The Caravan of Ambani's Antilia

Ten years ago, Caravan published the following. At first sight it looks like good enough journalism. But everybody in Mumbai real estate circles knew it was a bunch of stupid lies.

Will the Bombay High Court Order a CBI Probe Into How the Ambanis Acquired Land For Antilia?

Kaushal Shroff
24 May, 2016

But for over a decade, the land on which Antilia stands has been mired in controversy.

No. It was owned by a secular charity created by Khoja (Ismaili) Muslims. It was sold at above the circle rate to Ambani & the Charity Commissioner signed off on it. Perhaps the Khojas were worried about the worsening position for Indian Muslims after the attack on the Indian parliament & the Godhra atrocity. This was the time to cash out. Ambani had deep pockets and could pay in cash.  

Situated in one of the most affluent neighbourhoods of the city, the land, even conservatively, was valued anywhere between Rs 200 crore in 2002

The circle rate was 18 crore. Ambani paid a 3 crore premium. The Charity Commissioner signed off. Everything was done and dusted with expedition.  

and Rs 500 crore in 2007,

Bombay didn't go up in flames after ISI sponsored terrorist attacks. Indeed, even after the Taj Hotel attack, Muslims were not slaughtered. Their property was not seized.  

but the Ambanis, through their corporate entity Antilia Commercial Private Limited, acquired it for a little over Rs 20 crore—at most, a little over a tenth of the cost, but likely much lower considering the appreciation in real estate prices since then.

But, in 2002, if you were Muslim in Bombay, your life- let alone your property- might not be worth tuppence. Indeed, people even spoke of a nuclear exchange with Pakistan.  

At the heart of this matter is a tussle between two laws. Although the original owners of the land, the Currimbhoy Ebrahimbhoy Khoja Orphanage, sold the land in 2002 as they were entitled to do under the Bombay Public Trust Act of 1950, the land actually fell under the Wakf Act of 1995

No it didn't. Why? It was a secular charity to benefit orphans. It wasn't set up to maintain a mosque or other religious institution. Incidentally, the Waqf board in Mumbai is Sunni dominated. Khojas are Ismaili Shias. That was another reason to get rid of the property. Unlike the Bohras, Khoja political influence in India is not significant (as far as I know) because the Aga Khan had supported the Pakistan demand.  

—a law that governs properties set aside by philanthropists to be used for any objective considered pious, religious or charitable under Muslim law. This made the sale of the land without the permission of the respective state wakf board—which oversees the maintenance and administration of wakf property and land—illegal.

That's not what Indian Courts have said. In law, the thing was a secular charity. Ambani has the best lawyers. Smaller fish would have been scared off from bidding because of the notorious problems with Waqf property.  

In April 2004, the Maharashtra wakf board issued a notice to Antilia Commercial asking why the property should not be restored to the board.

The answer was go fuck yourself. They did get a small pay (16 lakhs) out from the Khojas who don't want to antagonise the lumpen Sunnis too much. Hilariously, the Board later decided that this bit of extortion was illicit! 

Though the trust eventually arrived at a settlement with the board, since then, many have claimed that their process was unscrupulous.

It wasn't. The Khoja trustees did the smart thing in selling to Ambani. The mistake was to pay off the Waqf board. They were bound to want a second bite at the cherry. But Ambani's own position was solid. He had bought the land from a secular charity.  PILs were barred by laches. The Waqf board, declaring its own previous actions as mischievous, aren't time-barred but the question re. what is or isn't a Waqf remains pending before the Supreme Court. Chances are, when the matter is resolved, Waqfs will find themselves fucked.  

The contest over the claim to the land has been ongoing since 2005, but neither the state nor the court has ordered any effective action.

Because the claim is a nuisance. Still, maybe it will terminate with a Supreme Court Judgment which destroys the basis for all the nuisance claims made by Waqfs. A great source of corruption will be curbed. 

After the Bombay High Court admitted the social activist and businessman in the matter on earlier this month, it may once again be in a position to order a Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) enquiry into the dispute.

 The High Court dismissed it and imposed fines on the dude and his attorney. 

Set up in 1892, the Currimbhoy Ebrahimbhoy Khoja Orphanage trust was, according to its constitution, meant to “provide maintenance and education to the orphane/destitute boys of the Khoja community.”

It did not say religious education. This was a secular charity. Though Sir Currimbhoy followed the Aga Khan, he wanted to benefit all Khojas regardless of sect. That is why he got it registered as a General Public Charitable Trust under the Maharashtra Charity Commissioner. 

The constitution also stipulates that the managing committee of the trust shall appoint a religious instructor to “teach the Koran and the general and fundamental principles of the Mohammadan religion to pupils of the orphanage.”

But, religious instruction was not the fundamental purpose. It is a different matter that the founder thought religious education was part and parcel of education.  

With a mandate to house young boys and educate them about Islam, the trust was eligible to be qualified a Wakf property.

But it wasn't registered as such. It was registered under the Charity Commissioner, not the Waqf board.  

The trust continued working till 2002, even as its management likely became increasingly aware of the escalating price of the land in its possession. On 21 November 2002, the trust sold the land to Antilia Commercial Private Limited—the Ambani-controlled corporate entity which purchased the property—for a sum that would later appear meager: Rs 21 crore.

In the circumstances, it was the smart move. If war between India and Pakistan had broken out, all Muslim property would have gone to the Custodian of Enemy Property.  

To put it simply, the Currimbhoy Trust was expressly registered under the Bombay Public Trust Act in 1952 and had been working under that law since. After the Wakf Act was passed in 1995, the charity commissioner’s notice officially gave up control of properties that would qualify as a wakf.

No. It was only in July 24, 2003, that an order was passed directing regional offices to stop dealing with the affairs of Muslim trusts.

I suppose the Currimbhoy Trust knew this change was in the pipeline. Hence they were in a hurry to do a deal. Why? The Trust didn't want to come under a bunch of corrupt Sunnis. I suppose the reason the Waqf board is pursuing the matter is because they have their eyes on some other juicy Khoja charities. I should explain, because the Currimbhoy baronets emigrated to Pakistan, their trust was more vulnerable.  

As a result, a few months before the trust sold the land, it had ceased to be answerable to the charity commissioner and was accountable to the Maharashtra Wakf Board instead.

No. That was the case a few months after the land was sold.  

In April 2004, two years after the land was sold, the board issued a notice to the trust and to Antilia Commercial asking why its permission had not been sought for the transaction. The trust chose to challenge the notice before the Wakf tribunal—a special court designated to deal with wakf disputes—in Aurangabad, and claimed that it was a trust and not a wakf property.

They got about 36000 dollars in 2005. Since then, they have got nothing. 

Last year the Central Government's Waqf (Amendment) act was passed. In Maharashtra, this means the Waqf board has to have non-Muslim & female members. Previously under "Section 40", the Waqf Board had the autonomous authority to declare whether a property belonged to it or not. That power has been completely removed, transferring dispute arbitration power to State Revenue District Collectors and the High Court.

A great nuisance has been curbed. 

An year into the litigation before the Wakf tribunal, the trust proposed an amicable settlement to the board. In 2005, the board indicated its acceptance of the settlement. It issued a resolution stating that the sale of the property was necessary to achieve the purpose of the trust—effectively giving the Ambanis a green light to begin construction. It also accepted Rs 16 lakhs in lump sum from the trust and withdrew the suit. The same year, the Currimbhoy trust filed a petition before the Bombay High Court, challenging the circular issued by the charity commissioner putting the trust outside the ambit of the Bombay Public Trusts Act.

And leaving it open to the rapacity of the Waqf board.  

The petition is still pending before the court.

De facto it isn't under the Waqf board.  

The wakf board’s decision to settle was criticised by many ministers, especially from the then-opposition in Maharashtra, the Bharatiya Janata Party, as well as from the Congress. They did not believe that Rs 21 crore was a reasonable price for the land the Currimbhoy trust had sold, and refuted the argument Rs 16 lakh was an acceptable settlement amount.

Why were various provincial politicians not allowed to dip their beaks? The answer is that the Ambani's were and are in the big league. 

In 2007, the state government responded to the criticism it was facing for its inaction and ordered a one-man commission comprising the retired high court judge ATAK Sheikh to look into the legalities of several contested wakf properties.

Congress was in power and wanted to shore up the Muslim vote.  

Sheikh’s report, which was finally released last year, raised red flags against the two former CEOs and one former chairman of the Maharashtra wakf board involved in green-lighting the sale of the land that Antilia stands on today. Sheikh was of the opinion that the board members were guilty of misconduct for personal gain. He noted that he asked SS Ali Qadri, one of former CEOs of the Maharashtra wakf board named in Sheikh’s report, whether the provisions of Section 32 (2) (j) of the Wakf Act—which requires that two-thirds of the wakf board vote in favour of a sale of a wakf property for it to be sold—were followed before the sale of the property. Qadri told Sheikh that “the provisions of section 32 (2) (j of the Wakf Act “were not attracted in this matter.” Sheikh inferred that this meant that the property had not been treated as a wakf. Qadri, he added, “appears to have a ulterior motive, may be for his wrongful gain.” Sheikh believed that Qadri’s conduct, “by making such statement, was exposed to be hostile to the wakf, specially when the board of the wakf is consistently taking stand that it is a wakf property.”

The problem with Muslims isn't that they fight with each other, it is that they accuse each other of renting out their rectums for pennies. 

Throughout these years, BJP MLAs continually raised the issue in the state assembly, asking the government to step in. In 2011, the BJP’s Eknath Khadse,

now with the NCP. He was sidelined in favour of Fadnavis because of corruption and other scandals. 

the leader of the opposition, said that the Antilia property was worth Rs 500 crore. Khadse demanded a CBI probe into the matter. Muslim MLAs including Nawab Malik from the Congress supported his request.

Bashing billionaires seemed 'populist' at one time. Now, only Rahul goes in for it.  

Then, in mid-2011, perhaps responding to the attention the issue was receiving, the centre,

under the utterly useless Manmohan 

too, suggested that the Maharashtra government institute a CBI inquiry into matter. With the pressure piling on it, the state government took the easy way out. It referred the central government’s suggestion to the state’s law and judiciary department for its opinion. Meanwhile, government officials took a stand that no CBI probe was warranted as Sheikh was conducting an inquiry under the Commission of Inquiry Act of 1952. This line of reasoning is specious at best; issues such as these are regularly investigated by multiple agencies simultaneously. In 2011, for instance, the Adarsh Society scam was being looked into by both the CBI and a judicial commission set up under the Inquiry act.

Nobody ever lived in it. But it hasn't been demolished either. A number of arrests were made but no convictions were secured.

Earlier this month, Shadaab Patel filed a PIL in the Bombay High Court seeking a CBI probe into the sale of the property. In his PIL, Patel claimed that Rs 21 crore was only ten percent of the prevailing market rates at that time of the sale. He also alleged that the payment of Rs 16 lakh to settle a dispute over a property measuring 4532.39 square metres in a prime locality in Mumbai was akin to “purchasing peanuts.” According to Patel, the deal involved large-scale corruption, with the pockets of a select few bureaucrats being lined up at the cost of the welfare of the orphans for whom the property was set aside.

This is the dude whose case was dismissed. He and his lawyers paid a fine to the court.  

Coming now, Patel’s PIL could make a crucial difference to the case. In his PIL, he has asked for an inquiry by either a Special Investigative Team of the CBI. The Bombay High Court accepted his PIL, and on 4 May, sought replies from Antilia Commercial, the wakf board, the state government and others.

There is no story covered by Caravan which isn't like this- false on the facts, false in terms of predictions, and utterly foolish given what is common knowledge amongst people in the field in question.  

Nadim Asrar on Sharjeel Imam

Nadim Asrar writes for Al Jazeera- 

Has India’s democracy failed its Muslims? Jailed scholar triggers debate

Democracy is majority rule. In 1946, the vast majority of Muslims voted for the creation of Pakistan. Partition and ethnic cleansing followed. In Pakistan, kaffirs became second or third class citizens. In India, Muslims lost all the previous concessions they had received. True, if they were the majority in a place- e.g. Vale of Kashmir- they could ethnically cleanse kaffirs, but kaffirs could retaliate with equal or greater brutality. 

Since Muslims haven't tried to kill Prime Ministers- e.g. Indira Gandhi or Rajiv Gandhi- they have not been slaughtered to the extent of Sikhs. But, if they start any violence against kaffirs- e.g. in Godhra- they get stomped. This was also the case with the riots certain Muslim politicians started in Delhi to mark the visit of Trump. They were stomped and the ringleaders are in jail under the draconian UAPA law. 

Sharjeel, whom I believe to be mentally ill, wasn't a ring leader but did incite violence. He was foolish enough to think Mulsims could 'cut off' Assam from the rest of India. He didn't realise that the Assamese, left to themselves, would slaughter every Muslim who didn't run away. 

Why is Sharjeel now being built up as a 'public intellectual'? The answer is Owaisi- the head of a Muslim party who is getting seats in the part of Bihar where, the nutter, Sharjeel wanted to stand. Owaisi is a nationalist and is being kept at arms-length by the dynastic 'INDIA' bloc. Owaisi is threatening to field 200 candidates in UP in March. This could hurty Akhilesh & Rahul while helping the BJP's Yogi retain India's biggest State for a third time. If he does so, he is Modi's natural successor. At 52 years of age, he could dominate the 2030s. 

Building up Sharjeel doesn't actually help the INDIA bloc because the fucker is insane in the mainframe. Still, he is in jail- rather than the lunatic assylum- and thus could be built up as a martyr. The problem is that by promoting Sharjeel (rather than Owaisi) you get Hindu vote consolidation. You help Modi.  

Sharjeel Imam questioned foundational ideas of India’s nationalism

It was Hindu. That is why Muslims broke away 

in an interview with The Quint, inspiring a heated debate.

There may have been heat. There was no light.  

Has the world’s largest democracy failed the world’s largest minority – its nearly 200 million Muslims?

Arguably it has failed its majority by not ethnically cleansing them. Perhaps this is the outcome these nutters really want.  

That question is at the heart of a polarising debate currently under way in India.

There is no debate. Owaisi has an Islamic party. He is a Nationalist but wants things of benefit to Indian Muslims. What is wrong with that? The answer is that he isn't pro-Pakistan and thus can't become a proxy for the US. Incidentally, Owaisi is Sunni whereas Sharjeel is Shia.  

The debate started with Sharjeel Imam, a 38-year-old Muslim scholar,

he is as ignorant as shit. What he does know is Arabic, Persian and Urdu. He should have studied at Osmania & joined Owaisi's outfit. He'd be an MLA from Bihar by now. Incidentally, his dad was associated with Nitish Kumar.  

who gave a lengthy interview to an Indian news website

a shite one 

on September 29 from his prison cell in New Delhi.

It is remarkable how people who believe in violent revolution turn into devout votaries of the constitution once in jail.  

Imam covered a wide range of issues and raised uncomfortable questions about the place of the country’s Muslim minority, which forms roughly 14 percent of India’s 1.4 billion population.

Only Muslims matter. They should be the majority everywhere. If they aren't, they should be treated as such because otherwise nutters like Imran will scream their tits off and shit themselves incessantly.  

“There are around 210 million Muslims in India – one of the biggest Muslim groups in the world, with practically zero say in this democracy,” Imam told the Indian news outlet, The Quint.

There is a Muslim majority state ruled by a Muslim dynasty. The Sikh majority state is ruled by Sikhs. The Christian majority states are run by Christians. How very strange! 

He criticised the Indian constitution for its “enshrined centralisation” of power

That is what Nehru wanted and that is what Nehru got. Why? There was an existential threat from Muslim salami tactics. Hindus had learned from their history. Either they would hang together or they would hang apart.  

and called its brand of secularism “particularly Islamophobic and parochial”,

because it was Hindu. Indian constitution should require all Hindus to chop off their own heads.  

adding that democracy was a tool to deny Muslims their political representation and rights.

The minority should rule the majority. Also, Hindus should chop off their own heads. Why are they not doing so? It is because the Indian constitution is really shitty.  

Who is Sharjeel Imam?

Hailing from Jahanabad district of Bihar, India’s poorest state, Imam graduated from the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay in computer science

but found technology to be Islamophobic 

and worked as a software engineer

The private sector is Islamophobic 

before returning to academics.

Academia turned out to be Islamophobic 

As a doctoral student at the Centre for Historical Studies at New Delhi-based Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), his primary research area was the political history of India’s Muslims.

Which everybody already knew.  Still, his Dad thought this useless fellow could get into politics with Communist help. 

In 2019, months after winning a second term in office, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist government passed a controversial citizenship law, which granted an expedited pathway to Indian citizenship for non-Muslim refugees from India’s neighbouring countries.

This had existed since 1948. Nehru passed an ordinance stripping citizenship from Muslims who had crossed the border in panic. Over subsequent decades the Custodian of Evacuee (later, 'Enemy') Property harassed Muslim property owners- alleging they intended to leave- till they ran the fuck away to Pakistan. Why? As Nehru said, room had to be made for non-Muslim refugees fleeing Pakistan.  

The United Nations called the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) “fundamentally discriminatory” against Muslims.

Because the UN is fundamentally shit. The plain fact is, non-Muslims are persecuted in Pak & Bangladesh. Muslims aren't. The former qualify for refugee status. The latter don't. What about Muslims accused of blasphemy? If they come to India, the Indian Mullahs put a price on their head. They have to hide or run away again. By contrast if Muslims try to fuck with non-Muslim refugees, they get stomped by the majority.  

The passage of the law ignited nationwide anti-CAA protests.

Which helped the BJP and led to Congress and the Left losing seats. The BJP consolidated its hold on Assam & the North East. Now it has won West Bengal. 

Led by Muslims, mostly women, a weeks-long demonstration near Shaheen Bagh, a densely-populated Muslim ghetto on the southeastern edge of New Delhi, became the epicentre of those protests.

Those women had been lied to. They were told their kids would be deported. Still, they served their purpose, Congress & the Left lost Delhi. Modi & Kejriwal (who chanted Hanuman Chalisa) gained. The BJP's hope is that Rahul's 'vote chori' (Bangladeshi Muslims losing voting rights) will have the same effect. There will be Hindu consolidation.  

Imam was one of the chief organisers of the Shaheen Bagh sit-in. He was arrested in January 2020 for inciting violence through speeches made at the protests.

He went crazy. His lawyer should have said- 'the boy suffered trauma from losing his father to a long battle with cancer. He became unhinged. Here is a Psychiatrist's report. Kindly send him to a hospital for observation. Don't send him to jail. He will get even crazier there.'  

But there had been no violence until his arrest.

Sadly, not enough people were arrested which is why there was violence. Still, the outcome of the riot was predictable. The minority started the trouble. Then the majority stomped them.  

It came the next month in northeast New Delhi where anti-CAA sit-ins organised in Muslim neighbourhoods were attacked by mobs, incited by hate speech from leaders from the governing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

Did you know that George Bush personally crashed planes into the World Islamic Trade Centre's twin towers where Al Qaeda was peaceful doing namaz? Muslims have never initiated violence.  

Despite him being already behind bars when the violence broke out,

which is why he wasn't killed in an 'encounter' 

Imam was charged with rioting, murder, attempted murder, sedition, and “promoting enmity on grounds of religion” under several laws, including a stringent anti-terror law.

He was guilty save by reason of diminished capacity- i.e. he was as crazy as a bed-bug. The properly 

He was not the only one. Nearly a dozen Muslim students and activists, including another JNU scholar Umar Khalid, were arrested and imprisoned for being the alleged conspirators in the 2020 riots. 

They should have been left to roam free so they could be killed in 'encounters'- right? Killing is cheap and easy in a poor country. Extrajudicial killing on an industrial scale is what has kept India together. Why pretend the Bench matters? Jail is where you are kept safe. Indeed, the big gangsters prefer to operate from the safety of a prison cell.  

they remain in jail without trial and repeatedly denied bail, with rights groups calling their continued incarceration a “gross abuse of power” and a glaring example of judicial oversight, in which the accused are “guilty until proven innocent”.

Hilarious! As if troublemakers can't be slaughtered out of hand. If Sharjeel or Khalid were important, they would have been killed. They aren't important. Keeping them in jail gives the police an incentive not to simply shoot those who instigate riots in which policemen are killed. 

According to Imam, such an alleged abuse of power – especially targeting Muslims – is systemic and goes back to the very ideas behind the founding of India as a Hindu-majority country.

You don't need to study at JNU to know this. It is fucking obvious.  

‘Secular and Hindutva frameworks share same ideas’

That may be changing. Yogi is an actual Hindu monk. He could be a three term P.M just like Modi.  

In his interview with The Quint, he called India’s independence icon Mahatma Gandhi a “fascist” for making Congress – the party that led India’s freedom struggle and currently in the opposition – an “essentially Hindu party”

It was already that. The Scotsman who founded it, in the 1880s,  was a Vedantin, Vegetarian who believed in cow protection. That's why there was a Muslim League.  

and for allegedly endorsing certain ideas and practices now pushed by Modi’s BJP and its ideological parent, the far-right Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS).

Yogi isn't from the RSS. If he wins a third term, he will succeed Modi. This means, in the Hindi belt, Hinduism will have the same position as Sikhism in the Punjab. The Abdullah dynasty in Kashmir will be replaced by something more Islamic. 

Founded in 1925 along the lines of the fascist parties in Europe,

No. Dr. Hegdewar created it as a 'non-political' copy of his pal, Dr. Hardikar's, Congress Seva Dal which could be banned at any time. Fascism only arises where there was a Commie threat.  

the RSS aims to turn a constitutionally secular India into an ethnic Hindu state.

led by a Mahatma. That's as Hindu as you can get.  

Imam also accused independent India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru of “falsehood and mythmaking” for projecting India as an ancient, “uniquely tolerant” civilisation in his book, The Discovery of India.

Kaffirs don't have civilization. They have 'jahilliyat'.  

But Imam reserved his most scathing attack for India’s pro-secular liberals, arguing that there is no difference between them and the supporters of the BJP and the RSS.

Because they are kaffirs.  

“In short, both secular and Hindutva frameworks share the same core ideas – the myth of uniformity, centralisation and denial of sharing of power,” he said.

Kaffirs should just kill themselve already. That is the true meaning of Ambedkar's Constitution.  

Hindutva refers to the Hindu supremacist movement championed by the RSS and the BJP

which is why they rule 72 percent of India. The majority wants to be supreme in its own country.  

in order to turn a constitutionally secular India into an ethnic Hindu state.

Yes. I think there will be more 'shuddhi' and 'ghar wapsi' in the Hindi belt over the course of the 2030s.  

In a rebuttal in The Quint, legal scholar Mohd Zeeshan Ahmad said Imam “raises serious historical and ideological questions that cannot be evaded merely because he is facing prosecution,” but that his “equation of secularism with Hindutva is unpersuasive”.

Owaisi, a barrister, has answered all these questions. You can have a Nationalistic Muslim Party which pursues the interests of Muslims while part of coalition governments. Currently, Congress is rejecting his 80-20 formula. The truth is, if Congress & the Samajwadi parties lose the Muslim vote-bank, their dynastic leaders will dwindle in importance.  

“Imam’s language risks projecting Muslims as a homogeneous political bloc, obscuring disagreements of class, caste, gender, region and ideology,” Ahmad wrote.

Owaisi is projecting Muslims as homogenous. The problem is that 'lower caste' Muslims might increasingly vote for the BJP on the basis of universal entitlements from which they disproportionately benefit.

The big question has to do with the caste census. Congress and its allies are talking about reservations in proportion to the population. But, to accomodate this, particular sub-castes may lose entitlements. This is because of 'open ended enumeration'- i.e. self-identification which, in view of Maha-Dalit & Pasmanda mobilization, may up-end current arrangements.  

“Where are the Pasmanda [less privileged castes] Muslims in this political imagination? Where is the question of gender justice, including the rights of women within Muslim communities? Who gets to speak for the ‘Qaum’ [community], and whose experiences are rendered invisible when a singular political voice claims to represent it?”

Owaisi is putting himself forward. He may not succeed, but younger Muslims may follow his lead. Screaming and rioting is useless. The only way to get power is by winning elections.  

But Irfan Ahmad, professor of anthropology and sociology at Ibn Khaldun University in Istanbul, Turkiye, and author of several acclaimed books on the Muslim question in South Asia, told Al Jazeera that Imam is right in questioning whether there is a difference between the Congress and the BJP when it comes to secularism.

i.e. BJP is secular. 

If you don't want secularism because you are Muslim then you should support Owaisi. His outfit is not tied up with either the Congress led or the BJP led alliances.  

“Indian nationalism rests on a false division between ‘secular’ nationalism of the Congress, especially through its figures like Nehru and Gandhi, on the one hand, and ‘communal’ right-wing forces on the other,” he said.

The division is between the Dynasty- which is now half Italian- and Meritocracy.  

“The fact is that from the beginning, the Congress had within what it depicted as its outside: ethno-racist-Hindu nationalists.

It also had Islamists and Commies but, as time went on, all it had was sycophants & corrupt cunts.*

 

The flow of leaders between the Congress and overtly Hindu parties was smooth,”

as was the flow into Islamist or Communist parties. Jinnah started off in Congress 

he added, citing Lala Lajpat Rai,

The Professor is wholly ignorant. Lala was always a 'garam dal' Congress man. Like Motilal, he joined Swaraj but Swaraj was just the portion of Congress which entered the Legislative Assemblies.  

K M Munshi,

a Congress-man who joined Swaraj. Later, in 1959, he joined Rajaji to found the pro-free market Swantantra Party. He chaired the meeting at which the Vishva Hindu Parishad was founded in 1966

Shyama Prasad Mookerjee,

Never a member of Congress. The Professor who wrote this is as ignorant as shit. That doesn't matter because he is teaching in Turkey.  

and Madan Mohan Malviya as examples.

Founder of the Hindu Mahasabha. His imprimatur helped both Gandhi & Motilal Nehru when they were beginning their political careers in India.  

“K B Hedgewar, the RSS founder, was himself earlier in the Congress.”

as were  Muhammad Ali Jinnah and Chaudhry Khaliquzzaman. Interestingly, the grandfather of Sen.Al Sayed's wife- Shamsuddin Bin Hussain Saheb Jukaku- was in the Muslim League before Independence and in the Congress party after it. He was a capable man but never rose above the rank of Deputy Minister.  

Ahmad, the professor, said the difference between the Congress and the BJP is “of the same nature as the one between Republicans and Democrats in the United States where both converge to advance ‘American interests’ and wage wars outside”.

Most Americans are kaffirs. They should kill themselves. That's what George Washington would have wanted- right? 

“The problem Indian Muslims face is

kaffirs. They should take a fucking hint and just kill themselves already 

not of party politics but the very Indian/Hindu nationalism which all political parties, including the Left, subscribe to, albeit not identically,” he told Al Jazeera.

This ignorant cunt doesn't even know that S.P Mukherjee was never in Congress. Nor was Ambedkar. Both served in Nehru's first Cabinet.  By contrast, Lala Lajpat lived and died a Congress man. 

“If a democracy routinely makes a community, Muslims in this case, invisible in terms of representation in legislatures, then there is something fundamentally wrong with this democracy. Declining ratio of Muslims in parliament testifies to

rising hatred for Muslims. Strangely, Kaffirs don't like being slaughtered by jihadis.  

the silencing of Muslims.”

 They should be allowed to go around demanding the slaughter of kaffirs. Sadly, if kaffirs are the majority they will silence such nutters by beating them to death. 

Ahmad says the “question worth asking is: how correct is the view of a secular India?”

The view of Ahmad is worthless because he is ignorant. Still, at least he isn't a kaffir jahil.  

On political empowerment of India’s Muslims

In his interview with The Quint, Imam suggested that India should have “constitutional republicanism”

It does. Maybe the nutter means ' Consociationalism'

that guarantees decentralisation of power and more community rights. He argued that the 1947 partition of the Indian subcontinent – which gave birth to Muslim-majority Pakistan – “was forced by the Congress”.

Gandhi said Congress leaders were killing Muslims in Bihar. He didn't suspend them from the party.  

He regarded Pakistan’s founding leader Muhammad Ali Jinnah as “a great, democratic leader” and poet-philosopher Muhammad Iqbal as his political inspiration. Calling for a faith-based separation of power, Imam underlined Iqbal’s call for the “creation of a Muslim India within India” and demanded proportional representation as opposed to the first-past-the-post (FPTP) system in Indian elections.

Why is Owaisi not demanding this? It is because Muslims will be slaughtered if they try to get this. Owaisi's brother did get in trouble for making stupid speech about how one Muslim could kill ten Kaffirs. It simply isn't true. The Rezakars backed by Yemeni soldiers proved utterly ineffective when Nehru's 'police action' took over Hyderabad.  

“As Iqbal and Jinnah rightly foresaw, FPTP with no safeguards will lead to permanent marginalisation of Muslims who were, even before partition, the hated minority, the hated ‘other’ of the emerging nationalist discourse,” he said.

Not in Muslim majority states. What Jinnah & Nehru didn't bother with was orderly population exchange.  

“History has proved them right.”

Pakistan is like Prussia- it is an Army with a State, not a State with an Army. Barristers like Iqbal or Jinnah were soon rudely shouldered aside by men in khaki. History proved both had shit for brains. Hilariously, Iqbal thought Pakistan could be more Socialistic than Hindu India! 

Responding to Imam, a columnist who goes by the pseudonym Ibn-e-Khaldun Bharati, wrote in The Print news website that Imam represents an “Islamist agenda” which “demands the status of a nation – a Pakistan within the borders of India”.

He is a nutter. Still, he can be used to stir up trouble- e.g. when a US President visits India. Can he also organize terrorist-cells? No. He is too stupid.  

Calling him “unapologetically anti-liberal, anti-secular, anti-democracy, anti-constitution – in a word, anti-national,” Bharati claims Imam feels “an entitlement to the rulership of India, which has kept their thought-leaders confused about whether they are a nation or a minority”.

The truth is, he is mad. He has delusions of grandeur. 

“A nation needs a state, whereas a minority needs

to emulate the smarter or more productive portion of the majority. If it is itself smarter and more productive, then it should encourage the majority to emulate its habitus.. 

constitutional guarantees. Neither in theory nor in practice can one be both at the same time,” he wrote. “But such has been the ingenuity of Muslim leaders that they have managed to be both simultaneously. They carved a country for themselves and also secured special privileges as a minority – a classic example of having one’s cake and eating it too.”

No. It was what happened everywhere when multi-ethnic Empires broke up. In 1919, the hope was that 'Minorities Treaties' would solve the problem. By 1934, these were being repudiated. Jinnah & Nehru could have done orderly population exchange. But that was too much work, yaar. India pherry hot. 

Incidentally, the Commies who backed the creation of Pakistan, often had to run away from there. The same thing happened to Tudeh after it backed the Ayatollah in Iran.  

Questioning Bharati’s submission, political analyst Asim Ali pointed out “the Kafkaesque nature of the whole affair”.

Did you know Kafka was a Yahudi? That's totes Kafkaesque, innit?  

“This is a man who has now been behind bars for six years ostensibly for a speech advocating a ‘chakka jam’ [road blockade]

The nutter thought mobs of Muslims could defeat the Indian Army & cut off the Siliguri gap. If he weren't insane, he would have been quietly 'encountered'. 

without any call for violence alongside the even more absurd charge of conspiring to incite the Delhi riots that took place a month after he was already in jail,

because a plan can't go ahead after one of the planners is in jail- right?  

” Ali wrote in a column for The Telegraph newspaper.

“The space of experience for Muslims like Imam includes not only their personal experiences of discrimination

he wasn't discriminated against. It's just that he didn't want to do useful stuff and get paid handsomely for it.  

but also of what they have learned about the history of recurrent communal pogroms, the framing of Muslim men in terror cases, the brutalities by policemen and so on,” Ali wrote, citing several examples of police atrocities in the past decades.

Why bother with policemen, when Kaffir mobs will happily do the job more thoroughly at no charge whatsoever to the Exchequer?  

While Ali argued that Imam’s depiction of Gandhi and Jinnah is “grossly distorted” and his reading of the pre-independence and partition history as “warped”, he conceded that there is “space for a person like Imam in a radical democratic project that strives for equality and liberty for everyone” in India.

There is space for lunatics of all descriptions. But criminals belong in jail.  

“Imam envisages a role as the head of an intellectual pressure group of middle-class Muslim activists displacing the clerical establishment as the principal voice articulating a ‘positive’ agenda of ‘Muslim demands’,” Ali wrote.

The cunt has no fucking intellect. Owaisi does. He is a British trained barrister.  Hyderabad is a high tech place. Bihar is a shithole. 

When it comes to the question of future intellectual Muslim leadership, comparisons are often made between Imam and Khalid. Both of them are often accused of being the “masterminds” of the 2020 New Delhi riots and are currently in the same jail in the Indian capital.

Khalid has proper Commie credentials. Sharjeel went astray because his father died.  

But that is where their similarities end.

Khalid, 39, is a left-wing activist who does not reject the Indian constitution – or its version of democracy or secularism – as explicitly as Imam does. He has also frequently cited Gandhi and his message of non-violent resistance in his speeches and writings.

Khalid has a ready-made career when he comes out of jail. He genuinely belongs to the Left eco-system. Sharjeel is distrusted by the genuine Islamists because he has not pursued disciplined study of fiqh. Commies may want to pump and dump him in specific Assembly segments but he is too erratic. He won't stay 'on message'. 

Khalid is hailed by India’s Marxists and liberals as a “model Muslim” who is being punished by an anti-Muslim government for his campaign against the BJP’s hate politics.

Is he an opportunist, like Kanhaiya? No. When he gets out of jail, he can rise within the Left eco-system. 

Global figures and rights groups frequently call for Khalid’s release.

Among them is New York City’s mayor Zohran Mamdani, who, while delivering the inaugural keynote address at the Nelson Mandela Global Leadership Forum in July this year, questioned Khalid’s imprisonment.

“Why must we wait as Umar Khalid enters his sixth year of captivity in Delhi – a political prisoner jailed under the same manufactured charges of terrorism levelled against Madiba,” he said, using the name for Mandela commonly used by South Africans.

There were some dim bulbs who thought Mandela would turn South Africa Communist. Mamdani's dad was always suspicious of the aristocrat, Mandela, whom he considered a Nationalist who would have no truck with Communist policies once his people seized power. Incidentally, the ANC only admitted non-Black members to its ruling body in 1985- by which time the UDF was leading the anti-apartheid movement within the country. 

It was the second time this year that Mamdani, who has Indian roots, had talked about Khalid since being elected as mayor.

Because Khalid genuinely belongs to the Left eco-system. His father was a member of the Islamist SIMI. That is why Khalid is a feather in the cap of the Left though he may be a 'Trojan Horse'.  

In January, he met his parents and left the following handwritten note for him: “Dear Umar, I think of your words on bitterness often, and the importance of not letting it consume one’s self. It was a pleasure to meet your parents. We are all thinking of you.”

The problem for Umar is that the Left's decline has continued. When gets out, he will be confined to the cul de sac of Academia or NGO activism. Power politics is out of his reach.  

Last month, Ireland-based human rights organisation Front Line Defenders in Dublin announced Khalid as the winner of the 2026 Award for Human Rights Defenders at Risk.

He is Muslim- i.e bound to hate Jews. 'Why has Ireland never persecuted Jews', a character in Joyce's Ulysses asks, 'because we nevel let them in!' 

Imam does not evoke such global solidarities, which are mainly limited to India’s Muslim community.

“Take the example of Zohran Mamdani,” says Ahmad, the professor. “While Mamdani spoke about Umar Khalid, what prevents him from even mentioning – let alone pleading for – names like Sharjeel Imam?”

Sharjeel is as crazy as a bed-bug. His lawyers should get him off on the basis of diminished responsibility.  

He says figures like Mamdani or left-wing liberals in India “find it convenient to speak for Umar Khalid because he is ‘secular’, in that he doesn’t posit himself as a Muslim nor uses the vocabulary of Islam to articulate his politics”.

Why is Mamdani not demanding the creation of an Islamic Emirate within the United States?  

“But these figures maintain an eerie silence about Imam, who conducts his politics in an Islamic vocabulary … The eloquence of liberals about Khalid and their silence about Imam is a sign of intellectual confusion, if not moral cowardice.”

Why don't they just join ISIS & kill kaffirs? Is it because they are cowards?  

When asked if he foresees Imam playing a role in an intellectual project of Muslim empowerment, Ahmad said while he had “no secret key to unlock the future”, he did fear that the “current regime is set to suppress such voices”.

It gains by letting Kaffirs hear such voices. This causes 'Hindu consolidation'.  

“In some ways, the treatment of Imam by the regime resonates with the imprisonment of Italy’s Antonio Gramsci in 1926.

Gramsci was wrong to back workers' control of factories. He should have sat quietly in the Soviet Union till Stalin got around to purging him. I suppose he believed his parliamentary immunity would keep him safe from Mussolini- whom he had formerly admired. 

At Gramsci’s trial, the prosecutor said: ‘For 20 years, we must stop this brain from functioning.’

The brain kept functioning. But its output was shit. 

Imam has already been unjustly languishing in jail for nearly seven years.”

He should be in a psychiatric hospital.  

Ahmad concluded by citing the 19th-century philosopher Henry David Thoreau

who was utterly useless 

to highlight the imprisonment of Imam, Khalid and other “prisoners of conscience” – both Muslims and non-Muslims.

“’The true place for a just man’ in an unjust order ‘is also a prison’,” he said.

Thoreau did spend a night in jail for not paying his taxes. A relative paid the fine and he was released. Since he was useless, nobody cared what he got up to. Sharjeel did have some potential as a politician because his father had been quite close to Nitish and his family is well respected. But, he is a nut job. His lawyer should get him off on that basis.  

The Economist wrong on Modi

Currently, Modi faces no challenges, in parliament, in the courts, or at the polls. Street protests have failed to gain transaction. Rahul's INDIA alliance has been left with egg on its face because it was unable to fill all the seats at the Ramlila maidan today. 

Modi lost his majority in the central parliament in 2024 but, since then, has increased his party's tally in the States. West Bengal was a historic win. The BJP runs 21 states which is 72% of India. If they retain UP in March of next year, they go into the General Election in pole position, more particularly if delimitation is implemented by then.

The Economist, for some reason, takes a gloomy view of Modi & the BJP's prospects. Sadly it is based on wishful thinking

| 25 years of Modi
Narendra Modi and the battle for India
India’s strongman has changed the country for good and ill. Now he is facing one of his sternest tests yet

Yogi is facing a test in UP. If he wins for a third time, he can be projected Modi's natural succesor- perhaps with Amit Shah managing the transition. The 2030s belong to him. 

Does Modi face a vote of confidence? No. If his government falls, elections will be called. He will win. What about the courts? Is there any sword of Damocles dangling over his head, there? No. It is Rahul who faces charges under the Money Laundering Act. 

IN EARLY OCTOBER India’s cabinet issued 11 pages of gushing praise to mark their leader’s quarter of a century in public office. As chief minister of Gujarat, a rich western state, then as prime minister, Narendra Modi had transformed “the lives of every citizen”, earning “unwavering support”. His dedication and honesty showed “the strength of India’s democracy”.

Nothing wrong with that. BJP will retain Gujarat. Will they also retain UP? The latest survey says yes. Like Bihar, voters don't want to go back to criminalised politics under a caste based, dynastic, party.  

A month of celebrations was organised to mark Mr Modi’s silver jubilee, including exhibitions, tree-planting and grassroots events. It has not gone quite to plan.

It has gone exactly to plan. The core supporters are happy. Are they also enraged with Rahul & protests against the deletion of Muslim non-citizens from the electoral role? Probably. 

Throughout October India has been gripped by protest, as unrest over the leak of an exam erupted into a broader anti-Modi movement.

That's over. Now, the demand is for the resignation of the Election Commissioner. In both cases, bureaucrats fucked up. Why? A plan is only as good as its weakest link. In the case of Nation-wide exams, the weak link is exam paper leaks. You need a plan to deal with a local leak such that only a small percentage of students have to do re-sits. The Ministry ordered 2 million to do so. That's just stupid. The Minister had to resign because he had command responsibility. 

The Election Commissioners are independent & can't be removed from office save by a complicated process of parliamentary impeachment. But, being ex-bureaucrats, they have shit for brains. Delete dead voters, or those who have moved, and they are scarcely likely to complain. For those who do complain, don't make the burden of proof too onerous. Let officials use their common sense or specify quick and cheap methods of verification- e.g. a Google search. Only where it is difficult to establish identity should the full bureaucratic process be implemented. 

Gen Z activists, student groups and opposition parties accuse Mr Modi and his ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of rigging elections, and are agitating for education reform and jobs.

But they don't have the numbers. The opposition said there would be a million people at the protest today. The actual number looks closer to 40,000. 

The 76-year-old strongman has appeared unsure how to respond.

Will Rahul hang himself on the 'votes for Bangladeshi Muslims' question? 'Vote chori' could be like 'chowkidar chor hai' (a slogan that harmed Congress in 2019) as well as the anti-CAA agitation (Bangladeshi Muslims should get citizenship). 

At times he has tried to mollify activists

no. He has tried to show humility and an avuncular attitude to the public at large. He thinks hysterical 'activists' are provoking 'Hindu consolidation'.  

, notably by sacrificing his education minister in July.

The Education Ministery fucked up. Pradhan may have wanted to return to Odisha in any case.  

Now he is cracking down on them. In Delhi the authorities cut off the mobile internet, cancelled trains and blocked roads while police detained thousands of protesters, beating them with sticks. All of it has been streamed around the world.

All of this is popular with Modi's core supporters- not to mention ordinary Delhites. The condemnation of the NYT or the Economist, angers Indian nationalists and helps the BJP.  

Mr Modi still has strong support, particularly among older voters.

He won big in Bihar which has a youthful demographic.  

His ideology remains potent. Though opposition parties are now more unified, they lack organisational muscle and are yet to offer a coherent alternative.

i.e. Rahul is a moon-calf. However, Priyanka is looking good. Maybe she and Akhilesh can win in UP. That's what really matters. 

Still, the unrest on the streets is a striking challenge to Mr Modi’s rule

it can be easily crushed. The farmer's protest was a different kettle of fish. By bending to them, Modi sent a signal that agricultural interests would always get the highest level of protection. After all, what enabled to consolidate his hold on Gujarat was the farm vote. 

—both to a governing model that is no longer meeting many Indians’ aspirations, and to strong-arm methods that have closed down other avenues for opposition.

If 'opposition' means creating a nuisance, close down its avenues by all means. One worrying development is the victory of the film star Vijay in Tamil Nadu. The older dynastic parties may be displaced by charismatic youngsters who make good 'reels'. The BJP, however, is a cadre based party.  Still, it has to get candidate selection right. In 2024, there were too many dynastic 'turncoats' which resulted in lethargic booth management. This time, the BJP has promised only 'winnable' candidates. Hopefully, this will be enough to get the cadres to pull out all the stops for Yogiji. 

That makes it a good moment to reflect on Mr Modi’s 25 years in office. What kind of India has emerged under him?

One in which Rahul's stupidity hurts only his party. Akhilesh, however, is smart. It was he who should get the most credit for BJP losing its majority.  

And what does his record suggest he will do next?

If the BJP wins in UP, Yogi will be promoted as the likely successor assuming this is helpful in the Hindi belt. Delimitation will go ahead a swill the RBI's plans for getting big companies to go public, deepening and strenghtening Indian financial markets. Strategic investment programs will go ahead. If, however, Akhilesh wins, the party will focus on welfare programs to bribe the voter.  

Mr Modi’s arrival on the political stage was heralded by

an internal tussle within the BJP Gujarat unit. 

an earthquake, which in January 2001 tore through Kutch in his native Gujarat, killing more than 20,000. The BJP’s ailing chief minister responded haplessly.

Keshubhai had the backing of Saurashtra Patidars but about sixty percent of Patels are from outside that region.  

His party installed a trusted apparatchik—a bearded, bespectacled 51-year-old who had never before stood for public office, let alone built a mass following. Few expected him to last long.

He didn't do conventional 'mandala' politics- i.e. keep his enemies close so that their enemies, outside the charmed circle, would harrass them. Instead he acted like a CEO picking his Cabinet team on the basis of merit. Unexpectedly, he was able to deliver cheap (rather than free) electricity for farmers and then focussed on getting them Narmada water. Gujarat had balanced 10 percent growth in both agriculture and industry. Hindu-Muslim riots, which are bad for trade, were crushed. Since Congress doubled down on demonizing Modi as a killer of Muslims, he became the Emperor of Hindu hearts without touching a hair on the head of a single Muslim! 

He almost did not, as a result of horrific religious violence that took place in Gujarat the next year.

He benefitted from it. Muslims killed Hindu pilgrims. They would cease to have any role in Gujarati politics. This meant that the Congress KHAM formula (Kshatriya, Harijan, Adivasi, Muslim) became unworkable. The casualty was Shankarsinh Vaghela- an RSS senior colleague of Modi who had become CM with Congress support. 

The vitriol Congress poured on Modi- as well as the US Visa ban- meant he cornered the Nationalist vote. 

After a group of Hindu pilgrims was burned to death on a train, vigilante mobs went on the rampage; more than 1,000 people died, most of them Muslims. Mr Modi never accepted responsibility or apologised for the bloodshed on his watch

being known as a killer of Muslim murderers is very popular in a mainly kaffir country. Ahmed Patel, Sonia Gandhi's advisor, warned against this disastrous strategy. Virtue signal about minorities by all means but, if they are seen as a murderous bunch, keep your distance from them.   

—instead, at an election later that year, he inflamed tensions with communal speeches. The BJP won a landslide. He has since won five elections in a row, two more in Gujarat and three nationally.

Why? He appeals to the majority community. That's a good thing in a democracy. It must be said, if Rahul had pushed aside Manmohan & led his party into the 2014 election, he would have got a majority. The lion of Gir would have roared, but the BJP would have put up Advani, who was twice Rahul's age.  

One confidant from the early days attributes Mr Modi’s remarkable ascent to his long training touring villages as a foot-soldier in the RSS, a Hindu-volunteer group. “His advantage has always been his grasp of the average Indian’s psyche, their hopes and fears,” he says.

Fortunately for Modi & the BJP, Rahul's psyche is that of a cry-baby.  

Steeped in Hindu-revivalist ideology, Mr Modi was particularly attuned to the victimhood many Hindus felt over policies that they believed had unfairly prioritised Muslims.

Kaffirs don't like being slaughtered by Jihadi nutjobs. America killed 1.3 million Muslims in revenge for 9/11.  

In Gujarat he established a governing model. Styling himself as a

technocrat like Manmohan 

Hindu hardliner and a “development man”, he aggressively courted foreign investment and forged close links with industrialists.

But when farmers changed their mind about handing over land, Modi cancelled the project. He knew that he was answerable to farmers, not industrialists in Mumbai. 

He offered businesses land, tax breaks and subsidies.

Everybody did. The Commies in West Bengal went the extra mile by using violence to shift peasants from the land. That backfired. The Tatas, previously disapproving of Modi, had to relocate their Nano plant to Gujarat.  

He kept the police, the courts and party cadres under tight control.

No. He motivated them to do a good job and thus feel good about themselves. There is no pont controlling the work-shy or demotivated.  

All the while he projected an image of himself as uniquely incorruptible: ascetic, celibate and without a family to enrich.

This was the RSS ethos. It is likely that the anti-corruption movement of Anna Hazare succeeded because of RSS help.  

As prime minister, Mr Modi applied this model to India.

The Economist thinks there is some other country which has such a model. Even if this is true, fuck would Modi know about it? He didn't go to Harvard or Oxford.  

A country of 1.45bn is, in effect, ruled by a few dozen people in the prime minister’s office

Nonsense! Once the Planning Commission became useless (which happened before it was scrapped) the PMO lost even hypothetical control rights over the economy 

and around Amit Shah,

a possible successor. But he comes from a rich family & the suspicion will be that he has unjustly enriched it. Yogi & Modi, are celibate.  

the home minister and Mr Modi’s longtime enforcer and strategist.

The country should be ruled by nice Italian lady- right?  

Many in Delhi say that Mr Modi is rarely challenged,

You don't challenge a good boss. You challenge a nutter doing stupid shit.  

and cabinet ministers take direction. So do BJP chief ministers.

Oddly, he faces less pushback than even Nehru in his prime. But that is because he does sensible things.  

Only twice before has India had such a dominant leader.

Only once before. That was Nehru.  

The first was Jawaharlal Nehru, who over 17 years as prime minister forged a newly independent India as a secular democracy inspired by socialist economic thinking.

The country became unable to feed or defend itself.  

The second was his daughter, Indira Gandhi, who took India leftward during her 16 years in office, often ruling as a populist authoritarian.

Her situation was always precarious. She never knew when a loyalist would turn on her. That's the problem with being a dynast. You have sycophants not genuine supporters. Still, if Modi loses his touch, he will be dumped as unceremoniously as Vajpayee or Advani.  

One other point. Dynastic autocracy is tempered by assassination. Indira and Rajiv were killed. There's a good reason why Rahul did not want to be PM. 

Mr Modi, born into poverty, defined himself against these figures. By promoting a mixture of Hindu-nationalism, pro-business reform and welfarism, he reduced their once-mighty party, Congress, to a husk.

Indira did that when she made it dynastic. Rajiv & Rahul have no political instincts.  

Like Gandhi, though, he took a firm grip over his party, the media and institutions, and built a personality cult.

No. The RSS remains independent. Modi is good at his job and thus retains support. Once he starts fucking up, he will be dumped. Can Yogi (who isn't an RSS man) be his successor? Yes, if he gets a third term.  

“Even Indira never had this level of control,” says Neelanjan Sircar, a political scientist.

Indira didn't have his core competence. Moreover, she didn't have an Amit Shah.  

Chart: The Economist

What this chart shows is that the BJP continues to rise. No wonder the Opposition are running around like headless cockroaches. 

The plight of the Left is particularly pathetic. The last time no Indian State was ruled by a Communist party was in 1977.  

The BJP’s formidable political machine was on show in May when the party unseated Mamata Banerjee, the chief minister of West Bengal, a populous eastern state.

Bangladeshi Muslim infiltration was a big issue. But it was Mamta's nepotism which doomed her. It must be said, the Bengal victory is particularly significant, since the RSS was inspired by the Bengali Anushilan Samiti revolutionaries.  

More than 70% of Indians now live in a state run by the BJP (see chart 1). Yet five months on, Mr Modi is facing the most difficult test of his premiership.

Where? In Parliament? No. The Courts? No. At the border? No. On some streets in the Capital? No. The Opposition simply doesn't have the numbers.  

“The BJP is in its strongest and its weakest position simultaneously,” says

a man so fucking stupid, he can only be an academic 

Rahul Verma of Shiv Nadar University, Chennai. It has never ruled more of the country, nor has it faced such fatigue and open discontent.

Why did it win elections in Bihar and Bengal earlier this year? Why do surveys say it will keep UP?  

To see what kind of country Mr Modi has made, consider his impact in three areas: the economy,

Ministerial corruption appears to have been curbed in BJP ruled States 

society and democracy.

The Economist doesn't get that Dynasticism is not Democratic. At one time, people said Varun and Maneka Gandhi, on behalf of the BJP, would challenge Sonia & Rahul. But Varun is now out of politics. The BJP brings forward fresh faced non-dynasts wherever possible.  

On the first he has been a moderniser, though not the reformer many had hoped for.

The hope was that he would reform land, labour & agricultural laws and then lose the election leaving Rahul to inherit a booming economy. Sadly, Modi wasn't stupid enough to go down that road. Still demonetization- which killed off the anti-corruption movement- showed the folly of wishing for things which will totes fuck you up.  

In 2014 he inherited plans for a national digital-identity and -payment system and a goods-and-services tax, to replace 17 state-level taxes. Weaker, coalition governments—long the norm before Mr Modi—had struggled to implement such changes. Mr Modi used top-down power to force them through, a massive achievement.

How do you use bottom-up power to implement Central Government schemes?  

The result has been to knit India together with a stronger internal market, in which almost all Indians can access services and make payments online. The national highway network is 60% longer than it was when Mr Modi took power and rural households enjoy 22.6 hours of electricity a day, up from 12.5. Voters have been given free grain, electricity connections and cooking gas. Direct cash transfers have cut graft and reduced poverty, forging a direct link between Mr Modi and the poor.

To be fair, all parties now understand the importance of infrastructure, cash transfers, & 'last mile delivery'.  

Pro-business more than pro-market, Mr Modi

needs to save Indian family owned businesses from their own propensity for internecine feuds

has tilted India towards a model of national capitalism.

Recent events have shown that there is no other choice for 'middle' powers.  

Since Gujarat his rise has been bound up with that of Gautam Adani,

whose family got their first break under Rajiv Gandhi. All littoral states need ports & Adani appears to be good at building and maintaining them. He has plenty of projects in Congress or even Communist ruled states. The reason he is linked to Modi was because, like other Gujarat based, entrepreneurs, he wanted to diminish the power of the Mumbai based 'old money' firms. But, over time, Mumbai too was won over by Modi. 

Interestingly, the US Secretary of State recently came to India to meet Mukesh Ambani. It appears, even the Americans need Indian industrialists.  

who has built an empire spanning ports, airports, energy and defence. Tycoons like Mr Adani have, like Mr Modi, got hard things done and helped the economy grow—by around 6% a year (similar to before Mr Modi came to power). The Reserve Bank of India has largely kept inflation in check, too, avoiding the gyrations that undid previous prime ministers. Mr Modi has been unusually fiscally prudent.

More needs to be done to deepen and widen Indian financial markets and to improve Corporate Governance.  

But the rewards have been top-heavy. The tycoons have done as well as ever.

Unless, like Anil Ambani, they have gone bankrupt.  

Mr Adani’s wealth has risen from $7bn in 2014 to more than $100bn.

Anil Ambani's wealth went from $42 billion in 2008 (when he was the 6th-richest person in the world) to effectively zero or negative by 2020.

Rural workers have not. Their real wages, which typically grew by 6% a year between 2006 and 2014, have since grown by 1%.

They may have declined. We really don't know.  

Salaried workers have done worse still: adjusting for inflation, average pay for this group, accounting for around a quarter of the Indian workforce,

They have done very well in Tamil Nadu which is 60 percent salaried. The Dravidian model has worked. Maybe North India needs an Aryan model with Muslims replacing Brahmins as the villains of the story. 

has fallen by 5% since 2017 (see chart 2).
Chart: The Economist

This is meaningless. You have to look at each State separately.    

Mr Modi’s failure was that he abandoned deeper land and agriculture reforms when they triggered mass protests

They can be done at the State level- as the Constitution envisaged. 

. Ironically, giving in to that discontent has helped lead to the discontent now.

No. The Government sent a signal that it would put the farmer's first- i.e. tell the Americans to go fuck themselves.

There is no real discontent now. There is some careerist opportunism on the one hand & a rather pathetic attempt by the Left to rally its few remaining cadres. Rahul's histrionics are a separate matter. The hope is that his coalition partners will accept that voters are accepting him as a credible Prime Ministerial face. If so Akhilesh can say 'vote for me as CM and, in 2029, Rahul as PM, Inshallah!' But if Akhilesh loses in March, it will be a case of 'three strikes and you are out'. The age of the dynast (save in Jharkhand & J&K) will come to a close. 

Despite steady growth, Mr Modi has not achieved the economic transformation he desired (and of which his cabinet boasts). The share of workers in agriculture has remained stubbornly at two-fifths; the share in manufacturing has grown only a little. Though India has been covered in shiny roads, informal labour remains ubiquitous. A huge expansion in higher education has not been matched by growth in salaried jobs, suppressing wages and creating a large cohort of frustrated youngsters.

The Hindi belt needs to learn from Tamil Nadu. The obsession with reservations has to end. There just aren't enough public sector jobs to make even the tiniest dent on the problem. What we are seeing at various protest sites is that casual labourers earn more than graduates. They can afford to take a day off to attend the protest and then go back to work. The wannabe cockroach isn't going to turn into a Social Media influencer or 'political strategist'. He has wasted his parent's money & will have to take any sort of work that he can get.  

“What we are seeing is Modi reaching the limits of his governing model,” says Pratap Bhanu Mehta, a former vice-chancellor of Ashoka University near Delhi.

No. What we are seeing is the beginning of the end of the Modi era. The man is 76. If Yogi wins, there is an obvious successor. But he may not want to shift to Delhi. Can the BJP find a second 'Modi-Shah' jugalandhi? I don't know. Maybe they will go for a technocratic Cabinet, if they win in 2029. After all, it is CMs, not PMs, who really make a difference.  

He has been able to push through big changes that require raw executive power. But he has failed in areas that require consensus-building or systemic reform.

So has everybody else. You can't have a consensus unless people want to agree.  

The change to Indian society, the second area, has been more dramatic. Under Mr Modi India has become more brash, nationalistic and Hindu, and, bluntly, a more forbidding place for the country’s 200m Muslims (just under a seventh of the population).

Hindus are the majority. Virtue signalling is all very well but it doesn't win votes.  

This is the most controversial part of his legacy. It is also where opposition to Mr Modi has been least effective.

Because Hindus are the majority- d'uh!  

The most visible change is that Mr Modi has fused religious nationalism with politics.

This happened in the 1890s thanks to Tilak & Vivekananda & the Arya Samaj. 

As prime minister he has regularly taken part in ceremonies and rituals—above all the consecration of the Ram Temple on the site of a former mosque in Ayodhya, fulfilling a decades-long campaign. The BJP has pushed through citizenship laws and begun to overhaul Muslim family law. Although the word “secular” remains in the constitution, Mr Modi has damaged the principle that India is a republic that treats all religions equally.

Nehru did lots of ethnic cleansing. Oddly, under Indira & Rajiv, Sikhs got it in the neck. Muslims were laughing their heads off.  

This is unlikely to be reversed. “Hindutva [Hindu-ness] is still a powerful magnet for the middle class,” says Rajdeep Sardesai, a TV anchor and political analyst.

Hinduism is a magnet for Hindus. Sardesai is a friggin genius.  

BJP chief ministers have emulated Mr Modi—and taken his ideology to new extremes. Opposition politicians have joined in “temple hopping” and “soft Hindutva”. The Cockroach Janta Party (CJP), the youth movement at the centre of the protests, has notably steered clear of religious issues.

Because it is just a couple of AAM party hacks seeking to build careers as 'political strategists' or 'influencers'. The thing is a silly season story.  

Since his fateful first year as chief minister in Gujarat, Mr Modi has fostered a culture of permissiveness around anti-Muslim bigotry and violence.

Everyone became bigoted after 9/11. Only the Americans took the trouble to invade Muslim countries and desecrate the Quran while sexually abusing Arab men.   

BJP politicians call Muslims “infiltrators” and “encroachers” and issue threats against them.

Which has caused them to win West Bengal & those North Eastern States where this is an issue. Interestingly Owaisi's outfit won some seats in Bihar. But this was because of disgruntled elements kept out of Rahul's coalition. It is doubtful that he can accomplish much in UP.  

Communal violence has continued to fall from its peak in the 1980s, a period marred by regular bloody riots. But there has been a rise in targeted attacks on Muslims by vigilante groups, which often meet with impunity. This will be the most damaging part of Mr Modi’s legacy—and it, too, will be difficult to reverse.

It is wholly inconsequential. Nobody gives a shit about rural mobs running amok.  

Chart: The Economist

Why is Modi's current coalition so stable? The answer is that, if elections are called, the BJP is expected to win by a landslide.  

With his blend of modernisation and religious nationalism, Mr Modi has been remarkably successful at unifying the Hindu vote. But how long can that go on if voters fret about the economy?

The problem is they may think Rahul would be worse in every way than Modi or Shah or Rajnath or Fadnavis. Yogi has been keeping a low profile but he is 54- two years younger than Rahul. Fadnavis is the same age as Rahul & is a good Hindi speaker but, though a 'Nagpur boy', he is not seen as a Hindu harliner. Also, he is a Brahmin. Yogi has broader appeal.  

In the national election in 2024, voters angry about jobs turned away from the BJP, forcing Mr Modi to govern in coalition (see chart 3).

No. The Opposition had effective seat sharing. Akhilesh did good candidate selection. BJP messaging was poor. Many Dalits believed the story that Modi would end reservations. But the biggest problem was candidate selection. Too many turn-coats were given seats. Booth management suffered because local party workers felt let down. 

A cynic might say, Modi needs Rahul to stay in politics. It is the unelectability of that hysterical moon-calf which makes him look so good by comparison. The problem is Modi's age. India did once have an 80 year old Gujarati as PM. But Morarji was a fucking disaster.  

Praveen Chakravarty, an MP who leads polling for Congress, claims that age is now the main electoral dividing line, with under 30s—who make up almost 30% of eligible voters—turning against Mr Modi.

But it is still poorer women who will determine the outcome.  

The focus of those on the street is the third area: Mr Modi’s handling of elections

They are handles by an independent Election Commission. The problem is, if Modi's supporters are in the majority, they will be happy if they think he is smart enough to have stolen the election.  

and institutions. Protesters accuse him of “stealing democracy” through a voter-verification process called the Special Intensive Revision (SIR), under which more than 130m names were removed from draft voter rolls.

Why are dead people not being allowed to vote?  The fact is, if you are on the electoral roll, you are grateful for voter suppression since your vote now counts for more. 

Still, if saying the election was stolen worked for Trump, shy should Stalin & Mamta & Rahul not take up the cry? 

On October 14th Abhijeet Dipke, leader of the CJP,

formerly of an anti-corruption party which imploded because of accusations of corruption 

sardonically compared the circumstances with “the Emergency”, a period when Gandhi cancelled elections, locked up political opponents and clamped down on the press: “Declare Emergency officially,” he said.

Why not say 'invade Poland' ? It would make as much sense.

The last revision of electoral rolls took place more than two decades ago, so one was overdue. The number of removals this time was much higher than before, at least some of which might be explained by higher internal migration or voters dying. Mr Modi’s defenders argue that only a small fraction of the 130m were eligible voters.

If the EC fucked up, let there be a proper inquiry into it. It is very difficult to impeach an Election Commisioner and he has immunity from prosecution. But, the Bench can reverse ultra vires rules they have made.  

The problem is the way the process has been carried out, which has been rushed, opaque and—true to form—centralised.

because the Election Commission is a central body with independent constitutional status. The same is true of the Supreme Court.  

Millions who were wrongly removed were not given a proper chance to appeal, leaving them disenfranchised (when appeals were completed, the vast majority were successful). Whereas previous exercises have been run by state and local operators,

i.e. the ruling party could rig things 

this one was run centrally from Delhi, using software that allowed little transparency about who had been removed and why.

If the EC becomes timid, the BJP can entrench itself in 72 percent of the country.  

To some, this is proof that Mr Modi is a would-be dictator who will break Indian democracy to cling to power. That is going too far. The SIR process has been murky, but there is no evidence that it has swung elections. The argument that Mr Modi holds power because he steals votes skims over the way the opposition has struggled to offer a more compelling alternative.

If the alternative to Modi is, the moon-calf, Rahul, the Opposition is bound to struggle. The bigger problem is that the INDIA bloc is ideologically very diverse. It includes Maoists like Neha Bohra, Islamists from the Muslim League, Dravidian chauvinists, Maratha chaunvinists, & various caste based dynastic parties. It is difficult to imagine a Cabinet composed of such disparate elements agreeing on anything at all- more particularly if the moon-calf presides over it. 

SIR is better seen as an extreme example of Mr Modi’s strong-arm tactics.

It has nothing to do with him. The Election Commission is independent.  

His government has extended control over Supreme Court appointments, weakening the independence of the judiciary,

No. The Collegium remains intact.  

and has cowed the once-combative Indian media with a combination of takeovers and hostile investigations.

The media will be just as combative as the CM of the State in which they are in wants them to be. Thankfully, the Media doesn't matter very much.  

It has similarly used the state to tie political opponents in legal knots. In all, Mr Modi has abused his powers more ruthlessly and over a longer period than any other Indian leader (though Indira Gandhi did suspend democracy, after 21 months she pulled back from the brink, called elections, and was voted out.)

No. Modi has abused power less because he is not a dynast. Sooner or later, he will be turned out to pasture like Vajpayee or Advani. Go by the book and the Courts can't throw the book at you. Anyone can allege anything. Proof is a different matter. Narasimha Roa was sentenced to jail for 3 years though this was overturned on appeal.  

And yet, Indian democracy is more resilient than many make out. The country is vast, diverse and noisy; competitive elections, while flawed, are ingrained. The scandal over SIR has shown that Indians remain deeply attached to their vote,

Hindus are deeply attached to ther heads. They don't want them to be chopped off during the course of demographich replacement. 

and that the media are still capable of holding the government to account. They have put pressure on the Supreme Court and the Electoral Commission of India to improve the appeals process for excluded voters.

There was pressure on them to get rid of bogus voters and non-citizens.That too will continue.  

This is a pattern in other democracies, says Milan Vaishnav of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a think-tank. “When you have a very strong leader, they can bend institutions to their will,” he says. “But when their popularity begins to fade, institutions tend to bounce back.”

The reverse is the case. If the leader is weak, institutions can't do shit. Why? The political will to enforce the decisions of the institution is lacking. Thus the Court may issue an arrest warrant for a gangster. The police won't act upon it because they don't want to be killed. The gangster rapes the Judge's wife. After that the Bench is quiet. The Home Minister blames the spinelessness of the CM. The CM blames the PM. Institutions become a joke. 

What about a strong leader who, for some reason, prefers to act through existing institutions. They may gain the appearance of effectiveness. But, an appearance is all that it is. 

Perhaps Vaishnav means that a strong leader prevents rival power centres from coming into being. But, in a parliamentary democracy, political power is the monopoly of the Cabinet. Part of the job of the Executive is to enforce the rulings of the Judiciary. But a weak Executive can't do this. 

Mr Modi has never faced stronger headwinds.

They were stronger in 2024. Now, he has West Bengal. His party's footprint is expanding. Rahul is happy he has Kerala. This has boosted his confidence. But, if Yogi wins big in UP, the future will belong to the younger man. 

At 76 he is—whisper many in Delhi—showing signs of ageing.

At 76, he is old. Full stop. There is no need to whisper it.  

Still, he is unlikely to back down or change his approach.

His approach does not matter. Yogi's does. I think this means doubling down on law & order. More bulldozer justice. I suppose the next election in UP will be the last before caste census results are known. Whatever their outcome, the issue of reservations will dominate the politics of 2028/29.  

Instead, he will continue to try to divide and weaken the opposition.

Put up the Cockroaches to split the INDIA vote? That would be a waste of money.  

In private, officials say ministers have been rattled by the way a handful of kids with smartphones have seized the agenda.

Which officials? Ones who are imaginary? I supose so.  

They will aim to stop the youth protests gathering steam by keeping leaders in custody or tied up in the courts, and channel discontent into opposition parties, which they are more comfortable fighting.

The BJP rules Delhi. They need to crush cockroaches. Rahul is the Leader of the Opposition. He is entitled to stage his little dramas.  

It is not clear such tactics will work. So far protesters have turned crackdowns into viral clips. Attempts to brand the CJP—who wrap themselves in the Indian flag and talk of constitutional rights—as “anti-nationals” have failed. Mr Modi cannot easily take the sting out of the movement, as he did in 2021 by dropping the reforms that had angered farmers; many in his party regard more concessions as a slippery slope. But stifling legitimate dissent will also cause pressure to build.

Farmers genuinely exist. They have a lot of votes. Cockroaches don't really exist- at least as a political force.  

The prime minister may look to shift the political debate onto more comfortable terrain. He could dial up the Hindu-nationalist rhetoric. Or suddenly table a controversial bill, say on delimitation, a thorny issue involving the allocation of parliamentary seats between states.

That will happen automatically on the basis of the census. Nobody has the numbers to block or dilute it.  

The BJP will try to paint Rahul Gandhi, the grandson of Indira and leader of the Congress party who heads the opposition alliance, as a street agitator who wants “regime change” without winning elections.

Just stick to calling him 'Pappu'. At some point, the BJP will have to get behind Yogi in a big way. The UP election is simply too important.  

The underlying sources of discontent—education, jobs, wages

which became sources of discontent in the 1890s 

—will fester. But the opposition will need to show that it has better answers. Mr Gandhi often speaks as if the mood had already turned decisively (and he had not lost three elections in a row). “We are going to destroy them,” he said of Mr Modi and Mr Shah at a rally on October 6th. So far, Mr Modi’s approval ratings have only dipped. Some voters dislike the BJP’s authoritarianism,

No. Lack of authority is what is disliked. Modi is authoritative enough but not an autocrat. That's why nobody is trying to kill him.  

but also worry about how an unwieldy coalition led by Congress, which has moved to the left under Mr Gandhi, would govern.

It will be shit. Then it will implode.  

The next big test will come in the spring with elections in several states, including the largest, BJP-run Uttar Pradesh. That one looks to be tight. If the BJP wins, it will claim that Mr Modi’s enduring popularity has been proved and the opposition are sore losers. If it loses, it will be the surest sign that Mr Modi’s appeal is waning.

It will be a sign that there are internal problems. The Party has said that candidate selection will be on the basis of winnability but everybody says that.  

For Mr Modi the risk now would be to believe what his outriders say—that the protests are just a small group of anarchists and anti-nationals who do not reflect Indians’ real grievances.

That is the case. The youth are not a cohesive voting block. My guess is Yogi will offer a big payout for poor women early next year.  

For the opposition it is the reverse: to believe that a few months of street action mean that Mr Modi is in terminal decline.

Priyanka seems sensible enough. Maybe she can do a good seat-sharing deal with Akhilesh.  

Over 25 years he has proved remarkably resilient. He is not going to go down without a fight.

He is going to bow out gracefully. कालो हि दुरतिक्रमः- Age is the enemy which can't be conquered. If he falls ill, Shah takes over & there is a sympathy factor. But if he remains in good health, it would be wise to build up a younger leader from a different part of India as the heir apparent. 

Perhaps Shah will stay on to ease the transition. He is 62- ten years older than Yogi- and has tremendous organisational experience. Maybe, Yogi has his own Amit. What is certain is that the only way you get good at governance is by actually doing it rather than, like Rahul, by running your own mock parliament and conducting mock impeachments or, indeed, mock 'youth-quakes'. 

Weber's Luther calling from the loo

 Max Weber wrote as follows of

LUTHER’S CONCEPTION OF THE CALLING

Luther believed Jesus was God. He called to many, but few were chosen. Everyone was welcome to feel they were called to God even if their lot in life was miserable. They were still part of God's mysterious economy even if they suffered from leprosy and their limbs kept falling off. But Ordination would be reserved for a few whose 'vocation' was accepted by the Church. 

This was pretty much the conception of all the other Christians- except, perhaps, the Anabaptists or, at an earlier time, various popular movements which the Church considered schismatic. 

Task of the investigation Now it is unmistakable that even in the German word Beruf, and perhaps still more clearly in the English calling, a religious conception, that of a task set by God, is at least suggested.

No. In the parable, the calling is to a wedding feast- which is secular. On the other hand, I don't suppose the priest celebrating Mass thinks himself on a par with a dude flipping burgers or pouring out wine for the customers.

The more emphasis is put upon the word in a concrete case, the more evident is the connotation.

Very true. When you say to a guy 'I've been calling you all day. Why don't you pick up?' you are clearly speaking in some arcane, theological, sense.  

And if we trace the history of the word through the civilized languages,

which are descended from uncivilized languages. Gods or Spirits have called to primitive people and, in some cases, revealed some particular thing to them.  

it appears that neither the predominantly Catholic peoples nor those of classical antiquity have possessed any expression of similar connotation for what we know as a calling (in the sense of a life-task, a definite field in which to work)

many ancient cultures mention an ancestor who was called to a new way of life- agricultural or pastoral or involving crossing the sea in fragile barques. There have also been 'calls' to leave a particular territory and settle somewhere else.  

, while one has existed for all predominantly Protestant peoples.

I suppose the Protestant priest, being a married man, has to think of his stipend and pension arrangements. Medicine came to be seen as a vocation- similar to that of the priest. Why? The nature of the profession is inherently noble. Lawyers, on the other hand, may be consummate professionals but we doubt they are any better than they ought to be. Judges or members of a jury are a different matter. They are 'as Gods' in that they are meant to act dispassionately.  

It may be further shown that this is not due to any ethnical peculiarity of the languages concerned. It is not, for instance, the product of a Germanic spirit, but in its modern meaning the word comes from the Bible translations, through the spirit of the translator, not that of the original.

It is the idea that there is an invisible hand- God's mysterious economy- which puts people into different stations in life.  But this is merely the workings of the Katechon which keeps the End of days at bay. 

In Luther’s translation of the Bible it appears to have first been used at a point in Jesus Sirach (xi. 20 and 21) precisely in our modern sense.

Verse 20: "Stand by your agreement and attend to it, and grow old in your work." (or "Stand by your duty and stick to it; grow old at your work" in the GNT) 
Verse 21: "Do not wonder at the works of a sinner, but trust in the Lord and keep at your job, for it is easy in the sight of the Lord to make the poor person suddenly rich, in an instant." 

Luther uses 'beruf' for 'work' and 'arbeit' for 'job'.  A person has one job but many 'berufe'- callings- e.g. being a Dad, a deacon in the church, as well as being a dentist. 

After that it speedily took on its present meaning in the everyday speech of all Protestant peoples, while earlier not even a suggestion of such a meaning could be found in the secular literature of any of them, and even, in religious writings, so far as I can ascertain, it is only found in one of the German mystics whose influence on Luther is well known.

 The Douai (Catholic) Bible has- 

Be steadfast in thy covenant, and be conversant therein, and grow old in the work of thy commandments."
& "Abide not in the works of sinners. But trust in God, and stay in thy place."

The Greek Orthodox version is similar. The Greek word διαθήκη  meaning a covenant, testament, or formal agreement. Since we don't bargain with the Lord, it follows that this is something we are called to by those with spiritual authority over us. 

Like the meaning of the word, the idea is new, a product of the Reformation.

It originates in God's covenant with Noah whose symbol is the rainbow.  

This may be assumed as generally known. It is true that certain suggestions of the positive valuation of routine activity in the world, which is contained in this conception of the calling, had already existed in the Middle Ages, and even in late Hellenistic antiquity. We shall speak of that later. But at least one thing was unquestionably new: the valuation of the fulfilment of duty in worldly affairs as the highest form which the moral activity of the individual could assume.

This is eusebia or pietas or, in India, dharma. It is older than recorded history.  

This it was which inevitably gave every-day worldly activity a religious significance,

Which it always had. There were rituals connected with every occupation and activity.  

and which first created the conception of a calling in this sense.

It is the essence of the Gospel. Most of the Apostles worked with their hands. At the time of Eusebius, a 'dual-track' was created with the higher track involving a dedicated monastic/ministerial life.

The conception of the calling thus brings out that central dogma of all Protestant denominations which the Catholic division of ethical precepts into prœcepta and consilia discards.

It is the other way around. Calvin & Luther wanted a married clergy. They were discarding the consilia re. celibacy.  

The only way of living acceptably to God was not to surpass worldly morality in monastic asceticism, but

doing what Calvin or Luther told you to do coz they were super duper special. What of Apostolic succession? Calvinists don't have it. Some Lutheran Churches do as do the Anglicans.  

solely through the fulfilment of the obligations imposed upon the individual by his position in the world. That was his calling.

You are called to do what I tell you to do. If you don't, you will burn in hell. I don't care if you are celibate and spend your time washing the feet of lepers. You and your Pope are gonna have flaming pitchforks shoved up your bumhole for ever and ever.  

Luther developed the conception in the course of the first decade of his activity as a reformer. At first, quite in harmony with the prevailing tradition of the Middle Ages, as represented, for example, by Thomas Aquinas, he thought of activity in the world as a thing of the flesh, even though willed by God. It is the indispensable natural condition of a life of faith, but in itself, like eating and drinking, morally neutral.  But with the developmen of the conception of sola fide in all its consequences,

Luther had uttermost faith in his own super specialness. Also Jews should be killed.  

and its logical result, the increasingly sharp emphasis against the Catholic consilia evangelica of the monks as dictates of the devil, the calling grew in importance.

It was self-serving.  

The monastic life is not only quite devoid of value as a means of justification before God, but he also looks upon its renunciation of the duties of this world as the product of selfishness, withdrawing from temporal obligations.

It is selfish to deny your dick to a vagina. Let me tell you, vaginas are really really nice. Personally, I wouldn't want to have one but I am glad they exist.  

In contrast, labour in a calling appears to him as the outward expression of brotherly love.

If peasants wouldn't labour for the Lords, Luther would be on short commons. He urged the Princes to ' smite, slay & stab' the revolting peasants.  

This he proves by the observation that the division of labour forces every individual to work for others, but his view-point is highly naïve, forming an almost grotesque contrast to Adam Smith’s well-known statements on the same subject.

His view-point is coarse & brutal. This is a guy who thought a fart could keep away the devil. Sadly, Hitler- born a Catholic- outdid him. 

However, this justification, which is evidently essentially scholastic, soon disappears again, and there remains, more and more strongly emphasized, the statement that the fulfilment of worldly duties is under all circumstances the only way to live acceptably to God.

Please your prince & you please your priest. A convenient doctrine.  

It and it alone is the will of God, and hence every legitimate calling has exactly the same worth in the sight of God.

Because he has predestined some to damnation no matter how virtuous they are.  

That this moral justification of worldly activity was one of the most important results of the Reformation, especially of Luther’s part in it, is beyond doubt, and may even be considered a platitude.

Yet Germany stagnated after devastating wars of religion. 

This attitude is worlds removed from the deep hatred of Pascal, in his contemplative moods, for all worldly activity, which he was deeply convinced could only be understood in terms of vanity or low cunning.

No. He understood it as a diversion from the sort of shite he got up to.  "All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone"

And it differs even more from the liberal utilitarian compromise with the world at which the Jesuits arrived.

It is boorish and German-all-too-German.  

But just what the practical significance of this achievement of Protestantism was in detail is dimly felt rather than clearly perceived. In the first place it is hardly necessary to point out that Luther cannot be claimed for the spirit of capitalism in the sense in which we have used that term above, or for that matter in any sense whatever.

But Weber will just go ahead and do so.  

The religious circles which today most enthusiastically celebrate that great achievement of the Reformation are by no means friendly to capitalism in any sense. And Luther himself would, without doubt, have sharply repudiated any connection with a point of view like that of Franklin. Of course, one cannot consider his complaints against the great merchants of his time, such as the Fuggers, as evidence in this case. For the struggle against the privileged position, legal or actual, of single great trading companies in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries may best be compared with the modern campaign against the trusts, and can no more justly be considered in itself an expression of a traditionalistic point of view.

In England, the Common Law, which opposes restraints on trade, is considered 'traditional'. Dyer's case dates from 1414. Justice Hull expressed outrage that the case had been brought at all. The suggestion was any restraint of trade had always been obnoxious in England. Lord Coke derived this rule from Greek speaking Druids!  

Against these people, against the Lombards, the monopolists, speculators, and bankers patronized by the Anglican Church and the kings and parliaments of England and France, both the Puritans and the Huguenots carried on a bitter struggle.

Nobody likes to pay more to a monopolist or a cartel.  

Cromwell, after the battle of Dunbar (September 1650), wrote to the Long Parliament: “Be pleased to reform the abuses of all professions: and if there be any one that makes many poor to make a few rich, that suits not a Commonwealth.”

Tudor monopolies were hated.  

But, nevertheless, we will find Cromwell following a quite specifically capitalistic line of thought.

Capitalism is about profit as the reward for risk taking. Monopolies are about captive rents.  

On the other hand, Luther’s numerous statements against usury or interest in any form reveal a conception of the nature of capitalistic acquisition which, compared with that of late Scholasticism, is, from a capitalistic view-point, definitely backward.

Because the guy was retarded.  

Especially, of course, the doctrine of the sterility of money which Anthony of Florence had already refuted. But it is unnecessary to go into detail.

The devil is in the detail and Luther's fart won't drive him away.  

For, above all, the consequences of the conception of the calling in the religious sense for worldly conduct were susceptible to quite different interpretations.

The one favoured by the guys getting the tithes was that the sun shone out of their backside. Whose farts are driving away the devil? Mine! Give me one tenth of your income and shut the fuck up.  

The effect of the Reformation as such was only that,

the Pope stopped getting money. Lots of valuable property changed hands. Then came religious wars &, for Germany, political fragmentation & economic stagnation.  

as compared with the Catholic attitude, the moral emphasis on and the religious sanction of, organized worldly labour in a calling was mightily increased. The way in which the concept of the calling, which expressed this change, should develop further depended upon the religious evolution which now took place in the different Protestant Churches.

Some were so consumed by fear of Hell fire that they went in for 'double predestination'- i.e. 'outward and visible' signs of election (e.g. becoming as rich as fuck). Anglicans were more relaxed about this.  

The authority of the Bible, from which Luther thought he had derived his idea of the calling, on the whole favoured a traditionalistic interpretation.

It favoured what came about in most parts of Protestant Europe- viz. Nation States with National Churches.

The Old Testament, in particular, though in the genuine prophets it showed no sign of a tendency to excel worldly morality, and elsewhere only in quite isolated rudiments and suggestions, contained a similar religious idea entirely in this traditionalistic sense.

Job starts off rich, then suffers poverty & disgrace. But, in the end, he gets back his wealth.  

Everyone should abide by his living and let the godless run after gain.

If a guy suddenly loses his wealth, it isn't necessarily because he was robbing widows and orphans and has been punished for it.  

That is the sense of all the statements which bear directly on worldly activities. Not until the Talmud is a partially, but not even then fundamentally, different attitude to be found.

Because the Jews were no longer an agricultural people.  

The personal attitude of Jesus is characterized in classical purity by the typical antique-Oriental plea: “Give us this day our daily bread.”

I have explained the philosophic depth of this saying elsewhere.  

The element of radical repudiation of the world, as expressed in the (disjunction between God and Mammon) excluded the possibility that the modern idea of a calling should be based on his personal authority.

No. You can serve God while gaining wealth and using it for some holy purpose.  

In the apostolic era as expressed in the New Testament, especially in St. Paul, the Christian looked upon worldly activity either with indifference, or at least essentially traditionalistically; for those first generations were filled with eschatological hopes. Since everyone was simply waiting for the coming of the Lord, there was nothing to do but remain in the station and in the worldly occupation in which the call of the Lord had found him, and labour as before.

Not necessarily. You could sell up, give your all to the poor, and follow Christ or his Apostle.  

Thus he would not burden his brothers as an object of charity, and it would only be for a little while. Luther read the Bible through the spectacles of his whole attitude; at the time and in the course of his development from about 1518 to 1530 this not only remained traditionalistic but became ever more so.

He was translating the Bible into, let's face it, a rather uncouth tongue.  

In the first years of his activity as a reformer he was, since he thought of the calling as primarily of the flesh, dominated by an attitude closely related, in so far as the form of world activity was concerned, to the Pauline eschatological indifference as expressed in 1 Cor. vii.17

Nevertheless, each person should live as a believer in whatever situation the Lord has assigned to them, just as God has called them. This is the rule I lay down in all the churches

If you were uncircumcised when you converted, stay that way. It is better to be celibate, but if you are married, don't commit adultery. 

One may attain salvation in any walk of life; on the short pilgrimage of life there is no use in laying weight on the form of occupation. The pursuit of material gain beyond personal needs must thus appear as a symptom of lack of grace,

this does not follow. If you make a lot of money & give it to the poor, chances are God really likes you.  

and since it can apparently only be attained at the expense of others, directly reprehensible.

Christianity's material gains came at the expense of other religions. That wasn't reprehensible at all. 

As he became increasingly involved in the affairs of the world, he came to value work in the world more highly. But in the concrete calling an individual pursued he saw more and more a special command of God to fulfil these particular duties which the Divine Will had imposed upon him.

He started off as a monk. Then, he married. God called him to sire six kids upon her.  

And after the conflict with the Fanatics and the peasant disturbances, the objective historical order of things in which the individual has been placed by God becomes for Luther more and more a direct manifestation of divine will.

He had six kids but not six wives. Divine Will often works the other way in those who concern themselves with it.  

The stronger and stronger emphasis on the providential element, even in particular events of life, led more and more to a traditionalistic interpretation based on the idea of Providence.

or fatalism.  

The individual should remain once and for all in the station and calling in which God had placed him, and should restrain his worldly activity within the limits imposed by his established station in life.

Also, he should not fuck my wife.  

While his economic traditionalism was originally the result of Pauline indifference, it later became that of a more and more intense belief in divine providence, which identified absolute obedience to God’s will with absolute acceptance of things as they were.

i.e. the fact that his people were getting the tithes.  

Weber's mother was a Calvinist of Hugenot stock. She appears to have suffered from some psychological malady. This prompts him to speak of 

...ethical peculiarities of Calvinism

A purely superficial glance shows that there is here quite a different relationship between the religious life and earthly activity than in either Catholicism or Lutheranism.

Some people are more prone to worry about Hell fire than others. This is true in every religion.  

Even in literature motivated purely by religious factors that is evident. Take for instance the end of the Divine Comedy, where the poet in Paradise stands speechless in his passive contemplation of the secrets of God,

Dante was in the troubador tradition. The beloved was the midons and love for her must be purely Platonic.  

and compare it with the poem which has come to be called the Divine Comedy of Puritanism.

Milton was writing in a different tradition- one where you married your beloved and had kids. Donne’s fusion of the spiritual and the sexual in love poetry helped pave a conceptual path for the representation of Adam and Eve in Paradise Lost. 

Milton closes the last song of Paradise Lost after describing the expulsion from paradise as follows:— They, looking back, all the eastern side beheld Of paradise, so late their happy seat, Waved over by that flaming brand; the gate With dreadful faces thronged and fiery arms. Some natural tears they dropped, but wiped them soon: The world was all before them, there to choose Their place of rest, and Providence their guide.

Like America- the 'wilderness Zion'- which the Puritans had begun to populate. Eden were well lost, for love of a connubial sort- more particularly if babies occur.  

And only a little before Michael had said to Adam:  . . . “Only add Deeds to thy knowledge answerable; add faith; Add virtue, patience, temperance; add love, By name to come called Charity, the soul Of all the rest: then wilt thou not be loth To leave this Paradise, but shall possess A Paradise within thee, happier far.”

What can be better than wifey & baby & woofy the dog?  

One feels at once that this powerful expression of the Puritan’s serious attention to this world, his acceptance of his life in the world as a task, could not possibly have come from the pen of a mediæval writer.

The Wife's lament in the Exeter book or the Pearl Poet's vision of his daughter  or Chaucer's Franklin's tale treat of the joys of connunbial love & family relationships. 

But it is just as uncongenial to Lutheranism, as expressed for instance in Luther’s and Paul Gerhard’s chorales. It is now our task to replace this vague feeling by a somewhat more precise logical formulation, and to investigate the fundamental basis of these differences. The appeal to national character is generally a mere confession of ignorance, and in this case it is entirely untenable. To ascribe a unified national character to the Englishmen of the seventeenth century would be simply to falsify history.

They had a national character at Agincourt.  

Cavaliers and Roundheads did not appeal to each other simply as two parties, but as radically distinct species of men, and whoever looks into the matter carefully must agree with them.

Nonsense! Plenty went from being one to the other and back again.  

On the other hand, a difference of character between the English merchant adventurers and the old Hanseatic merchants is not to be found;

They were completely different. The English rejoiced when the League was expelled by the Tudors in the sixteenth century.  

nor can any other fundamental difference between the English and German characters at the end of the Middle Ages, which cannot easily be explained by the differences of their political history.

England was a nation state. Germany wasn't. The English considered the Germans to be drunken gluttons with coarse manners & a propensity for ungovernable rage and violence. The Germans considered the English to be provincial and believed they had it under their thumb.  

It was the power of religious influence, not alone, but more than anything else, which created the differences of which we are conscious to-day.

It made no difference whatsoever. Protestant princesses- or, later on Princes- would be imported for royal weddings but it wasn't till Prince Albert that the English came to find anything likeable in German culture. There were some exceptions- e.g. Coleridge. By contrast, the Germans took to English plays- especially Shakespeares- very quickly.  

We thus take as our starting-point in the investigation of the relationship between the old Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism the works of Calvin, of Calvinism, and the other Puritan sects. But it is not to be understood that we expect to find any of the founders or representatives of these religious movements considering the promotion of what we have called the spirit of capitalism as in any sense the end of his life-work. We cannot well maintain that the pursuit of worldly goods, conceived as an end in itself, was to any of them of positive ethical value. Once and for all it must be remembered that programmes of ethical reform never were at the centre of interest for any of the religious reformers (among whom, for our purposes, we must include men like Menno, George Fox, and Wesley). They were not the founders of societies for ethical culture nor the proponents of humanitarian projects for social reform or cultural ideals. The salvation of the soul and that alone was the centre of their life and work. Their ethical ideals and the practical results of their doctrines were all based on that alone, and were the consequences of purely religious motives. We shall thus have to admit that the cultural consequences of the Reformation were to a great extent, perhaps in the particular aspects with which we are dealing predominantly, unforeseen and even unwished-for results of the labours of the reformers. They were often far removed from or even in contradiction to all that they themselves thought to attain.

So, there was no link between the two. I think the School of Salamanca influenced England, Holland and (especially through Pufendorf) Germany. Natural law was like 'the law merchant' which had arisen spontaneously- or so it appeared. Economic development reinforced it thus creating a habitus, if not a spirit, of capitalism. 

One might say, the wars of religion meant that a State's ability to borrow or mobilise savings became more and more important. This was directly linked to the health of Capital Markets and the existence, and level of liquidity, of a class of arbitrageurs or 'market makers'. The Dutch Republic and post-1688 England developed strong private property rights, early patent systems, public debt markets, and parliamentary limits on royal power, which lowered default risks and built investor confidence. However, speculative crashes tended to be worse than in Catholic countries. 

 we have no intention whatever of maintaining such a foolish and doctrinaire thesis as that the spirit of capitalism (in the provisional sense of the term explained above) could only have arisen as the result of certain effects of the Reformation, or even that capitalism as an economic system is a creation of the Reformation.

In which case, Weber's book is useless.  

In itself, the fact that certain important forms of capitalistic business organization are known to be considerably older than the Reformation is a sufficient refutation of such a claim. On the contrary, we only wish to ascertain whether and to what extent religious forces have taken part in the qualitative formation and the quantitative expansion of that spirit over the world.

Since religious forces existed, they did play some part in what happened. But did they do so for religious reasons or was religion a proxy for economic rivalry? Which came first? The chicken or the egg?  

Furthermore, what concrete aspects of our capitalistic culture can be traced to them.

The capitalistic culture of Japan, at that time, could be said to owe something to Ninoyima- the peasant sage. Why? Because it was Japanese.  

In view of the tremendous confusion of interdependent influences between the material basis, the forms of social and political organization, and the ideas current in the time of the Reformation, we can only proceed by investigating whether and at what points certain correlations between forms of religious belief and practical ethics can be worked out.

Correlation is not causation. Anyway, our 'interpretation' will create, as an artefact, the very thing it looks for. Weber was wasting his time. Still, at the time, his shite fitted well with prevailing prejudices. Catlicks go in for siestas and fiestas. Proddy bastids are tight fisted misery-guts. As for the Jews- don't get me fucking started, mate.