The state in polities broadly described as ‘liberal democracies’ with political economies broadly described as ‘capitalist’ are characterised by a feature that Gramsci called ‘hegemony’. This is a technical term, not to be confused with the loose use of that term to connote ‘power and domination over another’. In Gramsci’s special sense, hegemony means that a class gets to be the ruling class by convincing all other classes that its interests are the interests of all other classes. It is because of this feature that such states avoid being authoritarian.This is nonsense. First a class gets to rule and then it gains hegemony- i.e. moral and ideological and political legitimacy. If it isn't ruling, people don't believe it could rule until it finally makes a move which makes it a plausible ruling class. Suppose Mussolini's Black Shirts had spent all their time marching around and giving boring speeches. They would have been laughed at the way Moseley's Black Shirts were laughed at.
Authoritarian states need to be authoritarian precisely because they lack Gramscian hegemony.Nonsense! Authoritarianism, in some countries, is associated with higher productivity and superior internal and external security. If an autocrat- like Gorbachev- decides he'd prefer to be genuinely loved by his people and surrenders control of the economy, then there is a scissors crisis and he is toppled.
It would follow from this that if a state that does possess hegemony in this sense is authoritarian, there is something compulsive about its authoritarianism.So, if Russians wear fur coats instead of muslin kurtas in Winter this is because, according to Bilgrami, there is something compulsive about their desire to wear warm clothes.
Now, what is interesting is that the present government in India keeps boastfully proclaiming that it possesses hegemony in this sense, that it has all the classes convinced that its policies are to their benefit. If so, one can only conclude that its widely recorded authoritarianism, therefore, is pathological.Not if those 'recording' the supposed authoritarianism are known to be stupid liars.
There have been spectacular cases of this authoritarianism such as the recent arrest of five journalists and professors on charges that are virtually nonsensical.Why? Naxalites do exist. They genuinely are at war with the State. They do have supporters who keep their affiliation secret. Bilgrami himself writes only nonsense. His opinion on legal matters is worthless because he is stupid and ignorant.
The liberal middle class has expressed some anger about these and, given how authoritarian the government has become, that took some courage.The Indian middle class is not liberal. It is religious and socially conservative. It does not give a shit about some stupid professors or journalists. It only takes vanity, not courage, to virtue signal on this issue.
But Muslims and Dalits and, quite generally, the unprotected poor suffer from brutality and arbitrary arrest each day and this goes unreported even in the regional media. It is so pervasive that it is not news and it invokes nothing but indifference from the liberal middle class.Arresting people costs money. India is poor. It does not have the money to go around brutalizing and arbitrarily arresting hundreds of millions of people. Bilgrami is telling stupid lies.
Quite apart from this compulsive tic of authoritarianism (compulsive, as I said, because it exists in spite of the more or less plausible claim to hegemony), a good question to ask is what underlies the hegemony itself?The BJP is focusing on things voters want and is trying to deliver. Other parties which take this approach can beat it at its own game. Those that talk nonsense about Fascism or Authoritarianism get wiped out at the polling booths.
Before the 2004 election, there was a similar claim to hegemony by the then BJP government.No. The BJP claimed to have achieved something which it had not actually done- viz. deliver prosperity and security to the masses.
All was said to be luminous, all classes were told to bask in the Indian sunshine and vote the government in again. The electorate refused. No doubt this was partly because of the unexpectedly impressive campaign carried out by Sonia Gandhi’s leadership.The Communists too did well. But they frittered away their gains by adopting a foolish 'popular front' strategy. Sonia may have had some genuine sympathy with the Libtards and Sickularists and did give prominence to 'public intellectuals' like Bilgrami. But they shat the bed by alientating the Hindu majority. Indeed, they also alienated Muslims and Dalits by painting them as abject and unable to stand up for themselves. However, it was the corruption and incompetence of the ruling party which brought it down. Modi, no doubt, had done well in Gujerat but there was plenty of dead wood and senile nutjobs in the BJP- indeed, there still are. No party has a monopoly of talent. Still, the fact is, the RSS trained politicians have a better reputation than others. The Left should be raising up leaders of similar caliber. It can't do so by writing stupid shite.
Bilgrami is being foolish. Italy and Turkey had high illiteracy when Mussolini and Ataturk took over. China had low literacy when Mao took power. There is no connection between 'hegemony' and literacy.
But, more relevant to the question of hegemony is the fact that India was saved by its illiteracy.
The propaganda of ‘India Shining’ by an uncritical press reached mostly the literate middle class. The illiterate among the electorate got a far better political education from their own experience of life and politics. They voted the government out.As they had previously voted it in and would do so again. Literacy does not matter. Propaganda does not matter. What matters is whether voters believe a particular party will do a better job of governance.
What, then, was different in 2014?Congress looked utterly decrepit. Rahul had failed to take charge of the Commonwealth Games the way his Dad had taken charge of the Asian games. He wasn't putting himself forward for the top job and he wasn't letting Manmohan be effective either. Modi was the only candidate who said he wanted the top job because he'd be good at it.
Well, for one thing there is no denying that apart from the period of the Emergency, the incumbency of UPA-II was about as bad a period of governance as has been known in independent India. But y’s failures cannot explain x’s hegemony, which can only be explained by x’s success in convincing others that the interests of those it represents are the interests of all.Nothing can explain x's hegemony because hegemony does not exist. It is a silly theory.
And this was achieved not merely by the media (as cheerleading as before and possibly with wider influence now as a result of an increase in its reach) but, as is well known, by a swaggering leader’s charisma.Currently the BJP is much better than Congress and so it has become the national party by default. This may change. Even the Left may make a comeback if it dishes Gramsci for something more sensible.
As is also well-known, the substance of what he said and what his party stood for is to be found in two elementary propositions: open India to globalised finance even more than the past quarter century so as to create jobs and opportunities; and India is a Hindu country, with others to be tolerated on a strict understanding that that is so. Where the latter could not possibly be the basis of hegemony, the former was intended to pick up the slack.Poor countries need f.d.i to industrialize. This is a matter of common sense not some sinister 'hegemony'.
There was nothing new about the first of these substantial promises.Thus, it can have no explanatory value.
Manmohan Singh and his economic advisors had pursued just that strategy for ‘development’ and its outcome had been foretold by every honest economist (which is not to say that there were not many more, as always with that discipline, dishonest ones): an intensification of the impoverishment and insecurity of the poor and working people of the country, and a continuing criminal transfer of the nation’s wealth to the ultra-rich corporate elites.This is a fantasy.
Yet all classes came to believe in its efficacy even so, and this was the real achievement of the demagoguery of a charismatic leader and the crores his party acquired from the corporate elites both at home and abroad to spend on a fantastic public relations campaign that would turn a demagogue into a demigod of economic hope.So Bilgrami's theory of politics cashes out as the paranoid belief that he himself is smart and able to see the the truth while people who live in India are stupid and in thrall to some demagogue.
Will the voter believe next year that these hopes have been fulfilled? Will she find the pathological authoritarianism tolerable? Will she embrace the open season against Muslims and Dalits as the India she wishes to live in?We know the answer. The voter didn't believe Bilgrami's lies. Some Muslims and most Dalits voted for the BJP precisely because it was better at governance and 'last mile delivery'.
Politics is a demanding and difficult terrain. Anyone with a humane politics cannot allow the world to sober her too much. Anyone with a sensible politics cannot allow her idealism to make her politics remote and arcane. How to navigate these twin constraints, pulling in different directions, requires a sense of balance that is hard to maintain. Nothing seems more important today than maintaining it.and writing stupid shite like this.
A humane politics is bound to answer each of the questions I posed above with a resolute ‘No’.A humane politics would have put Bilgrami out of his misery. The sensible politics which obtains merely pays him no regard whatsoever.
But having given that answer, what sensible political options are available? Democratic politics, whether in India or elsewhere, surfaces both at the parliamentary site and at the site of movements.No. Democratic politics works though institutions of government. It does not 'surface' anywhere. Parliaments may be purely ceremonial. Movements may be apolitical. It is a separate matter that some Democracies have well oiled party machines. But these can be rendered obsolete as recent events have shown the world over.
Let’s, first, consider the former. Hegemony surfaces in very different ways in different political systems of democracy.Hegemony does not exist. Bilgrami is a cretin.
In two-party systems such as the United States, very often the ruling class simply spans both parties, and their differences are minor (though it is not as if they don’t often make a difference to people’s lives.)Bilgrami has lived for a long time in America. Do any Americans consult him for political advice? No. The fellow is a cretin.
It is very hard indeed to break out of the consensus between the two parties.Yet, Trump has done it.
And it is a symptom of how precarious the lives of working people have become in that country that they gave support to two leaders within the parties who were prepared to defy the consensus between their respective party orthodoxies. (Sanders with considerable success in the primaries even though he failed to secure the nomination, and Trump in both the primaries and the national elections–though it predictably turns out that Trump on every important issue is taking the orthodox positions of that party even further in the direction of an inhumane politics.)The 'orthodoxy' of the Democratic Party was better represented by Biden and the early Obama. Indeed, when Bill Clinton was first elected he was an orthodox tax and spend Democrat. His U-turn towards 'Workfare' & his liking for Billionaires with bizarre agendas was what made him unorthodox. Hilary continued that trend which is why she lost to Obama- more particularly because nobody believe another boom was on the horizon. Sanders was and is un-electable and hurt Hilary so badly that Trump, quite unexpectedly, was to pick up votes which Obama had worked very hard to keep.
Britain is not strictly a two-party system, but carries the historical weight of a two-party tradition and there again it is a symptom of how deep working-class dissatisfaction goes that both the Brexit vote and the continuing popularity of Corbyn has managed to finesse the long consensus that Blair and his successors in the party had managed to forge with post-Thatcherite Conservatives.What on earth is this cretin getting at? Both Labor and the Conservatives are divided on Brexit. There is no consensus. However, the Liberals haven't been able to capitalize on this though they are strongly Remain. Why? They foolishly allied with Cameron, not Brown, and thus shared the blame for Tory 'Austerity'.
India, unlike these countries, is fortunate to have a thriving multi-party political system.Where? At the Center, there have been either BJP led or Congress led Coalitions. Congress would also strategically prop up ambitious politicians who dreamed of becoming Prime Minister- but this was to show how stupid and worthless they were.
It is to that extent easier to oppose a consensual hegemony.Nobody cares if you oppose something which does not exist. You may as well bay at the moon or practice Voodoo.
Even if major parties form a consensus, more minor and regional parties can form alliances against the consensus.What good does this do? The Communists opposed the 123 deal with America for purely ideological reasons. Manmohan ignored them. Suddenly, they lost salience. Everyone could see they had become irrelevant. Henceforth, the consensus was that they didn't matter. Nor did their 'useful idiots'- henceforth deemed useless simply.
Fighting the consensus does not always require one to fight one’s own party’s orthodoxies as in two-party systems. The tasks in India are, thus, quite different.No. The tasks for politicians are the same in India or the UK or the USA. They are too have sensible policies, with proper last mile delivery, and to do grassroots work. Living in America, Bilgrami may not have got the memo. But then he had never been useful. He forgot that he was a Muslim who was supposed to bleat 'Islam is in danger' anytime triple talaq was mentioned.
The idea that any one existing opposition party can, without forming alliances, defeat the BJP in 2019 is wholly without sense. A refusal to contaminate one’s idealistic and humane politics by alliances with other parties is not sensible, it is a recipe for a party’s eventual demise.Who is Bilgrami talking to? Which party has 'idealistic and humane politics'? Congress? It is a corrupt, incompetent, dynastic outfit. What of the Samajwadi parties? They are corrupt, incompetent, dynastic outfits. Mamta's Trinamool too is now dynastic, corrupt, incompetent and criminalized. Perhaps Bilgrami is talking to the Communist parties. But they won't listen to 'fellow travelers' because they, by definition, have not grasped the right ideology and thus acquired the right praxis.. At best, they are 'useful idiots' whose function is to spread Communist lies.
Thus, for instance, it is becoming clear that some parties (the CPI-M, for instance) will become irrelevant for decades to come if they don’t seek to exert their (already dwindling influence) through alliances.We now know the outcome of this strategy. The CPI-M has been decimated. It got 5 seats- 4 with the help of its Tamil partner. But it will lose those next time round. After all, the name of the next C.M of T.N is actually Stalin!
To some extent, this common sense has finally emerged and parties seem to be seeking such alliances. But equally, such a sensible politics must throughout be guided by a humane politics and not embrace these sensible alliances at the cost of it. What does that imply?Nothing. Common sense leads effective leaders to have humane policies because voters are human beings.
There is an obvious lesson to be learnt from the period of the Emergency and its aftermath.If it is obvious, Bilgrami can't learn it because his profession is stupidity.
Opposition alliances emerged then with an exclusively negative purpose. It would be wrong to dismiss them as opportunistic since the purpose was a worthy one then (as it is now): to overturn an intolerably authoritarian regime. But such victories as that opposition achieved were short-lived and in fact, as we know, it suffered an utterly crushing defeat at the hands of Indira Gandhi’s Congress in 1980 for the very plain reason that it stood for nothing positive over and above opposition to a previously authoritarian Congress government.The Janata Morcha fell on the issue of dual membership of the RSS. The lesson to be learned is that the RSS is not a Fascist outfit. It is wrong to stigmatize it. Out of the various splinters of the Janata coalition, it was the RSS backed Bharatiya Janata Party which emerged as the most professional and faction free option.
And the situation is far worse today because nobody would describe that Congress government as relying on anything like the Gramscian hegemony that the current government and the class it represents enjoy.By Gramscian hegemony, Bilgrami means that the BJP is doing a good job. It is meritocratic and faction free. Congress is in disarray because Rahul is a cretin and so his Mummy has had to take over once again.
In fact, the Emergency was declared out of an anxiety that such hegemony was precisely what it did not have.Nonsense! It was declared because the Allahabad High Court had rendered Indira Gandhi's election null and void because of misuse of government machinery for her election campaign. She would have had to step down.
That leaves one with the absolutely alarming eventual prospect of another 1980-style outcome in the future. If the recently emerging opposition alliances do succeed next year, it would be a scary prospect to imagine the kind of hegemony a subsequent returning BJP government might have after the ineffectual rule of a government formed by an alliance of parties with no positive platform apart from ending the nightmare of the past four years.There was no nightmare. Some useful idiots went around repeating stupid lies. But no one was listening.
It becomes a matter of some urgency, therefore, that an election should be fought by a set of alliances at the national and regional levels with a common, positive, humane platform which can carry conviction.Platforms don't matter. What matters is expectations re. ability to deliver good governance and needful reforms.
To draw and erect such a platform requires a lot of enormously hard work, a great deal of tact and resolution and vision, and a leadership in each party of each alliance that fetches respect and has authority.Also one should be kind to animals and nice to the environment.
I can just hear the sneering dismissal of all this by the orthodoxies within the Congress.Nobody was listening to Bilgrami. Why bother sneering at this imbecile?
What positive common programme will suffice? It is here I think that the parliamentary site of politics has to pay attention to what is surfacing on the site of movements and provide a sort of unifying force in a common and integrated electoral platform of the causes that they reflect.There was an anti-corruption movement which became a quite successful political party. Other movements which did not morph into political parties fell by the wayside.
Only such a conscientious effort to integrate in the electoral field seemingly miscellaneous yearnings surfacing on the street and the maidan has any chance of getting the support of a massively heterogenous electorate with its prodigiously varied interests.No. Only a conscientious effort to improve governance- 'last mile delivery' in particular- will get you elected.
In my country of domicile, such attentiveness to causes emerging on non-parliamentary sites was the basis of virtually every fundamental and effective change in society: to give just two examples, FDR’s attentiveness to the demands of the labour movements of the 1930s and Lyndon Johnson’s acknowledgement of the civil rights movement.Both were already in power. FDR's policies failed to end the Depression. LBJ ended up helping the Republican 'Southern strategy'. Both the Labor Movement and the Civil Rights Movement had an explicitly political strategy and operated through caucuses within political parties. Bilgrami writes as though FDR & LBJ were making anthropological discoveries while exploring submerged portions of society.
So also, Sanders’s remarkable success in the Democratic primaries was entirely because of the energy that went into bringing together quite diverse ongoing causes in movements, ranging from the protests around post-financial crisis unemployment and wage stagnation to the protest against foreclosures of homes, to the students’ protests against the costs of higher education, and the mobilisations of millions marginalised on the health care front. Something similar lies in Corbyn’s success.But, both failed. Corbyn has paved the way for BoJo's no-deal Brexit which will reduce protection for workers. Sanders hurt Hilary enough to open the door to Trump.
The recent farmers and workers rallies in Maharashtra and in the north (and last November in Delhi) and the adivasis’ recent long march in Chhattisgarh, the repeated and remarkable Dalit display of political agency over the past few years against the recurring violence they face,were important and were addressed by the administration. Not so the bogus student activism of sclerotic Socialist parties-
the courageous and brilliant students’ campaigns against the communal elements on campus,failed completely because they were obviously careerist and partisan
the women’s protest against rampant sexual violence,failed because women would not vote for Kiran Bedi who was prepared to tackle the underlying problem.
are all causes that need to be integrated into a common platform speaking to the issues that concern labour and peasantry and the youth, women and the oppressed castes.But this won't change the fact that Hindus are a majority and they don't like people who shit on their religion- or who have chums who do.
It is true that Muslims have in recent years not shown the mobilisational agency that Dalits have shown and that they themselves showed in the immediate aftermath of the destruction of the mosque in Ayodhya.Muslims need to take the lead in putting together coalitions rather than playing second fiddle. Look at the Kerala Muslim League. We should get to vote for smart Muslims who aim to be C.M and then P.M on the basis of their achievements not their loyalty, or lack of it, to a dynastic patron.
In the face of the viciousness of the almost daily attacks on them (sanctioned tacitly by the very presence of BJP in positions of power at the Centre and the regions), they have gone entirely into their shells.If this were true, there would be something drastically wrong with the way Indians are practicing Islam. It is a rational religion which upholds 'hubb al watan min al iman'. It is progressive and law abiding. No doubt, laws differ in different places but this does not pose a problem for Muslims anymore than it does for Hindus or Christians or anybody else.
They need particularly deliberate inclusion, therefore, in forging such a common platform. Above all, any common agenda that doesn’t offer a serious programme of uplifting the poor through food schemes, employment schemes (both of which were started in small measure under UPA-I) and extending to health and housing schemes, will never have any chance of long-term success against the domination of the BJP.So, not only are Indian Muslims abject cowards, they are also starving and unable to feed themselves or treat their own illnesses. Would it surprise Bilgrami to discover that Indian Muslims are hardworking, thrifty and very successful in STEM subjects including Medicine? Why pretend their Religion- or faith in The Creator- has turned them into a starving, frightened, isolated community who need to be led by the hand?
we are able to interpret different utility functions as encoding different non-ergodic dynamics and remove the element of human irrationality from the explanation of basic economic behavior.This is very stupid goobledegook. A utility function maps consumption choices onto consumer satisfaction. It encodes facts about our physiology and our preferences which are given biologically and psychologically. It is not the case that we can change our physiology when Economic circumstances change. If this happened, we would go on splitting into different species.
1) Human behavior can be understood. It follows a rationale and is in that sense rational.This is nonsense. Billiard balls aren't rational. We can understand their behavior. Human beings can be rational- i.e. they reason about things. However, if humans evolved on an uncertain fitness landscape, then there would be survival value in unpredictability so as to baffle a predator or parasite. Thus, there is a fallacy of composition in saying 'if humans are rational, their behavior must be predictable or deterministic'. It is perfectly possible for human rationality to involve non-deterministic algorithms. These could have 'univalent foundations' with an appropriate type theoretic class of intensional objects. In other words, it has a mathematical representation of an idiosyncratic type or one with intractably many degrees of freedom. At the 'macro' level, we can speak of 'Muth Rationality'- aggregates behave as if all agents have the 'correct' economic theory and a common information set- but this is like an Aumann correlated equilibrium with appropriate public signals.
2) Humans make decisions in a manner that would optimise the time-average growth rate of wealth, were those decisions to be repeated indefinitely.This is mad. To optimize wealth growth we should live like misers who were also immortal. In reality, if it is worthwhile, we should try to find that wealth configuration which has the lowest ratio to Real Income. Indeed, that's what happens. We prefer assets which are more efficient and less costly because they generate more Real Income.
In our treatment, decisions are choices between different stochastic processes, not choices between different random variables as is usually the case in decision theoryThe problem here is that Knightian Uncertainty obtains. We don't know what stochastic processes obtain nor how they are combined.
There is no St. Petersburg paradox- it is merely silly and can be resolved linguistically- or better still, it can be ignored as evidence of the imbecility of pedagogues.
The range of questions we can answer in this way is surprising to us. Examples are: how does an investor choose the leverage of an investment ? How can we resolve the St. Petersburg paradox ? How can we resolve the equity premium puzzle ? Why do people choose to cooperate ? Why do insurance contracts exist ? How can we make sense of the recent changes in observed economic inequality? Do economic systems change from one phase to another under different tax regimes?
In the setting of decisions under uncertainty, optimizing appropriate growth rates can be mapped to Laplace’s expected utility theory, (which is worked out in Peters&Gell-Mann(2016)and inspired the Copenhagen experiment).If decisions are made under Knightian uncertainty then we don't what possible states of the world are. We don't know if growth has occurred because we don't know whether Wealth has decreased. Thus, currently, we don't know if we really have grown our economy over the last hundred years. It may turn out that there are no substitutes of fossil fuel and that our current Global Income is not sustainable. We were actually burning through our Wealth, not growing at all.
Each subject, in an experiment that spanned two days, engaged in a gambling paradigm with either additive or multiplicative wealth dynamics. At the start of each day endowed with an initial wealth of 1000DKK / ~$155 (Fig. 1a), after which they took part in a passive session during which they had an opportunity to learn, via observation, the deterministic effect of fractal stimuli on their endowed wealth (Fig. 1b). On the additive day (Day+ ) the fractals caused additive changes in wealth whereas on the multiplicative day (Day´ ) the fractals caused multiplicative changes to their endowed wealth (eqs. 1-5, Supp. Fig. 1). Having repeatedly observed these contingencies, subjects subsequently engaged in an active session during which they chose between gambles composed of the same fractals (Fig. 1c, eqs. 6-9). There were four sessions in total per subject, Passive´ and Active´ occurring on Day´ ; and Passive+ and Active+ occurring on Day+ . We adopted three complementary analysis strategies. The first is model-independent in the sense that we tested whether choice frequencies change according to gamble dynamics. The second and third approaches were model-dependent insofar as we formally compare theoretical models of utility in terms of their parameter estimates, and in terms of the predictive adequacy of each utility model.What is this shit supposed to prove? People learn to use different strategies when the game varies. But that game captures nothing about Reality. These cretins assume something which isn't true about the world and then say 'if the world were like we say it is, then people would act the way we say they will because we can rig up an experiment where we pay people to play along for a couple of days.' The problem is that they then run out of grant money to pay their lab rats who go back to the real world and behave completely differently.
The growth rate contains a function that we can identify with the utility function in Laplace’s theory (not in Bernoulli’s expected utility theory, which is inconsistent).If you rig things in advance and pay people to play a game, you can prove anything you like. Laplace and Bernoulli weren't economists. They were laying the foundations of Probability theory which may be used by Decision theory but which is not itself that theory. Bernoulli was simply asserting a common sense notion of diminishing marginal utility- i.e. the notion that beyond a certain point, more of something produces smaller and smaller increments of pleasure till satiation is reached. Peters, cretin that he is, thinks this is wrong- utility can be infinite!
In other words: ergodicity economics unifies different branches of decision theory (including intertemporal discounting and expected utility theory) into one concept: growth rate maximization.No! It is worthless gibberish. Gell-Mann was a smart guy- in his field. In Economics he was a senile shithead. As for Peters, I suppose he is a child of his age.
a null model of human behavior must be that people maximize the growth rate of their wealth.Right! Coz people don't eat food or need to buy clothes. They just maxmize the growth rate of their wealth! Which planet does this cretin live on?
That means they do different things, depending on the dynamics. Let’s fix \Delta t for a moment. Under additive dynamics they’ll then optimize \Delta x, under multiplicative dynamics they’ll optimize \Delta \ln x, and under general dynamics \Delta u(x).Sure. If you say 'a null model of human behavior is that they do whatever crazy shit my model says they do' then everything else follows.
So people optimize the change in a generally non-linear function of wealth… that’s utility theory, and that’s why we called the non-linear transformation u.That's not utility theory. It is some crazy shit you cooked up. People don't want to maximize wealth. They know they will die. The plan is to have enough to enjoy your retirement and maybe leave a bit for your kids. This may mean you get a sports-car and a second wife in your fifties because that's better than being on a cruise ship with your first wife while in your seventies. People make trade-offs like this all the time. What they don't do is 'optimize the change in a generally non-linear function' which only exists in the imagination of some shithead.
Turns out, this has less to do with your idiosyncratic psychology and more to do with the dynamic to which your wealth is subjected.Why does it turn out this way? The answer is because this shithead has a 'null model' of an utterly crazy type which says you and everybody else will always behave in an utterly crazy way.
I’ll leave the extension of this treatment to a random environment as an exercise. Hint: in a deterministic environment, growth rates are constant in time. In a random environment they are ergodic (that’s why at the London Mathematical Laboratory we don’t say “utility function” but “ergodicity mapping”).So if this crazy bed-bug had said 'the null model is that human beings turn into werewolves at a rate which depends on the rapidity of the lunar cycle' then- in a deterministic environment, that rate will be constant- e.g. every 28 days. In a random environment, where full moons can occur at any time, the London Mathematical Laboratory would gas on about your 'ergodicity mappings' to being a werewolf.
The obvious problem with these arguments is that they were not concerned with the means by which these ends were to be achieved.This is not true. Liberals uphold the Rule of Law. If there has been any illegality in what the Government has done, then Liberals would question it and the Courts would take remedial action.
The telecommunications blackout, the continuous curfew, the lack of consultation, the pre-emptive arrests of political leaders, the shotgun pellet injuries reported, were ignored, regretted in passing or justified as the necessary cost of moving quickly to maintain the advantage of surprise.Each of these measures has been used in the past. Failure to take such measures could have resulted in a bloodbath. It may be that there are some actions being taken which are unnecessary or unfair. Those actions should be investigated and over zealous officials should be punished.
Such concern as these commentators did express was raised perfunctorily and in passing: the hope that this state of collective, muted house arrest would not last longer than was necessary.This was perfectly reasonable. Commentators are not important because, like Kesavan himself, they are as stupid as shit and nobody cares about their opinions or feelings. Kesavan may feel that the concerns he himself is expressing represent anything more than a perfunctory reflex of virtue signalling. Nobody else does. Rather they find his article useful only for the purpose of understanding why Indian 'public intellectuals' are so utterly useless. The reason is that they are unable to reason.
The airlifting of troops and the incarceration of an entire population in peace-time,Kashmir is a border state which has faced repeated aggression. There is nothing objectionable to air-lifting troops there. The entire population has not been incarcerated. Some politicians have been put under house arrest or preventive detention.
glossed over by raison d’etat realists in the name of the nation, ironically made the operation seem more like an imperial annexation than an assertion of national sovereignty.How things seem to Kesavan has no significance whatsoever because he is a cretin. The wonder is that he isn't babbling about Nazi storm-troopers or screaming and shitting himself about the the Spanish Inquisition.
The second elision was the willingness of these commentators to accept the legitimacy of the government’s legal manoeuvre without considering its political and constitutional implications.The Supreme Court does not seem to think there are any constitutional implications. That is why they have not listed the matter for urgent consideration. The political implications are good for Jammu and Ladakh. It remains to be seen whether it will be good for the Valley. However, internal and external security are likely to improve.
Any precedent that allows a central government to abolish a state under President’s rule and reincarnate it as a Union Territory via presidential proclamation and simple majorities in the upper and lower house of Parliament, needs more scrutiny than a thumbs-up for ingenuity. The likelihood that this move will be tested in the Supreme Court should not be an alibi for kicking the issue down the road.Yet there is no other constitutional remedy. Kesavan may believe that 'liberals' should spend prolonged periods of time screaming and shitting themselves but even if they did so only a nuisance would be created.
If the state of Jammu and Kashmir, hedged about as it was with special constitutional protections, can be reduced to a Union Territory through a constitutional sleight of hand, what prevents a central government from imposing President’s rule in West Bengal and then, with a pliant governor’s assent, bifurcating the state into the Union Territories of Gorkhaland and Dakkhin Bengal? Or Kerala into the Union Territories of Malabar and Travancore?Nothing. The Government did bifurcate Andhra Pradesh though its Legislature was against it. Kesavan may not like it but the Indian Constitution does not permit the majority in a State from ethnically cleansing a minority. Even purely economic grievances have to be resolved such that minorities are not exploited or ignored.
Even if – in fact especially if – the Supreme Court were to sign off on the constitutionality of the government’s legal manouevre, a raison d’etat realist concerned about the national interest would assess the trade-off between re-making Kashmir and de-stabilising the Centre-state balance that underwrites this union of states.Sadly, Dr. Ambedkar and the other framers of the Constitution chose to make India a unitary, not a federal, structure. A State is whatever the Union Government chooses, for reasons of administrative convenience, to be a state. There has been a continuous process of State reorganization based on linguistic and other considerations.
Liberals should scream and shit themselves constantly. That wouldn't be embarrassing for them at all.
For a liberal supporter, the most embarrassing thing about the reasons for reading down 370 was that they were pro-consular arguments.
They accepted that the people of Jammu and Kashmir had to be coercively excluded from a decision that transformed their lives.If the majority of the people in a State want to kill or chase away the minority, they must be coercively excluded from doing so. India is a Democracy under the Rule of Law.
The average Sangh supporter might embrace this position since it is consistent with his view of restive frontier populations as subjects to be disciplined, not citizens to be consulted, but it isn’t a comfortable stance for a commentator whose public persona is neither authoritarian nor majoritarian.To get comfortable, such commentators should scream and shit themselves incessantly.
For these liberals a useful way of deflecting the charge that they were advocating a colonial re-making of Kashmir was to argue that it was a mistake to conflate the districts of the Kashmir valley with the districts that made up the state of Jammu and Kashmir. Building on this point these commentators cited the populations of Jammu and Ladakh as equal stake-holders in J&K’s future and argued that they were enthusiastic supporters of the abolition of 370 and the re-ordering of the state’s political geography.They may be even more enthusiastic supporters of becoming the 51st state of the United States of America. But, that option is not on offer. Being a State in the Union of India is a privilege not a right. A badly run State can be degraded to a Union Territory so that the police become independent of corrupt or criminialised politicians.
Implicitly (and often explicitly), Jammu and Ladakh were used as placeholders for “Hindu” and “Buddhist”. The bifurcation of the state is celebrated as the liberation of a Buddhist region from the overbearing Muslim politics of Kashmir’s valley. It’s worth pointing out here – if only because this fact has been glossed over so often in political commentary in recent days – that Buddhists are not the largest religious community in Ladakh. That would be Muslims who account for 46% of Ladakh’s population. Buddhists make up 40% of Ladakh’s population.But Hindus comprise the rest and Hindus revere Buddhism. It has never been the case that Hindu temples exclude Buddhists or vice versa.
Ladakh is made up of two districts, Kargil and Leh, which are predominantly Muslim and Buddhist respectively. The majority alluded to in recent commentary is, in fact, not a Buddhist majority but a Buddhist-Hindu majority, a civilisational coalition harnessed in recent times to do in South Asia the ideological work that Judeo-Christian has done for decades elsewhere.Bullshit! It is a fact that many of the great Buddhist savant-Saints were of Brahman origin. Buddhist Kings- like the present monarch of Thailand- employ Brahman purohits.
In a democracy, political opinions shouldn’t be read off a region’s religious demography; they should be expressed in a legislative assembly.This has been done. However, if the legislature in a State or Union Territory is dysfunctional, President's rule can be imposed. No State has any vestige of sovereignty in itself- as the Supreme Court has clarified with respect to J&K.
Since Jammu and Kashmir’s assembly stands dissolved and replaced by President’s rule, these commentators must necessarily endorse the government’s ingenious thesis that the governor of the state can be a proxy for its legislative assembly and, by extension, its people.It is the Supreme Court which has clarified this. Commentators don't matter. They can say anything that comes into their heads. The Supreme Court is the only authority which can interpret the Constitution in a manner that has the force of Law.
Commentary of this sort can be plausibly produced and consumed only by green-screening the political context in which 370 was gutted.God alone knows what Kesavan is getting at. The plain fact is that commentators are shit. Every asshole can produce commentary. Kesavan is welcome to consume this shit. Nobody else will.
The political context for this abolition is the BJP’s concerted attempt to discipline and diminish Indian Muslims.This is Kesavan's view- but he is too stupid and ignorant to be able to come up with a plausible narrative for other people to consider.
TThis is perfectly reasonable. Non-Muslims were ethnically cleansed and thus are refugees or the descendants of refugees. Muslims were not ethnically cleansed. They are not refugees or the descendants of refugees.
Should the Citizenship Amendment Bill be passed by Parliament (as it likely will), and should the National Register become an all India Inquisition with a cell in every state (as Amit Shah has promised), all citizens will be required to document their claim to citizenship, but only Muslims will be proceeded against should they fail to satisfy the National Register of Citizens because non-Muslims will have been amnestied by the provisions of the Citizenship Amendment Bill.
What the Harayana CM said was in the context of restoring the states sex-ratio by pro-women schemes.
The nonchalance that marked the lynching of Muslim men in the name of cow protection was matched by the lewd enthusiasm with which a BJP chief minister and BJP legislators read the abolition of 370 as a sign that Kashmiri women were now available to North Indian men.
Given this context it shouldn’t be hard for a dispassionate observer to see that the dissolution of India’s single Muslim-majority state is a majoritarian government’s way of bringing a recalcitrant Muslim population to heel.A dispassionate observer would note that Muslim majorities have ethnically cleansed non-Muslims in the region. They would see that only the Valley is Muslim majority. However, for economic reasons, it is still yoked to Hindu majority Jammu. Thus the Union Territory of J&K will still be Muslim majority. However, local politicians won't be able to use the police to terrorize Hindus.
That so many of these commentators manage to unsee the elephant in the room should worry their readers.Why? Commentators are worthless fools. We read them to make fun of them.
Commentators supportive of the government’s evisceration of 370 but keen to establish their secular credentials danced a three-step minuet: they started by calling out the BJP’s motives in dissolving the one Muslim majority state in the Union as communal; they then laid out the benefits that the dissolution would, nevertheless, bring, and concluded by urging the BJP to manage the transition wisely by setting aside its communal agenda.It doesn't matter if they danced a minuet or performed bharat natyam. Nobody gives a shit about these shitheads.
This is disingenuous. If you endorse a majoritarian government’s stealthy sleight of hand in gutting Section 370, you endorse the means that it will use because everything in its history and the history of Kashmir tells you that collective brutality will follow. You can’t let a wolf into a pen and then urge it to act like a collie.If you don't endorse a legal move by a democratic government you are saying that there is a defect in the Constitution. You would then need to make a proper legal argument. Screaming and shitting yourself won't cut it.
In the opinion of another Babu who babbles about minuets.
Nirupama Menon Rao, formerly foreign secretary and now a passionate advocate of Amit Shah’s initiative, wrote a column justifying it that ended with these lines: “Kashmir must be drawn away from the precipice, with humane and judicious calibration, bringing the prodigal back into the family fold. We must borrow from both Kautilya and post-Kalinga Ashoka.” This mess of mangled metaphors, cliché and pedantry, written up in High Babu, is the strain of having it both ways starting to show.
Christine Fair, a South Asian strategic studies specialist, was an early supporter of the government’s move on social media and more recently wrote an essay setting out her understanding of the issue. Her conclusion is similar to Rao’s, only more exhortatory:So Kesavan wants India to give up Kashmir. Why does he not say so? Is he afraid that someone might bring a petition to a Magistrate asking for Kesavan to be tried for sedition?
“If India genuinely wants to mainstream Kashmiris, this effort cannot begin and end with this legal sleight of hand. India must follow through with the various commitments to develop the state and to extend all of the rights of privileges of Indian citizenship to the residents. Should it fail to do so, Pakistan will be loitering like a hyena waiting to pounce upon the injured carcass of Kashmir.”
Fair’s itemisation of the government of India’s responsibilities towards Kashmiris is unreal. A government that is about to amend a law to smuggle in a religious test for citizenship that targets Muslims across India isn’t likely to commit itself to vesting Kashmiri Muslims with the “…rights of privileges [sic] of Indian citizenship…” Besides, Kashmir-as-carcass makes Pakistan’s intentions moot: a carcass, injured or otherwise, is dead.
Scholars, intellectuals and public figures intervening in policy controversies deserve our attention. Kuldeep Nayar is remembered for his opposition to the Emergency. Nikhil Wagle’s consistent critique of the criminalisation of Maharashtra’s politics has a place of honour in the history of Indian journalism. Gauri Lankesh is a larger than life figure today because she was murdered for her commitment to free speech and a secular politics. The dark side has its own heroes. There’s no shortage of Indians queueing up for a star in Hindutva’s Hall of Fame. The ranks of Modi’s willing enablers are massively oversubscribed. As the old classified ads might have put it, “Liberals need not apply.”What about M.J Akbar? He was a more important figure than Wagle or Lankesh. Furthemore, he was elected to Parliament on a Congress ticket. He doesn't seem to be doing too badly in Modi's Government. If he falls it will not be because of his Religion.
The first major political crime committed in the Valley occurred exactly 66 years ago.A crime is an unlawful act. A political crime is an unlawful act whose purpose is political.
In August 1953, the elected chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir, Sheikh Abdullah, was deposed from his position, and sent to prison.Deposition was a lawful act of the Government of Kashmir & its Head of State, the Sadar-i-Riyasat, Karan Singh (who seems to approve Modi's recent masterstroke) because Abdullah had lost the confidence of the Sadar's Cabinet. Why? He had dismissed Health Minister, Pandit Saraf who refused to go and who mobilized other malcontnents like Girdharilal Dogra. However, it was Bakshi Ghulam Mohmammad's support which was crucial.
For five years he languished in jail, without any charges being brought against him.This was legal precisely because India's laws, in this respect, did not extend to J&K.
In 1958, the Sheikh was briefly released, but then jailed again, for a further five years. This time, charges were brought against him, of his being a Pakistani agent.By whom? Bakshi Ghulam Muhammad- Abdullah's own former comrade and Deputy Prime Minister. Bakshi was right. Abdullah was a loose canon. He was playing into the hands of Pakistan. His stupidity prevented he himself gaining the protections embodied in the Indian Constitution. Bakshi was quite an able administrator and has been called the architect of modern Kashmir. He understood that Abdullah had alienated the Hindus and the Buddhists and that his 'Socialist' measures had run aground because he did not have the foresight to replace the traditional financial system with co-operative banks with the result that the poorer class of agriculturalists were going to the wall.
These were both laughable and contemptible, for while the Sheikh wavered between being pro-India and being pro-Azadi, he never remotely had any attachment to the State of Pakistan, because he believed that Hindus and Sikhs had exactly the same rights as Muslims.The charges against Abdullah were not 'laughable and contemptible'. They were correct. Jinnah may have believed Hindus and Sikhs would have had exactly the same rights as Muslims in Pakistan- but that's not how things had turned out, as everybody could see. Abdullah was engaging in fantasy. He had completely alienated the Hindus and Buddhists. J&K would break up. The Hindu politicians of Jammu would be fine because in India politicians get all the power. The Muslim politicians of the Valley would be displaced by Pakistani Civil Servants and Military officers because there was no way this small and impoverished territory could go it alone. Who would protect it from a 'tribal' incursion? From the Pakistani point of view, Abdullah was a 'useful idiot'. But he was useless from the Kashmiri point of view. In India, the Left gained by pretending to champion him while the Hindu Right gained by depicting him as seditious because, everybody knew, he was Nehru's chum. But, Abdullah was useless to his own people and they gained by his incarceration.
It was India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, who sanctioned the shameful and illegal arrest of Kashmir’s elected CM.No. It was sanctioned by the Sadar-i-Riyasat of J&K at the prompting of the Cabinet of the State which, after Abdullah's dismissal, was headed by his own Deputy, Bakshi Ghulam Mohammad. Delhi insiders say that it was Kidwai who pulled the trigger, not Nehru.
In April 1964, Nehru had a belated change of heart, and released the Sheikh.This was foolish. Given the fallout from the Hazratbal incident the previous year, Pakistan's Ayub Khan believed that this was Delhi's way of signalling that India was ready to give up the Valley- which was a nuisance because its people were superstitious cretins- so as to concentrate on the Chinese threat. This precipitated the 1965 war which greatly imperiled the status of Indian Muslims. But that is why Kidwai had pulled the trigger on Abdullah. His fantasies were helpful only to Pakistan, not Kashmir. If Abdullah prevailed, Pakistan would gobble up the Valley and the Hindus would go to town on the Muslims in the rest of India. Indeed, the 'Custodian of Enemy Property' did harass some loyal Indian Muslims. The father, in Salman Rushdie's novel 'Midnight's Children', was harassed in this way. Indeed, that is why Rushdie had to leave his beloved Bombay.
Tragically, after Nehru’s death, the Sheikh was jailed again, and kept there for another seven years, as ordered first by Lal Bahadur Shastri, and then by Indira Gandhi.How was this tragic? It was salutary for Indian Muslims. Moreover, Muslims of the Valley had shown courage against Pakistani infiltrators while the Indian Army could boast of exemplary valor on the part of Muslim soldiers against the foreign foe.
He was finally freed in 1972, a broken man, prepared to deal with New Delhi on any terms that New Delhi demanded.Why 1972? Guha doesn't tell us. The answer is that India had defeated and dismembered Pakistan.
In the years that their popularly elected leader was in jail, a deep sense of alienation permeated Jammu and Kashmir.If so, why didn't the Valley support the Pakistani infiltrators? It is a different matter that sensible people like having a choice of political parties and even a cretin can be a good figure-head for one such.
The distrust of New Delhi’s motives grew further in the 1960s and 1970s, as Congress governments at the Centre rigged elections and promoted corruption.Dynastic parties are corrupt. That is true. However, ideological parties can be cretinous. That is why Communism has all but disappeared. By contrast, a meritocratic political party with a 'good Governance' agenda can succeed. Modi has delivered J&K from thralldom to corrupt and incompetent dynasties which instrumentalize terrorism for political gain. They run with the hares and hunt with the hounds. As a Union Territory, J&K's administration can improve. The Police can do their job without worrying about the dynasts.
A brief window of hope was provided by Prime Minister Morarji Desai of the Janata Party, who in 1978 oversaw the first fair election in the Valley.Did J&K make great strides between 1978 and '82 (when Abdullah died)? No. Zia's hanging of Bhutto hurt the Kashmiri branch of Jamaat but with the beginning of the Afghan insurgency their stock would rise over the next decade. The Abdullah dynasty lived cocooned in its own fantasy world. Abdullah made his son, Farooq, his heir though he was a novice. This put Abdullah's son-in-law, the highly experienced G.M Shah, nose out of joint. Thus it was inevitable that the Party would split along factionalist lines.
But then, in 1980, the Congress returned to power, and the mischief began afresh. In 1983, Indira Gandhi used underhand means to unseat an elected state government.Guha is a historian. Historians are supposed to know the dates of important events. He doesn't. He says Farooq Abdullah was toppled in '83. Actually, it was '84. Indira played a part in it, to be sure, but it was G.M Shah, Farooq's brother-in-law, who was the prime mover.
Four years later, her son, Rajiv Gandhi, oversaw a blatantly rigged election. The leaders who fought and should have won some seats (had fairness prevailed) in that election went in disgust across the border, from where they began their jihad in 1989.So, they had to cross the border to begin their jihad. They couldn't do it while sitting in the Legislature and ordering the Police to turn a blind eye.
When Atal Bihari Vajpayee became prime minister in 1998, he had to deal with this long history of alienation and distrust in Kashmir. He sought to overcome it by supervising a free election in the state, by suggesting a bus link between the two divided parts of Kashmir, and by extending a hand of friendship to the people of the Valley.In other words, he did a deal with the Abdullah dynasty which made a lot of money as a result. This changed nothing as far as the Valley was concerned because that wealth did not trickle down.
Vajpayee offered humanity, democracy and pluralism as the three pillars of his government’s policy.No. He let the dynasty hold high posts so they could enrich themselves and their cronies.
His approach was in striking contrast to that of previous Congress governments, which had used corruption and factionalism to divide the people, and State power to suppress them.What else could Atal do? He needed the Abdullah's to prop up his coalition. But there were plenty of other corrupt dynastic satraps in his administration. India was shining only for the purpose of unjust enrichment. That is why Atal got the order of the boot.
In their own brute use of State power, Narendra Modi and Amit Shah have followed the playbook of Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi in Kashmir.In other words, Modi & Shah have followed the playbook of the Union of India since its inception and in every subsequent decade. However, in contrast to the past, their actions are scrupulously legal and wholly transparent. No corrupt deal has been struck. Parliamentary votes have not been traded for juicy sinecures or offices of unjust enrichment.
The abrogation of Article 370, they tell us, is in the best interests of the people of Kashmir, yet those very people are given absolutely no say in how that decision is made.On the contrary, those very people have absolutely as much say as any other Indian in that their elected representatives have a vote on the matter. Guha may not like the fact that the Constitution of India is unitary and that it is entirely a matter for the Union Government to decide what is or is not a State or Union territory. However, he has been calling for 'Constitutional patriotism' for quite some time now. Yet, at the first hurdle, he has become seditious to the Constitution of India and the intention of its framers.
The government converts the Valley into the largest prison in Indian history, where eight million people are shut up, their landlines and mobiles silenced, their access to food and medicines restricted.India was the largest prison in Indian history during the Emergency- when there was no external threat to the country. Currently, there is a clear external threat to Kashmir. What has been done is perfectly legal and justified by the circumstances. It does not amount to incarceration. Guha's hyperbole is of the Huccha Venkat type. It is hysterical and has no basis in fact.
Even former chief ministers are placed under arrest (in a chilling echo of August 1953).Only politicians who might pose a danger to public safety, or themselves be in danger, have been placed under house arrest. Guha is pretending that everybody- even ex CMs- has been arrested. He lives in a fantasy world.
Thousands of troops are flown in to make an already militarised zone look ever more like an occupied territory.Because this 'militarized zone' is under threat of external aggression. There are also a lot of troops in strategically important border areas. When the external threat increases, the number of troops increase. Britain had a lot of troops along its coast when Hitler was menacing its liberty. No doubt, Nazi propagandists- like Lord Haw Haw- represented this as a sign that the U.K was occupied by the minions of the Jewish plutocracy. Why is Guha, an Indian citizen, playing the part of a Lord Haw Haw?
What happened in Kashmir last week bodes ill for Indian democracy.No it doesn't. It is an expression of Indian democracy. Either things in J&K will improve or some other expedient will have to be sought for.
Laws outlive themselves, and might have to be modified or changed. However, the people who are to be affected by the change must be trusted, respected, and heard.They are trusted to vote for people who will give utterance to their voice in Parliament. There is a right to emigrate. But there is no right to secession. Guha's 'Constitutional Patriotism' entails this view.
I wish the President himself had thought a little before signing so blindly on the dotted line.The President is thoughtful. He is a former Supreme Court advocate. Guha is not thoughtful. He writes any shit that comes into his head and doesn't bother to read over what he writes and check his dates. He says here that Farooq Abdullah was toppled in '83. People my age remember it happened in '84. Guha was in India at the time. Why does he alone have a defective memory in this respect? The answer is that he is stupid and ignorant. In this, he is quite different from President Kovind.
He knew that millions of citizens whom this law would impact had been silenced beforehand.Nonsense! He knew that some Muslims in the Valley would fear this move and would say so in more or less hysterical terms such that Public Order would be put at risk. Thus his Home Minister took precautionary measures which, so far, have proved adequate.
Could he not have returned the order, and asked for a wider consultation in Kashmir, and with Kashmiris, before it was introduced in Parliament?No. Not if he was interested in upholding his oath of office. He is not required to pander to cretins like Guha. He has to put the interests of the country and the observance of the Constitution of India above any merely personal interest in how his actions are perceived.
Those Indians exulting at what just happened in Kashmir might reflect a little on the awful precedent it has set.Very true. The awful precedent is that corrupt, incompetent, dynasts who instrumentalize criminality can be disintermediated from Governance. Democracy does not necessarily mean being trapped in a shit-hole.
This abuse of State power to shut up and immobilise citizens could happen next to your district, your province, your leaders, your children.If your district, your province, your leaders or your children want to ethnically cleanse minorities or to accede to a country based on ethnic cleansing, then the State does not abuse its power in anyway by taking stern measures.
I concur entirely with Pratap Bhanu Mehta when he writes, about the government now in office: “This is a state that will make a mockery of democracy and deliberation. This is a state whose psychological principle is fear. This is a state that will make ordinary citizens cannon fodder for its warped nationalist pretensions”.The rest of us concur entirely that Guha, Mander, Mehta and other such 'public intellectuals' who were the Dynasty's 'useful idiots' are idiots, certainly, but wholly useless.
We have been warned.Guha & Co were warned that their 'long march through the Institutions' had ended in not just irrelevance but downright silliness. They ignored the warning. Now they are foaming at the mouth, the Academic disciplines, or University Departments, they represent are seen as utterly rabid.
This is because — for all the other parallels I began this column with — in one critical respect, 2019 is not 1992. This is that the government now in power in New Delhi is far more vindictive and vengeful than the one that was in power when the Babri Masjid was demolished.That party was the Congress party which opposed the demolition of the Masjid. Condemning the enemy of the ruling party is a means to curry favor with it. Guha, being a historian, may not be aware that the Prime Minister at that time was Narasimha Rao who, like it or not, was Sonia's second choice- after Shankar Dayal Sharma turned her down- for the office of P.M.
When Bharat Ram and Lalit Thapar were approached by Dharma Kumar, they did not think that the fate of the tens of thousands of workers they employed would be put at risk by the mere act of their signing a statement.How could the fate of either Ram or Thapar's enterprises be put at risk? Congress was in power. These rich men were attacking the BJP because it was the enemy of Congress. Thus they were currying favor with the Ruling party.
But were I to approach their counterparts today, even if they entirely approved of what I was trying to do, they would be too scared to sign on. They would have feared retribution, in the form of unannounced raids, cooked-up cases, arrests, and worse.They would fear being associated by a Huccha Venkat type cretin who does not understand that Congress was ruling in 1992 when the BJP broke the law and thus it was a smart move to condemn the BJP for doing something illegal because the ruling party would reward such behavior. Now, by contrast, the ruling party has done something which is perfectly legal. Why condemn it? What has been done is for the good of the country. Guha may not like it, but he is a fool. Why pander to this cretin? Tomorrow, he may demand you sign a letter saying Modi must convert to Islam to show his secular credentials. The day after, he may suddenly discover that he is not himself a Muslim and thus he might try to bite his own foreskin off so as to remedy a defect his ancestral religion has saddled him with.
