Iqbal's 1930 Allahabad speech.

The following is excerpted from Iqbal's address to the Muslim League in Allahabad in 1930.

Islam and Nationalism It cannot be denied that Islam, regarded as an ethical ideal plus a certain kind of polity—by which expression I mean a social structure regulated by a legal system and animated by a specific ethical ideal—has been the chief formative factor in the life-history of the Muslims of India.

In that case, Islami spirituality has been of only secondary importance. Yet, devotional piety was a feature of Islam even in places in India where there was no Islamic polity- i.e. no 'social structure regulated by an Islamic legal system'.  

It has furnished those basic emotions and loyalties which gradually unify scattered individuals and groups, and finally transform them into a well-defined people, possessing a moral consciousness of their own.

Islam arrived in India with missionaries, traders & invaders. Indian people were already 'unified' by caste, region & language. That remains the case to this day for the vast majority of Pakistanis. It is estimated that 95 percent of the population know their own biradari.  

Indeed it is no exaggeration to say that India is perhaps the only country in the world where Islam, as a people-building force, has worked at its best.

Which is why the British were ruling India. They weren't ruling Iran or Turkey or Saudi Arabia- probably because Islam wasn't a 'people-building force' in those countries 

In India, as elsewhere, the structure of Islam as a society is almost entirely due to the working of Islam as a culture inspired by a specific ethical ideal.

the structure of Islam is due to the working of Islam. Iqbal wasn't stupid at all.  

What I mean to say is that Muslim society, with its remarkable homogeneity and inner unity, has grown to be what it is, under the pressure of the laws and institutions associated with the culture of Islam.

Iqbal knew that some sub-continental Muslims retained a lot of their pre-Islamic customs or else conformed to the practices of their neighbours.  

The ideas set free by European political thinking, however, are now rapidly changing the outlook of the present generation of Muslims both in India and outside India.

India was somewhat laggard in this respect. Turkey's Tanzimat began in 1839. Homosexuality was decriminalised in 1858- i.e. 110 years before the UK got round to doing so!  

Our younger men, inspired by these ideas, are anxious co see them as living forces in their own countries, without any critical appreciation of the facts which have determined their evolution in Europe.

Iqbal lacked such 'critical appreciation'.  

In Europe Christianity was understood to be a purely monastic order

Catholic priests were celibate. Monks and Nuns were separate. Orthodox and Protestant priests coud get married. Surely, Iqbal had noticed this in England?  

which gradually developed into a vast church organisation. The protest of Luther was directed against this church organisation, not against any system of polity of a secular nature, for the obvious reason that there was no such polity associated with Christianity.

It was called the Papacy. There were Papal States- i.e. territories whose monarch was the Pope. There were also a fair number of Archbisoprics with temporal power.  

And Luther was perfectly justified in rising in revolt against this organisation; though, I think he did not realise that in the peculiar conditions which obtained in Europe, his revolt would eventually mean the complete displacement of universal ethics of Jesus by the growth of a plurality of national and hence narrower systems of ethics.

There has been no such displacement. Christianity is the same in Germany as in Italy or England.  

Thus the upshot of the intellectual movement initiated by such men as Rousseau and Luther

who lived three centuries apart 

was the break-up of the one into mutually ill-adjusted many, the transformation of a human into a national outlook, requiring a more realistic foundation, such as the notion of country and finding expression through varying systems of polity evolved and national lines, i.e. on lines which recognise territory as the only principle of political solidarity.

This is nonsense. There were national crowns- e.g. of England, Scotland, France, Sweden etc.- before the Reformation.  

If you begin with the conception of religion as complete otherworldliness, then what has happened to Christianity in Europe is perfectly natural. The universal ethics of Jesus is displaced by national system of ethics and polity.

No. Different nation-states or multi-ethnic Empires enshrined Christian teachings into their own legal codes.

The conclusion to which Europe is consequently driven is that religion is a private affair of the individual and has nothing to do with what is called man's temporal life.

No. Man's temporal life was affected by laws made for religious reasons- e.g. the criminalization of bigamy, buggery & blashphemy.  

Islam does not bifurcate the unity of man into an irreconcilable duality of spirit and matter.

Surah Al-Isra (17:85), when asked about the spirit, the Quran states: "Say: The spirit is from the affair [or command] of my Lord, and you have not been given of knowledge except a little". We may have a lot of knowledge about the material body of a man, but still know little about the spirit which gives him life. 

In Islam God and the universe, spirit and matter, Church and State, are organic to each other.

In which case, Shiahs are heretics if the State is Sunni.  

Man is not the citizen of a profane world to be renounced in the interest of a world of spirit situated elsewhere.

Many of the pleasures of this world- wine, silk clothes, sodomy- must be renounced. 

To Islam matter is spirit realising itself in space and time.

No. That's Hegel for whom matter is not an independent or ultimate substance; rather, it represents Spirit (Geist) in a state of externalization or self-alienation (Äußerlichkeit), projecting itself into the forms of space and time on its way to self-consciousness.

The rūḥ (spirit) is explicitly classified in mainstream Islamic doctrine as a created thing (makhlūq). In death, the pious Muslim hopes his spirit will return to its Creator. 

Europe uncritically accepted the duality of spirit and matter probably from Manichaean thought.

There were plenty of pantheists in Europe. 

Her best thinkers are realising this initial mistake today, but her statesmen are indirectly forcing the world to accept it as an unquestionable dogma.

Very true. Churchill was constantly badgering Coolidge on this point.  

It is, then, this mistaken separation of the spiritual and the temporal which has largely influenced European religious and political thought and has resulted practically in the total exclusion of Christianity from the life of European States.

Iqbal, being as stupid as fuck, didn't get that Europe was ruling most of the world. It is smart to imitate successful people. Don't do what they don't do.  

The result is a set of mutually ill-adjusted States dominated by interests not human but national.

Said the guy famous for wanting a nation for the Muslim majority areas.  

And these mutually ill-adjusted States, after trampling over the moral and religious convictions of Christianity, are today feeling the need of a federated Europe, i.e. the need of a unity which the Christian church organisation originally gave them,

It didn't. England kept fighting France even when both were Catholic. Iqbal truly had no clue about European history.  

but which, instead of reconstructing it in the light of Christ's vision of human brotherhood, they considered it fit to destroy under the inspiration of Luther.

The Roman Empire wasn't Christian when it united much of Europe and the MENA. Christianity had its own early schisms just like Islam.  

A Luther in the world of Islam, however, is an impossible phenomenon;

the Wahhabis had prevailed in the Hejaz. Some European scholars spoke of  Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab  as the Arab Luther. 

for here there is no church organisation, similar to that of Christianity in the Middle Ages, inviting a destroyer.

Catholicism was opposed to Orthodox Christianity before there was a Protestant Reformation.  

In the world of Islam we have

Sunnis of different Mazhabs & Shias of various stripes. Iqbal had a particular hatred of Qadianis.  

a universal polity whose fundamentals are believed to have been revealed but whose structure, owing to our legists' want of contact with the modern world, stands today in need of renewed power by fresh adjustments.

Egypt and Afghanistan had gained full independence in 1922. Iraq would become independent in 1932.  

I do not know what will be the final fate of the national idea in the world of Islam.

The number of independent Muslim nations would continue to rise.  

Whether Islam will assimilate and transform it, as it has assimilated and transformed before many ideas expressive of a different spirit, or allow a radical transformation of its own structure by the force of this idea, is hard to predict.

Islamic countries would modernise at their own pace and to the extent that they wished to do so.  

 You are a Muslim assembly and, I suppose, anxious to remain true to the spirit and ideals of Islam.

The Muslims in the Congress party are your rivals.  

My sole desire, therefore, is to tell you frankly what I honestly believe to be the truth about the present situation. In this way alone it is possible for me to illuminate, according to my light, the avenues of your political action. 

Try to win elections and get Ministerial portfolios.  

What, then, is the problem and its implications? Is religion a private affair?

Under the British- yes.  

Would you like to see Islam, as a moral and political ideal, meeting the same fate in the world of Islam as Christianity has already met in Europe?

Yes. Europe ruled lots of Muslim countries. Turkey had lost its non-Muslim subject population. To maintain its independence it was imitating Europe to the extent of getting rid of the Arabic script in favour of the Roman alphabet.  

Is it possible to retain Islam as an ethical ideal and to reject it as a polity in favour of national polities, in which religious attitude is not permitted to play any part? This question becomes of special importance in India where the Muslims happen to be in a minority.

They were the majority in some regions. 

The proposition that religion is a private individual experience is not surprising on the lips of a European.

There is congregational worship in Europe. Many European countries had an Established Church. Perhaps, Iqbal was thinking of 'separation of Church & State' in the US.  

In Europe the conception of Christianity as a monastic order, renouncing the world of matter and fixing its gaze entirely on the world of the spirit, led, by a logical process of thought, to the view embodied in this proposition.

Yet, it was Protestant countries- where there were no monks- which first embraced Secularism. Incidentally, the East India Company's rule in India was quoted as an example of secular government establishing itself quite cheaply over a vast territory. The Mutiny was blamed on Christian missionaries.  

The nature of the Prophet's religious experience, as disclosed in the Quran, however, is wholly different.

It is similar to that of the other Prophets.  

It is not mere experience in the sense of a purely biological event, happening inside the experient and necessitating no reactions on its social environment.

This was true of all the preceding prophets as well.  

It is individual experience creative of a social order. Its immediate outcome is the fundamentals of a polity with implicit legal concepts whose civic significance cannot be belittled merely because their origin is revelational. The religious ideal of Islam, therefore, is organically related to the social order which it has created. The rejection of the one will eventually involve the rejection of the other. Therefore the construction of a policy on national lines, if it means a displacement of the Islamic principles of solidarity, is simply unthinkable to a Muslim.

Yet, this was the direction then being taken by the Turks, the Iranians and even the Afghans (briefly).  European dress was being made compulsory. Beards and turbans were out. Moustaches and hats were in.  

This is a matter which at the present moment directly concerns the Muslims of India. "Man," says Renan, "is enslaved neither by his race, nor by his religion, nor by the course of rivers, nor by the direction of mountain ranges. A great aggregation of men, sane of mind and warm of heart, creates a moral consciousness which is called a nation."

This is the case even if some are atheists or belong to opposing religious sects.  

Such a formation is quite possible, though it involves the long and arduous process of practically re-making men and furnishing them with a fresh emotional equipment. It might have been a fact in India if the teaching of Kabir and the Divine Faith of Akbar had seized the imagination of the masses of this country. Experience, however, shows that the various caste units and religious units in India have shown no inclination to sink their respective individualities in a larger whole.

Indians were happy enough to serve foreign masters with a kick-ass army & navy. Iqbal clung to his knighthood.  

Each group is intensely jealous of its collective existence. The formation of the kind of moral consciousness which constitutes the essence of a nation in Renan's sense demands a price which the peoples of India are not prepared to pay.

Plenty of Muslims and Christians followed the Mahatma.  

The unity of an Indian nation, therefore, must be sought, not in the negation, but in the mutual harmony and cooperation of the many.

This could be done for purely secular ends. As Jefferson said 'in matters of religion, divided we stand, united we fall' (i.e end up fighting each other over religious shibboleths) 

. It is, however, painful to observe that our attempts to discover such a principle of internal harmony have so far failed. Why have they failed?

Because the Muslim League existed.  

And as far as I have been able to read the Muslim mind, I have no hesitation in declaring that, if the principle that the Indian Muslim is entitled to full and free development on the lines of his own culture and tradition in his own Indian home-lands is recognised as the basis of a permanent communal settlement, he will be ready to stake his all for the freedom of India.

Muslims should be allowed to kill kaffirs. Kaffirs should not be allowed to retaliate.  

 Even the authors of the Nehru Report recognise the value of this higher aspect of communalism. While discussing the separation of Sind they say:"To say from the larger viewpoint of nationalism that no communal provinces should be created,

e.g the partition of Bengal by Lord Curzon? 

is, in a way, equivalent to saying from the still wider international viewpoint that there should be no separate nations. Both these statements have a measure of truth in them. But the staunchest internationalist recognises that without the fullest national autonomy it is extraordinarily difficult to create the international State. So also without the fullest cultural autonomy, and communalism in its better aspect is culture, it will be difficult to create a harmonious nation."

Sindhi is a language separate and distinct from Gujarati or Punjabi.  

 Communalism in its higher aspect, then, is indispensable to the formation of a harmonious whole in a country like India. The units of Indian society are not territorial as in European countries,

Yes they are. Sindhis speak Sindhi and live in Sindh.  

India is a continent of human groups belonging to different races, speaking different languages and professing different religions.

But Indians didn't want linguistic nationalism. Hindus wanted to stick together to avoid Muslim salami tactics.  

Their behaviour is not at all determined by a common race-consciousness. Even the Hindus do not form a homogeneous group. The principle of European democracy cannot be applied to India without recognising the fact of communal groups. The Muslim demand for the creation of a Muslim India within India is, therefore, perfectly justified.

As was the creation of a Hindu India where Muslims would lose any sort of affirmative action.  

The resolution of the AllParties Muslim Conference at Delhi is, to my mind, wholly inspired by this noble ideal of a harmonious whole which, instead of stifling the respective individualities of its component wholes, affords them chances of fully working out the possibilities that may be latent in them.

Sadly, the biggest of those possibilities was ethnic cleansing.  

And I have no doubt that this House will emphatically endorse the Muslim demands embodied in this resolution. Personally, I would go farther than the demands embodied in it. I would like to see the Punjab, North-West Frontier Province, Sind and Baluchistan amalgamated into a single state. Self-government within the British Empire, or without the British Empire, the formation of a consolidated North-West Indian Muslim state appears to me to be the final destiny of the Muslims, at least of North-West India.

It would have to fight Afghanistan- at least that is what seems to be happening now.  

The proposal was put forward before the Nehru Committee. They rejected it on the ground that, if carried into effect, it would give a very unwieldy state. This is true in so far as the area is concerned; in point of population the State contemplated by the proposal would be much less than some of the present India provinces. The exclusion of Ambala Division and perhaps of some districts where nonMuslims predominate, will make it less extensive and more Muslim in population—so that the exclusion suggested will enable this consolidated State to give a more effective protection to non-Muslim minorities within its area.

Hilarious!  

 The truth is that Islam is not a Church.

In Islam, Church, State, and Civil Society were simultaneously created such that every Muslim man was an equal member of all three. In England, Common Law is of Anglo-Saxon origin, Kings Equity was Norman French, and Canon Law was Latin. In Islam, all three had a common origin and terminus- more particularly if Arabic was the mother tongue. 

It is a state conceived as a contractual organism long before Rousseau ever thought of such a thing, and animated by an ethical ideal which regards man not as an earth-rooted creature, defined by this or that portion of the earth, but as a spiritual being understood in terms of a social mechanism, and possessing rights and duties as a living factor in that mechanism.

It was territorial. Muslims go on hajj to Mecca not Manchester.  

The character of a Muslim state can be judged from what the Times of India pointed out sometime ago in a leader on the Indian Banking Inquiry Committee. "In ancient India," the paper points out, "the State framed laws regulating the rates of interest; but in Muslim times, although Islam clearly forbids the realisation of interest on money loaned, Indian Muslim states imposed no restrictions on such rates."

There were work-arounds.  

I therefore demand the formation of a consolidated Muslim state in the best interests of India and Islam.

So that usury could be banned? But the workarounds were well known.  

For India it means security and peace resulting from an internal balance of power;

Sadly, States go to war with each other. Pakistan's military adventures would prove burdensome to the economy. Moreover, the military would usurp power from barristocrats like Iqbal.  

for Islam an opportunity to rid itself of the stamp that Arabian Imperialism was forced to give it, to mobilise its law, its education, its culture, and to bring them into closer contact with its own original spirit and with the spirit of modern times.

Arabian Imperialism was justified as jihad. Was Iqbal against the concept?  

Federal States Thus it is clear that in view of India's infinite variety in climates, races, languages, creeds and social systems, the creation of autonomous States, based on the unity of language, race, history, religion and identity of economic interest, is the only possible way to secure a stable constitutional structure in India.

It would mean endless war. Pakistan broke up. Hindu India has not done so.  

The conception of federation underlying the Simon Report necessitates the abolition of the Central Legislative Assembly as a popular assembly, and makes it an assembly of the representatives of the federal States. It further demands a redistribution of territory on the lines which I have indicated. And the Report does recommend both. I give my wholehearted support to this view of the matter, and venture to suggest that the redistribution recommended in the Simon Report must fulfil two conditions. It must precede the introduction of the new constitution and must be so devised as to finally solve the communal problem. Proper redistribution will make the question of joint and separate electorates automatically disappear from the constitutional controversy of India.

The creation of majoritarian states would do so but might they not go to war with each other over contested borders? Perhaps, Iqbal believed that Europe's nation-states would be able to achieve collecive security under the League of Nations. Sadly, by the time he died, it was obvious this was a pipe-dream. 

 One lesson I have learnt from the history of Muslims.

It is the same lesson that all history teaches. Do sensible things. Don't listen to stupid shitheads even if they write good poems.  

At critical moments in their history it is Islam that has saved Muslims and not vice versa.

Which is why southern Spain was still Muslim ruled.  

If today you focus your vision on Islam and seek inspiration from the ever-vitalising idea embodied in it, you will be only reassembling your scattered forces, regaining your lost integrity, and thereby saving yourself from total destruction.

Nothing can save any created thing from going to destruction. The point about Religion is that union with the Godhead is possible after death.  

One of the profoundest verses in the Holy Quran teaches us that the birth and rebirth of the whole of humanity is like the birth and rebirth of a single individual.

There is no metempsychosis (re-birth) in Islam.  

Why cannot you who, as a people, can well claim to be the first practical exponents of this superb conception of humanity, live and move and have your being as a single individual?

Why can't you all fit into the same pair of underpants?  

I do not wish to mystify anybody when I say that things in India are not what they appear to be.

British aren't ruling. I think the real Viceroy is my neighbour's cat.  

The meaning of this, however, will dawn upon you only when you have achieved a real collective ego to look at them.

Also, you should all fit into the same pair of underpants 

In the words of the Quran, "Hold fast to yourself; no one who erreth can hurt you, provided you are well guided" (5:104)

Politics is about solving collective action problems of an economic type. Don't be guided by nutters like Iqbal.  

V.Ramani's very stupid ruminations

Indian democracy is unusual in that it is dynastic. Rahul says he could have become PM at the age of 25. Since he didn't want to be killed, he refused to step up to the plate in 2013/2014 which is why Modi has been able to rule. Still, he remains the Leader of the Opposition purely by birthright.

V. Ramani, a senile former IAS officer, writes in Scroll.in of the crumbling pillars of Indian democracy. Oddly, he doesn't mention the only pillar which has crumbled- viz. Rahul Gandhi's brain which has turned to shit. 

the structure of democracy in India rests on seven pillars, namely (i) legislature (ii) executive (political and bureaucratic) (iii) political parties (iv) judiciary (v) independent institutions (vi) media and (vii) civil society.

All these things can exist in non-democratic countries. There is only one pillar of a democracy- viz. there is peaceful transition of power on the basis of electoral outcomes. That pillar has stood in India because the Army won't interfere to keep a regime in power even if it loses elections. There is no Indian Imran Khan or Field Marshall Munir.  

As of today, all the pillars appear shaky, threatening the future of democracy, although it could be argued that structural weaknesses in the Indian democratic edifice have existed right from 1947.

Anyone can say anything at all is shaky. But why bother?  

I Legislature

Let us start with the legislatures, both at the union and state levels. Cracks appeared in the post-Nehruvian era.

Congress began to lose elections. Indira lurched to the Left, got rid of the senile Syndicate, and turned Congress into ancestral property.  

The “aya Ram gaya Ram” phenomenon of politicians switching parties started in 1967, a legacy that continues to the present day.

Ramani hasn't heard of Rajiv's anti-defection bill.  

Reminiscent of Indian Premier League auctions, legislators are tempted by the highest bidders, though other pressures such as the fear of investigative agencies can also act as triggers for crossovers.

No fool like a retired IAS fool.  

Disconcertingly, it is no longer just individual bait: shoals of legislators are willing to defect en masse, lured by the attractions of power and patronage and the fear of state action.

Unpopular leaders- e.g Udhav Thakeray- or those seeking to make their party dynastic- like Mamta- may indeed be deserted by the majority of their legislators. 

The anti-defection provisions in the Constitution have become a dead letter: in no case have presiding officers ruled against defectors

Because the thing only happens if there are enough of them.  

 Major legislations are rushed through without adequate public debate and reflection.

Who is to say what is 'adequate'?  

The quality of discussions in legislatures, especially Parliament, has taken a deep dive.

Because Rahul has shit for brains.  

Presiding officers often give short shrift to Opposition demands for discussion or to notices for legislative intervention, as in the cases of the proposed impeachment of the chief election commissioner and a former High Court judge.

Both are difficult to do. The Opposition doesn't have the numbers. Moreover, it would be a waste of Parliamentary time.  

II Executive

At both the political and bureaucratic levels, there is inadequate engagement with public opinion, especially on crucial policy matters.

Losing elections makes you pay attention to public opinion.  

The Citizenship (Amendment) Act,

Which confirmed the previous position that non-Muslims fleeing Islamic persecution would have a path to citizenship 

the farm laws

withdrawn when farmers objected 

and the Special Intensive Revision of the electoral rolls

decided upon by the independent Election Commission. It is supposed to remove the names of dead people rather than let the ruling party use their votes to keep itself in power. 

Weakening the EC strenghtens the party which now rules 72 percent of the country.  

are just some of the glaring instances.

of what? All were perfectly proper and in keeping with what went before.  

Dissent and criticism are brushed off as the handiwork of “urban naxals”, “dimagi naxals” and “anti-nationals”.

When was this not the case? Does Ramani not know that the Government hunted down and killed Naxalites? There are draconian laws against secessionism and terroristic activities.  

The use of civil servants, especially those in the investigative agencies, to lodge cases and subject dissenters and political opponents to harassment has become commonplace.

It was worse when I was young.  

More disturbing is the fact that civil servants, in violation of the oath to the Constitution they take when joining public service, are more than willing and enthusiastic to implement the orders of their political masters, be it the sudden demolition of structures (by a curious coincidence, mostly owned or occupied by the Muslim community), the interference in prayer meetings of the Christian community and the harassment of interfaith couples on the bidding of lumpen vigilante groups.

Ramani often destroyed Mosques and raped 'inter-faith' couples. Sonia was terrified of him because she was a Christian.  

It seems that the senior bureaucracy of the various services has virtually abdicated its role of pointing out to the political executive the absence of legality in the orders it is asked to carry out.

They are welcome to do so and get transferred.  

Infrastructure and mineral resource extraction projects are being given virtually blanket permissions, ignoring the voices of caution from environmental experts and groups and bypassing local consultation with affected stakeholders

Which is why India is a little less poor than it used to be.  

. The ecological consequences are becoming visible, with repeated hill landslides and flash floods, apart from growing desertification of arable lands.

Civil Servants are sodomizing trees and bushes. This is causing desertification. Ramani was once a Civil Servant. He is speaking out against a practice in which he himself participated.  

III Political parties

The initial years after Independence saw many stalwarts from different political parties serve with distinction in Parliament and state legislative assemblies and councils.

Then, we had Nehru. Now, we have Rahul. Sad.  

The watershed year was 1967,

when Indira Gandhi got her Daddy's job. 

when the lure of pelf and patronage led to the mushrooming of political parties, many of them dominated by one family. The Indian National Congress was no exception.

Things are better now. Modi's dad was a chai-wallah.  

Sycophancy became the path for political advancement, with genuflections to the ruling deities in various parties.

It was particularly intense under the Dynasty.  

The system of hereditary succession took firm root in nearly all parties. With hard work and meritorious performance receiving no returns, the decades from the 1990s saw wannabe politicians jumping ship whenever they felt the reward for switching loyalties was higher.

An elected politician has to keep the anti-defection law in mind. A wannabe can do what he likes.  

Loyalty to the ruling coterie in a party was the sole criterion for political survival. Criminals and carpetbaggers freely entered the political arena.

This is why people prefer the BJP.  

Winning elections and deriving the benefits from exercise of power has become the sole preoccupation of politicians. Governance, legislative debate and the quality of enacted legislation have suffered grievously.

Bring back the Brits. They were smart.  

Today, India seems to live from election to election: what happens in the five-year interregnum between polls seems to concern neither the politician nor the ordinary citizen.

That was what people said when I was a kid. We only see our MP once every five years. 

IV Judiciary

The judiciary, given the constraints of manpower and the burden of litigation, has often been the lumbering elephant in the room. What has been particularly disconcerting in recent years has been its propensity, especially at the highest levels of the Supreme Court and High Courts, to take an agonisingly long time in deciding issues that impact the life and liberty of the individual as also matters that have a crucial bearing on constitutional issues and on the lives of ordinary citizens.

The Bench became more activist. But it kept doing stupid shit.  

Bail pleas are deferred for months on end, with the draconian provisions in laws like the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act and Prevention of Money Laundering Act, ensuring that the process itself becomes the punishment.

 Both came into effect under Congress administrations. 

It took years for the accused in the Bhima-Koregaon and the Delhi riots cases to get bail, with some still in judicial custody after more than six years. Chargesheets are yet to be filed in these cases.

That is a matter for defence lawyers. If they are crap at their job, what can be done about it?  

Stan Swamy and GN Saibaba were instances where the rigours of incarceration led to their deaths.

They would have died in any case because of old age or long term health issues.  

And who can forget most of the Aam Aadmi Party leadership in jail before and at the time of the 2025 Delhi elections, denying them the right of participating in election campaigning?

Who can forget their corruption?  

The executive has also got away with omnibus clearances of projects that affect the environment, in the absence of meaningful judicial intervention.

Ramani is very sad that India is no longer as poor as shit. Why has the Bench not prevented everybody from doing anything useful?  

V Independent institutions

At the heart of the crisis today is the severe weakening of nearly all independent institutions, meant to serve as the guardians of democracy.

Nothing of the sort has happened. Shitty institutions are a little less shitty because the country is a little richer.  

We are witnessing the continued unrest arising from the SIR, with the names of 130 million citizens being deleted from the rolls.

Why are dead people not being allowed to vote?  

The functioning of the Election Commission has come in for scathing criticism.

Trump & Bolsanaro claimed any election they lost was rigged. No doubt, Congress only won Kerala because of 'vote chori'.  

But it is by no means the only institution that has suffered a dent in its reputation. Information Commissions, the Lokpal, the National Green Tribunal, the National Commission for Scheduled Castes, the National Commission for Women and the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights have proved ineffective in acting as a check and balance on executive action/inaction.

They were always shit.  

VI Media

In a cruel twist of irony, Lal Krishna Advani, one of the founders of the Bharatiya Janata Party, observed about the media after the Emergency: “When they were asked to bend, they crawled.”

They were asked to crawl. Some did. Some did not.  

Today, large sections of the media, both print and electronic, need no such suggestions.

Because they need to make money.  

They readily genuflect to authority

in Tamil Nadu, they genuflect to the ruling Dravidian ideology. 

and are more than willing to carry the messages of the government of the day, forgetting their duty of speaking truth to power.

There is no such duty. Parrhesia was a Quaker thing. But Quaker newspapers supported the Liberal party. They told lies to help it.  

The fear of losing government advertising revenues, the apprehension of coercive action and the outright purchase of independent news channels by powerful corporate interests have silenced the media.

Sadly, no. The media remains noisy.  .

VII Civil society

Leonardo Bruni translated Aristotle's koinōnía politikḗ into societas civilis ("civil society"). We are all part of it. Unlike the UK, which has a King & an established Church, there is no 'first' or 'second' estate. Everybody is part of the only estate which exists.

It is difficult to decide whether civil society is civil anymore.

It never had any obligation to be so.  

Paraphrasing Mahatma Gandhi on Western civilisation, one must say that civil society in the India of today would be a good idea.

It would be nice if Rahul learnt some manners from his sister.  

Whether on TV channels or on social media, haranguing and shrill accusations are the order of the day. Communities, families and friendships have been split down the middle. Dialogue and discussion have been replaced by partisan postures, with each side retreating into their respective echo chambers.

e.g. Scroll.in.  

The polarisation of society, probably dormant before 2014,

when a nice Italian lady was running things.  

has come into the open in recent years, with disturbingly large sections of the “educated” majority community “othering” the Muslim community and lumpen groups and the arms of the state harassing the Christian community on the grounds of alleged religious conversion.

It is Hindus who should be othered. Why has 'sanatan dharm' not been banned?  

Governments may change in the future, but the damage to the ruptured social fabric may take far longer to repair.

Nehru should have surrendered to Jinnah. India would now be an Islamic republic.  

Civil society stakeholders – corporate bigwigs, politicians, bureaucrats, academics, media persons, not to mention the large army of WhatsApp uncles and aunties – have enthusiastically espoused the ruling majoritarian ideology.

Because the majority is Hindu. Ramani cries and cries when he remembers this.  

It might be out of blind adoration, bringing to mind Babasaheb Ambedkar’s warning that in politics, bhakti or hero-worship is a sure road to degradation and to eventual dictatorship.

 Assassination tempers autocracy. Three people with the surname Gandhi have been killed. Why not a fourth? 

In many cases, ambition dictates obedience, as well as the apprehension of consequences and/or sheer apathy in the garb of self-interest.

Why do people do things which are in their own interest? Why don't they chop off their own heads and shove them up their rectums? Clearly, it is what Ramani has done.  

Sharjeel Imam should plead insanity

Sharjeel Imam's father was politically quite influential in Bihar. He was associated with Nitish Kumar. Sharjeel didn't want to settle down with an IT or corporate job. He went to JNU to do a PhD. At the time, allying with the Communists and then entering Bihari politics under the auspices of a Leftist party seemed a good way to launch a political career. Academia would provide a safety net. Sharjeel had a deep love and knowledge of Arabic, Persian and Urdu literature- more particularly of a religious type- and thus would make a good Professor specialising in recent Muslim history in the Gangetic plain.

Sadly, Imam's father passed away after a protracted battle with cancer. Sharjeel was bereaved and could not get the spiritual support of his religion from his Commie pals. He got involved in the anti-CAA protests (kaffirs should not be given refuge in India. Let them die or be forcibly converted in Pakistan or Bangladesh) but went a bit crazy and is now in jail. 

 Karvaan India has published a letter by Sharjeel Imam written to a Bengali journalist before the Bengal elections in which the BJP took power from Mamta's TMC.

I excerpt the following

My studies and research on partition have led me, again and again, to the conclusion that the Cabinet Mission Plan of 1946 was the last serious attempt at solving these issues,

This was Maulana Azad's view. It gave the League 'greater Pakistan' after a ten year, no-secession, waiting period. Strangely, kaffirs showed no enthusiasm for having their throats slit in a leisurely fashion by Muslim leaders. 

and that Congress rejected it, which led to partition. Any future solution that brings peace between the communities

This was achieved by ethnic cleansing. Sadly, Sharjeel's family were on the wrong side of the border.  

and nations of South Asia will have to follow the blueprint of the Cabinet Mission Plan,

otherwise Sharjeel will start eating his own shit to protest violation of Constitutionji by kaffir bastids.  

a loose confederation of decentralised nations.

Also, kaffirs should kindly throw away any weapons they might own and chop off their own arms and legs.  

In the short term we need to struggle and agitate for

kaffirs to come to their senses and kill themselves 

four systemic changes necessary for Muslims and other marginalised sections. The first is decentralisation, with power flowing from the bottom upwards and never the other way round.

This is like Maulana Hasrat Mohani's condemnation of the Constitution. He was a founding member of the Indian Communist Party. He doesn't seem to have understood that Communism is an atheistic creed.  

Urban and local bodies should be empowered against the state government, and state governments against the Union Government.

And Sharjeel should be empowered against his jailers.  

This should become a fundamental and sacrosanct feature, so that nobody could convert an autonomous state like J&K into something else.

By killing all kaffirs, we can ensure this outcome. Otherwise, why not eat our own shit to protest against the continued existence of kaffirs? 

The second is proportional representation as the method of elections, with seats according to vote percentage.

Sadly, if kaffirs are left alive, they won't vote in the right way.  

First Past the Post should be abolished, because it is the most undemocratic way of conducting elections and particularly unsuitable for a vast and diverse nation like India

Changing the Constitution is a great idea- for the BJP. They can proclaim a Hindu Rashtra and do to the Muslims what Pakistan has done to kaffirs.  

Nations around the world have been moving from FPTP to PR or mixed systems, among them Germany,

adopting PR doomed the Weimar Republic 

Indonesia, NZ, Türkiye, and even Nepal and Sri Lanka in South Asia.

PR would still be territorial. It isn't a magic wand to turn a minority into a majority.  

According to newspaper reports, Bangladesh is also discussing a switch to PR. Retired Election Commissioner SY Qureishi also spoke of his changed stand on FPTP and PR in his recent book.

Because he is senile. The fact is changing the Constitution at a time when BJP controls 72 percent of the country means entrenching it in power forever. There could be an anti-nepotism bill banning the sons or daughters of PMs and CMs from holding high office.  

The third is reservations for religious minorities in institutions, among them the judiciary, executive and universities, in all branches and departments, with internal quotas for backward and marginalised castes and sections within these religious groups.

BJP will have no difficulty finding stooges of the right religion to fill such quotas.  

The fourth is a democratic mechanism for complete religious autonomy, for example Waqf, which should be handled by an elected Muslim body chosen by Muslims.

& Hindus should have the same rights. The problem is that the majority will take property from the minority.  

These fundamental changes are necessary for all marginalised classes.

The reason they are marginalised is they cant change shit.  

One only needs to check how many seats Mayawati’s BSP would have received in the 2014 or 2024 Lok Sabha (BSP had no MPs), or in the 2017 and 2022 UP assemblies, had their vote percentage been taken into account. In 2014 they were the third largest party in India with 4% of the vote and won zero seats. FPTP suppresses the voice of the marginalised in exactly this way. Bihar in 2025 offers a similar case, where RJD won 38% of the votes and fewer than 15% of the seats.

But, if the Constitution is changed when BJP is powerful, it will entrench itself. Sharjeel should shut his stupid mouth. His lawyer should plead 'diminished capacity' due to bereavement triggering pschosis.  

I have written earlier about my reasons for planning to take part in the Bihar elections of 2025 from Bahadurganj in the Seemanchal region,

where Owaisi's party did well. This cretin should have gone to Osmania not JNU.  

Kaushik Basu's ignorant knowledge curse

 Can knowledge reduce human welfare? That depends on how we define knowledge & welfare. If knowledge means useful information and welfare means utility, then the answer is no.

Kaushik Basu disagrees. 

The knowledge curse: how knowledge can reduce human welfare Kaushik Basu1 and Jörgen Weibull

Greater knowledge is always an advantage for a rational individual.

No. Adequate knowledge is useful. There are diminishing returns to acquiring, storing & accessing information.  

However, this article shows that for a group of rational individuals greater knowledge can backfire, leading to a worse outcome for all.

It is possible that a shared delusion turns out to be useful. But knowledge that such is the case means people can keep the useful behaviour while discarding the delusion- e.g. being good so Santa doesn't put you on his naughty list can lead to good habits which are advantageous even though Santa Claus was locked up long ago for being a creepy pedophile.  

Surprisingly, this can happen even when new knowledge does not mean the discovery of a new action but simply provides a deeper understanding of the interaction at stake. More specifically, enhanced knowledge about the current state of nature may hinder cooperation among purely self-interested individuals. The paper describes this paradoxical possibility—a ‘knowledge curse’—and analyses the evolutionary process that occurs if, initially, only a few people have access to the greater knowledge. It concludes with a tentative comment on ways to avert this potential knowledge backlash

Basu was cursed with stupidity. Fuck does he know about anything useful?  

Consider a two-person world, or a world of many who are matched pairwise and play the Base Game where one player chooses between the rows and the other columns. 

 A B A 53, 53 51, 52 B 52, 51 50, 50

Both go for 53,53.  

The numbers represent expected payoffs that players obtain, with the row player’s payoff listed first and the column player’s listed second, for each of the four strategy combinations. Thus, if player 1 chooses A and 2 chooses B, 1 gets an expected payoff of 51 and 2 an expected payoff of 52. There may be variations in payoffs, but since they do not know when and why the variations occur there is not much they can do about this. It is natural that players will settle into using the strictly dominant strategy A, which gives a higher expected payoff than strategy B, irrespective of what strategy the other player uses. As a consequence, they get an expected payoff of 53 each. The assertion in §1, that the discovery of a new action can cause everybody’s welfare to drop can be illustrated with a simple example. Suppose that, in addition to actions A and B, there is discovery of a new action, C. Here is the Expanded Base Game, with action C for each player added in: A B C A 53, 53 51, 52 0, 55 B 52, 51 50, 50 0, 54 C 55, 0 54, 0 1, 1

Knowledge has decreased because there is greater uncertainty. The Muth rational solution (i.e. one which assumes people use the correct economic theory) remains the same. 

New knowledge of one type may reduce knowledge of another type. In this case, knowledge about what the other will do falls while some other sort of knowledge rises.  

What happens after this scientific advance? Both players will now choose their dominant strategy C and they will end up with a payoff of 1 each. There is, however, no surprise in this. The new action has converted the game into an extended Prisoner’s Dilemma.

It may do. It may not. What matters is whether C has changed the likelihood of some D, E, F etc.  

What would be surprising is welfare collapsing with the advance of science even without the discovery of any new action.

Not really.  Ecclesiastes 1:18 states, "For with much wisdom comes much sorrow; the more knowledge, the more grief". The idiot is perfectly happy. The savant is a miserable fuck. 

This counter-intuitive possibility is the focus of the present study. To examine it, consider a scientific advance. A Galileo Galilei comes along and discovers that if the moon is in phase 1, the game that humans play is the Phase-1 Game given below A B A 4, 4 101, 1 B 1, 101 98, 98

If so, there is no impredicativity or interdependence. But, in that case, there is no game.  

That is, if the moon is in phase 1 and the two players choose action A, they will get payoff 4 each. And so on. Strategy A is still strictly dominant. Galilei also discovers that if the moon is in phase 2, then the game that humans play is the following Phase-2 Game : A B A 102, 102 1, 103 B 103, 1 2, 2 In this phase, strategy A is strictly dominated by strategy B, and if both players use this strategy, they each receive payoff 2. Now note that the expected payoffs, when both phases of the moon are equally likely, are the ones given in the Base Game payoff bimatrix. That is, if, for instance, both choose A, each will half the time (when the moon is in phase 1) get 4 and half the time (phase 2) get 102, which makes for an expected payoff of 53. Once the knowledge of the scientific breakthrough spreads through society, human income drops to an expected level of 3, the average of payoff 4 in phase 1 and payoff 2 in phase 2. This calamitous collapse, from 53 to 3, is brought about simply by the advance of knowledge.

No. It is brought about by the manner in which the game has been rigged. The fact is, Galileo's discover stuff which has endless applications in all sorts of fields. True, a particular 'coordination game' may be adversely affected but there is a bigger payoff for some other reason. Thus, discovering that the earth goes round the Sun may reduce Religious Faith which in turn causes more people to tell lies, but it may also lead to greater astronomical knowledge permitting mariners to cross great oceans and discover new continents.  

It is not our claim that this will always happen, but the fact that it can is alarming enough.

It really isn't. We get that Science can undermine religious fate- if people think they are descended from monkeys, they might rob and rape and grab my bananas- but science can make our lives less 'nasty, brutish & short'.  

There is a lot of writing about the existential risks that human society faces. However, we tend to associate such risks with human folly, irrationality and lack of knowledge.

Religious people may say it is because people no longer fear that the Devil will fuck them in the ass 

What is summed up in the above parable is that in some interactions, perverse outcomes can be the result of science and rationality.

Only by an arbitrary ipse dixit assertion. 

Game theory is all very well if the payoff matrix is accurately known but, because of Knightian Uncertainty and impredicativity, it never is.  

Justice Deepak Gupta on Umar Khalid

In January, the Supreme Court refused to give bail to Umar Khalid & Sharjeel Imam. Why?

 According to the prosecution, the conspiracy culminated in the deliberate incitement of widespread communal violence on and around 22nd, 23rd, and 24th February 2020. The acts allegedly committed during this period were not spontaneous but were the outcome of coordinated efforts to inflame tensions, mobilise crowds, and execute violent actions across various parts of Delhi. 13. The riots are stated to have resulted in grave consequences, including the loss of 54 lives, among them a senior police officer and an Intelligence Bureau official, as well as grievous injuries to several police personnel and civilians. In addition, extensive damage was caused to over 1,500 public and private properties, alongside substantial intangible harm to public order, social harmony, and the nation at large.

In other words, prima facie, both men were ringleaders of a conspiracy which falls squarely under the rubric of the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act. No bail can be granted.

A former Supreme Court Judge, Deepak Gupta, has written an article in the Tribune which is summarised as follows by Maktoob media.

Former Supreme Court judge Justice Deepak Gupta criticised the judiciary’s failure to protect individual liberty, citing rights activist Umar Khalid’s prolonged incarceration and the Elgar Parishad case, and said “the process has become the punishment” as people are labelled “anti-nationals” and their lives ruined.

The alternative would be to let the majority community slaughter the minority community in the name of 'individual liberty'.  

He questioned why, “if the allegations were as serious as claimed,” the prosecution had not shown the same urgency in starting the trial.

Because the troublemakers were already in jail. The problem with UAPA is that bail is not given if there is a prima facie case- i.e. the prosecution's claim is plausible.  

Gupta said that “the process has become the punishment”, arguing that people are condemned and their lives ruined by being labelled “anti-nationals”, while courts have failed to protect their fundamental rights.

Both Umar Khalid and Sharjeel Imam want India to give up Kashmir. This is secessionism and is 'anti-national'. It is criminalised by Section 152 of the BNS (Indian Penal Code). There is no 'fundamental right' to acting in a way which  "endangers the sovereignty, unity, and integrity of India." It explicitly criminalizes anyone who purposely or knowingly excites or attempts to excite secession, armed rebellion, or subversive activities, or encourages feelings of separatist activities. [1, 2]

Writing in The Tribune in an article titled “The True Meaning of Freedom”, Gupta argued that independence is not merely freedom from foreign rule but also means that citizens should be able to “think and speak without fear”, express dissent and receive equal treatment regardless of caste or religion.

Is Gupta calling for the repeal of section 152 as well as the UAPA? Does he deny the freedom of the elected legislature to make laws which punish secessionist activities more particularly of a violent type? 

That may be the true meaning of freedom for Gupta. Yet he chose to remain in India where no such thing has ever obtained. 

He said India can be truly independent only when it gets rid of “corruption, bias, bigotry and intolerance.”

In other words, no country is truly independent. Sadly, even in Heaven, you aren't allowed to tell God to go fuck himself.  

Having spent almost half a century in the legal profession, Gupta said he was focusing on the legal fraternity and stressed that “no country can claim to be independent unless it has an independent and fearless judiciary.”

Nonsense! China is independent. It does not have an 'independent and fearless judiciary'.  

He said this requires judges with integrity, intellect and “a spine,” the strength to stand up for justice and the courage to fight injustice while acting “without fear or favour.”

They must follow the law. They can't do anything they like. Otherwise they will be ignored or disintermediated.  

Gupta said constitutional courts, including the Supreme Court and High Courts, are not merely arbiters of disputes but are also responsible for protecting and upholding citizens’ fundamental rights.

They can order a particular party to provide a remedy. But if that party can ignore the court with impunity, the Bench can merely express its sorrow. Judges don't have magical powers.  

He said that, sadly, constitutional courts in recent years had not shown the “requisite sensitivity or strength” in doing so.

He was a useless piece of shit. That's true enough.  

He specifically referred to the right to liberty under Article 21, saying that this right is being violated “with impunity” and that courts in many cases have become “mute spectators.”

Because Judges don't have magical power. Also, in a constitutional bench, every judge has just one vote. Even the CJI can't override the votes of his brother judges.  

He recalled Justice H.R. Khanna’s dissent in the ADM Jabalpur case, in which Khanna held that even during an Emergency, citizens could not be deprived of fundamental rights except according to the procedure established by law.

Yet that is exactly what happened. The fact is, if there was an insurgency or serious law & order problem, the judiciary turned a blind eye to extra-judicial killing on an industrial scale.  

Gupta then addressed the issue of bail and prolonged pre-trial detention.

While “bail, not jail, is the rule” is a frequently cited legal principle, he said that in practice “jail, not bail” has become the rule.

For poorer people who can't afford lawyers.  

He noted that about 75% of people behind bars are undertrials, compared with about 24% who are convicts, and said it was shocking that there are three undertrials for every convicted person.

The judiciary has refused to reform itself. Some High Courts have introduced case management rules but the problem of adjournments remains. Senior advocates have a cozy relationship with judges. The system is run for their benefit such that cases are prolonged and more and more 'repeat fees' are collected.  

Against this backdrop, Gupta highlighted the case of Umar Khalid, writing, “Umar Khalid has been behind bars for more than six years and the trial has not even started.

His lawyers asked for adjournments on three occassions for personal reasons. Also, Khalid put in different pleas at different times.  

What about his right to liberty? What about his right to speedy trial?”

The Supreme Court did read in such a right in Hussainara Khatoon v. State of Bihar (1979). But you have to have an independent Case Management service in the Courts to ensure that there is a well defined time-table for every case. 

Gupta noted that the Supreme Court, in a later decision, had itself questioned the validity of the judgment in Umar Khalid’s case.

But they didn't give him bail.  

He went on to cite the Elgar Parishad case, noting that the accused had remained behind bars for years and that one had died in jail, while the trial had still not begun eight years after the incident.

When police officers are killed or injured, some useless idiot or the other will be made a scapegoat.  

He questioned why, if the allegations were as serious as claimed, the prosecution had not shown the same urgency in commencing the trial.

It is the defence who should show urgency.  

Gupta said that “the process has become the punishment”, arguing that people are condemned and their lives ruined by being labelled “anti-nationals”, while courts have failed to protect their fundamental rights.

Nationalists outnumber anti-nationals. If everybody gets 'true' liberty', the minority will be slaughtered.  

He also discussed the detention of Sonam Wangchuk, criticising the Supreme Court’s repeated adjournments in the habeas corpus proceedings.

Wangchuk was released within 6 months.  

Gupta argued that petitions concerning personal liberty must be decided at the earliest

In which case, the majority can do what it likes. The minority will get slaughtered. You pick up the ring-leader and he gets bail in a couple of days and can take revenge to his heart's content.  

and said the court should have determined whether Wangchuk’s detention was legal, even after the detention order was withdrawn

Preventive detention is legal in India and is explicitly authorized under Article 22 of the Constitution of India. 

Gupta also expressed concern about what he described as majoritarianism within the judiciary.

& the legislature & the country at large. That is why a small number of British people are no longer ruling India. Sad.  

He wrote that while democracy is based on majority rule, majoritarianism, where the voice of the other side is not heard, is “anathema to democracy”,

No. It is intrinsic to it.  

and said that “courts at all levels are moving towards majoritarianism.”

Because India became independent and the Hindu majority took over the country.  

He cited the Ram Janmabhoomi and Gyanvapi cases in this context and said the latter had opened the “floodgates of litigation” that could affect relations between communities.

He forgets that millions died or were displaced because of Partition. Some silly people pretended that Hindus were sweet and nice. Only Muslims went in for killing. The evidence is that all communities can do ethnic cleansing. 

He described the decision as one taken to “appease the majority.”

The alternative is to let the majority run amok.  

Gupta also contrasted the treatment of people from different communities in bail matters, writing that members of one community who consumed chicken in a boat on the Ganga were denied bail for months, while members of the majority community who consumed liquor on the same river were granted bail within hours.

Gupta weeps to recall that Hindus are the majority in India. 

He noted that such treatment was not the justice, liberty, equality or fraternity guaranteed by the Constitution.

True liberty would involve letting the majority slaughter the minority.  

He defended the right to dissent and peaceful protest, saying criticism of the government and its policies is an essential part of democracy.

When it is done by the leader of the Opposition- sure. Not when it is done by crazy kids.  

“The government is not the country,” he wrote,

Nor is the Bench.  

adding that the nation is above the executive, legislature and judiciary.

In which case, the majority should be permitted to slaughter the minority.  

Gupta also criticised the collegium system for judicial appointments, calling it “totally opaque” and saying important decisions are taken without sufficient explanation.

Fair point. Let the Government appoint judges.  

He raised concerns about the social composition of the higher judiciary, noting that many recent Supreme Court and High Court appointments were from upper-caste backgrounds and arguing that the Supreme Court should have representation from all sections of society.

We need more illiterate judges.  

Concluding his article, Gupta said that although the vast majority of judges are people of integrity, “the number of black sheep is increasing”

They were numerous enough in the Nineties.  

and called for introspection at the highest levels of the judiciary to restore public trust. He warned that if people lose faith in the judiciary, it could become irrelevant and “sound the death knell for a democratic India.”

No. Democracy just means that those who win elections get to rule. A Monarchy or One Party State may have a very good, wholly independent, Judiciary.  

“Where there is no democracy, the people can never be free or independent,” he said.

Nonsense! Enlightened Despotisms or Oligarchies often have more economic freedoms and better minority protection.  

What will happen next in the Umar Khalid/Sharjeel case?

The Supreme Court denied bail but made the following observations-

Before we conclude, it bears reiteration that a principle lies at the heart of constitutional adjudication in matters of this nature. 

That principle isn't what Gupta says it is. 

The Constitution guarantees personal liberty, but it does not conceive liberty as an isolated or absolute entitlement, detached from the security of the society in which it operates. The sovereignty, integrity, and security of the nation, as well as the preservation of public order, are not abstract concerns rather they are constitutional values which Parliament is entitled to protect through law. Where a special statutory framework has been enacted to address offences perceived to strike at these foundations,courts are duty-bound to give effect to that framework, subject always to constitutional discipline.

437. In the application of such law, the Court does not proceed on identity, ideology, belief, or association. It proceeds on role, material, and the statutory threshold governing the exercise of jurisdiction. Criminal law does not mandate identical outcomes merely because allegations arise from the same transaction.


Those alleged to have conceived, directed, or steered unlawful activity or terrorist activity stand on a different legal footing from those whose alleged involvement is confined to facilitation or participation at a different level. To disregard such distinctions would itself result in arbitrariness.

438. The present decision reflects this constitutional method. It neither endorses the prosecution case nor prejudges the guilt of any accused. It applies the law as it stands, recognising that individual liberty must be protected, but that it must also withstand the legitimate demands of national security and collective safety.

This balance is not a matter of preference rather it is a matter of constitutional duty.

439. Before parting, it is necessary to reiterate the limited nature of the present determination. The Court has not examined the merits of the prosecution case beyond the confines mandated at the stage of consideration of an application seeking bail, nor has it expressed any opinion on the ultimate culpability of any of the accused. All observations are confined to the material presently on record and to the statutory and constitutional standards governing pre-trial liberty under a special enactment.

440. Having regard to the nature of the prosecution and the period of incarceration already undergone, it is considered appropriate to direct that the Trial Court shall proceed with the matter with due expedition and shall endeavour to ensure that the examination of witnesses, particularly the protected witnesses relied upon by the prosecution, is taken up and carried forward without delay.

441. The prosecution shall take all necessary steps to secure the presence of its witnesses on the dates fixed and the parties shall refrain from seeking adjournments except for reasons which are unavoidable. The Trial Court shall be at liberty to regulate the proceedings in accordance with law so as to ensure that the trial is not unnecessarily prolonged, while at the same time safeguarding the rights of all parties.

This is perfectly reasonable. Why has Deepak Gupta got his knickers in a twist? Perhaps he believes the political tide is shifting away from the BJP. Might a future Congress led coalition reward him in some suitable manner? 

The NYT wrong about cockroaches

Lydia Polgreen, an NYT journalist, says she has seen things in India which 'should scare Modi'. Modi knows India better than her. Why is he not scared? The answer is that his party has won West Bengal and Delhi and looks set to retain UP. His party rules 72 percent of the country and is likely to get a fourth term. 

Currently, there is an agitation in India about 'vote chori'- votes being stolen. Sadly, Modi hasn't allowed crazy rioters to invade the Indian equivalent of Capitol Hill. No doubt Lydia felt Biden was very authoritarian for wanting to punish those nutters. 

Narendra Modi, the barrel-chested strongman leader of India for the past dozen years, has finally met his match

Yogi? If Adityanath wins UP for a third time, he will be seen as Modi's natural successor.  

— and it looks a lot like Mohini Majumdar.

a Bengali. The BJP just won West Bengal. 

Just 20 years old, slender and voluble, Majumdar is an English student at Delhi University:

she may want to become a journalist. Maybe she can earn some money writing or podcasting about the 'cockroach' agitation. 

an unlikely antagonist for an omnipotent autocrat.

Rahul Gandhi is the antagonist. The truth is, Rahul's cowardice and stupidity is what keeps Modi in power.

Yet early on Oct. 10, she shared an early morning taxi to the center of Delhi with a gaggle of classmates. Dressed casually in flowing cotton and sensible shoes, Majumdar and her friends could just as easily have been on their way to a stroll in one of this city’s splendid gardens. But their plan, she told me, was to march across the street to a place called Jantar Mantar, a historic monument at the center of Delhi that has for decades served as a designated ground for protest.

It has been denotified. Sad.  

They had been there before, over the summer, joining thousands of other young people in raucous, meme-driven protests after a leaked paper led to the cancellation of a college entrance exam. Eventually, under the banner of the upstart Cockroach Janata Party, they forced the resignation of India’s education minister. It was the first time Modi’s government had dismissed a top official under pressure from public protests.

Modi does get rid of underperforming Ministers but he does it in a polite manner. The rumour is that he Minister who resigned was eager to return to Orissa which the BJP has won recently.  

Now, they were back for an even bigger fish: Modi’s handpicked chief election commissioner, who had overseen the deletion of more than 130 million people from the country’s voter rolls in a murky process that threatened to undermine faith in the voting process in the world’s largest democracy. “These kinds of protests really prove that you should be political, and everything is political in our life,” Majumdar told me as she waited for the march to begin.

The allegation is that the CEC is targetting Muslim illegal migrants. Sadly, this is popular with the Hindu majority.  

She never did get to march that day. A few minutes after I spoke with her and her friends, a column of police officers decked out in camouflage descended on the students, manhandling them into a waiting bus. The officers drove them 40 minutes north of the city center and held them in a police station until after dark, eventually letting the women go; only when they refused to leave did the officers also release the men.

Macron must be wishing he could deal with his revolting students in the same way.  

So great was the threat these students presented to Modi’s rule that his government reportedly deployed over 50,000 security personnel to the streets, shut down dozens of metro stations, blocked long-distance trains from arriving in Delhi and threw up yellow steel barricades across the capital, leaving its usually teeming streets eerily deserted.

India is a 'hard' state with enormous state capacity. So far the police and paramiltary has used kid gloves. But they will enjoy killing cockroaches all the more when the time comes.  

Majumdar was one of thousands of people detained that day by the authorities in an all-out attempt to quash the protest.

Which was in fact quashed. Rahul Gandhi's agitation is a different matter. The BJP hopes it will backfire and lead to 'Hindu consolidation'.  

Despite these efforts, Modi appears more vulnerable than at any time since he was first elected prime minister.

He looked vulnerable in 2024 when BJP lost its majority. His ally- Nitish Kumar- was notoriously unreliable. Then we realised that if a second election were held, the BJP would win by a landslide. Thus it was and is in nobody's interest to topple him.  

Young people like Majumdar, educated, middle-class and Hindu — the children of a generation that rocketed him to power — are in open revolt, incensed by the government’s derogation of education and democracy.

No. Youth is in revolt in France and young people did bring down Governments in Sri Lanka, Nepal & Bangladesh. But Modi can only be brought down by electoral defeat. The problem is that the Opposition are likely to split up and thus fresh elections will be called which the BJP will win.  

Willing to risk detention and the baton blows of the feared lathi, they are setting out to make Modi, who has carefully managed his image as a civilizational figure who will lift India into glory, an object of fun. Majumdar, undeterred by her detention, joined another protest the very next day.

Modi's personal popularity isn't enough for his party to win elections. Candidate selection & booth management remain vital.  The problem with making fun of Modi is that Rahul is far more ridiculous. His sister, on the other hand, is dignified.

For Modi, it is a stunning turnabout.

No. It is like the anti-CAA protest. Congress comes across as depending on a Muslim vote-bank. This helps the BJP consolidate the Hindu vote.  

For over a decade, his rule seemed durable and unshakable. His rise to power, initially inconceivable and then inevitable, was a foretaste of the world to come. Before Brexit blew apart Britain, before Donald Trump ascended to the American presidency, before an influx of Syrian refugees turned European politics rightward, Modi led the world’s largest democracy toward a vision of nationalist, right-wing populism, promising a civilizational restoration.

Nonsense! Modi promised better governance and 'last mile delivery'. His first big speech after becoming PM had to do with ensuring all rural households had an indoor toilet. Open defecation was unhealthy and put women at risk.  

To be fair, all parties have realised that universal benefits and last mile delivery are the only thing which matters when it comes to winning elections. What is important is credibility. 

Today, India is once again in the vanguard — this time leading, perhaps, in the opposite direction.

 The BJP will stay in power even if doesn't get a majority. As the biggest party, it may give 'outside support' to evanescent coalitions with a view to convincing the voters that it and it alone can provide stable government. Unlike the dynastic Congress, where assassination tempered autocracy, killing a BJP PM won't change anything because there are plenty more like him who can do the job just as well. 

As Modi has consolidated his power over this vast nation and its sprawling state apparatus, many Indians have grown weary of the bargain he has offered: growth and national prosperity in return for a hardening authoritarianism.

Why is Modi not letting young people burn down Delhi?  

Beset as Modi is by crises within and without, his iron grip on power is clanging against the steel of India’s messy democracy.

This crazy lady spoke to one Bengali girl. She hasn't even mentioned Rahul Gandhi, Mamta Bannerjee, Akhilesh Yadav or anyone else who matters in Indian politics. 

Indian democracy isn't 'messy'. It is well organised. Unlike the US, there is an independent Election Commission. Sadly, it does delete the names of dead people from the voter rolls and this can cancel out the advantage of an incumbent State government. But that is what the Law requires.  

As governments struggle and discontent flourishes worldwide, the country offers a lesson for us all.

Have an independent Election Commission. Quash crazy protests before they turn violent. 

When I moved to India as a correspondent for The New York Times in 2009, I discovered a place

run by a nice Italian lady. That's true Democracy- right?  

brimming with optimism and ripe with possibility. Fresh off an election victory, the Congress Party formed a sturdy coalition government led by Manmohan Singh, a soft-spoken, teetotal technocrat with a Ph.D. in economics.

He had no power. Sad.  

Unfettered by its most irksome left-wing coalition partners,

Manmohan had done a nuclear deal with the US. Nothing came of it.  

his government would be free to make deep reforms and get India’s economy soaring.

It was already doing well. The Wall Street Crash didn't have much effect. Sadly, Manmohan wasn't permitted to do fundamental reform of labour and land laws.  

It didn’t work out that way. Indians saw their dreams of prosperity founder in the wake of the global financial crisis,

The economy had fully recovered by 2010. 

while their government was snarled in scandals of grubby self-dealing.

There was a lot of corruption. Also different Cabinet Ministers ignored the PM and pursued their own policies.  

An anti-corruption protest movement sprang up, expressive of deep discontent that Modi’s right-wing Hindu nationalist party rode to power. Modi pointed to the prosperous state he governed, Gujarat, and promised to do the same for the rest of India.

The anti-corruption movement morphed into the 'Common Man party' which still rules Punjab. It lost Delhi because of corruption and in-fighting. Two of the 'Cockroach' founders worked for that Party before it imploded. That is why there is media interest in them.  

Abstemious and devout, Modi offered himself up as a servant leader with no personal interests to pursue beyond the uplift of the nation.

Manmohan was equally clean. But he had no power.  

For many Hindus, his assertion of Hindu pride and even supremacy proved enticing. That he allegedly stood by idly as hundreds of Muslims died in religious riots in the state he governed in 2002 — his role in this tragedy led the United States to deny him entry for nine years

because they wanted to please the ruling party 

— was mostly ignored by the public.

Modi's reputation for killing Muslims helps him win elections in a Hindu nation which hates Islam and is frequently at war with Pakistan.  

One of the voters who rolled the dice on Modi was a man named Surender Kumar. I met him outside a popular market in Delhi, where he was waiting for passengers in his motorized rickshaw. Back in 2014, he was angry about corruption and thought it was time for a change. He cast his ballot, with some hesitation, for Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party. But a dozen years on, he is disappointed. “The government came with certain kinds of promises during the elections, and none of them we see right now,” he told me. “Just to protect kingmakers in the government, they are letting kids be beaten.”

 Kids should be allowed to burn buses. That way there will be higher income for rickshaw drivers. 

Though Kumar’s parents had been penniless manual laborers, he managed to leave their world of physical toil behind. Driving his rickshaw could net him between $200 and $300 a month, before expenses, a decent working-class living. But his son and daughter, growing into adulthood during Modi’s tenure, haven’t been able to make a similar leap.

Delhi was ruled by Congress & then the Common Man party. It has come under BJP rule only recently.

Kumar could not afford private school or tutoring classes for them, so neither made it to college. His daughter studied cosmetology and opened a small beauty salon, but has struggled to make a go of it. His son works at McDonald’s, earning what his father describes as pocket change. Inflation eats away at his own earnings: The price of the natural gas that fuels his rickshaw has more than doubled, he told me. “You can’t name a thing which has retained its price,” he said. “Rice, cooking oil, mustard oil, cooking cylinders.”

The cost of living does matter- as Trump well knows. Charges of 'authoritarianism' don't matter. It's just a type of pear-clutching old maids indulge in.  

Further up the economic ladder, among the middle-class Hindu families that make up many of Modi’s most fervent supporters, the struggle to provide economic advancement for the next generation is both all-consuming and increasingly uncertain.

Hormuz is hurting everybody.  

In a sprawling, tree-filled apartment complex at the northern edge of Delhi, Shivani Sharma, a teacher, described a life that revolved around a singular goal: getting her 17-year-old daughter, Sanskriti, into a good public university and launched into a well-paying career. This has involved expensive private schools and costly tutoring sessions to sharpen her math and science skills in preparation for the relentless battery of highly competitive government-administered entrance exams.

Higher caste people- like Shivani, want an end to Reservations. That is the real elephant in the room. Young people feel they are being unfairly treated just because of their ancestry. It may be that in 2030, reservations are not renewed. Much depends on the outcome of the caste census.  

“You have to have a very good score,” Sharma said. “Only then you can get entry into the Delhi University,” the prestigious school where she had gotten her bachelor’s degree in the 1990s.

Why not mention that Sharma wants the Government to get rid of reservations so that her meritorious daughter can get into a good College? 

For middle-class families, admission to a good public university is akin to a lottery ticket — the tuition is low and the credential confers real prestige. If Sanskriti does not make the cut, the family may have to come up with upward of $15,000 per year to pay for a private college. As it is, they struggle to keep up with her current educational expenses. In addition to running a school with her husband, Sharma earns extra money by tutoring children in the neighborhood. Her husband has a part-time job in a clothing showroom.


“We live simply,” she told me. “We don’t take international tours. We don’t wear expensive clothes. We don’t spend money here and there. We try to save money for our daughter’s education.” Sharma grew up in a big family, with five sisters and a brother. Yet none of her siblings has more than two children, she said. “We didn’t opt for the second child because I knew it’s very expensive and it’s very difficult to raise both the children and give them a good lifestyle and good education,” she told me.

Given the stakes, the leaked exam paper — expressive of deep corruption in the education system — rattled Sharma. “Some children committed suicide,” she said. “Only insiders can leak the paper. Who else can leak the paper? It’s a lot of corruption.”

It was a mistake for the Central Govt. to take control of such a big exam. Even if there was a leak in one place, only kids in that area should have been asked to re-sit the exam. To make everybody do it was utterly foolish.  

Even a bachelor’s degree from a prestigious college is no guarantee in a country where graduate unemployment is at nearly 40 percent for those ages 15 to 29 and starting salaries are abysmally low. Food delivery drivers often earn more than entry-level tech workers with engineering degrees. To improve Sanskriti’s chances in life, Sharma said they are considering sending her abroad for a master’s degree. That would probably cost $100,000, an unfathomable sum that would require them to go into debt.

There is increasing anger at the reservations policy. Some said that this contributed to the rise of the BJP after the Mandal report (i.e. extension of reservations to Educationally Backward castes). In UP, Akhilesh is backing reservations based on population share but we won't know what that is till the caste census is completed. 

Young people across the country increasingly see this as a fool’s bargain, a debt-filled dead end. And they are not afraid to say so, loudly and publicly. Aditi (she goes by one name), the 29-year-old president of the students’ union at Jawaharlal Nehru University,

She belongs to a Maoist party.  

is emblematic. Her parents are stalwart supporters of the B.J.P. But like many members of Gen Z, she rejects the empty promises of Hindu nationalism.

Because she is a Commie embedded in the Left/Liberal eco-system.  

“People have gotten bored with Modi’s narrative,” she told me. “Young people have tasted blood.”

Maoists used to make a point of drinking the blood of 'class enemies'.  

Modi’s government has faced down discontent before. In 2019, a new citizenship law that targeted Muslims

It didn't. It confirmed that non-Muslims fleeing Islamic persecution would continue to receive assylum and a path to citizenship in India.  

was rightly seen as an affront to India’s foundational ideal of secularism, enshrined in its constitution. But Modi was mostly able to wave that away as minority special pleading. Protests the next year by farmers, heavily drawn from India’s Sikh minority, could be dismissed as separatist agitation, even as the government mostly ceded to the farmers’ demands.

Farmers matter. Cockroaches don't.

But this time, the protests have been driven in part by the concerns of the aspirational Hindu families that are the bedrock of Modi’s coalition.

No. Aspirational Hindus want reservations to end & lower taxes on the urban middle class.  

For many of these Indians, it may have been possible to ignore the ugly aspects of Modi’s rule, indeed to retreat from politics altogether

doing politics used to mean asking nice Italian lady if she would like some pasta 

and focus on building futures for themselves and their children. But many are realizing that all their hard work can be scuppered by a purloined exam answer sheet; by the devaluation of college degrees, which command little premium in an oversupplied labor market; and by a compromised election commission that could silence their most fundamental individual choice in a country of over 1.4 billion people.

All this has been happening for decades. What is new is the threat to IT jobs from AI.  

Modi’s centralization — the very thing that seemed destined to consolidate his power — has become a booby trap.

Modi used to be a Chief Minister. He knows that each State has to pursue its own policies. You can't have micro-management from the Centre. One problem is that the BJP is over-reliant on bureaucrats with an inflated reputation for efficiency.  

He captured and muzzled the mainstream press, especially television news,

the mainstream media need advertising revenue which in turn depends on market share. If people are switching to your rival because of the political line that you take, you may consider moderating your stance.  

only for an enormous ecosystem of independent and influential journalists to rise up on YouTube and Instagram.

This has happened all over the world.  

He centralized the process of college examinations, leaving him no one else to blame when evidence of systemic leaking of exam papers emerged.

The thing was mishandled. Only a small number of students should have been asked to resit the paper. 

His control over the election commission has left him with few options when faced with difficult questions over deleted voters.

He has no control over them. It is the Supreme Court which will decide if they did something wrong. The Bench may ask Parliament to form a committee with a view to improving procedures.  

Modi has also discovered that despite his efforts to project global leadership, his power quickly fades at the water’s edge.

Modi isn't crazy. He knows that India is only a regional power. Still, it is partnering with different countries for different purposes. 

After promising to elevate India to great-power status,

Modi knows that voters don't care about this. 

he has found himself stuck, subject to the mundane gravity of global events over which he has little control. He has suffered a series of embarrassments on the world stage, especially at the hands of the Trump administration.

Trump has embarassed everybody. So what? Indians don't give a fuck about him.  

What’s more, the pressure valve of migration is tightening. On the upper end of society, the dream of sending a child abroad, especially to the United States, is dying. On the lower end, uncertainty in the Persian Gulf is making migrant labor there a shakier proposition too. For a country that is the world’s largest receiver of remittances, amounting to roughly 4 percent of gross domestic product, that’s a big problem. That’s before you consider rising prices for fuel and tariffs on exports.

Economic problems are of great importance. Whom do voters think will be better at dealing with them? Currently, it is the BJP because the Opposition is disunitied & Rahul is a retard. 

There will be no sudden fall for Modi. Though leaders in neighboring South Asian countries like Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka have been swept aside by youth uprisings, there is little chance of that happening here.

Which is why the cockroach protests were utterly insignificant.  

India may seem like a chaotic and cacophonous place, and in many ways it is. Yet India’s government has always changed through the orderly process of elections, and Modi will not face the national electorate again until 2029.

What really matters is the UP election in March 2027.  

But something profound has shifted. Modi’s aura of omnipotence and serene competence has been shattered.

in 2024 when he lost his majority. But since then his party has gained West Bengal & Delhi & Orissa.  

The protests have transformed his main challenger, Rahul Gandhi of the Congress Party, as well. They have given him the chance to shed his image as the pampered and ineffectual scion of a storied political dynasty. The political landscape, settled for so long, is suddenly altered.

The BJP hopes that Rahul will come across as relying on a Muslim votebank. Interestingly, Owaisi- the ambitious leader of a Muslim party- is staying away from 'vote chori' allegations. Why? Hindus will vote for the BJP if they think it really is getting rid of Muslims on the electoral roll. 

India’s democracy has always been improbable.

It was dynastic till assassination tempered autocracy.  

It is a society of boggling diversity and deep divides of religion, ethnicity and caste. Inequality, always pervasive, has deepened as the country has grown richer in ragged, uneven ways. And yet its constitutional democracy has endured, with the brief exception of Indira Gandhi’s emergency rule, since its independence from Britain nearly eight decades ago.

Indira realised that her son's pals would arrange a nice 'accident' for her. The problem with being the Emperor of Delhi, is that your kids will try to kill you to grab the throne. That's why Indira held elections- though she didn't expect to lose them by such a big margin. Fortunately, the Oppposition was deeply divided and thus she returned to power with a full majority within three years.  

It is telling that this unexpected challenge to Modi’s power was catalyzed by affronts to two fundamental features of Indian democracy.

India always had a problem of 'booth capture'. Reforms in the Nineties tackled the problem but in places like Mamta's West Bengal it requried massive presence of police from other states to curb the power of the criminals who controlled the voting booths.  

As the political scientist Pratap Bhanu Mehta

who is utterly useless 

explained to me, taking exams and voting in elections are perhaps the two most important pillars of individual agency in India.

I can't recall a time when the newspapers weren't filled with stories of leaked question papers & booth capturing. Indeed, people weren't even bothering to cheat. They just bought degree certificates. That's how you ended up with illiterate teachers in Government Schools.  

Each contains the possibility of self-actualization, something that can seem nearly impossible in a country that is simultaneously so multitudinous and so hierarchical.

meaningless jibber-jabber. At one time, people thought Mehta might be a proper political scientist commissioning surveys and analysing voting data. He preferred to babble nonsense about how he lurved Lord Rama- who is everywhere and thus ought not to have any Temples. 

Exams hold the promise that anyone from anywhere, with enough hard work, can improve his or her station in life.

Unless there are resrvations and quotas. India has plenty of Jason Arday type Professors.  

Even more fundamental, if diffuse, is the individual franchise, which carries the notion that each citizen has an equal role in choosing who governs India.

Nope. The majority gets to fuck over the minority. India broke apart after the 1946 election. Pakistan broke apart after its first General Election.  

These two pillars, Mehta told me, are “the self-conscious revolt against caste, kinship, religion.”

Which expresses itself as Dynastic parties based on a particular sub-caste.  

This is perhaps why copies of the Indian Constitution have figured so prominently in the protests, along with images of its main architect, Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar.

Everyone wants the Dalit vote.  But Ambedkar wanted a sunset clause on reservations. Maybe they won't be renewed in 2030. 

It is easy to harbor romantic notions about Indian democracy.

it became dynastic. A nice Italian lady was appointing its Election Commissioners 21 years ago. What was her qualification for running the country? The answer is she was the Queen Regent for, the moon-calf, Rahul.  

It is a project never before attempted in human history — for so many people with so much diversity to live together by common assent, under a written constitution that guarantees rights for all.

The Brits had started holding general elections in 1923. India was way bigger (it contained Burma, Pakistan & Bangladesh) back then. What nobody expected was that the House of Nehru would replace the House of Windsor.  

For the past 12 years, India has engaged in a different experiment, one all too willing to brush aside the unfulfilled aspirations of the Constitution in the name of material progress and Hindu pride.

Rahul refused to step up to the plate. He had torn up Manmohan's ordinance but refused to replace that Prone Minister. It was a case of 'Modi or nobody'.  

But a new generation of Indians has risen up,

they have voted the BJP to power in West Bengal, Delhi, & Orissa.  

insisting that the price of that trade is far too high. Armed only with witty slogans

two of the leaders did Masters degrees abroad. They have returned to India in the hope of making money as independent political strategists or Social Media influencers.  

and astonishing bravery, these young people have revived their country’s glorious tradition of nonviolent dissent.

Will the Cockroach party win elections in the same manner as the Common Man party? No. Still, some of the people involved may make a lot of money.  

As peers from Paris to Tirana, Milan to Madrid, take to the streets demanding radical change, they would do well to look to Delhi as a guide.

What they will see is that Modi easily crushed stupid kids. In India, only elections matter. The State has enormous reserves of coercive power. The Brits crushed the Freedom Movement easily enough. Indira crushed the opposition easily enough. Still, Indian politicians like fighting elections because the thing is an addictive competitive sport.