatus.”

The irony is that he wrote this about previous administrations yet Gopal, cretin that she is, is pretending that Modi's Government is doing something unprecedented.

Varadarajan, whose platform the Wire has previously fallen foul of powerful and wealthy figures with strong connections to the government,

but which was supported by powerful and wealthy rivals of those figures

faces a different set of charges. Since the outbreak of the pandemic, there have been strong moves in the Indian media and sections of the ruling dispensation to pin blame for the spread of the virus on Muslim communities.

Sadly, the Tablighi Jamaat had a big conference in Malaysia which caused the virus to spread to other countries.

Yogi Adityanath, a fundamentalist Hindu cleric turned politician with a good line in inflammatory speech, is the chief minister of India’s largest state, Uttar Pradesh, where tensions have been rising. Although the Wire misattributed a quote to him on its website, the erratum was quickly corrected and acknowledged.

What was that quote? Gopal seems to be suggesting it had something to do with Hindus. This is not true. The Wire was saying that the Yogi claimed that religious Hindus would be immune. They merely wanted to defame the Yogi. They didn't understand that this fake quote of theirs could be used by Hindu nutjobs to get people to defy the lockdown.

Nonetheless, Varadarajan now stands accused of a fantastical range of crimes, including disobeying an order of a public servant and creating or promoting enmity between classes.

He may get off by saying no malice was intended.

The real problem may be that the Wire reported correctly that Adityanath had attended a Hindu religious gathering after the national lockdown was declared on 24 March.

Swarajya Magazine reports 'On 31 March, Varadarajan tweeted a link with this text, “On the day the Tablighi Jamaat event was held, Adityanath insisted on a large Ram Navami fair planned for Ayodhya from March 25 to April 2 would proceed as usual and that ‘Lord Ram would protect devotees from the coronavirus’.”

This was wholly false. Varadarajan was warned to take this down. He refused. That is why he is in trouble. The fact is there was TV coverage of the Chief Minister cancelling the event on 19th March.

This report came even as public feelings have been whipped up against Muslims because Tablighi Jamaat, a Muslim organisation, held an event prior to the lockdown where many attendees did get infected.

But the event continued after the lockdown. By contrast, there was no Hindu gathering of any sort because of the prompt action of the Yogi- who is the head of an important Hindu sect.

The Wire has also noted that “believers” in more than one religious community have been late in adopting precautions against large gatherings.

But the Wire has lost all credibility. It publishes fake news. Varadarajan may get a stiff fine or even have to do some jail time. He may try to pretend that he is a martyr. The truth is he is a shoddy journalist.

For a long time now, India has benefited from the title of world’s largest democracy

nonsense! It has suffered from having such a big population.

(meaning, in fact, the most populous democratic state). That grand moniker continues to lull the world into believing constitutional rights and freedoms thrive in that nation, when they are in fact under grave threat.

Nobody gives a shit about far away countries unless they grow economically and make cool stuff and provide a great return on your investment dollar.

Although the misuse of state powers to intimidate principled journalists and of religious divides to garner votes has occurred under other governments, including those of the current Congress opposition, there is little doubt that the last six years of Modi’s government have seen an alarming crackdown on campus dissidents as well as journalists and writers.

Nonsense! A journalist in Mamta's Bengal lives in fear. Modi knows that stupid lefties publishing fake news benefit him. They cause the English speaking elite to embrace the BJP.

Fourteen journalists have been killed in India since Modi’s election in 2014. (In the 10 preceding years when the opposition was in power, 17 journalists were killed.)

But none were killed in states with a BJP Chief Minister.  The fact is there are a lot more journalists now than ever before because of rapid economic growth and technological progress.

Journalists routinely face intimidation, legal proceedings and restrictions on accessing information.

Journalists also routinely use fake news to extort money.

Female reporters deal with constant online harassment, including threats of sexual violence.

Often from their editors. Tarun Tejpal is still out on bail.

Three prominent rationalists who have challenged Hindu orthodoxy have been murdered in recent years.

But the suspect is not linked to the BJP at all.

A widely condemned 2019 Citizenship Amendment Act promises fast-track citizenship to select religious minorities claiming asylum from neighbouring countries, conspicuously discriminating against Muslims.

Because Indian Muslim organizations won't tolerate people like Dr. Taslima Nasrin who fled Bangladesh.  A price was put on her head. She had to run away to Sweden. By contrast, though Indian Muslims may not like to see non-Muslims escape Islamic persecution, they are powerless to do anything about it because the non-Muslim majority will retaliate. By contrast, no one cared about Taslima Nasrin. The Left turned their back on her. Then the Swedes took her in.

As Donald Trump wrongly claims his government has “absolute power”, we know from the case of Viktor Orbán, who has seized sweeping emergency powers in Hungary, that the global lockdown against the virus can strengthen authoritarian forces if not strenuously guarded against.

We know nothing of the sort. China is plenty authoritarian. That seems to have worked for it in this case. America, with a much smaller population, has higher mortality from this 'Chinese virus'.

It will take a vigilant citizenry and media to stop that from happening.

It takes smart people to keep bad shit from going down. This disqualifies all the gobshites Gopal mentions.

In India it is precisely dissident intellectuals like Teltumbde, journalists like Varadarajan and committed activists like Navlakha who are leading the defence of pluralism and democracy.

Fuck off! Those cretins are pathetic failures. At one time they seemed so promising. But by doubling down on telling stupid lies they painted themselves into a corner. This doesn't mean they can't try to commit crimes. It just means that they get caught before they can work any great mischief.

It is of the utmost importance that the world speaks up for them and stands by them now.

Hilarious! Why stand up for nutters who believe that BoJo and Macron and Trump and so forth are all evil puppets of Neo-Liberalism who should be killed immediately?

For, in doing so, we stand up for ourselves and a world we will want to see changed for the better after the pandemic, one in which we can all breathe more freely.

Gopal is a lecturer in English. She is as stupid as shit. I'd rather read BoJo's threatened book on Shakespeare than anything Gopal writes. Anyway, she is Indian. Why does she not go home and stand up for the cretins she mentions in India? Is it because she can't play the race card back home? Nobody will say 'poor thing. She is a darkie. Thus her brain is puny. We must be nice to her when she talks worthless shite. Intellectual affirmative action, don't cha know.'

Siddhartha Varadarajan on Modi & Covid

Siddhartha Varadarajan, American citizen and soi disant Marxist, is in the business of doubling down on his journalistic mistakes. Almost two decades after he alleged that Modi orchestrated the post-Godhra riots, as opposed to calling in the Army to end them, he is still pretending that Modi's aim is ethnic cleansing, not running the country in a clean and efficient manner. Varadarajan was not alone in getting Modi wrong. But the consequence of the Left convincing itself that Modi was Hitler was that it disappeared from Indian politics.

However, Varadarajan is still around as a journalist to mislead youth. He writes in the Wire-

To understand what Narendra Modi has done to India in the first year of his second term as prime minister, I want you to consider the contrasting fate of two young people, Amulya Leona and Anurag Thakur.
Leona, still in her teens, has been in jail for three months now, charged with sedition and other serious crimes for simply shouting ‘Long Live Pakistan’ and ‘Long Live India’ from the stage of a public event in Bangalore.

The girl, who was being paid by anti-CAA protest organizers, shouted 'Pakistan Zindabad' when standing beside Owaisi, the dynastic Muslim politician, who was outraged and had her bundled off stage into the arms of the police. The silly girl meant no harm. But her actions were those of a double-agent seeking to embarrass Owaisi and other Muslim politicians in India. Shouting 'Fire' in a crowded auditorium could cause a panicked stampede. Lives might be lost. That is why the law punishes people who shout 'Fire' in a Cinema Hall or else joke about being suicide bombers when boarding a plane. Amulya is being punished for a similar type of stupidity. The question is whether she was paid to raise this slogan or whether it was her own idea.

If Leona spoke about living, Thakur, who is junior minister of finance in Modi’s government, spoke about killing.

Thakur has been elected to the Central Parliament four times. He has the right to express the sentiments of his constituents in any terms that the law allows. Of course, any member of the Public can file a 'F.I.R' at any police station if she believes Thakur has broken the law. But the guy is smart. He knows the law. It is unlikely that he would have overstepped the mark.

From the stage of a public event in Delhi, he exhorted a crowd of Bharatiya Janata Party supporters to shout “Shoot the Traitors”.

Varadarajan, as an American citizen, may feel that traitors to India should be cuddled by Indians. However, the fact is, the majority of Indians want to see Traitors punished. It is the duty of a legislator to give a voice to the demands of the Public, in so far as this can be done in a lawful manner. Thakur, it appears, has done nothing wrong in the eyes of the law. 

The ‘traitors’ were not an abstraction but the women and men of Shaheen Bagh and elsewhere who had been protesting the government’s Citizenship (Amendment) Act.

This is Varadarajan's own view regarding the utterance of a man who is not his chum. Will a Court accept Varadarajan's interpretation? No. It is unreasonable. People in Delhi knew that Thakur did not mean that a bunch of old women, who had been lied to and who were sitting in Shaheen Bagh because they genuinely believed they themselves might be deported, were traitors. No. He meant those lying to them and who were orchestrating attacks on the police and on non-Muslims were either Traitors to India or else foreign operatives of Enemy or Terrorist organizations. Indian Law severely penalizes the actions of such people. In a violent confrontation, shoot to kill orders can be issued. In 1992, riots in Delhi were nipped in the bud because an I.P.S officer avenged the killing of a constable of his by issuing a shoot to kill order. Some twenty or thirty members of the mob died but all rioting stopped completely. 

A few days later, in fact, someone actually fired on the protestors at Jamia Millia. However, the police has yet to file a case against Thakur, let alone seek to take him into custody. “The time is not right”, a top law officer of the government told the Delhi high court when asked whether the police intended to register an FIR against the minister.

Why was the time not right? The police had taken a battering from Muslim mobs. Non Muslim mobs had retaliated and quickly gained the upper hand. It wasn't till the National Security Advisor intervened and a new Police Chief was appointed that confidence was restored. Still, if even the Muslim minority could put the Police on the run, clearly they could not afford to take on the non-Muslim majority.

Varadarajan does not get that the anti-CAA protests failed. They were expected to give a boost to Congress and the Left in the Delhi elections. But both were wiped out. Thakur's stock went up. The deeply silly Leona became emblematic of the 'Pinjra Tod' stupidity of Shaheen Bagh type protest. Girls protesting restrictive Hostel rules, 'broke their cage' but ended up in Jail.

Leona and Thakur are not alone.

Thakur is not alone because he is part of the default National party which seems destined to get a third term in office. Leona is not alone because she is in an overcrowded jail. 

Not since the emergency of Indira Gandhi have so many people across India spent so much time in custody for political reasons than in the past year, and never before has the sword of arrest and detention hung over more heads.

 Since India's population keeps increasing, we would expect, ceteris paribus, nothing but this outcome. The good news is extra-judicial killing has gone down a lot.                                         

One former chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir, Mehbooba Mufti, is now into her ninth month of incarceration. 

That helps her party- which was allied with Modi's- for when elections are eventually held. Under Nehru, his pal Sheikh Abdullah spent a decade in jail. Indira too kept him in jail till he did a deal. That's how politics works in Kashmir.

At the same time, never before in independent India has there been such impunity for those connected to the establishment.

Nonsense! Indira's reign, supported by the Left, was the high water mark for such impunity. Sonia, reviving that alliance, conferred a similar impunity upon her corrupt cronies. 

If you are a member of the ruling party or support the government’s political agenda, you can advocate violence and even carry it out, spread hatred against religious minorities, humiliate and abuse the poor, without worrying about being asked to render account in a court of law.

Varadarajan, poor fellow, is shitting himself because he will have to render an account of his own efforts of a similar type in a Court of Law. 

The fact is the anti-CAA protest was supposed to be a rainbow coalition of workers and peasants and tribals and so forth. But only poor Muslim women would actually buy into that pack of lies. So, the thing backfired. The non-Muslim vote got consolidated. Muslims were left in the lurch.

In New Zealand, an Indian origin Justice of the Peace was sacked for advocating an economic boycott of Muslims in India.

So what? Being a J.P is an honorary position. 

In Uttar Pradesh, two MLAs were caught on camera doing the same thing on the ground, yet they got to keep their jobs and the police insisted there was no reason to file charges.

Why? The anti-CAA agitation has made non Muslims hate Muslims because, it seems, they object to non-Muslims gaining a safe refuge from Islamic persecution in neighboring countries. Varadarajan was part of this conspiracy. As an American citizen, he has nothing to fear. But the Indian Muslim has suffered because of his mischief. Will the Indian Courts be able to punish Varadarjan? I doubt it. By contrast, a Muslim activist who used to write for the Wire is languishing in jail. 

In many parts of India today, the right of the people to mock or even criticise their leaders no longer exists or hangs by a slender thread.

This is certainly true of Mamta's Bengal or the Shiv Sena's Maharashtra. However, Modi knows very well that writers like Varadarajan help him gain the loyalty of 'Lutyens' Delhi'. This is because we know Varadarajan's whole family. They are a bunch of corrupt cretins. 

Last week, the police in Madhya Pradesh registered a criminal case against a journalist for referring to the prime minister as a ‘gappu’, or braggart.

Anyone can register a criminal case if there is evidence that Indian Law has been broken. The post in question reads ' Gappu, Tadipar, Balatkari, aprakirtik sasanghat walo ko pare kar de to BJP suchmuch dheynisht party hai'. The meaning is that the BJP is populated by rapists and sodomites and braggarts and externed criminals. A local member of the BJP took objection and registered a case with the Police. No arrest has as yet been made. As an equally worthless journalist, Varadarajan may well object to the application of the Law to his own tribe of scribblers. But Indians like seeing journalists squirm.

In Agra, a man who called the Uttar Pradesh chief minister a ‘dog’ has been charged with sedition.

Interestingly, this was done by a female sub-inspector. It remains to be seen whether any arrest will be made. Still, what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. If people in New Zealand can get into hot water for a Tweet or Facebook post, so can people in India. 

Last month, a young photographer in Kashmir was threatened with arrest under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act as a terrorist for a photograph she posted on Instagram in 2018.

And German tourists keep getting thrown in jail in Greece for taking photos at the airport. The fact is, different countries have different rules regarding this sort of thing based on their own National Security considerations.

In Andhra Pradesh, a woman who asked a series of embarrassing questions about the recent industrial accident in Vishakapatnam was arrested by the police.

She wasn't arrested. She was ordered to appear to answer a case filed against her. She is supported by the opposition TDP. 

The purpose these ‘individual’ cases serve is to scare others into silence. The amended UAPA has also given home minister Amit Shah the power to designate any individual as a “terrorist” without a trial or even the filing of charges.

I think this will stand because it is foolish to say an organization can be designated terrorist but an individual can't. The fact is Terrorist organizations morph continually. Professional terrorists change their allegiance to better funded franchises.

Modi’s abject failure as an administrator is evident from the manner in which he has handled both the coronavirus pandemic and the human catastrophe he triggered by imposing a lockdown without any planning or preparation.

This is Varadarajan's own view. It appears the public disagrees. 

But for me, the disaster he has caused is the logical if hideous culmination of an underlying pathology that has come into sharp focus during the past year – his contempt for democracy.

Wonderful! Varadarajan couldn't get elected rat catcher in America. He can't run for elected office in India because he is a foreigner. But Modi keeps getting re-elected. It is Democracy which has raised him up to global status. All this in just twenty short years. Prior to being appointed C.M of Gujarat in 2000, he had never won an election. Since then, he hasn't lost a single one. Modi is the first person who couldn't afford to go to College to end up in the highest office in the land. Varadarajan thinks it is because Modi has contempt for Democracy. But we all know that Varadarajan and his ilk has contempt for 'uneducated' OBC types from mofussil towns. The odd thing is that people like me- a caste fellow a few years ahead of him at the LSE- now respect Modi and listen when he speaks whereas we feel contempt for Varadarajan who, as Jag Suraiya recalls, once asked 'who or what is a Kurmi?' Surely, this was disingenuous. Varadarajan's dad was a U.P cadre IAS officer. He himself went to Mayo. He must have known what sort of people were Kurmis. He was simply expressing his contempt for the 'great unwashed'. Brahmins like him is what turns us into DMK supporters. 

Only a leader who has that contempt – who believes he can stay in power regardless of what he does – will run the risk of not bothering to make any effort to ameliorate the suffering of millions of migrant workers, all of whom have the right to vote.

Varadarajan's contempt for the truth is what has sunk his journalistic career. He won't be remembered as a Frank Moraes or Kuldip Nayar.  He has gone in the direction of Prem Shankar Jha. But Jha, in his day, was considered an intellectual. Varadarajan was always a verbose cretin.

Modi’s disregard for democracy runs deep and wide, and extends to every institution that is meant to serve as a check and a balance to the exercise of executive power.

The opposite is the case. The reason Modi was not brought down in 2001 itself by rival factions within the Gujarat Sangh Parivar was precisely because he strengthened Institutions and delegated power. The pay-off was efficiency and voter satisfaction. Then, Gujarat began to grow at an unprecedented rate- that too in a balanced manner- because Modi was able to do a deal with the farmers and curb the greed of the Corporates. 

In his first term as prime minister, he undermined the judiciary, the Reserve Bank of India, the Central Bureau of Investigation, the country’s university system, the Central Vigilance Commission, the Right to Information, Parliament and its committees.

Nonsense! The judiciary had over reached and was bound to draw in its horns. Putting Rajan into the RBI was a stunt. It failed. The CBI was never independent. The University system had degenerated forty or fifty years ago. Right to Information was a nuisance. On the other hand, Parliamentary functioning improved because Congress and the Left continually lost seats and thus could create less and less havoc. 

In his second term, he has turned his sights on the federal nature of India’s polity.

But India has a Unitary, not a Federal, Constitution. The Center can redraw State boundaries or downgrade them to Union Territories. 

He has also gutted the Central Information Commission

which was so useless nobody had heard about it. Apparently it was created in 2005.

and further undermined the independence of the judiciary to ensure his assaults on the democratic rights of the people from Kashmir to Kanyakumari are not challenged.

Why does Varadarajan not simply say 'Modi is sexually assaulting my arsehole every night'? That would be more believable. 

Gone is the pretence of development and growth, used as a camouflage during the first term to avoid a backlash to the BJP’s communal agenda.

Gone is Varadarajan's pretence that he is only anti-Modi because Modi is a Hindu. It is now obvious that Varadarajan's rage against the BJP is caused by the horrible anal rape at Modi's hands which he has to endure every night. As a Tambram myself, I feel vulnerable. First Modi buggered Mani Shankar Aiyar but we said nothing because that Doon School asshole deserves all he gets. Then Modi sodomized Siddhartha Varadarajan. Again, we said nothing because that Mayo College asshole must be habituated to such shenanigans. What if Modi now comes for me? I went to St.Columba's and still am cherry in the anal department. Who will speak up for me? Sanjay Subhramaniyam? No. He will simply mutter into his beard about Vasco da Gama. As for his brother, he is too busy being Minister of External Affairs. Nirmala Ji, kindly save my Tambram ass from Modi's lust!

The only “accomplishments” the BJP can point to in the first year of Modi’s second term all relate to its anti-Muslim mindset. First came the gratuitous criminalisation of Muslim husbands who abandon their wives without properly divorcing them. (However, Hindu husbands who do the same have nothing to fear.)

So Modi did something for Muslim women which, Varadarajan believes, Hindu women are denied. He should try explaining this to his wife. She will slap the black off him sho' nuff.

Then on August 5 came the scrapping of Article 370 and the imposition of a communications blockade on the people of Jammu and Kashmir that ran for six long months and has still not been fully lifted.

With the result that the war against Terror turned a significant corner. But this is good for Muslims who suffer disproportionately when suicide bombers run amok.

Next, the Modi government pushed for, and secured, a favourable (if manifestly absurd) verdict from the Supreme Court on the Ayodhya issue that will see the fulfilment of the BJP’s long-standing agenda of building a Ram temple at the site where its leaders and supporters destroyed the Babri Masjid in 1992.

It turns out, Indian law gives judicial personality to a Hindu deity but not to Allah or Jehovah. The Hindu deity won his suit which was instituted before the BJP existed. 

In an inversion of legal common sense, a property dispute which led to the commission of a heinous crime was fast-tracked at the urging of Modi even as the criminal case continues to languish.

Varadarajan is not a lawyer. He is a journalist. In an inversion of journalistic common sense, he credits the BJP- which he abhors- with a popular decision made by the Bench. What he should be doing is saying 'Modi hasn't delivered for Hindus.' 

Last December saw the Modi government’s third ‘accomplishment’, the passage of the CAA. Just as the stated purpose behind the Triple Talaq law would have been served by making it a crime for any husband, and not just Muslims, to abandon their wives without a proper divorce settlement, the stated purpose behind the CAA could have been met by allowing any bona fide victim of persecution from the neighbourhood to become an Indian citizen rather than just the non-Muslim ones.

What happened when Taslima Nasrin was granted refuge in India? Some Indian Muslims put a price on her head. She had to run away to Sweden. The fact is a Muslim who is persecuted on religious grounds in Pakistan or Bangladesh would not be safe from Indian Muslims if they took refuge in India. By contrast, though Indian Muslims object to non Muslims gaining refuge in India, they can't kill them without getting killed in an asymmetric manner themselves.

But the Modi government’s intention was to use religion as a factor to polarise society.

Varadarajan and his ilk's intention was to keep the BJP out of power. But because of their stupidity, they drove even English speaking upper caste people into the arms of the BJP. Nobody minded if Soniaji was being advised Ahmed Patel. But if she was listening to kooks like Romilla Thapar or Harsh Mander then she had to go. There was truly no alternative to NaMo. 

Home minister Amit Shah’s infamous ‘chronology’ made it clear the government intended to proceed next to creating an all-India National Register of Citizens, a plan he and Modi were forced to backtrack on, at least temporarily, when they realised the depth of public opposition to it.

Amit Shah very cleverly defused the situation in Assam- itself the product of Judicial activism- by raising this bogey. But now Shah is touting 'One Nation, one Ration Card' to deal with the problem of migrants. The pandemic has concentrated minds on this issue. Obviously, this ties into a National Register of Citizens such that entitlements are portable. The opposition to the NRC was orchestrated and based on lies. It has now run out of steam. Poor people face existential problems relating to access to the public distribution system. They will clamor for the thing because it is vital to their own economic security. 

The government’s next ‘accomplishment’ was to use communal violence in Delhi to break the resolve of the anti-CAA protests.

Being beaten to death does tend to 'break resolve'. But if mobs do it- in retaliation- thoroughgoing ethnic cleansing follows. The minority gets it in the neck. The Left-Liberals abruptly disappear back into their Ivory towers. 

When that process failed – or was interrupted by the coronavirus – it spun a yarn about the violence being the product of an ‘Islamist-Marxist conspiracy’ and arrested several activists at the forefront of the protest against the CAA under the draconian UAPA.

With hindsight, this should have been done sooner. But six months ago who would have predicted that the Left-Liberals would so bungle the anti-CAA protest? There was plenty of money available and the whole country was seething with different types of economic woe. Modi hoped the thing would become a Muslim dominated affair but this was by no means inevitable. I still don't understand why the Left wasn't able to put up a bigger showing. So far as I can make out, they gave the excuse that the thing was being hijacked by Islamic State type fanatics and so they felt they had to keep away. But, the Muslim activists too had their own complaints. It seems they were being asked 'not to look Muslim'. What were they supposed to do, discard beards and burqas and put on janeos and bindis? 

This despite the fact that the whole world knows the violence was overwhelmingly targeted at Muslims, and that Muslims were as likely to conspire to destroy their homes and livelihoods as the Jews in Nazi Germany were to engineer Kristallnacht.

A Polish Jew shot a German diplomat in Paris because he was angry at the deportation of Polish Jews. Kristallnacht was a reaction to this. It turned out to be popular not just in Germany but also in France and Poland. Anti-Semitism helped Hitler conquer Europe and recruit local collaborators.

The timeline of the Delhi riots are clear. Some Muslims started it and then the entire community got stomped. Why did they start it? Perhaps there was some money on the table for instigating a riot while Trump was in India. The other explanation is that the Police Commissioner was a poltroon.

While the Modi lobby is likely to see the suppression of democracy and the growing insecurity of Muslims as major achievements in their leader’s sixth year as PM, there is no getting away from Modi’s three big failures: his government’s Kashmir policy, his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic and his inability to insulate the poor and vulnerable from the predictable consequences of the lockdown.

Varadarajan speaks too soon. Kashmir seems a success. So does his handling of Covid. 'Insulating the poor and vulnerable' has to do with 'One Nation, One Ration Card' which nicely dovetails with NRC, Aadhar and Modi's various populist schemes.

As for the Muslims, they have to find some separate political representation. Owaisi seems to be doing well out of his projection of a 'Nationalist Muslim' persona. At the regional level, Muslims will retain a place in governing coalitions. But what about the Center? Tokenist representation can be provided by any party. Muslims want more and they will get it sooner or later. But how it will happen remains unclear. 

The government’s unwillingness, on ‘security’ grounds, to restore 4G services in the valley or release all political leaders and permit democratic political activity is the biggest indication that the scrapping of Article 370 is not the silver bullet Modi and Shah claimed it would be.

No. It shows the policy succeeded. 

The longer the current approach continues, the greater will be popular fears in the valley of a ‘demographic’ solution to the Kashmir problem.

But the thing is inevitable. 

Of course, the Supreme Court’s refusal to do anything about the mass arrests or the internet ban, let alone prioritise the question of the legality of the Article 370 and CAA moves, can be chalked down as another great government achievement, one that Ranjan Gogoi, MP, can savour as he contemplates life from the treasury benches.

Wonderful! Varadarajan says Modi's superpowers include changing the past. Gogoi is from a Congress family. As a Judge, he helped the Bench take charge of the Assam migrants issue which politicians had failed to solve. Once the Court mandated Nationality Registry was completed, Modi and Shah had to engage in some pretty nifty footwork. Thanks to the idiocy of the Opposition, they snatched victory from the jaw of defeat.

Sadly for India and, for Narendra Modi, the ad hoc, knee-jerk, centralised, undemocratic style of functioning that is the hallmark of the prime minister’s method of functioning has led him to commit monumental blunders on the coronavirus front that not even the judiciary can save him from.

Varadarajan thinks a style of functioning can be the hallmark of a method of functioning. Either that or he no longer thinks before writing his worthless articles. 

Indeed, after first giving the government a pass on its treatment of migrant workers, the Supreme Court was forced by the unending misery on display across India to reconsider its approach.

But the Bench now knows that its activism was silly. If it continues to attract attention then everybody and her cat will come forward with accusations of rape and murder against every Judge. Indeed, just recently some Supreme Court Judges gave color to the theory that Justice Loya had been killed by his fellow Judges because the fellow refused a bribe. I am not saying that Loya was anally gang raped before he was murdered. Yet, when it comes to Judges, it is generally a case of 'in for a penny, in for a pound.' If a bunch of them decide to kill one of their number, why not sodomize him as well?

The fact is that from the word go, Modi’s handling of the crisis has been disastrous. As late as March 13, his government was blithely declaring there was no public health emergency. Yet 11 days later, the prime minister felt compelled to impose a national lockdown with four hours notice to the public. While Modi cannot be faulted for believing a lockdown was the answer to the spread of the disease – most of the world’s leaders have acted similarly – he is perhaps the only major leader to have made zero preparations.

The fact is, Varadarajan's reporting can't be trusted even in the slightest detail. Modi's handling of the crisis is quite good. India has done quite well. Its low mortality rate is a matter of comment.
In any case, a Prime Minister is not supposed to make preparations for pandemics. Health is a State, not a concurrent, subject. Perhaps one or two bureaucratic heads should roll. But hindsight is 20-20. 

Even if he had firmed up the lockdown plan on March 19, the day he announced the ‘Janata Curfew’ for March 22, that would have given him six days to plan for the consequences.

But, the responsibility to 'plan for the consequences' falls upon the States as per the Indian Constitution. Some, like Kerala did very well indeed. None did very very badly. 

Having squandered the days before the lockdown and immediately after in the pursuit of political objectives such as the toppling of the Congress government in Madhya Pradesh and the communalisation of the pandemic, the Modi government hoped the heavy-handed use of state machinery would allow it to get away with its minimum governance.

No time was wasted. It is not the case that the politicians or administrators who were tasked with the Public Health, Policing and other relevant functions were  involved in behind the scenes politicking. Varadarajan speaks of 'communalization of the pandemic'. This refers to the spread of the virus by Tablighis who had attended a Conference in Malaysia. Varadarajan's suggestio falsi is that Muslims are spreading the virus. This is not the case. One Muslim organization, unfortunately, was holding a Conference in the wrong time and at the wrong place. But that organization has been condemned by other Muslim organizations. Varadarajan's genius is to appear 'secular' and anti-Modi, yet write in such a way that the Muslim community alone gets defamed and his own high caste brethren feel that only the BJP can save their hides. 

The reality is that the lockdown has failed to contain the epidemic even as it has laid waste to the economy and to the livelihoods of millions.

So, the reality is that the virus has hurt India just as it has hurt almost every other big country in the world. 

Along the way, the sangh parivar’s ugly Islamophobia has also undermined years of Indian diplomacy in the Gulf region – a development that will have harmful economic consequences for the country.

No it won't.  The pandemic has revealed the Gulf's extreme vulnerability.  Its prosperity is based on an unsustainable model. The remittance economy will die off. This means funding for Islamic extremism will dry up. The era of globalization is over. Dirigiste Nationalism is back on the agenda. Big countries like India can still grow- more especially as crude oil prices crash. By contrast, both the Gulf and Iran will have to pipe small.

During Modi 1.0, Arun Shourie joked that the BJP government was ‘Manmohan Singh plus cow’.

Shourie was a cretin, sure enough.

Today, given the manner in which Modi has used the pandemic to centralise governance, promote the interests of big business, trample on the democratic rights of the people

anally rape Siddhartha Varadarajan every night,

and manage the judiciary, his rule is increasingly beginning to resemble the emergency of Indira Gandhi. Apologists for Indira Gandhi used to say, ‘at least the trains run on time’. Modi 2.0 is not even able to manage that, such is the shambles six years of ideologically driven ‘governance’ have created.

Not to mention the condition of Varadarajan's rectum. 

If there is one thing we’ve learned about Modi in all the years he has been chief minister and prime minister, it is that he never learns from his mistakes.

Varadarajan has been writing about Modi for 20 years. The one lesson he never learns is that Modi is a smart guy who figures out ways to do his job better than even his supporters had hoped. 

The current situation is the product of his cult of personality, and the only response he is capable of is to double down on his worst impulses.

Modi is good at P.R. But he doesn't have a 'cult of personality' for the excellent reason that this would attract the ire of his rivals within his party. They would feel that they were not being given proper credit for their own achievements. This was the problem with Indira and Rajiv- but also what made Manmohan so ineffectual in his second spell in office.

The fact is Modi was prepared to leave Gujarat precisely because he had no personality cult or nepotistic or caste based network to protect there. He took a risk by going to Delhi. But he was a better PM than anyone had predicted. 

Centralisation of authority, authoritarianism and divisive, polarising politics have helped him transcend crises before.

The reverse is the case. Delegation of authority and institutional checks and balances have enabled him to improve governance more especially in the context of last mile delivery. The polarising politics of the Left-Liberals has helped Modi. He doesn't have to create a Muslim bogeyman because people like Varadarajan do it for him by claiming that Indian Muslims don't want non Muslim refugees to gain asylum in India. They are prepared to kill cops and burn down their neighbor's houses and demand 'azadi' to do so on a bigger scale. This scares the shit out of the non-Muslim. They then flock to the BJP. 

As COVID-19 spreads and the economy flounders, the coming year will prove far more damaging for Indian democracy than anything we have seen thus far.

Varadarajan thinks democracy is damaged if Modi gets more and more popular. So what he is saying is- 'BJP will trounce Mamta in West Bengal. They will win big in 2021'.  Such a sentiment is highly demoralizing to the Opposition. Why on earth is Varadarajan's rag being financed? It helps only the BJP who, however, are too canny to waste money on the English press. Perhaps, there is some big Corporate conspiracy to destroy the Left-Liberal Indian establishment from within. But the thing is otiose. Those fuckers are as stupid as shit. They can be relied on to help only their enemies.