Piketty's pipe dream

Some 20 years ago, the Paris School of Economics was set up with Thomas Piketty as its first President. It has a 'World Inequality Lab' which has published a Global Justice Report.

Piketty et al, write in the Guardian-

A global transformation that reconciles planetary habitability and high standards of wellbeing for all is possible – as long as three conditions are simultaneously met.

No more war or civil strife. A strong World Government able to enforce laws cheaply in every territory and region of earth. An accurate mathematical model of the Global Economy & planetary Ecology such that an optimal global plan can be implemented.

Sadly the last is mathematically impossible because of problem of concurrency, complexity, computability and categoricity. Still, one may say 'A Theocratic World Government may rely on Divine Revelation. Perhaps, 'Expectations will create Reality'. If everyone thinks they will get to Heaven if they obey the World Government, then laws will be cheap to enforce. We may have 'self-fulfilling prophesies'. This is why we must back a Theocratic World Government and have done with 'separation of Church & State' & Democracy & the Rule of Law. 

Fast decarbonisation of energy systems is necessary.

Sadly, it appears that it is still rising. Moreover, the need to rearm in a multi-polar world may lead to a reversal of decarbonization even in affluent countries.  

But we also need a major shift away from overconsumption towards “sufficiency”.

Sadly, my 'overconsumption' is somebody else's income. Do I really need to buy an expensive pizza when I could satisfy my hunger by eating some bread & cheese? No. But if everybody stops getting takeaway pizza, those who cook & deliver it will lose their jobs. But I myself may lose my job because the service I provide isn't really a necessity.  

This would involve a sharp reduction in labour hours

quit your job 

and the use of raw materials,

become homeless & eat only what you can find in dumpsters 

along with big changes in consumption patterns,

i.e. adopting the life-style of a hobo 

food habits, land use and forest cover.

Forest cover may increase if there is population collapse.   

Financing and politically sustaining decarbonisation and sufficiency will require a drastic reduction in inequality of income, wealth and power,

Income will fall. But power will have to increase to prevent wealth accumulating such that countervailing power is gained by a mercantile class. We need a Theocracy which severely punishes 'economic crimes'- e.g. lending money at interest, charging more than the 'just price', transacting business with those under the embargo of the Magisters, etc. 

between countries and within them.

In other words, there has to be an all powerful World Government.  

This reduction of global inequality is compatible with deep decarbonisation;

So is mass suicide or our entire species developing a debilitating mental illness 

indeed, it is a necessary condition for shared prosperity on a finite planet.

Our recent history suggests that the reverse is the case. The good news is that China may have already begun to decarbonize. The fly in the ointment, as with Europe's own decarbonization since 1990, may be that some other set of low wage countries start doing the carbon intensive manufacturing. More worrying is the perceived need to rearm and reduce supply chain vulnerability in a multi-polar world. It may be that such fears are overblown. NATO might revive once Trump loses power. A modus vivendi may be reached with the new Eurasian power-block headed by China. There may be a renewal of Global treaties conducive to carbon trading. Meanwhile, new cheap, Green, energy sources may become mainstream by the end of the decade. Sadly, it is likely that those who provide it will grow wealthy. Inequality will rise if only to drive Tardean mimetics of a productivity enhancing sort. 

Tariq Thachil's RSS reading-list.

Scroll.in has an article penned by two academics at some American University on 'the rise of Hindutva'. 

Beyond elections, a reading list to understand the rise of Hindutva and the BJP
What turned the BJP and the RSS into social and political behemoths? These books have some answers.

Sadly, no book has the answer. Why? It is because even a child could answer the question by saying

1) It was obvious that Marxism had failed everywhere by the end of the Seventies. This meant Religion was no longer seen as 'the opium of the masses'. 

2) The rise of militant political Islam caused non-Muslims to want to circle their own wagons. The issue of caste-based reservations ('Mandal') needed to be countered by Hindu vote consolidation ('Mandir') 

3) India's fascination with Gandhian gesture politics (spinning wheels & so forth) ended when the Janata Morcha imploded (on the issue of dual membership of the RSS) Later, other evanescent coalitions imploded in the same way till the BJP emerged as the only Janata survivor able to serve as a national alternative to Congress (which retains Gandhian clauses- e.g. the requirement that all Congress members be 'habitual spinners of cotton). In other words, Hindu consolidation would take a non-Gandhian direction. 

The Dynasty could have pre-empted the rise of the BJP by returning Congress to its roots as the muscular Hindu party par excellence but autocracy was tempered by two assassinations. 

Tariq Thachil & Rohan Venkataramakrishnan
May 18, 2026 · 11:30 am

Once described as a North Indian “Hindi belt” party

The RSS is from Maharashtra though it came into politics under a Bengali- Syama Prasad Mukherjee.  

that would find it hard to grow beyond its upper-caste base,

this was also said of Congress before the Great War 

the BJP now draws in votes from every corner of the country and supporters from across castes, communities, and even religions.

The underlying ideology that powers the BJP-Hindutva-and the party’s parent organisation, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, is indisputably the most influential socio-political force in the country – and by dint of India’s sheer scale, one of the most important phenomena in global politics.

It is nationalist and pro-Hindu just as Congress was.  

How did this happen? What turned the BJP and the RSS into social and political behemoths?

Assassinations. However,  incompetence & corruption, too, played a part. However, it was Rahul's reluctance to take the top job, thus risking assassination, which enabled the BJP to win a majority in 2014.   

How did a movement known for polarising rhetoric and the instrumentalisation of violence catapult to power?

It is not known for any such thing. It was Congress which went in for the ethnic cleansing of Muslims & even Sikhs.  

And how should we understand Modi’s individual role within the broader story of Hindu nationalism?

By understanding that he did a great job in Gujarat and promised to do a great job in Delhi. Since he was miles better than any rival, he remains in office. 

Governance is about running a tight shift and focussing on last mile delivery. It isn't about intrigue & virtue signalling. 

India in Transition asked Tariq Thachil, former Director of the Center for the Advanced Study of India,

in Pennsylvania- a place where there is zero interest in, or knowledge of, India. 

to put together a reading list of key works for students and scholars to better understand the rise of Hindu nationalism and the BJP.

This is a reading list for those who want to completely misunderstand Indian politics.  

Thachil’s first book, Elite Parties, Poor Voters (Cambridge University Press, 2014), which looked at how elite parties use social services to win mass support through a study of Hindu nationalism, won the 2015 Gregory Luebbert Award for best book in comparative politics, and the 2015 Leon Epstein Award for best book on political parties, from the American Political Science Association.

Did any Indian politician or political analyst read it? No. Why? It was shit.  

Its publisher describes it thus-

Tariq Thachil shows how arguments from studies of wealthy democracies (such as moral values voting) and the global south (such as patronage or ethnic appeals) cannot explain why poor voters in poor countries support parties that represent elite policy interests. 

In 1946, why did poor Muslims vote for the Muslim League even though it could plausibly be called an elite party? The answer is that Muslims don't like kaffirs. But, kaffirs can come to feel the same way about jihadis. 

He instead draws on extensive survey data and fieldwork to document a novel strategy through which elite parties can recruit the poor, while retaining the rich.

How did Mrs Thatcher get working class English people to vote Tory? She promised to make them better off. True, this might mean having to break the back of the Coal Miner's Union. But, since nobody wanted to go back to the three-day week, that was a small price to pay for owning your own home and getting shares in public utilities. 

 He shows how these parties can win over disadvantaged voters by privately providing them with basic social services via grassroots affiliates.

This may have been plausible in 2014. It isn't now. The problem with 'grassroots affiliates' is that they tend to be gangsters. They take kickbacks ('cut-money'). They may also rape you or force your daughter into prostitution. Voters don't like this. They want 'universal provision' and the disintermediation of 'grassroots affiliates'. 

 Such outsourcing permits the party itself to continue to represent the policy interests of their privileged base. 

Also, these elites have turned the Post Office into a paedophile ring. Did you know that the elites are putting something in your coffee which causes you to forget Satanic abuse you undergo every night at the hands of a cabal of billionaires? 

Extends the study of why poor citizens vote against their interests to the non-Western world

Extends paranoid American theories to the rest of the world. 

The first book to provide a theory of social services as an electoral strategy,

In Econ, this is called Director's Law (after Aaron Director) Stigler's  1970 paper 'Director's Law of Public Income Redistribution' is the locus classicus though there had been previous theories of a similar sort. 

It is fucking obvious that political parties compete for votes by promising more and better social services. 

 explaining why parties use social services for electoral purposes, how services win votes, and when this strategy succeeds or fails

Why not explain, instead, why eating your own shit is a bad idea? After all, if there is a person stupid enough not to understand why better social services garner more votes, then that person may currently be eating her own shit and wondering why she feels ill all the time. 

CASI Managing Editor Rohan Venkat spoke to Thachil about the books and papers he chose – from the canonical “insider” study of the RSS’ organisational working, to works that examine the movement’s efforts to broaden support across caste, gender, and geographical boundaries, to a paper that studies Modi’s personal appeal – and asked about his own book as well as non-Indian scholarship that might offer a useful perspective on the success of Hindu nationalism.

Congress, as Gandhi said in 1939, is a Hindu party. It was nationalistic because Hindus wanted to take over the nice offices and mansions which the Brits had built for themselves. We may say 'Gandhi's Congress followed the line of Gokhale. The BJP followed the line of Tilak. Since all Gandhi's policies failed and then all Nehru's policies failed, Hindus have returned to the path of Tilak.  

The Brotherhood in Saffron: The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and Hindu Revivalism, Walter K Anderson & Shridhar D Damle (Westview Press, 1987)

It was quite well researched but tends to miss the wood for the trees.  Still, it pays tribute to some unsung heroes- e.g. Ganesh Savarkar

'G. D. (alias Babarao) Savarkar, a former revolutionary and the older brother of Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, helped the RSS expand into western Maharashtra. He merged his own Tarun Hindu Sabha (Hindu Youth) as well as the Mukteshwar Dal (Liberation Organization), associated with Pachalegoankar Maharaj (a Hindu saint who passed away in 1986), into the RSS. He accompanied Hedgewar on trips to western Maharashtra, introducing him to Hindu nationalists. Some of these contacts (e.g., K. B. Limaye, Vinayak Apte, and Bhaurao Abhyanker) were to become prominent RSS officials in Maharashtra. Pune developed into the center of RSS activities in western Maharashtra.'

Dalme stresses that the Congress ban on dual-membership meant that the RSS would either have to stay with the Mahasabha, whose President its head did not get on with, or else find some other party to join. This difficulty was solved when SP Mookerjee broke with the Mahasabha. 

All of the books I’m going to recommend are to help understand the rise of something that we would call Hindu nationalism.

Which started gathering steam in the 1880s. Incidentally, AO Hume, who founded the Congress party, was a Vedantist who advocated cow-protection. 

Some might call it the Hindu Right, or Hindutva, in terms of the ideology it represents, but all of these are linked to the rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party, the current ruling party in India.

Both these dudes are of Indian origin. Why are they talking about the place as if it was some distant planet?  

That party is the political arm of a family of organisations called the “Sangh Parivar,” linked by this shared ideology of Hindu nationalism or Hinduvta. And the parent organisation within the Sangh Parivar is called the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the RSS, which sometimes calls itself the largest NGO or civil society organisation in the world.

Hardikar & Hegdewar were Maharashtrian Medical students in Calcutta before the Great War. They were inspired by the 'Anushilan Samitis' (which gave training in martial arts) set up by Hindu revolutionaries in Bengal. Hardikar set up the Congress Seva Dal as a paramilitary outfit with the help of Nehru. But Congress itself could be banned at any time & so Hegdewar set up the RSS as a 'social', not 'political', organization. Its volunteers did good work and thus it was able to expand. Interestingly, those who became full-time 'pracharaks' chose celibacy. Unlike the Seva Dal, which degenerated into a bunch of sycophantic careerists, sociopathic opportunists & outright thugs, the RSS preserved a good moral ethos as a sort of cross between the Boy Scouts & the Rotarians. 

After Independence, the RSS helped Shyam Prasad Mookerjee (the son of the great Sir Ashutosh) found the Jan Sangh. Once Nehruvian policies failed, the Jan Sangh, like other non-Congress parties, began to rise. The 1967 elections were the turning point. You could travel from Amritsar to Calcutta without setting foot in a Congress ruled state. Then, Indira Gandhi got shot of the senile shitheads of the Syndicate and make her party Dynastic. She was actually less shitty than Morarji Desai, which is why she prevailed. 

I don’t think you can understand the rise of the Hindu Right in India without first fundamentally understanding the RSS.

Which this nutter refuses to do though the thing is blindingly obvious.  

It was the foundational organisation out of which the BJP grew and without which the BJP would not have been able to persist and survive in Indian politics long enough to achieve the success it has today. The resilience of the BJP, and its ability to survive in relative political obscurity for many decades was really predicated on having this “strong organisation” behind it, which is much discussed but not always understood.

No. The Jan Sangh had some good leaders- Vajpayee, Advani, Nanaji Deshmukh- and both Lohia & JP Narayan were prepared to use them so as to take on the Congress Party- more particularly under Indira.  

So, at the beginning of this list, I wanted to recommend a book that really unpacks the workings of the RSS. The great strength of the RSS, that even its critics will accept, is its organisational prowess, the loyalty of its cadres to the cause, and its willingness to do the painstaking work of propagating their ideology person-by-person.

Congress Seva Dal did the same thing but became decadent. By the mid Seventies, if a man said 'my son attends the RSS shaka', you understood that the boy was of good character. If you said 'my son is in the Youth Congress', you understood that he was either a pimp or a thug.  

Anderson and Damle is the classic text and the first major English language academic book to provide a view of the inner workings of the RSS.

Anderson may simply have been naive & ignorant. Damle had an agenda. Consider the following-

' Hedgewar's revolutionary past and the paramilitary nature of the RSS convinced the Central Provinces Home Department that the RSS could develop into a dangerous revolutionary group, and this suspicion continued throughout the pre-independence period. 

More to the point, it might get involved in communal riots. Thus the administration needed to know whom to arrest or extern from the District if a flare-up was expected. But the Khaksars and other such groups were also under surveillance. 

In fact, the RSS remained scrupulously nonpolitical 

Hegdewar himself would resign so as to go to jail as part of a Congress agitation. The problem was that 'freedom fighters' were pushing against an open door. The only question was who would dominate India when the Brits departed. The answer was, he who controls the army controls the country. That is why Gandhi kept demanding the Brits hand over the Army to Congress. 

and it was not until after independence that it began seriously to consider political activities. People who knew the RSS well, such as Dr. Hardikar, the leader of the Hindustan Seva Dal (the youth unit of the Congress) criticized the RSS for its refusal to get politically involved.

He knew there was an undercover cop noting down his speech. He wanted to preserve the RSS's alibi for obvious reasons. 

 V. D. Savarkar, the president of the Hindu Mahasabha after 1937, frequently denounced the RSS for its "purely cultural" orientation.

He was an old-school revolutionary of the pre-War type who thought assassinations were a good idea. 

 In his typically frank manner, Savarkar publicly stated, "The epitaph for the RSS volunteer will be that he was born, he joined the RSS and he died without accomplishing anything.

Unless he volunteered to help flood victims or to build a school etc. 

Brotherhood in Saffron unpacked how the RSS worked organisationally and focused on the day-to-day work of building the organisation and how it ran. Understanding the RSS as an organisation and not just an ideological formation is what Anderson and Damle do brilliantly. And that’s why it remains a landmark book to understand the wider Sangh Parivar.

Not really. We understand that joining the RSS and doing voluntary work gains you respect and trust. This in turn means you can rise in the Co-operative movement or Trade Union movement or that of the Agriculturists etc. RSS lawyers and Doctors tend to do a lot of pro bono work and this raises their prestige. They can get good grooms and brides for their children. However, for many, the attraction of both Gandhian as well as RSS type movements was that caste barriers were broken down. In other words, the burden of maintaining ritual purity was lifted because people felt you were doing something worthwhile for the country as a whole. 

It must also be said, provincial India was as dull as ditch-water. The big cities did have brothels and wine-shops but you either got syphilis or cirrhosis. Even doing voluntary work was better than either dying of boredom or dying of the clap. 

They published a recent follow-up, The RSS: A View to the Inside (Penguin Viking, 2018), but the first is more impactful. There is a tendency with a lot of this scholarship to focus on tall leaders and heads of movements. The contribution of this book was to show that it is the everyday workings of thousands and later tens of thousands of volunteers that is the strength of the RSS.

It is also the strength of the Republican party and the Democratic party and every other party in every democracy under the Sun.  

The book has its critics. Damle, himself, was part of the reason they had access to RSS insider information, since he was an affiliate, and very much someone who is not held at a “full arm’s length” from the movement.

He stresses that the RSS was about being a good and decent person rather than an assassin or a bank robber.  

That relationship permitted insider knowledge that the book draws on. More critical observers of the movement have rightly criticised the book as overly sympathetic, and even celebratory.

Why does Damle not reveal details of the Satanic orgies in which RSS pracharaks bathe in the blood of Muslim virgins?  

But those valid concerns should not obscure the fact that the best parts of the book delineate the day-to-day workings of the organisation in a way we previously had not seen.

Few Indians would need to read a book to grasp how the RSS works.  

The Hindu Nationalist Movement in India, Christophe Jaffrelot (Columbia University Press, 1996)

which ignores the fact that Congress was the embodiment of that movement. 

This is a long, dense book, and one that I don’t suggest you try to read start-to-finish in one sitting. But to this day, it remains the most encyclopedic account of the rise of the Hindu nationalist movement,

which began around the time Hindus started organizing to get rid of foreign invaders whom they described a 'mleccha'. It would be fair to say that the Greek struggle for independence from the Ottoman Turks inspired English speaking Indians like Raja Ram Mohun Roy. The idea was that India had once been as culturally and scientifically rich as ancient Greece but, like that unfortunate country, it had become poor and ignorant because of centuries of Islamic misrule.  

touching on all aspects – electoral, non-electoral, ideological. If you want a reference text to understand this century-old movement, if you want granular details about how the different wings of the movement work with and are sometimes in conflict with each other, this is the benchmark text.

If you have Hindus and hope the Indian nation will disintegrate, this is the book for you.  

Hindutva and Dalits; Perspectives for Understanding Communal Praxis, Edited by Anand Teltumbde (SAGE and Stree-Samya Books, 2005)

Why do Dalits prefer Hindutva- which wants to get rid of casteist thinking- to Islam- which thinks Dalit kaffirs should be killed same as all the other types of kaffir? 

Teltumbde doesn't know.  

One of the key aspects of the rise of Hindu nationalism was its growth in appeal from what was seen as, for many decades, a niche social movement that had a very loyal organisational base, but one whose political support was circumscribed to very particular parts of Indian society – specifically upper-caste Hindus.

Upper-caste Hindus wanted to get rid of various ritual taboos. That's why they joined Nationalist outfits which promoted 'inter-dining'. Also, in the Army, we see the son of a Duke taking orders from the son of a cobbler. If he didn't do so, there would be no fucking Army. India would either be enslaved yet again or it would get rid of casteism- including the dynastic rule of a nice Italian lady's mooncalf of a son.  

The BJP was often dubbed a “Brahmin, Bania” party.

Nehru in his Autobiography said India had become 'Bania-ified' (i.e. merchants had too big a role). His mission was to 're-Brahminize' it. 

The Jan Sangh was dismissed as the 'traders' party'.  

That really started to shift in the 2000s when other social groups – particularly from non-elite and marginalised Hindu communities – began to voice support for Hindu nationalism.

They had supported Congress because it was the muscular arm of Hindu nationalism (even though Gandhi would keep pretending that Hindus were incapable of defending themselves. But that was because he wanted the Brits to hand over the Army to him. Otherwise Muslims & Punjabis (irrespective of creed) would grab all the nice shiny things. ) 

Electorally, the BJP could not be the dominant force it is today without having spread its appeal outside of upper-caste Hindus, who are a small fraction of India’s population.

That could be said of Congress & the Communist parties.  

Those in the movement and the party knew they had to overcome this pigeon-holing. But for a long time, external observers thought the BJP could never have mass appeal.

Only if they had been brainwashed by the Left. 

Teltumbde’s book, an edited volume with work by many scholars, does a great job of raising the question of how the movement expanded. Much of the book was prompted by the participation of some Dalit individuals in Hindutva mobilisations, especially the 2002 pogrom in Gujarat.

Why did Dalits & Tribals kill Muslim usurers or other gangsters? Didn't they know it was their duty to play second fiddle to Muslims so that Islamic rule could be re-established in India?  

Everyday Nationalism: Women of the Hindu Right in India, Kalyani Devaki Menon (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010)

A Hindu nun- like Uma Bharati- could become Chief Minister even though she was of 'Backward Caste'. The Hindu right will promote Hindus, regardless of gender or caste, on the basis of merit.  Why? Hindus want Hindus to prosper and gain in strength. 

 It is not intuitively obvious why women might be attracted to a masculinist, sometimes aggressive, often violent movement.

Women don't want to become Chief Minister. What they really want is to be raped and robbed by all and sundry. Indeed, a woman whose breasts are being lopped off by a rapist will become very indignant if some masculinist & aggressive person uses violence against her assailant.  

One of the things I really like about Menon’s book – and several others on this list – is that none of them reach for what I see as lazy arguments about “false consciousness”. It’s not that women are being forced or coerced into participation. There are complex reasons why they find participation in the movement appealing or affirming, and she’s trying to help make sense of that.

It really is very difficult to understand why a woman would rather be Chief Minister rather than a victim of rape.  

Riot Politics: Hindu-Muslim Violence and the Indian State, Ward Berenschot (Columbia University Press, 2011)

Nehru presided over the biggest ethnic cleansing of Muslims in the sub-continent.  

I picked this for two reasons. One, it would be remiss to have a reading list on the rise of Hindu nationalism without at least one text that fundamentally foregrounds violence, because violence has been an integral strategy for the expansion of the movement.

Why did Gandhi go to Champaran in 1917? The answer is that Bihar was consumed by cow-protection riots. Gandhi helped create a distraction so as to preserve the Congress/Muslim League pact negotiated by Jinnah.  

I, myself, have written about how movements like the Rath Yatras of the 1980s and 1990s or the massive amount of violence following the Babri Masjid demolition in 1992 were harnessed to consolidate upper-caste support for the BJP at a critical time, when it was trying to move from obscurity to relevance.

It had stopped being 'obscure' in 1977. Nanaji was offered the Deputy Prime-Ministership. Vajpayee got the External Affairs portfolio.  

Violence had a role to play in the gradual expansion of the party’s workings,

Rajiv didn't get re-elected with a huge majority after Sikhs were slaughtered in Delhi. What actually happened was that Sikhs committed suicide because they were so sad that Indira had died.  

and Berenschot documents this process at the very local level in Gujarat, the state where the BJP has enjoyed the most consistent support over a long period of time.

Behenchooth, the famous Indian expert on Dutch politics, has documented the manner in which trillions of Muslims were tickled to death in Amsterdam by Geert Wilders. He also sodomized Uranus with his giant, invisible, cock. 

In particular, he looks at how the ability to produce violence or “riots” is deeply intertwined with everyday politics

 Modi put an end to the periodic riots in Gujarat which started in 1969. 

. He looks at what political scientists called “patronage politics,” where you have to go to politicians as a voter and ask them for help, which they will provide in return for support. This sort of discretionary exchange is what makes politics work.

No. Modi has shown that voters hate that shite. Entitlements must be universal. If they are discretionary then the party machine at the local level will be taken over by thugs who will demand 'cut-money' in between raping and robbing everybody in the vicinity. 

The Greater India Experiment: Hindutva and the Northeast, Arkotong Longkumer (Stanford University Press, 2021)

Places which fear Muslim infiltration will switch from Congress to the BJP. File under 'sad but true'.  

What all these books have in common is that

they don't mention the elephant in the room- viz. fear of demographic replacement by Muslims. This is becoming a factor in European politics.  

The Politics of Vishwas: Political Mobilization in the 2019 National Election, Neelanjan Sircar (Contemporary South Asia, May 2020)

This is a great paper.

It is shit. This is the abstract-

In this article, I develop a model of the politics of vishwas (trust/belief). 

Why bother? Nobody votes for a guy they don't trust or have faith in. 

This is a form of personal politics in which voters prefer to centralize political power in a strong leader, 

No. That is Dictatorship or Autocracy. It can also be called plebiscitary Caesarism- e.g. Hitler as Fuhrer or Mussolini as Il Duce. 

and trust the leader to make good decisions for the polity

in a Democracy, elected representatives are trusted to make good decisions in the public interest. 

 – in contrast to the standard models of democratic accountability and issue-based politics.

Only a trustworthy person is capable of accountability.  Political issues gain salience where there is a divergence of opinion regarding what needs to be done and in what sequence things should be done. 

If people don't trust you, they don't think you can account for your actions or that you will tackle political issues in a proper manner. 

 I argue that two factors lead to the BJP using the politics of vishwas to dominate Indian politics.

The party which wins the election is the one which a plurality of voters considers most trustworthy. 

 First, like much of the world, there is an increasingly strong axis of conflict between those who believe in a unitary (Hindu) national identity for India

which is what it got in 1947

 and those who view India in ‘multicultural’ terms.

Hinduism is the name of a Religion not a culture. 

 This obliges supporters of Hindu nationalism to support political centralization to stymie federalism, 

Which is what the country chose from 1947 onward. What changed was the penalty for secessionism got heavier. 

which would require negotiation across regional, linguistic, caste, and religious identities.

There was no negotiation after partition. Muslims could either shut up or fuck off. 

 Second, the BJP’s control of media and communication with the voter, in tandem with a strong party machinery, give the party structural advantages in mobilizing voters around the messages of Narendra Modi. I find that this change in Indian politics is reflected in voter turnout behavior in India.

Why, then, did BJP lose its majority in 2024? 

One of my bugbears with academic research – and we’ve talked about this before – is that I don’t think we have great work in political science explaining the specific impact of Modi.

You also don't have great work in Physics explaining why you will hurt yourself quite badly if you jump out of a window on the tenth floor of a building.  

... what Sircar talks about in this piece is persuasive. He argues that the biggest shift under the BJP and Modi has been the centralisation of political power.

That happened under Nehru & reached its acme under Indira & Rajiv.  

... Sircar documents how the BJP under Modi is increasingly relying on the trust in a strong leader and the belief in that leader’s ability to do right by his supporters, irrespective of the actual performance record.

Which political party says 'our leader is shit. Don't vote for us.'?  

He distinguishes from a politics of vikas, or development – the meat-and-potatoes politics that we think drives a lot of support – and the “politics of vishwas,” of trust in a leader like Modi.

If you don't trust a guy to deliver development, you won't vote for him.  

It’s not really about tallying performance, but the underlying trust in an individual, communicated by a strong party organisation.

Sadly, that isn't enough. You have to show that every guy from your party who is standing for election is trustworthy and better than his rival.  

Rohan: Two follow-ups. Tell us about your own book, Elite Parties, Poor Voters (Cambridge University Press, 2014).

That book was an attempt to understand what was happening with the BJP. It came out a few months after the 2014 election, which was the first in which the BJP under Modi came to power, and they have remained in power since. My interest was to see how the BJP consolidated support across the central belt of India from Gujarat to Chhattisgarh. I basically argued that it did so by being able to create this unlikely social coalition between its core base, upper-caste Hindus, and disadvantaged and marginalised castes, specifically Dalits and Adivasis.

Who were Hindus & who had strong reasons to hate Muslims. But it was corruption which brought down Congress- more particularly because Rahul refused to step up to the plate.  

The question was “how did they do that?” and the simple answer in the book was that they did it through a division of labor. The BJP at the time remained very much oriented to the interests of its upper-caste core.

Did you know that Modi is actually a British aristocrat named Lord Nicholas Maugham?  

The policies that the upper castes favored at the time was where the party oriented itself, whether on questions of economic liberalisation or caste quotas. And it outsourced the recruitment of Dalits and Adivasi voters to its social movement partners.

i.e. the RSS.

This is why it’s so important to think of the BJP’s rise as embedded within the Hindu nationalist movement, and specifically organisations that style themselves as seva organisation. Seva Bharti, Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram – which works for tribal communities specifically – and others. The book detailed that process and how it worked. Part of it was trying to show that, while there’s no question that the current dominance of the BJP owes a lot to the personal popularity of Narendra Modi, a lot of the groundwork to make the BJP even come up to the position to where it could be on the precipice of dominance was long in the making, well before 2014.

In other words, the RSS did the sort of stuff Congress Seva Dal should have been doing. Modi, first in Gujarat and then in Delhi, is doing the stuff a good Prime Minister should be doing. It appears that his cabinet is clean and efficient rather than corrupt and consumed by intrigue. 

Still, Modi can't afford to be complacent. He isn't a Professor of stupid shit in Amerika. He could get the order of the boot in 2029. 

Defending RaGa from Guha

Scroll.in has published the following 

Responses to Ramachandra Guha’s column “How the Gandhi family has helped Modi consolidate power.” 

Why liberal critiques of Rahul Gandhi ignore institutional capture
By Pius Fozan

Soon after the 2024 general elections,

in which Congress doubled its score & BJP lost its majority 

I chanced upon a political scientist at Vienna’s iconic Café Central.

The guy might know about Austrian politics. India is far away from Vienna.  

Over coffee, he remarked that the true tragedy of modern Indian liberalism is

that not all Indian Liberals can become Professors in Vienna? 

its penchant for perfectionism in an age of existential crisis.

One might say that Gandhians wanted moral perfectionism but Liberals were always aware that India is very poor. It can afford Liberal policies and institutions. It must cut its coat according to its cloth.  

He was referring to the comfortable habit of Delhi’s intelligentsia of judging the Congress leadership by the standards of a peacetime democracy,

India is at peace though some border areas may witness insurgency from time to time 

rather than the asymmetric warfare of a computational autocracy.

i.e. Hindus are the majority. They prefer voting for Hindu leaders even if they are OBC- like Modi- rather than Brahmin- like RaGa.  

We are told, with varying degrees of sociological certainty, that the Congress remains a “family firm”

Rahul really is the son of Rajiv who really was the son of Indira who really was the daughter of Nehru.  

and that Rahul Gandhi lacks the “gravitas” and “curriculum vitae” required to unseat a formidable electoral machine.

Suppose you are the head of a regional party. You do a deal with Congress whereby you dominate your own State. But you also want some juicy portfolios at the Centre so as to siphon off funds. The question is would your bagman be happy to serve under Rahul? Is he competent? Suppose he gets some stupid idea into his head. Can he be persuaded to give it up? 

Rahul may not want to be PM. He might nominate someone else. The problem is that he might tear up the ordinances issued by his nominee. That's what he did to Manmohan. If the PM lacks power, the administration turns to shit. The opposition will win by a landslide- as BJP did in 2014.  

This assessment, while satisfying to the purist, is not merely harsh: it is analytically flawed.

India's problem is that it has a Hindu majority. Also, most of its people are nationalistic. They don't want foreigners to conquer it.  

It reduces the existential struggle for the soul of the Republic to a critique of the personal failings of a single individual, unwittingly validating the very playbook designed by Narendra Modi and Amit Shah.

Rahul says he could have become PM in 1995. He could definitely have become PM in 2004, 2009 and 2013. I think he would have won a full majority if he entered the 2014 election as the sitting PM. 

The critique relies on an intellectual silo that deliberately ignores the terrifying asymmetry.

i.e. the fact that Hindus are about 80 percent of the population.  

To judge the opposition without addressing the ruling party’s unprecedented concentration of capital – manifest in the Bharatiya Janata Party’s Rs 10,000-crore war chest –

if Rahul hadn't been crap, Congress would remain the richest party 

is an analytical farce. The modern BJP is a corporate-bureaucratic behemoth boasting state-of-the-art infrastructure in every taluka, sustained by the deep, century-old societal penetration of the Sangh Parivar.

Congress achieved that in the Twenties & Thirties. The Dynasty ruled the country for 38 out of its first 40 years. Sadly, assassination tempered autocracy.  

Finally, the critics over-index on individual personality traits while under-indexing on the profound socio-political mutation that has occurred within the Indian electorate.

It occurred because Rahul didn't want to become PM just in case he was shot like his granny or blown up like his daddy. The problem was his dog in the manger attitude. He wouldn't do the job and he wouldn't let anybody else do it on his behalf.  

The rise of the BJP is not the result of Rahul Gandhi’s alleged lack of discipline; it is the consequence of a decades-long, meticulously crafted cultural and ideological project that has successfully shifted the centrist gravity of Indian politics towards a muscular majoritarianism.

Congress, as Gandhi said in 1939, was the Hindu party. This was borne out by the 1946 election results. It remained the party for all Hindus till the mid-Sixties when regional & caste based parties began to rise. 

Today, the entire state architecture – from the judiciary to a capitulated media – has synchronised its vocabulary with the government’s rhetoric.

If so, why did the BJP lose its majority in 2024? It would be fair to say that the BJP has become the default national party. Still, if the opposition gets its act together on seat sharing, then the BJP can only form a Government as part of a coalition.  

To mock Gandhi’s direct public outreach as “gimmickry” under such total institutional capture is laziness.

It is foolish. The fact is Congress spent a lot of money sending the message that Rahul is in charge. That's a good thing. Voters want to know that there is an effective chain of command within the party they vote for. Congress has won in Kerala & seen a change of Chief Minister in Karnataka. In both cases, it was made clear that the High Command had chosen the CM.  

Labelling the chief targets of this ruthless state apparatus as its accomplices shifts the moral burden away from the institutions and corporations that actually broke our democracy.

This crazy fool is saying 'Modi is Hitler. Did you know Hitler came from Austria and used to live in Vienna? I went to Vienna & talked to a 'political scientist' there. This enables me to understand that all those RSS dudes are actually blonde, blue-eyed Nazis wearing jack-boots.' 

The air of indestructibility that envelops the current regime may well unravel in the years ahead,

In other words, it may lose the next General Election. The question is whether whatever Coalition is cobbled together in 2029 is stable.  

driven by economic distress, joblessness and institutional decay.

not to mention the worsening global economy. What if the State goes off a fiscal cliff? Populist schemes may have to be scrapped. There is bound to be a big backlash.  

When that moment comes, the alternative will not emerge from the immaculate conception of a textbook liberal leader. It will have to be forged from the messy, flawed, and resilient people we actually have.

in Vienna? No! Oslo! 

The question of political incompetence

By Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee

Who always says the stupidest thing possible.  

From the views that have appeared on X about Ramachandra Guha’s column, it appears that the core issue is not whether Rahul Gandhi is incompetent as a political leader,

He is the Leader of the Opposition. He may not be as competent as Modi but he is clearly better than Mamta or even Stalin.  

but what defines incompetence itself.

Everyone knows that 'incompetence' means 'not being able to do the job assigned to you'. Has Rahul asserted control over Congress? Yes. Has he helped win any States? Yes (Kerala). Is he a good Leader of the Opposition? Good enough. He is always on the attack. That show's fighting spirit. 

A friend teaching political science said in private that Guha’s article is badly timed as the paper leaks and the CBSE marking debacle is currently the most serious national issue.

Guha's article was stupid. He said Priyanka should not have been given the Wayanad seat. But doing so helped Congress win in Kerala.  

Guha’s article is a distraction from the political narrative of the moment.

The current narrative is about the 'Cockroach Janata Party' set up by a student in America. He is due to return to India. Will he lead a 'youth quake' of the sort we have seen in Nepal, Bangladesh & Sri Lanka?  

Narratives of criticism can’t be dictated by the logic of singularity.

Sure they can. Hegel explained why. Narratives of criticism based on it had a huge influence on the politics of many countries- including India. 

Guha has the right to make his point. I nevertheless granted my friend’s point. Public intellectuals must prioritise issues that have an urgent material ground and have impacted people’s lives.

No. They are welcome to focus on arcane matters of interest only to policy makers at the highest level.  

Politics is about time, who can have control over time, and who can shake off that control and reclaim it.

No. Politics is about solving collective action problems or deciding who gets to pass the buck.  

Guha writes that the Congress has “belatedly realised Rahul is not the new Nehru”.

Congress realised that without Rahul- or some other dynastic head- the party would dissolve into squabbling factions.  

Whether that is true or not, Rahul Gandhi’s qualities are more reminiscent of Nehru

who presided over the ethnic cleansing of Muslims in Delhi itself.  

than Indira’s anti-democratic strains

she made the party dynastic. But, it must be said, 'the Syndicate' was utterly useless. Morarji was the worst PM ever.  

and Rajiv Gandhi’s buckling under communal politics on more than one occasion.

Why has he not married a nice Muslim man? Is it because he is 'communal'?  

During Partition, many Congressmen became openly communal.

Maulana Azad said Nehru was communal. He chose only Hindus as Chief Ministers in 1937 

Nehru stood his secular ground and took enormous risks to address volatile crowds in Bihar in 1946 for the sake of Hindu-Muslim fraternity.

Yet, in Delhi, the Muslim percentage of the population fell from one third to five percent when he became PM. In 1948, he passed a law forbidding the return of refugees who had crossed the border in panic. It is a different matter that, as a Socialist, he was against religion as 'the opium of the masses'. But this was also true of Ataturk and Nasser & Ba'athist leaders.  

Rahul Gandhi has shown a similar commitment to a secular society by his politics of love (“mohabbat ki dukaan”).

He lurves Modi. He also wants Varun to join Congress- thinks nobody at all.  

His emphasis on the politics of listening has been a clear departure from top-down, elitist, muscular forms of Indian politics. Rahul Gandhi appears humane and accessible. We do not know the true measure of what he achieved during Bharat Jodo Yatra because the mainstream media bent its knees and ignored the historic event under political diktat.

Did Congress double its numbers in the Lok Sabha? Yes. We have to accept that the Yatra was a success.  

Politics is a matter of conviction and a refusal to lose one’s ground.

There are some 'conviction politicians' and some pragmatists and some populists and so forth. Refusing to 'lose one's ground' is silly. Mamta refused to resign. People laughed at her. Now it looks as though her candidate for Leader of Opposition has lost to an upstart who, till a decade ago, was with the Communist party. 

Guha is a pragmatist.

No. He is a cretin. He thinks Priyanka shouldn't have taken Wayanad. But she has proved to be an excellent Parliamentarian.  

Pragmatism has a retrospective limit in politics.

No. It is a virtue because Politics is about solving collective action problems by making compromises of various types.  

It is justified by past assessment.

No. It is justified by present assessments.  

Pragmatism does not offer hope.

Yes it does. You see a smart pragmatist take power and you become hopeful about the future. Look at Suvendu Adhikari in West Bengal.  

It has no tools to offer for the future.

If finds such tools.  

Political futures are run by the ability to take risks.

Anyone can take risks. It is gaining power which is tricky.  

Rahul Gandhi has been taking risks like Nehru did in 1946-’47.

No. He was cautious. What would have been risky was trusting the Muslim League. Nehru hated the whole lot of them and pulled the trigger on Partition. Overnight, the League disappeared from North India. Muslims who remained would become a vote bank for Congress. Why? The alternative was ethnic cleansing.  

Failure is a matter of time in politics.

No. It is about losing power.  

Those who dismiss Rahul must qualify if their idea of incompetence is pragmatic, or political.

It is pragmatic. Incompetence means being shit at your job.  If your job is political, you are incompetent if you are shit at politics. 

The pyramidal structure and political history of the Congress Party favours the Nehru-Gandhi family.

No. What favoured it was Nehru being less shit than Gandhi & Indira being less shit than Morarji & even Rajiv turned out to be less shit than VP Singh & Arun Nehru. Sonia, once Rahul returned to India, was less shit than Pawar. Whether we like it or not, Rahul has asserted control rights over his party. Who now remembers the Group of 23?  

Guha needs to ask questions of the party and not the family.

Why bother? Everyone knows what happened to the Group of 23. Of them only Tharoor holds elected office but he isn't going to stand again. It is obvious that there will be no Congress without the Dynasty. Its great virtue is that sibling does not challenge sibling. Primogeniture has prevailed.  

He is focussing on the wrong issue in his desperation to see the Congress (a party Gandhi wanted disbanded in 1948) back in power.

Guha hates the BJP. Is he happy with Congress rule in Karnataka- where he lives? I suppose so. It must be said that the transition to a younger CM has been very deftly managed.  

Why single out the Congress when criticising dynasty?

Fair point. Dynasticism doesn't seem to have worked for Mamta or even Stalin.  

By Kay Benedict

Who is a perfectly sensible journalist. 

Ramachandra Guha is mistaken if he thinks all the ills in the Congress will end if the Gandhi family relinquishes the leadership.

Guha is always mistaken about everything. He is the Huccha Venkat of Indian Historiography.  

Other than finding fault with Rahul Gandhi, Guha does not offer an alternative road map.

Because he has shit for brains.  

Pray, other than the Gandhis, which Congress leader is acceptable pan-India?

Rahul could nominate a technocrat. It worked for Sonia.  

Last, over 12 years, the Bharatiya Janata Party has spent crores to project Rahul Gandhi as “Pappu” and to make India Congress-mukt.

He did it to himself. I don't blame him. He doesn't want to get shot or blown up. If you come across as a moon-calf, nobody will bother to assassinate you.  

Aren't the leaders of regional parties also responsible for the BJP's growth?

Mamta gave West Bengal to Modi as an early birthday present.  

Many of these once-secular parties, such as the Janata Dal (United), Janata Dal (Secular), Lok Janshakti Party, Telugu Desam Party and the Nationalist Congress Party factions are now with the BJP.

They started off as anti-Congress. We must admit that the BJP is the most successful heir to the Janata Morcha of 1977.  

In the past, strong regional parties such as the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam

which Rahul has ditched so as to suck up to Vijay.  

and the Trinamool Congress also helped prop up BJP governments at the Centre.

Mamta would enter and exit Vajpayee's Cabinet with her usual histrionics.  

Even parties like the Aam Aadmi Party, Biju Janata Dal, YSR Congress and All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen indirectly helped the BJP to contain the Congress, the Rashtriya Janata Dal being the sole exception.

RJD has such an evil reputation that it enabled Modi & Nitish to sweep the Bihar polls.  

Even the Congress has many leaders peddling soft Hindutva, whom Rahul Gandhi has, of late, managed to isolate.

I think they are 'ageing out' of politics. Rahul's brand looks quite strong from the youth point of view. But 'affiliation' isn't enough. You need energization so as to do booth management on the ground.  

That leaves only the Congress, Rashtriya Janata Dal

which now has only 4 Lok Sabha MPs and 25 MLAs 

and the Left parties

CPM has 4 Lok Sabha seats and about 43 MLAs spread across the country 

as the principal challengers of the BJP on uncompromising ideological terms.

Which nobody gives a shit about.  

Why single out the Congress when criticising dynasty?

Because Rahul could have been PM but refused to step up to the plate. He is a Roi Faineant.  

Dynasty, per se, is not harmful.

If the current scion is competent- sure. 

The BJP and most regional parties also have dynastic families. Not just Rahul Gandhi, no Opposition leader can electorally challenge the BJP, plush

flush not plush 

with money and muscle power, supported by the fawning mainstream media,

If BJP is popular, you lose readers if you keep attacking it.  

the Enforcement Directorate, Central Bureau of Investigation and a section of the judiciary.

If the BJP keeps getting re-elected then it is seen as having legitimacy and auctoritas. I think the BJP would have put up Advani in 2014 if Rahul had become PM & led his party into the General Election. 

Intensity of BJP attack on Rahul Gandhi shows that he is not irrelevant

He is the Leader of the Opposition- i.e. the person likely to become PM if the Opposition win the 2029 election.  

By Hasnain Naqvi

Will Muslims start voting for Owaisi's party? What happens after delimitation- i.e. an increase in the percentage of Hindi speaking MPs? 50 million Indians have Urdu as their first language (this is probably undercounting) and at least 100 million Muslims have Hindustani as their mother tongue. They are bound to want their own party (or at least a caucus) so as to address issues of direct concern to them. 'Secular' parties keep saying 'Modi is Hitler. He will kill or deport you. Vote for us if you want to live!' But Modi has been in power for many years. If Muslims haven't run away from Gujarat, what do they really have to fear elsewhere? 

Ramachandra Guha’s article reduces Rahul Gandhi’s political journey to a caricature that no longer corresponds with political reality.

That could be said about anything Guha writes.  

To argue that Rahul Gandhi displayed “focused hard work” only during the Bharat Jodo Yatra ignores the broader transformation of opposition politics in India over the last four years. The yatras themselves were not symbolic spectacles but sustained political exercises that reconnected the Congress leader with ordinary Indians across regions, classes and communities. Their political impact became visible in the Congress revival in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections and the emergence of a more coherent opposition bloc.

This is perfectly fair. However, we have to ask, did Congress's allies gain or lose since then? Currently, it looks like they lost. One might say, 'Mamta self-destructed. Stalin faced Vijay who showed exceptional political nous (unless the thing was a fluke).' Still, it has to be said, it is bad for regional pride if you are seen as playing second fiddle to a cretinous dynast.  

More importantly, Gandhi’s politics today extends far beyond social media interventions. His persistent advocacy for a caste census, electoral transparency, institutional accountability, unemployment, guarantees of a minimum support price for crops, Manipur and crony capitalism reflects a structured political narrative centred on constitutional democracy and social justice.

Very true. Constitutional democracy & Social Justice require son of the former PM to become PM.  

Whether one agrees with all his positions is secondary. What deserves acknowledgment is that he has emerged as one of the few national leaders consistently foregrounding concerns about democratic erosion, inequality and institutional opacity.

No democratic erosion occurs if the son of the PM becomes PM. It is only if some lowly 'chai-wallah' becomes PM that the Constitution is put in peril. 

Guha’s critique also underestimates why the ruling establishment devotes extraordinary political energy to attacking Rahul Gandhi.

The Government attacks the Leader of the Opposition because the latter's job is to attack the former.  

The intensity of that response itself suggests that he is no longer viewed as politically irrelevant.

Because he is the Leader of the Opposition.  

Guha is looking at the wrong end of the pyramid

There is no pyramid. Guha is merely exhibiting his imbecility. He thinks Priyanka should not have stood in Wayanad. But doing so helped Congress win Kerala.  

By Nikhil Sanjay-Rekha Adsule

Blaming Rahul Gandhi and the Gandhi family for the Bharatiya Janata Party’s political dominance has become a reflex for India’s liberal intelligentsia. Ramachandra Guha recently leaned into this narrative, framing the Indian National Congress as a stubborn "family firm" that hands Narendra Modi his best electoral weapon on a silver platter.

Rahul refused to enter the Cabinet or takeover from Manmohan even after he tore up this ordinance. This meant that the BJP put up Modi rather than Advani. Modi's campaign was thoroughly professional. He gained a full majority.  In 2019, there was some hope that Rahul would do well because he now seemed keen on becoming PM. But he imploded soon enough. Modi won because he deserved to win. That remains the case though, it may be, a deteriorating global economy, will cause fiscal collapse & the drying up of 'last mile delivery' of essential public services and transfers. God alone knows what will happen next.  

By treating a massive political shift like a corporate human resources problem, it pushes the idea that a vibrant opposition will magically appear the moment the Gandhi family steps aside.

Congress would implode.  

Guha misreads how India’s political system works. We are not dealing with a uniform European nation

There is no such European nation- even Iceland.  

but a sprawling, hyper-complex puzzle of regional prides, linguistic identities, caste hierarchies, and intense local rivalries.

But Hindus are the majority. Hindutva- ecumenical Hinduism- means there can be a national party 

A pan-Indian opposition cannot be run on managerial efficiency alone.

Sure it can.  The BJP was in opposition but had managerial efficiency. However, it was complacent in 2024. 

The Gandhis today serve as vital central gravity. Rahul Gandhi’s authority is rooted in history rather than backroom political deals. It acts as a neutral internal referee. An ambitious leader from the South is never going to accept a rival from the Hindi heartland as their national boss. Take away that central anchor and the Congress will not undergo metamorphosis into a meritocracy – it will simply shatter into a dozen squabbling regional factions.

It might disappear altogether. Perhaps that will be the fate of the TMC.  

Besides, the obsession with political lineages being uniquely toxic is an elite myth.

The problem with primogeniture is that the heir might be a cretin.  

Look at established global democracies. They routinely rely on legacy names to anchor public trust during highly polarised eras, whether it is the Kennedys in the US

two brothers got shot. The third had a skeleton in his cupboard and thus didn't have a shot at becoming POTUS. Since then, there have been no Kennedys in politics- unless you count Bobby's crazy son.  

or the Khama family in Botswana.

The traditional kings of the people of that country. Sir Sereste married an English woman and thus was barred from the throne. Thus he became the elected President of the country when it gained independence. His son succeeded him but the current President belongs to a different party and lineage.  

Mass movements such as the Bharat Jodo Yatra

not a mass movement. It was a 'mass contact' strategy which was meticulously planned & which cost a lot of money.  

also show that leadership isn't just sitting in an ivory tower – walking thousands of kilometers through heat and rain is a gruelling, physical commitment that bypasses a hostile media to connect directly with citizens.

All Indian politicians do this- if they want to get elected.  

Guha fixates entirely on the top of the pyramid while ignoring the absolute bottom.

Does Congress have good cadres for booth management? Yes, in some states or areas. But its Seva Dal is pretty shitty compared to the RSS.  

The BJP does not win elections because of who leads the Congress; it wins because of an unmatched, year-round grassroots machinery driven by disciplined booth-level agents and panna pramukhs.

Congress had mastered this long ago.  

Demanding a change at the high command is just a distraction from the real battlefield. The Congress must stop debating its leadership and start building a tech-savvy, ideologically trained local cadre that can actually protect polling booths and convert public sympathy into actual votes. Changing the face at the top without fixing the foundation is a fundamental misunderstanding of modern political warfare.

You can't change the face- save by substituting Priyanka for Rahul. Can local Congress activists create an army of volunteers for booth management? Yes. Look at Kerala or Karnataka. The problem is the Hindi belt which is going to gain more seats. The Dynasty is from UP. Rahul has regained his seat there. Congress hopes to overthrow Yogi in 2027. It is said that they are reaching out to Mayawati. There are plenty of very smart, public spirited, young people in UP & Bihar. The future belongs to the Party which can help them rise up in politics so as to improve the lives of their brethren.  

Daniel 4.14- gōd·dū ’î-lā-nā

I watch May's month, by Hadad's Thunderous Madness, all but washed away

Along with Heart's Healing, Akkad's Annealing, in but Hashem's Delay

 Wakefulness, Iyer, chops down the tree of its own Egregore

Would Wood could Sleep, not Ire wrack it Evermore.

Envoi- 

Prince! Corruption is the Chrism: Calamity, the Crown

Of that tree, Krishna says all must cut down

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, The 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.