Akeel Bilgrami's Gramscian stupidity

 Akeel Bilgrami wrote as follows a year ago in Outlook-

The state in polities broadly described as ‘liberal democracies’ with political economies broadly described as ‘capitalist’ are characterised by a feature that Gramsci called ‘hegemony’. This is a technical term, not to be confused with the loose use of that term to connote ‘power and domination over another’. In Gramsci’s special sense, hegemony means that a class gets to be the ruling class by convincing all other classes that its interests are the interests of all other classes. It is because of this feature that such states avoid being authoritarian.

This is nonsense. First a class gets to rule and then it gains hegemony- i.e. moral and ideological and political legitimacy. If it isn't ruling, people don't believe it could rule until it finally makes a move which makes it a plausible ruling class. Suppose Mussolini's Black Shirts had spent all their time marching around and giving boring speeches. They would have been laughed at the way Moseley's Black Shirts were laughed at.

Consider the career of Jayprakash Narayan. When he was wandering around in the boondocks doing bhoodan work, he had no 'hegemonic' power.  He was respected, even venerated, but he was ignored. It was only when he started interfering in actual politics that he gained a modicum of such power.

Authoritarianism is a style of exercising power. But, this style is dictated by the nature of the country. Russia has always had authoritarian leadership- or else has been anarchic. Gorbachev may have wanted to avoid authoritarianism but he failed almost immediately. Putin was a welcome change from the drunken buffoon Yeltsin. China too has always been either authoritarian or a complete shambles. India has always been a relatively 'soft' state for purely fiscal reasons associated with rain-fed agriculture and strong, caste based, hurdles to increasing productivity. Simply put, authoritarianism can't pay for itself and, in any case no great psychic benefit accrues from rendering very poor people yet more abject.

Authoritarian states need to be authoritarian precisely because they lack Gramscian hegemony.

Nonsense! Authoritarianism, in some countries, is associated with higher productivity and superior internal and external security. If an autocrat- like Gorbachev- decides he'd prefer to be genuinely loved by his people and surrenders control of the economy, then there is a scissors crisis and he is toppled.

Why pretend that the style of exercising power is simply a matter of fashion? Russians can't go around in dhotis and sarees. Their asses would freeze off if  they did. Indians can't go around in fur coats. They'd boil to death. Indian fashions are different from Russian fashions because the climate is different.

Gramsci was Italian. What he had to say may have had some relevance to his own country. But Italy is very different from India. No doubt, there was once quite a strong Communist movement in India. But they shat the bed repeatedly, thanks to their ideological blinkers, and their 'long march through the institutions' ended in wholesale irrelevance.

It would follow from this that if a state that does possess hegemony in this sense is authoritarian, there is something compulsive about its authoritarianism.

So, if Russians wear fur coats instead of muslin kurtas in Winter this is because, according to Bilgrami, there is something compulsive about their desire to wear warm clothes.

Now, what is interesting is that the present government in India keeps boastfully proclaiming that it possesses hegemony in this sense, that it has all the classes convinced that its policies are to their benefit. If so, one can only conclude that its widely rec­orded authoritarianism, therefore, is pathological.

Not if those 'recording' the supposed authoritarianism are known to be stupid liars.

Bilgrami is saying that if any country elects a party he doesn't like then that party must be pathologically insane. This means the voters of that country are cretins.

There have been spectacular cases of this authoritarianism such as the recent arrest of five journalists and professors on charges that are virtually nonsensical.

Why? Naxalites do exist. They genuinely are at war with the State. They do have supporters who keep their affiliation secret. Bilgrami himself writes only nonsense. His opinion on legal matters is worthless because he is stupid and ignorant.

The liberal middle class has expressed some anger about these and, given how authoritarian the government has become, that took some courage.

The Indian middle class is not liberal. It is religious and socially conservative. It does not give a shit about some stupid professors or journalists. It only takes vanity, not courage, to virtue signal on this issue.

But Muslims and Dalits and, quite generally, the unprotected poor suffer from brutality and arbitrary arrest each day and this goes unreported even in the regional media. It is so pervasive that it is not news and it invokes nothing but indifference from the liberal middle class.

Arresting people costs money. India is poor. It does not have the money to go around brutalizing and arbitrarily arresting hundreds of millions of people. Bilgrami is telling stupid lies.

The middle class needs the labor of the poorer class. If your workers keep getting beaten or arrested, you will suffer from great inconvenience and may go bankrupt. Taxpayers don't want their money wasted on beating up their own workers. What the middle class is 'indifferent' to, is the stupid lies of cretinous academics who were once considered 'useful idiots' by the Reds but are now known to be utterly useless though as idiotic as ever.

Quite apart from this compulsive tic of authoritarianism (compulsive, as I said, because it exists in spite of the more or less plausible claim to hegemony), a good question to ask is what underlies the hegemony itself?

The BJP is focusing on things voters want and is trying to deliver. Other parties which take this approach can beat it at its own game. Those that talk nonsense about Fascism or Authoritarianism get wiped out at the polling booths.

Before the 2004 election, there was a similar claim to hegemony by the then BJP government.

No. The BJP claimed to have achieved something which it had not actually done- viz. deliver prosperity and security to the masses.

All was said to be luminous, all classes were told to bask in the Indian sunshine and vote the government in again. The electorate refused. No doubt this was partly because of the unexpectedly impressive campaign carried out by Sonia Gandhi’s leadership.

The Communists too did well. But they frittered away their gains by adopting a foolish 'popular front' strategy. Sonia may have had some genuine sympathy with the Libtards and Sickularists and did give prominence to 'public intellectuals' like Bilgrami. But they shat the bed by alientating the Hindu majority. Indeed, they also alienated Muslims and Dalits by painting them as abject and unable to stand up for themselves. However, it was the corruption and incompetence of the ruling party which brought it down. Modi, no doubt, had done well in Gujerat but there was plenty of dead wood and senile nutjobs in the BJP- indeed, there still are. No party has a monopoly of talent. Still, the fact is, the RSS trained politicians have a better reputation than others. The Left should be raising up leaders of similar caliber. It can't do so by writing stupid shite.

But, more relevant to the question of hegemony is the fact that India was saved by its illiteracy.

Bilgrami is being foolish. Italy and Turkey had high illiteracy when Mussolini and Ataturk took over. China had low literacy when Mao took power. There is no connection between 'hegemony' and literacy.

The propaganda of ‘India Shining’ by an uncritical press reached mostly the literate middle class. The illiterate among the electorate got a far better political education from their own experience of life and politics. They voted the government out.

As they had previously voted it in and would do so again. Literacy does not matter. Propaganda does not matter. What matters is whether voters believe a particular party will do a better job of governance.

What, then, was different in 2014?

Congress looked utterly decrepit. Rahul had failed to take charge of the Commonwealth Games the way his Dad had taken charge of the Asian games. He wasn't putting himself forward for the top job and he wasn't letting Manmohan be effective either. Modi was the only candidate who said he wanted the top job because he'd be good at it.

Well, for one thing there is no denying that apart from the period of the Emergency, the incumbency of UPA-II was about as bad a period of governance as has been known in independent India. But y’s failures cannot explain x’s hegemony, which can only be explained by x’s success in convincing others that the interests of those it represents are the interests of all.

Nothing can explain x's hegemony because hegemony does not exist. It is a silly theory.

And this was achieved not merely by the media (as cheerleading as before and possibly with wider influence now as a result of an increase in its reach) but, as is well known, by a swaggering leader’s charisma.

Currently the BJP is much better than Congress and so it has become the national party by default. This may change. Even the Left may make a comeback if it dishes Gramsci for something more sensible.

As is also well-known, the substance of what he said and what his party stood for is to be found in two elementary propositions: open India to globalised finance even more than the past quarter century so as to create jobs and opportunities; and India is a Hindu country, with others to be tolerated on a strict understanding that that is so. Where the latter could not possibly be the basis of hegemony, the former was intended to pick up the slack.

Poor countries need f.d.i to industrialize. This is a matter of common sense not some sinister 'hegemony'.
If Hindus want to vote for parties which say India is a Hindu country then all power-seeking political parties will say this- if Hindus are a majority in that constituency.

There was nothing new about the first of these substantial promises.

Thus, it can have no explanatory value.

Manmohan Singh and his economic advisors had pursued just that strategy for ‘development’ and its outcome had been foretold by every honest economist (which is not to say that there were not many more, as always with that discipline, dishonest ones): an intensification of the impoverishment and insecurity of the poor and working people of the country, and a continuing criminal transfer of the nation’s wealth to the ultra-rich corporate elites.

This is a fantasy.

Yet all classes came to believe in its efficacy even so, and this was the real achievement of the demagoguery of a charismatic leader and the crores his party acquired from the corporate elites both at home and abroad to spend on a fantastic public relations campaign that would turn a demagogue into a demigod of economic hope.

So Bilgrami's theory of politics cashes out as the paranoid belief that he himself is smart and able to see the the truth while people who live in India are stupid and in thrall to some demagogue.

Will the voter believe next year that these hopes have been fulfilled? Will she find the pathological authoritarianism tolerable? Will she embrace the open season against Muslims and Dalits as the India she wishes to live in?

We know the answer. The voter didn't believe Bilgrami's lies. Some Muslims and most Dalits voted for the BJP precisely because it was better at governance and 'last mile delivery'.

Politics is a demanding and difficult terrain. Anyone with a humane politics cannot allow the world to sober her too much. Anyone with a sensible politics cannot allow her idealism to make her politics remote and arcane. How to navigate these twin constraints, pulling in different directions, requires a sense of balance that is hard to maintain. Nothing seems more important today than maintaining it.

and writing stupid shite like this.

A humane politics is bound to answer each of the questions I posed above with a resolute ‘No’.

A humane politics would have put Bilgrami out of his misery. The sensible politics which obtains merely pays him no regard whatsoever.

But having given that answer, what sensible political options are available? Democratic politics, whether in India or elsewhere, surfaces both at the parliamentary site and at the site of movements.

No. Democratic politics works though institutions of government. It does not 'surface' anywhere. Parliaments may be purely ceremonial. Movements may be apolitical. It is a separate matter that some Democracies have well oiled party machines. But these can be rendered obsolete as recent events have shown the world over.

Let’s, first, consider the former. Hegemony surfaces in very different ways in different political systems of democracy.

Hegemony does not exist. Bilgrami is a cretin.

In two-party systems such as the United States, very often the ruling class simply spans both parties, and their differences are minor (though it is not as if they don’t often make a difference to people’s lives.)

Bilgrami has lived for a long time in America. Do any Americans consult him for political advice? No. The fellow is a cretin.

It is very hard indeed to break out of the consensus between the two parties.

Yet, Trump has done it.

And it is a symptom of how precarious the lives of working people have become in that country that they gave support to two leaders within the parties who were prepared to defy the consensus between their respective party orthodoxies. (Sanders with considerable success in the primaries even though he failed to secure the nomination, and Trump in both the primaries and the national elections–though it predictably turns out that Trump on every important issue is taking the orthodox positions of that party even further in the direction of an inhumane politics.)

The 'orthodoxy' of the Democratic Party was better represented by Biden and the early Obama. Indeed, when Bill Clinton was first elected he was an orthodox tax and spend Democrat. His U-turn towards 'Workfare' & his liking for Billionaires with bizarre agendas was what made him unorthodox. Hilary continued that trend which is why she lost to Obama- more particularly because nobody believe another boom was on the horizon. Sanders was and is un-electable and hurt Hilary so badly that Trump, quite unexpectedly, was to pick up votes which Obama had worked very hard to keep.

Trump has cut taxes and made conservative Supreme Court picks. But he is scarcely an orthodox Republican when it comes to Trade. When it comes to immigration it should be remembered that the 'deporter in chief' was Bill Clinton, followed by Bush. Obama targeted deportation more effectively at border states and ex-cons. Trump is screwing up deportation and is inflicting maximum economic harm for a minimal result. No doubt, this reflects a demographic anxiety of a type which 'orthodox' Republicans had found a workaround for long ago.

Bilgrami believes 'precariousness' motivates people to vote for 'unorthodox' candidates. The problem here is that there was far greater 'precariousness' in 2008 than in 2016. There is a theory that voters 'put a nigger in the White House' to scare Wall Street straight. If this is true, then how do we explain 'no drama Obama' getting a second term? There was more precariousness in 2012- when long term Unemployment hit a post war peak, real income had declined and people spoke of a 'Zombie economy' which was neither dead nor alive, than in 2016 when real median household income hit a peak.

It may be that anxiety of one sort or another lead people to lose faith in existing 'power elites' and causes them to vote for 'mavericks'. However, history shows that some 'insiders' do crazy shit while seemingly crazy 'outsiders'- and there was a time when Obama looked like a rank outsider with a crazy name- prove to be highly competent in improving the existing administrative and political machine, or rendering it somewhat less dysfunctional.

If Bilgrami is wrong about the country in which he lives, what of other countries of which he knows less?

Britain is not strictly a two-party system, but carries the historical weight of a two-party tradition and there again it is a symptom of how deep working-class dissatisfaction goes that both the Brexit vote and the continuing popularity of Corbyn has managed to finesse the long consensus that Blair and his successors in the party had managed to forge with post-Thatcherite Conservatives.

What on earth is this cretin getting at? Both Labor and the Conservatives are divided on Brexit. There is no consensus. However, the Liberals haven't been able to capitalize on this though they are strongly Remain. Why? They foolishly allied with Cameron, not Brown, and thus shared the blame for Tory 'Austerity'.

India, unlike these countries, is fortunate to have a thriving multi-party political system.

Where? At the Center, there have been either BJP led or Congress led Coalitions. Congress would also strategically prop up ambitious politicians who dreamed of becoming Prime Minister- but this was to show how stupid and worthless they were.

India, being a segmentary society under conditions of agricultural involution and industrial stagnation, has a history of factionalism and dynastic outfits. This has not been a blessing. What it lacks is two National parties with ideological 'clear blue water' between them.

It is to that ext­ent easier to oppose a consensual hegemony.

Nobody cares if you oppose something which does not exist. You may as well bay at the moon or practice Voodoo.

Even if major parties form a consensus, more minor and regional parties can form alliances against the consensus.

What good does this do? The Communists opposed the 123 deal with America for purely ideological reasons. Manmohan ignored them. Suddenly, they lost salience. Everyone could see they had become irrelevant. Henceforth, the consensus was that they didn't matter. Nor did their 'useful idiots'- henceforth deemed useless simply.

Fighting the consensus does not always require one to fight one’s own party’s orthodoxies as in two-party systems. The tasks in India are, thus, quite different.

No. The tasks for politicians are the same in India or the UK or the USA. They are too have sensible policies, with proper last mile delivery, and to do grassroots work. Living in America, Bilgrami may not have got the memo. But then he had never been useful. He forgot that he was a Muslim who was supposed to bleat 'Islam is in danger' anytime triple talaq was mentioned.

The idea that any one existing opposition party can, without forming alliances, defeat the BJP in 2019 is wholly without sense. A refusal to contaminate one’s idealistic and humane politics by alliances with other parties is not sensible, it is a recipe for a party’s eventual dem­ise.

Who is Bilgrami talking to? Which party has 'idealistic and humane politics'? Congress? It is a corrupt, incompetent, dynastic outfit. What of the Samajwadi parties? They are corrupt, incompetent, dynastic outfits. Mamta's Trinamool too is now dynastic, corrupt, incompetent and criminalized. Perhaps Bilgrami is talking to the Communist parties. But they won't listen to 'fellow travelers' because they, by definition, have not grasped the right ideology and thus acquired the right praxis.. At best, they are 'useful idiots' whose function is to spread Communist lies.

Thus, for instance, it is becoming clear that some parties (the CPI-M, for instance) will bec­ome irrelevant for decades to come if they don’t seek to exert their (already dwindling influence) through alliances.

We now know the outcome of this strategy. The CPI-M has been decimated. It got 5 seats- 4 with the help of its Tamil partner. But it will lose those next time round. After all, the name of the next C.M of T.N is actually Stalin!

In Kerala, Congress has gained at the expense of the Communist party by tactically opposing Sabarimala Temple entry for women. This has enabled Rahul to stay in Parliament. But for how long?

The Communists were foolish to follow a 'popular front' strategy based on a false equation between the BJP and the Nazi party. But, that popular front policy had failed in the Thirties itself! What they needed to do was to present themselves as a clean, meritocratic, cadre based party similar to the RSS backed BJP. By playing footsie with dynasts and opposing things like the 123 deal for purely ideological reasons, they dug their own graves. Still, where the Communists- or any other party- has done 'last mile delivery', they can survive. This is because 'hegemony' does not exist. All that matters is actual governance.

To some extent, this common sense has finally emerged and parties seem to be seeking such alliances. But equally, such a sensible politics must throughout be guided by a humane politics and not embrace these sensible alliances at the cost of it. What does that imply?

Nothing. Common sense leads effective leaders to have humane policies because voters are human beings.

There is an obvious lesson to be learnt from the period of the Emergency and its aftermath.

If it is obvious, Bilgrami can't learn it because his profession is stupidity.

Opposition alliances emerged then with an exclusively negative purpose. It would be wrong to dismiss them as opportunistic since the purpose was a worthy one then (as it is now): to overturn an intolerably authoritarian regime. But such victories as that opposition achieved were short-lived and in fact, as we know, it suffered an utterly crushing defeat at the hands of Indira Gandhi’s Congress in 1980 for the very plain reason that it stood for nothing positive over and above opposition to a previously authoritarian Congress government.

The Janata Morcha fell on the issue of dual membership of the RSS. The lesson to be learned is that the RSS is not a Fascist outfit. It is wrong to stigmatize it. Out of the various splinters of the Janata coalition, it was the RSS backed Bharatiya Janata Party which emerged as the most professional and faction free option.

And the situation is far worse today because nobody would describe that Congress government as relying on anything like the Gramscian hegemony that the current government and the class it represents enjoy.

By Gramscian hegemony, Bilgrami means that the BJP is doing a good job. It is meritocratic and faction free. Congress is in disarray because Rahul is a cretin and so his Mummy has had to take over once again.

In fact, the Emergency was declared out of an anxiety that such hegemony was precisely what it did not have.

Nonsense! It was declared because the Allahabad High Court had rendered Indira Gandhi's election null and void because of misuse of government machinery for her election campaign. She would have had to step down.

That leaves one with the absolutely alarming eventual prospect of another 1980-style outcome in the future. If the rec­ently emerging opposition alliances do succeed next year, it would be a scary prospect to imagine the kind of ­hegemony a subsequent returning BJP government might have after the ineffectual rule of a government formed by an alliance of parties with no positive platform apart from ending the nightmare of the past four years.

There was no nightmare. Some useful idiots went around repeating stupid lies. But no one was listening.

It becomes a matter of some urgency, therefore, that an election should be fought by a set of alliances at the national and regional levels with a common, positive, hum­ane ­platform which can carry conviction.

Platforms don't matter. What matters is expectations re. ability to deliver good governance and needful reforms.

Alliances aren't a good thing. It is better if there is a clear chain of command and that incentive compatibility obtains- i.e. when an order is given, it is in the interest of the person tasked with a job to actually do that job well.

To draw and erect such a platform requires a lot of enormously hard work, a great deal of tact and resolution and vision, and a leadership in each party of each alliance that fetches respect and has authority.

Also one should be kind to animals and nice to the environment.

I can just hear the sneering dismissal of all this by the orthodoxies within the Congress.

Nobody was listening to Bilgrami. Why bother sneering at this imbecile?

What positive common programme will suffice? It is here I think that the parliamentary site of politics has to pay attention to what is surfacing on the site of movements and provide a sort of unifying force in a common and integrated electoral platform of the causes that they reflect.

There was an anti-corruption movement which became a quite successful political party. Other movements which did not morph into political parties fell by the wayside.

Only such a conscientious effort to integrate in the electoral field seemingly miscellaneous yearnings surfacing on the street and the maidan has any chance of getting the support of a massively heterogenous electorate with its prodigiously varied interests.

No. Only a conscientious effort to improve governance- 'last mile delivery' in particular- will get you elected.

In my country of domicile, such attentiveness to causes emerging on non-parliamentary sites was the basis of virtually every fundamental and effective change in society: to give just two examples, FDR’s attentiveness to the demands of the labour movements of the 1930s and Lyndon Johnson’s acknowledgement of the civil rights movement.

Both were already in power. FDR's policies failed to end the Depression. LBJ ended up helping the Republican 'Southern strategy'. Both the Labor Movement and the Civil Rights Movement had an explicitly political strategy and operated through caucuses within political parties.  Bilgrami writes as though FDR & LBJ were making anthropological discoveries while exploring submerged portions of society.

So also, Sanders’s remarkable success in the Democratic primaries was entirely because of the energy that went into bringing together quite diverse ongoing causes in movements, ranging from the protests around post-financial crisis unemployment and wage stagnation to the protest against foreclosures of homes, to the students’ protests against the costs of higher education, and the mobilisations of millions marginalised on the health care front. Something similar lies in Corbyn’s success.

But, both failed. Corbyn has paved the way for BoJo's no-deal Brexit which will reduce protection for workers. Sanders hurt Hilary enough to open the door to Trump.

The recent farmers and workers rallies in Maharashtra and in the north (and last November in Delhi) and the adivasis’ recent long march in Chhattisgarh, the repeated and remarkable Dalit display of political agency over the past few years against the recurring violence they face,

were important and were addressed by the administration. Not so the bogus student activism of sclerotic Socialist parties-

the courageous and brilliant students’ campaigns against the communal elements on campus,

failed completely because they were obviously careerist and partisan

the women’s protest against rampant sexual violence,

failed because women would not vote for Kiran Bedi who was prepared to tackle the underlying problem.

are all causes that need to be integrated into a common platform speaking to the issues that concern labour and peasantry and the youth, women and the oppressed castes.

But this won't change the fact that Hindus are a majority and they don't like people who shit on their religion- or who have chums who do.

It is true that Muslims have in recent years not shown the mobilisational agency that Dalits have shown and that they themselves showed in the immediate aftermath of the destruction of the mosque in Ayodhya.

Muslims need to take the lead in putting together coalitions rather than playing second fiddle. Look at the Kerala Muslim League. We should get to vote for smart Muslims who aim to be C.M and then P.M on the basis of their achievements not their loyalty, or lack of it, to a dynastic patron.

Bilgrami thinks Indian Muslims are cowards- stupid cowards- who don't get that if they present an abject appearance then they will be trampled. On the other hand, if they show they continue to be courageous, smart, enterprising and have a lot to contribute to cleaning up politics and the bureaucracy, then no external enemy or internal dissension can hold the country back.

In the face of the viciousness of the almost daily attacks on them (sanctioned tacitly by the very presence of BJP in positions of power at the Centre and the regions), they have gone entirely into their shells.

If this were true, there would be something drastically wrong with the way Indians are practicing Islam. It is a rational religion which upholds 'hubb al watan min al iman'. It is progressive and law abiding. No doubt, laws differ in different places but this does not pose a problem for Muslims anymore than it does for Hindus or Christians or anybody else.

They need particularly deliberate inclusion, therefore, in forging such a common platform. Above all, any common agenda that doesn’t offer a serious pro­gra­mme of uplifting the poor through food schemes, employment schemes (both of which were started in small measure under UPA-I) and extending to health and housing schemes, will never have any chance of long-term success against the domination of the BJP.

So, not only are Indian Muslims abject cowards, they are also starving and unable to feed themselves or treat their own illnesses. Would it surprise Bilgrami to discover that Indian Muslims are hardworking, thrifty and very successful in STEM subjects including Medicine? Why pretend their Religion- or faith in The Creator- has turned them into a starving, frightened, isolated community who need to be led by the hand?
Islam was ahead, not behind, other Religions is rejecting Marxist stupidity. Only the Chinese pretend that Muslims need to be 're-educated' by the kindhearted goons of the Communist Party.