Ghalib's Ghazal 78- 2 verses

Longing's sigh longs for, but, Love's life-sentence to be prolonged

Not by climbing curls did Zal come to- whom Anqa e'er belonged

Leviathan is the myriad mouth of every post-Flood wavelet

Till our tears become pearls & Indra's net- Eyes forget.

Ivrim, Arya & Crap's Messiah

That everything is entangled because of radical fungibility

Is the insight of Natanson, Bose & Statistical stability

For aught that endures incurs, higher than haecceity, a cost

Hindus & Hebrews- kategoros of their own Holocaust.

Envoi

Peace hath a Prince! Tho' Maths & Music, mutually, are Maya

Harmonic traps- Ivrim or Arya- All craps' Messiah. 

Teltumbde telling lies about Godse

Ambedkarite politics is based on hatred of Brahmins (though Ambedkar's second wife was Brahmin). Their political program was based on Churchill's speech 'our duty in India' given in March of 1931 which insisted that 'Gandhi stands for the substitution of Brahmin domination for British rule in India.' Churchill believed Gandhi to be a charlatan or a simpleton who had been given command of the Congress only so as to pull the wool over the eyes of the British, the Muslims & the 'depressed classes'. Churchill said 'Already Nehru, his young rival in the Indian Congress, is preparing to supersede him the moment that he has squeezed his last drop from the British lemon'. 

Nehru was aware of Churchill's views. He saw that 'federation', which Churchill championed, would leave the Brits in charge and thus became the strongest voice for a unitary India- a fact which Rahul doesn't seem to understand. Interestingly, in his Autobiography, he called for the 'Brahminization' (as opposed to Baniaization) of India. Gandhi was a bania- i.e. a businessman just as the Brits were a 'nation of shopkeepers'. 

Churchill's intellectual heirs are firstly the Pakistanis- who embrace the two nation theory that he propounded. Secondly, the DMK in Tamil Nadu which is the successor of the 'Justice Party' and which holds 'sanatan dharma' as anathema. Thirdly, we have the Ambedkarites. Indeed, Ambedkar himself welcomed the killing of the Mahatma. At the time, he wrote as follows in a private letter- 

 "My own view is that great men are of great service to their country, but they are also at certain times a great hindrance to the progress of the country. Mr Gandhi had become a positive danger to this country," 

"He had choked all the thoughts. He was holding together the Congress which is a combination of all the bad and self-seeking elements in society

this is precisely the gravamen of Churchill's 1931 speech. His own Tory colleagues thought he was mad. Brahmins couldn't be uniquely evil. If there were corrupt and cowardly Brahmins, the same could be said of every other community.  

who agreed on no social or moral principle governing the life of society except the one of praising and flattering Mr Gandhi. Such a body is unfit to govern a country," 

Idolatry of Ambedkar or Periyar, on the other hand, is perfectly fine.  

"As the Bible says that sometimes good cometh out of evil, so also I think good will come out of the death of Mr Gandhi. It will release people from bondage to supermen, it will make them think for themselves and compel them to stand on their own merits," 

Sadly Ambedkar & his pal J.N Mandal (who was Jinnah's law minister) had no merit. Mandal had to run away to India. Ambedkar couldn't get elected to Parliament. Without the Brits to prop them up, they collapsed. 

Anand Teltumbde is married to a grand-daughter of Ambedkar. He writes in 'the Wire'-  

Reflections on the Murder of Gandhi and the State of India

Gandhi’s murder cannot be viewed merely as an event of the past.

Nor can the pogrom carried out against Brahmins in Pune by the Congress party.  

It marked the beginning of an ongoing project.

As did the killing of two other people with the surname 'Gandhi'.  

January 30, 1948 was not an end; it was the first shot in a long war against pluralism,

the country had been partitioned. Pluralism was dead in the water. Ambedkar may have dismissed his contribution to the Constitution as 'hack work' but, the fact remains, the Constitution is unitary and it stripped Muslims of any type of affirmative action (e.g. such as had been given to Muslim Dalits by the 1935 GoI Act)  

secularism,

Cow protection is a Directive Principle 

and constitutional democracy in India.

The Constitution creates a unitary State with an overmighty Centre. Moreover, it permits its own suspension as Mrs. Gandhi's opponents discovered during the Emergency.  

Reflections on the Murder of Gandhi and the State of India

Seventy-seven years ago, on January 30, 1948, three bullets struck down Mahatma Gandhi at a prayer meeting in Birla House. The gunman, Nathuram Godse, was a Chitpavan Brahmin from Pune.

The previous assassination attempt was made by a Punjabi refugee some of whose family had been massacred by Muslim mobs. He was angry that Gandhi was saying the refugees should go back while Muslims who had fled should be allowed to return.  

It was however no simple act of homicide. It was the Brahminical ideology

Madanlal Pahwa was Khatri 

that sought to exterminate Gandhi’s plural, inclusive vision of India

which had already been exterminated by Jinnah 

as an obstacle to a project of Hindu supremacy

established by Nehru & Indira  

and a nostalgic yearning for a restored Peshwai order.

This is the crux of the matter. Ambedkar had got it into his head that the Peshwas had discriminated against his community. This was the line that British officials were pushing in the Nineteenth century. Gokhale must be just as bad as Tilak because both are Chitpavan. But the founders of the RSS weren't Chitpavan.  

The assassin did not act in isolation. He was backed by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS)

No. The RSS wasn't stupid or crazy. Killing Gandhi was foolish. If it must be done, get a Muslim to do it.  

and the Hindu Mahasabha, and blessed by V. D. Savarkar

who had suffered so much when in prison that he wasn't quite sane

the father of Hindutva.

He only adopted it after the War when it became obvious that the Brits were on the way out. The question was whether they could leave India weak by creating an artificial coalition of Muslims, Dalits, Dravidians & the Princes as a check to the Hindu majority. Thanks to Nehru, the answer was no.  

After the assassination, the RSS sought to distance itself from Godse. But historians like D.N. Jha

who was so shit at history that he said there was never any temple at the Ram Janambhumi.  

demolished that claim.

By lying.  

In his memoir, Godse’s brother Gopal Godse himself confessed that all the Godse brothers had been associated with the RSS at the time of the murder.

They were also associated with the King Emperor because, in law, they were his subjects. OMG! King killed Gandhi!  

Public anger followed reports that RSS members had celebrated the murder by distributing sweets in parts of Maharashtra provoked public attacks on Brahmin houses at many places. 

Distribution of sweets should be banned. It provokes 'public attacks'. Jews were distributing sweets in Poland. That is why Hitler was provoked into attacking that country.  

Ideological disposition

The historical disposition of Brahminical ideology has been to secure and preserve supremacy over the religio-social and cultural order,

So, Churchill was right! Indian 'freedom struggle' was actually a cunning Brahmin plot! Ambedkar should be praised for serving the Brits. Jagjivan Ram should be castigated for going to jail.  

rather than to exercise political power directly. Within the varna hierarchy, rulers who wielded temporal authority were placed below Brahmins, their legitimacy dependent on rituals, codes, and moral sanction controlled by them.

Very true. Brahmin priests controlled British & Muslim rulers.  

This deeply entrenched hierarchy shaped Brahminical attitudes towards political power, particularly when external forces entered the subcontinent. As a social group, Brahmins were rarely opposed to being ruled by outsiders;

Peshwa didn't fight the British. He distributed sweets. That provoked the Brits to attack him.  

instead, they tended to accommodate and even support the dominant power, provided it guaranteed the preservation of their social hegemony.

Very true. Brahmins in Pakistan supported Muslim League. J.N Mandal was actually a Brahmin.  

There is no sustained historical instance of Brahmins as a community organising resistance to an external ruling power merely on the grounds of foreignness.

Just as there is no historical instance of Ambedkarites telling the truth.  

Even under Muslim rule – so relentlessly vilified in contemporary Hindutva discourse – Brahmin elites adapted, served as advisers, administrators, and intellectual intermediaries, and secured their privileged position within the social order. This pattern repeated itself under British rule.

Smart people do well. Ambedkar did well. His Brahmin wife must have been controlling him.  

The only moment of collective Brahminical rage was provoked not by colonial domination per se, but by the defeat of the Peshwai in Pune – the singular historical instance of direct Brahmin political sovereignty.

Because Brahmins were seldom Kings. This proves they must have been controlling Kings- more particularly British Emperors of India.  

The subsequent rebellions, including participation in the events of 1857 (later romanticised by Savarkar as the “First War of Independence”), were driven less by a universal anti-colonial vision than by the desire to restore lost Brahmin rule.

Mangal Pandey was a Brahmin. Thus, he was very evil.  

Even here, the acceptance of Bahadur Shah Zafar’s nominal leadership illustrates a familiar strategic flexibility: political alliances were negotiable, so long as the deeper structure of social dominance could ultimately be reclaimed.

Did you know Brahmins are dominating Pakistan? Field Marshall Munir is secretly wearing janeo.  

Birth of Hindu consolidation

In Indian history, most external groups that entered the subcontinent eventually settled, assimilated, and made India their home.

Unless like Nadir or Abdali, they were content to simply loot it and then withdraw- no doubt, because they were secretly wearing janeo.  

The British – and other Europeans – were different. They arrived as merchant capitalists, captured political power to secure commercial interests, and never intended permanent cultural integration.

A.O Hume, founder of the Congress party, was a vegetarian Vedantist advocated cow protection on agronomic grounds. 

This distinction mattered.

The Brits didn't want to lose power to a miscegenated Creole caste.  

For Brahminical elites, the real historical disruption had come earlier from large-scale conversions of marginalised castes to Islam,

plenty of Brahmins converted to Islam. Iqbal was related to Sapru. Incidentally, Acharya Kripalani's elder brother had become a Muslim.  

which weakened their demographic and cultural monopoly. Islamic civilisation posed a sustained challenge to their authority, creating a deep, if often tacit, resentment toward Muslim rule.

Why did J.N Mandal run away from Pakistan? Do Dalits in that country not feel any resentment to 'Muslim rule'?  

When the British defeated the Muslim powers, they were naturally happy.

As were Dalits.  

The British, unlike earlier rulers, were expected eventually to depart. By the mid-nineteenth century, it became clear that preparations had to begin for reclaiming political authority by exterminating Muslims as the competitors.

By contrast, Muslims never dreamed of re-establishing a Caliphate.  

This shift is traceable to eastern Bengal,

which is where J.N Mandal came from. He got the Namasudras in Sylhet to vote for joining Pakistan. They soon had to run away from there.  

where Brahminical elites felt threatened by Muslim numerical strength and by colonial policies that empowered Muslim peasantry.

Tagore warned his people not to cut their own throats by supporting the Freedom struggle. 

Religion was increasingly mobilised to consolidate Hindu identity against the “Muslim other.”

While J.N Mandal was mobilizing Dalits to vote for the Muslim brother. But he soon had to run away.  

The intellectual fountainhead of this turn was Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay (1838–1894). In his later novels – Anandamath, Devi Chaudhurani, and Sitaram – Bankim articulated a vision that cast Muslim rule as civilisational darkness and imagined Hindu regeneration through militant unity.

Meanwhile, plenty of Muslims were talking of killing kaffirs the way God commanded us to do. 

Anandamath (1882) depicted Hindu ascetics rising violently against Muslim authority and introduced Vande Mataram, equating the nation with Hindu goddess imagery, implicitly excluding Muslims and Christians from the imagined community.

Ambedkarites think Hindus are very evil for not wanting to live under Muslim rule. But, J.N Mandal- Ambedkar's most important ally- had to run away from such rule.  

Bankim’s project was clearly anti-Muslim.

Because Muslims are against kaffirs.  

British rule was portrayed as a one that had ended Muslim dominance and thus as benefactor.

This is also what Raja Ram Mohan Roy & Dwarkanath Tagore thought. But the Peshwai regime disagreed.  

Thinkers such as Ahmed Sofa

who wasn't actually a Sofa 

later observed that Bankim was among the first to articulate the dream of a Hindu Rashtra.

He himself supported the dream of a Bengali Muslim Rashtra.  

Organisationally, this vision was seeded through movements like the Hindu Mela of 1867, led by figures such as Debendranath Tagore, Nabagopal Mitra, and Rajnarayan Basu.

The last two were Kayastha, not Brahmin.  

These gatherings, often described as “national,” were explicitly Hindu in character, defining Indian identity through religious symbolism and excluding Muslims from the cultural imagination. The ideological seed had been sown.

It is fair to say that Hinduism was the 'seed' of Indian nationalism. It is what holds the country together. That is why anti-nationals hate it. Yet, without a strong India, they too will suffer. Like J.N Mandal, they may have to run away to some place where kaffirs are protected.  

The birth and shaping of the RSS

Two Marathi Medical Students in Calcutta before the Great War were inspired by the 'Anushilan Samitis' of 'Jugantar'. Later on, Dr. Hardikar founded the Congress Seva Dal which his pal, Hegdewar, joined. When it appeared likely that the Seva Dal would be banned. Hegdewar founded the RSS. By then, communal riots had become widespread as local politicians jockeyed for power. 

Reform currents within Hindu society arose along two tracks: Western-educated reformers seeking modernisation,

i.e. Brahmo & Prarthana Samaj 

and orthodox revivalists seeking a return to scriptural “originals.”

Which was also the claim of the Brahmos & Prarthana Samajis.  

The most influential of the latter was the Arya Samaj, founded by Dayanand Saraswati, a Gujarati whose movement found its strongest base in Punjab.

Arya Samaj is anti-casteist. Its leaders belong to different castes.  Since Indian Arya Samajis are patriots of India (just as British Arya Samajis are British patriots) they are very evil. 

After his death in 1883, its followers decided to establish Hindu Sabhas, culminating in the foundation of Punjab Hindu Sabha on December 16, 1906 under leaders such as Lal Chand,

a Khatri 

U.N. Mukerji,

Bengali Brahmin 

and Lala Lajpat Rai.

from a Jain Agrawal family. 

This consolidation of Hindu organisational politics was mirrored among Muslims. On December 30, 1906, Muslim elites gathered in Dhaka to found the All-India Muslim League under figures including Khwaja Salimullah, Aga Khan III, and Hakim Ajmal Khan, to articulate Muslim socio-economic and political concerns.

It had predecessors in the 1880s.  

While the Muslim League evolved into a political counterweight to the Congress – widely seen as the majority organisation – the Hindu Mahasabha made little headway beyond a largely upper-caste constituency.

It decided to follow an appeasement strategy in 1916. That is why it promoted Motilal Nehru & Mahatma Gandhi.  

In the interwar years, the rise of fascism in Italy under Benito Mussolini impressed sections of India’s right wing.

Mussolini impressed Gandhi, Tagore, Iqbal & Bose.  

Marathi journals associated with Bal Gangadhar Tilak praised European nationalist icons such as Giuseppe Mazzini. Vinayak Damodar Savarkar and his brother Ganesh had earlier founded Abhinav Bharat, inspired by Mazzini’s Young Italy. Though Savarkar once influenced revolutionary circles in England, his incarceration in the Cellular Jail marked a turn: he submitted mercy petitions to the British

because a lot of other prisoners were given an amnesty. The fact is, the Brits had conceded the principle of transfer of power. The only question was whether Hindus would be masters in their own house. Gandhi only had salience when it appeared that he could deliver a united India strong enough to protect minorities if not its own borders (because the Royal Navy would remain necessary till India built up its own fleet. The first Indian admiral was only appointed in 1958.) 

and later articulated Hindutva as a political doctrine for Hindu consolidation.

Hindutva is ecumenical and anti-casteist. Since this is good for India, it is very evil.  

B.S. Moonje,

a Doctor who had seen service in the Boer war. 

a Savarkar associate

a Tilak associate. The Savarkars were junior to him.  

and mentor to K.B. Hedgewar,

and Hardikar 

the founder of the RSS drew organisational lessons from Mussolini’s youth brigades

No. He was imitating what his pal Hardikar had already done at the end of 1923. There may have been a member of the Seva Dal committee who had returned from Italy and who knew about the Black Shirts. However, the inspiration for Seva Dal was Bengal's 'Anushilan Samitis' from before the Great War. I should mention that all the nationalists of the period paid reverence to Sri Aurobindo who was in exile in Pondicherry.  

and shaped RSS as a secretive militant organisation.

A voluntary organization which is a cross between the Boy Scouts & the Rotarians.  

The RSS, from its inception, kept itself aloof from the anti-colonial struggle.

It was an over-ground 'social' organization which, it was hoped, would not be banned when the Seva Dal was banned. Nehru was an enthusiastic member of the Seva Sal.  

Myths and falsehoods

Stupid myths and falsehoods are Teltumbde's stock in trade.  

The Hindutva movement is deliberately founded on the myths and falsehoods.

It is founded on the vision of a Hinduism purged of hereditary distinctions of caste and sectarian squabbles about dogma. Since it is good for India, anti-nationals hate it.  

It follows the Goebbelsian dictum that “If you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it, and you will even come to believe it yourself.,”

That is the Ambedkarite stock in trade. The problem is that repeating stupid lies causes people to think you are a stupid liar. Nobody cares if you rot in jail.  

The propaganda machine assumes bigger importance in this than the truth. The RSS followed this dictum in its tenacious spread.

No. It followed the dictum that if you are part of a voluntary organization, then you need to be polite and to behave decently. It is this ingrained habit which has helped RSS pracharaks to rise. Other Sangh Parivar outfits may lack this organizational ethos.  

At his trial, Nathuram Godse read a 92 page hand-written statement justifying killing of Gandhi. Each reason he cited rested on a selective or false reading of events.

Sadly, there was more truth in them than in any tome written by Teltumbde.  

Partition of India: Godse blamed Gandhi for “vivisecting” the nation.

Gandhi could have launched an agitation to prevent it. There is such a thing as 'command responsibility'.  

In fact, Gandhi opposed Partition to the end

by going on a fast? He would do that in order to get India to pay money to Pakistan despite ongoing hostilities. The truth is he didn't oppose Partition. It is a different matter that it saddened him.  

and held no executive authority;

yet he had been acclaimed by Govind Vallabh Pant, Premier of UP, as the Il Duce & Fuhrer of India'. He had command responsibility even if he held no legislative or executive office.  

the decision emerged from negotiations among the British, the Congress leadership, and the Muslim League amid spiralling communal violence.

Ambedkar supported Partition. So did his pal, J.N Mandal. But Mandal had to run away to India.  

“Muslim appeasement”: He claimed Gandhi “privileged Muslims over Hindus”,

true enough. He actually offered Jinnah the post of Prime Minister of a united India.  

citing Gandhi’s fasts and support for Hindustani.

India decided Godse, not Gandhi, was right. Hindi in Devanagari script is the official language.  

Those fasts in Calcutta and Delhi sought to stop retaliatory killings

they failed utterly.  

and restore civic peace for all citizens, while Hindustani was proposed as a bridge language in a deeply divided society.

India decided it didn't need no stinkin' bridge.  

Release of Rs 55 crores to Pakistan: Godse treated this as Gandhi’s betrayal.

It was. There's a good reason Congress did little to keep the Maha-crackpot safe.  

The transfer was a Cabinet decision honouring financial commitments made at Independence; Gandhi’s fast pressed for communal peace in Delhi,

this failed. The Muslim percentage of the population dropped from 33 to 5 percent. Nehru brought in a law to prevent Muslim refugees who had fled in panic from returning to India and reclaiming their property. 

not for overriding state policy.

State policy was right to override the Mahacrackpot.  

Non-violence (ahimsa): Godse argued that Gandhi’s creed weakened Hindus.

Gandhi, writing after the Second World War broke out, said Congress was the party of the High Caste Hindus. They were devotees of Ahimsa- i.e. shit at fighting. Thus the Brits should hand over the Army to Congress otherwise the Muslims & the Punjabis (regardless of creed) and perhaps also the Gurkhas, would take over the country. The anal cherries of the Dalits might be protected by the Ahimsa fairy, but, otherwise, the Hindus would be reduced to destitution and virtual enslavement. 

Godse was right to say that Gandhi's creed weakened Hindus. It also weakened India. If the majority won't fight, even the minorities are fucked.  

Gandhi’s non-violence was a mass political strategy against colonial rule and communal hatred,

which failed utterly the moment it was tried 

not a denial of a state’s right to maintain order or defend citizens.

Gandhi thought the Brits should hand over their country to Hitler. He didn't think the British state had a duty to fight.  

Undue influence on government:

Which was fucking obvious.  

Godse portrayed Gandhi’s moral authority and fasts as coercion outside democracy. Gandhi held no office; his interventions were appeals to conscience in moments of breakdown, not instruments of state power.

Those appeals stopped once he was shot. A nuisance had been curbed.  

Long before January 30, 1948, Gandhi had faced a string of threats and failed attempts by Hindu extremists. A bomb was hurled at his motorcade in Pune on June 25, 1934 during his Harijan tour against untouchability; in May and September 1944 at Panchgani and Sevagram, Nathuram Godse himself was stopped while trying to attack Gandhi with a dagger and released when Gandhi refused to press charges.

If this is true, then the Police should have kept Godse under observation. They have a duty to prevent crime irrespective of the target of the crime. The big question is why Morarji Desai, when informed of the wider conspiracy of which Pahwa was part, refused to take any action. Maybe he was simply stupid. Equally odd is the fact that Godse was caught by an American.  

In June 1946, boulders placed on a rail track near Nerul – Karjat derailed the train carrying him; a bomb planted at a Bombay venue in September 1946 exploded prematurely; and on January 20, 1948 a grenade was thrown at Birla House to create confusion for an assassination attempt that failed.

Pahwa was arrested. He had previously made a confession to a Sociology Professor who informed Desai. Yet, no action was taken. Why?  

This record predates both Partition and the Pakistan payment controversy, undercutting claims that these were the motive. The earliest attack was clearly against Gandhi’s anti-untouchability campaign after the Poona Pact, suggesting their Opposition to Gandhi’s social reform agenda and hatred for the Dalits.

It was the suggestion Gandhi himself made. Nobody believed him. The Poona Pact was based on Rajah-Moonje pact- i.e. it was seen as a smart move by the Hindutvadis.  

Rather, the Hindutva hostility toward Muslims, Christians, and Communists – articulated by M. S. Golwalkar – can also be read as reflecting

their virulent attacks on Hinduism?  

a deeper hatred for the lower strata of Hindu society, which formed the bulk of these targeted groups.

Sadly, it is the lower strata of Hindu society which attacks Dalits.  

Gandhi might seem an odd target for a Hindu assassin.

Which is why people didn't believe there were any such attempts. People assumed it would be a crazy Muslim who would get rid of the Mahacrackpot.  

He proclaimed himself a sanatani Hindu, invoked Ram Rajya, drew on bhajans and epics, and for much of his life accepted varna and even caste as moral ideas. What Godse and the Hindutva camp opposed was not Gandhi’s religiosity but the political use he made of it; his vision of inclusivity.

i.e. everybody, including the Brits, should do what he told them to do- e.g. surrender to Hitler.  

Using Hindu idiom to argue for coexistence and caste reform, he undercut the project of Hindu consolidation.

No. His one good idea was that Congress-wallahs should spend time in jail. This built esprit de corps and was good for Hindu consolidation. On the other hand, when rioting occurred, his financiers stepped in to make sure Hindu gangsters killed plenty of Muslims. Gandhi was cool with that. He said that he personally knew which Bihari Congressmen had killed innocent Muslims. Did he demand their suspension from the Party? Nope. As he said to Viceroy Wavell, if India wanted a blood-bath, let it have a blood-bath. The soldier was shocked by the callousness of the civilian.  

It was antithetical to Godse’s worldview: Gandhi blocked the idea of India as a Hindu nation, humanised Muslims amid communal fury, and redefined Hindu virtue away from revenge and dominance.

No. Gandhian administrations after 1937 alienated Muslims who complained of school-children having to sing 'Vande Mataram' etc.  

He was dangerous not because he was insufficiently Hindu, but because his moral politics hollowed out the case for Hindu majoritarianism.

He was a nuisance. Godse is praised for having curbed it. But he too was a nuisance and was hanged.  

The attitude returns: From Gandhi to Gauri

Although moral censure curbed its open expression, Hindutva ideology did not disappear; it

was the basis of the Congress party. Nehru succeeded in 'Brahminizing' India by using 'Socialism' to clip the wings of the mercantile and productive classes.  

receded and endured. Its subdued existence is reflected in the permission for Godse to read out his long justification for his crime though Justice Khosla was inclined to bar it as irrelevant.

It relevant. The danger was that rumours would spread that the actual assassin was a Muslim close to Nehru or something of that sort. 

Over decades, this current moved from the margins toward state power,

Lohia & JP had brought the Jan Sangh into the mainstream in the Sixties. The RSS played a big role in bringing down Indira in 1977.  

culminating in 2014 with a former RSS pracharak becoming the prime minister.

Vajpayee became a pracharak in 1947. He became PM in '97-98. 

In the run-up to the 2014 elections, a high-octane campaign backed by the RSS was launched against the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA)

Rahul had refused to become PM. Moreover, he wouldn't let anybody else take that job. Thus, it was a case of 'Modi or nobody.' Sadly, that remains the case today.  

II government on patently false alibi but it succeeded.

I suppose Teltumbde means 'allegations (not alibis) of corruption were false.' But, they were irrelevant. Rahul should have become PM saying he would root out corruption. He'd have won a majority before fucking up and getting shot or blown up like Daddy and Granny.  

The defeat of the Congress at the polls appeared certain. From 2013 onward, a grim pattern re-emerged: public intellectuals

whom nobody had heard of 

marked, tracked, and shot at close range for what they wrote and said. Narendra Dabholkar was killed in Pune on August 20, 2013. His work against superstition and for scientific temper made him a target.

Of some nutter whom nobody has heard of.  

Govind Pansare was shot outside his home on February 16, 2015 after challenging sectarian readings of history and organising workers.

Sadly, Teltumbde wasn't shot because he was utterly useless.  

M. M. Kalburgi was murdered at his doorstep in Dharwad on August 30, 2015 for his critique of blind faith and Brahminical practices. Gauri Lankesh

was important because of the Lingayat/Veerashaiva controversy.  

was gunned down in Bengaluru on September 5, 2017 for her relentless journalism against hate politics. As the investigations revealed they were planned and executed by Hindutva outfits – Sanatan Sanstha

founded by a crazy hypnotherapist who had spent a couple of decades in the UK 

and the Hindu Janajagruti Samiti.

Which denounces films. It is harmless. 

These killings

didn't matter at all, save in that Lankesh was a Lingayat journalist with her own magazine.  

reflected the same animus that once marked Gandhi as an obstacle, now marking rationalists, scholars, and journalists who stand in the way of a Hindu Rashtra vision.

Teltumbde doesn't stand in the way of any vision. Nobody wants to kill him. Sad.  

Godse’s Deification

After 2014, Nathuram Godse – long confined to the margins of public memory – began to surface in ways that would have been unthinkable in earlier decades.

Why? The Mahacrackpot had made Nehru his heir. Indira had made Congress dynastic. So long as Gandhi parivar was willing to supply Prime Ministers (or Regents like Manmohan keeping the seat warm for Rahul), it made sense to say 'Gandhi was great'. But those days are gone. Currently, Modi is the only guy who can run the country. The Opposition don't have a candidate. Thus, precisely because nutters like Teltumbde say 'RSS killed Gandhi' we are obliged to say 'killing Gandhi was an act of great heroism.' The real problem, however, is that autocracy is curbed by assassination. Indian politicians don't want to get shot. Rahul knows that if he is PM, he will get blamed for some stupid shit and thus become a target for some group or the other. 

The shift did not come through official endorsement, but through a loosening of taboos in parts of the public sphere: fringe groups openly praising him, attempts to install his busts, small shrines dedicated in his name, and social media campaigns recasting him as a “patriot” rather than an assassin. What had earlier been whispered in closed circles started appearing in rallies, local commemorations, and online networks.

Why? Teltudmbe's answer is 'It is a Brahmin plot dating back thousands of years!'  

Elected representatives from the ruling ecosystem occasionally made statements praising Godse or calling him a nationalist, triggering controversy but also revealing how far the moral boundary had moved.

Moral boundaries don't matter. What matters is whether the Gandhi dynasty will appoint a technocrat to run things so that they don't get shot when GoI does stupid shit.  

Each episode followed a pattern – outrage, tactical distancing by party leadership, and then quiet return of the same sentiment in another form. The cumulative effect was to normalise public ambivalence toward Gandhi’s assassin in a way that steadily eroded the earlier national consensus that treated the act as a civilisational shame.

Ambedkarites did much to paint Gandhi as an evil bastard. Logically, they should praise Godse as their deliverer. Had Gandhi lived, would the Hindu Code Bills have been passed?

Digital media accelerated this rehabilitation. WhatsApp forwards, Facebook pages, and YouTube channels circulated selective readings of Godse’s courtroom statement, stripped of context, presenting it as heroic testimony.

It is better than this cretin's testimony.  

This cultural re-framing did not require state proclamation.

RSS was banned because of Gandhi's assassination. Yet it could grow so large as a Parliamentary party that it got Cabinet seats in some States by the end of the Sixties. From '77-to '79 if even had a Cabinet minister at the Centre. But the first BJP Chief Minister dates from around 1990. The killing of Rajiv Gandhi gave it the chance to gain power at the Centre. But once Rahul returned to India in 2002, Congress regained momentum. Thus 'cultural framing' doesn't matter. What matters is whether the owner of a dynastic party has a dog in the manger attitude. Rahul won't rule- because he doesn't want to get shot- but he also won't let any one else rule. This is the political 'framing' which decides outcomes. 

It flourished in an atmosphere where majoritarian assertion,

i.e. what happened in 1947 

grievance politics,

see above 

and hostility to dissent

see above. Ambedkar approved India's First Amendment which goes in the opposite direction to America's.  

had become mainstream. In that climate, the assassin of Mahatma Gandhi could be reimagined not as a warning from history but as an icon for the present.

It is obvious that a lot of people who joined the RSS in the Fifties, Sixties, Seventies etc. thought the Mahacrackpot was a nuisance. Thanks, first to Indira & Buta Singh and then to Rao & Manmohan, Gandhianism was kicked out of Indian politics long ago. Ambedkarite shite was given a shot in the arm by Mayawati. Let us see if she can make a comeback in the Hindi belt after delimitation. 

Millions of Godses Murdering India

What is alarming today is not an isolated act of violence but the gradual social production of a mindset in which hostility is moralised and prejudice is recast as patriotism.

This happened when Muslims were massacred or chased out of Delhi. Nehru was Prime Minister at that time.  

The outlook once identified with Nathuram Godse now circulates through a broad ecosystem of schooling, cultural work, and media messaging that presents India as exclusively Hindu, treats minorities with suspicion, and brands dissent as betrayal.

Custodian of Evacuee (later 'Enemy') Property treated Muslims with suspicion. They seized property because they 'anticipated' that the owner might migrate to Pakistan.  

This reproduction happens across channels. Institutions linked to the RSS, thousands of schools and hostels where cultural instruction shades into ideological orientation. Curricular revisions soften or omit difficult histories

stupid lies spread by Leftist Professors 

– Gandhi’s assassination context, caste oppression, communal violence

this nutter is pretending that Brahmins love Muslims and want to kill only Dalits. That may have been J.N Mandal's belief but he had to run away to India.  

– while elevating civilisational pride.

Indians should hate and be ashamed of Indian civilization.  

Social media sustains a flow of grievance narratives, misinformation, and selective hero-making;

e.g. Ambedkar worship 

parts of broadcast media echo majoritarian frames and stigmatize critics as “anti-national.”

This works if the shoe fits. It doesn't work- as with Owaisi- if it doesn't fit at all.  

Even fringe attempts to memorialise Godse, though not mainstream, signal how far the moral threshold has shifted.

The 'moral threshold' for this nutter shifted when he started to tell stupid, paranoid, lies.  If was genuinely smart, he'd be an IT billionaire. 

Gandhi’s murder cannot be viewed merely as an event of the past. It marked the beginning of an ongoing project.

To make India strong and prosperous. That's what this nutter objects to.  

January 30, 1948 was not an end; it was the first shot in a long war against pluralism,

which succeeded at Partition. The word 'pluralism' was coined for Burma which had already split off from India.  

secularism,

i.e. saying Hinduism is evil. Taliban is very nice.  

and constitutional democracy in India.

Dynasticism. Why is a low-born chai-wallah sitting in the office which used to belong to Cambridge alumni like Nehru, Indira & Rajiv? Incidentally, Rahul has an MPhil from Cambridge. Also, he is a janeodhari Brahmin.  

The forces that killed Gandhi are today in power. They are no longer rebels

There were Communist rebels. There were no Hindu rebels in independent India because the country was ruled by Hindus.  

but the rulers of the state. The danger, therefore, has multiplied many times over.

In which case, Muslims should be fleeing.  

Every attack on minorities, every killing in the name of cow protection,

e.g. the cow protection riots in Bihar in 1917? Gandhi was sent to Champaran to distract attention from it.  

every hate speech,

so long as only Hinduism is attacked 

every communal riot, every attempt to erase composite culture – these are all part of the same project that killed Gandhi.

& which succeeded thanks, in some part, to him. Going to jail together created esprit corps. Gandhi's son married Rajaji's daughter- thus breaking caste taboos. More remarkably, when Nehru's sister married a Muslim, it was Gandhi who broke up the marriage and got her a suitable Brahmin groom.  

The incidents may appear separate, but the ideology behind them is coherent.

It is the Indian national ideology. If the majority won't fight for India, the minorities are equally doomed.  

Millions of Godses are at work to destroy India in body and spirit.

In which case the country should be getting poorer and weaker. Yet, under Modi, the opposite has been the case.  

Bodily India is being disfigured by their regime through silence over or the lies about the effective loss of control on vast lands along the Line of Actual Control (LAC) in eastern Ladakh at Galwan, Depsang and Hot Springs.

More was lost under Nehru. But then, had Gandhi prevailed, the whole country would have been lost to the Japs in '42.  

Simultaneously, India is being devastated daily by flattening of hills, ecological damage, diversion of forest lands, devastation of environment and destruction of rivers through policies that favour big capital.

Big Capital has the money to finance the State. This cretin thinks India should emulate Venezuela.  

All facilitations for rich and wealthy at the cost of the people are being sold as development and people are being intoxicated with religion and silenced with free rations and occasional freebees.

Rich and wealthy foreigners finance the Wire and publicize this cretin's worthless books.  

India is being killed in spirit through systematic destruction of her history, disfiguration of its archaeology, culture, and trampling upon all the values embodied in the Constitution.

Also, Modi is incessantly sodomizing Dalits like Teltumde. He is too traumatized to talk about it but we should do so for him.  

In this, we must acknowledge our own responsibility.

Teltumbde should not tried to suck Modi off. That randy bugger went ass-to-mouth on him. Dr. Ambedkar must be turning in his grave.  

By remaining silent,

because Modi has shoved his dick in your mouth 

by treating all this as ‘normal,’

It isn't normal for the Prime Minister of a big country to sodomize an elderly shithead every day.  

and by viewing each incident in isolation, we too have become complicit with Godses’ projects.

Fuck Godse's projects. It is Modi's project of going ass-to-mouth on every elderly Dalit which should worry us. By not speaking out against this atrocity, the editors of 'the Wire' are complicit in Teltumbe's brains having been buggered to buggery. Omidyar Sahib should kindly take action.  

G.A Cohen's cretinism

G.A Cohen wites

A person is exploited when unfair advantage is taken of him,

That is true enough. However, without unfairness, per se, an unanticipated or unjustified onerousness of obligation may be resented as exploitative even if it does not benefit the other party.

and he suffers from (bad) brute luck when his bad luck is not the result of a gamble or risk which he could have avoided.

This does not follow. If a person is befuddled by drink and ends up being taken advantage of, he may well resent having been exploited. More importantly, if a person who can beat or kill you or ruin your career harbours such a feeling, it is in your interest to compensate the person so thoroughly that he is appeased. 

I believe that the primary egalitarian impulse is to extinguish the influence on distribution of both exploitation and brute luck.

Exploitation is like unconscionability and thus is justiciable or can be brought under the scope of a tribunal of some sort. Insurance schemes are the remedy for bad luck. The primary egalitarian impulse is to rant and rave. It isn't to do anything sensible. 

To be sure, principled non- and antiegalitarians

are useless and stupid as Cohen 

also condemn (what they consider to be) exploitation,

This causes Exploitation to cry and cry and run home to its Mummy. 

but they do not have the same view of exploitation as egalitarians have, partly because they are less disturbed by brute-luck-derived asset differences which skew distributive outcomes.

Exploitation, as I have frequently explained, arises because Viceroy Sahib is surreptitiously entering the hovels of the poor and draining them of their precious bodily essence through aggravated acts of fellatio and cunnilingus. This is the true cause of poverty and inequality.  

On the foregoing sketch of the primary egalitarian impulse,

which I have far more elegantly expressed 

a statement which purports to express and assert it is exposed to two kinds of challenge. First, such a statement might be criticized for misidentifying what should, in the light of the fundamental egalitarian aim, be equalized.

Dignity? Abolish the distinction between Professor and Student. Given anybody who wants a PhD as many of them as they like.  

I shall myself so criticize Dworkin's equality of resources proposal, since I think that (among other things) it penalizes people who have tastes for which they cannot be held responsible but which, unluckily for them, cost a lot to satisfy.

Which is why other people must be held responsible for supplying those tastes.  

But one might also reject equality of resources on the quite different ground that it conflicts with some important nonegalitarian values.

Like not having your head kicked in by people you hold responsible for supplying your expensive tastes.  

One might say, for example, that while it is indeed brute luck which distributes children into rich and poor families, it would be wrong to seek rectification of the results of that luck, since

you would get your head kicked in. On the other hand, you are welcome to chop off the legs of tall people so they attain height equality with the short. 

that would undermine the institution of the family. In this article I shall not discuss problems for egalitarian proposals of that second kind, problems, that is, of trade-off between equality and other values. That is because I shall treat the various egalitarian proposals to be reviewed below as weak equalisandum claims. An equalisandum claim specifies that which ought to be equalized, what, that is, people should be rendered equal in.

This is the claim made by the vendor of a good or service. Everybody who paid for the thing, got the same thing. If a mistake was made, the vendor apologizes and makes reparations. 

There may be vendors, or potential vendors willing to meet any given equalisandum demand. The question is how much will they charge or, in economic terms- the opportunity cost- i.e. the best alternative foregone. 

Cohen, of course, isn't interested in equalising anything. That's the sort of thing the market, or a  bureaucracy, can do well enough. He is only interested in making stupid demands. Still, he got paid a little money to do so. Why grudge him that? 

An unqualified or strong equalisandum claim, which is the sort that an uncompromising egalitarian asserts, says that people should be as equal as possible in the dimension it specifies.

Thus, McDonalds will sell me the same 'Happy Meal' at the same price as it charges other customers. True, it make me happier than someone else but that is 'consumer surplus'. Marx considered 'profit' to be 'producer surplus'. By the Morishima fundamental theorem of Marxism, if even one enterprise makes a profit, exploitation exists. The Feminist version is that even if one man has a dick, then, because dicks may well enter vaginas, women are being exploited. 

A qualified or weak equalisandum claim says that they should be as equal as possible in some dimension but subject to whatever limitations need to be imposed in deference to other values: those limitations are not specified by the claim in question.

This is mere puffery. McDonalds may say 'we hope all our customers will experience as much joy as possible while eating their Happy Meal.  Sadly, we understand that some of our customers may be dealing with bereavement or other tragic outcomes and thus we cannot guarantee that all customers will experience an equal degree of joy from their Happy Meal. However, we assure you that everybody- rich or poor- will receive exactly the same item. Enjoy!' 

Now, strong equalisandum claims face objections of the two kinds distinguished above, and which I shall now call egalitarian and nonegalitarian objections.

I suppose, some people say they got fewer fries than others in their Happy Meal. That is an egalitarian objection or claim to reparation. The nonegalitarian objection would be that a beejay should be provided to me by a Super-Model while I eat my Happy Meal because I've got a really tiny dick and so the Universe owes me big time. 

An egalitarian objection rests on a view about the right way to treat people equally which differs from the one embodied in the strong equalisandum claim it challenges.

For example, I might demand McDonalds make a Happy Meal for people who want Indian, not American style, fast food. If there are enough Indians in the area, perhaps they will consider doing so. However, it is likely that some other vendor would have already cornered that market. My point is, the market takes care of this objection by itself.

What matters is if there is an incentive to supply whatever is being demanded. If demand is effective- i.e. backed up by money- it will be provided though the quality may be low or non-existent. The fact is you can easily buy a 'Philosopher's Stone' or 'flying unicorn' quite cheaply. Sadly, they are more than a bit shit. But this is also true of places which market themselves as egalitarian utopias.

The egalitarian objector thinks that people should be equal, to some or other extent, in something other than what the claim he opposes specifies, but he does not, qua egalitarian objector, object to the strength of that claim as such.

e.g. McDonalds should supply Samosas as well as Burgers because of the large Indian population in this region.  

By contrast, a nonegalitarian objection to a strong equalisandum claim says that, while the claim might (and might not) correctly identify what should be equalized, it wrongly fails to defer to nonegalitarian values which restrict the extent to which the form of equality it proposes should be pursued: because of those values, so the objection says, the equalisandum proposal is unacceptable (at least) in its strong form.

Gibberish. Strong egalitarianism is everybody getting the same Happy Meal. There is another dimension- e.g. the issue of whether the Indian Samosa is equal to the Burger- which is being invoked by weak as piss palaver. Thus a guy who complains that McDonalds is inegalitarian because it privileges the food of the White Man over the cuisine of the benighted darkie whose ancestors were raped, sodomized and subjected to incessant fellatio and cunnilingus by aristocratic Viceroys. 

An egalitarian objection to a strong equalisandum claim also applies to the weak one correlative to it, whereas a nonegalitarian objection challenges strong proposals only.

Egalitarianism is welcome to have as many dimensions as it pleases. A strong equilisandum objection would point to material evidence that such and such person got less of such and such good or service than other people. A weak one would just waffle on about how there is some other dimension which is being neglected- e.g. why is McDonald's not chopping off the penises of all customers? Don't they understand that no meal can be 'happy' if there is even one penis prowling around which might end up in a vagina?  

Since mine will be a weak proposal,

because Cohen has shit for brains and isn't really interested in equality at all.  

objections of a nonegalitarian kind will not detain me. Taking welfare as a sample equalisandum proposal,

If it is 'strong' then there is a multidimensional configuration space in which it has a representation. This means that any deviation from the prescribed outcome vector for a particular individual, then there is a valid claim of inequality. 

I shall presently illustrate

your own idiocy 

the distinction I have tried to draw by describing supposed objections to the welfare equalisandum which are (a) plainly not egalitarian, (b) arguably, and so I believe, egalitarian, and (c) problematic with respect to how they should be classified. But, before embarking on that exercise in differentiation, a word about what I shall mean by 'welfare' here, and throughout this study. Of the many readings of 'welfare' alive (if not well) in economics and philosophy, I am interested in two: welfare as enjoyment, or, more broadly, as a desirable or agreeable state of consciousness,

which is a matter of psychology, not economics. It may be not just multiply but infinitely realizable. There may be a 'moksha' pill or technique. But whereas a commodity space has a mathematical representation as a multi-dimensional space, 'Enjoyment' or 'agreeable states of consciousness' do not. 

What I mean is this. If I define 'Happy Meal' as a burger of a certain size plus x number of French Fries, then claims about getting an unequal portion can be usefully made. Otherwise, all we have is worthless jibber jabber about the true meaning of Happiness and how anybody can be called happy so long as even one penis is prowling around.  

which I shall call hedonic welfare; and welfare as preference satisfaction, where preferences order states of the world, and where a person's preference is satisfied if a state of the world that he prefers obtains, whether or not he knows that it does

which is why we can argue that the bloke is not happy with his happy meal because his own penis has not been cut off. What if it crams itself up his own arsehole? I tell you penises cause RAPE! They must be banned immediately!  

and, a fortiori, whatever hedonic welfare he does or does not get as a result of its obtaining.

Very true. You may think you aren't getting hedonic welfare from your dick being cut off but, a fortiori, you don't at all. No one can be truly happy till not even a single solitary dick can prowl around imperilling vaginas. 

Egalitarianism may or may not be desirable. However, market or bureaucratic or other protocol bound allocation systems have no difficulty with a strong equalisandum because they benefit by seeking to equalize outcomes- e.g. ensuring the Happy Meal each customer receives is the same. 

Cohen doesn't get this. 

a) Many people think that a policy of equalizing welfare is inconsistent with the maintenance of family values, because, so they say, those values endorse practices of benefiting loved ones which generate welfare inequalities.

But you can still equalize outcomes in the commodity space. Some aspects of welfare- e.g. having a nice Mummy or being pretty- aren't commodities. Yet. Further scientific progress and higher economic productivity may increasingly make them so.  

Now, however penetrating that point may be, it does not represent an egalitarian objection to equality of welfare.

It could do. Maybe there is trade off between increasing equality in the commodity space today but decreasing it in the wider 'welfare' space later on. If we let the Elon Musks of the world control more resources, maybe they will make amazing discoveries such that non-commodity aspects of welfare become more equal. In affluent countries, maybe this is what the vast majority want. They seem to have lost the taste for redistribution by the end of the Sixties. 

One caveat which Cohen & Co ignore is that 'disutility'- which cashes out as opportunity cost- is a sort of 'negative' Welfare. Once that is factored in, egalitarianism is just a Utilitarianism where market-makers enable Hicks-Kaldor improvements- i.e. the world wags on as before. 

Unregulated kinship generosity may be precious on other grounds, but it could not be thought to promote the result that people get an equal amount of something that they should have equal amounts of.

Very true. We should have equal amounts of health and beauty and wit and intelligence. It's unfair that my sister has more of these things that I do. That's why I hate my parents.  

Accordingly, if the family values objection indeed has force against equality of welfare, it is a reason for restricting the writ of that particular equalisandum, or form of equality, and not a reason for proposing another equalisandum in its stead.

Also if any one objects to my shitting on them, then we should restrict the writ of the 'equalisandum' whereby people who haven't shat on me feel it is unfair for me to shit on them.  

Family values do not challenge equality of welfare when the latter is construed as a qualified equalisandum proposal.

Only in the sense that you are wrong to object to my shitting on you.  

Another objection to unqualified equality of welfare

there is only one. Welfare can't be objectively measured 

which is not egalitarian is that implementing it would involve intolerably intrusive state surveillance.

surveillance is useless in such cases 

("Hi! I'm from the Ministry of Equality. Are you, by any chance, unusually happy today?")

Say you are miserable. They may give you some money.  

Gathering the information needed to apply unqualified equality of resources

is impossible. It is only with hindsight that we discover what was or wasn't a resource.  

might well involve less intrusion, and that would be a reason for preferring unqualified equality of resources to unqualified equality of welfare, but not one which impugned the egalitarian character of equality of welfare.

What impugns Cohen's shite is the fact that it involves things which can't be measured and thus partial ordering is impossible.  

Wittgenstein's error

We read in Wittgenstein's Tractatus that “what can be said at all can be said clearly, and what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence”.

This is obviously false. What can be said can also be said very obliquely or in a confused or garbled manner. Drink enough Whiskey and you will see this for yourself. Is the reverse equally true? I think so. It is merely a matter of skill. At any rate, we can't prove otherwise. The fact is, we frequently find a phrase or idiom- sometimes in another language, sometimes amongst the less educated class of our own people- which perfectly expresses something inchoate which we had previously struggled to express. 

As for what cannot be talked about- e.g. being homosexual at a time when male homosexuals were pitilessly prosecuted- the truth is an artful, elegant, superbly witty, discourse develops around it such that everything can be expressed without anything be said. Indeed, some older British homosexuals felt that de-criminalisation of sodomy killed off an exquisite idiolect- 'Polari'- which had added colour and spice to the drab world of post-war reconstruction. 

Can anything said in 'natural language' be recast in terms of propositional calculus? For any particular purpose, yes- it can be done well enough. It is merely a question of 'restricted comprehension' or giving well-defined extensions to intensions. 

In 1939, the University of Cambridge offered two courses on the “Foundations of Mathematics” — one taught by Alan Turing, the other by Ludwig Wittgenstein. Both were wrongheaded. Math has no foundations. It is useful and burgeons where people are motivated by utility rather than the desire to shit higher than their arseholes. Still, computer checking of proofs- or indeed computer generated proofs- are useful for Math and so Turing & Gentzen were on the right track. Brouwer too was useful. With Voevodsky you had 'univalent foundations'. With Wiltless you had vacuity.

Li Po's reply to Tu Fu

That Heaven's Net be e'er more vast & wide

Than such mesh as might mere flesh abide

Let our Distress be vaster yet & wider

Fuck fine wine. Drink cider.

Envoi- 

Dream-Prince! If Despair, this Envoi, yet arrives

Not Malarial milieus- Delirium survives.

Chibber vs the Subalterns

 After the Great War and the beginnings of electoral politics in India, educationally backward or otherwise underprivileged communities began to rise up. Dalit leaders challenged untouchability. So called 'criminal' castes and tribes demanded 'denotification'. Almost everybody demanded affirmative action quotas. By and large, these movements succeeded. More and more Legislators and then Ministers and then Chief Ministers came from the previously 'backward' castes which had little voice in the administration. There were some false starts. Naxalites (extreme Maoists) thought they could use Tribals & Dalits as cannon fodder so as to come to power by 'encircling the cities'. They failed, factionalized and most of them joined mainstream politics. 

The 'Subaltern Studies' clique pretended they were giving voice to the tribals & Dalits in a manner which would promote the Maoist cause. This was glamourous on some Campuses but it was wholly delusional. Still, one could get a PhD by writing nonsense in the illiterate idiom of those cretins. Nobody cared. Smart people don't study useless shite at Uni more particularly because genuine 'Subalterns' were becoming Chief Ministers, founding dynasties, and getting as rich as fuck. They had their own propagandists who wrote in the vernacular language. They didn't need- or even know about- stupid Professors teaching nonsense on Western Campuses.

A Swedish meatball- Axel Andersson- didn't get the memo. As late as 2013, he wrote an article in the LARB titled-

Obscuring Capitalism: Vivek Chibber’s Critique of Subaltern Studies

Chibber is from India. He knows Subaltern Studies is shit. Naxals don't want it. Indian Communist Parties have no use for it. The thing is a waste of time.  

Vivek Chibber's latest book challenges the theoretical fundaments

fundament can also mean anus 

of the

utterly useless, not 

influential Indian Subaltern School.

THE AIM OF NEW YORK UNIVERSITY sociology professor Vivek Chibber’s latest book Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital (Verso, 2013) is to challenge the theoretical fundaments of the influential Indian Subaltern School.

it has zero influence in Indian politics. Thus it is useless shite.  

This new departure in South Asian historiography was an attempt to write a “history from below,”

Those from below were making history by taking over politics & the perks of office. They could manufacture their own mythology easily enough. They didn't need stupid Bengali Kayasthas or Baidyas or Brahmins to do it for them. But those darkies might be able to get a bit of affirmative action on Western Campuses. Then the Left Front in Bengal collapsed and these guys were shown to be useless tossers with zero support in their native countries.  

unburdened by colonial biases.

Different Brits had different biases. It was easy enough for an Indian from a particular community to pick the British official who had praised it while disparaging its rivals.  

In particular it sought to re-interpret the subcontinent’s tortured road to industrialization

Slow, not 'tortured'. The truth is, Indian industrialists were a bit crap and, in any case, successive Governments showed little interest in helping them flourish.  

and inclusion in the modern capitalist economy.

That happened long ago. The East India Company was Capitalist and pretty fucking modern. British India was the first truly secular administration in world history. Holyoake, the guy who invented the word 'Secularism' pointed this out about a century after British rule in India got off the ground.  

Subaltern Studies rose to prominence in the 1980s

when the Left Front had taken power in West Bengal. Would the CPM be replaced by the CPML? No. The Naxals had shit for brains.  

and was part of a wave of postcolonial critique of an ongoing essentializing gaze

which is wholly imaginary like the little old lady who thinks muscular men are trying to get into her bathroom to see her naked.  

used when discussing formerly colonized cultures.

Whining about being a darkie is all very well if you live in a White majority country. It is utterly mad if you live in a country populated by darkies from which Whites had run away long ago.  

Chibber formulates his critique of the critique (by way of Karl Marx) through the affirmation of Enlightenment universals.

Fuck off! Enlightenment thinkers like Hume, Smith, Kant etc. thought darkies had shit for brains. The big question facing them was whether Catholic Irishmen or Slavic people had brains. The answer was- not fucking likely, mate.  

He argues that we are all endowed with reason and that this is not merely a “Western” construct.

Even Swedish meatballs can reason. Sadly, they lose that ability if they have a PhD in shit.

It was a book that he did not want to write, as he admits in the preface, believing that there was no space in “intellectual culture” for a “serious engagement with postcolonial theory.”

Because it is shit. But so is Chibber's Marxism.  

But he wrote it all the same. The result is not without its ironies: parts of Chibber’s language and arguments are not so far from the postcolonial theory he attacks.

Shit is like other shit. That isn't ironic at all. It's simply a fact everybody discovers by the time they are about two years old.  

His text, both engrossing and at times infuriating, mounts an eminently useful barrage of arguments against Subaltern Studies and raises the stakes of the debate. It is not the first such attack, but it is maybe the most forceful in its curious combination of erudition and, on the other hand, a tendentiously narrow definition of the subject matter.

It is tendentious to say shit is shit just because it issued from a fundament. Maybe it is chocolate cake.  

Let me begin with a story that does not feature in Chibber’s book, even if “Postcolonial Theory” makes up the first and most important half of its title.

Meatball's story is about Colonialism, not Post-Colonialism.  

The Joinville psychiatric hospital at Blida, Algeria,

which was a French Colony 

constituted a society on the margins of the surrounding one, without for that reason being very different.

No. It was very different because its inmates were mad.  

It was a city within the city.

It was a lunatic asylum, not a city.  

An unmistakably colonial air hung over

an un-mistakeable French colony 

the whitewashed buildings, from the patients’ pavilions to the staff villas and the grand main entrance, and permeated the institution’s organization. Two thousand patients were separated according to sex but also according to ethnicity. Algerian inmates were in the “native,” or, later “Muslim” wings. But French-Algerian and native alike were united in the misery of their situation and condition.

Because they were mentally ill.  

The incarceration of the ill of Joinville was accompanied with a brutality that raised the question of how punishment could exist so freely without crime.

No it didn't. Asylums were like prisons or concentration camps. Inmates could be dangerous. Punishment was dished out pour encourager les autres.  

Frantz Fanon

a black man from Martinique which chose to remain with France in 1946. That was a sensible decision.  

arrived in Joinville in 1953 with a rare display of sartorial elegance, monogrammed handkerchiefs ready to wipe his brow, and progressive notions of mental illness. He was black, from Martinique, and a recently graduated psychiatrist who had not yet turned 30.

He had studied nonsense and was trying to write in the style of Sartre. What he should have done was research lithium salts.  

He had, however, the previous year published his groundbreaking Peau noire, masques blancs (Black Skin, White Masks), an analysis of the dehumanizing effects of colonial racial discourses in which the “native” others had to wear the “mask” of whiteness to succeed.

In other words, guys from Martinique were only black on the outside. Inside, they were trying to control their natural inclination to rape and rob just like White Frenchmen. This is called 'civilization'. 

Already during the introductory tour of Blida-Joinville Fanon criticized the wide array of repressive measures wielded at the hapless patients. The new colleagues observed him with curiosity. What mattered more than his history and style of radical engagement was that he was a newcomer, green, for all intents and purposes a Frankaoui (a term with locally flavored Arab ending used by the Franco-Algerians to describe their kin from the mainland) in foreign waters. His enthusiasm would soon succumb to the blistering sun

Martinique gets pretty hot. It isn't on the same latitude as Sweden.  

and the reality on the ground.

as opposed to the reality underneath it.  

Influenced by the work of François Tosquelles at the asylum of Saint-Albain in Lozère, Fanon began with a program of “sociotheraphy” in the European women’s wing under his charge, in order to break the confinement and apathy of the patients. A number of collective activities were organized. Religious holidays were celebrated, workshops started and cultural events offered. There were also meetings with doctors, nurses and patients in which all were allowed to raise their concerns. The turn from repression and isolation to social engagement, to the irritation of his upstaged colleagues, soon proved to have been a success. Already after one month a large and elaborate Christmas celebration took place with staff and patients.

Fuck has this to do with 'subaltern studies' or post-colonial theory?  

The subsequent move to repeat the experiment with the native men under his charge proved more difficult, as Alice Cherki chronicled in her Fanon biography from 2000 (in English translation 2006). Fanon spoke neither Arabic nor Kabyle and had to resort to an interpreter when explaining his project to the interns who remained impassive as the activities got underway. The detractors among his colleagues saw it as a clear case of not understanding an inherent backwardness of the Muslim mind. Fanon soon realized the problem: he had insensitively implemented a Western program on a society whose difference he did not grasp.

Did he resign and fuck off back to some place where everybody spoke French? No. I suppose he was already trying to help the Algerian liberation movement.  

The political situation compounded the challenge as Fanon’s invitation was easily understood as a colonial imposition. The Muslim men had interpreted the experiment as a call to live up to a western model of behavior by the dominant power and preferred, Bartleby-style, not to participate. Fanon concluded that there was nothing atavistic in this reaction; it was a sign of resistance.

It was sensible. It was obvious that this guy couldn't help them. Muslim dudes- like Christian dudes- like Doctors who give them a pill which makes them feel better. They aren't interested in childish games. 

As Fanon continued his explorations at Blida-Joinville the surrounding society was thrown into turmoil by the nascent war of Algerian independence. The fallout soon reached the institution. More and more of the patients became those having suffered torture at the hand of the French authorities, neatly mirrored by an influx of torturers who had suffered as a consequence of their trade.

That's the problem with torture. Shooting people is cheaper and more effective.  

Fanon began working with the clandestine opposition to colonial rule and eventually quit his post at Joinville in 1956, two years into the bloody war.

Why be a psychiatrist when you can get paid to be a crazy politician?  

Though he had only a few years left to live before succumbing to leukemia in 1961

he was smart enough to go to the US for medical treatment 

he wrote the important works L’An V de la révolution algérienne (A Dying Colonialism) and Les damnés de la terre (The Wretched of the Earth).

Lots of Muslim Algerians became more wretched after Independence. The smart ones emigrated to France. Fanon's white wife stayed behind. She killed herself.  

Fanon’s analysis of the racially divided universe of colonialism and the forms of resistance against its formidable physical and noetic power would form one of the building blocks in “postcolonial” thought.

No.  Postcolonial thought is what succeeded Anti-colonial thought. In the Fifties, it was expressed by things like the Bandung Conference or opposition to the Suez invasion. Fanon was irrelevant. People noticed that Martinique had chosen to stay with France. 

His world was drastically changing and these, often violent, upheavals would have far-reaching political and intellectual consequences.

Anticolonial agitators became post-colonial administrators or intellectuals unless the wrong faction gained power and they had to run away to somewhere still ruled by Whites.  

Political maps were entirely redrawn.

Some were as portions of a former colony broke away- e.g. Pakistan from India. Most were not- e.g. Algeria, though there was a brief 'Sand War' with Morocco which ended when Cuban troops landed in Algeria.  

The 19th-century scramble for colonizing the Global South had reached such frantic levels that by 1900 more than 90 percent of Africa, 56 percent of Asia and 99 percent of the Pacific was under colonial rule.

Which led to anti-colonial movements which began establishing relations with each other such that a common anti-colonial ideology came into existence. This continued to burgeon as post-colonial ideology in places like Algiers, New Delhi & Djakarta.  

The movement began to reverse after World War I and the reversal intensified after the World War II. By the late 1970s formal territorial colonialism was practically over, mostly thanks to wars of liberation like the one in Algeria.

No. Algeria was unusual because it had a lot of French settlers. In most other places there was a peaceful transition of the Indian sort. Dutch Indonesia and French Vietnam and Portuguese African possessions were exceptions.  

The human cost of both colonialism and its dissolution begs belief.

beggars not begs.  

In one of the most infamous cases, the Belgian Congo,

no. That was the 'Free State of Congo'. Once Belgium established direct rule, things got better.  

between 10 and 13 millions Africans died.

sadly, Independence didn't do much to help the people though their kleptocratic leaders got very rich. 

Today the poverty of the Global South remains as the deep scars in the landscape through which the disaster traveled.

There are no such scars.  

The work of understanding colonialism

was done by economists and military strategists.  

and the process of decolonization that

was presided over by lawyers, politicians and administrators 

Fanon had been so instrumental in developing

Fanon didn't develop shit. He wrote hysterical Sartrean shite.  

would take an unexpected turn when Edward Said published Orientalism in 1978.

The departure of the Brits turned out to be a fucking disaster for Palestinians- especially Protestant ones like Said.  

The volume on the construction of the image of the “Orient” by Western scholars at first seemed so marginal that Said had difficulties interesting a serious publisher.

The book was shit. It referenced French dudes like Massignon whom nobody had heard of.  

It appeared as a highly specialized discussion apt to only interest the experts in the field.

It was nonsense. Still, at that time Arafat & the PLO seemed very important. The Americans were trying to get Israel to return to the pre-67 borders. Anyway, his book might piss off the Jews. Nobody really likes them you know.  

In a matter of a few years, however, the colonial “other” and the process of “othering” became commonplace in academic parlance.

Because only very stupid people were doing PhDs in that shite. Back in the 50s & even the 60s, a Phd on a shithole country could get you a gig with the State Dept. Then, it was discovered, shithole countries don't matter. Even if they turn Commie, they will need to export raw materials to get hard currency. Still, Oil Sheikhs had plenty of that commodity. If they liked Said, why not promote him? After all, he went to the right Schools & Colleges and fantasized that he'd slept with Candice Bergen.  

At the same time literatures from previously colonized areas were read more extensively and analyzed in the West as a counter-canon, a means to question the continuing “hegemony” (after the Italian Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci) of the “occidental” logic that had underpinned the colonial enterprise.

No. What happened was that illiterate kids who needed a Comp Lit credit could be spoon fed the childish scribblings of darkies from shithole countries. Previously, Comp Lit meant actually reading a French or Spanish book in the original. 

The colonial reality of the majority of the world would in earnest become part of the discussions of Western academia, thanks to pioneers such as Said who had studied and challenged the previously reigning stereotypes of the colonized mind.

In other words, you could pretend that you were the equal of Vasco da Gama coz you had read a story by R.K Narayan and thus had discovered India all over again.  

A returning question became: who was it that had been denied a voice

Dumb people. Nobody else. Under Colonialism, there were law courts. If you witnessed a murder, you were supposed to provide testimony before the Magistrate.  

and had only been spoken for?

Spivak pretended that her great-aunty hanged herself while on her period because she was actually a Ninja assassin but couldn't say so. The truth is, Aunty was pissed off with her Daddy because he hadn't married her off, as is required by Hindu scripture, and was sending her to skool instead.  

Marxist “history from below” was, importantly, given a new lease on life as it turned to the vast, poor and oppressed underbelly of the Global South.

If there was oppression, it was a case of darkies doing it to darkies. Incidentally, plenty of the new leaders came from poor families- e.g. Idi Amin, Emperor Bokassa, etc.  

The vague and empathic posture that had characterized the Third-Worldism of the 1960s and 1970s

The Fifties and Sixties was characterized by 'Developmentalism'- i.e. economists, agronomists etc. advising on how to raise productivity. The problem was 'immeserizing poverty'- i.e. demand for primary products can be inelastic and thus raised output lowers revenue. Could a global 'North-South' deal be done to improve the terms of trade for the poorer countries? No. Thus, over the course of the Seventies, Developmentalism curled up and died. Stupid shitheads were welcome to teach paranoid nonsense under the pretense of engaging with Turd World countries. This involved saying 'my research shows that in 1875, a White dude said 'darkies suck ass big time'. This caused darkies to become utterly shit because they had been 'objectified' as the alterity of the catachresis of the constipation of the oesophagus of Neo-fucking-Liberalism.'   

was replaced by seemingly more refined theoretical tools that also helped uncover continuing colonialism in a way of thinking:

Indians had been doing that since about 1757. It involved saying 'that dude drinks wine rather than desi daru. This shows his brain has been colonized. Also, he probably takes it up the arse from Governor General Sahib.'

the Western essentialising of natives, which could be as present in the metropole as among the Western educated postcolonial elites themselves.

Boko Haram is right to demand the banning of books. Why? Books are Western. If you read a book your brain will be colonized and you will end up sucking Donald Trump's dick.  

Formal independence had not been enough to free either the west or the former colonies from a legacy that showed a remarkable resilience and still shaped the relationship between north and south.

In 1963, President Kennedy failed to wipe my bum probably due to I iz bleck. This terrible crime still haunts America and has caused the election of the Donald. I should be paid billions in reparations.  

According to Vivek Chibber, it was around this time, the early 1980s, that everything started going wrong.

By then, everybody knew that Communism doesn't work for a Hayekian reason.  Not just Thatcher & Reagan, even Mitterand, elected with Communist support, went in for a tournant de la rigueur- i.e. an economic U-turn. The Left was dead in the water. 

Chibber does not pretend to supply an intellectual history of the larger field of “postcolonial theory,”

I have done so. The thing is easy enough.  

but there is a mini-history of origins that places its occurrence at the “cultural turn” in academia in which anthropologists and historians started to interest themselves in a brand of cultural analysis focused on the discursive formation of reality, taking the cue form literary theory.

Why? It is because 'Developmentalists' had given up because their dog wouldn't hunt. Crazy nutters were welcome to move in and squat in the condemned building they had evacuated. Incidentally, at one time 'anthropologist' didn't mean drug-addled, unemployable, shithead.  

Postcolonial theory had first reached academia through departments of literature and cultural studies.

Because Professors of Literature had become wholly illiterate. Said had pointed out that when he was young a Lit Professor knew two Classical and half a dozen modern European languages. By the Seventies, you had Eng Lit Professors who hadn't even read Hamlet.  

Chibber would have preferred it not to spread from there. He reduces its role to having brought literature from previously colonized and marginalized voices into the canon.

Sir William Jones brought Hafiz and Kalidasa into the Western canon in the eighteenth century. That was a big factor in the Romantic movement. What was unusual about the Eighties was that shite writers- not good ones- gained acclaim amongst a narrow academic coterie. But Tagore was popular everywhere. Mahashweta Devi, who wrote like shite, was not. 

This he calls a “salutary achievement.”

It was meaningless. Good wine needs no bush. People read Marquez & Borges because they were good.  

But the leakage of models and techniques from literature departments into its more socially scientific minded neighbors spelled trouble.

No. Sociology, Anthropology etc. had already turned to shite. There were some stupid Marxist Economists but they taught Econometrics which can be quite useful.  

The postcolonial theories did not only claim to analyze but also to guide political action.

Useless people boycotting shite aren't engaged in political action. They are merely making a nuisance of themselves.  

This familiar combination made it possible for its proponents to take over an academic Marxism that had found itself in a rut in the 1980s.

It had failed and everybody was abandoning it.  

Although profoundly Marxian in background, many postcolonial scholars took issue with the universalist assumptions of historical materialism

Post-modernists took the extra step and questioned the universalist assumptions of Physics. Why are so few Voodoo practitioners getting Nobel Prizes? Is it because they iz bleck?  

To believe that capitalism would function in the same way in the south and the north was,

not an assumption any Development Economist made after about 1965. Corrupt shitholes would have more rent seeking.  

according to many, another result of the arrogant Western assumption that its models and history were the blueprints for the rest.

Marx may have assumed something like this. Mill did not. Why? Darkies must have shit for brains- right?  

The agenda of bringing excluded voices into the discussion

we must bring the excluded voice of the Dalit woman into the discussion. What's that? Mayawati is a Dalit Woman and has been Chief Minister of India's largest province four times? Oh. Well, in that case, why bother?  

or, at least, questioning the existence of such exclusion

which ceased to exist before these cunts got to Collidge.  

gives much of the field of postcolonial theory its most important justification.

It existed so as to get credentials to cretins.  

Its proponents argue, however, that the colonial wound does not constitute a historical wrong that can be cured just by the admittedly political act of adjusting the canon and the reading lists and bringing into visibility the previously oppressed.

Reading lists for shite subjects are shite. Nobody cares about them. On the other hand, it is very important that schizophrenic hobos read Mahashweta Devi as translated by Gayatri Spivak.  Otherwise they would be guilty of excluding a shittier and stupider voice than any of the ones they already have in their heads. That's fucking Racist mate. 

Chibber surely does not believe so either, but still puts his money on a standard Marxist approach to a world that Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has called “post-colonial” and at the same time “neo-colonized”.

Because she is stupid. Still, it is true that, when she was a little girl, some stupid Commies said 'Nehru is the puppet of Wall Street. Let us kill all the kulaks so as to achieve true independence'. Sadly, since soldiers are the sons of kulaks, they were quickly beaten into submission.. 

He fears that the Enlightenment universal of reason will become collateral damage in the postcolonial critique of “Western” epistemic dominance, that such theories will undermine their own instruments of radical critique when they move from a study of culture to political activism.

In other words, saying 'Whitey be debil' won't help you in a White majority country. Sadly, it won't help you in Hindu majority India either unless you add 'Muslims be debil'.  

However, his premise that postcolonial theory can be kept in neat isolation in literature departments is erroneous.

Because it is a virus endemic amongst the terminally stupid- i.e. the only kind of student these cretins get to teach.  

Fanon, to begin with, would tell us that psychiatry was politics,

It is no such thing. It is about medication and/or stuff like CBT.  

especially so in the colonial context.

Never in that context. It was a disease like leukemia which has a genetic component. 

Said would add that academic practices were equally permeated by colonial politics.

I suppose there were former colonial administrators or experts who were still alive and who had tenure back then. But that was long ago.  

To be fair, Jewish Professors of the period probably weren't greatly enamoured with Arabs more particularly after they had got as rich as fuck. 

But this evidently does not automatically mean that postcolonial research, whatever discipline it might find itself in, should be excused any inconsistencies just because of its politics.

There is no post-colonial research. There was, however, some State sponsored post-colonial ideology and praxis underpinning various 'South-South' or 'Non-Aligned' institutions. Some Universities in the capital city would have retired diplomats etc. holding Professional Chairs for this purpose.  

The “salutary achievement” of Chibber’s book lies exactly in highlighting some of the failures of postcolonial theory,

Post-colonialism could have been useful if a 'North-South' deal to more equitably share the gains from trade had been feasible. But if even the Bretton Woods straitjacket broke down (i.e. exchange rates could not remain fixed) then what hope was there for something far more elaborate?  

although this does not mean that this theory should retreat to the implied “fussy world” of the humanities.

shitty world of the sub-humanities.  

Chibber will unwittingly drive the second point home himself.

Let it simply die already.  

If there is one true adversary in Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital it is a use of postcolonial thought in India.

It is used as a way to escape India and gain affirmative action on a Western Campus.  

The author shares many of its concerns, having worked on the topic of the country’s industrialization,

which depends on getting rural girls into giant factory dormitories- though Chibber won't say so.  

explaining more directly this need to write a book that he did not want to write. The theories under attack came into being in relation to the annual series Subaltern Studies that was first published in 1982. The main thinkers associated with the school were, to name a few, Ranajit Guha, Partha Chatterjee, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Homi Bhabba and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.

all of whom emigrated as soon as they could 

They had all come of age in post-independence India, completing their first degree there before moving on to western academia (Guha, born 1928, being the exception).

Bengal became autonomous when he was 9 years old.  

Both Subaltern Studies and the individual volumes on Indian historiography produced by the members would have a profound impact on postcolonial theory.

In other words, the guys doing that stupid shit had a profound impact on that same stupid shit.  

Chibber directs his critique mainly against Guha’s Dominance Without Hegemony from 1997

The Brits had hegemony in directly ruled territory. That's why Guha spoke English. 

and Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe from 2000.

Europe was provincialized by the US after it tore itself apart in two bloody wars.  

He stealthily avoids direct confrontation with Spivak

she is crazy 

and her engagement with poststructuralist French theory,

which was crazy 

though he indirectly delivers a familiar incrimination of concept creation and neologisms in general. Orwell’s advice in “Politics and the English Language” from 1946 hovers menacingly in the background as yet another specter.

It is irrelevant. Chibber is an old fashioned Marxist- i.e. retarded rather than crazy.  

Subaltern Studies tried to understand the divergent developmental paths of India 

India didn't go in for oceanic trade. The West did. So did the Japs and then the Koreans and now the Chinese. They are the biggest ship builders in the world. By contrast, India has only now achieved parity with Colombo port which ranks only about 25th in the global ranking.  

and the West and argue that the model of capital’s universalizing drive fails in India,

because Capital neither has a drive nor a hive. Countries fail if they are lazy or if they do stupid shit. India was both lazy and inclined to do stupid shit. 

leaving a different image of the power relations created by capitalism.

Money can only create 'power relations' if it isn't stolen or confiscated by the State. Still, we get that Chibber, being Indian, wants to blame some abstraction rather than India's laziness or stupidity for its currently being as poor as shit.  

The implication is that the Western model of studying the nation’s development has to be questioned as it is permeated by Eurocentric assumptions.

Like the assumption that people will work hard and do sensible stuff? But immigrants to the West do both where and when it is 'incentive compatible' to do so.  

The main among these assumptions is that part of capital’s universalizing tendency is to bring with it political and cultural changes all around the world.

That happens through 'Tardean mimetics' which itself is associated with higher productivity leading to superior status.  

Guha and other subaltern theorists agree that this happened in Europe where a capitalist bourgeoisie rose to hegemony,

Fuck that. What happened was that the parts of Europe which did well had more incentive compatible mechanisms. Sadly, it was shit at resolving conflicts peacefully and thus got 'provincialized' by two world wars. America, after its Civil War, didn't have this problem.  

the position of being able to represent all the other classes like the proletariat, overturned the feudal order and moved towards liberal democracy.

This is magical thinking. Incentives matter. Ways of classifying people don't.  

If this supposedly happened in Europe, it did not happen in India.

Because Indians didn't and still don't give a shit about incentive compatibility. It is a 'scarcity economy' where the big political issue is reservations for a paltry number of shitty Government jobs.  

The native bourgeoisie failed to press for revolution,

Why didn't they demand the slitting of their own throats? Plenty of bourgeois dudes supported land reform and always bought land, if permitted to do so, when big estates were broken up. 

worked alongside the landed classes,

The bourgeoisie owned land. It was a safe enough investment. Everybody who is anybody has a bit of land in his portfolio. That's why Amitabh Bacchan was classed as an 'agriculturist' for legal and administrative purposes. 

and did not take it upon themselves to speak for those without a voice, the subalterns (following Gramsci’s terminology).

Nonsense. Many a middle class lawyer set up as a Trade Unionist because that was a profitable business.  

Capitalism was implemented not through bourgeois hegemony but by colonial dominance,

As Gandhi pointed out, plenty of Indian 'banias' were happy to lend to the East India Company because their hoondis (bills of exchange) were highly liquid. But then, many a General or Prince was happy to surrender to the Brits in return for a pension. BTW tax farming (zamindari) is a capitalist enterprise. That's how Tagores and Guhas got rich.   

physical force in other words.

You can buy plenty of 'physical force' with money.  

Dominance without hegemony came to identify the colonial condition,

even though there was hegemony even when there wasn't much display of 'dominance'- e.g. in Princely States or big zamindaris. 

and by extension, also the postcolonial.

How? The Brits had fucked off. They couldn't dominate shit. Did they have 'hegemony'? No. If McMillan said 'suck my cock', Nehru would tell him to fuck the fuck off.  

The evident ironies in Guha’s position are not lost on Chibber. Guha puts forward a critique of the liberal idea of universalizing categories,

there were none such. Classical Liberalism wanted a restricted franchise. Let those who actually paid the property or income tax decide how that money should be spent. One proviso. Voters must have a penis.  

that produce the exclusion of the subaltern,

Not having the vote excluded them.  

through a decidedly Whiggish argument that it is the bourgeoisie that necessarily creates liberal politics.

Swedish meatball doesn't know that the Whigs were big landed magnates. Tories were smaller squires.  

But the premise, in Subaltern Studies, that the European revolutions were the result of a capitalist bourgeoisie that started to reform society in a more democratic direction is not correct.

i.e. they were ignorant shitheads who knew nothing of either India or Europe or anywhere else.  

The long-lasting effect of the British Civil War

There was an English Civil War not a British one. Swedish meatball is as ignorant as shit.  

and the French revolution was, as Chibber points out, to strengthen the state rather than capitalism or democracy.

No. The Brits weakened the State and curbed Stuart absolutism by bringing in stupid Hanoverians to rule the country. Napoleon strengthened the French State but France ended up weaker than under the Sun King.  

The advances towards democracy were the result of

rising productivity (higher tax yield from workers)  or conscription (equal sacrifice) as well as rival parties striving to outflank each other. Once you had universal franchise, after the Great War in the case of UK, the Liberal party was displaced by the Labour party. 

the subaltern working classes rising and pressuring the bourgeoisie rather than following their lead.

Fuck off! The Earl of Derby was persuaded by Disraeli that doubling the franchise would benefit the Tories. He wasn't pressured by his stable-boy. Short run, Disraeli's gambit appeared to have boomeranged but, long term, it was a brilliant piece of strategy. Similarly the Tories gained long term from universal franchise. Workers & women tend to be quite sensible and nationalistic. 

The subaltern studies vision of the universalizing drive of capital

which doesn't exist.                                

is flawed and there is thus no reason to say that it does not apply to India.

There is no reason for cretins to talk about India- a country they know nothing about, even if they are Indian by birth.  

Chibber convincingly argues that capital’s universalizing drive exists, but that it is merely a matter of capital extending to more and more markets.

If there is a market, there is a market-maker (arbitrageur) and thus a Capitalist.  

Capitalism is not supposed to bring democracy, capitalists are happiest the more control they have over their workforce.

Managers want to control workers whether they work in the public or private sector. Capitalists are concerned with the rate of return, volatility, beta, etc.  

The preeminent example of the nature of capital’s universalizing drive to make all local markets dependent on it,

Capital runs away from 'local markets' which aren't profitable.  

we might add, is obviously China.

In 2013, when this meatball wrote this, China was a net Capital importer to the tune of a quarter of a trillion dollars. Now it is a capital exporter to the tune of half a trillion. 

Capitalism fits perfectly with state communism as has been made evident for all to see.

We think the opposite now. Can Xi rebalance the economy? We don't know. 

The difference between the ex-colonies and the West was

they had been colonized by people from a different continent. Still, if they did sensible things, they could overtake the West. Look at Singapore. Its nominal per capita income is about 70 percent higher than the UK. It is double in purchasing power terms.  

thus not that capitalism failed to universalize.

The UK got lazy and did stupid shit. Thus it fell behind Singapore. Brexit as motivated by the desire to create a 'Singapore-on-Thames'. It failed miserably. Dyson, who supported Brexit ended up moving his operations to Singapore.  

Rather, the colonial problem was that it was allowed to universalize all too well.

Colonies differed greatly from each other. Nothing can be 'universalized' where things are ideographic, not nomothetic.  

If capitalists only rule by consensus when forced to, otherwise being quite at ease in relying on coercion, the key question is, as Chibber points out, that of subaltern agency, given that it is only this class that can force politics to take a radical direction.

Yet, it has never actually done so partly because 'radical directions' cause poor to die of starvation.  

But this thesis becomes problematic in the framework of Subaltern Studies, where the psychology of the Indian peasant is heralded as impossible to comprehend through western, and falsely universal, categories.

That was a myth exploded by econometric work on the 'rational peasant' which, in the case of India, was proved by the Green Revolution in the Sixties. Even the fucking Sociologists knew about it by 1979. 

The discipline has described the Indian subaltern as motivated by a sense of community rather than utilitarian calculations.

Because it was ignorant.  

It is these kinds of statements that Chibber dismissively refers to as “canards” with such frequency as to risk his narrative sounding like a culinary digression.

He is right. Peasants were known to be rational by the time he grew out of short pants.  

Familiar with the topic, he convincingly argues that the Indian peasantry was motivated by the same range of material concerns that can be found all around the world. The arguments of Subaltern Studies on the contrary, and this is Chibber’s coup de grâce, contributes to an orientalising image of the “East.”

It is backward shite from the Fifties. Nehru firmly believed that peasants were as stupid as shit. If they got hold of some money they would blow it on a big wedding or religious feast.  

The charge of postcolonial orientalism becomes even more pronounced in Chibber’s discussion of Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe. Chakrabarty sought to contrast two ways of understanding history. The first was dominated by universal categories framed in “Western” discourses of rationality.

From which the East was excluded.  

According to this model the postcolonial world will reach the same level of modernity and industrialization as the West, eventually.

Fuck off! Some Eastern countries will rise higher- unless they have done so already. This became obvious at the Tokyo Olympics back in the Sixties. 

It just got on a later train.

Japan's bullet train was the fastest in the world. It was launched in 1964. China & Japan are now way ahead in developing mag-lev.  

All local dissonances and particularities that do not fit in with this universal trajectory will be shed at some point or another as the world homogenizes.

Lazy peeps can chose to remain poor.  

But this idea is based on a specific notion of how capitalism should spread. Having rejected capital’s universalizing tendency, the subaltern scholars turned to a study of the particularities of the lower classes of India, the second mode of understanding history, contributing to a descent to what Chibber calls a “seemingly fascination endless with religion, ritual, spirits, indigeneity, and so on.”

Ignorant shitheads made up stories about people they considered more ignorant yet. But those dudes were becoming Chief Ministers of newly created States. They were also getting very rich.  

If they had placed more emphasis on the relationship between capitalism and dominance, rather than hegemony, in both the Global North and the Global South, the analysis might have looked very different.

It would still have been shit because they had shit for brains.  

Subaltern Studies would not have had the same need to insist on the Eurocentric, and colonial, nature of rationality and all-universal theories.

Yes they did. If anyone said 'you are stupid', they could reply 'I can't help being a darkie. Darkies have shit for brains, mate. Boo hoo! Kindly give me tenure for the sake of DEI.' 

The critique of the post-independence nationalist leaders might also have been different. Nehru did not press for “industrialization, scientific research, modern administration techniques, and similar practices” because he was in the thrall of a colonial Enlightenment rationality, as Chibber objects, there was simply no way to feasibly make an alternative path outside of capitalism.

Yes there was. It involved Stalinist 5 year plans. Sadly, Nehru couldn't do collectivization of land which would have killed off half the population. 

It is hard not to sympathize with Chibber’s two charges against Subaltern Studies of “obscuring capitalism” and “resurrecting orientalism.”

Why not simply admit that the thing was stupid, ignorant, shit?  

His case is well argued and the notion of a shared rationality makes possible any kind of meaningful dialog about arguments in the first place. But Chibber also neatly trips himself up in his attempt to indict the entirety of postcolonial theory through the specific example of Subaltern Studies. His insistence on the pitfalls related to idealizing the European bourgeoisie as harbingers of democracy and orientalising the Indian peasantry as community and tradition oriented subalterns outside of the Western logic is an eminently postcolonial analysis made possible through postcolonial practices.

Chibber is a Mohyal Brahmin. He knows very well that the Brits kept gassing on about how productive the Punjabi peasant was. Indeed Punjab was a big wheat exporter between 1880-1910. The Brits wanted to settle Punjabis in Canada and other agricultural regions. Those who settled in California did very well. Bengali cunts may have thought the Indian peasant was shitty. Punjabis know different and, what's more, they know the Brits both knew and said different.  

Arguments about the impenetrable divide between the West and the East belong to the murky Manichean universe of colonialism.

No. They belong to boring Bengali blathershites. Kipling identified with the Punjab. He said West & East meet when strong men work together doing something useful.  

Exploring “othering” only makes sense

if you think everybody is saying mean things about you behind your back and refusing to invite you to orgies.  

with the presupposition of a shared humanity. Chibber thus proves that postcolonial theory is well able to formulate its own debates, even by employing those voices that, like his, profess to stand outside the field of the same postcolonial theory.

Julian Go is a sociologiest within it. He is shit. So is Chibber but Chibber is Punjabi- i.e. a bit thick- whereas Go is the smart sort of Asian.  

Chibber does a good and important job criticizing some of the fundaments of Subaltern Studies. Postcolonial Theory is a book that should be read by all engaging with postcolonial theory,

i.e. shitheads 

though keeping in mind that the biggest canard in Chibber’s text is that postcolonial theory would necessarily have to stand in antagonism with Enlightenment rationality.

Very true. It could get down on its knees and suck it off.  

It is on the contrary the case that postcolonial critiques often deal with colonial failures to extend notions of the universal to the colonial world,

or to extend them to women and poorer workers in their own country. 40 percent of men didn't have the vote in the UK in 1914. Middle class darkies, on the other hand, couldn't just vote in the UK, they could stand for Parliament. Two Indians got elected to Westminster before the Great War.  

instead treating this world as an economic, political and ethical exception. It also points to the fact that all colonial, and postcolonial, interactions have to undergo complicated processes of translations and mediations because of the history of violent colonial domination.

Not in India. There wasn't a lot of violence while the Brits were around.  

These processes of translation often have the aim, as in the example of Fanon at Joinville with which I began, of repairing the application of universal systems of values that colonial systems have interrupted.

Fuck off! Fanon didn't repair shit. He should have resigned because he was unqualified to treat Arabs. Incidentally putting lunatics in asylums aint an Arab practice. Let them wander around as 'fools for God'. They'll be well enough looked after.  

Fanon, faced by the refusal of the Muslim patients of Blida-Joinville to participate in his sociotheraphy, did not content himself with the colleagues’ explanation that it was the consequence of an “oriental” Muslim mind.

They knew that if they were simply allowed to wander around, they'd get enough to eat and have a higher quality of life. The sad thing is that 'Franz Fanon hospital' expanded during the Sixties and Seventies at a time when European asylums were being shut down and 'care in the community' was gaining favour. Apparently, the place is quite horrible now.  

After first concluding that it was rather a healthy resistance against a colonial imposition Fanon began to reflect over his own program together with the local nurses and his co-worker Jacques Azoulay. The holidays around which he had proposed that the patients celebrate held no meaning for them. They had not wanted to participate in the choir because singers were seen as itinerants and outcasts. Basket weaving was a female activity and therefore problematic for them. Fanon revised the program and built up a traditional teahouse for the patients, replicating the meeting place of the men in society. He also started to celebrate Muslim holidays and brought in troubadours from the outside. His idea of therapeutics was both rational and universal but it had to take into account cultural difference as well as the wound of colonial domination.

No. Fanon was merely catering to the tastes of his patients. Medicine is a service industry. Since he was shit at it, it is fortunate that he gave up the profession quite soon.  

Postcolonial theory naturally reflects the society around it, much like Blida-Joinville.

Now called the Franz Fanon Hospital.  

It exists in a world, a shared universe, preoccupied with the vexed notions of difference and translation just as Fanon’s clinical work was.

The vexed question is where the money is supposed to come from. When oil prices were high, conditions were better in the hospital. When they fell or when money had to be diverted to fighting the rebels, it deteriorated.  

Chibber’s Postcolonial Theory and the Spectre of Capital is an important engagement with Subaltern Studies.

Why engage with shit? Just pull the flush already.  

Rather than negating the premise for the analytical framework of postcolonial theory, however, it reinforces its raison d’être.

Darkies have shit for brains. Thus the raison d'etre for Whining about Whitey or Capitalism or Neo-Liberalism. What else can darkies do if they have shit for brains?  

The categories developed in postcolonial scholarship, instigated by forerunners such as Fanon

who was a French citizen and would have remained so had he lived into our own day 

and Said,

an American citizen. Neither was 'post-colonial' save in the sense that Said's country had once consisted of 13 Colonies.  

have given invaluable tools to probe failed drives to universalize and identify those that show more promise to be able to take colonial history into account.

That was done long ago by people like Macaulay.  

In a twisted final irony it is the postcolonial term ‘orientalism’ that will colonize Chibber’s language and argumentation, inscribing him in a tradition whose breadth and importance he underestimates.

That's not so bad. What Chibber should worry about is the word 'canard' turning into a Muscovy duck and roosting up his fundament.