Prof. Shruti Kapila, whose agon, or contest, is with Facie Devji as to which of them is the bigger imbecile, has a paper titled
Ambedkar’s Agonism, Sovereign Violence and Pakistan as Peace On December 16, 1946, in his initial response to Jawaharlal’s Nehru’s famous Objectives Resolution that had declared India a sovereign republic,
No. It said India would become one after transitioning through Dominion status.
B. R. Ambedkar found the prospective claim on India’s future form as ‘uncontroversial’ if ‘disappointing’. Asked to respond to it by Rajendra Prasad who was chairing the freshly formed Constituent Assembly, Ambedkar recognized Nehru’s proclamation as akin to the Declaration of Rights of the French Constitution as it focused on ‘rights’ to the exclusion of ‘remedies’ and chose in return to invoke and cite the French revolution’s fiercest critic and the figurehead of British conservatism, Edmund Burke.
Ambedkar meant that instead of an 'equality clause' there should have been a 'remove inequality clause' which would then have been the basis of justiciable remedies. However, this would have enabled Muslim Dalits to gain benefits received by Hindu Dalits (which they had previously received). Thus, he quoted Burke and let the matter drop.
Pirating figures from the canon of modern politics either as evidence, caution or for insight into the future political formation of India had been one of the striking signatures of Ambedkar’s wide-ranging writings.
'Pirating'? Is this woman mad? A barrister who had been a member of the Viceroy's Executive Council and who was India's Law minister had every right to quote Burke. This was not theft or piracy. It was what was expected. Why is Kapila calling a learned and venerable man a 'pirate'? Is it because he was born a Dalit?
This was not, however, to seek the preservation of an old order or even to right remedies that he indeed instituted by drafting the Indian constitution.
Did remedies Ambekar instituted need to be 'righted'? If so they were maladies, not remedies.
But by invoking Burke, Ambedkar alerted to the dangers of war and violence in its force and ability to degrade, waste and even consume the very object of contest.
But the law is not a matter of 'war and violence'. Ambedkar was not a pirate. He helped draft the Indian Constitution which is about the Rule of Law, not killing and raping.
Drawing attention to the Muslim League’s absence from the Assembly, Ambedkar clarified that the stakes of Hindu and Muslim relations portended war and peace with a potential of perpetual war that could render the object of recovery – namely India – becoming entirely consumed by violence.
Ambedkar and his pal Mandal backed a Muslim-Dalit alliance. They were to be sadly disappointed. Both lost political salience. Hindu majority India did not become consumed by violence. It stripped Muslims of reserved seats and, in places, ethnically cleansed them.
Ambedkar concluded his short intervention by warning his assembled political peers of their own fantasies.
Yet it was he and Mandal- who was Jinnah's Law Minister but was forced to flee to India- who were the fantasists.
Ambedkar said-
If there is anybody who has in mind the project of solving the Hindu Muslim problem by force, which is another name of solving it by war, in order that the Muslims may be subjugated and made to surrender to the Constitution that might be prepared without their consent, this country would be involved in perpetually conquering them. This conquest would not be once and forever.
He wasn't laughed at because he was merely a politician whose strategy had failed. The Muslims weren't going to pamper Dalits. They ethnically cleansed Namasudras like Mandal though they did prevent scavengers from leaving.
While his warning was met with silence on that occasion,
because all politicians were saying stupid shit at that time.
Ambedkar’s views ought to have been familiar given that only a few years prior to this Assembly and in 1940 he had published his disquisition on the prospect of Pakistan. The reaction in the Assembly conformed to the reception of this earlier explication of his ideas on Pakistan.
He was dismissed as a crackpot. Still, he was useful to the British and being a sound enough lawyer did some worthwhile 'hackwork' (his own description) on the Constitution. Then he faded from political salience and thus had to reinvent himself as a Boddhisattva. Thanks to Mayawati, he is now a Hindu god.
In the second edition of Pakistan or the Partition of India, published in 1945, Ambedkar reprised what was by his own admission the ‘singular’ nature of his enterprise. His book was ‘disowned by the Hindus and unowned by the Muslims’, which only emboldened his claim to nonpartisanship regarding a viscerally divisive idea and history.
Ambedkar's political significance is negative. He represents the failed and always bound to fail notion that a Muslim-Dalit alliance can turn Hindus into a minority in their own country.
Although much belated, Ambedkar’s book on the idea of Pakistan is today enjoying a new kind of attention.
From cretins.
Above all, the book stands, as demonstrated in Faisal Devji’s Muslim Zion, as a testament to the triangulated history of the formation of Pakistan in that it was conditioned by the caste question inasmuch as by the internationalization of the minority, thus refreshingly enabling the understanding of the formation of Pakistan as an idea that cannot be exhausted by or fully equated with the question of religion.
This is illiterate garbage. Pakistan got shot of Mandal. It had no interest in helping Dalits. The country was founded on Religion and nothing else.
For the more literal minded, it continues to be marshaled –- much as it was in the defining decade of its initial publication -- as evidence that functions as proof in a lawyer’s case prosecuted by the historian for or against partition.
Ambedkar was wholly irrelevant. Mandal did help keep Sylhet for Pakistan- a mistake he was soon to regret.
In focusing primarily on Ambedkar, this article will reconstruct and interpret the work of hostility and antagonism that was central to his political thought and writings.
Kapila is saying Ambedkar was full of hostility and hatred. That's all you can find in his 'political' thought and writing. Many would agree, but they wouldn't dare so so- more especially if they are academics. Still, a woman who can call Ambedkar a pirate can also say he was motivated by rancor and envy.
As a thinker, Ambedkar remained singular in taking account of the full and potential measure of violence predominantly in caste relations but beyond in the comparative contexts of revolutions and formations of nation-states in the modern world.
Which person, at the end of the Second World War didn't take account of the 'full potential' of violence? There was massive ethnic cleansing all over the world- not just parts of India. But it had no permanent consequences because Hindu India was stronger- if it wanted to be- than its Muslim neighbor.
As I have elaborated elsewhere, Ambedkar’s idea of the political radically appraised the question of social antagonism and converted inherent hostility and the potentiality of violence into institutionalised competition, thus converting antagonists into adversaries.
An 'adversary' whose head is kicked in ceases to be any such thing. However, there may be economic or political competition- but this happens even between members of the same family. Incidentally, the dictionary tells us that adversary means the same thing as antagonist. Mummy and the baby may be antagonists on specific issues- e.g when baby wants to eat mud and wails loudly when prevented from doing so- but they love each other. They aren't really enemies.
In this sense and in short, Ambedkar’s idea of the political converted antagonism into agonism, a central theme of this article.
The central theme of this article is based on ignorance of the English language. Antagonism is the same thing as agonism. Where there is a conflict- even a friendly one- the two sides are said to be against each other.
The political here refers to the consideration and the domain of power, conflict and antagonism
which is embedded in institutions. By contrast the domain of power, conflict and antagonism which is concerned with elves and orcs is not 'political'. It is fictitious.
rather than to either the institutional management or representation of ‘interests’ commonly understood as ‘politics’
because that's something real not bullshit.
or even as the domain of deliberation and freedom associated with a wide range of traditions from classical liberalism to Hannah Arendt.
only if that deliberation is concerned with real things- e.g. Parliaments and Courts and Economic policies.
Strikingly, Ambedkar’s book on Pakistan recognised such a distinction between the political and politics.
Nonsense! The man wasn't utterly stupid. There is no distinction between the two. Science deals with what is Scientific. One may say 'I do Science' instead of 'I am engaged in Scientific Research'.
At one register, it documented the detail of contentions that have gone down in history and historiography as ‘bargaining counters’ between dominant protagonists and parties ranging from a piece of territory to institutional mechanics and representation.
Because politics has to be about stuff that really is political- i.e. is concerned with 'pieces of territory' and the institutions they contain and who controls those institutions etc.
Suffused as these were with the instrumentality of interest, and even as Ambedkar assiduously recorded the contentious views and issues of all parties, he rightly asserted that the book was not simply ‘the X, Y, Z of Pakistan.’
Because it was a silly polemical work which, however, was quite topical. Ambedkar and Mandal hoped that the Dalits could raise their bargaining power by allying with the Muslims who, however, were only concerned with pumping and dumping them. Mayawati's success flowed from a Brahmin-Dalit alliance while Mulayam 'Mullah' Singh Yadav gained from an OBC-Muslim alliance. But such alliances are fragile.
In a related register, Ambedkar’s book sought to provide an analytical and conceptual framework for the issue of Muslim nationality in relation to the political with the sub-title of the book The Indian Political What’s What indeed betraying its intentions in as many words. In his own words then the ‘analytical presentation’ of the book intended ‘to explain the A, B, C of Pakistan.’ The following discussion will engage
only with Kapila's own stupidity. She doesn't understand why it was in Ambedkar's interest to write as he did. The fellow wasn't a crazy 'pirate'. He was a very smart man who, however, had backed the wrong horse.
primarily with the second aspect elaborating the horizons of hostility, the potentiality of war and the promise of Pakistan as peace.
This is stupid shit. There was only one question in 1947- after the Muslim League's convincing victory in Muslim seats the previous year- would Bengal and Punjab break up? The answer was yes because Hindus and Sikhs genuinely hated and feared Muslim domination. This was a bad outcome only for the League which drew most of its support from people who ended up on the wrong side of the border. That's why Pakistan could not have a proper General Election till 1970- after which it promptly broke in two.
Ambedkar was a preeminent nonviolent thinker precisely because he
was no such thing. He may have hoped that in Bengal, Dalits and Muslims might be able to dominate the High Caste Hindus but he knew no such thing was possible in Bombay Presidency etc.
understood the full measure, potential and consequences of violence.
Nonsense! He didn't know about atom bombs and V2 missiles. He was a lawyer with advanced degrees in Economics.
Crucially, unlike his global and historical interlocutors
an interlocutor has to be alive. Kapila means the thinkers who influenced Ambedkar but who couldn't actually talk to him coz they were dead.
whether it was constitutional experts or Karl Marx, the nation became the identified container of the political in the form of an agnonistic and radical democracy.
Fuck is agnonistic? This silly woman does not seem to understand that there was no 'radical democracy' anywhere then, nor is there any such thing anywhere now. Nations have no magical power to 'contain' radical or 'agonistic' ideas. Thus Pan-Islamism crosses borders as do various other creeds- e.g. Fascism, Communism etc.
As opposed to cosmopolitanism for which ‘humanity’ is the basis of political ethics and universal horizon,
Kapila's English is terrible. You can take the girl out of Punjab but universal horizon is basising her all the time due to cosmopolitanism and 'humanity'- as opposed to such manatees as are found in the ocean.
for democracy ‘the people’ or popular sovereignty remains the basic unit of politics.
Whereas in Punjab, bullocks are having vote due to universal horizon is basising them innit?
Ambedkar’s agonism was constitutively elaborated
in other words that pirate's crazy hostility infected his paranoid screed
and attached to the question of nationality in this crucial sense rather than to any universalistic framework or human rights and is most clearly elaborated in his book on Pakistan inasmuch as it was by his disquisitions on caste.
Ambedkar, like Gandhi, was a political--------- crackpot. Both came a cropper because it turned out Muslims were not interested in allying with them.
Moreover, unlike his political rival Mahtama Gandhi, Ambedkar’s political vision was staked on the reproductive capacity of political ideas through an institutional design in which the subject -- national and dalit -- was embedded in popular sovereignty.
No. Both were foolish enough to think they'd play a big role thanks to Muslims allying with them rather than pumping and dumping them. Once it was obvious that India would be Hindu or else merely a geographical expression, both lost salience. Ambedkar, it must be said, had intellectual distinction and so would have been kept on in the Cabinet to do 'hackwork'.
Agonism or the recognition of hostile distinctions as opposed to their violent eradication or willful neglect, in effect became the nonviolent condition for the life of the Indian nation and democracy.
No it didn't. There was ethnic cleansing and partition. Muslims got short shrift in Hindu dominated India. Ambedkar was cool with Muslim Dalits losing reservations and other benefits.
While cognizant of extant discussions on agonism in relation to democracy and liberalism, this essay departs from those perspectives in its focus on modern India.
Of which Kapila is sensationally ignorant because she is as stupid as shit.
For the modern West, the question of agonism has re-emerged after its initial reckoning by Nietzsche to dislodge the coercive emphasis of consensus in the so-called ‘post political’ era of globalization and late-capitalism, enabling the recognition of distinctions and promising to renew liberal democracy.
Bullshit! For the contemporary West, agonism is wokeness gone mad. It resulted in things like Brexit and the extinction of the Left in France and Trump's apotheosis in America. Who would have thought that Bernie bros would end up voting for Biden?
By contrast, the considerations of distinction --especially in their potential for and forms of antagonism and hostility --framed the political foundations of India.
Those foundations were and are Hindu. Any non-Hindu majority area is secessionist to some degree.
In short, whether it was a Gandhi or an Ambedkar the consideration of violence in the context of distinctions whether of caste or religion remained
utterly unimportant. If a minority plays up, it gets its head kicked in.
pre-eminent and constitutive rather than one that emerged as an after-effect of a history of consensus.
Perhaps Kapila's views are colored by the Khalistani violence in Punjab. The rest of India doesn't really have much political violence.
Moreover, and significantly, the question of enmity or even antagonism was defined by intimacy and familiarity rather than the externality of the category of the foreigner -- however fabricated or invented -- as the potential enemy or oppositional figure that has animated modern political thought elsewhere and primarily in the modern West.
Again, this may be a Punjabi thing. There is a story about three friends- one Sikh, one Hindu, one Muslim- who lived together in perfect amity prior to partition. Then the ethnic cleansing began. The price of a virgin from another religion dropped dramatically because of all the abduction that was going on. Thus these three friends could no longer make a living by pimping out each other's sisters. Sadly, they had to separate and get jobs to earn a little money.
Nevertheless, the resurrection of the controversial works and ideas of Carl Schmitt on the dimensions of the political in the contemporary appraisal of both democracy and Communism on a global stage is undeniable.
This is a stupid availability cascade confined to cretins. Agamben with his anti-Covid lockdown antics, has knocked the bottom out of it.
To clarify, for Schmitt antagonism oriented the political horizon that was staked on the distinction of the friend and the enemy with the possible and real destruction of the enemy as its condition.
That cretin thought Nazism was cool. After the War, he discovered it was so not cool, dude. Should of stuck to Catholicism innit?
While the salience of antagonism for the political domain is integrated but the departure with Schmitt lies here primarily as for him homogeneity and unity are not only inter-changeable but are also the ultimate ends of order and sovereignty.
Very true. Schmitt's arsehole wasn't just united by his body to his mouth, it was actually homogeneous with his mouth. He could use his anus to eat while pooping out of his lips.
He concluded his famous book The Concept of the Political quoting Virgil’s verse ‘ab integro nascitur ordo’ (‘from unity/integrity/homogeneity order is born’).
Virgil's line is
- Magnus ab integro saeclorum nascitur ordo. 'The great order of the ages is born afresh'. At one time Schmitt was hopeful that a 'New Order' would be born in Europe- once it was ruled by Germany. Integro means 'to renew, restore, make whole' or 'start from scratch and recreate'. It does not mean 'unity' or 'integrity' or 'homogeneity'. Babies are born due to Daddies and Mummies are not homogenous. Daddy is having a pee pee which is he putting in Mummies hoo ha. True, things may be different in the Punjab. A homogenous gentleman may be giving birth due to he has high integrity. That is the true reason Sonia Ji was firing Amarinder. She had been reading Schmitt who in later life came to this pessimistic conclusion-
stat pro ratione Libertas e Novitas pro Libertate. (Freedom replaces Reason; Novelty replaces. Freedom.)
The Indian political by its very conditions of heterogeneity
e.g Daddy having pee-pee while Mummy has hoo-ha. Thankfully, Kapila is now living in Engyland where everybody agrees BoJo is big twat.
and division militated against the mounting of sovereignty towards a homogenous end while retaining a focus on unity.
Unless we accept that the place has a 80 percent Hindu majority and Hindus have no problem with a Nationalism based on anti-casteist Hindutva.
Ambedkar’s agonism became a salient precept
How?
and his critique of Vinayak Savarkar’s Hindutva in this context, discussed below, remains instructive.
The silly man didn't like Hinduism and so decided it didn't really exist. Then he became a Boddhisattva and Mayawati built a lot of pilgrimage sites for him and so he is now a Hindu god firmly associated with Ganesha (because Mayawati liked statues of elephants) despite the fact that Ambedkar detested Ganesh and Hanuman and Hindus.
Precisely because Ambedkar’s political thought was animated by
nothing but his hatred of Hinduism.
questions of antagonism in relation to sovereignty or even unity, Pakistan and its consideration proved to be inescapable.
Savarkar had noted that the population exchange between Turkey and Greece was on the basis of religion not language. Thus he adjusted his idea of Nationalism. So did Liaquat and Jinnah. There would be a bigger 'hijrat'. But this left the League's biggest supporters on the wrong side of the border. Congress didn't care greatly about Hindu minorities because the vast majority of Hindus lived in Hindu majority areas. Jinnah was simply a fool. His descendants are in India, not Pakistan.
The difference comes to this: a community has a right to safeguards, a nation has a right to demand separation.
This was pre-War thinking. Europe had discovered that 'safeguards' didn't work. Majoritarianism and population exchanges were the way to go. Lebanon, sadly, didn't get the memo which is why it is now in such a mess.
Ambedkar’s intervention was exemplary in noting that Pakistan was premised on the power of the idea itself; this quality made it not only inevitable but also charged with a force of persuasion that could not be contained by discounting it.
But that idea was premised on Islam. Don't discount Islamic force coz them dudes know how to fight. It may take twenty years but they will kick your ass- even if you spend a trillion dollars. Biden has learnt this to his cost.
Yet he was precise in dating the idea of Muslim nationality to the very recent past.
Because previously there had been the idea of a universal Caliph who might make separate provision for 'dhimmis'. The first world war killed off the big Empires- Tzarist, Hapsburg, Ottoman etc.
Emphasizing the somewhat belated ‘philosophical justification’ for Pakistan, Ambedkar noted that the imperial constitutional parleys of the interwar period that had structured political settlements and representation of Hindus and Muslims in the language of ‘majority’ and ‘minority’ could not, however, exhaust let alone take a full account of the ‘political sentiment’ of Muslims.
Ambedkar shared the general Hindu view that Muslims be kray kray. They, with equal justification, considered Hindus to be greedy, hypocritical, windbags. Still, many Muslims in Hindu majority areas read the writing on the wall. It was better to surrender and get rewarded for loyalty to the ruling party rather than run amok and get slaughtered.
As is well known, initial if piecemeal representation for Indians in the opening decade of the twentieth century instituted ‘separate electorates’ for Hindus and Muslims
on Muslim insistence
that were amplified in periodic constitutional discussions ranging from the future nature of franchise to local body governance. It was however, the Round Table discussions held at the highest imperial table in 1930- 32 and in London with the British Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald heavily involved that brought the question of the minority to a heady if divisive head.
'heady head' is good. Mobled Queen is good.
Ambedkar at that point raised the question of the untouchable to be officially identified as a ‘minority’ in the manner in which it been designated for Muslims.
Actually, Gandhi- at the Second Conference- behaved so stupidly that he united all the 'minorities' (including the Justice Party which represented the non Brahmin majority in Madras) against Congress. How did Gandhi manage to do this? He demanded Congress be given control of the Army! Previously he had demanded that the Brits transfer power to the Congress party. He went on repeating this demand even in 1939 though he admitted that Congress only represented High Caste Hindus and that after the Brits left the Punjabis (including Hindu Punjabis) would make common cause with the Indian Muslims to take power from the non-violent Hindu who, however, would use his Ahimsa super-power to prevent those meat-eaters from anally violating each and every Congress-wallah. Truly, the Mahatma was a maha-crank. Yet, it was Jinnah who proved yet stupider. As for Ambedkar- poor fellow, he is now a Hindu god (because Hindus regard 'Boddhisattvas' as incarnations of Vishnu).
This led to Gandhi’s open debate with Ambedkar with the Mahatma declaring a fast unto death until Ambedkar dropped this demand altogether. This defining difference was ultimately staked on two issues: the boundaries and ends of what Hinduism might be and secondly, what might be the best measures to affect the end of untouchability. Gandhi won then and an entente between the two men was established through the Poona Pact (1932) with Ambedkar dropping the idea, at least for that moment. Gandhi’s was a pyrrhic victory.
No. It was permanent. After the Brits left, 'Harijans' voted for Congress. Ambedkar couldn't get elected anywhere. He had to turn to Religion.
By 1950, Ambedkar had instituted not only radical remedies on caste
Rubbish! He'd merely ensured that Congress Dalits would have a seat at the table. The problem was that the High Caste Hindu soon saw that the Dalit politician was better than the non-Dalit. Moreover, in 'reserved seats' there was less Party factionalism and in-fighting. In particular, the problem of rising agricultural castes facing off against the 'feudal' blue-bloods was circumvented.
Having Dalit MPs meant that rural aristocrats had an excuse for not wanting to be in Parliament. That was a good thing. They were useless tossers.
but decisively also prove to be more influential as both a thinker of Muslim nationality
Ambedkar was not a 'thinker of Muslim nationality'. He was, in some senses, a man of his time. Islam seemed backward to him.
while also bequeathing the institutional architecture of Indian democracy.1
Which he, quite rightly, dismissed as 'hackwork'.
The interwar period marked however, as it was also by strife and unprecedented majority-minority talk had crucially caused a breach in Muslim history.
Nonsense! Getting beaten by Marathas and Sikhs and Brits had caused that breach. Falling behind Hindus educationally and commercially had increased a sense of malaise.
Their ‘philosophical’ discovery of national sentiments had irrevocably transformed the political language of their self-understanding and in their interface with others.
These sentiments were well attested in the eighteenth and nineteenth century before being briefly eclipsed by the Aligarh school of intellectuals. But the reaction was swift. Maulana Azad started off as an anti-Aligarh advocate of 'Hizbullah' politics. Being half Arab, he was willing to ally with Gandhi and Nehru because he knew the Arab world wanted a united India to intervene against European colonial powers. Then, they realized that Nehruvian India was useless.
The ‘national feeling’ prevalent among Muslims, Ambedkar wrote, though recent was nevertheless so powerful that Muslims were above all no longer ‘content to call themselves a community.’
Ambedkar wrote stupid shit- just like everybody else at that time. At least he didn't argue, as Netaji Bose did, that British rule would have been cool provided they had appointed their own bastards to every office of profit in the country.
The ‘fundamental difference’ between this conception of community versus that of nationality
is that a community is not a nation. Everybody knows that. Ambedkar realized- as did everybody else- that Muslim majority areas could go their own way. Hindus would flee because they retained vivid memories of what Muslim rule would be like. That's it. That's the whole story.
as Ambedkar identified was the category of the people, -- popular or general will or sovereignty itself.
To his credit, Ambedkar was a pragmatist who didn't go in for paranoid Rousseauian bullshit.
Hitherto, he argued ‘political philosophers’ had been satisfied, if not complacent, in recognizing ‘communities’ as differentiated but integral to the political unit of the ‘governed’.
Wilsonism had been predicated on minority protection. But, over the course of the Twenties and Thirties, it became blindingly obvious that the thing was unworkable. Still the Brits had given Ceylon universal suffrage on the basis of strong minority protection and so some Indian Liberals thought this was still one way forward. They forgot that the Ceylonese elites were anglophile while Indian elites had turned seditious twenty years previously.
Yet under conditions of distress, ‘communities’, he noted, had the natural right to ‘insurrection’
till enough of them were beaten to death in which case they had a natural right to sullen obedience
but were limited to a search for changes in the modalities of government.
You are welcome to 'search for changes in the modalities of government' while you are on the toilet.
Thus, critically, insurrections remained internal to a given political dispensation.
Very true! People call you a silly-billy if you attempt to overthrow the French government while living in Nicaragua.
Underlying this distinction of a right to ‘insurrection’ towards a given political order and a ‘disruption’ oriented towards a separation was a consideration of self-preservation as fundamental to ‘natural rights’ rather than as a moral principle alone.
In other words, don't do it if you will get your head kicked in.
Though Ambedkar in this context would lengthily and approvingly cite the British moral philosopher Henry Sidgwick,
An Imperialist who was a member of Indian Civil Service Board and who spoke of the need to 'protect inferior races of men' from the evils attendant on governing themselves.
he was nevertheless pointing to the limits of coercion and force in maintaining unity and underscored that ‘disruption’ or separation even in historically bounded units of territory held together under even patriotic conditions, had potentialities for peace if destinies had become divergent so much so that the ‘true interests of the whole may be promoted by disruption.’
It makes sense to say that Society is better off if oppressed sections of society are permitted to rise up. In the short run, there may be disruption. Long run, everybody is better off.
Moreover, as elaborated below, Ambedkar was equally fixated on the question of violence both in the maintenance of sovereign order – as it had emerged in relation to caste – and in its force for disorder, especially in relation to Hindu and Muslim relations in the twentieth century. As part of his understanding on natural rights, however, Ambedkar understood the generative power of violence. If too few, in short, had means to violence, as in the case of upper caste Brahmins, it would militate against the formation of and/or destroy the social order.
In other words, a narrow military caste might preside over social decay- e.g. Mamelukes in Egypt.
Conversely, if there was widespread violence, that too would destroy the social order, a condition he described at length as the state of affairs between Hindus and Muslims in interwar India and as testified by his first intervention to the Constituent Assembly and will be further elaborated below.
Ambedkar was wrong. There's no need to rub it in. The fact is, back then a lot of Indians had crazy beliefs about the martial qualities of different castes and communities. The lesson of the two world wars was that race and caste and religion don't matter. Anybody can become a soldier.
The point of emphasis here is that Ambedkar, unlike natural rights theorists such as Hugo Grotius and even the arch foundational thinker of sovereignty Thomas Hobbes, was not seeking an Archimedean point of equilibrium on the question of violence.
He was an Economist trained under, the Pragmatist, Dewey.
Instead, he was making explicit the altogether radical potential for discovering and instituting sovereignty anew and brooked no squeamishness towards either the question of separation or indeed violence. In such a perspective, Ambedkar is less amenable to be cast out as a ‘communitarian liberal’ or a proponent of ‘group rights’.
Cast out? He could be cast as an x or even 'outed' as a closet x. He can't be cast out as anything.
Instead, he can more accurately be approached and understood as a thinker of modern sovereignty.
But all thinking about modern sovereignty is stupid shit. Amebdkar wasn't stupid.
For Ambedkar, only the ‘nation’ has the ‘right to disruption’
This stupid woman is contradicting herself. We have seen that Ambedkar admitted that women, colored people, trade unions etc, had a 'right to disruption' and that Society as a whole could be made better off by addressing their grievances. But women are not a separate Nation. The Suffragettes weren't demanding a separate homeland for women.
and ‘secession’, he argued, which went far beyond any right to insurrection.
Ambedkar had studied in America. He accepted America's right to rebel against Britain. He did not accept the right of the South to secede so as to keep its 'peculiar institution' of slavery.
This distinction, while being ‘fundamental’, could only be determined on the basis of ‘ultimate destiny’ or goals. It is in this vein, Ambedkar concluded, that both ‘prudence and ethics demands that bonds shall be dissolved’, so that the potentialities are ‘freed’ in such a manner so as to ‘pursue its [own] destinies.’ The nation, as opposed to community, Ambedkar realized, was the crucible of the idea of the people, or more precisely it was the nation that converted ‘the people’ into a political category and dislodged it from ‘community’.
Ambedkar was a pragmatist. He didn't think ideas could be the crucible of anything. Words are either useful or they are shit. What Kapila has written is shit. Ambedkar was well aware that the Soviet Union had turned 'the people' into a political category. But Stalinist 'Nationality' was bogus. As for communities- ones where people are killed because they are a little richer are ones you should dislodge yourself from pronto. Run far far away.
This transformation was categorically – according to him and as recognized later by historians of nationalism – the work of imagination.
Just as Kapila's scholarship is wholly imaginary.
Ambedkar noted a distinct anticipatory resoluteness in Muslim political thought on the question of Pakistan. Noting surprise and even perplexity that Muslim leadership ‘did not press for Pakistan’ at the Round Table negotiations between empire and its ‘minorities’ in 1930,
But the Muslims got the separation of Sindh from Bombay Presidency. The other thing which happened during the Second Conference was that the Brits had to send troops to Kashmir to put down a tribal invasion via Poonch. This was a period when some Muslims thought they could bide their time and gain political concessions while building up military capacity to take back the sub-continent. Gandhi could be a 'useful idiot' for them. Then he suddenly demanded Congress control of the Indian Army! Clearly the crooked bania was only appearing to be as innocent as a lamb!
he nevertheless apprehended the interwar period as the defining moment of departure in Muslim political aspirations.
This was because the point of departure of something which starts in the interwar period is... the interwar period. That's how Time works- though perhaps not in Punjab.
Whether it was the official designation of majority-minority or the status of Indian Muslims as a ‘community’, neither of these, according to Ambedkar, could exhaust the will to a political and distinct entity that, however belated it had nevertheless become salient.
Why is Kapila's English so bad? The answer is she doesn't read over what she writes.
In a further note that was not generally accepted by his contemporaries --or indeed --by the received historiography that considers the arrival of Pakistan as a last-ditch and tragic outcome of brinksmanship, Ambedkar turned the conventional terms on their heads. While official discussions focused on the colonial census that had corralled subjects into politically constituted ‘groups’ rather than considering them as people,
but man is a political animal. By contrast corralling plants and fish into 'politically constituted groups' is silly.
this move had an overwhelming power in determining the terms of the debate that had repeatedly discussed nationality as no more than a function of demographics.
What else could it be? A function of Astrophysics?
Its most powerful effect was that the national question was considered through the prism of ideas of ‘majority’ and ‘minority’.
The Sikhs of the Punjab certainly objected to this. Their argument was that one Sikh was worth 'sava lakh' (125,000) non Sikhs. However, everybody else agreed that two Sikhs was one too many.
Strikingly, Ambedkar argued that once separate electorates had been recognized, the recognition of ‘minority’ had, in effect, created a ‘statutory majority’.
Ambedkar may have wanted to believe that he had a political future in independent India. But this would have involved saying nice things about the majority religion. Mayawati was able to come to power by getting friendly with the Brahmins.
To be sure, Ambedkar dismissed the claims of the ‘majority’ to constitute an actual political unit, recognizing that such aspirations were associated with Hindutva. He dismissed these claims partly because he recognized Hindutva’s then political body Hindu Mahasabha as a mirror image of the Muslim League and believed rather presciently that both would disappear with the recognition of Pakistan.
Actually, Shyamprasad Mukherjee did better in India than Mandal or Ambedkar. The truth is Congress, at the time, was the true muscular arm of Hinduism.
More importantly, as argued here, caste militated against any imagined unity within the Hindu social.
But Mandal soon found that Muslims were no friends to the Dalit. By contrast, Hindus wanted Dalits to rise up precisely because they were Hindus and, what's more, had good reason to attack Muslims if they got fractious.
Instead, the emphasis fell on the question of the ‘minority’, and Ambedkar understood the ‘minority’ not only in the terms ordained by colonial rule but related centrally to hostility and violence. In the first instance, however, he recognized that the national question was of salience to Muslim political aspirations themselves.
Because Islam, ab ovo, was about the creation of an Islamic State.
Ambedkar argued that ‘the delay in discovering the philosophical justification for Pakistan is [precisely] due to the fact that the Muslim leaders had become habituated to speaking of Muslims as a community and as a minority.’
Because the King Emperor was safely in the saddle. Gandhi had unilaterally surrendered in 1922.
To him this ‘terminology’ had taken Muslim aspirations in a ‘false direction and had brought them to a dead end.’ Moreover, he argued that while this recent philosophical discovery of Pakistan represented ‘a complete transformation’ amongst Muslims, it was ‘brought [about] not by any criminal inducement but by the discovery of what is their true and ultimate destiny.’
Islam is genuinely political. The Prophet and the first Caliphs created a very successful State.
Staked on a futurity rather than as the belated expression of a repressed ideal in the subcontinental script, Pakistan as an idea was not possessed by the past.
It was founded on Revealed Prophesy- which, of its nature, is concerned with the future.
This was precisely because the future by definition cannot be ‘observed’ or ‘checked’ let alone ‘experienced’ and futurity is thus, a feat of the imagination that ‘breaks free’ from ‘spatial controls’.
Prophesy, founded in Revelation, gives the required information which is deemed irrefragable.
Unsurprisingly, given the density of imperial negotiations and settlements, the territorial moorings and debates over Pakistan have held sway in received histories and dominant accounts.
In other words, 'received histories' have concerned themselves with facts not vacuous bullshit.
Ambedkar was distinctive in recognizing that more than even a spatial idea or territorial telos, Pakistan was staked on the reckoning of temporality that was entirely future-oriented.
All plans and programs are future-oriented. No political party promises to give you a better yesterday. Ambedkar had met Lala Lajpat Rai in America. He independently arrived at the same conclusion- viz. Muslims be kray kray. Run away from territory they rule- unless the ruler is a smart monarch concerned with enriching his realm by protecting foreigners or those of other faiths.
Such a futurity was both a break in historical time as it was a departure from imperium -- both Mughal and British -- that ultimately conditioned the inadequacy if not the destruction of prevailing categories whether of ‘community’ or ‘minority’ that had hidebound Muslim aspirations.
This is nonsense. Independence ended Imperial rule but did not involve any 'break in historical time'. Rather the 1935 Act was replaced by something more comprehensive. There still is a Hindu and Sikh community in Pakistan which is called a minority. Similarly there are Muslim communities in India. Kapila must have heard of Owaisi. She may know of the Kerala Muslim League. Why is she pretending that 'qaumi' politics has disappeared in a country where, during every election, analysts do 'communal arithmetic' to work out which party will win.
In its most recent appraisal by Faisal Devji, Pakistan as a political idea is here too best understood as the apprehension of the future.
People are very apprehensive of Pakistan's future under Im the dim and his devout wife who feeds djinns.
Radical in its capture of an untold future, the formation of Pakistan was only possible, as he argues, by the rejection of dominant political languages in which putative attachments to soil, blood and even history are forsaken for the negation of both Indian nationalism and imperial endgames.
This is meaningless. India was partitioned as Ireland and Palestine were partitioned.
For Devji, though, the emphasis lies on the postwar reconstitution of the world order: a Muslim Zion or Pakistan operates as a fitting if contrasting pair to Israel as the ‘minority’ form acquired the historical destiny of the national.
Nonsense! Israel was created by migration. Ireland is the better example. The Catholic South is still separate from Protestant majority Ulster.
In the identification of destiny or even the future as the vantage point of Pakistan, Ambedkar would however, reprise contemporary and comparative history and equally ancient Indian history to discover and uncover the basis of sovereign power and its effects.
Ambedkar's book might be a bit shit, but it was topical. He wasn't crazy enough to try to 'uncover the basis of sovereign power' anymore than he tried to 'uncover the basis of poverty' as being imbricated in the catachrestic modality of not having a pot to piss in.
In short, in separate disquisitions on caste Ambedkar sought to explicate the historical and Indian sovereign order especially in relation to violence.
No. He wrote some silly polemical shite about how Dalits were actually Buddhists despite lacking any such cultural traits or memories. His original theory that they were 'broken men'- i.e. remnants of vanquished tribes- was more sensible.
Such an uncovering was ultimately directed towards securing new and nonviolent political foundations for India
Non-violence means money. When you buy things for money, no violence is involved. Ambedkar was a lawyer and an economist. He knew that 'non-violent' foundations for India meant the Rule of Law and a thriving private sector. His concern was that Dalits would get left behind in the commercial rat race. What he should have done was reserved the leather industry for the leather-working caste and gotten the State to finance its export led expansion. The Japanese realized a little too late that this was the proper course for getting rid of their own 'untouchability' problem. Still, Ambedkar had befriended the Kanpur Dalit millionaires. Perhaps if he himself had been of Mayawati's caste, his contribution would have been more useful. Still, since Mahars had shown they could rise through education, and since he himself had shown extraordinary diligence in this matter, Ambedkar deserves his place in the Hindu pantheon. Also he wore suits instead of prancing around in an adult diaper.
with direct consequences for his considerations of Pakistan and thus these must be apprised here. For Ambedkar, caste portended the historical horizon of both extreme separation and deep sovereignty.
Can there be a 'horizon' of both extreme darkness and extreme light? No. This woman is talking nonsense.
Unlike dominant discussions on caste and Ambedkar that take the figure of the dalit or untouchable as central, the focus here is on the Ambedkar’s rendition of the Brahmin as a dispersed monarchy shrouded in violence, and in the policing of separation between Brahmins and others that he sought to not only uncover but undo.
His wife was a Brahmin. Did he think she had magical powers or exercised 'dispersed' monarchical powers, shrouded in violence? Nope. He had diabetes and choosing a doctor for a wife was a smart move.
Kapila provides this Amedkar quote-
The Sovereign Order of Caste The Nazis had indeed a great deal to learn from the Hindus. If they had adopted the technique of suppressing the masses devised by the Hindus they would have been able to crush the Jews without open cruelty and would have also exhibited themselves as humane masters.
Ambedkar had read Nietzsche and, rightly, reviled him. He knew very well that Jews had been treated badly in the medieval period. But, he also knew that Jews were considered smart and successful. Nobody thought the 'pariahs' had any such quality. Thankfully, people like Ambedkar- by their personal achievements- were able to put an end to this prejudice.
Why did the Nazis kill- rather than continue to extort and oppress- the Jews? I think it was because German officials found that killing Jews was a way to stay away from the front-line. They could claim to be doing vital war-work while preserving their own stinking hides.
In the mid-twentieth century world-historical context of Nazism and the holocaust, Ambedkar elaborated the nature of violence that premised and had made perpetual the power of the Brahmin. Designating the Brahmin as Superman, the Hindu social for Ambedkar was, ‘nothing but Nietzsche’s Gospel put in action.’
Brahmins- most of whom are very poor and some of whom are as stupid and radically ineducable as me- are greatly delighted to be depicted as Supermen with occult powers.
In tackling the issue of violence and power, Ambedkar uncovered the Brahmin as sovereign but importantly not in the form of a king or monarch.
Kapila may well be a Brahmin. In Punjab they tend to be poorer than the dominant Jats. Normally, they are very good and decent people. Sadly Kapila didn't stick to STEM subjects and thus ended up babbling nonsense. Still, at least Punjab now has a Dalit C.M.
In other words, in Ambedkar’s rendition of caste, the Brahmin had emerged as the Superman, a figure who could kill but not die. In so doing, he elaborated the question of violence as historically systemic by pointing out to its means, instruments and ends.
Brahmins have magic powers coz they know secret mantras. If you aint nice to me I will put a curse on you. Buy my books on Amazon and you too will get some of my yogic power.
In showing the intersection between Nietzsche’s idea of the Superman
as opposed to Tim Burton's idea of Batman
and the Brahmin, as well as the catastrophe of violence that this idea entailed, Ambedkar starkly articulated the position of the untouchable. ‘As against the Superman,’ the untouchable, ‘has no right to life, liberty or property or the pursuit of happiness. He must be ready to sacrifice everything for the sustenance of the life and dignity of the Superman.’
Also you must buy my books otherwise I will put a curse on you and your dick will fall off.
The question of sacrifice here was understood in terms of life itself. In fact, the untouchable was inculcated, as he wrote, with the belief that he should ‘respond to such call for sacrifice in the interest of the superman as his supreme duty.’
Ambedkar, like other Mahars, had wanted to reverse the British decision to suspend military recruitment from that caste. Thus showing that Mahars had a tradition of sacrificing their own lives for the sake of the Regiment was a smart move. The Indian Army did create a Mahar regiment in 1941 when Ambedkar joined the Viceroy's council.
The ability to take life, in other words, was at the core of the Brahmin as sovereign.
But Brahmins had no such power or ability. The King did. But Kings were generally Kshatriya, not Brahmin.
By contrast, as he wrote, ‘The Untouchables are the weariest, most loathed the most miserable people that history can witness. They are a spent and sacrificed people.’29 Whereas Nietzsche was interested in creating a brave new ‘race’, the Hindu order of things was, as Ambedkar argued, ‘interested in maintaining the privilege’ of the Brahmin who had ‘come to arrogate to itself the claim of being Superman.’
Ambedkar was keen to keep anti-Brahmin Princes on side. However, it was in Tamil Nadu that anti-Brahminism became the ruling ideology.
While it is out of bounds for this discussion, it is important to point out that Ambedkar had repeatedly dismissed caste as a form of race and had disputed colonial ethnographers and emerging anthropological debates on the same. Equally, for Ambedkar, caste was unique to India and a formation that as he pointed out ‘marks off Hindus from other peoples.’
Ambedkar was aware that Japan had untouchables but no Brahmins whereas Bali has Brahmins but no untouchables. Thankfully, the violent suppression of Buddhism in Japan enabled the common folk to rise up. Sadly, the plight of the untouchables persisted.
The arrogation of the Brahmin as sovereign was an outcome of a regicide. In the depth of India’s antiquity lay the origins of the Brahmin’s power that had, in the first instance, emerged through the killing of a Buddhist king.
Buddhist Kings might kill Jains but they protected Brahmins. The Thai and Cambodian monarchs have hereditary Brahmin priests. Many of the great Buddhist Scholar-Saints were of Brahmin lineage. The lowest caste admitted to the Sangha was the barber (monks need to be tonsured because unlike Jain ascetics they don't have to pull out their own hair by the roots) and the person who disposes of faded flowers offered in puja.
This turn to history by Ambedkar was not an antiquarian interest or a recuperative exercise.
It was a fantasy similar to the notion that an evil Scientist named Shabazz created the White Race.
Like other ideologues of the period, be it B. G. Tilak or Jawaharlal Nehru and indeed Savarkar, history was the template through which political futures were imagined. Importantly, as he explained, this history of regicide is ‘even more than a past [but] of the present. It is a ‘living past’ and therefore as really present as any present can be.’
To their credit, no actual Dalit bought into this shit. Sensible people rose in the Congress party- before it turned to shit- just as they now rise in the BJP or other successful parties.
It is striking that Ambedkar interprets India’s past and the destruction of Buddhism in particular as constitutive of the violent power of the Brahmin as sovereign.
At that time the 'Aryanist' Buddhist converts of North India had a theory that Ganapati and Hanuman were 'Dravidian' deities. They viewed Dalits as the original Dravidians. Thus Ambedkar- who hated both Ganesha and Hanuman though both are revered in China and Japan- pretended that Dalits were Aryan Buddhists while Brahmins were 'White Huns' who destroyed Buddhism in India.
With rhetorical flourish and considerable conviction and in contrast to Hindutva narratives of history and their focus on the oppressive nature of Muslim rule Ambedkar wrote, ‘[T]he effects of Muslim invasions on Hindu India have been really superficial and ephemeral. The Muslim invaders destroyed only the outward symbols of Hindu religion such as temples and Maths etc. They did not extirpate Hinduism nor did they cause any subversion of the principles or doctrines which governed the spiritual life of the people…To alter the metaphor the Muslims only stirred the waters in the bath and that too only for a while. Thereafter they got tired of stirring and left the water with sediments to settle… [In contrast] …Brahmanism in its conflict with Buddhism made a clean sweep. It emptied the bath with the Buddhist Baby in it and filled the bath with its own waters and in it its own baby.’
Coz Brahmans were actually 'White Huns' or something of that sort. The truth, however, was that Buddhism did not vanish from India till Muslims destroyed its Universities and Temples. Hindus and Buddhists continue to worship in each others' temples to this day. Ambedkar was talking nonsense because, as a politician, it was his job to talk nonsense.
The question of Hindus and Muslims was not necessarily an antagonistic one for Ambedkar, primarily due to their common historic experience as rulers; this tied them symbolically, at the very least. More significantly, caste and especially the power of the Brahmin had remained intact despite the change in imperial dispensations.
Coz Brahmins have magic powers. Everybody thinks I'm stupid and that my books are shit. This is far from the truth. Anyway, if you don't buy my books I will put 'shaap' on you and then your dick will fall off and you will cry and cry.
Unlike the Hindutva thinker Savarkar,
who was right about Muslims- as everybody realized post 9/11
in turning to history the aim was not to forge antagonisms anew but rather to explain the source, preservation and perpetuation of sovereign power.
Because Ambedkar was gambling on a Muslim-Dalit alliance able to turn the Hindus into a minority.
Kapila, somewhat cruelly, dwells on Ambedkar's crackpot theory-
It is in this context that Ambedkar identified Buddhism rather than Islam as the critical point of antagonism in relation to Hinduism. ‘The history of India’, Ambedkar wrote, ‘is nothing but a history of mortal conflict between – Buddhism and Brahmanism.’
Though Buddhism disappeared at the time of the Muslim conquest.
The regicide of the Buddhist king Pushyamita and the destruction of the Buddhist state in the classical past were understood by Ambedkar as the originary moment of the installation of the Brahmin as sovereign. A key consequence was the promulgation of caste laws and taboos as enshrined by Manu that had made untouchability permanent.
But they either pre-existed Manu or else he had magic powers coz he was Brahmin.
Ambedkar delineates and details several features of this problem in which Brahminism was deemed the ‘counter-revolution’ to the Buddhist ‘revolution’ in India.
Though Buddhist accounts show that Brahmins preexisted Buddhism. Indeed, one particular sect of Brahmins were granted immediate acceptance into the Sangha.
Equally he raises the problem of the historic conflict between Brahmin and Kshatriyas (the warrior caste) especially on the question of kingship and power.
Princes employed Brahmin priests. There was no conflict.
Three related issues that emerge from Ambedkar’s disquisitions are pertinent here. In the first instance, and as a consequence of the regicide, taboos and codes between castes were redistributed especially in relation to the rights to bear arms. According to Ambedkar, the taboo on Brahmins to bear arms and hold kingly power was lifted.
Though no such taboo existed. Some brahmins became warriors. Most did not.
Moreover, the Brahmin was made immune from capital punishment, regardless of the crime he had committed.
This was also true of Shramans. However, a person could always be degraded before being executed.
The right to bear arms and to rule was further amplified for the Brahmin by the rights to regicide and rebellion.
Sadly, exercising this right tends to involve your head getting separated from your body.
Critically, however, these rights were circumscribed by the condition that they could only be invoked when the (kshatriya) king or ruler had failed to uphold the social order.
By not killing rebels.
Thus the king or ruler became, as Ambedkar put it, ‘liable for prosecution and punishment like a common felon.’
Unless he killed anybody who tried to fuck with him.
With the destruction of Buddhism, codes and taboos enshrined and embedded the sovereignty of the Brahmin
this can only be done by actually making the Brahmin the King.
and consequently made the question of direct ruler-ship or kingship not irrelevant, but more precisely suborned the king to the Brahmin. Secondly, a separation was forged between Brahmin and non-Brahmins.
But unless the thing pre-existed, how would anybody know in which class they fell?
Through the principles of ‘graded inequality’, the foundational source of separation and its outcome was the disarming of the Shudra,
who must have been shit at fighting if he could be so easily disarmed
who was not only deprived of means to violence by the restriction on the right to bear arms, but was effectively barred from any form of self-protection.
Very true. Shudras were constantly being sodomized by evil Brahmins. This affected their productivity. That's why India is so poor.
A division not only of labor or occupation held isolation and fixity that had formed the nature and principles of the Hindu social but ultimately was vested in violence as a fundamental aspect of sovereignty.
Not to mention incessant sodomization of Shudras.
With nuance
i.e. Ambedkar does not spell out the rampant sodomizing of Shudras
and complexity,
which is why we must read between the lines and discover that Brahmins were buggering Shudras all over the place
Ambedkar outlined how the erstwhile hostility between Kshatriyas and Brahmins was converted into an ‘entente’ that ultimately closed off the ranks of power to the lower orders and the shudras in particular.
Because you should not give any power to shudras who are being buggered senseless by evil Brahmins
In short, this originary regicide, with the consequent redistribution of ritual and sacramental power, had two enduring effects.
Firstly Shudras were incessantly sodomized. Secondly everybody laughed themselves silly at Ambedkar's stupid book. He should have stuck to writing about Monetary theory or Fiscal policy- i.e. stuff he'd got PhDs in. Instead he waded into a field where his ignorance of Sanskrit would make him a figure of fun. Then he married a Brahmin and people felt sorry for him. Probably, wifey is beating and taunting him. No wonder he hates Brahmins so much and longs to escape into a Buddhist monastery where wifeji can't get at him.
While it diluted the sovereignty of the king, it also made the king dependent on the Brahmin.
Coz Brahmins got magic powers dude.
Equally, it totalized and controlled the instruments and means of violence against others and in the end made a group (or varna) into the untouchable (caste).
Come to think of it, if Shudras keep getting sodomized, being an untouchable is preferable.
For after all, as Ambedkar argued, the shudras were once warriors
but were shit at fighting which is how come they were buggered to buggery by evil Brahmins
and through internecine warfare and as an outcome of the banishment of Buddhism were reduced to the lowest and the most abject subjects of Hinduism.
i.e. guys whose bungholes were constantly dripping with cum
The Buddhist commitment to nonviolence had nevertheless produced new norms for the Brahmin, especially in relation to meat-eating, which were projected outward and deployed against the untouchable.
But at least the untouchable's anus was left intact.
So the Brahmin incorporated principles of nonviolence from the very regime of Buddhism that he displaced, with strict taboos on vegetarianism.
Just as Muslims became vegetarians when they displaced the Brahmins and the Brits took to polygamy after they displaced the Mughals and the Indians all became white skinned after they displaced the Brits.
This allowed for the Brahmin to emerge sovereign, but without killing, or indeed, dying, and was ensured as an immortal rather than a sleeping sovereign.
Coz u can't sodomize Shudras properly if you are asleep or dead.
Finally, unlike other versions of kingship (Western and Islamic) that derived some of their status from the divine, the laws of Manu, as interpreted by Ambedkar, had made caste divine but crucially not kingship.
Yet, Ambedkar lived in a country where several Hindu Kings- e.g. that of Mysore- received divine honors.
Caste, he wrote, ‘is sacred, not open to abrogation, amendment and not even to criticism.’
Also Shudras aren't allowed to complain about the condition of their rectums.
Through this three-tiered approach, where the Brahmin had the capacity to punish and even kill the king,
in between sodomizing Shudras
with no means of violence or rebellion left to the lower orders
coz rebelling is tough if your ass is being incessantly pounded
and with caste as the dispensation of the divine, the Brahmin emerged as sovereign though not singularized as the monarch. This made the power of the Brahmin perpetual with the responsibility of the social deposited on the king. Significantly, the ‘social’ was not only isolated and separate in nature but incorporated the diffused monarchy of the Brahmin.
not to mention the diffused Brahmin dicks up every Shudra bunghole.
Such an interpretation, while it was directed towards the problem of untouchability in India, nevertheless helps explain the context of the formation of the republic in India.
To Kapila- sure. But Kapila has shit for brains.
As argued elsewhere, the republic would not be a question of simply displacing the various kings and princes or monarchy. It would require another equally ambitious task, namely the creation of the ‘people’ or a fraternity that could only be possible under democratic conditions.
Very true. You have to create 'people'. It is not the case that Daddy puts his pee pees into Mummy's hoo haa and that's how new people are created. Rather there must first be 'democratic conditions' and then politicians can create people though, no doubt, evil Brahmins will immediately sodomize them because Pushyamitra killed some Mauryan dude.
For a fraternity to be constituted, Ambedkar identified the antagonism and violence between the Brahmin and the untouchable as the crucible of sovereignty in India.
This was very funny because Shudras and Muslims were the principle aggressors against Dalits.
Indeed, according to Ambedkar, Brahminism was the counter-revolution to the revolution of Buddhism that had enshrined equality and nonviolence.
and which broadcast untouchability all the way to Japan.
This identification of a dispersed sovereign order
in which Shudras were incessantly sodomized
rather than the figure of the king or monarch explained the perpetual and systemic power of the caste system which was bounded in violence.
and the wrecking of Shudra rectums
Ambedkar, with polemical flourish wrote that this system was perfected to the extent that the Nietzschean doctrine of ‘Realize the ideal and idealize the real’ had been actualized in India.
Which is how come it had a British King Emperor.
As a ‘permanent difficulty’, caste cut through time’s arrow of the present and the past.
leading to the incessant sodomization of Shudras
Historically understood, the question of caste (Brahmin) as sovereign power and its perpetuation was thus, neither a doctrine of ‘social utility’, nor of ‘individual justice’.
Coz of all the cum dripping from the bungholes of bewildered Shudras
In short, caste was understood as political in the stark sense as it was preoccupied with and cohered by the question of violence and power. This is precisely why he compared caste, how so ever heuristically, with Nazism.
Come to think of it the Nazis killed a lot of Gypsies who are believed to be of Dalit (Dom) ancestry.
The critical point of departure was, as pointed out in the epigram above, that the violence of caste was at once hidden as it was obvious. Deploying the modern triad of politics in relation to caste and Hinduism, Ambedkar denounced it as ‘inimical to equality, antagonistic to liberty and opposed to fraternity.’
That's why he had no political future in independent India. Telling 80 percent of the population that they are evil bastards won't get you elected.
Systemic, with ritual and sacrament as legitimacy, comprising the denial of freedom of opportunity and knowledge and, above all, the right to bear arms, caste was not only a ‘cruel wrong’ but was also the ‘most shameless method of preserving the established order’ and power.
Whereas working for the Brits wasn't shameless at all. Mandal went a step further. He allied with the Muslim League till he was forced to run back across the border.
While the lower and subjugated orders experienced this powerful order of things as ‘fate’ there was indeed nothing random about caste. Delinking the arbitrariness of fortune and fate that is inherent to the understanding of violence and power, Ambedkar instead denaturalized the familiar, accepted and consensual understanding of caste.
He told stupid lies. That was what politicians do. Kapila is being cruel in mentioning this aspect of his legacy.
Through a study of the classical past or what he termed the ‘exhumation of debris’, of Ancient Indian history, Ambedkar understood that violence was not necessarily equal to power. Instead, in so doing he uncovered an argument that if means and instruments were the categorical condition of violence, then caste was not a social, but a political doctrine that controlled and monopolized violence.
Coz Nizams and British officials didn't control or monopolize shit. Evil Brahmins stalked the land incessantly sodomizing Shudras.
The past, in this sense, for Ambedkar, most overtly carried revolutionary potential.
Wake up sheeple! You too are being incessantly sodomized by Brahmins of some description.
Above all, this allowed Ambedkar to identify that the source of sovereignty in India lay with the Brahmin.
There certainly is a Brahmin dynasty in India. Rahul has made it very clear that he is a 'janeodhari' Brahmin of some especially exalted sort. Nehru, it will be remembered, was referred to as Punditji.
Precisely because caste militated against fraternity and also because the Brahmin was dispersed, yet located above the monarch, the discovery of the ‘people’ became essential to Ambedkar’s political project.
Very true! Ambedkar wandered the land examining the cum dripping rectums of Shudras
This was because, unlike the French revolution, there was no automatic replacement of the singular monarch or sovereign with the general will.
Napoleon was a General. Then he made himself Emperor. But his will wasn't general at all. Ambedkar was educated in America and England. He didn't rate the French Republic very highly coz it was shit at fighting.
A revolutionary discovery of the people or the commitment to the idea of the republic premised on popular will was expressed more forcefully and fully on discussions of nationality.
But 'nationality' has nothing to do with 'popular will'. Medieval Europe recognized different Nationalities even if all were equally subject to the same Pope and Holy Roman Emperor.
The question of nationality renewed the question of the recognition of difference that had marked the infamous hostility of relations between Gandhi and Ambedkar.
Nonsense! Gandhi and Ambedkar had the same nationality. It may have been a shit nationality coz India was a shithole, but they had no choice in the matter.
The entente between the two political rivals was not only short-lived but destroyed and made redundant in the making of a new and powerful political language of both nonviolence and nationality especially in relation to Muslims.
How? Rajaji and Gandhi had accepted Pakistan by 1946. True Ambedkar only got into the Constituent Assembly through Mandal's efforts and Mandal chose Pakistan but everybody understood that Ambedkar was unelectable in Bombay because people could understand what he was saying. Like Rahul Gandhi, Ambedkar could only get elected from a place where people spoke a language of which he had no command whatsoever.
Significantly, it was not only a question of the nation but of the ‘people’ or popular will and sovereignty itself.
Ambedkar wasn't popular. He was also anti-national in the sense prevalent at that time. Still, he is now a Hindu god.
This question entailed not only the question of the historic source of sovereignty but also demanded the recognition of a new nationality and its ‘people,’ namely Pakistan.
If Ambedkar’s discussion of caste uncovered the violent source of sovereignty in India,
as exemplified by Shudra rectums dripping with Brahminical cum
then it is striking that the question of Pakistan, on the contrary, opened up for him the possibility of peace between Hindus and Muslims.
based on Hindus massively retaliating against any violence initiated by the minority
While considering the respective ‘Hindu’ and ‘Muslim’ cases for and against Pakistan, Ambedkar reprised the recent history of relations between the two and their representatives. Armed with a battery of statistics of killings, Ambedkar noted that the interwar period had seen Hindus and Muslims ‘engaged in a sanguinary warfare’. The high nationalist era or the decades from 1920-40, despite Gandhi’s efforts to ‘bring unity’, Ambedkar argued, had been an era of ‘civil war between the Hindus and Muslims of India’ that was only ‘interrupted by brief intervals of armed peace.’ By the critical moment at the end of the Second World War, ‘the ‘depth of antagonism’ had ensured that the ‘mirage’ of Hindu-Muslim ‘unity’ had vanished and was both ‘out of sight and also out of mind.’ With this context before him, Ambedkar
should have been able to predict that his pal Mandal had fucked over his own people- the Namasudras- by joining hands with the League.
examined the question of unity and separation once more, setting out the relationship in terms of the social and the political in the same manner in which he had posed the question of caste. The issue of the social and political – especially as it was couched in terms of the possibility of union and separation on the issue of Pakistan – emerged in Ambedkar’s book in direct contrast to the case of caste. As we have seen, caste for Ambedkar was a political union bound in graded sovereignty marked by the divine dispensation of social separation.
and magical Brahminical dicks buggering every Shudra bunghole.
By contrast, Hindus and Muslims had maintained a complex social union through their long history.
Because no Muslim savant was stupid enough to claim that Brahmins had magical powers or were incessantly sodomizing Salafi rectums.
Yet in the contemporary era of the nation-state, their social relationship defied being translated into a political union.
Just as Dalit-Muslim political union was a non-starter.
And what is equally staggeringly singular, but which generally goes unnoticed is that Ambedkar marked out M. A Jinnah --so often seen as the arch manipulative leader of the times --as entirely ‘incorruptible.’
Ambedkar ended up a Hindu god. The pork eating, whiskey drinking Jinnah ended up as the founder of a State where Shias like himself now feel unsafe.
The question of Muslim nationality as a politically separate force was, in Ambedkar’s eyes, not an outcome of cynical machination or bad faith. Since the days of the Poona Pact at least, the concept of separation did not in itself cause anxiety or squeamishness in Ambedkar. In the context of the Round Table Conference and the Pact, he had certainly argued that Hindus and Muslims, unlike Dalits, were estranged, but not imperatively separate. He did not revise this position or argue in the imperial mode that Hindus and Muslims were primordially distinct and separate so that the newly articulated Muslim demand for the nation state simply enabled Muslims to fulfill their separate historical destiny.
True enough. He wrote garbled, hate-filled, nonsense. But that was cool because the Brits needed some token Dalits to maintain the fiction that the Indian masses supported their rule.
In contrast to the caste question, Ambedkar recognized that Hindus and Muslims had a long history of what he termed social union. Whether it was language, ‘race’ or custom, he argued that there was considerable commonality between Hindus and Muslims and in several social and cultural respects, their relations were ‘honeycombed.’ Yet it was history and particularly the ‘inability to forget’ that militated against a political union between Hindus and Muslims.
Did they intermarry? No. So there was no union. By contrast, Ambedkar himself married a Brahmin.
Building on the insights once more of the French experience – and in particular the nineteenth century philosopher Ernest Renan’s works on nationality and nationalism – Ambedkar posited the necessity of forgetting the past to constitute a national union.
He certainly invented a past to justify his crazy obsession with Brahmins.
Unlike other nationalists, whether a Nehru or a Savarkar, who turned to history to testify to India’s credentials for modern nationality, for Ambedkar the hold of history had become an impediment to any union between Hindus and Muslims.
Why not add Maulana Azad and Badshah Khan? Why does Kapila mention two Brahmins? Is it because she is a Brahmin herself?
‘The crux of the problem’, Ambedkar wrote, was that ‘common historical antecedents’ were difficult to ‘share together.’ Whether it was shrouded in violence or past ruler-ship, history had become the insuperable obstacle. ‘The pity of it is’, he wrote ‘that the two communities can never forget or obliterate their past.’
The Nehrus had served the Mughals from the second decade of the eighteenth century onward. That is why Motilal Nehru was considered by the Hindu Mahasabha to be the ideal ambassador of the Hindu-Muslim unity needful in the United Province. The Nehrus certainly had some very devoted and capable Muslim helpers- e.g. Rafi Ahmed Kidwai. Sonia too benefited from the sage counsel of Ahmed Patel.
He cited Renan who had argued that ‘deeds of violence have taken place at the commencement of all political formations’, even those whose ‘consequences have been most beneficial.’ Yet, as Renan wrote, and Ambedkar repeated, it was ‘forgetfulness and I shall even say historical error, [that] form an essential factor in the creation of a nation.’
Ambedkar's own 'historical errors' should be effaced from our memory. Let us focus on what he could have been- i.e. a 'Law & Econ' maven doing mechanism design and advising on monetary and fiscal policy etc. The inter-war period was marked by all sorts of craziness. Let us forgive and forget. Gandhi is fine as a Sadhu Mahatma. Ambedkar is even finer as a Hindu God dressed in a smart 3 piece suit.
The Hindus and Muslims, Ambedkar surmised, had ‘no such longing’ whereby the past and its antagonisms could be forgotten in the forging of a union.
Ambedkar was wrong. His own city of Mumbai- or, at the least, Bollywood- showed there was indeed such a longing.
Here he cited the question of ‘invasions’ and the fear of becoming mere subjects as critical to Hindu and Muslim anxieties that were rooted in history.
Gandhi and Rajaji and some other Hindu politicians certainly had an exaggerated fear of domination by meat eating Muslims and Punjabis. Equally Bihari Muslims feared Bhumihar or other Hindu domination while, of course, the Marathas and Sikhs and Gurkhas excited equal apprehension.
The implication was that in the case of caste, history had obfuscated and repressed the true nature of sovereignty that Ambedkar assiduously revealed.
He was peddling a silly story about Dalits being Buddhists whereas the truth is that they are survivors of the lost kingdom of Atlantis.
By contrast, for Hindus and Muslims, the past was ever-present and constantly articulate, allowing little or no capacity for its own repression. Such repression and forgetting, had it existed, would have enabled the suturing of violent past events and the creation of a new relationship of unity. But this was now not to be. The power of history coupled with the ‘tyranny’ of numbers had rendered the Hindu-Muslim relations hostile and antagonistic.
But that hostility was quickly ended with a little blood-letting and ethnic cleansing of the minority. Then the majority realizes that minorities tend to do a lot of the menial work. You are slitting your own throat if you chase them away.
The ‘communal problem’ was not a matter of disposition, whether this was the much-rehearsed polemics of ‘insolent’ demands and ‘meanness’ on the part of either Muslims or Hindus. Instead, Ambedkar directly addressed the question of majority and minority and the potentiality of violence and through it, peace. It [the communal problem] exists and will exist wherever a hostile majority is brought face to face against a hostile minority. Controversies relating to separate vs. joint electorates, controversies relating to population ratio vs. weightage are all inherent in a situation where a minority is pitted against a majority. The best solution of the communal problem is not to have two communities facing each other, one a majority and other a minority, welded in the steel frame of a single government.
Sadly, as Pope said 'for forms of Government' only fools contest. If a country is ruled by stupid people then it will go down the toilet.
The best thing Ambedkar could have done was stick to Economics instead of becoming part of a die-hard Tory attempt to hold on to the trappings of power.
As this extract clarifies, the coercion or ‘steel frame of a single government’ could not on its own resolve the depth of antagonism nor the powerful will to nationhood which was present on both sides. In fact, the political mechanisms described by Ambedkar as ‘controversies’ would only create conditions in which hostility would be perpetuated. In Ambedkar’s reckoning, these relations between Brahmins and untouchables and Hindus and Muslims were mirror opposites.
Either they were opposites or they were transpositions. Mirrors don't show you the opposite of yourself- I don't see a beautiful young woman rather than an ugly old man in my mirror- they merely transpose left and right.
A separation founded on and preserved in violence had constituted the order of things for caste.
Sadly, caste can exist without any violence. It is not illegal to refuse to consort with a particular class of people.
The work of the republic, then, would be to ensure that even though castes could not be ‘dissolved’ a relationship, however competitive and adversarial, could be established between castes that had hitherto been marked only by separation.
Yet, castes did compete- for example for Government jobs or contracts- before and after Independence. Kapila is writing nonsense. Ambedkar may have hoped that Dalits could gain hegemony over Indian 'Shudras' and Muslims but this was a non-starter because those were precisely the groups with which Dalits directly competed. By contrast, the Brahmins grumbled about Bania domination and thought that 'Socialism' was a good stick to beat the mercantile class with.
By contrast, while a density of social relationship indeed existed between Hindus and Muslims, their antagonism when encountered could not be sublimated but only expressed in violence.
Not if one was clearly superior to the other in terms of retaliatory capacity.
From his work on Pakistan, it is clear that political separation for Ambedkar offered the possibility of peace. ‘Integral India’, he concluded was ‘incompatible with an independent [India] or even with India as a dominion.’
because Muslims be kray kray. On the other hand Brahmins have magical powers to sodomize Shudras. Dalits should join Viceroy's Council while the going is good.
The antagonism between Hindus and Muslims, as Ambedkar interpreted it, was not if the same kind or even degree of the antagonism between Brahmins and the untouchables.
Especially Dalit dudes married to Brahmin doctors.
Their antagonism existed on the surface, was ambient and given to easy mobilization, Hindus and Muslims were thus in a state of civil war.
Not to mention Christians or Jews who were in a state of civil war with Muslims elsewhere.
This called for some form of separation of historical brotherhood that had taken on a murderous logic. While the violent antagonism steeped in separation of castes was so complete that it become both obvious and invisible. Caste antagonism thus could only be managed if not overcome through a facing of different caste groups within the same political horizon and the recognition of a historic sovereign order that had to be displaced.
Alternatively, one could ignore the paranoid side of Ambedkar and just focus on raising productivity through education and infrastructure investment and doing good mechanism design and having a sound monetary and fiscal policy.
Reading Kapila or Devji can only render you stupider than you need to be.
Whether it was Muslin nationality or caste, Ambedkar’s influential political pursuit would be thus overwhelmingly agonistic
i.e. a fucking nuisance
and zealously nonviolent.
i.e. impotent
Read together, Ambedkar’s interventions on caste and Pakistan were, though diametrically opposed, a matter of the recognition of separation.
Coz Muslims want Islamic States where non-Muslims get short shrift. But then, Hindu India too didn't want to indulge Muslims in any way. This sentiment seems to be gaining ground in Europe- France, in particular.
For caste, the principle of separation remained a deliberate blind spot, which he undertook to illuminate, summoning up history, social practice and the issue of deeply embedded violence. By contrast, Hindus and Muslims were often described as and recognized as a union or a fraternity, but according to him this was merely ‘display’. A sense of mutual ‘antagonism,’ he concluded, was the essential form of this relationship, which would constantly come to the surface in a ‘common theatre.’ ‘It is the common theatre’ – that is, united India itself – he argued, ‘which calls this antagonism into action.’ ‘Pakistan’ thus had the ‘advantage’ of ‘defanging’ the antagonism by excluding the possibility of a common platform that was both the site and the cause of deadly confrontation. Pakistan offered the possibility of removing this ‘disturbance of the peace’ and ensuring an enduring ‘tranquility’ through the separation of the antagonists.
Everyone had come round to that view. Muslims be kray kray. Let them go their own way.
Critiquing the Hindutva ideologues’ hostility to the creation of Pakistan, Ambedkar directly reintroduced the question of caste. Dismissing Har Dayal, whom he categorized not as an anarchist or a revolutionary but as part of the ideological world of Hindutva,
because he was high caste and, like Ambedkar, a precocious scholar
he chastised him for his views on Muslim conversion or what was termed as ‘shuddhi’ [reconversion/purification].
Har Dayal, like Gandhi, had come under the influence of Bhai Parmanand- an Arya Samaji activist. However, unlike Gandhi, Har Dayal's vow of celibacy did not preclude him from marrying Swiss or Swedish wives. Ambedkar, poor fellow, was stuck with a Brahmin wife. Sad.
In other words, he dismissed the Hindutva desire to incorporate the Muslim as Hindu on the basis not of religion but of caste itself.
Though a Jat Muslim being shuddified would remain a Jat as would a Rajput or whatever.
The Hindutva idea of ‘assimilation’, he reminded Har Dayal and others, was an affront to Hinduism itself since ‘caste is incompatible with conversion.’
Though Ambedkar knew plenty of 'Brahmin' Christians who practiced untouchability. There were similar Brahmin Muslims- e.g. Iqbal.
More stridently, he ironically identified Savarkar’s claims to be compatible with the idea of Pakistan itself. If, according to Savarkar’s assertion, ‘Hindus are a nation by themselves,’ Ambedkar argued that ‘this of course means that the Muslims are a separate nation by themselves.’
Savarkar was, like Ambedkar, a Maharashtrian. However, Savarkar- as a Chitpavan- was viewed with suspicion not just by the Brits but also some Brahmins who resented slights they had received under the Peshw'sa rule. Godse's killing of Gandhi was a godsend in that the Pune Brahmins got a damn good kicking so they learnt their place. Savarkar was mixed up in that stupidity. Still, as Ambedkar said to his wife, Gandhi's assassination was providential. In the Hindu scheme of things, Gandhi's 'avatar' had come to an end. Like Krishna, killed by a hunter, somebody or other had to put an end to a life that lost its purpose.
In fact, precisely because of their belief in the existence of the Hindu and Muslim nations in India, Ambedkar surmised that Jinnah and Savarkar, were alike and in agreement. The key difference was separation and violence, once again. Jinnah, he averred, wanted separation. Of the Hindutva proponents, on the other hand, he wrote, Mr. Savarkar…wants Hindus and the Muslims to live two separate nations, in one country, each maintaining its own religion, language and culture. One can understand and even appreciate the wisdom…because the ultimate aim is to bring into being one nation... One can justify this attitude only if the two nations were to live as partners in friendly intercourse with mutual respect and accord. But that it cannot be, because Mr. Savarkar will not allow the Muslim nation to be co-equal…he wants the Hindu nation to be the dominant nation and the Muslim nation to be the servient [sic!] nation. Why Mr. Savarkar, after sowing the seed of enmity between the Hindu nation and Muslim nation should want that they should live under one constitution and occupy one country is difficult to explain.
Not really. Savarkar wanted Hindus too to preserve only the outward show of religion while inwardly adopting a Nationalist ethos placing the interests of the entire country above all else. Hinduism then was merely Indianism which was compatible with any or no religious belief about the hereafter.
These were not stray or hapless remarks.
They were foolish. It was obvious that a Marathi speaking Hindu would get a Hindu dominated Maharashtra which would play a big part in a unified India. It was equally obvious that a Gujarati speaking Muslim would, in Pakistan, be as a stranger in a strange land.
Through a discussion of territory and nationality, Ambedkar had taken full account of raging polemics, party positions and constitutional considerations. The separation of caste though immanent had rendered the Hindu social as an asocial body politic.
Savarkar agreed that Hindus must get rid of caste so as to rise as a military and economic power.
Confronting that fact and ensuring the proper relation between castes had the potentiality of converting a separation that was singular to India into a political union.
If castes have a 'proper relationship' then India would not just be a political union, it would be rich and very very strong. But this has nothing to do with confronting some imaginary fact. The truth of the matter is that if me and the neighbor's cat had a proper relationship then we could become very very rich through You Tube videos featuring us coming up with all sorts of cute dance routines and what have you. Indeed, since cats are very fond of people who make breakthroughs in quantum physics, a proper relationship between me and any cat would involve our creating a time-machine which can ensure that the Big Bang unfolds in a manner far more beneficial to our two species.
‘Unity’ or ‘the people’ or popular sovereignty, Ambedkar astutely realized, was contained within the national form.
But this simply wasn't and isn't true. Popular sovereignty may involve the removal of all national boundaries. It may involve the universal rule of some bunch of Commissars or College of Cardinals. It certainly won't be 'contained' within the national form coz of Tardean mimetic effects across borders.
The central issue was the problem of hostility and antagonism and its correct recognition for a nonviolent and even peaceful emergence of a new politics.
People could see that Hitler and Tojo and Mussolini were hostile and antagonistic to the countries they invaded. But this 'correct recognition' did not magically create a 'nonviolent' and 'peaceful' politics. Instead, those murderous bastards had to be bombed to kingdom come.
His recognition of Pakistan was constitutive of an agonistic politics
But his politics was 'agonistic' long before anybody had heard the word 'Pakistan'? How could the recognition of something at a later date be constitutive of something which existed at an earlier date? H
that took two mutually constitutive directions.
Kapilaji, if you love the word constitutive so much, why don't you marry it? Also a person who simultaneously walks in two different directions is a person who has tripped and fallen on her arse.
Whether it was the antagonism of caste or of religion, he sought to convert that relationship, without the erasure of those fundamental differences, into an adversarial relationship,
Antagonistic means adversarial. Kapila is saying Ambedkar sought to convert antagonism into itself. In other words the man had shit for brains. We don't believe Kapila. We think it is she who has gobar in her kopdi.
which would become peaceful.
Antagonism may be peaceful to start of with. Substituting the word Adversarial for the word Antagonistic won't have some magical effect. Things may be different in Punjab. A guy stabbing another guy may cease to wish to do so if Kapila says to him 'convert your antagonist into an adversary'. However evil Brahmins may then sodomize them with their magical, invisible, cocks.
One dimension required the recognition of separation, namely Muslim nationality, and the other, the end of separation namely a compact between castes.
Does Kapila really not know that, except in parts of East Punjab, ethnic cleansing of Muslims was never completed in Hindu India? Even if a 'compact between castes' is achieved by Hindutva- Muslims will still feel left out.
The overall concern that emerges in the totality of Ambedkar’s writing is the making of ‘people’ as the subject of politics.
Nonsense! What emerges is special pleading for Ambedkar's own caste. This was cool because he represented nothing else in politics.
More precisely, he sought the correct ‘container’ for an expression of popular sovereignty and as such his was a radical republican project.
Which failed utterly. The Republican Party of India has more factions than it has voters.
In a major departure from the subject oriented-political thought and practice of Gandhi, or even Tilak, that had located sovereignty in the individual subject,
because everybody lives in a Presidential palace of their own and gets invited to the White House- right?
for Ambedkar its rightful place was with the general will.
Which, for a pragmatist, does not exist.
Ironically, the work of separation, in its full measure, enabled the philosophical discovery of the general will or a true popular sovereignty.
Really? How come Kapila lives in England not the Punjab which is brimming with 'popular sovereignty'? Is it because Punjabis think she is stupid and that she knows shit about Indian history?
Both the nature of caste and the recent but deadly antagonism between Hindus and Muslims called for the recognition of violence and hostility.
Because previously Indian dudes who were being stabbed by other Indian dudes who kept saying 'I hate you. Just fucking die already!' were not able to recognize that they were facing violence and hostility. They thought the guy stabbing them was just trying to be nice
But in Ambedkar’s case, this was not for an ethical resolution or personal transformation, but for the institution of nonviolent politics.
Because people who are being stabbed to death can easily set up institutions of nonviolent politics- right?
The existence of enemies and antagonists, in distinction to Gandhi, offered for him not the opportunity for self-transformation, but the conversion of those relations into agonistic politics.
Ambedkar understood that 'agonistic politics' might involve assassinating your adversary. Everybody did.
As such, the destruction of the dispersed monarchy of the Brahmin and the recognition of Muslim nationality were two sides of the same political consideration.
In the view of, the cretin, Kapila. Why not simply say Ambedkar would have got to rule his own Republic if the Muslims and Hindus and everybody else fucked off leaving just Ambedkarite Buddhists who...still wouldn't vote for him if some ex-assistant of his stood against him. Sad.
The conversion of violence and hostility into the nonviolent separation of historical brothers and the assumption of a new fraternity -- though not entirely recognized today as Ambedkar’s political thought and work - - above all laid the foundations for the assumption of not one but two agonistic republics.
There is a third- Bangladesh- which has overtaken both in terms of per capita Income by concentrating on getting women into factories where they produce useful things. Meanwhile India has managed to export Kapila to Cambridge. But her shite will come boomeranging back to India. A new generation of illiterate graduate students will be writing about how antagonistic stabbing should be converted into adversarial knifing so that a nonviolent general will will become General of Army of the deconstruction of the hegemony of the upar di gur gur di annexe di bedhiyana di moong di daal of di Pakistan and Hindustan of di durr phitey mun
