Borges's 'search for al-Mutasim'

  Borges summarises his own 'search for al-Mutasim' as follows

a man... falls among people of the vilest class

the ultimate 'fex urbi' such as might gather in the catacombs 

and adjusts himself to them, in a kind of contest of infamy.

Theirs is a reverse cursus honorus- like that of Flavius Clemens, the Roman Consul, who aspired, not to the pomp and glory of a Senate funded Triumph rendering him Divine for a day, but, rather, an ignoble abasement to a Jewish carpenter which could only end in an equally ghastly death upon the gibbet. 

All at once - with the miraculous consternation of Robinson Crusoe faced with the human footprint in the sand - he perceives some mitigation in this infamy: a tenderness, an exaltation, a silence in one of the abhorrent men. "It was as if a more complex interlocutor had joined the dialogue."

Christ is that interlocutor where any two are gathered in his name.  

He knows that the vile man conversing with him is incapable of this momentaneous decorum;

The decorum of the Mass arises from a personality far greater than any set of persons.  

from this fact he concludes that the other, for the moment, is the reflection of a friend, or of the friend of a friend.

That sounds like Second Corinthians, 3.18- 'But we all, with uncovered face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image, from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord.'

Rethinking the problem he arrives at a mysterious conviction: some place in the world there is a man from whom this clarity emanates; some place in the world there is a man who is this clarity. The student resolves to dedicate his life to finding him.

Why does that man have to be on earth now? It is sufficient for him to have existed some where at some time. But, on the reflection theory, there may well be a supremum of the set of extant 'reflections'. That's close enough. 

Borges, of course, was aware that- for his Christian readers- there was nothing particularly Indian or Islamic about the story he imputes to an Indian Muslim. Thus he adds 

the conjecture that the Almighty is also in search of Someone,

if so, it is likely that he is moving much faster than even the swiftest of his seekers. But what is sought is itself moving very much faster.  Thus the space of the search is expanding too rapidly for seeking to be worthwhile. We might square the circle by putting the all highest in pursuit of the lowest. But, with rational expectations, this means everybody is in pursuit of the lowest because that is where they can be overtaken by what they seek- unless the lowest's rate of sinking too is eponential. 

and that Someone in search of some superior Someone (or merely indispensable or equal Someone), and thus on to the end - or better, the endlessness - of Time,

Space-Time would be expanding exponentially- this ultimately leads to heat death 

or on and on in some cyclical form.

There's a crunch and then a contraction.

Borges wasn't a mathematician but, as a librarian, he might have been attracted, by the title, to Hardy's little book 'orders of infinity' which developed the calculus of Paul du Bois-Reymond  who first used a diagonal-like method in 1875  to construct real functions that grow faster than any given sequence of functions, whereas Georg Cantor, who bitterly attacked his use of infinitesmals, formalized the diagonal argument in 1891 to prove the uncountability of the real numbers and classify infinite cardinalities.

Consider the introduction to Hardy's book

 If, like Whitehead, you dispense with space as a container and focus of processes (or functions) then what really matters is how fast different functions grow or how quickly they converge to a steady state. 

In the fictional novel Borges is pretending to review, the search terminates just as in Attar's 'parliament of the birds', the thirty birds do find the Simurgh- which turns out to be themselves! But, it may be, they must search again to become more truly the Simurgh constituted by themselves. Can this process continue infinitely? The answer depends on whether error correction is faster than error accumulation. The imaginary novelist, Mir Bahadur Ali, issues a revised edition. Borges says it is inferior the original. Even if the search is perfect, the account of it may degrade. We lose what we gain the more we seek to explain what it is.

I believe Borges was aware of the influence of Karl Krause on Spanish literature & considered Yrigoyen (whom he passionately supported) as being part of that tradition. Krause used the German term das Urbild (meaning "the archetype," "prototype," or "original image" which both thought & reality seek to mirror) to describe the ideal or perfected model of humanity. This concept was fully laid out in his foundational 1811 book, Das Urbild der Menschheit (translated as 'The Ideal of Humanity' in English). Perhaps Yrigoyen's political failure disillusioned Borges. The project of creating a rationally harmonious Human League (Menschheitsbund) appeared to have run aground wherever you looked. 

Borges, a Republican and spirited anti-Fascist, was appalled by the terrible suffering caused by the Spanish Civil war and its aftermath. The temptation for a society to retreat into some non-human fabricated reality- as happens in Tlon, Uqbar- might be too great to be resisted 

 

Liaquat Ahmed bitter against Bismarck

This is from 'Conversations with Tyler Cowan'

The Panic of 1873 and Its 20-Year Political Toll

In Britain there was a 13 year period of lower growth and price deflation. In particular, the agricultural depression diminished the importance of the 'Squirearchy'- i.e. the landed gentry whose power and influence had been rising since the 1830s. 

The brief

Historian Liaquat Ahamed argues the Panic of 1873 did not collapse the world economy,

It didn't affect much of the world. The truth is there were a lot of crooked speculators who needed to be squeezed out of the market. 

it poisoned its politics for twenty years. Growth held near 2.5% through a long deflation

i.e. higher real wages & returns for landowners  

, but the fallout helped end Reconstruction,

it would have ended anyway. Whites weren't going to kill whites so as to protect blacks.  

fueled Gladstone's Egyptian bond windfall

It was obvious that Egypt- unlike Ottoman Turkey- had enormous economic potential and thus could pay its debts. This meant that the foreign administrators who were levying taxes on salt, tobacco, etc. in Turkey, could not recover even half the debt amount. 

The yield on Egyptian bonds was high (12 percent) precisely because of the possibility of a native rebellion against the foreign origin Khedive & other Pashas.  

and let Bismarck wreck bimetallism/

Getting French reparations enabled Germany to go on the gold standard. Japan followed suit after getting reparations from China. In Germany's case, Bismark wanted the new unified country to have a strong currency as well as a strong army. He believed this was achieved by Fredrick the Great's monetary reforms.  

There is a version of investing wisdom that says the best returns come from information nobody else has.

Everyone knew that Egypt was of vital interest to the UK because of the Suez Canal. Baring become controller general in 1879. He was confident that Britain would prevail because the Egyptian army had done badly in a war with Ethiopia.

William Gladstone, four-time British prime minister, seems to have proven it by accident.

Gladstone had the same information as other investors in London. 

In the early 1880s he quietly put 40 percent of his net worth into Egyptian government bonds, which were paying 12 to 14 percent interest.

Britian had been controlling Egypt's finances since 1876.. 

Then Britain invaded Egypt.

They crushed Urabi Pasha's revolt which threatened the foreign origin aristocracy. The Khedive initially appealed to the Ottoman Caliph for aid to put down the revolt but only Britain had the money & men to restore the Khedive.  

Then Britain insisted Egypt repay its foreign creditors in full,

there was a 25 percent bonus, but this was cut down to 10 percent. It appears that loan amounts were inflated relative to cash actually disrbursed.  

at par. Gladstone's bonds, bought at a discount reflecting real default risk, turned into one of the great trades of the Victorian age.

I doubt there would have been an intervention if Egypt hadn't done so badly in the Ethiopian war.  

Whether he engineered this or simply believed, with total sincerity, that debts are debts and must be paid, is a question the historian Liaquat Ahamed cannot fully answer. "I'm sure he thought that it was the moral thing for Egypt to pay its debts," he tells Tyler Cowen ,

Gladstone understood that there has to be a haircut if the debtor can't pay in full.  

before adding the harder part: if Gladstone could have forced the same terms on Turkey,

they too had foreigners controlling a lot of the State's finances But their ability to pay was lower.  

which also owed European bondholders, he would have. He couldn't, because Turkey mattered more. Egypt owed roughly 500 billion dollars to British and French investors and paid close to full value; Turkey owed about a billion and settled for something like 30 to 50 cents on the dollar.

 

: At the time of its sovereign default in October 1875, the Ottoman foreign debt was estimated at £214.5 million. (When Egypt suspended its debt servicing in 1876, the accumulated Egyptian public debt managed by the European-controlled Caisse de la Dette Publique totaled roughly £94 million

The difference was not the size of the debt. It was geopolitics. Britain needed the Ottoman Empire intact as a check on Russia, and needed Egypt as nothing more than a ledger entry.

Britain had taken Cyprus and, obviously, the Suez canal was important for it but it preferred to have a 'veiled' protectorate.  

Ahamed's new book is called 1873, after the panic that supplies its title, and his conversation with Cowen keeps circling back to a single, almost architectural idea: a financial crisis can leave the economy standing while it quietly rearranges the politics around it.

Politics gets rearranged whether or not there are booms of slumps. Indeed, they occur even in non-monetized economies.  

His earlier book, Lords of Finance, won a Pulitzer Prize for showing how the 1929 crash produced the Great Depression.

Previoulsy, people thought it was caused by everybody getting really sad coz of the rumour that Mickey Mouse had cancer.  

The new one argues that the Panic of 1873, despite giving its name to what contemporaries called the Long Depression, did remarkably little damage to output. By one measure, the major economies grew at 2.5 percent a year for two decades after 1873, even as prices fell . "A better title would have been The First Great Deflation," Ahamed says, noting that wages and prices in that era were flexible enough to absorb the shock in a way later economies, with their sticky nominal wages, could not.

There was some wage stickiness and this tended to increase as time went on.  

If the economy adjusted, the political system did not.

No. The political system did adjust almost everywhere.  

Ahamed traces a line from the 1873 crisis to the collapse of the Republican Party's postwar dominance in the United States,

which was bound to happen. Whites won't fight whites just so as to help blacks.  

the contested 1876 election, and the backroom bargain that ended Reconstruction. What followed, he argues bluntly, was Jim Crow.

Also the persecution of homosexuals. Previously, Southern gentlemen displayed patience and stoicism when black homosexuals took turns wrecking their rectums. I tell you the 1873 panic has much to answer for.  

This is the pattern that interests Ahamed more than GDP charts: deflation does not just lower prices, it redistributes power,

Workers got more power.  

and the losers in that redistribution do not stay quiet. In Europe the same decades brought a revival of protectionism,

Germany put in 'iron & rye' tarrifs in 1879.  

a retreat from the liberal confidence of the mid-Victorian years, and new imperial appetites, including Britain's invasion of Egypt.

They put down a revolt. They annexed Cyprus a few years previously. 

Cowen pushes back gently, noting that imperial land grabs were hardly new to nineteenth-century Britain. Ahamed's answer is that 1873 marked "a sort of second wind to imperialism"

because the fucker is obsessed with Egypt. Incidentally, Egypt was trying to annex African territory to its south. Sadly, the Ethiopians kicked them in the goolies.  

, reviving a project that had briefly seemed to be losing momentum.

Fuck off! The opposite was the case.  

The Villain of the Piece

Ask Ahamed who the heroes of this story are and he resists the frame; mostly, he says, the people running the global monetary system in the 1870s and 1880s had no real idea how it worked ).

Stock Markets needed to adopt better protocols to shut out conmen & crazy people.  

Ask him who the villain is, though, and he does not hesitate.

"The biggest villain in my whole book is Bismarck." 

German chancellor Otto von Bismarck, flush with victory after the Franco-Prussian War,

which followed a victory over Austria-Hungary. 

imposed a punishing reparations bill on France and, in Ahamed's telling, went further by dismantling bimetallism, the system under which currencies were backed by both gold and silver at a fixed ratio.

It was bound to breakdown. Everyone would try to convert silver into gold at the fixed exchange rate.  

France had been the linchpin of that system, holding the largest reserves of precious metal and successfully stabilizing the relative price of gold and silver for decades. When Germany abandoned bimetallism for a pure gold standard, the system France had anchored came apart,

because Germans wanted to exchange their silver for gold. In the US, silver was underpriced and thus disappeared from circulation even before the 1873 Coinage act. 

and with it went the cushion that had kept global prices steady.

Global prices shouldn't be steady if supply and demand determinants are changing.  

Ahamed believes the resulting deflation, not some natural law of monetary history, set off the distributional damage of the next quarter century .

One could say that the agricultural depression led to a loss of power and influence for the Country Squire.  

Cowen presses him on whether any currency peg can really survive for long, and Ahamed concedes the obvious limit: a system backed by two metals collapses once one metal's supply swings wildly relative to the other. What saved the gold standard from exactly that fate,

if a country didn't have enough gold, it didn't have gold convertibility. But this made borrowing more expensive.  

almost by accident, was geology. The gold discoveries in South Africa in the 1890s flooded the world with new bullion just as deflationary pressure was becoming unbearable.

"I think the South African gold discoveries essentially saved the gold standard." — Liaquat Ahamed

What permitted to burgeon was global peace. With the Great War, convertibility had to go. 

Without that windfall, Ahamed thinks the United States might well have abandoned gold for silver within another decade (17:38), a counterfactual that would have rewritten twentieth-century finance before it began.

The US would have had to raise the silver/gold exchange rate which had been fixed some decades previously.  

Who Pays the Bill

The conversation jumps forward half a century to Germany's hyperinflation of the 1920s, when the currency collapsed so completely that people reportedly used wheelbarrows to carry cash to market. Ahamed offers a reading that is more cynical than the textbook story of simple monetary mismanagement: he suspects the inflation may have been, in part, a deliberate strategy to convince Germany's creditors that war reparations could never be collected.

The Germans, very foolishly, decided to subsidize the striking workers in French occupied territory. They soon ran out of cash. Hyperinflation liquidated their war-debt to their own people.  

The policy worked in one narrow sense. Central bank governor Hjalmar Schacht later stabilized the currency and is credited with presiding over what Ahamed calls two separate German economic miracles, the recovery of the mid-1920s

based on borrowing & 'extend & pretend'. After the Wall Street crash, the chickens would come home to roost.  

and, more troublingly, the rearmament boom of the 1930s under Hitler,

or FDR or Chamberlain 

built on empty reserves and tight import controls.

and robbing Jews.  

From here the thread runs forward to Ahamed's own years working with the World Bank and his book on the International Monetary Fund. His verdict on that institution is pointed: the United States, he says, has repeatedly used the IMF as an arm of its own foreign policy, pushing money into countries whose debts are not sustainable.

'Free money' is the most expensive sort of finance. 

The deeper failure, in his view, both in the Eurozone crisis and in the run-up to 2008, was the absence of any clean mechanism for restructuring debt that cannot be repaid.

There is also the problem of the 'vulture fund'.  

Someone has to decide who eats the loss, and Europe, lacking a single fiscal authority willing to play that role, let the question fester.

There were plenty of Accountancy firms and Merchant Banks getting fat fees for debt consolidation & restructuring.  

Asked why Britain, with an educational system that keeps producing the inventors behind modern artificial intelligence, has seen almost no real wage or productivity growth since the 2008 financial crisis, Ahamed admits he does not know.

The composition of the work-force has changed. Still, historically, England has substituted skilled labour for capital which meant that they didn't get internal economies. The scaling up problem continues. To be fair, England can't create cities from scratch. Hyperscaling has to be left to the US and China.  

It is a small, honest gap in an otherwise confident account, and it matters, because it is the same puzzle that runs through the whole conversation: good institutions and smart people do not automatically produce good outcomes.

Geography matters.  

Systems need something to hold them steady, the way France's reserves once held gold and silver in balance.

France was doing very stupid shit at that time.  

That idea resurfaces, unexpectedly, at the end of the interview, when Cowen asks about Ismaili Islam, the branch of Shia Islam to which Ahamed belongs by birth though he describes himself as non-practicing. Ismailis, he explains, follow a living spiritual leader, the Aga Khan,

just like the Dawoodi Bohras. But the Bohras went in an ultra-conservative direction whereas the Khojas have a Europeanised leader.  

regarded as a direct descendant of the Prophet Muhammad,

There are at least ten million such.  

whose authority over a community of two to three million people worldwide is centralized and continuously updated. If the Aga Khan says move to Africa, Ahamed notes, large parts of the community will do it.

Come to think of it, Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan was UN High Commissioner for Refugees just when Idi Amin expelled the Asians. East African Asians have done very well in their new homes in he West. But the Bohras, in India, are doing very well economically. 

With hindsight, the Aga Khan's support for the Pakistan movement created a set-back for his Indian followers.  

It is, structurally, the opposite of the chaos Ahamed has spent the whole conversation describing: one trusted authority, able to adjust course in real time, rather than a system of rigid pegs waiting to snap.

The Ismailis have to be cautious. Previously, they had been persecuted by the Sunnis. History may repeat itself  

Near the close, Cowen asks what Ahamed is optimizing for, since he left a successful private-sector career, declined to finish a Harvard doctorate, and has now written three books he did not need for income. The answer is almost offhand but it is the clearest statement of method in the whole hour.

"When you want to find out about something, writing a book about it is a remarkably good way of learning it." — Liaquat Ahamed

Sadly, it is also a remarkably good way to remain ignorant and bigotted.

Ahmed,who is about a decade older than me, was born in Kenya. He went to a British Public School back at a timee when teachers thought the Empire was a jolly good thing. Darkies, it is true, are horrible, but they became slightly less so once they learnt to play cricket. Perhaps, moving to Harvard for his Doctorate changed his attitude to the Raj. 

COWEN: Do you view imperialism as a natural expression of liberalism, or as something contrary to its spirit?

Historically, the owners of plantations in the West Indies or Nabobs who had gotten rich in the East Indies, tended to be Liberal or even Radical. Burke & Sheridan- as Irishmen- were suspicious of the influence this new moneyed class was acquiring. The Scots, too, felt that the rewards of Empire might end up making England even more dominant 

Because the liberals themselves often favored it. There’s a whole literature called liberal imperialism as a topic.

Indeed. The Liberals- including Benthamites- tended to favour Imperial expansion whereas the Tories only embraced Imperialism in the 1870s. One reason was the extension of the franchise. The newly enfranchised upper middle class might have reason to envy the toffs but they could console themselves that the nig-nogs had it worse.  

AHAMED: No, I think it’s definitely contrary to the spirit of liberalism.

Some Indians wanted to believe that Gladstone & Morley & so forth were anti-imperialist at heart. The truth is, they supported self-administering & self-garrisoning Federations under the British Crown.  

COWEN: The liberalism of that era, surely it was a doctrine that thought England and some other countries could improve the rest of the world.

Yes. Even Bertrand Russell, who went to jail because of his Pacificsm during the Great War, believed that a just war could be fought against less advanced races.  

They thought of that as quite a liberal idea. Malthus

who opposed Tory 'paternalism'. If the workers weren't half starved, they wouldn't work long hours under horrible conditions.  

and Mill, of course, worked for the East India Company. They don’t seem so morally torn over that. I’m not saying they were correct, but isn’t that in some way a high watermark of liberalism to think you can reengineer the whole world along liberal lines?

The Classical liberal thought upper middle class men- under the leadership of the great Whig aristocrats- should run a night-watchman state. Mill became more radical after retiring  

AHAMED: Yes, you’re right. They didn’t think that they were damaging these societies, but I think the long-run consequences weren’t happy.

Yet, mercantile Gujeratis, like his own family, did very well under the Raj. Incidentally Zohran Mamdani is of Islamili origin on his father's side.  But so too is the great Ben Kinglsey. Gujarat certainly has very talented people. 

Turing v Witlesstein

Deductive reasoning didn't start with Geometry. It began with the Law Courts & Administrative Tribunals & guys arguing in political or military councils for one rather than another course of collective action. 

Math adopted the notion that laws existed and judgments (theorems) must be formulated after a process of scrutiny or cross-examination of a categorical type. 

A paradox was something against expectations or received opinion. But it could arise if a witness affirmed two contradictory things- e.g. 'I did not have sex with that woman' and 'I jizzed copiously on her dress'. The prosecutor would use deductive reasoning to show that a guy who wasn't sexually involved with a particular woman would not think his jizz would be found on her dress.  

In this context, the following exchange between Witless & Turning, remarked upon by Ash Jogalekar, is revealing...of the former's stupidity. 

I've always found this conversation between Wittgenstein and Turing (reprinted in Andrew Hodges's Turing biography) endlessly fascinating: "WITTGENSTEIN: … Think of the case of the Liar. It is very queer in a way that this should have puzzled anyone – much more extraordinary than you might think. … Because the thing works like this: if a man says ‘I am lying’

He is admitting to be a person whose testimony can't be relied on. Does this mean it is 'inadmissible'? Not necessarily. Still, if you have been relying on his previous statements, you now no longer expect the same outcome. That is the 'paradox'. 

we say that it follows that he is not lying,

Nothing necessarily follows from any statement whatsoever. Still, for a particular purpose, there may be protocols such that there is a buckstopped assignment of truth values to statements. 

from which it follows that he is lying and so on. Well, so what?

To get the liar to tell the truth, make sure he is under oath & understands the penalty for perjury 

You can go on like that until you are black in the face. Why not? It doesn’t matter. … it is just a useless language-game, and why should anybody be excited?

Set theory is useful. It isn't a 'language game'. Scrabble is.  

TURING: What puzzles one is that one usually uses a contradiction as a criterion for having done something wrong.

If you do the same sum twice and your answers contradict each other- you have indeed done something wrong. 

But in this case one cannot find anything done wrong.

I may say I'm a liar but that doesn't mean I'd lie under oath and risk going to jail for perjury. Still, I would be well-advised not to say 'I'm a liar' or 'I'm a pedophile. Could I baby-sit for you?'  

WITTGENSTEIN: Yes – and more: nothing has been done wrong. … where will the harm come?

You say you are a liar and you get your head kicked in coz the thug next door no longer believes you are his wife's gay Yoga-instructor and Yoga is best performed nude and in a comfortable double bed. 

TURING: The real harm will not come in unless there is an application, in which a bridge may fall down or something of that sort.

People who say they are liars aren't trusted. This may entail getting your head kicked in.  

WITTGENSTEIN: … The question is: Why are people afraid of contradictions?

Coz if you say x or believe x and someone contradicts you or the evidence is that x is definitely not the case, then you might be in big trouble. It's like when you ring your banker to confirm that the  

It is easy to understand why they should be afraid of contradictions in orders, descriptions, etc., outside mathematics.

Math is protocol bound- just like the law. True, you could have mathematicians or lawyers who don't mind contradicting themselves in the course of their professional activities. But they aren't going to be pulling down the big bucks.  

The question is: Why should they be afraid of contradictions inside mathematics?

It will turn into stuff done by drunken hobos if contradictions are ubiquitous within it.  

Turing says, ‘Because something may go wrong with the application.’ But nothing need go wrong. And if something does go wrong – if the bridge breaks down – then your mistake was of the kind of using a wrong natural law.

Which is fine if you are a drunken hobo for whom dumpster diving provides adequate nutrition.  

… TURING: You cannot be confident about applying your calculus until you know that there is no hidden contradiction in it.

If Bletchley Park had been staffed by drunken hobos, the military would have placed no confidence in its Enigma decrypts.  

WITTGENSTEIN: There seems to me to be an enormous mistake there. … Suppose I convince Rhees of the paradox of the Liar, and he says, ‘I lie, therefore I do not lie, therefore I lie and I do not lie, therefore we have a contradiction, therefore 2 × 2 = 369.’

This is ex falso quodlibet- the fact that any nonsense can be deduced from a lie.  

Well, we should not call this ‘multiplication’, that is all.

No. We call it multiplication of an erroneous sort.  If you are paid to do arithmetic, you get sacked if you keep making mistakes in multiplication. 

… TURING: Although you do not know that the bridge will fall if there are no contradictions, yet it is almost certain that if there are contradictions it will go wrong somewhere. WITTGENSTEIN: But nothing has ever gone wrong that way yet.

Lots of bridges would have collapsed, as, indeed, would civilizations, if there weren't a contiuous process of weeding out engineers & economists who get their sums wrong.  

Turing's work contributed to the creation of the digital computer. That was very fucking useful. Witless did nothing useful. 

Self-reference (as in the Liar's paradox) & Impredicativity do create problems for computing. Maybe that is no longer true. But, the fact is, by Wells thorem, full impredicative type inference (where type applications are left implicit and automatically inferred by the compiler) is undecidable. Because of this, mainstream languages traditionally restricted themselves to predicative inference or required explicit type annotations for higher-rank/polymorphic use. I don't know what the state of play is now- maybe Vovevodksy resizing has been implemented without Girard paradox-  but, the fact is, the liar's paradox suddenly became important for commercial and military reasons at precisely the time when Turing & Witless had this discussion 

Gautam Bhatia effectively eating his own shit

Gautam Bhatia- a lawyer who believes that Judges can be sued for libel for things they say in open court- writes in Time magazine of the recent protests- led by Rahul Gandhi- in Delhi. 

In India, a Dark Shadow Falls on Its Vaunted Elections

Mamta Bannerjee says she lost West Bengal to her former lieutenant because votes were 'stolen' by the Election Commissioner. Like Trump, after he lost to Biden, she hopes to hold on to her party by shifting blame away from her own mistakes. 

Since people believe that Mamta's thugocracy was propped up the votes of dead people & illegal Muslim immigrants, 'vote chori' is considered anti-immigrant Muslim. This is why Owaisi- head of the major all India Muslim party- refuses to have anything to do with these protests. If Hindus think 'vote chori' is anti-Muslim, they will double down on support for Modi's BJP. Owaisi wants Muslims to switch from supporting dynastic politicians like Rahul or Akhilesh (in U.P) and points out that Tejasvi lost big by allying with Rahul in Bihar. Owaisi's party did well. Some think that Akhilesh should ditch Rahul & ally with Owaisi. But,for the moment, Akhilesh remains part of Rahul's block. 

Has a 'dark shadow' fallen on Indian elections? No. Unlike the US, India has an independent Election Commission. There are 3 Commissioners and removing them is as difficult as removing a Supreme Court judge. 

Still, in politics, perception is reality. People who believe there is a 'dark shadow' also believe this hurts Muslims and thus helps the Hindu majority. In other words, this is a perception which is helpful to the BJP. Sadly, it doesn't guarantee that Yogi can defeat Akhilesh for a third time in the March 2027 election in Uttar Pradesh- India's biggest state. In the General Election, the BJP lost its majority largely because of Akhilesh's charisma, smart candidate choice & whisper campaign (the suggestion was that Modi would cancel the reservations for Dalits which he had himself extended for a decade just three years previously). Can Akhilesh pull off the same trick in March? Not if there is 'Hindu vote consolidation' based on the notion that Modi- by some magic- is getting Muslim voters deleted.  

In Saturday, New Delhi, the Indian capital, was under siege.

This would be news to anyone living in Delhi. With the farm protest, there was a possibility of 'siege'. The current agitation is small in scale & has the air of something manufactured by the media during a 'slow-news' period. 

The Indian government deployed more than 20,000 police and paramilitary personnel, barricaded the city center, and suspended internet access.

In a specific area. They had done the same thing in 2019 & 2021 in specific carea.  

By evening, more than 7,000 people were detained by the police, including leaders from India’s opposition parties, lawyers, and journalists.

Rahul has pushed the boat out. Congress won in Kerala & retains Karnataka. Both states have sent party cadres. There are also Communist cadres from a Maoist party allied to Congress in Bihar. Mamta's loyalists too are in evidence.  

Despite the crackdown, thousands turned out in Delhi on Monday to protest with even greater vigor.

Because the crackdown has been mild. Why? Presumably, the ruling party hopes that- as with the Shaheen Bagh, anti CAA, agitation- it will lead to Hindu consolidation against supposed Muslim 'infiltrators'. The dilemma for Akhilesh is that if Muslims desert him in favour of Owaisi's party (which has gained credibility thanks to its good performance in Bihar), then he loses for a third time and ceases to be a potential Chief Minister. He will be like Mayawati- important but not powerful.  

The repressive effort sought to deter a planned protest at Jantar Mantar, a traditional protest site in New Delhi.

Previously, it was Boat Club till it was denotified. The same thing has now happened to Jantar Mantar. The BJP now rules Delhi. It has to curb protests there because the locals find them disruptive.  

The protest centered on two core demands: the resignation of India’s chief election commissioner and the rollback of a nationwide process known as Special Intensive Revision (SIR).

In other words, illegal migrants should have the vote. So should dead people or those who moved away. The problem here is that if the ruling party in a State can control votes of this sort, then it can entrench itself. But 72 percent of the Indian population lives in BJP ruled states. If you cripple the Election Commission, then the BJP entrenches itself in the same way that Congress did till the Nineties when TN Sheshan beefed up the EC.  

The chief election commissioner heads the national electoral body and is appointed on the recommendation of a committee headed by the prime minister.

This could change.  

The SIR ostensibly seeks to clean up and update the electoral rolls but has removed 130 million Indians from the rolls—more than half the number of Americans eligible to vote in the midterm elections.

If you are alive, and have the right to vote, you can reinstate yourself easily enough.  Dead people, however, 

The troubles truly began in the summer of 2025. Several Indian states were about to hold elections for their state legislatures. Ahead of those elections, the Election Commission announced an electoral revision in those states, citing the need to “clean up” electoral rolls.

They are constitutionally mandated to revise the electoral roll.  

Numerous voters would be required to prove that they were citizens

the allegation was that particular political parties were bringing in illegal migrants to act as a vote bank 

and entitled to be on the rolls by producing one or more documents from a select list. Election Commission officials would scrutinize the documents and either accept or reject them.

This could be done online.  

Judicial avoidance

Civil society groups and political activists promptly challenged the proposed electoral revisions before the Supreme Court of India in June 2025.

They challenge anything and everything.  

They questioned the power of the Election Commission to undertake electoral revisions at such a scale. India’s election law does authorize the commission to undertake a revision of electoral rolls in specific electoral constituencies, provided it records its reasons in writing.

The law requires the Commission to revise electoral rolls. It must keep written records of all its actions.  

The petitioners argued that it does not grant the Election Commission overarching power to require voters already on the rolls to prove their eligibility afresh.

 You have to be alive to be eligible. The Commission has no business requiring dead people to prove they are alive. They should remain on the electoral roll.  

The petitioners also argued that Election Commission’s list of acceptable documents was exclusionary and would result in large scale disenfranchisement. In India, access to documents issued by the government depends heavily on caste, class and gender. Many people simply lack necessary documents or the ability to navigate the bureaucracy to obtain them.

But they have no difficulty getting on the electorl roll even if they are dead.  

For months, the Supreme Court did not rule on the legality of electoral revisions on such a vast scale,

they were legal. Only after a Court ruling of illegality would the exercise become illegal.  

allowing the exercise to become a fait accompli. Instead, it engaged in prolonged courtroom negotiations

The Bench does not negotiate.  

with the Election Commission over which documents Indian voters would have to provide to remain on the electoral rolls. There was an extended debate on whether Aadhaar, India’s national digital identity document, would be accepted.


But even as the legal debates continued, exclusions from electoral rolls mounted. In the eastern Indian state of West Bengal, where Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) had never won a state election,

then the TMC- the ruling party there- split because Mamta was promoting her nephew as her successor. Her lieutenant joined the BJP. Voters, fed up with Mamta's corruption & criminality, voted for Adhikari. If the Election Commission is hamstrung, he can entrench himself in West Bengal. No doubt, all BJP voters have plenty of dead relatives who deserve the vote.  

nine million people—around 12% percent of the electorate—found themselves excluded from the rolls.

This was particularly hurtful for dead people who were already experiencing social exclusion due to nobody was inviting them to birthday parties. The good news is that turnout rose to a record level. Thus more people voted after the exercise than before it  

Faced with these exclusions, and still unwilling to rule on the legality of the SIR, the Supreme Court took the extraordinary step of creating an entire administrative machinery:

Bhatia does not understand the difference between an appellate body and administrative machinery. He is as stupid as shit. 

tribunals staffed by judicial officers to hear appeals from excluded voters.

What's wrong with that?  

When the petitioners warned that these tribunals would take years, if not decades, to resolve all the appeals, the Supreme Court judges

didn't believe them.  

effectively said

Gautam Bhatia eats his own shit 

that it was fine for excluded people to not vote in the upcoming election as long as they would eventually be put back on the rolls.

Fuck off! They said people excluded can't vote because they are not currently eligible to vote. However, they may regain that eligibility by inclusion in the electoral roll.

Similarly, a murderer currently serving a life-sentence is not eligible for release even if he has appealed his conviction and it may be many years before that appeal is heard. True, he may be declared innocent at a later time. But that doesn't mean he is innocent now. 

The West Bengal election went ahead using the new electoral rolls and the BJP won.

Because there was a strong police presence from neighbouring states. When Mamata's goons tried to initimidate them, they were beaten. Since the goons didn't know where those policemen's families lived, they were not able to rape and kill their children. This meant that they had to run away with their tails between their legs.  

One indication of how flawed the SIR may have been was that around 90% of the voters in West Bengal, whose appeals were decided, were eventually restored to the rolls.

That shows how efficient the appelate process was.  Sadly, the appeals of dead people weren't decided- even when some pious soul had lodged such an appeal on their behalf. 

Nine out of every ten excluded voters had been wrongfully removed.

Some of the software heuristics were questionable- e.g. having a dad who was over 50 when you were born.  

Yet even as exclusions numbered in the millions in each state, the Supreme Court noted that the data did not indicate “systemic disenfranchisement.”

Because the data did not indicate it. Nor did it indicate that Gautam Bhatia eats his own shit. Still, that is what everybody is effectively saying, no matter what they are talking about or, indeed, even if they are maintaining a profound silence.

See what I just did? I used Bhatia style argumentation.  

Unchecked bureaucrats


Eventually, when the Supreme Court finally issued its judgment in the summer of 2026, it upheld the entire exercise. It affirmed the wide powers of the Election Commission to conduct the electoral revisions as it saw fit.

Because that was what the EC was set up to do.

A central argument against the exercise was that by requiring every elector, including those already on the electoral rolls, to prove their eligibility afresh, the Election Commission was treating each individual as presumptively ineligible to vote.

Dead people are ineligible to vote. There is a presumption that all human beings are mortal- i.e. they may die at any time. This means there should be a presumption that every voter could have lost eligibility to vote.

This was a grossly disproportionate exercise of power, particularly because more proportionate methods were available to the election commission.

It could have presumed that very few humans die. Eating shit incessantly has made Gautam Bhatia a stupider shithead than nature intended.  

The court rejected this argument too and, I believe, effectively immunized the commission from the requirement to act in a proportionate manner.

Gautam's beliefs are absurd. What comes out of his anus isn't really chocolate cake.  

As the legal scholar Vasudev Devadasan

shithead 

noted, the judgement had the effect of creating a "permanent class" of disenfranchised persons who simply cannot participate in political life.

e.g. dead people.  

The consequences soon became apparent: the new BJP government in West Bengal threatened, on more than one occasion, to cut off welfare benefits for

dead people 

people excluded from the electoral rolls through the SIR. Although the Supreme Court noted that the SIR was not meant to determine citizenship,

but was meant to determine not being fucking dead 

by the summer of 2026, that distinction was becoming difficult to sustain.

Only for people who are gobbling up lots of chocolate cake which came out of their own anuses.  

Beyond the threat to people’s welfare entitlements, there were widely reported cases of passport renewals being denied because applicants had been excluded from the electoral rolls through the SIR.

I widely report Bhatia's eating his own shit. This doesn't mean he will desist from doing so.  

In 2020, the Indian government’s attempts to create a National Register of Citizens (NRC) had been widely criticized because of how it would force every individual to prove their citizenship to state authorities, and lead to widespread exclusion.

of non-citizens.  

After widespread protests across the country against it, the NRC was shelved.

It was too expensive. Ethnic cleansing is more cheaply done by mobs wielding agricultural implements.  

The SIR now appeared to be a way of introducing the NRC through the backdoor.

Bhatia's backdoor produces delicious chocolate cake. 

The truth is, currently, getting rid of illegal Muslim immigrants is popular everywhere though only Pakistan & Iran have done it on a large scale. We may say 'such and such policy or such and such judicial process aims at getting rid of Muslims' but, even if the thing is true, this helps whichever party is seen as more Islamophobic. On the other hand, if people really want to get rid of a particular minority, there is no substitute for going after them with pitchforks and flaming torches.  

As the SIR proceeded across multiple states—with large-scale exclusions in each—patterns began to emerge: disproportionate exclusions among vulnerable and marginalized people

also the socially excluded dead 

and of religious minorities, especially Muslims; and the use of algorithms to exclude even voters who possessed the required documents, citing "logical discrepancies" such an arbitrary age gap between parent and child, judged by arbitrary criteria that varied from state to state.

But it is easy to get your vote restored if you were entitled to it in the first place. For the very poor, there are political parties who will send people to your home to do it for you. It is likely that they will give you some nice gift and, on election day, take you to the voting booth and give you an appropriate reward. 

Other disturbing facts also came to light. In certain neighborhoods, people had submitted pre-filled forms in bulk, seeking to have Muslims removed from off the electoral rolls by questioning their citizenship. India’s electoral law allows third parties to object to anyone’s inclusion on the electoral rolls.

Electoral fraud is a crime everywhere. All countries lets 'third parties' report crimes of any and every sort. 

In Delhi, the omission of some prominent people from the rolls provoked public outrage. The Election Commission then introduced a “VIP portal”

there is no such thing. The online portal is accessible to everybody.  

through which their names could be restored, creating a two-tier system of class privilege.

This is sheer fantasy.  

A tenacious reporter


Against this backdrop, an investigative report by Ritika Chopra, a journalist with the Indian Express newspaper in the last week of September, landed like a bombshell. Her report showed that although the Election Commission’s decisions were supposed to be taken by consensus among its three commissioners, the chief election commissioner had been taking them unilaterally, often over the objections of, and sometimes without involving, the other commissioners. (The Election Commission responded by describing differing “views and observations” as part of “deliberation in any institution.”)

The reason two extra Commissioners was introduced was so as to prevent it turning into an autocracy. But this also makes it difficult to scapegoat the Chief Commissioner.  

More reports followed, documenting more unilateral decisions,

which the constitution requiresthe Commission to make 

opaque algorithms built by private corporations,

why not have hackable algorithms built by pussy cats?  

and the increasing centralization of authority

I suppose ECINet is meant. Is it dog shit? Probably. But it can be improved. 

within the Election Commission to add or remove voters. It was a clear departure from India’s decentralized electoral system, which is designed to guard against decisions made in bad faith.

The Brits introduced elections. The system was and is centralized. It did not arise in an organic manner out of Parish & Municipal & Borough elections. Maybe, India had become a Federation, each State would have had its own Election Commission. But India is unitary. Elections were and are and will remain centralized. 

These reports crystallized latent anger, particularly against the chief election commissioner. Under Indian electoral law, election commissioners are appointed by a committee in which the political executive holds a two-to-one majority; they are, in effect, executive appointments.

Just as Bhatia is, in effect, an eater of his own shit even if he is dining in an expensive election.  

The Supreme Court’s 2023 attempt to reform this system was bypassed by subsequent legislation. The court then left a challenge to that legislation on the back burner. All of this explains why the chief election commissioner became the primary focus of public anger.

Not really. The guy lacks charisma. He can't defend himself.  Make an Aunt Sally of him by all means- more particularly if you have nothing better to do.  

The story of the SIR is

a bunch of stupid lies 

both an account of large-scale voter disenfranchisement in India and one of institutional crisis. Two failures converged: the failure to entrench the Election Commission’s independence in law

It is completely independent in Law. I suppose Bhatia means, let it be self-appointing like the Bench. But that would change nothing.  

and in the Constitution, and the failure of the Supreme Court to intervene despite evidence of disenfranchisement placed before it.

The evidence was false.  

Together they culminated in the furious popular protests

Rahul & Priyanka are poor Muslim labourers. Their vote was taken away by evil Hindu bastid. That is why they are protesting.  

in Delhi and the Indian government’s crackdown.

It is difficult to see how this story ends.

It is a silly-season story. It doesn't matter how it ends.  

The right to vote is hard won

It was imposed by the Brits.  

and its loss keenly felt.

Indians want to lose their vote in India because they want to become citizens of a richer country- preferably one with fewer Muslims. 

History shows that once people lose confidence in the institutions meant to protect that right, restoring their trust is exceedingly difficult.

Bhatia's history shows he eats his own shit.  

A long shadow hangs over electoral integrity in India.

No. One can either have an independent EC with the balls to crack down on voter fraud or you let the ruling party in the State to pad the rolls with phantom voters. 

Lifting it will require urgent, systemic reforms.

Nope. There is a choice. The cheaper option is to turn a blind eye to dead people voting.  

Whether those reforms will come remains uncertain.

What is certain is Bhatia, effectively, eats his own shit and will continue to do so in saecula saeculorum. That is true meaning of Indian Secularism. Mind it kindly.

Mujib Mahsal on Delhi protests

 The NYT's Mujib Mashal- whom I believe is of Afghan origin- write

Crackdown Exposes Limits of Modi’s Playbook for Maintaining Power

Modi's playbook for maintianing power consists of nothing but strategies to win elections. India isn't Afghanistan- now ruled by the Taliban- or Pakistan- where a former Prime Minister is in jail and President's rule has been imposed on his revolting province- or Bangladesh- where a student uprising toppled the ruling dynasty. Something similar had happened in Sri Lanka & would happen in Nepal (except that a young rap artist took power from an elderly Communist).

India, however, is not like its neighbours. The only way power is 'maintained' is by winning elections. Nothing else works.

Sadly, Mujib- perhaps for genetic reasons or perhaps because he went to Columbia- does not understand that, in a Democracy- at least one with a majority Hindu majority- those who wish to retain power have to appeal to voters more than their opponents. Nothing else matters.

Currently, there is a 'cockroach' protest, involving some Social Media type opportunists, and a separate agitation spearheaded by Rahul & Priyanka Gandhi whose aim is to convince voters that the only reason Congress has performed so badly is because the elections were rigged. Nobody believes this but, if it worked for Trump- in terms of keeping control of the Republican party & making a comeback- then maybe it can work for the Dynasty because....urm... India is like the US- right? It doesn't have an independent Election Commission. Moreover, until 1965, African Indians were denied the vote in most Southern States. Mahatma Luther King protested against this. Obama was his son. Sadly, Obama was mentally retarded and didn't understand that Rahul is a genius rather than a callow moon-calf with the mental age of Greta Thurnberg when she first rose to fame. 

Some people in Congress think that the 'Cockroach party' (started by a guy who was with the AAP media cell before that party imploded in Delhi) is Modi's machiavellian attempt to set up a younger alternative to the 56 year old, grey bearded, Rahul. 

The truth is, some of the young Social Media savvy opportunists involved in the current agitation are looking to set up as independent political strategists/ media campaingn managers who, after making enough money, accept an offer from one of the Opposition parties. Others are just kicking up their heels a little before ending up in some Academic or NGO ghetto. 

What really matters is whether the BJP can keep U.P- the biggest State- next March. This means that Akhilesh Yadav is the only person who really matters. In the 2024 election, his smart choice of candidates hurt the BJP & lost them their majority. The problem is that UP may be like Bihar- i.e. voters may remember the Samajwadi era as 'jungle Raj'. Thus Yogiji may win & what's more, become Modi's successor. In other words, he will be unassailable even if Akhilesh's party does well in the next General Election. 

Moreover, so long as Rahul remains Leader of the Opposition, he himself will be overshadowed on the national stage. This means that, though the Hindi belt gets more seats in 2029, he can't be the 'King-maker' in the event of a hung parliament.

Thus, Akhilesh may ditch Rahul & ally with Owaisi because Owaisi, unlike Rahul's allies, did well in Bihar which was swept by the BJP. I should explain, if Akhilesh allies with Rahul and is defeated once again then it will be a case of 'three strikes and you are out'. He will become like Mayawati- viz. not unimportant but no longer a Chief Ministerial face. 

If Yogi wins a third term, he doesn't just become a natural successor to Modi, he also gets the whiphand over the RSS. Thus, the BJP goes into the 2029 elections stronger than ever- particularly in the Hindi belt which will get more seats. The next decade will belong to them.

This does not mean the BJP can afford to be complacent. True, Rahul may- once again- destroy himself by his hysteria. But, what voters care about is 'last mile delivery'. Geopolitical uncertainties & the mounting cost of climate change could derail the economy. A desperate electorate will turn against incumbent administrations. What this means is that the early 2030s will be a period of unstable coalition governments. The BJP can still keep a lot of power simply by being the one party which can appeal to all Hindus, regardless of caste. 

In this context, it looks as though the allegation of illegally deleting Muslim names (or legally deleting illegal Muslim migrants) was helpful to the BJP in West Bengal. Might it also be helpful in UP? I doubt it. Yogi has already cracked down on 'Bangladeshis & Rohingyas'. He can only win on 'last mile delivery' & 'bulldozer' justice. 

The idiot Mujib says- 

Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India has long succeeded in isolating and undermining opponents.

No. His opponents came together in 2024 and thus he lost his majority. But it is Rahul and Rahul alone who has been undermining not just his own party but any party he allies with, for over a dozen years now. 

 The Gen Z protests pose a challenge unlike any he has faced before

Because it isn't a challenge at all. The Farmer's protest was a challenge. Modi had to eat humble pie. Suppose he had yielded to Trump's bullying re. opening the agricultural sector, his goose would now be well and truly cooked. 

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has long cultivated an image abroad as the popular elected leader of the world’s largest democracy,

He had a majority in 2014 and 2019. He doesn't now but is still wildly popular. Moreover, his party has won West Bengal & Bihar. If it retains UP, it remains unassailable.  

a sober voice of peace in a world of violence.

Everybody wants peace. Sadly, Trump is a senile buffoon.  

He has balanced that role at home in India with another penchant, as a strongman whose lieutenants have wielded the arms of the state at dissenters,

Stupid shitheads have been pretending he is a Fascist and that trillions of dissenters have been beaten, sodomized and subjected to slut shaming by his Stormtroopers.  

exploiting an increasingly pliant legal system and bureaucracy.

The bureaucracy is supposed to be pliant. The judiciary- like the Election Commission- is supposed to the independent. 

Of course, like Trump, you can say that any election his party loses is 'stolen' and any Judge whose decision you don't like was bribed and that, even as we speak, over ten trillion dissidents have been anally raped by Mahua Moitra's dog- who is being paid off with dog biscuits by none other than Queen fucking Victoria.

These efforts have undercut and splintered the opposition, cowed independent media and jailed activists.

Opposition parties don't want to lose seats to each other. They can come together to fight general elections but may part way for State elections. 

No media is 'independent'. It has to make a profit or get a subsidy. If Modi wins elections, most people want to hear nice things about him. Why? Because they like him. You make more money by pleasing the majority rather than by pandering to an antagonomic minority. 

If 'activism' means making a nuisance of yourself- sooner or later, the State has to fine or jail you.  

On Saturday, Mr. Modi’s balancing act broke down as violent scenes across the capital city were beamed to screens around the world,

the world doesn't vote in Indian elections. Modi, rightly, thinks these violent scenes hurt Rahul & help him. Notice,  Akhilesh has stayed away. Mamta & Mahua haven't. But both are seen as hysterical losers. Akhilesh is a former CM. He is 3 years younger than Rahul. He may win in March. This means he is a possible future PM. 

exposing the rough edges of his rule and the limits of his formula for maintaining power.

His power has been unaffected. There are no 'rough edges' to his rule. We see police-women doing their duty while 56 year old Rahul indulges in adolescent antics. Mahua, of course, has actually bitten a police-woman who, no doubt, has received a rabies shot.  

The police in New Delhi unleashed force at young protesters angry over what they say is Mr. Modi’s manipulation of the country’s voting system,

the BJP gained Hindu votes in Bengal by the perception that they were cracking down on 'illegal' Bangladeshi migrants who had previously been put on the electoral roll. Thus 'vote chori' (deletion of voter names) is seen as 'anti-Muslim'. But Owaisi- who did well in Bihar on his own- is standing apart from this agitation. He is signalling that this isn't really a Muslim issue but, like CAA, it can cause Hindu consolidation. But, by voting for a Muslim party (his own), the bargaining power of Muslims increase.  

bashing them and dragging them to detention by the thousands. Phones in hand, the youth have documented the harsh treatment, down to the dirty condition of the police stations they were held in. They found ways around an internet shutdown in central New Delhi to flood social media with content undermining the image of a democratic leader happily in control.

This image prevails in India- which is where Indian voters live. What Americans think of this does not matter in the slightest. 

“The old playbook has become old, it’s tired, it doesn’t work,” said Gyan Prakash, a

Marxist nutter. He is over 70 years old. The Commies have just lost Kerala. The Commie agitators in Delhi have zero grass-roots support.  

Princeton University historian who has written extensively about the Indian government’s descent into authoritarian rule in the 1970s. “And so what do they have now left? They have the police.”

Every country has the police. Pakistan needs something more to contain the threat from Imran Khan. But India is perfectly peaceful.  

Mr. Modi has remained characteristically mum on the protests.

 Modi is a great communicator. When he speaks, his words have maximum impact. 

His official social media accounts instead posted birthday greetings and festival wishes, keeping with his practice of associating himself only with positive things.

as opposed to stupid shit.  

But he still faces the challenge of how to deal with the mounting dissent, which analysts say

which ones? Gyan Prakash?  The fucker has lived in the US for the last 4 decades. He is even more ignorant of India than he is of US politics. 

is unlike anything he has faced so far. The once-battered opposition is feeling invigorated, trying to widen the crack opened by the young people through months of stubborn agitation.

Vijay's victory in Tamil Nadu (albeit based on the fan club phenomenon unique to T.N) has rattled the dynasts. What if some rap-star or movie starlet or maker of 'reels' gets momentum and upsets the electoral applecart?  

Mr. Modi had long found ways to box in opponents, dismissing them as lightweight or demonizing some as terrorists and “anti-nationals.”

Terrorists can get elected if those they terrorize are unpopular. Indeed, at one time, there was talk of Hindu terrorism. Sadhvi Pragya- recently acquited on a terrorism charge- got elected from Bhopal with a big majority in 2019. 

Anti-nationalists get elected in areas where there is a strong secessionist sentiment.  

The youth movement, however, increasingly draws on a cross-section of society that makes the protesters hard to target the same way.

Does this nutter really think the cockroaches matter more than Rahul & Priyanka? How fucking stupid is he?  

The government’s heavy-handed response has elicited rare objections from members of Mr. Modi’s camp, who usually maintain silence, including from a senior ideologist of his party and a cabinet minister.

 This is a complete fabrication. 

Mr. Modi also faces a generational challenge. He and his Bharatiya Janata Party, which has long combined digital savvy with a Hindu nationalist ideology that espouses hierarchy and uniformity, seem stumped by a vocal Gen Z cohort that responds poorly to that kind of rigid authority.

They can be crushed easily. That is why there is no point crushing them.  

The current wave of anger is

opportunistic. Akhilesh is keeping his cards close to his chest. Maybe Rahul's thunder can be stolen by non-dynastic 'cockroaches'.  

over what the protesters see as a threat to the sanctity of voting in India, and it calls into question Mr. Modi’s image as an elected leader with a strong popular mandate. His party often cites his three victories in national elections — Mr. Modi has been prime minister for 12 years — and its success in local elections in dismissing criticism of his government’s conduct.

But if Yogi loses UP, then it becomes a lame duck.  

Over the past year, a nationwide revision of voter rolls has culled more than 130 million names. Mounting evidence of chaos in the revision process and allegations that millions of Indians were deliberately disenfranchised have fueled popular anger.

This is a justiciable matter. Rahul has promised to submit evidence. There needs to be an investigation. 

The protesters are demanding the resignation of Gyanesh Kumar, an election chief appointed through a process that Mr. Modi dominates.

It is a constitutional office similar to a Supreme Court judge. Let us see what the two other Commissioners have to say.  

They accuse Mr. Kumar of doctoring the voter rolls to lock in the ruling party’s advantage for years to come.

Like Trump claiming Biden stole the election. No doubt, if the Republicans lose the mid-terms, we will hear more such claims.  

Mr. Modi’s party has rejected the allegation, saying the critics are sore losers who cannot successfully compete in elections.

Rahul is a cry-baby.  

At a news conference, Ravi Shankar Prasad, a senior lawmaker from Mr. Modi’s party, said, “We are not against protest, which is a natural part of democracy.”

Facing an earlier wave of youth protests over the summer, Mr. Modi made a rare concession with the resignation of his education minister

BJP won Orrisa. No doubt, Pradhan wanted to return there. He could be a future CM.  

amid mass agitation over scandals in college entry tests.

His party appears to have learned from that episode that giving in simply fuels demands for more, said Mr. Prakash, the historian.

In Pradhan's case, the same mistake had been made twice. Perhaps he wanted to return home.  

The resignation of the election chief could be particularly damaging, as the opposition could spin it as an admission that Mr. Modi’s electoral mandate was questionable.

It would make no difference at all. Suppose a Trump supporter learns that Trump rigged the last election. Will he now vote for Kamala? No! She's a darkie with a Hindooooo name.  

“They are between the devil and the deep blue sea,” Mr. Prakash said.

Indian Marxists prefer to live in Trump's US.  

Rajat Sethi, an analyst who formerly advised B.J.P. state governments, said that while the earlier protests against the education minister were nonpartisan, the current wave feels heavily influenced by the political opposition.

The examination mess was the fault of the Ministry. The Minister resigned. This sort of thing happens all the time.  

He said he feared that the opposition, in demanding the resignation of the election chief who holds a constitutional office, could bring about the kind of violent upheaval seen recently in neighboring Bangladesh and Nepal.

In Bangladesh, the Army refused to intervene. In India, the police won't need the help of the army.  

“My biggest question is: What is the endgame on this?” Mr. Sethi said.

This is a silly-season story which will end as the battle for UP heats up. Elections matter. The votes of poorer women determine outcomes.  GenZ doesn't fucking exist. There are young people who have to work and other young people who will have to work sooner or later. 

“Political parties are tasting blood on this, so they will be on the street because they have never be able to galvanize for the past 12 years.”

Rahul is committed to this and has Supriya Sule (Sharad Pawar's daughter) & Mamta with him. But both are has-beens.  both are has-beens. It is reported that Akhilesh will join Rahul tomorrow but he is said to be peeved at being kept out of the loop. He doesn't gain much from 'vote chori'. It is only Mamta who is doubling down on that shite. 

The government’s heavy-handed response has not quashed protests entirely. While it has erected vast numbers of barricades in central New Delhi and put thousands of security forces on the streets, protesters have kept popping up in different corners of the city, before police rush in to round them up.

New Delhi isn't India. Still, voters want the BJP administration to crack down on these out-of-town cockroaches. 

Leaders of the youth movement promised more protests after being released from detention.

Mohak Gupta, a 22-year-old psychology student, was among the protesters who arrived early on Saturday, only to find barricades and columns of security. All day, he said he played cat and mouse with the police and shared his entire experience on Instagram.

So this is about Instagram, not Elections.  

He said what the ruling party doesn’t understand about members of his generation is that they will do exactly what they are told not to do.

While Daddy pays for you to stay in Collidge.  

“They used force last time, too. They hit me with a baton,” he said, referring to the summer protests. “It doesn’t work with us. They made me more angry. How could they hit us?”

Cockroaches get stomped. Even psychology students will figure this out sooner or later. Sadly, it won't be the jackboot of the Fascist which will crush the dreams of GenZ. It will be life itself, or, more prosaically, the bitter business of having to earn a living.  

Rudrangshu Mukherjee getting Bhishma wrong

 The historian, Rudrangshu Mukherjee, writing in Scroll.in, puts forward a curious theory about the death of Bhishma- a great hero in the Mahabharata epic.

The conventional view is that Bhishma refused to defend himself against a particular warrior who was born female but who exchanged gender with a Yaksha. Thus he was felled by the countless arrows fired by Arjuna. His body, however, did not touch the ground because it rested upon so many arrows which had been shot into his hide. Bhishma had the boon of dying at the moment of his own choice. Instead of dying immediately, he chose to remain on the arrow-bed for 58 nights until the arrival of Uttarayana- when the Sun begins its northward journey.  This permits Bhishma to give a long discourse in Ethics and Public Policy to the victorious Pandavas. 

a downcast Sanjaya brings to Dhritarashtra the news that Bhishma is nihata.

 निहत means 'struck down'. Bhishma was struck down by Arjuna's shower of arrows. 

The statement is unequivocal and reiterated in the next sloka with the words, “The son of Santanu, Bhishma is nihata.” The word nihata is repeated. (Mbh: Bhishma parva: adhyaya 13: slokas: 1-3). This raises two problems.

One, why announce Bhishma’s death

Bhishma was struck down. He was not dead.  

even before the description of the battle has begun? Kaliprasanna Sinha, who, in the second half of the nineteenth century, translated the epic into Bengali prose taking it sloka by sloka not only recognised this problem but addressed it in a footnote. Sinha wrote that on hearing the news that Bhishma was nihata, a surprised Dhritarashtra asked Sanjaya to narrate to him the details of the battle. Hence the first sloka of the Bhagavad Gita.

The Gita is about Arjuna seeing the assembled armies and intuiting the horrible outcome of the battle. But this occurred before hostitilites commenced. 

Thus, according to Sinha, the announcement anticipates the Gita (Sinha: i: 879). This explanation is plausible as a narrative device since it helps to understand the insertion of the Gita at this juncture –– Dhritarashtra’s question about what is going in Kurukshetra, followed by Sanjaya’s description, which begins with the Gita.

This is nonsense. Dhritarahtra heard of Bhishma's death ten days after the Gita had been revealed and the war had commenced. 

The second problem is more difficult to resolve. How can someone who has the boon of ichhamrityu be slain (nihata) in battle?

He can be struck down- more particularly if he refuses to fight back. However he remains alive because of the boon that was given to him. He departs the earthly plane at the auspicious time of his choice.  

The issue becomes more complicated as the narrative progresses and readers are presented with a graphic description of the battle on the tenth day of the war. The epic says on that day, pierced by arrows all over his body – the arrows left a space of only two fingers between them – Bhishma contemplated that this was the right moment to die and the rishis and the vasus in the sky concurred with him (Mbh: Bhishma parva: adhyaya:14; slokas: 34-37).

In other words, this was the time at which he was released from his duty to fight for the Kauravas. Death, coming at the ordained time, cancels all obligations. However, if you kill yourself to avoid paying a debt, you would be considered to have used an ignoble method to escape your duty.  

He continued to fight a little longer but soon fell from his chariot. The arrows stuck in his body did not allow his body to touch the ground, and so Bhishma lay on a bed of arrows. He realised that this was that time of the year when the sun was in the south and it was not the best moment to die. He heard the same message from heaven and announced that “I am alive and I will wait for the sun to journey to the north.” (Mbh: Bhishma parva: adhyaya:14; slokas: 97-102.)

Bhishma asserts that he has the definite freedom to choose the time of his death. (Mbh: Bhishma parva: adhyaya: 14; sloka: 109). But Sanjaya, while reporting this incident to Dhritarashtra, says that after Bhishma had been slain (nihata),

struck down, not slain 

the sons of Dhritarashtra did not know what to do (Mbh: Bhishma parva: adhyaya: 14: slokas: 112-114). The word nihata is repeated again in sloka 122; and in adhyaya 15 in slokas 3 and 5. In sloka 6 the verb killed (badh)

'badh' can mean 'tied up'. Bhishma was in their power. Should they chop off his head? No. The dude had recognised (& the God's agreed) his time was up. He would remain on his bed of arrows till the auspicious time for his soul to depart this mortal realm. The good news was that this meant he had leisure to give Yuddhisthra very detailed instruction on Ethics & Public Policy.  

is used.
This is the nub of the puzzle: is Bhisma alive or nihata (slain/dead)?

He is alive but 'tied up'. He can't move. He is no longer a threat.  

Within a space of a few slokas, the Mahabharata is making two different and contradictory statements. According to Bhishma himself he is alive and has chosen his time of death. But the epic is also saying that he is nihata.

Nihata, in context, means 'struck down' and 'badh' means 'tied up' or 'unable to escape'.  

He is alive since we hear him asking for a pillow, asking for water, advising Duryodhona and counselling Karna.

Later on in the Mahabharata, in the Santi and Anushasana parvas, he instructs Yudhishthira on kingship or rajadharma. So why the repeated use of the word nihata?

because we are touched (nihat) by it 

The word recurs so many times in the context of Bhisma, as recounted above, it cannot be written off as a slip – spots on the text as it were.

Bhishma was struck down by a big shower of arrows. We are touched by the image of this great warrior seer- regarded as the common grand-sire of the Pandavas & Kauravas- reposing on a bed of arrows while fixing his mind on celestial matters. 

A simple lexicographical solution offers itself. Apte in his dictionary gives the following meanings of nihata: Struck down, smitten, killed, slain (Apte:1957-59). It is possible to argue that the epic is using the word nihata in the sense of “struck down” or “smitten” and not in the sense of killed and slain. Such a reading would solve the puzzle at the cost of diminishing the richness of what the epic is trying to convey.

In some legends, a vetala (vampire) can possess a corpse. Perhaps Bhishma was dead. Dracula took over his body. Those stupid Hindus have been treating 'Bhishma-Niti' with venerance when it was actually dictated by Nosfer-fucking-atu!

I would suggest that something more significant is at work here. Bhishma is alive and not alive – however bizarre such a statement sounds in mundane and literal terms. There are some clues in the text that indeed this was the state in which Bhishma placed himself post his fall from his chariot.

Slokas 95 and 96 in the 14th adhyaya says that after Bhishma fell from his chariot, he was enveloped by the ambience of heaven (svargia bhava) and that the clouds brought forth rain and there was an earthquake. Such a phenomenon would suggest that this was not just a fall of any very powerful warrior, but more than that – it was the fall of an extraordinary figure, maybe even a suprahuman one.

Bhishma is the incarnation of a Vasu and thus is more than mortal. We may say that figures like Bhishma & Parasuram represent the old order which was giving way to the urban, commercial, civilization of the emporium cities of the Gangetic plain. 

This suggestion is strengthened by Sanjaya’s report to Dhritarashtra that Bhishma, on the bed of arrows following yoga, began to chant (jap) the maha upanishad (Mbh: Bhishma parva: adhyaya 14: sloka: 125). Moreover, the epic says that after learning that Bhishma would wait to die till the sun began its northward journey, his mother Ganga, the daughter of Himalaya, sent the maharishis, as swans, to Bhishma.

The maharishis asked: why would a mahatma like Bhisma depart for the next life when the sun was in the south? Hearing this, Bhishma looked at them and after some thought told them: “As long the sun is in the south I will by no means go to the next life. This is what is in my mind.” (Mbh: Bhishma parva: adhyaya:14: slokas: 102-107).

In this context it is worth noting that when Bhishma, lying on his bed of arrows, asked for water, various kinds of food and potable items were brought to him. Seeing all these, Bhishma remarked, “Now I am no longer in a position to accept any items belonging to the human world. I have been delivered from the human world, I am on a bed of arrows and waiting for the sun and the moon to alter their movements. I will drink heavenly water, not earthly water.” And it is heavenly water that Arjuna provides to Bhishma (Mbh: Bhishma parva: adhyaya:16: slokas: 10-25).

Bhishma had eaten Kaurava salt and thus had been bound to fight for them. Now, he is 'dead to the world'. If some sin was incurred by eating what Duryodhana provided, then Bhishma expiates it on his bed of arrows.  

All these pieces of evidence gleaned from the end of the Bhishma parva would strengthen the conclusion that he was no longer inhabiting the world of humans. He was in some undefined supramundane sphere.

The mind of the Yogi, sitting in samadhi, may well be in some such place. But he can continue to offer instruction to us. 

The description that his body did not fall to the ground but was propped up above the ground by arrows is perhaps the epic’s way of indicating metaphorically that Bhishma was no longer connected with the earth, he was above the earth but he still had not attained paradise. It is possible that the word nihata was used to signify that he was no longer a part of the material world. But the epic could not kill Bhishma because he had agency over his own death.

 We feel Bhishma, with the hubris of a warrior, caused great injury to Shikhandini. Let him pay for his crime in this life and be clear of the karmic debt.

Bhishma’s last moments in the world of humans are narrated at the end of the Anushasana parva. Here we learn that when Yudhishthira saw that the sun was making its way north, he with all his brothers and relatives travelled to where Bhishma lay on his bed of arrows. After exchanging greetings, Bhishma tells Yudhishthira that he had been on the bed of arrows for fifty-eight days and these had seemed like a hundred years to him (Mbh: Anushasana parva: adhyaya: 145: sloka: 27).

Which is long enough to expiate his sins of ommission or commission.  

It would not be unfair to read this as an admission on Bhishma’s part that he had suffered and felt pain as any human being would. A part of him, it would appear, is still anchored in the world of human beings. But the suprahuman dimension of his “existence” is reiterated in the description of his death or departure from this world.

He was a celibate seer who had gained 'siddhas' through itnense 'tapas'. Also, he was the reincarnation of a particular Vasu.  

The relevant slokas say that the unshackled wind of Bhishma’s life travelled upwards. Everyone, including Vyasa and other rishis who were present, was astonished to witness this.

Such things don't happen every day.  

Then Bhisma began to rid himself of his limbs and through the power of yoga each of his limbs became free of arrows. Within a short time his body became free of arrows, much to the wonder of even Vyasa and Krishna. Then his life spirit broke through his head and flew into the sky and disappeared. Thus, the epic says, the greatest of the Bharata lineage merged with Time. The gods rained flowers and beat drums (Mbh: Anushasana parva: adhyaya: 146: slokas: 2-11).
It is clear that Bhishma did not die in the manner of ordinary mortals.

He had taken and kept a 'terrible' (Bhishma) vow. He wasn't ordinary at all.  

The passing of life from his body was an ethereal phenomenon.

Celestial.  

It is also worth noting that as in the case of all human beings, the passing of a son was mourned by the mother. Ganga, Bhishma’s mother,

having been unable to drown him as a baby 

mourned him and was inconsolable. She asked how he could be slain

struck down, not slain 

by Shikhandi –– the word nihata reappears here in the mouth of Ganga. Vyasa and Krishna consoled her and explained to Ganga that it was Arjuna who had slain (again nihata) Bhishma following kshatriyadharma on the battlefield (Mbh: Anushasana parva: adhyaya: 146: slokas: 23-32).

We are thus not free of the conundrum of how a person who is declared to be nihata so many times, including by his own mother, was alive for 58 days and had been able to provide long disquisitions on aspects of ruling, kingship, dharma and so on through two of the longest parvas, save the Adi parva, of the epic –– the Santi and the Anushasana parvas.

There is no conundrum. The dude was struck down & then he decided to die on a a particular day. There were other heroes- some of them super-human- who fought and died at Kurukshetra. But they didn't have Bhishma's boon which, to be honest, isn't particularly desirable.  

The only plausible explanation seems to accept that Bhishma is not entirely human. He was originally one of the Vasu gods – Dyaus Vasu – who had come to earth in human form under a curse and a blessing of Vashistha. As a god he cannot die,

Nonsense! His mummy was supposed to drown him as a baby- as she had done with seven of his siblings- but her husband intervened. That is why Bhishma had to suffer a long life on this earthly plane. However, his mother got him educated by all the great sages. That's why Bhishma-Niti is esteemed. 

as a human he is mortal.

Krishna is god. Nevertheless, he dies.  Ashwattama doesn't die though he is no god. 

This paradox is resolved in the epic by bestowing on Bhishma the agency over his own death. Like any human warrior, he is declared to be nihata but this is not followed immediately by his mrityu since he has the boon to choose the time of his own mrityu.
It could be said that this is a situation where the universal principle of mortality –– operative in the case of all human beings – is clashing with the magical principle of a boon.

There is no clash. What requires explanation is why Bhishma decides to stop fighting. The answer is that he knows that the time of his death has come. His earthly obligations are cancelled. The gods agree.  If this were not the case, some one would be bound to ask why Bhishma didn't use some particular occult weapon or magical power to continue the fight. 

One may speak of 'prarabhda karma'- Yogic philosophy compares past actions (Sanchita) to a full quiver of arrows, future actions to arrows in hand, and Prarabdha to an arrow already fired from the bow—it cannot be called back and must hit its target. However, an expert archer can shoot an arrow to deflect another arrow. Still, everything must be paid for one way or another.  Bhishma-niti explores the 'economia' wriggle-room that exists within Hindu Shastric 'akreibia'. 

Thus Bhishma, after his fall from the chariot and on the bed of arrows, is not inhabiting the sphere occupied by ordinary mortals.

It is the same sphere as the other characters in the epic.  

This is a liminal space at the limit of life and death where the ambience is heavenly but Bhishma is able to talk and counsel Yudhishthira and set out the principles of rajadharma. Such a situation, where a universal principle and an exceptional boon that transgresses the universal principle

there is no transgression if the boon is used in an unexceptionable manner- which is what happens here

are overlapping is narratively constructed and the Mahabharata invites/expects its readers/listeners to willingly suspend their mundane disbelief.

It doesn't expect them to be as stupid as shit.  

This situation is obviously unique and therefore a marker of Bhishma’s extraordinary and suprahuman status. But Bhishma is not the only character in the Mahabharata who is on the threshold of divinity and humanity.

Lord Krishna is the Godhead.  

Vyasa and Vidura also straddle the spiritual and the secular worlds with equal ease. 

Vyasa is the biological progenitor of the Kauravas. Vidura is his son.  

Lying on the bed of arrows, Bhishma told the maharishis who had come to him as swans that “Where I was before, I will return there, my proper abode, when the sun moves to the north.” (Mbh: Bhishma parva: adhyaya:14: sloka:108) Thus at the moment of his mrityu, his life spirit moved skywards where the gods reside. His end was in his beginning.

In other words, he was a Vasu who didn't want to suffer long in a human incarnation. Sadly, his father prevented his Mum from drowning him as a baby. No wonder, he waited till the Sun was on its northward course to lay down his life so that he could follow 'devayana' (the path of the god) and thus rejoin his Vasu siblings in Heaven.  I should explain 'Pitrayana (path of the paternal ancestors) is associated with the southward course of the Sun and eventual rebirth as a human being. This is the reason Bhishma postponed his death.