Ram Guha's on RaGa

 Rahul Gandhi once said that he could have become PM when he turned 25. He was right. True, like his father, he'd have faced back-stabbers within his own Cabinet and would have been brought down, but- like his father- he'd have bided his time and waited for his successors' coalitions to break down before returning to power. All Rahul needed to do was avoid getting assassinated. 

When Rahul returned to India in 2002, Congress's fortunes revived. Had Rahul spearheaded its campaign, Congress would have gained a majority. Atal was clearly senile. Mamta kept walking in and out of his Cabinet. Fernandes's reputation had been hit by a corruption scandal. Nobody could be sure that Modi, Advani's protege, might not implode in Gujarat. Maybe Vaghela could revive the KHAM caste equation. Maybe the Patels would rebel under Keshubhai. More to the point, maybe the farmers would demand free electricity or Narmada water would dry up for some exogenous reason. 

Rahul's refusal to takeover the running of the Commonwealth Games (his father had run the Asian Games) and then his refusal to shoulder aside the senile Manmohan & lead his party into the 2014 election as the sitting PM, enabled Modi to get a majority. The hope was that this was a strategic move. Maybe Rahul was about to get married so as to sire an heir for Dynasty. Meanwhile, let Modi do the required land & labour reform. There is bound to be a reaction. Congress, under Rahul, wins big in 2019. The problem was that Modi wasn't a senile sack of shit- like Atal. Demonetization took the wind out of the sails of the anti-corruption movement. The air-strike against Pak terror camps was hugely popular. But Rahul did a great deal to make himself and his party unelectable. 'Chowkidar chor hai' (the watchman is the thief) is elitist. Rich people blame the servant when something goes missing. Modi came from the 'chowkidar' class. Rahul had ancestral wealth. Moreover, his attempt to appease the Hindus stressed his elite Brahmin status. Modi's Hinduism is ecumenical & independent of caste. Most damaging of all was Rahul's failure to reach seat-sharing agreements with other parties. Once Kharge came in, Congress greatly improved its tally purely on this basis. But the opposition still doesn't have a credible Prime Ministerial face. 

The one thing Rahul & Priyanka got right was Kerala- which Congress has been able to take. In Karnataka, too, there seems to have been a peaceful transition of power. What is helpful to Congress in the South is that Rahul can't speak any of the local languages. 

Ram Guha- the depths of whose stupidity have still not been plumbed- writes in Scroll

Soon after the general elections of 2024, I met a young Congress legislator.

 If he was from Karnataka, he would expect Guha to praise Kharge's generalship. 

He asked me for five pieces of advice for his leader, Rahul Gandhi. I said I had only one; that Priyanka Gandhi should not run for the Lok Sabha from Wayanad.

That was a great move. It showed the Dynasty was committed to Kerala and raised the possibility that Priyanka could be the Prime Ministerial face while Rahul focussed on touring the country to establish 'mass contact'.  

I added that I was certain the advice would be disregarded.

Would Kharge listen to a Tambram shithead? Fuck, no!  

There is little doubt that Rahul Gandhi’s Bharat Jodo Yatra helped in enhancing his credibility, in portraying him as being a man of the people. Yet the Yatra’s gains were frittered away by the reassertion, after the elections, of the Congress as a family firm.

It can be nothing else. Look at Karnataka. Why did Siddaramiah yield to Shivakumar? It was because the Dynasty has reasserted residuary control rights. That's a good thing provided Rahul doesn't do stupid shit. 

Priyanka Gandhi won the Wayanad seat

thus helping Congress take Kerala from the Commies 

(as safe for her as Gandhinagar is for Amit Shah), and spoke grandiosely about how she and her brother were uniting the country, her representing the South and he the North.

Priyanka is smart. She always knows the right thing to say.  

Then, for a parliamentary debate on the Constitution’s 75th anniversary, the Congress chose Priyanka as the lead speaker,

she did a great job. 

even though it was her own grandmother who sabotaged the Constitution by imposing the Emergency.

She lifted it quickly enough.

Meanwhile, the Congress winning 99 seats in the general elections encouraged the coterie of sycophants around Rahul Gandhi to proclaim that he was now a prime minister-in-waiting.

This is the normal presumption re. the Leader of the Opposition. The exception was Sonia who was Italian. 

These claims were amplified by intellectuals and journalists in Delhi, whose sterling anti-Hindutva credentials were clouded by their lack of judgment, and perhaps by the seductions of being rajgurus.

To be anti Hindutva in a Hindu country is to show lack of judgment. Rajgurus are guys like Prashant Kishore who can help a Party win the elections.  

Premature elation

Two years later, we can see that this sense of elation was premature.

There wasn't much elation. What if Nitish stabbed Modi in the back in his usual manner? There would be another General Election. BJP would get an absolute majority.  This is still the state of play- albeit with the added twist that seat redistribution in favour of the Hindi belt is likely to be accomplished by 2029.

The odd state unit of the Congress (such as Kerala) remains well-organised, and capable of winning the odd assembly election.

Kerala has pendulum politics. All parties there are well organized because Malayalee people are good at organization.  

In most other parts of India, the party has steadily lost ground.

Because it is anti-Hindu and led by a cretin.  

The Bharatiya Janata Party is now the natural party of governance in Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Haryana, and several other states where the Congress was once dominant. Rahul Gandhi has been incapable of arresting this slide.

Mamta couldn't stop BJP taking Bengal. As with Assam, there is genuine fear of Muslim demographic growth & the politics of appeasement.  

According to a recent report in The Print, since Rahul assumed a formal leadership role in the Congress around 2008, the number of Congress MLAs nationwide has dropped by almost half, from 1,204 to 676.

BJP has 1811 now. It had 889 in 2008.  

I have met and corresponded with Rahul Gandhi,

but not Modi or anybody else with half a brain. 

and know him to be a decent human being. Even without this slight acquaintance, I would have much sympathy for him because of the personal tragedies he has suffered,

the same ones his mum & sister suffered 

and because at the age of 55 he remains an instrument of his mother’s will.

No more than she is of his.  

One can have little doubt that he entered politics at Sonia Gandhi’s command,

She could have become PM herself or promoted her daughter. Rahul returned to India at the age of 32 because he hadn't made anything of himself.  

and that he leads the Congress at her behest too.

If Guha says so, we know it can't possibly be true.  

However, when the future of the Republic is at stake, one is forced to state one’s case directly and even brutally. Rahul Gandhi may be a good fellow; nonetheless, those who wish for a successful pushback against the hate-filled regime of the BJP should perhaps stop looking to him as their principal source of hope.

Guha is filled with hate for the BJP. Sadly his brains are filled with shit.  

As a prospective prime ministerial challenger to Narendra Modi, Rahul Gandhi lacks discipline, gravitas and a curriculum vitae.

Didn't stop his daddy- an airline pilot- becoming PM. Rahul could put Priyanka forward as the PM face because she is civilized and has a brain. Thus other parties- if given good portfolios- will be willing to let Congress take the lead. The problem with Rahul is that he is stupid & talks bollocks. Nobody wants to serve under him.  

Even when he takes up an important issue, such as the partisan conduct of the Election Commission of India, he rarely does so in a sustained manner.

There is no 'partisan conduct'. It is the job of the EC to strike off bogus voters from the electoral roll. The fact that this harms gangster parties- like the TMC- doesn't mean it isn't the right thing to do.  

We see him giving the odd press conference on “vote chori”, followed by a trip to Europe or Latin America.

He truly is shit. Still, if you get candidate selection right & put a Prashant Kishore type expert in charge, you can still win big. There are plenty of other playboy dynastic politicians. If they delegate to smart people, their party can stay in power.   

Indeed, in his 22 years in politics,

in Parliament. He was born into politics.  

it was only during the few months of the Bharat Jodo Yatra that Rahul Gandhi showed himself capable of the focused hard work that the leaders of the BJP put in all the time.

That's unfair. He put in a fair number of hours in 2017 before taking over as President in December. Rahul was given credit for Congress gains in Rajasthan, Chattisgarh & Madhya Pradesh.  

Nowadays, his political interventions are mostly on X, attracting an array of immediate likes, yet destined to be forgotten within 24 hours.

That is irrelevant. Either Congress rebuilds support amongst Hindu, Hindi, speakers or it gets relegated to the Dravidian fringe. Currently, it is Vijay's victory in Tamil Nadu which is concentrating minds. He kept his powder dry, entered late, and relied on his fan clubs. Equally, Mamta's fall shows the limits of kleptocratic populism. Mamta's histrionics were insufficient for her to even retain her own seat. Her nephew's 'Diamond Harbour model' is in tatters.

To be fair, one could say that the BJP has expanded by taking over disgruntled Congressmen in Assam, Bengal, etc. But, the question is, what caused the disgruntlement? Alliance with Communists in the case of Mamta & the TMC. But Muslim appeasement was also a factor.  Don't forget Mamta quit the Lok Sabha on the issue of 'infiltration'. 

Gestural gimmickry

Rahul’s lack of gravitas is also manifest in his gestural gimmickry, his naïve belief that jumping into a pond with fisherfolk or entering a kitchen with a chef will win his party votes.

Nothing wrong with gimmicks. Rahul is ensuring that party funds are spent on building him up as the big Boss who decides the 'vichardhara' (ideology) of Congress. Thus, he says, his cousin can't join Congress because he has the wrong vichardhara. The problem is that it is an anti-Hindu ideology. Only Stalin was genuinely enthused by it, but Stalin is now in the dustbin of history. Will his MPs as well as those loyal to Mamta turn on Rahul in Parliament? Perhaps. But that won't change anything on the ground.  

And his lack of a curriculum vitae is manifest in his never having held a real job.

He doesn't have Ministerial experience. But both his granny and his daddy hadn't held any significant portfolio before becoming PM. This is why both faced rebellions within their own Cabinet.  

No one really knows what employment Rahul Gandhi had before he became an MP in 2004.

He was employed by Michael Porter's Monitor Group whose clients included India based FCMGs (fast moving consumer goods) & IT companies.  

In the ten years that the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance was in power, he refused to take a ministerial position.

He refused to take charge of the Commonwealth Games the way his Dad took charge of the Asian games. Still, the main job of a Dynast is to get married & have babies. That was his most serious shortcoming. 

Why then should Indian voters trust him to be an effective prime minister of this large and diverse country, and in an ever more threatening geopolitical environment?

If Sonia could preside as his Regent, why couldn't he step up to the plate even if it was only to replace Manmohan with Montek or some other technocrat? The truth is he neither wanted the job himself (probably because of the risk of assassination) nor will he let anyone else in his party take it. He tore up Manmohan's ordinance but wouldn't shoulder the old man and take the job himself. This creates a problem for the Opposition. Even if Rahul lets one of them become PM, he will cut the fellow off at the knees. Also, his obdurate stupidity & ignorance would make him impossible to work with as a 'first among equals'.  

Finally, Rahul Gandhi has a marked inability to learn from past mistakes.

Like Guha.  

The “chowkidar chor hai” campaign spectacularly backfired in 2019, yet he continues to personally attack the prime minister (calling him cowardly, compromised and so on),

Rahul is right to attack Modi for being Westernized, Elitist & out of touch with Indian reality. The fellow can't even speak Gujarati! I suppose, they don't teach Indian languages at Eton. Rahul, by contrast, started off as a chaiwallah and then worked his way upward.  

instead of focusing on governance failures

in Karnataka? 

or indeed on renewing his own party at the grassroots.

Mummy is the grassroot. 

Many in the Congress acknowledge these criticisms, but, out of a lifetime of devotion to the Gandhis, think that his sister should be presented as the prime minister-in-waiting instead. Having belatedly realised that Rahul is not the new Nehru, they now hope that Priyanka will be the new Indira.

Screw that. She's a nice, polite, lady with common sense. She could preside over a Coalition Cabinet well enough. Also, it is her son who is the heir. She doesn't have to be the second Indira. Just desi Sonia is good enough. 

Admittedly, Priyanka is a far better orator than her brother in Hindi, a language understood by a plurality of Indians.

Also English. 

However, she too carries the burden of being an entitled dynast.

No. She's an Empty-Nester who has taken up politics rather than competitive Mahjong. But can Raihan be the next Rahul? He is engaged to a Muslim. If he marries her without converting, he loses the Muslim vote. If he converts, he loses period. 

And she may be even less successful in getting voters out. On the one occasion Priyanka led an election campaign, for the 2022 assembly polls in Uttar Pradesh, the Congress’s vote share was 2.27%.

Congress lost in all 5 states. Can Congress ally with Mayawati? Currently, she is turning away their overtures. Since we expect the Hindi belt to get more seats after the next General Election, UP in 2027 is going to be watched very closely.  

Dynastic entitlement

Incidentally, one (apparently unnoticed) lesson from the recent assembly elections is that all represented a negative comment on dynastic entitlement. The BJP was helped in Assam by

promising to deport Bangladeshis 

Tarun Gogoi’s son leading the Congress campaign, and in West Bengal by

promising to deport Bangladeshis 

Mamata Banerjee’s promotion of her nephew, Abhishek. In Tamil Nadu, Vijay was aided by Stalin’s elevation of his son, Udhayanidhi,

a film-star- but not as big a film-star as Vijay whose Dad (who had previously launched Vijaykantha) had helped turn Vijay's fan clubs into socio-political organizations. Vijay's genius was to come out from under his Dad's shadow & go it alone. Will he do a reverse takeover of the Anna DMK? But if he is shit at governance he will get the order of the boot.  

in Kerala the Congress by Vijayan’s promotion of his son-in-law.

who is Muslim. 

Of course, there were many other factors at work, but this was certainly one of them.

Not really. Vijayan avoided defeat last time around because of Teacher Shailaja's handling of COVID. Otherwise anti-incumbency would have prevailed. 

These criticisms of the Congress’s First Family are far from being an endorsement of the current regime.

An endorsement from Guha is the kiss of death.  

In numerous articles written since the Modi government came to power in 2014, I have

told hysterical lies 

documented how it has eviscerated public institutions, cowed the press and the judiciary, undermined democratic processes, brutalised religious minorities,

sodomized ghosts 

pursued an error-strewn foreign policy, damaged Indian science, promoted crony capitalism, and ravaged our forests, soils, water, and air.

& forced Guha to eat his own shit 

There is no question that the principal architects of this undoing of the Republic since May 2014 are Narendra Modi, Amit Shah and their party, the BJP. Yet it is also now starkly evident that in their pursuit and consolidation of power, Modi and Shah have had, as their (witting or unwitting) accomplices, Sonia Gandhi, Rahul Gandhi, and the sycophants who surround them.

Not to mention Guha who now eats nothing but his own shit. 

I must not end on a despairing note. At the moment, the BJP under Modi looks impregnable. But so did Viktor Orbán and Fidesz in Hungary, and yet they were spectacularly unseated by the hitherto unknown Péter Magyar

who worked in Orban's office. Magyar could be compared to Adhikari. Why not suggest that Smriti Irani will take down Modi? 

 

and his new Tisza Party. For two years prior to the election, Magyar travelled the country tirelessly, going to small towns and even villages to make his case

that his wife & other party big-wigs had covered up a sexual abuse scandal in a Children's home.  

against the authoritarian who had run and ruined Hungary. Magyar worked assiduously to build an Opposition alliance of all parties, Left, liberal, and Centre-Right. That he was a fresh face, untainted by corruption or dynastic privilege, and worked so hard were all inestimable assets.

Hungary has a population of ten million. India has a population of 1.4 billion. Guha has shit for brains.  

As a Hungarian editor quoted in the Financial Times said about Magyar: “He is incredibly driven. Others have the tools, but he went in and did all the legwork.”

In a country with less than one-third the population of Delhi.  

This, alas, is not what anyone can say about Rahul or Priyanka Gandhi.

Unless they win. Rajiv was on his way back to victory when he was killed.  But he came across as a Hindu- like his mother. Indeed, she had fought a court case to establish that her sons were of the Hindu faith. Rahul is anti-Hindu- like Guha. Also, like Guha, he has shit for brains. Still, it is enough to be less shitty than your rival to win elections. The problem facing the Dynasty is that Assassination tempers Autocracy. Rahul, quite naturally, wants to put off the evil day when he comes into his birth-right. 

Strauss's Kuzari

In the battle betwixt Kedar & Seir, You are the ipseity whose army lost,

Just as, in Goyim Justice, Thy Jew bears all the cost, az gevalt!

Till Halevi's Kuzari up Kalam's Shi'te rectum crams

Job's Eliphaz's prattle: Rambam's Nevayot rams.

Envoi- 

That Gold hath a God which, by its own diligence of assay, sires a Prince of Peace

To refine, confine, e'en Kenotic desires-  Leo, just say- Nigga please!

Mihir Dalal on Arun Shourie.

 When I was young, Arun Shourie was regarded as a hit-man for Ramnath Goenka, owner of the Express. Prem Shankar Jha was his, more sober, more straightforwardly Socialist, counterpart at the ToI and, later on, the Hindustan Times. Both were the sons of ICS officers as was Brajesh Mishra who was close to Shourie more especially when they both served Vajpayee as PM. Jha, who studied at Oxford, was cultured and wrote quite well. Shourie did not- but maybe that was the fashionable new American style.  He zig-zagged politically but there was always something of the crack-pot about him. He had done a PhD in Econ from Syracuse but may have come to think of himself as a combination of Woodward & Bernstein. Some senior journalists thought he had a nose for detail and might mature. But the crackpot could never see the forest for the trees. 

Mihir Dalal, of whom I have written before, has an article on Shourie's long career. Dalal knows his stuff but his views are bizarre.

Perhaps no other journalist or thinker has impressed his passions, furies and perfidies as thoroughly upon India’s public sphere as Arun Shourie.

He became a Minister under Vajpayee. Was this because of Brajesh? But he was clearly a crackpot. Charitable people said it was because his son had cerebral palsy. Less charitable pointed out that he was Punjabi. Dalal takes the charitable view.  

Yet his influence on post-Emergency politics is poorly understood.

Goenka had been with the Jan Sangh at the end of the Seventies. No doubt, he was using his attack dog in some manner profitable to himself. People used to say 'Shourie is a World Bank man' as though that was a recommendation. But Jha was a World Bank man too. Were they good journalists? Good enough. The Eighties were a period when press exposes did have material political effects but that was because the Dynasty was dying nasty and Cabinets had turned into a game of musical chairs. 

Arun Shourie’s services as prophet of Modi’s India

Vajpayee's, maybe. Modi would have nothing to do with that crackpot.  

The most influential Indian journalist of his era, Arun Shourie traded repute as a leftist dissident

Sarkari dissident 

to shape the intellectual scaffolding of the Hindu Right

it had none- other than Hindutva which Shourie isn't into.  

– and took much of the country’s elite with him

He was a crackpot. Elites are interested in staying elite. That means making the right investments- i.e. backing winners.  

THE EMERGENCY of 1975 was the point of no return for Indian democracy.

It returned within a couple of years. Britain and Canada too had States of Emergency during the Seventies.  

The story of the next five decades is, essentially, a story of the decline of liberal politics.

There was no liberal politics before or after.  

India’s elite and middle classes abandoned the vision of the country’s founding fathers.

It became less of a starving shithole. It may be that the elites & the more affluent of the middle class no longer want government jobs for their progeny, but almost everybody else  does. 

The Emergency freed them up to disparage the pursuit of egalitarianism and sneer at the idea of shielding Muslims from the worst impulses of Hindu majoritarianism.

e.g. killing guys who keep trying to kill you. Dalal may not know what happened under Nehru in 1947/48. He probably thought 22 percent of Delhi's population decided to go for a picnic to Pakistan and liked to so much they refused to return even though Sardar Patel promised to personally cook beef biryani for them.  

But Indira Gandhi’s authoritarian interlude also jolted the oppressed masses into defiance and political autonomy.

They turfed her out but voted her back in after three years.  

They gradually withdrew from the Congress party’s paternalistic hand

There were two hands. It had split in 1969. There were more splits but the main Congress remains the ancestral property of the Dynasty.  

and began to assert themselves in ways that shocked their former masters.

e.g. shooting Indira? She should have seen it coming.  

For better and for worse, the nature of Indian democracy changed:

because such is the nature of all things 

the body politic, scarred and energised in equal measure, searched for new forms of life.

e.g. making butt babies?  

What began with

the Hindu majoritarian regime of the Brahmin 

Indira has culminated in the Hindu majoritarian regime of

the backward caste  

Narendra Modi. Years after she resigned as the British prime minister, the conservative icon Margaret Thatcher said she considered her greatest achievement to be Tony Blair, who transformed the left-wing Labour Party into a neoliberal force. With only some exaggeration, it could be said that Indira’s is Modi –

No. Priyanka says she wanted Rahul to inherit the throne. Mrs. Thatcher could not pass on Number 10 to Mark.  

the Congress’s nemesis, yet one who inherited her politics of authoritarian nationalism and forged it into a brutal instrument of Hindu supremacy.

Keep saying that if you want Modi to keep winning. Hindus are the majority and they do want to be supreme in their own country.   

Trained as an economist, Shourie emerged as an important public intellectual

Fuck off! If you are trained as an economist, you can only be a 'public intellectual' if other economists say you are hella smart. Amartya Sen was a public intellectual. Shourie was a guttersnipe.  

during the Emergency and turned into an implacable enemy of Indira Gandhi – and, later, of Rajiv Gandhi, her son and political successor.

Nobody cared. If you are a politician, your enemy is the guy who might get more votes than you next time round.  

With the exceptional courage that would become one of his hallmarks, Shourie, risking imprisonment,

If he wasn't imprisoned, there was no fucking risk. The boy was clearly cracked in the head. Blame Goenka. Why haven't you arrested him under FERA?  

accused Indira of being a fascist

Nowt wrong in that. Gandhi, Tagore, Iqbal, Bose all praised Mussolini.  

and relentlessly mocked her enablers in the upper and middle classes.

It was easy to mock Shourie. Good economists could make a lot of money. Look at Soros.  

In polemical essays, he called for the redistribution of wealth

starting with himself?  

and for the masses to assume control of state institutions.

like nuclear reactors?

As the executive editor of the Indian Express in the late 1970s, his “insurgency journalism” restored respectability to the press after its disgraceful abdication of duty during the Emergency.

No. People continued to tune in to Mark Tully on the BBC. Indian journalism was shit. Still, there were some juicy stories getting leaked from every direction.  

At the same time, his work as an activist helped open up new possibilities for civil society.

Lots of ex-Civil Servants were setting up NGOs.  

It is thus a minor irony that the inchoate, reactionary politics Indira improvised through the Emergency was hijacked and systematically constructed into an intellectual agenda for the Hindu Right by Shourie, her hated opponent.

The Hindu Right sought to consolidate the Hindu vote across caste lines. This could be done in two ways- by pointing to 'Minority appeasement' or 'aggression' or by constructive projects e.g. Ram Temple, celebrating festivals, etc. Indira, in her later years, was personally more religious than Atal or Advani but her dominance was purely the result of the disunity of the Opposition. 

Initially inspired by leftist icons like Marx and Gramsci,

I suppose they were popular on American campuses of the period- at least with darkies and other social rejects.  

he drifted towards the other end of the political spectrum after his first stint at the Express. Over the next three decades – in two dozen books, countless newspaper articles and any number of public lectures – he envisioned and detailed many of the themes that define India as we know it today: the unlikely union of capitalism and Hindutva,

An unlikely union would be between Capitalists and Communist parties. Religion based parties are natural allies for Capitalism.  

the spectre of leftist treachery, the rationalisation of dominant-caste superiority on the basis of “merit”,

i.e. getting higher marks in competitive exams. But it is 'Forward' castes not 'dominant' castes who talk of merit. Agricultural caste want a job quota on the basis of their percentage of the population  

the presumed regressiveness of Islam in contrast to the putative greatness of the Hindu tradition, a paranoid fear of real and imaginary threats to the Indian state.

We get it. Dalal hates Hinduism.  

The historian Ramachandra Guha once called Arundhati Roy “the Arun Shourie of the Left”,

because he has shit for brains. Prem Shankar Jha was the Shourie of the Left.  

charging that the free-spoken writer “falsified, exaggerated, used hyperboles, suppressed fact, overwrote – all that Shourie did from the other side.”

Guha does the same thing. He is the Huccha Venkat of Indian historiography.  

In his latest avatar, Shourie has seamlessly turned away from the Hindu Right and become one of Modi’s most scathing critics.

Nobody noticed. Nor did they notice Jha.  

He has variously described the prime minister’s rule over the last 12 years as “true fascism”, a “pyramidal mafia state”, the equivalent of “Congress plus cow” – that is, an amalgam of Hindu fanaticism and the corrupt ineptness of past Congress rule. Once he told an interviewer with fury that Twitter handles followed by Modi had “hurled abuse at me and my handicapped son.”

That was foolish. They will think they won.  

When Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won power in 2014, Shourie was in contention to become the finance minister, reprising his presence in the cabinet under the earlier BJP-led government of Atal Behari Vajpayee.

He and Brajesh were in the doghouse. Some older RSS people still rated Subramaniyam Swamy- who had better academic credentials.  

But Modi excluded Shourie, a decision lamented by numerous political commentators.

Fuck off! Shourie was shite. 

The omission of the right’s “only credible” intellectual, according to Guha, told “us all we need to know about” Modi.

Guha is not a political commentator. He is a stupid historian.  

Guha wasn’t just implying that Modi was anti-intellectual, but also that Shourie might have had a moderating influence on the prime minister.

Fuck would he know?  

Shourie’s time as a BJP member, which began in the late 1990s, ended unceremoniously in 2015. Last year, Shourie sustained his criticism of the Hindu Right with a long, critical book on V D Savarkar, a founding father of Hindutva.

The poor man is senile. Leave him alone.  

Dalal gives an account of Shourie's career, 

Shourie began writing research articles and essays, initially on economic issues and later also on politics. In a long 1972 essay titled “Conservative Influence of Liberalism”, he presented a long list of complaints against Nehru, one of his heroes. Not discounting Nehru’s monumental achievements, Shourie believed he had constructed a bland liberal system in which entrenched power and privilege were untouched.

This cretin hadn't twigged that Nehru had created a dynastic party. Unless there was one and only one biological heir, the party would split and keep splitting.  

From a “Marxian standpoint”, it was evident that the Congress was financed by the urban rich and that its rural organisation was controlled by landlords.

No. It was obvious that it had been funded by 'license-permit Raj' Corporations and 'quotas' for contractors, etc. . This was banned in 1969 who thought the Syndicate would get the cash. But, it was the same system save with black money. But there was money for other parties as well.  

The “mental makeup” of the Nehruvian elite – their psychology, ideas and culture – also betrayed the hollowness of their socialist rhetoric.

There was no elite. There were some hirelings and some bureaucrats and some dynasts. 

Shourie pointed out that since many members of the elite had read law and studied in England, they had absorbed the liberal values of British political culture and eschewed radicalism.

I suppose he thought Jyoti Basu a moderate.  

Nehru had erred gravely in discarding the “Gandhian tradition” of mass politics in favour of a technocratic paternalism embodied by elite institutions like the Planning Commission.

Vinobha Bhave & JP were wandering around the countryside doing Bhoodan. That was a grave error on JPs part, which he had come to realize around this time.  

The Indian independence movement’s vision of swaraj – which for Mohandas Gandhi meant not just an end to colonial rule but also wholesale democratic transformation – had no place here.

Actually, there was democratic transformation. People like Kamraj Nadar became Chief Ministers. 

Shourie contrasted Nehru’s mild approach with that of his Chinese peer, Mao – and also with the populism of Nehru’s own daughter, Indira. He commended her for aggressively pursuing land reform, failure to do which had been one of her father’s most damaging failures.

Shourie didn't know Land Reform was a State Subject.  

With her undisputed stature, Indira, like Nehru in the 1950s, “had a unique opportunity to be an agent of change.” Shourie mused, “Will she fail us?”

Okay. I get it now. Goenka thought this guy was a joker.  

Soon, the answer was clear: likely yes. In essays published shortly thereafter, Shourie offered a withering critique of Indira’s leadership.

 No. He revealed his low IQ. 

He observed that poverty couldn’t be reduced “without hurting the rich”, but the rich knew “that those who mouth socialist slogans in public eat out of their hands after office hours.”

Indira Gandhi would say this about JP. The pro-Moscow Communist Party were against JP, accusing him of being 'Communal' (he was trying to topple the only Muslim to have become CM of Bihar, but their support for the Emergency proved disastrous for their political future. 

 Shourie was able to get a Government job in 1976 which permitted him to return to India with his family.  

By now Shourie was writing incendiary commentary. A long essay titled “Symptoms of Fascism” was due to appear in Seminar, but with press freedom in suspension, the magazine paused publication altogether rather than submit to the censors. Still, this piece, and his other articles on Indira’s malevolence, were passed around among politicians and activists jailed under emergency powers. His work drew the attention of the newspaper baron Ramnath Goenka, whose flagship publication, the Indian Express, was one of the very few mainstream outlets still daring to dissent.

He later explained to a journalist that he had some incriminating letters between Indira and her husband. He was probably lying. An Indian Press baron has a low opinion of the intelligence, or gullibility, of Indian journalists.  

In 1978, after the Janata Party had thumped Indira’s Congress at the polls, a compilation of Shourie’s essays was published as Symptoms of Fascism. Notwithstanding its shrill tone, some of the analysis in the volume was irrefutable, and some stunningly prescient.

It was shit. Fascism only exists if there is a Commie threat.

Developing the arguments of the economist K N Raj, Shourie noted that the intermediate or middle class – lawyers, writers and bureaucrats, embodied by leaders like Mohandas Gandhi, Nehru, Vallabhbhai Patel and B R Ambedkar – had taken over the state after Independence.

No. Indian politicians took power at the Centre as they had in the Provinces. Previously, some British politician was top dog. 

To realise the utopian promises of the freedom struggle,

The Brits fucked off. India was free. It's performance was a little better than it had previously been. Broadly speaking, it went in the direction the majority of its people wanted it to go in. With hindsight, one might say different decisions should have been made. But, a young Nation is entitled to make its own decisions. Who could say with certainty that schemes which drew wide support were misconceived? 

they dramatically expanded the state and turned it into the primary agent of modernisation. But while the middle class increased its own power, it failed to rein in the industrialists and rural landowners – the biggest obstacles to its “socialistic” aspirations.

No. Industrialists lost power. The big estates were broken up. In some places Communists came to power. In others, regional parties did. Power shifted from educationally forward castes to 'backward castes' & Dalits. Modi is our first OBC PM. He makes the phoren educated sons of IAS officers look like a fucking Punch & Judy show. 

Aakar Patel's imbecilic diplomatic strategy

 I am old enough to remember a time when there were some old people who remembered a time when Amnesty International wasn't crap. The same can't be said for Aakar Patel, current head of the Indian branch. He writes in the Deccan Herald-

Why Have We Got So Insecure That Questions Begin To Rattle Us Now?

Any shithead can ask questions. Nobody gives a crap about them.  In this case, a young Norwegian journalist- Helle Lyng Svendsen- who is exactly as stupid as her name sounds- says her Facebook & Instagram accounts were suspended. But that was probably because lots of people complained. She simply does not matter to Indian diplomacy. I suppose, since Norway exports oil and India is a big importer, that was the only thing of interest to either country. 

For the past 12 years, India’s diplomats have been operating under a Nehruvian carapace.

Fuck off! Nobody gives a shit about Nehru or diplomats. Still, if Modi has a couple of ex-IFS officers in his Cabinet, maybe they weren't all shite.  

We have been telling the world, particularly the democratic and developed nations, that we are secular, pluralist and liberal.

No. We have been saying our economy is booming and that we are a great place to invest.  

That we respect human rights and individual liberties. This is of course false

Nobody gives a fuck about shite only virtue signalling nutters bang on about.  

When Israel is told it is misbehaving in the region, and that its idiotic war has damaged the world, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been pointing to the validation of Israel offered by the mother of democracy as his defence. That medal was extremely good value for money.

Bibi is saying 'India is Hindu. We have a strategic partnership with them against a possible Turkey/Pak/Saudi/Iran axis. Even if the Yanks fuck off, the Kaffirs can get the better of the Jihadis. Aakar has shit for brains. He doesn't understand why Modi got the medal. India wants to send the message that, as Modi said, Israel will provide the innovation, while India provides the aspiration- i.e. makes cheap drones or whatever. 

Assume for a moment that I am a big and strong fellow who lifts heavy weights easily and is flexible and fit. If someone approached me to comment on what they saw as my being unhealthy and absence of strength, would it affect me?

You'd beat the shit out of him. First he tells you you are a weakling. Then he says you take it up the arse. Then he rapes you. Failure to beat the shit out of the fellow implies not just consent but that you are a cum dumpster.  

If the first assumption is true, that I am in fact big and strong, then it should not make any difference. In all likelihood, I will ignore the comments and move on.

He goes around saying 'I'm worried about X. I told him he was looking weak and unhealthy. Does he have cancer? If so, can we really rely on him? Maybe we shouldn't renew his contract. 

Assume that I am wealthy and have been for generations. Why would the remark from a stranger pitying the fact that I was poor or that I looked destitute upset me or anger me?

Because it affects your credit rating or the value of shares in your company. Sue the cunt for libel. 

It was not a reflection of the truth, which was that I was in fact not only rich but had been so almost forever. The view that someone else holds of me will not affect me negatively if that view is not only wrong but the opposite of what I know to be reality.

But your reputation does matter. If people think you are a coward, people will be more apt to challenge you to a fight. If people think you are poor, they may not want to do business with you. There's a reason laws of libel exist.                                                                     

The remarks from others about me only bite when they are close to the truth, and when I am insecure about the very things that their words carry.

Aakar's job is to tell stupid lies. Fortunately, he is, by nature, a stupid liar. Thus he doesn't feel insecure at all. 

The words of a young woman, a foreign reporter, have caused the mighty ministry of external affairs to lecture her, and the world at large, about the greatness of this nation.

Nobody cared. 

Lessons were given about our heritage and our culture and ancient traditions in response to an anodyne question about freedom.

Freedom is a matter of law. If you think your freedom has been wrongly violated take it up with the Bench, not the Foreign Ministry. 

Something about constitutional values and fundamental rights, including the right to approach the Supreme Court, was also said. The young woman followed up with a question which will not occur to most Indians. Why, she asked, did Indians have to approach the Supreme Court to claim fundamental rights?

They can approach any court including the Supreme Court. Only the judiciary can grant judicial  

The answer from our foreign office grandee was that it was his press conference and therefore presumably she should shut up.

Because she was utterly stupid  

The media here then jumped in. Not on the side of its fraternity, mind you, but to close ranks with the government and scream at the reporter for daring to ask things that were so obviously false. What the point of any of it was lost to the dispassionate observer, but it is interesting to examine the pathology here.

Beyonce gives a press conference. A reporter asks 'how do you justify your decision to carpet bomb Cambodia?' Beyonce says 'I'm not Nixon. Fuck is wrong with you?' Other journalists tell the fucker to shut up. You are making the rest of us look bad.

Why do we get angry and upset when questioned about our behaviour and values if we are secure in the truth?

Because telling stupid fuckers to go fuck themselves is a good way to release steam. 

The answer to that can only be that we are not in fact secure. And then the next questions must arise: is that because we are insecure despite the truth? Or insecure because what we are claiming is not true?

No fucking questions arise if you beat and chase away shitheads. 

Let us assume that the first is the case. That India and its government are insecure despite the truth, and the facts, which are that we are a democratic nation, where individuals have liberty and that the State is not malign.

India, like other nations, isn't going to be lectured on democracy and human rights and sodomy for senior citizens.  

We are merely touchy when we are asked about the subject.

We say 'shut the fuck up you ignorant cunt.  

If that is so, then the advice to foreign reporters and observers is to engage us as if we were children.

Tough guys. Fuck with us and we will shit in your mouth.  

We should be patted on the head, told we are good boys and girls, and given some sort of lollipop.

Aakar gets lollipop & stuffs it up his bum.  

Being asked hard questions will provoke a tantrum from us and this should be avoided.

Fuck tantrums. Beat the shithead.  

It should be mentioned here that this is how other nations deal with our government. If they want something from us, they will offer us a lollipop (or a medal) and a place to recite our little speech, and then extract from us what they need. When Israel is told it is misbehaving in the region, and that its idiotic war has damaged the world, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been pointing to the validation of Israel offered by the mother of democracy as his defence. That medal was extremely good value for money.

This shithead doesn't get that Israel & India are helping each other militarily. Licking the lollipop Aakar extracts from his bum is a job for the head of Amnesty International. 

Let us now turn to the other possibility, that we are insecure because we know that what we are claiming is false. That we are not in fact as democratic or liberty-loving as we claim to be, and to be reminded about that begins to upset and anger us.

Other people have real jobs. Aakar gets paid to lick a shit-stained lollipop.  

If this is the case, there is an easier solution for it. It does not concern the external world and they do not need to calibrate their behaviour towards us or treat us as children. This solution is to simply speak the truth.

Aakar can do nothing of the sort.  

 India’s government now speaks with a forked tongue.

No. It speaks with a pragmatic, albeit, upbeat, tongue.  

It says things and behaves locally in a different way than it speaks abroad.

It does last mile delivery for its own people. It trades with other countries and has partnerships in specific areas with some of those countries.  

It does not brag to the world and their reporters about bulldozers and lynchings and bail-denials and voter-deletions and community-exclusions that are the basis of New India.

Because foreigners don't have votes in India. Thus bragging is restricted to the places where it is happening. 

It talks the language of Nehru and inclusion.

Nobody does so. DEI is DOA.  

It would be easier for all of us and for the world and its reporters, if we stopped lying about what we are actually all about.

Just say 'I'm a virtue signalling cretin. Ignore me'.  

Someone making a clever pun said that diplomats are individuals sent to lie abroad for their country.

Whereas the King lies at home. The pun arises from the fact that the Monarch is sail to lie at such and such place. The Ambassador, as the King's representative, was said to do so as well.  

But given the anxiety and anger that lying is producing, we should consider the option that honesty might be the best diplomatic policy.

Diplomacy is about signalling. Indian diplomats are signalling that India is a reliable partner for specific purposes with specific countries. Aakar thinks Indian Ambassadors should be saying 'India is a shithole. Don't visit. Don't invest. Stay the fuck away.' 

Benedict Anderson's Cretinous Imagined Communities

Nationalism exists where it is useful for a Nation to exist. A Nation exists where a bunch of people who exchange brides and information using common linguistic or other protocols band together for mutual defence. Such a Nation may merge into a larger Nation but choose to recover its sovereignty at a later date. Thus Scottish Nationality exists alongside British Nationality and would be revived if the United Kingdom breaks up. 

The word Nation was used in medieval Universities in Europe to distinguish scholars with the same mother tongue. Thus, the 'German Nation' was the German speaking students. The 'English Nation' was the English speaking students and so forth.  But this was scarcely a new idea. It has always existed. The most ancient Empires mention their Great Kings as subjugating Nations. The word 'Goy' in Hebrew means 'Nations'. The Goyim are the various types of non Jews, but the Jews too were a Nation- one chosen by God.

The ancient literatures of China and India became the basis of Chinese and Indian political theory. Both culminated in the development of a distinctive Nationalist ideology. But Arab Nationalism too has deep roots as does the Nationalism of every other ancient polity. What about Societies where a written language and literature is a relative novelty? In my experience, they have as vivid a sense of Nationality as any other type of country.

This does not mean that any Nation's boundaries are not contested or that any Nationalist ideology does not have contain some bizarre or unrealistic claims. But then almost everything in the social sphere involves an 'essentially contested concept' as well as rivalrous interessement mechanisms.

Since there is a little money to be made in writing a book about 'Nationalism' so that cretins in a worthless University Department can get and grant credentials, it follows that all sorts of silly books will be written on this topic. Perhaps the silliest book still widely referred to by stupid people was Benedict Anderson's 'Imagined Communities'.

Consider the following quotes from his magnum opus

I propose the following definition of the nation: it is an imagined political community-and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign. 

This is foolish. The Welsh are a Nation. They are not sovereign.  Some people imagine that the Scots will be better off being completely sovereign. Others that it would be better off sovereign with respect to Westminster but not sovereign with respect to Brussels. 

There are other 'imagined communities' - e.g. 'Christendom' or 'the Islamic Ummah' or 'the Peace Loving Jew Haters of the World' or whatever- which may or may not be imagined to be sovereign or inherently limited. 

Furthermore, there is no reason believe Nationalism is 'limited' at all. A particular Nationalism may want to enslave or exterminate everybody to gain more and more Lebensraum. Indeed, it may want to storm the Heavens or sublate the Multiverse or dam up the rivers of Time so as to irrigate the deserts of solitude.

It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.

This may be true of Churches or Covens or certain Vocations. It is not true of even the smallest nation. Iceland is tiny. Icelanders don't believe 'the image of their communion' lives in any of their minds. I found out the hard way. I phoned everybody in the Icleandic phone directory asking them why the 'image of their communion' which was living in their mind had defrauded me? Those who took the trouble to reply assured me that this was not the case. Did I myself have an 'image of communion' in my mind? No. I'm not saying I can't imagine a world in which Anderson might not be right. But that world isn't this world where we evolved by natural selection.

Communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined.... 

This is nonsense. If people say 'this is a Community' and 'this is how you need to imagine it'; you don't take their word for it. You test it out for yourself. Only if it really is the case that you can have high confidence in making transactions with Community members such that protocols are observed in the manner envisaged or imagined; only then will you yourself accept that this a Community and that you are a member of it. Otherwise it is just 'cheap talk' bullshit. 

Communities, like other things in the Social Realm, are to be distinguished by only one criteria- utility. It may be useful to pretend that something which is useless is actually very useful. But this is the case only for a very small number of people. 

Finally, [the nation] is imagined as a community, because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship.

Sadly, this is not the case. It may be useful to pretend that it is at certain times. Indeed, there may be a convention of this sort. But it is a convention of a purely ritualistic kind. 

 Ultimately, it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willing to die for such limited imaginings.

Anderson knew that Communism- which is not Nationalistic- had been directly responsible for the rise of Hitler and Mussolini and Franco. Stalin's purges and the holdomor were repeated by Mao. People were killed or they starved to death because of an imagined 'horizontal comradeship' which was anti-Nationalistic. 

It is odd that an old Etonian who lived in America should write-

What the eye is to the lover — that particular, ordinary eye he or she is born with - language - whatever language history has made his or her mother-tongue — is to the patriot. Through that language, encountered at mother's knee and parted with only at the grave, pasts are restored, fellowships are imagined, and futures dreamed.”

This may pass as a stupid type of poetry. But it is worthless as analysis. Blind people fall in love same as sighted people. The 'eye' is nothing to the lover. Neither does language matter to the patriot. Welsh speakers have been demonstrating their patriotism since before Agincourt. Throughout history, patriots have quit their village, where the dialect, more often than not, would have been unintelligible to the 'patriots' in the Army or other National institutions, and acquired a very different mode of speech. It is sad but true that we forget the 'mother tongue' and acquire the jargon that helps us advance in life. We woo in that language. We wed in that language. Times may change. We may emigrate elsewhere and start speaking a different language. Another wooing and another wedding may make the language in which we end up mothering being entirely foreign to that of our own nativity.

Had Anderson been a rustic idiot, we could understand why he might write such tripe. But the guy was smart and cosmopolitan. Why commit the 'no true Scotsman fallacy' as if he'd never received more than a Dame School education?

“No one can be a true nationalist who is incapable of feeling ashamed if his or her state or government commits crimes including those against their fellow citizens”

A neuro-diverse person may not 'feel shame' where it would be conventional to at least pretend to feel shame. But such a person can be a 'true nationalist' or a 'true anti-nationalist' or anything else they please.

Anderson was a good linguist. But he didn't get why Muslims in Java and Hindus in Bali might want to kill and chop off the dicks of Communists. This wasn't because he was shite at Indonesian Bahasa. It was because he was an Old Etonian. He did not feel personally threatened by news of what Stalin had done and what Mao was doing to peasants and religious people.

“It is important to keep in mind that to learn a language is not simply to learn a linguistic means of communication. It is also to learn the way of thinking and feeling of a people who speak and write a language which is different from ours. It is to learn the history and culture underlying their thoughts and emotions and so to learn to empathize with them.” ― Benedict Anderson, A Life Beyond Boundaries

Once again, there is no evidence that autistic savants or neuro-atypical people perform worse at learning languages. The poet savant Daniel Tammet can learn a language very quickly. His artistic achievements suggest that having different emotional responses is not a barrier to empathy or linguistic creativity.

Did Anderson understand his own English culture?

“It is nice that what eventually became the late British Empire has not been ruled by an 'English' dynasty since the early eleventh century: since then a motley parade of Normans (Plantagenets),

whose rule was resented as foreign till the reign of the English speaking Henry IV- a theme of much popular literature and represented in the sorts of History books used in schools at the opposite end of the social scale from Eton.

Welsh (Tudors),

 Henry VII was a quarter Welsh and half English. They are considered an English dynasty.

Scots (Stuarts),

The Lowland Scots have always been English speaking

Dutch (House of Orange)

William of Orange's Mum was English. His wife, Queen Mary, was English and it was in her right that he ruled.

and Germans (Hanoverians) have squatted on the imperial throne.

The Hanoverians were only brought in so as to keep the Catholic Stuarts out. There was no 'imperial throne' at that time. Disraeli gave Queen Victoria an Imperial throne which she took because her daughter had become an Empress and it wouldn't do if she took precedence over her own dear Mum.

No one much cared until the philological revolution and a paroxysm of English nationalism in World War I.

Nonsense! Look at Thackeray's 'Four Georges' or the Scott's Ivanhoe which turns Robin Hood into a Saxon hero. This was very much a Regency or Early Victorian notion.

Still, Shakespeare's historical plays represent the never to be re-achieved high water mark of presentment of Englishry as the highest possible claim to a place, like that of Falstaff, 'in the bosom of Arthur'. In other words, from the point of view of English literature itself, Henry IV was English and Henry V a wastrel redeemed by the Nation's need.

All this may be beneath the notice of an Old Etonian. But it is how ordinary English people imagine their history.

Consider the following line-

House of Windsor rhymes with House of Schönbrunn or House of Versailes.” ― Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism

Why is this un-English? The answer is that there had been 'Merry wives of Windsor' at the time of Falstaff, but more recently a 'Widow of Windsor' when England attained an acme of relative power and prosperity. Thus House of Windsor does not 'rhyme' at all with vainglorious Versailles or Schonbrunn's sugary confection.

The problem with Anderson was that he had not been thought to think. All he could do was spout bullshit of a vaguely poetic sort.

Look at this-

“All profound changes in consciousness, by their very nature, bring with them characteristic amnesias.

Is it true? No. Amnesia does occur- but it is not associated with 'profound changes in consciousness'. Rather, it is associated with trivial things like being hit on the head or drinking too much.

Out of such oblivions, in specific historical circumstances, spring narratives…

Rubbish! Confabulation may occur. But confabulations aren't narratives because they merely fill in gaps in memory with whatever seems plausible or is 'ready to hand'.

The photograph… is only the most peremptory of a huge modern accumulation of documentary evidence… which simultaneously records a certain apparent continuity and emphasizes its loss from memory.

Photographs- like paintings- are valuable as evoking memories or helping us visualize things important to us which may have happened before we were born or are happening far away from where we now are. They don't record 'apparent continuity'. CC footage may do so- but we know that the Lizard People from Planet X are tampering with them so as to erase evidence of their complicity with the Neo-Liberal nomenklatura.

The selfies I take don't emphasize any 'loss from memory'. God alone knows what Anderson's major malfunction was. Perhaps he was a victim of alcoholism and needed someone to follow him around taking photos so as to discover what he had been up to while black-out drunk.

Out of this estrangement comes a conception of personhood, identity… which, because it cannot be “remembered”, must be narrated.” ― Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism

Narrations can be wholly fictitious. They are autopoetic. Confabulation fills in gaps. But, in general, this happens only when one is questioned or a question arises in one's mind.

J.L Mehta on Sankara & Heidegger

Some 40 years ago, J.L Mehta published the following in a book titled 'Heidegger & Asian thought'.

Heidegger and Vedanta: Reflections on a Questionable Theme 

Vedanta is an orthodox school of Hindu theology which holds the Vedas to be uncreated. It is monist and affirms karma (reincarnation).  

 What is questionable can sometimes be worthy of thought,

No. It is always worthy of thought unless the question is idle or foolish. However, of what is unquestionable, thoughts- however bitter- are futile.  

and what is unthinkable can sometimes be glimpsed as that which thinking is about.

No. The thought that such glimpsing is possible is thinkable but idle or foolish.  

Both Heidegger and Vedanta thought amply illustrate this.

Hindu thought is idle or foolish if there is no soul and no rebirth and no enlightenment or 'liberation' from the karmic cycle. Advaita Vedanta is idle or foolish if there can be no identity of soul and universal soul. An idealistic conception of Advaita may affirm that there is a 'transcendental ego'- a pure, unchanging structure of awareness. It is the "subject" that observes and is itself the one abiding object of which nothing can be predicated. The question was whether Husserl's 'bracketing' or 'phenomenological reduction' was a way to establish this. An alternative view was that what Sankara did was like Hegelian 'sublation'. If Heidegger's thought, as a criticism of Husserl, was idle or foolish, then a philosopher adhering to Advaita- e.g. Radhakrishnan- would need to see if Husserl's program could support Sankara's point of view. Alternatively, the Idealist could say 'Sankara is a religious thinker. Soteriology is separate from Philosophy. Vedantic soteriology is linked to Vedic orthopraxy (vigyan) and is supported by different dogmas (matam). Similarly Christian soteriology is founded in Christ, not some variety of neo-Kantianism. Philosophy, by itself, can't provide a proof of God, or a proof that there is an immortal 'atma' (soul) unless there is at least one 'absolute proof' (in the Godelian sense). Thus it is different from Theistic Religion.'

It would be perfectly reasonable to say Heidegger and other 'existential' thinkers enable the philosopher to keep the religious realm separate from his own subject rather than claim that it is reducible, or supervenient, upon it. 

This is not the route Mehta takes. He babbles about Weberian 'disenchantment' & the romantic trope of the old Gods withdrawing and hiding themselves from the increasingly mechanised world of men. 

No other justification can be offered for the following very questionable enterprise of bringing together two disparate ways of thinking, so wide apart in time and in their entire context.

Some German philosophers were influenced by Vedanta. Was Heidegger influenced by them? Up to a point. Equally, prominent Indian philosophers- e.g. Radhakrishnan who achieved cult status in the UK in the Thirties- were influenced by German philosophy. Some sensible points might be made in this connection. 

The attempt can have unquestioned validity only for those who believe, like Nicolai Hartmann and many contemporary comparativists, that there are “eternal problems” in philosophy,

which would be 'open problems' in other disciplines like mathematical logic. 

everywhere and at all times the same, or, with Paul Deussen, that it is the same voice of the Eternal Truth that is heard by thinking spirits everywhere. Perhaps, however, the task of thinking, in the comparative sphere, is not limited to the search for what is common to the thought-content (the thoughts, the Gedanke, the answers given) of two different philosophical traditions, or the construction of new concepts overarching them, nor to the quest of motifs in another tradition that may supplement a deficiency in one's own and so “enrich” it. Perhaps there is, beyond this, the more exciting, in the end even more rewarding, task of trying to see and lay open the hidden truth of the paths taken by thinking (the Denken, the movement of thinking, the questions asked) in each, and letting questions arise in the process and stay with us, without seeking to come up with precipitate answers.

Mehta found this rewarding and exciting. But, a Hindu might well ask, did he in fact know the 'paths taken by thinking' by Vedic priests whose livelihood derived from performing complex rituals or chanting the Vedic psalms in the prescribed manner? To do so, he would himself have had to perform karma kanda or else observe and carefully question those who did so.  

This involves a movement of thought that is less like an arrow in flight toward its target than a roving and a rambling, a movement to and fro, between two different realms of discourse and vision, an exploration of two different topologies.

If there is a topology, there is a well defined set. True, an expert in karma kanda may be able to relate everything in an Upanishad to its Brahmana (priestly instruction manual) in which the Vedic text is elaborated upon. However, some rituals mentioned there have disappeared. We may say, 'such and such Saint has given us a good enough gist of the matter'. Sadly, knowing the gist isn't enough to reconstruct 'the paths taken by Vedantic thinking'.  

There are no predetermined rules for a game of this kind,

because it is a type of playing with yourself. What's important is that you wipe up after yourself.  

only the playing of the game can generate the rules, if at all.

I suppose there are no rules for playing with yourself. What matters is that you wipe up after yourself.  

So much by way of apology for the following fragmentary, somewhat Heideggerian, remarks on this questionable theme. 

The theme is not questionable in itself. One may well ask how and why priests performing particular rituals sought to link them to a grander Monistic Soteriology which may have arisen independently in ancient India. However to do this one would need to begin with their lived experience of conducting those rituals and their intuition that they would be inefficacious or soteriologically fatal if they were not performed with right cognition. 

Deussen quotes the following passage from Sankara's Commentary on the Brahmasutra (I, iii, 33) as ‘‘characteristic for Samkara period as well as for his theological conception": 'For also, what is for us imperceptible was for the ancients perceptible; thus it is recorded, that Vyasa (the author of the Mahabharata and others used to meet the Gods and [Rishisj face to face. But if some would assert that, as for those now living so for the ancients also it was impossible to meet with gods and the like, they would deny the variety of the world; they might also maintain that, as at present, so also in other times, there was no world- swaying prince  and thus they would not ac-knowledge the injunctions referring to the consecration of kings; they ought further assume that, as at present, so also in other times, the duties of castes and Asramas had no stable rules, and thus treat as vain the canon of law which provides rules for them. We must therefore believe that the ancients, in consequence of pre-eminent merits, held visible converse with Gods and [Rishis]. The Smrti also says (Yogas Sutra 2, 44): “through study is gained] union with the beloved godhead." And when it further teaches, that Yoga bestows as reward the mastery of nature, consisting fin the freedom from embodied being and its laws, and thereby] in the ability to become as small as an atom and the like, this is not to be rejected out of hand by a mere dictatorial sentence.  Samkara goes on to quote the Sruti (Svetasvatara Ufmmsad 11, 12) pro- claiming the greatness of Yoga, and adds that we do not have “the right to measure by our capabilities the capability of the Rishis who see the mantras and Brahmana (i.e., the Veda).” Samkara remarks in conclusion, From all this it appears that the Itihasas and puranas  have an adequate basis. And the conceptions of ordinary life also must not be declared to be unfounded, if it is at all possible to accept them. The general result is that we have the right to conceive the gods as possessing personal existence, on the ground of mantras, arthavadas, itihasas, puranas, and ordinary prevailing ideas.

This is not an important passage. It is obvious that if you are a priest or a follower of Shruti & Smriti, you accept the Deity even though you have never seen him. People who say 'you are performing some absurd actions for no reason known to you' are wrong. You are praying to God in the manner prescribed by Scripture.  

Here, the gods are absent

No. A thing may be present though we do not see it.  

but they are not denied; they have withdrawn from man’s sight

No. Some men may that sight right now. It is just that if someone says 'can you see God when you pray to him? Does he answer you back?', you can reply 'nope. But my prayer is according to prescribed forms. There were great seers who did see God. We follow their precepts.'  

but still form a presence on the horizon.

Sankara never says anything of the sort.  

A world has passed, but its links with the present are not broken.

Nor does he say that. Everyone knows that there still are great seers or devotees. Maybe one such exists in the neighbouring district. Who knows? Maybe our next door neighbour has the beatific vision though he doesn't give himself any airs and graces on that account.  

The present, though impoverished, is still seen, understood and interpreted in the light of a nobler past and as continuous with it. Sankara would not perhaps have said, with Heraclitus, that “Here too there are gods,” but would have found little to quarrel with Catullus when he said of the golden age: then indeed did the gods come down and visit with men.

He would have said 'if this sentence by the Yavana had been included in an Upanishad, then the meaning is mediation on such gods is approved because 'texts, speaking of Brahman with form, have the injunctions about meditations as their main objectives. So long as they do not lead to contradiction, their apparent meanings should be accepted. But when they involve a contradiction, the principle to be followed for deciding one of the other is that, those that have the formless Brahman as their main purport are more authoritative than the others which have not that as their main purport. It is according to this that one is driven to the conclusion that Brahman is formless and not its opposite, though texts having both the purports are in evidence.' (Brahma Sutra Bhasya of Sri Sankaracharya III.ii.14 translated by Swami Gambhirananda)

Life, in this Upanisadic tradition, was still experienced as touched by the Divine,

Priests serve God. Texts devised by and for priests are going to be about God not Geology.  If you are performing a priestly function and don't have at least the aspiration to be touched by the Divine- which for Theists may be just as good because it arises from God's will or grace- then yours is the life of a miserable drudge. Your position is that of a miser who is employed in giving away to the indigent the wealth of a philanthropist. You hate to see the stock of gold depleted but can earn your bread in no other way. 

and the dimension of the holy provided the context for all inquiry into reality  and into the nature and destiny of man, and for the pursuit of freedom and immortality.

No. There was other Sutra literature about Medicine, Math, etc. But Vedanta was created for and by Brahmin priests.  

The quest for truth was still a quest for the truth of life, for the living truth, and its articulation into a coherent body of argued and examined statements; it was not just a matter of detached theoretical contemplation.

Sankara was in the God business. He wasn't saying anything about the quest for truth in chemistry or medicine or agronomy. 

It was a profoundly religious quest,

Because the dude was a monk.  

and yet a passionately intellectual one.

Because theological hermeneutics is an intellectual activity.  

The eighth century in India, when Sarpkara probably lived and wrote, was the century that experienced the impact of the Buddhist thinker Dharmaklrti, of Kumarila and Prabhakara, thinkers of the Purva Mimamsa, of Mandana Misra, the lone-wolf in the history of Advai- ta Vedanta, as he has been aptly described, and a century which was heir to the imposing and strikingly original work of the Speculative Grammarians.

All this is irrelevant. Sankara supports an orthodox view with common sense arguments. Some feel he goes too far in a Monist direction. Dualism is better. Let God be God. We are happy simply worship him and pray for his Grace. If God wishes a particular person to receive some higher mystic union, that is his business. 

But the India of this century, and of many more centuries to come, was not yet under the shadow of what Nietzsche called “the spirit of Socratism,"

there had been Indo-Greeks. The Jain Munis were known as 'gymnosophists'. Vedic orthodoxy had been challenged by Shraman sects. The Buddhists say there is no soul. But they are pious people. Does the difference in dogma (matam) matter? Perhaps not. There is 'observational equivalence' between Nagarjuna, Umaswati & Sankara. The 'vigyan' is the same. Still, for the proper performance of prescribed rituals, let each religion preserve its own traditional philosophical commentaries. 

and its thinking was not primarily an operation with concepts about a reality understood solely in terms of being, but had something of the quality of meditation, reflection, and remembrance, even in the midst of the lively give and take of argument and debate so character- istic of the Indian philosophical scene. What is to be heard, thought about, and meditated upon is not a bare ontological principle or a meta- physical ultimate, ground, or arche, but a reality experienceable and experienced as sacred.

No. It could be experienced as a delusion or dream. Mehta is talking about 'dis-enchantment'- i.e. the deplorable fact that fairies have disappeared.  

And the hearing, the reflecting and arguing, the meditating, the learning and teaching, the composition of commentaries and independent critical or creative works, all these activities are carried on within the dimension of the holy and the ambience of the Divine.

No. They are a sideshow. Verse 22 of the Bhaja Govindam says ' rathya carpata viracita kanthaH, puyapuya vivarjita panthaH / yogi yoganiyojita citto ramate balonmattavadeva – 

The yogi who wears but a quilt made of rags, who walks the path that is beyond merit and demerit, whose mind is joined in perfect yoga with its goal, revels in God consciousness, and lives thereafter as a child or as a madman.

It is not the case that shite JL Mehta got up to with his Professorial chums in Seminar rooms was associated in some way with the ambience of the Divine. 

Similarly, Heidi- who once hoped to be a Catholic priest- was no such thing even if he gassed on about gelassenheit. Still, if some German Catholics feel he struggled with what was once their common Faith to some good purpose, why cavil? 

The medium is not irrelevant to the message and is often part of it. But concern for the “philosophy” of the Upanishads and the Vedanta, for their content, has stood in the way of sufficient attention being paid to the medium; the literary structure and style; the poetry and not just the prose of these writings; the rhetoric and what appear to be minor embellishments; the magico-mythic dements still clinging to an endeavor where they do not seem rightfully to belong (for example, the role of the sacred syllable Om); above all, the verses of obeisance and praise to be found at the beginning and conclusion of most Vedanta works.

This is like saying of the Vicar's sermon- 'I deplore the fact that the fellow kept mentioning Christ. This distracts us from what's really important- viz. the medium. Why did he use his mouth rather than his anus to make noises?  

 Turning now to Heidegger, we find ourselves in a completely different life-world; it is the world of our present-day experience,

if we happen to teach worthless shite 

life as we all experience it, irrespective of how we individually choose to respond to it. The world in which and for which Heidegger writes is a world which Nietzsche meant when he spoke of “how the influence of Socrates, down to the present moment and even unto all future time, has spread over posterity like a shadow that keeps growing in the evening sun”; a world under the domination of that “profound illusion,” again in Nietzsche’s words, which lies in “the unshakable faith that thought, using the thread of logic, can penetrate the deepest abysses of being, and that thought is capable not only of knowing being but even of correcting it.”

Nietzsche contracted syphilis and went mad. Thankfully, Socrates had no influence on medical science which, in 1943, developed penicillin as a safe and effective treatment.  

It is, further, a world which has been determined by the spread of Christianity and its subsequent secularization, so that, in the words of Arend Theodoor van Leeuwen, “in the spread of modern Western civilizations throughout the world something of the spirit of ‘Christianity incognito’ is at work.”

No. Christianity was and still is at work. It doesn't have to go incognito. It can announce itself and attribute any good it has done and is doing to Lord Jesus himself.

 Why pretend this great religion had something to do with Socrates? Nietzsche may not have liked it- but he was as crazy as a bedbug. Perhaps, if Heidi had got a Professorship in a Catholic University, he'd wouldn't have gone to the bad.  

It is a world shaped by the Enlightenment and by the spirit of technology, a world disenchanted and desacralized, as Max Weber saw.

Little kids may like fairy stories. But even they see that death is overcome by forgiveness, by compassion, by repentance. The Church needs some smart people to teach theology but even they would rather be working with the poor and vulnerable.  

As Heidegger has also described it, a characteristic feature of the modern world is the flight of the gods (Entgotterung)

Very true. Thor has fucked off with my TV remote. Fuck you Thor! Fuck you very much! 

This expression docs not mean the mere setting aside of the gods, a crude atheism,

get rid of goblins and gremlins by all means. Thor may be a great character in the Marvel Comics. But the Bible is not a comic-book.  

the disappearance of the gods is a two-sided process. First, the world image is Christianized, in so far as the ground of the world is set up as the infinite,  the unconditioned, the absolute;

Physics may do this. But why bother? Shut up and calculate! 

on the other hand, Christendom gives a new interpretation to its Christian character by transforming it into a world-view, thus adapting itself to modernity.

It would be fair to say that Christianity, as it spread during the Dark Ages, enabled Europe to return to a notion of a universal civilization capable of technological and socio-economic progress of a type scholars may well say laid the basis of 'modernity'.  

Desacralization (Ent- gatterunx' is the state of indecision regarding God and the gods. Christendom has the largest share in the emergence of this state. But desacralization does not exclude religiosity; indeed, it is through it primarily that the relationship with the gods is transformed into religious experience (Erlebnis) as a subjective process.

Hinduism does have lots of Gods but Vedanta is Monistic. Religious experiences- e.g. attainment of nirvikalpa samadhi- may be achieved by a devotee of a particular deity at a particular place but it is related to 'Nirguna Brahma'- God without predicates.  

Once it comes to this, then the gods have indeed fled.

Not from Hindu India. One may say of Catholic Italy, that the Saints took the place of the tutelary gods.  

The consequent emptiness is filled up by the historical and psychological investigation of myth, as a substitute.

That is a type of scholarship. It has nothing to do with the toiling masses who keep alive a sacred geography.  

The question of Being, as Heidegger poses it, is marked by a radical putting into question of all that has led up to this present state, of the entire Greek-Christian tradition of thought which he sums up under the word “metaphysics.”

Islam, too, knew Aristotle. Hinduism & Buddhism, however, appear not to have been directly affected by his metaphysics though there may be some borrowing in terms of astronomy & mathematics & medical science. 

Equally radical is his attempt to so transform “the question of Being” itself, from its original formulation by the Greek thinkers, through the thinkers of medieval Europe, down to his own initial manner of posing it, that this questioning itself becomes a path of preparing for a possible future in which the dimension of the holy may once again give meaning to our world, no longer forsaken by the gods, and man heal himself through a thinking which has freed itself at last from its tutelage to the Greek paradigm.

There were neo-pagan groups at that time. But, in India, they would have been orthodox. Vedanta could be found at their bottom by those who had an interest in putting it there.  

The world-historical context in which Heidegger raises the question of Being is one which he has described as “the darkening of the world, the flight of the gods, the devastation of the earth, the transformation of men into a mass, the hatred and suspicion of everything creative’’

Or as Swinburne put it- 

 'Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean; the world has grown grey from thy breath;
'We have drunken of things Lethean, and fed on the fullness of death.

In Hindu India, however, no ascetic sect triumphed or, even if it did, forced the gods of the forests and the fields into hiding. Ganapati is to be found in Japan. Indeed, the double bodied Kangiten of the late Heian period is like our Ardhanarishvara. There seems to have been a convergent evolution in this respect. 

The essence of this darkening of the world is the absence of God, as Holderlin experienced it, in this destitute time, to which we ourselves still belong. Heidegger’s explanation of the neediness of this time is worth quoting in full: For Holderlin’s historical experience, the appearance and sacrificial death of Christ mark the beginning of the end of the day of the gods.

'Great Pan is dead'. Plutarch says this happened at the time of Tiberius. Was it a reference to Christ? No. All gods had not died. 

Night is falling. Ever since the “united three” — Herakles, Dionysos, and Christ— have left the world, the evening of the world’s age has been declining towards its night. The world’s night is spreading its darkness. The era is defined by the god’s failure to arrive, by the “default of God.”

This is the theme of 'birha'- love in separation as applied to the Deity. The Viyogini is considered superior to the Yogi. Longing is more intense than union. 

But the default of God which Holderlin

poor fellow, he went mad. His mate, Hegel, poor fellow, didn't.  

experienced does not deny that the Christian relationship with God lives on in individuals and in the churches; still less does it assess this relationship negatively. The default of God means that no god any longer gathers men and things unto himself, visibly and unequivocally, and by such gathering disposes the world’s history and man’s sojourn in it.

Religion still gathers people of all sorts to it.  

The default of God forebodes something even grimmer, however. Not only have the gods and the god fled, but the divine radiance has become extinguished in the world's history.

I suppose JL Mehta didn't spend a lot of time watching Televangelists or visiting Mega-Churches.  

The time of the worlds Night is the destitute time, because it becomes ever more destitute. If has already grown so destitute, u can no longer discern the default of God as a default, 1 1 The question of Being, as it unfolds in Heidegger's thinking, is directly relevant to this destitution of the present age, "for which the ground fails to come, hangs in the abyss'"; it is a reaching down into the abyss, experiencing and enduring it, so that a "turning of the age" and the return of the gods may be prepared for through a rethinking of Being.

Plenty of people wrestle with their Faith. They may see this in cosmic terms. But they calm down and become happy and productive when they return to the Church and lay down a self-imposed burden.  

With all his originality and brilliance, Samkara writes as at one with his tradition, a tradition mediated, if is true, by the passing of the Vedie age and by a long period of Buddhist intellectual and religious dominance, but yet unbroken.

 He was a Namboodri. Namboodris continue to perform Vedic rituals. They are 'shrauta'. The strength of Vedanta was that it could be handed down from father to son in any or every village or forest hermitage. Buddhism had gotten used to great Universities & splendid monasteries. This made them vulnerable to rapacious invaders or Princes who coveted their accumulated wealth. Since monks are celibate, the religion can't reproduce itself in a wholly organic manner. 

Heidegger, on the contrary, starts off, with Nietzsche as precursor, as a radical thinker in whom the crises of thought and sensibility in the sciences and philosophy, in theology and in literature, are gathered to a focus.

Husserl had converted to Evangelical Lutheranism. Heidi had wanted to be a Catholic priest. He came to phenomenology, like many other lapsed Catholics, through Brentano but broke with Husserl and remained distant from the Neo-Kantians who tended to support the Social Democratic party. Many were purged when the Nazis took power. But they had little time for Heid or Carl Schmitt.  

Samkara too was not just a traditionalist intent on restoring the Vedic tradition but was a thinker moved by the experience of his age as destitute, pervaded by an absence and hanging in the abyss.

He didn't want to get married. He wanted to be a monk and to travel and to learn from and debate with the leading Pundits of his age. But he returned to perform his mother's last rites which was a transgression of his monastic vows. But we love him for it. 

The rise and development of the Buddhist schools (and of some others) in the preceding centuries was only a symptom of this, bringing to the surface a corrosion in the very substance of things, the abyss that was opening up in the very core of what is and summed up in the formula “Everything is without a self’’ and in the elevation of the subjective sphere as the ultimate frame of reference.

This is unfair to the Shraman religions. Previously, Brahmin boys who wanted to devote themselves to study joined a Shraman sect. Sankara created one for his own type of Hindu. But similar things were happening amongst other caste lineages in other parts of India. Perhaps this had always been the case. We don't greatly care. 

It is from within this awareness that Samkara understood his work and started on his way of thought,

No. Like the Brahmin priests mentioned in the Upanishads, he wanted to recover the spirit and the 'darshana' way of seeing the rituals which, for Uttara Mimamsa, are a necessary part of religion.  

seeking to exhibit how it was still possible and supremely needful to think of life as grounded in Being

This isn't needful at all. Sankara was like Nagarjuna & Umaswati. In their different ways they were upholding orthodoxy and pushing back against dogmatic distinctions without a difference. 

to show how experience is unmeaning and an unmitigated pain

It simply isn't unless you have tooth-ache & your wife just left you.  

unless thought of as grounded in a “self,” revelatory of it and therefore alive with “the radiance of the divine” (in Heidegger’s sense).

Sankara wasn't a Professor of useless shite. He had a busy life & ended up creating a prestigious monastic order. Also, he was Tamil (Malayalam hadn't split off at that time). He had imbibed Paripadal with his mother's milk. Radiance of Thirumal is imbued in all things.  

Samkara said, This tree of samsara , the round of worldly existence, which sprouts from action and constitutes the field of confusion and error, must be torn out from its very roots. Alone in pulling it out lies the fulfillment of life’s purpose. A statement like this can easily be misunderstood as a classic example of a life-denying philosophy.

Not by Hindus. Everyone knows the upside down tree in the Gita.  BTW fuck is a 'life-denying philosophy'? If you are doing that shite, you are alive though you may be approaching brain death. 

In reality, what it denies is not life but the death-in-life that consists in taking things as empty of a self, without a ground in Being and yet holding us in their grip through the illusion of being all that there is, exercising this magic spell over us.

India was a big country with diverse spiritual lineages. One could praise intoxication & delusion & say that there was an antinomian path to grace or you could say that you gained the same result following the orthodox path without having to spend a lot of money on booze or broads. Sankara was a dude who did well in his line of work. It was probably the most prestigious line, outside politics, for a Brahmin at that time. Heidi was a Professor of a shite subject. Its prestige was falling. Then his entire country went down the toilet. Einstein's stock was rising. If he subscribed to the 'block-universe' theory, people took note. Bergson & Husserl & Heidi had eternally shat the bed.