Sarat's Devdas killed

This Night having been more desiccating than any noon-tide Day

Upon thyVulva's Eye-petal dew's uncertain spray

Devdas found his owl illiterate Parvati

& such Brahmanism as is Sterility. 

Why was the Second Five Year Plan such a disaster?

Around Christmas, in 1954, Nehru visited the ISI campus. He made the following note-

I have been to the Indian Statistical Institute today and spent about two and a half hours there. I met all the foreign experts and statisticians who had gathered there in considerable numbers.

These included, D.D. Degtavar and MJ. Rubinstein from USSR- whose views Nehru largely adopted- as well as Charles Bettelheim, a French Marxist, and Richard Godwin, an American Leftist who had taken refuge in Cambridge. 

Professor Frisch was unfortunately unwell and in bed. However, I met him in his bedroom. So far as the others were concerned, we met in a group.

None of these 'foreign experts' knew anything at all about India. But neither did the Indians involved because they weren't business people or farmers. How could their Plan fail to fail? 

2. In the course of our talks various points were made. I am mentioning some here.

3. The principal point on which emphasis was laid was that it would not be possible for these statistical labours concerning the Second Five Year Plan to bear fruit during the next few months.

Because those involved knew nothing about the country except that Diarrhoea was a way of life there.  

They would require from twelve to eighteen months to produce any satisfactory result.

It did start in April 1956. Sadly, it was shit. A bunch of foreigners can't find out things about a country which its own people were almost completely ignorant of.  

Of course, some kind of very preliminary note could be prepared in the course of the next three months and they propose to do so.

Why not get preliminary notes from people who actually knew something about the country.  

But this note would only be a general indication of the lines of approach.

Based on ignorance 

4. Therefore, it was suggested that the preparation of the Second Five Year Plan, as a whole, should be delayed.

These guys were so clueless, they didn't have even a plan for a plan.  

For the present, an interim plan should be aimed at. This would be for the first year of the second five year period. Meanwhile, the fuller plan should be worked up.

Once you know your budget, you can make plans. It is wise to plan for different scenarios because there may be an unexpected revenue shortfall or a cost escalation. Nehru had brought in a bunch of eggheads who didn't know the country and who hadn't ever run an enterprise. They could come up with a plan but it was certain to be utterly crap.

5. It was important that the Second Five Year Plan should not be given any final shape till these social and statistical studies were completed.

If you don't have the resources to do 'social and statistical studies', just focus on budgeting. Fuck planning.  

Also, it was important that this Second Five Year Plan should not start off on the wrong foot.

That's what happened.  

If it takes a wrong direction, then it will be difficult to reverse it.

See above.  

It was also bad to proceed on some ad hoc basis or on guess work. Therefore, the direction should be right.

It was wrong.  

The interim plan for a year would give that direction and work would proceed while the fuller plan was in course of preparation.

What this amounts to is- do stupid shit for a year and, during that time, make plans for doing stupider shit in the following years unless you run out of money.  

6. This preparation of what might be called the real plan would require a great deal of help and cooperation from engineers, technical experts, the Reserve Bank, industries and national laboratories.

What about businessmen- i.e. guys who knew about planning and budgeting and how to turn a profit?  

The statistical group added, what was obvious, that it would be essential for them to have the closest cooperation with the Planning Commission.

Which ought to have been subject to the Finance Ministry because plans are what have to change when budgetary projections change.  

7. Everyone who spoke laid stress on planning being primarily on the physical level 

It was so shit that inflation rose 

and not merely to be an allocation on the financial basis.

When the money ran out, the Plan had to be scaled down.  

Finance, of course, counted. But it should come in at a later stage when the physical objectives were defined.

Let us first decide what to buy before we ask what price it is and how much money we have.  The problem with poor people is that they are obsessed with how much things cost and how little money they have in their pockets. That's the reason they don't have nice mansions or super-yachts. 

In fact, planning at all levels should be on the physical plane to begin with.

But budgets must be in money terms. Depending on how much money you have and how much things cost, you can make a plan to buy specific items or a reasonably close substitute.  

Planning, of course, would include all aspects, including special planning for manpower.

Why not have a special plan for Godpower? 

8. Great importance was attached to a full geological survey of resources and sub-soil riches.

That would take a lot of money. Multinational corporations might be willing to do the prospecting in return for leases. But what about the people living on mineral rich land? Will they be compensated? Or will they be resettled in a Gulag? Nehru hadn't waded through a sea of blood to gain power. He was a barrister who won elections arranged by the British. If he tried to collectivize land, the Army- composed of the sons of landlords & kulaks- would slaughter him & his fellow shitheads.  

It was stated by one person there that so far as his knowledge went, only five per cent of the area of India had thus far been fully investigated from the geological point of view.

The Geological Survey of India was founded in 1851. Nehru did put extra resources into it but completely drove out private capital- both domestic and foreign. The burden of finding, mapping, and mining minerals fell entirely on state-owned Public Sector Undertakings (PSUs) and the GSI. This monopoly choked out the competitive, high-risk venture capital that typically drives mineral discovery globally. GSI did shallow drilling & was technologically backward. It had to prioritise ground water & coal verification for PSUs. 

This investigation should be undertaken by the State as foreign investigators or private persons might not like to reveal everything they found.

Why would anybody reveal anything to a confiscatory state? Even bureaucrats would under-report so as to avoid having more work to do.  

9. While the full plan for the second period would be for five years, there should be annual plans for each of those five years and there should be continuous checking of results and correction of plan from time to time from the experience gained.

The Second Five Year plan did set some Soviet style physical targets- e.g. for  Finished Steel it was 4.3 million tons. The actual outcome was 2.4 million tons. Steel has long gestation. Coal pretty much hit its target. There's nothing wrong with quantititative targets or the use of input output matrices & critical path analysis. But such things have no magical properties.

10. It was stated that techniques were now available for solving almost all the problems that arose in planning.

There is only one problem with planning. The future is unknown.  

But this required time and full help from all concerned.

If you give me a week and plenty of help from all the people of the world, I will be able to tell you what will happen tomorrow. True, you will already have known what I will tell you for six days but what's a few days between friends? 

Professor Frisch

who knew nothing about India 

welcomed the decision of the Government to nationalize the Imperial Bank and to extend its operations in the rural areas.[6] He said that good as this was, it should be supplemented by some organization which would be required to give practical help in the shape of advice in regard to accounting etc., to peasants, i.e., presumably that this rural banking system should have men especially to advise in a friendly way in all the rural credit and accounting problems. He attached great importance to it.

I hope Nehru advised Frisch on the advisability of educating Norwegian economists in a friendly manner on the inadvisability of stuffing herring up your anus as a means to gain nutrition.  

12. Professor Frisch was also of opinion that the entire system of taxation should be reviewed and varied. I cannot go into this matter because I did not fully understand all he said and I could not pursue our talk.

Frisch proposed a negative marginal tax rate (essentially a wage subsidy) to incentivize higher labor input and optimize production

But he seemed to think that income-tax should be reduced considerably and a number of other forms of taxation employed. This would not only bring in more money, but give incentives. He pointed out that the present system of taxation involved wastage. Business houses spent money so as to escape taxation.

Government should employ everybody & tax everybody so as to cover the loss made by doing so.  

13. Stress was laid on the importance of the role of science in planning. Our national laboratories were praised as Fine institutions not only in their equipment but also in the type of young scientists working there. But, it was pointed out that these laboratories had nothing to do with our planning, although they ought to be intimately interested in them.

The planning was shit. The labs weren't. Subjugate what was not shit to what was shit- that's Socialism- right?  

They lived in a kind of ivory tower thinking of odd experiments in research. There should be full interconnection between science and practice at all levels, and therefore, planning should be done with the closest participation of scientists and engineers at all stages.

Indian cooks made tasty curry. Why not closely involve them in planning in the the hope that curry turned to shit?  

14. It was suggested that after the Baroda Science Congress[7] there should be a special conference of directors of national laboratories and institutes to consider this matter and how to make systematic use for planning of research. Scientists, technicians, educationists, engineers, etc., should be given a planning orientation and should be made to think in terms of national development.

Also cows should be consulted. That will please the Hindoooos.  

15. Stress was laid on the great importance of decentralising industrial enterprises in the public sector. This is to say, these State enterprises should be given a good deal of freedom and should not be interfered with. It was pointed out by the Soviet representatives that in the USSR there was a great deal of decentralisation of this type.

Indeed, the reason so many people were trying to escape from the Soviet Union was because there was too much freedom there.  

16. It was mentioned that it would be necessary to have a great expansion of health and education.

paid for by what?  

17. A very brief reference was made to land policy and state trading, but there was no talk about it.

Because they knew nothing about it. 

18. The main concern of these people was that no commitment should be made on the old pattern of planning and that the whole subject should be considered anew.

Because they were novices in all matters Indian. To be fair, many had come to India believing that the quality of official statistics would be similar to that of Britain (because British civil servants had administered India). But such was not the case.  

Velupillai quotes Dick Goodwin- creator of the first input-output matrix for the Indian economy- as saying

Vlado Chernozemski- the guy who caused World War 2?

 Had Archduke Ferdinand been killed by a Muslim- Muhamed Mehmedbašić- rather than an Orthodox Christian Serb- there would have been no First World War because the Turks would have got the blame. Sadly, Mehmedbasic's nerve failed. He didn't chuck the grenade he had in his hand as the Archduke's car passed by. 

Similarly, if Vlado Chernozemski- a Bulgarian who killed the King of Yugoslavia in 1934- had not accidentally also shot the French Foreign Minister- Louis Barthou- maybe there would have been no Second World War.

This is because Barthou was negotiating the Franco-Soviet mutual assistance pact. After his death, the task of completing it fell to Pierre Laval- later executed for his collaboration with the Nazis- who had moved to the Right & who considered the Bolsheviks as a great threat to European Civilization.

De Gaulle would write '"Louis Barthou had thought of a return to the traditional system of Russian alliance. But he was assassinated, and from that moment on, the policy of abandonment prevailed. Our leaders, caught between the fear of war and the illusions of peace, surrendered themselves to the stream of events..."

Barthou had got the Soviet Union into the League of Nations and wanted a comprehensive multi-lateral 'Eastern Pact' to pen in Germany and preserve the existing borders. The Brits were suspicious of Barthou's plan but he was able to win over Stanley Baldwin causing him to say that Britain's frontier now lay along the Rhine. 

The Brits saw Laval as an opportunist but considered him to be pragmatic and transactional. Sadly, the Hoare-Laval pact (which sacrificed Ethiopia to Mussolini) provoked a backlash at home. Baldwin threw over Hoare & Laval, quite naturally, felt betrayed. 

Laval didn't believe that the Soviet Union had the military capability of Tzarist Russia. Though the Soviets were embracing mechanisation, he didn't believe there could be a 'Russian steam-roller'. Thus he ensured that the bilateral treaty agreement was strictly compatible with the multilateral provisions of the League of Nations Covenant and the Locarno Treaties. That in practice meant that military assistance could be rendered by one signatory to the other only after both an allegation of unprovoked aggression had been submitted to the League of Nations, and the approval of the other signatories of the Locarno Pact (the United Kingdom, Italy and Belgium) being attained. Even this was only agreed to by Laval after Germany announced its re-armament. Poland, however, reacted strongly. They refused to accept any scenario where Soviet troops crossed Polish territory. They considered the pact to be a betrayal of the 1921 Franco-Polish agreement. They sought to rely on their non-aggression pact with the Soviets (1932) and with Hitler (1934). Partly, this was because France had earlier refused to act jointly with Poland in a pre-emptive strike. De Gaulle, who had been an official observer during the Soviet-Polish war, had great respect for Pilsudski and favoured a more robust approach. But, as the Poles could understand, France needed Britain which now repented the harst peace terms imposed on Germany and which was in no mood for military adventures. Once Barthou established good relations with Baldwin- based on convincing him of the Nazi threat- it is possible that Poland would have revised its views. Sadly, the Brits were obsessed with the notion that Mussolini could be a counterweight to Hitler based on an exaggerated notion of Italian military strength. It may also be the case that Pilsudski's death meant Poland took a harder line not just against the Soviets but also the Czechoslovaks (Poland had lost some territory in the 7 day Czech/Polish war of 1919). Later, they would help themselves to a piece of that unfortunate country along side Hitler & Horthy .

Some historians- notably Robert J. Young- who wrote a biography of Barthou- & Jean-Baptiste Duroselle- considered a leading expert on the diplomatic history of the period- treats Barthou as the sole "hero" of French interwar foreign policy (vide his seminal work, France and the Nazi Threat: The Collapse of French Diplomacy 1932–1939.) 

Another foundational giant of French international history, Pierre Renouvin, meticulously mapped out how Barthou was systematically pooling all the European powers threatened by the rapid revival of Germany. Renouvin’s analysis supports the idea that Barthou's strategy was highly cohesive—simultaneously locking in the USSR, securing British support, using Italy’s fears of an Austro-German union (Anschluss), and solidifying the Little Entente (Czechoslovakia, Romania & Yugoslavia) . Renouvin concludes that Barthou's sudden assassination shattered this entire interlocking system. 

Michael Jabara Carley, an expert on Soviet foreign policy and Franco-Soviet relations,  emphasizes that Barthou's approach was the only window in the early-to-mid 1930s where a genuine anti-Nazi containment front could have succeeded. Carley’s research highlights that Maxim Litvinov (the Soviet Foreign Minister) found a reliable, hardheaded partner in Barthou. He notes that after Barthou's death, his successor Pierre Laval allowed anti-communist domestic pressures to stall and dilute the alliance, transforming a potentially robust military guarantee into a toothless piece of paper. 

It is a silly to think some random French dude could have prevented a World War. The truth is, it was the Spanish Civil War which provided the template for what would come. There, the French PM- Leon Blum- initially tried to help the Republicans but internal opposition- as well as British disapproval- forced him to renege. In France there were those who said 'better Hitler than Blum'. Suddenly, every Nation State had to fear an ideological 'fifth column'. 

Still, if Barthou could have been Europe's saviour (just as the Archduke is sometimes seen as the guy who could have saved the Hapsburg Empire by giving the Southern Slavs a better deal), then it is significant that a Serb & a Bulgarian put an end to European hegemony thus laying the foundations for the rise and rise of the 'coloured' races. 

Dreze's jhollawallah econ

 How is it that I can eat an apple but an apple can't eat me. The answer, according to jhollawallah economics, is 'chance'.  It isn't the case that apple trees chose one evolutionary strategy- one whereby their fruits were edible such that their seeds would spread widely- and that human beings adopted another strategy- one which involved increasing inequality replaced increasing divergence in reproductive outcomes. In other words- when everybody was poor, inequality was about who had more descendants. Later, the tables were turned. The poorest would be the most fertile. 

Dreze asks why poor men, transporting illegally mined coal by bicycle in Ranchi, are worse off than guys with PhDs in Econ whose daddies had PhDs in Econ. 

How come they are in their situation, and I in mine?

They had little inherited wealth or human capital. Dreze had quite a lot. Productivity in Belgium diverged from that of greater Bihar around 1500, if not earlier. Western Europe did not go in for 'jholawalah econ'. It focused on raising productivity through better technology and mechanism design. 

The only answer I can find is: “chance”. Perhaps a few of them drank or gambled away their land, but most are in that situation for no fault of their own.

Their ancestors followed jhollawallah economics.  

They were born in a poor family of the wrong caste

& the wrong colour & the wrong continent. Get them a visa to Belgium & fortune will begin to smile upon them.  

suffered from undernutrition in childhood,

which is what happens when poor people have babies who are bound to be very fucking poor. 

did not get a chance to study, and so on. In a different environment, they might have become geologists, engineers, artists, or hockey champions.

or boring Belgian cunts 

But they never had a chance.

Because of jhollawallah economics 

In India, as elsewhere, the privileged tend to nurture the illusion that they “deserve” what they have.

Dreze nurtures the illusion that his arsehole is his own. It isn't. It is a place where everybody should be welcome to park their coal or their bicycle.  

This illusion, however, evaporates with even the most casual introspection.

It is mere 'chance' that you aren't a rent-boy or, indeed, a guy who pays money to have stuff shoved up his arse. Ergo, your arse must have stuff shoved up it by all and sundry. Such is jhollawalla economics.  

Sure, some rich people work hard  – but so do koilawalas, construction workers, and domestic helpers.

Sure, some rent-boys work hard attracting customers but Dreze too works hard in his own way. Why is his anus being denied vast injections of jizz? Is it because Narendra Modi is a fucking Nazi? 

What is jholawallah econ? It is a variation of begging-bowl econ. It is Amartya Sen's 'second order public goods' which involves saying 'we really ought to have more first order public goods'. Sadly, it demanding or begging for a thing is itself regarded as a good thing, then 'second order' talk crowds out first order work.

Dreze believes he is doing 'research for action'- i.e. explaining why money should be pissed against the wall in a manner which buys votes or enables leakages. 

First, action-oriented research is not a stand-alone activity.

Masturbation need not be solitary. Also, it can be integrated into a wider repertoire of equally boring shite.  

Rather, it is part of a larger effort to achieve practical change through democratic action, that is, action based on democratic means and institutions  – public debate, the media, the courts, the electoral process, street action, among others.

This is done by political parties. Academics are welcome to join one such or, indeed, create a party of their own. However, in so far as their discipline is positive rather than normative, they will be at a disadvantage because imperative, not alethic, propositions have a stronger tie to action. 

Dreze's book reveals his hatred of India as a Hindu majority country. It is his right, as an Indian citizen, to hate people of another religion. However, as his views become known to more and more Indians, his influence is likely to decline. 

Why Shruti can't be an Economist & India can't be independent.

 

When a small boy tries to imitate his daddy, he is likely to fail. Once he is grown up, however, he will have little difficulty emulating the work habits of his senior colleagues.

In a paper titled

Premature Imitation and India’s Flailing State  

SHRUTI RAJAGOPALAN AND ALEXANDER TABARROK

suggest that India tried to imitate more mature economies. This is not the case. India wanted to split up on the basis of religion and then pursue ideologies- e.g. Gandhian Socialism, Islamic Fundamentalism- which had no takers in more technologically advanced countries. 

The colonial authorities had begun promoting responsible worker's associaton from about the 1890s. The 'sweated labour' or 'unfair competition' argument was gaining currency in Westminster and the influence of Trade Unions increased. Interestingly, a Communist MP- Saklatvala, a cousin of the Tatas- was able to win elections by playing the 'coolie labour' card much to the disgust of Indian nationalists. Tory Secretary of States for India believed that by granting separate representation to Labour in legislative councils, the power of the Congress party would be diluted. 

Trade Unionism proved lucrative for politicians and lawyers and the tight labour market which prevailed during the Second World War created a bonanza for workers in the organised sector. After independence, Congress took some steps to curb independent Trade Unions but the inertial force of the British legacy prevailed more particularly because India was a member of the International Labour Organisation. 

This becomes obvious when you look at the timeline of Indian labour law.

1881 – First Indian Factories Act- restricted the employment and working hours of children while setting basic safety rules. 
1890 – Bombay Mill Hands Association: Formed by N.M. Lokhande, marking the emergence of India's first organized labor welfare and advocacy effort. Lokhande was an associate of Phule both of whom were promoted by the British as having a positive influence on the lower castes. In particular, the Raj wanted poorer people to focus on economic grievances rather than unite under the banner of religion.
1891 – Indian Factories Act (Amended): Expanded factory coverage, raised the minimum age and reduced working hours for children, and introduced a weekly holiday and midday stoppage for women workers. [1]

1901 – Indian Mines Act: Extended safety and labor regulations to underground and surface mine workers.
1911 – Indian Factories Act: Restricted working hours for men in textile factories to 12 hours a day and further limited child labor hours.
1919 – International Labour Organization (ILO) Formation: Established via the Treaty of Versailles; India became a founding member, heavily influencing subsequent domestic labor standards.
1920 – All India Trade Union Congress (AITUC) Formed: Created as the first central trade union federation in India to represent workers nationally and globally.
1922 – Factories Act: Extended protections to a broader range of power-using factories and standardized daily and weekly work limits.
1923 – Workmen’s Compensation Act: Provided financial compensation to employees for industrial accidents and occupational diseases resulting in death or disablement.
1926 – Indian Trade Unions Act: Gave legal recognition and immunity from civil/criminal prosecution to registered trade unions.
1929 – Trade Disputes Act: Provided mechanisms for the investigation and settlement of industrial disputes through courts or boards of conciliation.
1936 – Payment of Wages Act: Regulated the timely payment of wages and prohibited unauthorized deductions or arbitrary fines by employers.
1946 – Industrial Employment (Standing Orders) Act: Required employers in industrial establishments to formally define and communicate conditions of employment (standing orders).
1947 – Industrial Disputes Act: Replaced the 1929 act and established the primary framework for resolving strikes, lockouts, layoffs, and retrenchments. 

After Independence, not imitation but instititutional inertia led to further legislation which, however, could be ignored with greater impunity by those who were politically connected.  

Post-Independence & Modern Consolidation
1948 – Factories Act & Minimum Wages Act: The Factories Act 1948 overhauled health, safety, and working hours, while the Minimum Wages Act mandated state- and sector-specific baseline compensation. 

Nehru was suspicious of the industrialists who had financed Congress. His Planning Commission, promoting nationalization as part and parcel of Socialism, created the 'licence-permit Raj' which hamstrung Indian industry. It must be said, labour militancy sponsored by Communists in West Bengal was even more successful in driving away industries. But the Commies were imitating Mao in an equally poor country. Unlike the West, where 'feminist' labour reform increased participation for women even in tough 'masculine' fields, India's paternalistic legislators tended to go in the reverse direction.  However, because most private sector growth was in the small scale sector (or in fields reserved for 'cottage industries) the percentage of the workforce covered by legislation tended to fall.

1991 – Economic Liberalization: Sparked widespread privatization and a shift toward contractual and informal hiring practices. 
2019–2020 – The Four Labour Codes: Consolidated over 40 central labor laws into four simplified codes—Code on Wages (2019), Industrial Relations Code (2020), Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code (2020), and Social Security Code (2020)—to streamline compliance and extend coverage to gig and platform workers. 

This wasn't 'imitation'- premature or otherwise. The truth was that, as a senior Economic advisor said, to comply 100 percent with labour law, you would have to break at least 20 percent of them. In other words, labour law was a vast thicket of self-contradictory laws and procedures.  

Shruti and Alex begin by quoting a West Indian origin economist who advised Nkrumah. He knew nothing about India.

'There is the same contrast even between people; between the few highly westernized, trousered, natives educated in western universities, speaking western languages, and glorifying in Beethoven, Mill, Marx or Einstein, and the great mass of their countrymen who live in quite other worlds. —W. Arthur Lewis, “Economic Development with Unlimited Supplies of Labour”

In the West Indies, the majority of the population had been enslaved and transported from their native land. A few were able to hang on to elements of their ancestral culture and religion. Most- especially in urban areas- were 'mimic men' of the sort satirized by V.S Naipaul. 

But Tardean mimetics didn't arise in India- the truly rich and aristocratic made a point of not learning English-  save in so far as it involved imitating horrible dictators like Stalin or Mao. After all, India had cme under the dominion of Turkic/Mongol Eurasian warlords- which is what both Stalin & Mao were. But the Indian government never crushed the peasantry by licensing man-made famines of a vast scale. 

Lant Pritchett (2009) has called India a flailing state.

Indians called him a stupid cunt. Still, it is true that Manmohan was a 'prone' Minister.  

A flailing state is what happens when the principal cannot control its agents.

by shooting them or sending them to a Gulag? American voters decided that Obama & Hilary were 'flailing'. In 2016 they voted for an elderly billionaire who had never held any sort of elected office or, indeed, Government job.  

The flailing state cannot implement its own plans

because of budgetary constraints. But that was true of the Second, Third and Fourth Five year plan. There was also a Plan holiday in 1990-92. After that, there was enough money in the kitty but the private sector was taking the lead. 

and may have its plans actively subverted when its agents work at crosspurposes.

Nehru's mistake was to put planning above budgeting. He was a deeply silly man. It is fucking obvious that, for the poor, only budgets matter. Pigs can't really fly, though they may plan to.  

The Indian state flails because it is simultaneously too large and too small: too large because the Indian government attempts to legislate and regulate every aspect of citizens’ lives

No. There is an inherited inertia from the Bureaucratic Raj of the Windsor dynasty which persisted under the Gandhi dynasty. As in every other field, labour laws multiplied meaninglessly. There was 'rent seeking'- sure. But what defeats rent seeking is beating and extorting the rent-seeker. In other words, gangsterism has countervailing power over the politico/bureaucratic class. This is why so many legislators have criminal records. Admittedly, some of the charges are fabricated. Sadly, some have also been thrown out by the courts. Rahul didn't really rape a girl with the help of his foreign friends. 

and too small because it lacks the resources and personnel to rule according to its ambitions.

One might say this about the Second Five year plan. Back then, Nehru & Nkrumah thought that the Yanks & the Soviets would compete in building infrastructure and heavy industry essentially for free.  

To explain the mismatch between the Indian state’s ambitions and its abilities, we point to the premature demands by Indian elite for policies more appropriate to a developed country.

Indian elites aren't stupid. They weren't demanding that their own dividend income be cut so that workers could have a better quality of life. 

One could say- as Edwin Lim, of the World Bank, did- that Indian 'activists' get paid a lot of money by Western NGOs to indulge in virtue signalling and create road-blocks for development. But, it is easy to beat activists or just chase them away, That's what happened to Medha Patkar once the Gujjus got organised. They got their Narmada water and made very good use of it.  

We illustrate with four case studies on maternity leave,

The public sector gets 730 days of Child Care Leave (CCL)- a very valuable benefit. 

housing policy, open defecation,

which directly relates to health outcomes & the safety of rural women 

and education policy.

which is shit.  

We then conclude by discussing how the problem of limited state capacity

what limits power is countervailing power 

points to presumptive laissez-faire as a preferred governing and learning environment for developing countries.

Sadly, that involves getting colonised in one manner or another. Armies and Navies don't arise by the unfettered working of the market.  

Matt Andrews, Lant Pritchett, and Michael Woolcock (2017) point to one explanation for India’s flailing state. In order to satisfy external actors, the Indian state and other recipients of foreign funding often take on tasks that overwhelm state capacity, leading to premature load bearing.

No. Foreign funded 'activists' can be a nuisance but it is easy and satisfying to beat them or just threaten them till they run the fuck away. Manmohan started the trend of going after the funding of these 'cockroaches'. He suspected that Western coal exporters, etc, wanted to prevent India exploiting its own mineral resources.  

As these authors put it, “By starting off with unrealistic expectations of the range, complexity, scale, and speed with which organizational capability can be built, external actors set both themselves and (more importantly) the governments they are attempting to assist to fail” .

No. The 'activists' just want money and fame by winning some sort of International prize & getting funded by foreign foundations.  

The expectations of external actors are only one source of imitation, however.

Tardean mimetics is about getting money and power by imitating those who were similar to you but who are now much better off.  

Who people read, listen to, admire, learn from, and wish to emulate is also key.

No. What matters is reinforcement. I imitate both Beyonce & a janitor. I get paid for the latter, not the former activity. That's why I am a full time janitor rather than a Beyonce impersonator.  

We argue that another factor driving inappropriate imitation is that the Indian intelligentsia

doesn't exist. The Dalit intellectual is different from the Muslim or RSS intellectual.  

—the top people involved in politics, the bureaucracy, universities, think tanks, foundations, and so forth—are closely connected with Anglo-American elites,

There is a circulation of elites. India is not synchronised with Anglo-America. Even if the CJP or CEA studied in the West, that was thirty years ago when a different ideology prevailed.  

sometimes even more closely than they are to the Indian populace.

 One might say this about both political leaders in the west. They are fighting yesterday's battles or seeking to revive ideas which passed their sell-by date fifty years ago. 

As a result, the Indian elite initiates and supports policies that appear to it to be normal even though such policies may have little relevance to the Indian population

fuck would these two cunts know about what is relevant to Indians? 

as a whole and may be wildly at odds with Indian state capacity. This kind of mimicry of what appear to be the best Western policies and practices is not necessarily ill intentioned.

India shouldn't have become independent. It's intention may have been good- it wanted to be a proper nation state- but it was misguided. Indians are shit. They should be ruled by White peeps not brown peeps imitating White peeps. 

Also, Shruti should kill herself. She is trying to imitate an Economist but can't succed because she don't got a dick. Sad. 

It might not be pursued to pacify external or internal actors, and it is not a deliberate attempt to exclude the majority of citizens from the democratic policy-making process. It is simply one by-product of the background within which the Indian intellectual class operates.

Intellectuals have never held power in India. True, Nehru wrote some books. Some may have thought this made him an intellectual. But he got to be PM because he was a Hindi speaking Brahmin who had put in enough jail time. Nobody thought the cow-belt dominated Indian politics because its people were smarter or better educated. Rather, it was because 'Pandy's rebellion' had succeeded. The littoral states benefitted more from overseas trade & thus might favour the revival of foreign dominated enclaves which might, once again, expand into the hinterland. Also, the Hindi speakers had shown vim and vigor in ethnically cleansing Muslims. They could come in handy at some future time. Niradh Chaudhuri, who had begged Whitey to come back to rule India, paid a back-handed compliment to the 'bhaiyyas' by pointing out their genuine loathing for Europeans. 

The Indian elites are more likely, because of their background, to engage with global experts in policy dialogues that have little relevance to the commoner in India.

Policy dialogues are shit- always and everywhere.  

In the next sections, we discuss the flailing state and the demographics of the Indian elite.

Back in the Fifties & Sixties, the State Dept (& the CIA) financed American Sociologists like Shils to gas on about native 'intelligentsias'. Then, they realised, it was a waste of time. Peasants, it turned out, were rational. Eggheads were addled.  

We then illustrate with case studies on maternity leave, housing policy, open defecation, and right-to-education policy how India passes laws and policies that

are populist. The hope is they will gain votes in the short run while becoming, or remaining, ineffective longer term. 

make sense to the elite but are neither relevant nor beneficial to the vast majority of Indians.

If they create vote-banks, they serve their purpose. Even if few gain a benefit- e.g. reservations in government jobs- the many will vote to keep that entitlement.  

We conclude with a discussion of the optimal governing and learning environment when state capacity is limited.

What limits state capacity is either the law- which totalitarian methods- or countervailing power of various sorts.  

The Flailing State In India, corruption often takes the form of circumventing the law. Some 30 percent of driver’s licenses are estimated to be fake (PTI 2016).

 Studies show that roughly 20% to 33.5% of college students in the US have used or owned a fake ID.

Of the licenses that aren’t fake, a large number of drivers manage to avoid taking the driver’s test, which leads to unqualified drivers and more accidents on the roads (Bertrand et al. 2007). It’s possible to tell a story in which these outcomes are a design from the top, but it’s more realistic to see them as a consequence of agents who do not obey principals—a flailing state.

The British inherited an administration where low-level corruption was the rule. The way to reduce it is to reduce State capacity- i.e. run a 'night-watchman' state. But, as Prasad told Gandhi, even paying for the village 'chowkidar' was considered onerous by the Bihari rustic. 

To eliminate corruption you need to pay a living wage. But, in that case, the threat of 'transfer' is meaningless. Politicians lose their own lever of power over government servants.  

This is a story about 'mechanism design', not agent principal hazard. 

In China, this kind of corruption leads to executions.

Sometimes & in some places. It is always possible to purge corruption at the local level without killing people.  

The executions don’t happen in India, one feature or bug of democracy, but that shouldn’t be taken to imply acquiscence. The top-level bureaucracy is of very high quality.

Really not. Good mechanism design is about subsidiarity & self-screening or self-certiification. It is in the interest of truck drivers that truck drivers aren't drug addicted nutters. Let them self-certify on a local basis. Different states can ban drivers from poorly self-policing regions.  

The rot in India usually does not come from the head (Vaishnav and Khosla 2016).

Sadly, the head does what the stomach wants it to do. Even in Singapore, there seems to be a problem of elite 'self-dealing'. 
Eight Singapore public officers have been referred to the police following a government investigation into claims that civil servants used non-public information to buy private properties near future Mass Rapid Transit (MRT) stations before they were publicly announced. 
The investigation was launched after a September 2026 working paper published by the US-based National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) alleged that Singaporean civil servants and their relatives bought an estimated S$270 million (US$210 million) worth of property near planned train stations ahead of public disclosure.

Since academic economists made this discovery, it must be completely wrong. 

Part of the problem is a simple lack of personnel.

No. Auxillaries can always be hired, or voluntary groups (e.g. Home Guard) can be expanded without creating a big pension & other welfare obligation. There is resistance to this, but it happens by default.  

India, for example, has surprisingly few government workers

depending on your definition of government worker.  

—about one-fifth as many per capita as the United States. The number of police per capita, for example, is only 135 per 100,000, one of the lowest rates in the world and far below the median (318) or mean (333) of police officers per 100,000 capita in the rest of the world (UN Office on Drugs and Crime 2017).

These figures overcount the populatiion & under count those who discharge police functions. Nobody knows how many Gram Chowkidars there actually are. Often, the post attracts no salary but comes with benefits in kind. 

Moreover, a significant number of the police are assigned to VIPs rather than to protecting the public at large (Vaishnav 2017).

About 66,000 police personnel were deployed to protect 20,000 VIPs. There are over 2 million police personnel. So we are only speaking of about 3 percent of the total. Moreover, there is a 'spill-over' benefit to the neighbours of VIPs (who tend to live in swanky areas) as well as increased confidence that terrorists and gangsters won't be able to capture the State. However, if there is an insurgency, extra-judicial killing on an industrial scale can be done swiftly and thoroughly. India is a 'hard state' because the Army is loyal. 

The number of judges per capita (12 per million) is far below the U.S. rate (108 per million), which helps to explain India’s enormous backlog of 32 million cases, millions of which have been in process for more than a decade (Joshi 2017).

Fewer judges would mean less backlog. India's problem is that the Judiciary doesn't believe in Res Judicata. Also, case management should be done by a separate agency.  

Although most of India’s governance problems can find links to the lack of manpower in state services, there is also the problem of regulatory overload.

Which is a much smaller problem in India than the US because the organised sector is 15 percent not 85 percent.  

The top levels of government impose a massive regulatory burden that is increasing each year, with little attention paid to personnel and state capacity. Many regulatory and civil offenses are increasingly categorized as criminal offenses and arbitrarily enforced (Rajagopalan 2017). India has essentially all the inspections, regulations, and laws a developed country such as the United States has, but at approximately $235 of federal spending per capita the Indian government simply cannot accomplish all the tasks it has assumed.

This silly woman doesn't get that there are no fucking regulatory tasks to do with the unorganised sector. 

Still, broadly speaking, Shruti is right. She should not try to imitate Economists because she does not have a penis. By regulating herself not to bleed from the cooch once a month, she is proving herself to be just as stupid and ignorant as the Indians who, with tragic results, started imitating White peeps who have proper Nation-States of their own 

Gheorghiu on Dummett & Sandqvist

Alexander V Gheorghiu writes in Aeon-

In 1973, the British philosopher Michael Dummett was invited to deliver the annual philosophical lecture at the British Academy. He took as his subject ‘The Justification of Deduction’ – how to justify the ordinary practices of mathematicians

if they are useful, what more justification is required? Math, like other disciplines, needs resources. That which is useful, makes money. Math progresses fastest when it makes money by raising producitivity. 

without helping oneself to the assumption that their subject matter exists in a realm of its own.

Whether this is Plato's realm of forms or South Park's 'Imagination-Land' scarcely matters. The only question is, 'can the thing pay for itself'.  

The problem, he told his audience, was perhaps ‘one of the most fundamental and intractable problems … in all philosophy’.

Philosophy is merely a displacement activity. Dummett, it must be said, introduced low IQ peeps like me to one or two elementary mathematical ideas.  

What Dummett took from Frege’s work on logic was that the problems of mathematics are, at heart, problems of language.

The foundations of mathematics are not necessarily what we would call mathematical. On the other hand, the foundations of those foundations may well be mathematical because, in the ultimate analysis, everything is.

Where things had gone wrong, he thought, was that Frege had grounded his account in a mind-independent notion of truth.

All protocol bound financial, legal, or scientific accounts have that feature. On the other hand, my account of my life as a prostitute in Hollywood in the Eighties is not grounded on anything save the mind-dependent notion that I'd look utterly ridiculous playing the Julia Roberts role in @prtty Woman'. 

‘In this respect (and in this respect alone),’ Dummett wrote, ‘Frege’s new approach to logic was retrograde.’

Why posit mind-dependent entitites? For all we know, we are meat machines merely. More advanced species truly have minds. The proof is, their minds can change reality at the most fundamental level.  

For Frege, logic answered to truth: the rules were good because they preserved something already fixed.

only if there was 'restricted comprehension'. Otherwise, you got nonsense 

Dummett turned this around.

Following Wittgenstein’s later thinking, Dummett argued ‘a theory of meaning is a theory of understanding.’

is a theory of information storage, retrieval, or exchange which in turn is an economic theory of a trivial type.

And understanding, he insisted, must be manifestable: whatever a competent speaker knows in knowing what a sentence means must be something she can, in principle, display in her use of language.

Suppose there is a sentence you hear on the point of death which explains to you the central mysterey of your life. It can be uttered at no other moment while conveying the same meaning. Can it, in principle, be conveyed? Not if it causes death unless our 'principle' stipulates for an after-life. But that may contradict the meaning received or, rather, prevent its reception in the intended form. 

More generally, unless meaning is understanding and both remain fixed, some problem of the above type arises, at least in principle, under any and every imaginable set of circumstances. 

In The Logical Basis of Metaphysics (1991), Dummett gave this account of language, logic and reality its most sustained form. Our linguistic practices – the ways in which we are prepared to assert, justify and infer – determine logic.

Only if that is what we habitually do and even then, this would only be true for ourselves.  

Logic, in turn, determines what counts as a fact,

Sherlock Holmes may use logic to show us that what we accept as fact can't be any such thing. But this is a story about a guy who is smarter than us determining what we come to believe.  

what counts as truth, and ultimately what we are entitled to regard as real.

Sadly, for most of us, earning a living determines what counts as truth. Also, I'm not really the star of 'Pretty woman' even though many people mistake me for Julia Roberts. Sadly, it appears she has gained a lot of weight. That's why I am often referred to as 'fat cunt'.           

Consider how a child learns the word ‘red’.

The same way she learns the name of things she sees 

We do not begin by telling her about light of a certain wavelength, or the metaphysics of colour properties, or the conditions that would make ‘this is red’ true. We point at things.

Or she points at things and we say 'do you want the red one or the blue one'? 

We correct her when she calls a ripe tomato green; we approve when she calls a fire engine red. Over time, she comes to use the word as we do – and at that point, she understands it.

A child may indeed be said to understand God as well as we do. But it is unlikely to understand the nature of Diplomacy even if its daddy is a diplomat. 

There is no further fact, hidden behind the practice, in which her understanding consists. The understanding is the practice, competently exercised.

The practice can dispense with the understanding. If you are giving your g.f plenty of orgasms, she tends to feel that there's something important about her which you understand very well. If this isn't the case, it may be a good idea to attend one of those courses on communicating with your partner during sex and understanding each other's needs & (let's face it) limitations.  

Dummett died in 2011, having been knighted in 1999 for ‘services to philosophy and to racial justice’.

he was a convert to Catholicism. At that time, some Christian Churches, believed in the natural inferiority of black people.  

He is remembered as one of the most significant British philosophers of the previous century. Yet for all its power, his programme remained a prospectus: he set out what a theory of language, logic and reality must achieve, but he never completed one.

But he was less shite than others of his ilk.  

In 2005, Tor Sandqvist, a doctoral student at Uppsala University, submitted a thesis 

He showed first-order classical logic could be validated using solely constructively valid reasoning in the metalanguage, eliminating the reliance on a priori "bivalence" (the strict assumption that everything is fundamentally True or False)

that took up Dummett’s challenge: to justify the ordinary practices of mathematicians without any appeal to truth.

His base-extension semantics provides mathematical accounts for intuitionistic and classical systems based entirely on inductive rules of inference rather than traditional model theory. 

Where Dummett had given the conditions a solution must satisfy, Sandqvist gave a solution. He produced a precise mathematical justification of deduction as mathematicians actually use it, grounded entirely in practices of assertion. The boxer’s fists were untied.

Now it appears, the boxer may be replaced by an AI. Sandqvist & Voevodsky appeared together at Conferences till the latter passed away in 2017. 

It was rediscovered a decade later in the Department of Computer Science at University College London, where a group of logicians recognised what Sandqvist had actually built, and developed it into a full framework on a par with the orthodox truth-conditional view. The framework now stands equal to the truth-based account, analogous to the situation after Gödel’s PhD thesis. What about mathematics? The UCL team have recently shown that the Dummett-Sandqvist framework gives a way to understand what Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems are about, and it is not the limits of knowledge.

. Gheorghiu reframes incompleteness as a divergence between two internally determined notions of consequence associated with a single theory, rather than as a gap between syntactic provability and truth in a mind-independent structure. The result clarifies the relationship between reflection, consistency, and inferentialist approaches to meaning, and shows how substantial semantic determinacy may arise from the inferential structure of arithmetic itself.

The problem here is that determinacy arises in a pooling equilibrium- i.e. a coordination game- whereas it may be useful to have discoordination games for certain purposes involving costly signals. 

If meaning comes from practices of assertion, then our concepts are settled only as far as our practices have settled them.

In other words, the thing is a moveable feast. But focal solutions for coordination games cshift all the time.  

A system of definitions is a kind of constitution that determines something. The US Constitution, for example, is meant to enshrine a form of democracy.

It was meant to solve the problem created by dual sovereignty. Southern Democrats abandoned a racist 'form of democracy' when I was about 2 years old.  

But what a constitution defines answers to how it is amended.

It may do. It may not. The Warren Court was described as having brought about a 'Constitutional Revolution'. Some say that Trump appointed Judges are bringing about a Counter-Revolution.  

Principia Mathematica is a constitution for arithmetic.

without algorithms for things like long division 

To read it as a constitution is to assume it is consistent; otherwise, it would be nonsense.

We only need to assume that there could be a Judge Hercules giving it a 'harmonious construction'.  

So, when we amend it by asserting that ‘Principia Mathematica is consistent,’ we are not changing the subject: the new axiom says aloud only what the practice already did. Gödel’s theorems apply afresh to the enlarged constitution: the amended system has its own unprovable truth, its own consistency it cannot certify.

The US constitution is 'buck stopped' in that the Supreme Court has the final say unless 'doctrine of political question' arises. But this is a matter of economia, not akriebia.  

No amendment is the last; each faithful extension opens room for the next. To grasp a concept like arithmetic is not to survey a finished structure;

the 'extension' is epistemic, impredicative & not well defined.  

it is to hold a principle for going on: a rule for laying the next stretch of line, not a map of where the line ends.

Thus we don't have to be silent about anything of which we can't speak precisely.  

Dummett called this openness indefinite extensibility.

There could be (using Kripke schema) an end to mathematical time when all choice sequences become 'determinate'.  

Faithful is the word doing the work, because not every amendment is. Gödel claimed the US Constitution could deliver a dictatorship.

This was obvious at the time. That's why Presidential terms were restricted. Otherwise the Executive could pack the Bench & then go in for gerrymandering.  

That does not make dictatorship a form of democracy.

Why not? The Weimar Constitution explicitly provided for a Caesarean President. In practice, the US has this. Mutually Assured Destruction means that POTUS could pull the plug on all life on earth. That's pretty fucking dictatorial.  

Whatever loophole he had in mind, it would have contradicted the practices the Constitution already enshrined. An amendment can betray what a constitution defines. But it can also unfold it, drawing out what the founding commitments demanded all along.

White heterosexual men who owned slaves never intended for the American Constitution to protect gays, blacks, First Nations & women. 

Only the second kind is what Dummett has in mind.

Dummett & Farquarhson (who was White South African) hoped that some ideal type of constitution could be created to safeguard minorities. Sadly, the thing was a pipe dream.  

The constitution of our language is our current practice for public discourse.

Sadly, public discourse is stuff Trump says, not what erudite savants talk about.  

As it is extensible in this way, what we claim as ‘true’ is not a fixed structure with a ceiling we are forever failing to reach, but something that can change. Gödel’s verdict never applied to mathematics, but only to some edition of the constitution. Within the Sandqvist system, we can attend to the extension systematically. Hilbert’s words outlive his programme: Wir werden wissen. We shall know. Not because the answers are waiting at the end of a ladder, but because truth goes exactly as far as we have built the rungs.

For Per Martin Lof knowing a proposition means explicitly possessing a constructive proof or verification. In that sense, AIs may soon know math better than most early career mathematicians. Even as we speak, more rungs may being added such that, as Terence Tao says, AI 'jumping robots' can by pass the slow collobarative process of mathematicians assisting each other to find hand holds and footholds to ascend further up the mountain. 

Guardian demanding an end to death.

The Guardian's  Hannah Ellis-Petersen and Shaikh Azizur Rahman write- 

How do you explain the deletion of 130 million names?’:

 Out of one billion voters, according to Election Commission data, of the 130 million names deleted from voter lists, 28 million are dead, 63 million have relocated, 10 million are duplicates and 30 million could not be traced by officials.

All those who have relocated can get their names on the electoral roll through a simple process. Political parties will assist people likely to vote for them to do so. Sadly, dead people are not allowed to vote. Indeed, they aren't even invited to dinner parties. 

What of the 30 million who can't be traced? Some may have been bogus voters created by ruling parties or else may have been citizens of foreign countries.

The last big revision of the electoral roll was 24 years ago. I suppose, COVID held up this exercise in the same manner that it held up the census 

why Indian voters are on the streets

Some political parties have organised protests and their cadres have shown up in force. 

Anger at electoral roll changes has boiled over, sparking a crisis for Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist government

Rahul says he has evidence that there has been a conspiracy to delete voters likely to vote against the BJP. Trump too said the election had been stolen because Biden won.  

Born into a small village in West Bengal, Shahida Fakir

 Shahida Fakir alleges that she was deported from Navi Mumbai to Bangladesh which is where she is now living. Clearly, there may be more to this than meets the eye. 

had always taken her vote for granted. That was, until it was suddenly taken away. She presented officials with her Indian birth certificate and family land documents from the village going back to 1962.

I have similar documents. But my name has been deleted because I am no longer an Indian citizen.  

Both her parents had been on the electoral roll going back decades, so she showed proof of that too. But when the final revised voter list came out in April, Fakir was not on it.

Can this be verified? I am a Muslim lady named Shahid Fakir. I was brutally raped by Elon Musk & Bill Gates & gave birth to two disabled daughters. Sadly, my claim for compensation from those two billionaires has not been successful. Why? The facts of the case, as I have presented them, can't be verified. 

The 38-year-old migrant worker, born into a poor Muslim family, was not alone. Since last year, 130 million names – more than the population of Japan – have been removed from India’s electoral roll through a process known as SIR, or special intensive revision. In the nearly eight decades since India’s independence, never have the voter rolls shrunk by such a huge amount over such a short time.

Never has the population been so big.  

The Narendra Modi government has called SIR a legitimate exercise to clean up the electoral rolls.

The Election Commission- an indepent, Constitutional, body- has a duty to carry out such exercises from time to time.  

Overseen by the election commission, tens of millions of dead and duplicate names have been removed. Yet so have the names of millions of living Indian citizens.

Because they have moved. 

Critics allege that the pledge to “purify” India’s voter roll of illegal immigrants has instead been used for more sinister purposes – disenfranchising tens of millions of Muslims,

which is popular with Hindus. The BJP wants credit for something it hasn't done.  

other minorities,

homosexuals?  

and poor and lower caste communities, who are largely not BJP voters.

No. They largely are if they are Hindu.  

In a matter of weeks, nationwide anger at SIR has boiled up and spilled out on to the streets of India’s biggest cities, presenting a formidable challenge to the government.

Not really. The question is whether the BJP will gain as much by it as it did for the anti-CAA protest. That's why Owaisi- head of the biggest Muslim party- will have no truck with this agitation. 

Over the weekend, Delhi was transformed into a high-security fortress of barricades, roadblocks and tens of thousands of police and paramilitaries who detained thousands of people, as they attempted to stop youth-led protests calling for the man who oversaw SIR, the chief election commissioner, Gyanesh Kumar, to step down immediately.

They also stopped them looting and burning down shops. Sad.  

On Monday, opposition parties – who have decried SIR as a “weapon for vote theft” by the Modi government – drew tens of thousands of supporters as they marched through the capital and presented a petition to the supreme court, demanding Kumar’s resignation.

He may well resign. Who needs the grief?  

The youth-led Cockroach Janta party (CJP) movement, who were behind the call for Saturday’s action, have vowed to “fight on” in their protests against SIR.

The guy who started it used to be with the 'Common Man' party. Is he trying to steal Rahul's thunder? Probably not. If he and his ilk do well, Congress may offer them tickets. 

Opposition and civil society leaders allege that SIR has already given the BJP an electoral advantage in states such as Bihar and West Bengal, claims the party denied.

Anti-immigrant sentiment in West Bengal may have helped the BJP. But Mamta was brought down by her own nepotism & thuggery. In Bihar, the fear of  a return to 'jungle Raj' enabled Nitish & Modi to win.  

Others say the exercise has had even more concerning implications: under changes to SIR unilaterally implemented by Kumar, the election commission has become the arbiter of Indian citizenship, a sweeping overreach of its remit.

The problem here is that if you hamstring the EC then the ruling party in a State can entrench itself using bogus votes. Since the BJP rules about 75 percent of the country, they will be able to perpetuate their rule.  

The consequences are already playing out in West Bengal, where Modi’s Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) recently came to power and began a crackdown on “illegal” immigrants, complete with several new detention centres. Civil society groups say Muslims excluded by SIR are being targeted.

This is what the BJP wants Hindu voters to believe. The problem is Rahul. If he says it is happening, it isn't happening at all. The boy has shit for brains.  

Fakir was among them. Just three months after the voter list was published – and while her hearing to challenge her exclusion was pending – she was picked up by police and accused of being an illegal Bangladeshi immigrant.

She was picked up in Navi Mumbai, which is where she lives. Yet she claims to be a resident of West Bengal. She says she was sent to Assam and then pushed across the border. Her husband and children have not been affected.  

In July she was pushed over the border to Bangladesh, a country she had never been to nor had any connection with, and remains stuck there.

she is living with a family and, for some reason, the Bangladeshi government has provided her with armed guards.  

“I have all the documents to prove I am an Indian citizen,” she said in a tearful phone call from the Bangladesh border village where she has been sheltering. “I fell on their feet and begged the police not to send me to Bangladesh but they pushed me over the border.”

After I was raped by Bill Gates & Elon Musk, I begged them to give me bus-fare so I could get home. They laughed at me and stole a valuabe gold chain- weighing 20 kg- which I happened to be wearing.  

A Bangladesh border guard officer confirmed Fakir’s account. “We checked all her documents and are convinced that she is an Indian citizen,” they said.

The British Government has verified that I am a British citizen. This proves I was raped by Gates, Musk & other rich peeps. Also they stole a valuable diamond tiara I happened to be wearing.. 

In September, her family submitted a petition to the supreme court challenging her deportation. The Indian government was given a month to respond.

“All I want is to return to my family and my home in India. I am waiting desperately for that day,” she said. The backlog of millions of voters in West Bengal challenging their exclusion means it could be years before Fakir’s case is heard.

Those across West Bengal who have been stripped of their votes speak of their terror of being accused of being an alien in their own land. Some have had benefits taken away.

Many of the 'Windrush' generation faced this situation.  

Mohammad Hedayet Ullah Siddiqui, 80, from the North 24 Parganas district, said his grandfather had been a freedom fighter for Indian independence and three generations of his family were on the voter rolls. Yet after SIR, Siddiqui described his “humiliation” on finding his name gone.

“With my name erased from the voter list, I am in constant terror. What if they send me to a detention camp?” he said. “I cannot bear to think about being separated from my children and grandchildren at this age, especially when all my ancestors have been buried in India.”

There is also the danger that Bill Gates & Elon Musk might rape him because they have developed a taste for elderly brown men.  

Critics say the problems began in 2023, when the Modi government changed the process for appointing the three-body election commission, giving majority control to the government for the first time.

Previously, the PM chose the Election Commissioner from a panel of candidates drawn up by the Law Ministry. 

In Anoop Baranwal versus Union of India, 2023, a five-member Constitution Bench ruled that it was the intention of the makers of the Constitution that the power to appoint the CEC and other ECs was not meant to be given exclusively to the executive and that the power was to be exercised “subject to any law made by Parliament”. Noting that no such law was enacted since the inception of the Constitution, the court laid down an interim arrangement for the appointment. This was to operate until Parliament made its own law. The court said the appointments should be made by a three-member committee comprising the Prime Minister, the Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha (or the leader of the party that is largest in the Opposition) and the Chief Justice of India. It was in response to this that Parliament enacted the 2023 Act, which received presidential assent and was notified late in December 2023.

The act replaced the CJI with a Union Minister. 

Thus, the position was that prior to 2023, the PM chose whereas now, the Leader of the Opposition gets a vote. 

Within a matter of months, the Modi-led panel had appointed Kumar as the election commissioner in spite of opposition objections.

Congress didn't want an independent EC when it was in power.  

“For decades, the election commission was one of our more credible, independent bodies, but now that has been eroded,” said Ronojoy Sen, a senior fellow at the South Asian Studies Programme, National University of Singapore.

It lacked teeth. Booth capturing was rife. The truth is the revision exercise could only be implemented in West Bengal because the Centre was willing to bring in police officers from outside the state.  

By the following year, the new election commission body had begun SIR, starting in Bihar, where it immediately raised concerns among human rights groups after more than 6 million names were removed. Not long after the revisions, the BJP won a landslide victory in the Bihar state elections.

Because the oppostion was shit.  

Despite concerns over SIR rumbling on for months, it did not spark national protests until the Indian Express newspaper last month revealed that two members of the election commission had raised 14 objections to how voters were being excluded from the rolls, but they were unilaterally overruled by Kumar.

This is the sort of evidence which must be presented in court and verified.  

“India has always been a flawed democracy but at least citizens felt they had the right to vote and that elections were regular and fair,” said Sen. “SIR has taken away that right. From how it has been conducted, it’s difficult to see how the motive was anything other than to enhance the election prospects of the BJP.”

The BJP gets 'Hindu consolidation' if it is perceived as taking votes away from Muslim immigrants.  

Three former election commissioners have openly criticised SIR as a “hostile exercise” that has undermined the sanctity of the country’s electoral rolls by focusing on the exclusion – rather than inclusion – of voters. OP Rawat, a former chief election commissioner, described changes to the voter registration form as “wrong and illegal”.

93 percent of deleted names in West Bengal were reinstated by tribunals but only after the election. That looks suspicious. It is illegal if the intent was to change the outcome of the election. But that must be proved in court.  

Ashok Lavasa, who was an election commissioner between 2018 and 2020, called for the SIR to be scrapped. “An unfair procedure has been imposed on millions of people in the country, and you have the judiciary which has validated that,” he said last month. “How do you explain the deletion of 130 million names?”

If the revision is legitimate, both these guys were derelict in their duty.  

None have been more vehement in their opposition than SY Qureshi, who was chief election commissioner between 2010 and 2012.

appointed by Congress.  

“This is a national harassment exercise designed to throw Muslims off the electoral roll,” he claimed. “The only way to restore the credibility of India’s elections is to restore those deleted voters.”

They are being restored- if they are alive. Sadly, discrimination against dead people continues unabated. 

The BJP has denied any political involvement or motive in the SIR process, accusing the opposition Congress party of “jealousy” over its recent electoral victories and saying any deleted voters can simply re-enrol. The BJP spokesperson Sudhanshu Trivedi said the allegations were “disinformation” and part of an opposition campaign “being orchestrated to create an atmosphere of division and anarchy”.

Or one where Hindus rally to the BJP- more particularly in UP where elections are due in March.  

Nonetheless, the election commission has appeared to accept some flaws in the process. Late last week, it belatedly put a cap on the number of voter deletion forms – which allow people to submit objections on behalf of others – after incidents in which people submitted thousands of forms targeting legitimate Muslim voters.

Why create a headache for yourself?  

Public anger, meanwhile, has continued to build. In Delhi, where the SIR exercise left millions of people off the draft list, protests are expected to continue this week.

A Delhi resident for 30 years, Prashant Tandon,

a Hindu. Even if he is a refugee from Pakistan, he has a route to citizenship 

60, said he could not believe it when a notice came to his door, questioning his life as a voter. “If someone doubts my citizenship, they should produce evidence against me,” he said furiously, adding that he would be protesting alongside the young people. “I should not have to prove that I am an Indian citizen.”

Or that you are alive. The fact is every Indian has an inalienable right to immortality. Under Modi, hundreds of millions are being deleted from life every decade. Only if the BJP is defeated at the polls will the Grim Reaper fuck the fuck off from Ind's coral strand.