My point is that the BJP is not very different from Congress. One branch of the dynasty has joined it. Politicians move easily between these two parties. If one party denies them a seat, they move to the other. Often, the father belongs to one party and the son to another. Sometimes there is a bitter rivalry between brother and sister or Uncle and Nephew. More commonly, the thing makes no difference. It is just a case of a family hedging its bets rather than putting all its eggs in one basket.
Currently, Modi is the only viable and attractive candidate for the post of Prime Minister. Moreover, as a skillful orator, he has done a great job projecting the Nationalist narrative. At no point has he descended into Hitler style demagoguery. Imran Khan is spitting and hissing and threatening genocide. Rahul is crying hysterically about 'vichar-dhara'- i.e. ideology- while Modi talks about vikas- development- and comes away looking like he, not Rahul, has a Cambridge MSc in Development Studies. Thus, Modi has acquired the mantle of Gandhian morality- he builds toilets- as well as that of Nehruvian idealism but tempered by Patel's hard-headed pragmatism. As a poet himself he is at ease quoting Tagore as well as ancient Tamil poetry. As an RSS man, he capitalizes on Ambedkar's soft spot for that organization and is giving Dalits a route to meritocratic success in electoral politics which the Dynastic parties will not concede them. What I mean is that, in a dynastic party, a Dalit Minister is welcome to be corrupt and incompetent- indeed, this is preferable- so long as he delivers his vote-bank. But he can't aspire to the top job. The same is true of the Muslim. 'Ayaz qadr e khud bi shinaz'- the slave Ayaz must know his place. In the BJP, by contrast, a Dalit- if not a Muslim- can take the top job purely on the basis of merit. The day may come when this would be equally true of a Muslim. This can't be said about Congress or any of the various caste-based dynastic outfits including the TMC where Mamta is promoting her nephew.
This is the current political reality in India. How should the anglophone intelligentsia respond? In my personal opinion, they should struggle against Fascism by drinking Bacardi & Coke and binge watching Netflix. I have a hazy memory that this is what Baudrillard counselled. Pranab Bardhan, however, has taken a different tack. He writes as follows in Goenka's Indian Express-
In the world’s largest half-democracy, we have by now got used to a constant barrage of spin, half-truths and lies which has successfully hijacked the legacy of past leaders for its own cause — Gandhiji, Patel, Netaji Bose, Bhagat Singh, Vivekananda and even Ambedkar — although all of them were openly against the idea of Hindutva, as currently interpreted, and Hindu Rashtra.Bardhan lives in America. God alone knows what he has got used to. He is speaking of the BJP administration which capitalized on the RSS's legacy and that of Vajpayee and Advani- but also Modi's own success as Chief Minister of Gujarat- to gain power. It has no need to hijack anything. On the other hand, it pays a graceful tribute to various leaders who, if not themselves in a direct line of descent from the RSS's own founders, were nevertheless very closely associated with people who were.
Thus Gandhi was close to Patel and Prasad and Malviya and so forth all of whom were close to both the Mahasabha as well as the less political RSS. However, that last was created by a Doctor on the model of the Congress Seva Dal which was more militant and which had been created by another Doctor two years earlier. Savarkar was part and parcel of the 'Hindu terrorist' movement which included Vivekananda, Aurobindo, Bagha Jatin, Ghaddar, as well as the Maharasthrian and South Indian revolutionaries. At a later point Bhagat Singh consulted with him. By contrast, as Maulana Azad recounts, these groups were suspicious of recruiting Muslims and, in general, had opposed the partition of Bengal which would have helped the Muslim majority in the East of that Province. Niradh Chaudhri, Sharat Bose's secretary, has given a convincing account of the Hindu Nationalist mindset. It was bitterly anti-British. The White Man was 'the enemy within'. The small British minority was stripped of all power post independence. It became de rigeur to blame the long vanished Brits for all Ind's ills. Fools like Shashi Tharoor and Jayati Ghosh are still at it.
Sadly, there was also an anti Muslim element in this- as well a patronizing, if not hostile, attitude to Dalits. The fact is that people like Jinnah and Ambedkar and Mandal had a good reason to be suspicious of Congress concessions. Once in power, they could take it all back. Mandal was fooled in this way by the Muslim League and had to flee Pakistan along with millions of his Namashudra followers. But the position of Muslims in Independent India was only marginally better. When they tried to revive talk of reserved seats, they were bluntly pointed to the door. Shuddh Hindi became the official language. There was not even the semblance of lip-service to Gandhian 'Hindustani'. But, the Muslims well knew, Gandhi himself would have abandoned the thing without a fuss.
I am not saying the caste Hindus were especially evil or hypocritical. The Muslims did the same thing where they had the upper hand. However, they could go the extra step and do ethnic cleansing because of the different nature of their religion. Caste Hindus preferred to keep Muslims and Dalits- but also rural OBCs- as vote banks and a cheap labor pool.
No Hindu leader was against 'Hindu Rashtra' as such- including Communists (who accepted the Stalinist line on Nationalities). This is because they knew what would happen to them in a Muslim Rashtra. No doubt, like Jinnah, elite leaders pretended that they would be as secular as the British. But then their stock in trade was their mimic Britishness.
In the sphere of ideology, the idea of nationalism is in the process of being hijacked.We know what the Indian idea of nationalism was. It meant the imposition of Sanskritized Hindi and the relegation of Urdu to the margins. It meant cow protection in the Constitution and the passing of draconian anti-beef laws in many States. It meant the relative economic and educational decline of Muslims. Border States which harbored separatist aspirations received the loving attention of the Army and Border Security Force. 'Indian Army, come rape us' was the placard held up by mothers in Manipur.
How could this nationalism be 'hijacked'? What more could it possibly require? The plane was already on the tarmac in Cuba and the leader the hijackers was smoking a cigar with Castro.
Already for many in our country (including the hysterically cheer-leading sections of the media), nationalism is narrowly taken as majoritarianism in the service of a jingoistic state and focused on hating a neighbouring country (and, of course, “enemies within”). The British politician, Nye Bevan, after his first visit to Pakistan in its early days is reported to have thus described that country: “I have never been to a country so much in love with hate”.He could have said that about India just as easily. There was genocide on both sides of the border.
Unfortunately, we are fast reaching a situation where this description may fit our country as well.Bardhan and his ilk have been spitting poison at the BJP for thirty years. However, since they have been doing it from foreign campuses, few took any notice. The situation Bardhan says 'we are fast reaching' was in fact reached twenty years ago when Vajpayee took power and conducted a nuclear test.
Gandhiji said there could be no politics without religion. He considered the Indian freedom struggle to be a religious undertaking involving the technique of satyagraha which he held to be common to all Faiths.
Religion-based nationalism as propagated by Jinnah, and opposed by Gandhiji, was the basis of the formation of Pakistan.
Jinnah said his Pakistan would be perfectly secular. Nobody believed him. But then nobody really believed Muslims would thrive in India either.
All over the world today, ethnic nationalism of one kind or another is making a comeback — Christian nationalism in Poland and Hungary, white nationalism among evangelical Christians in the US, Slavic and orthodox-church based nationalism in Russia, Islamic nationalism in Turkey and Indonesia and so on.Why? It is because politicians listened to cretins like Bardhan and thus failed to do 'last mile delivery'.
About a hundred years back, the leaders of social thinking in India applied their mind to what should be the basis of nationalism in the diverse, extremely heterogeneous society of India.Rubbish! By 1919, nobody in India was thinking straight. People were jumping on foolish bandwagons like 'Khilafat' and Gandhian boycotts of Courts and Schools and Colleges and so forth. The Gokhale type intelligentsia surrendered to the demand for immediate Swaraj without any co-operative transition period.
I have particularly in mind the thoughts of Gandhiji and Tagore on nationalism expressed in various forms (essays and lectures by both, and in the case of Tagore, also in literature with several poems and at least three novels — one of which later was the basis of a widely-known Satyajit Ray movie, Ghare Baire) in the first three decades of the 20th century.Tagore had got his fingers burned during his brief infatuation with the revolutionists and thus backtracked. But then he had much to lose. Gandhi had displaced Jinnah as the bridge between the Hindus and Muslims but was merrily laying the foundations for Partition because he opposed a co-operative dyarchy such that technocratic leaders of different communities formed Developmental coalitions. Instead, you had London trained barristers disguising themselves as Sadhus or Mullahs so as to stir up the masses with religious slogans.
They were, of course, both anti-imperialists, thus sharing in the popular movements of nationalism against colonial rulers, but they wanted to go beyond this to think about a more positive basis of nationalism.But both were stupid and ignorant. All they could do was say 'Boo to Whitey! Industrial Civilization is very horrible! Let us go set up shop in some rural backwater and pretend to be reviving some ancient Aryan Spiritual Culture which does not feature indoor plumbing or air-conditioning or cool stuff of any description'.
Both of them found the nation-state of European history, with a singular social homogenising principle and militarised borders and jingoistic mobilisation against supposed enemy states, unacceptable and unsuitable for India’s diverse society.Europe had educated its people and made them more productive. Its wars enabled the middle class to displace Emperors and Aristocrats. Sadly, since Germany wasn't disarmed, it had a Second War the result of which was even more salutary than the first because, this time round, it was the working class which gained power. After that, Europe's standard of living rose by leaps and bounds which is why Indian leftists- like Ranajit Guha and Amartya Sen and Homi Bhabha- made a bee-line for its frigid shores.
Instead, they both drew upon the long folk-syncretic tradition of Indian society (which grew out of the layers of sediments formed by successive waves of social reform and rebellion, called the bhakti movements, against the dominance of the rigid Hindu brahminical system, over many centuries in different parts of India), extolling inter-faith tolerance and pluralism, and wanted to make that the constructive basis of Indian nationalism.But this involved living in a shithole without a functioning water-closet or air conditioning or HD TVs. Folk-syncretic traditions are boring- unless repackaged by Coke Studios- and getting bitten by mosquitoes while being forced to watch that shite is no fun at all. Exposure to Gandhian thought or Tagore's miserable wailing is what caused people like Bardhan to get their skates on and head for America on the basis of whatever Credential they could lay their hands on. No doubt, once safely cocooned on an Ivy League campus, these shitheads could pretend to be into Tagore and Gandhi and eating your own feces coz that's like organic and sustainable, right?
Both Gandhiji and Tagore were deeply religious persons. But Gandhiji openly said, “Free India will not be a Hindu Raj; it will be an Indian Raj, based not on the majority of any religious sect or community”.Jinnah didn't believe him. But then nobody believed Jinnah when he said the same thing about Pakistan. That's how Politics works. Everybody says that if they are elected, even their opponents will be much better off.
Tagore was trenchant in his criticism of the western idea of the nation-state, “with all its paraphernalia of power and prosperity, its flags and pious hymns… its mock thunders of patriotic bragging”, and of how it stokes a national conceit that makes society lose its moral balance.Bardhan hightailed it for the West quickly enough. Why has he not quit the purlieus of 'power and prosperity' and gone back to live in his ancestral shit-hole?
Nehru, who was personally close to Gandhiji and ideologically close to Tagore,and physically close to Edwina Mountbatten
saw more value in the modern state than they did in providing a unifying structure in a divided society and in unleashing the forces of planned economic development.That's coz he was in charge of the modern state and if it got more money he could afford to fly around in a nice big airplane haranguing foreigners in places like Bandung.
By the time the Indian Constitution was framed, both Gandhiji and Tagore were dead. Nehru (along with Ambedkar), in leading the way, drew upon the society-centric pluralistic idea of nationalism of Gandhiji and Tagore and gave it a legal-juridical form in the Indian Constitution.Rubbish! The Indian Constitution looks like a Western Constitution- most notably the one of the Irish Free State. It does have some Indian features- e.g. a Directive Principle re. cow protection- but it doesn't have any Gandhian features. It is unitary and centralizing. Suppose Tagore had written the Constitution. It would have been vacuous, maudlin, shite.
The Nehru-Ambedkar idea of nationalism, forged and refined through elaborate deliberations of the Constituent Assembly, gave India the basis of its civic nationalism that prevailed for many decades.No. Civic nationalism framed the Constitution which the Courts interpreted over subsequent decades such that, very gradually, one could speak of civil society as being reshaped by Constitutional law. Civic nationalism was not something static. It evolved- often in mischievous directions- during each decade and this evolution affected how the Constitution was amended and re-interpreted. Bardhan is writing as though adopting a Constitution frictionlessly creates a new golden path. If this were true, nobody would study Economics. Constitutional Law could, by itself, fix every problem of Mechanism Design. Suppose Nepal adopts a better Constitution than America. Immediately, the Nepalese would be richer and more powerful than the Americans. This is sheer magical thinking- though, to be fair, it is par for the course for cretins like Bardhan because they teach a wholly worthless subject.
It is this inclusive idea of civic nationalism that is now being attempted to be dismantled by the Hindu nationalists.If Hindu nationalists exist then 'inclusive ideas' either didn't exist or are wholly useless. It doesn't matter if they are dismantled. They have already failed.
Even at the time of the framing of the Constitution, the RSS had opposed the Constitution as “western”, even though in their earlier history, many of their leaders used to admire the ethnic basis of nationalism in a western country, Germany — their revered leaders like Savarkar and Golwalkar had expressed open admiration for the efficient Nazi system of mobilising and organising the German nation.But it was the Congress President, Govind Vallabh Pant, who said 'Mahatma Gandhi is the Il Duce and Fuehrer of India'. The RSS was a weak sister to the Congress Seva Dal. Indira was no respecter of the Constitution. Her own husband called her getting rid of the elected Communist government of Kerala a Fascist action. We all remember her demand for a 'committed' Judiciary and the manner in which she changed the Constitution during the Emergency. It was at this time that the RSS emerged as the least corrupt and most trust-worthy of the defenders of Democracy.
Earlier, Japanese nation-state had also been inspired by German history. It is not surprising that Tagore’s lectures in Japan as early as 1916 against the aggrandising nation-state did not make him popular with the Japanese.Around this time, Tagore believed that the Indian revolutionaries were targeting him for assassination. Tagore also attacked Gandhian stupidity a few years later but had to backtrack. Why? His silly Shantiniketan needed money and Gandhi could supply it. So the 'Gurudeva' genuflected to the 'Mahatma' and both were soon joined by a variety of other shitheads with bogus titles like 'Acharya' and 'Neta' and so forth, so as to constitute a circle jerk of a Mutual Admiration Society.
In the West, the US is a case where the idea of civic nationalism was pursued (though not always successfully).The US is a case of a country which got very rich and very very powerful by doing smart things. Gassing on about 'ideas of civic nationalism' is not a smart thing. That is why they hire stupid brown people to do it.
In a 2009 speech, Barack Obama said: “One of the great strengths of the United States is… we do not consider ourselves a Christian nation, (but) a nation of citizens who are bound by ideals and a set of values”, presumably as enshrined in the Constitution.Why did Obama say that? It's coz Jews in America are very important- more particularly to the Democratic party. The 'deporter in chief' (as he is now misleadingly called by the Democratic circular firing squad) did not hesitate to drone strike the fuck out of Pakistan, nor to kill Osama in cold blood. This may not have been the Christian thing to do, but it was perfectly sensible.
This is a major historical example of what the German philosopher Habermas calls “constitutional patriotism”, as opposed to patriotism based on “blood and soil” which used to have popular appeal in Germany, and which in history has been associated with a great deal of persecution, violence and devastation.The USSR had a constitution, as did Mao's China. Stalin and Mao weren't exactly sluggards in the persecution, violence and devastation department. The truth is, if Hitler hadn't declared war on both the USSR and the USA, Germany would have been like Franco's Spain in the Fifties and Sixties. Habermas might still have written tosh, but it would have been a different stripe of tosh.
It is this German history that Einstein may have had in mind when he said nationalism is “an infantile disease, the measles of mankind”.Yet Einstein did not condemn Zionism. When declining the post of President of Israel he said he was saddened and ashamed, not of Israel, but of his lack of fitness to serve it.
Anyway, why quote Einstein in this context? He was a Physicist not a Historian or Political Scientist.
This battle of alternative versions of nationalism is raging all over the world today.There is no battle. Just some senile hacks writing shite op-eds.
Our identities are necessarily multi-layered but ethnic nationalists privilege one of these layers, usually based on the narrow particularities of religion, language or culture that makes it easy to mobilise certain groups.Bardhan, in writing this, is privileging one layer in his putative readers. It is the layer of ignorance, stupidity, and a reflexive prejudice against the BJP coz its leaders didn't go to the right Schools and Colleges.
In the name of national integration and fighting enemies, both outside and within, they undermine minority rights and procedures of democracy, they accuse liberals of appeasing the minorities (blacks and Hispanics in the US, immigrants in Europe, Kurds in Turkey, Muslims in India), and try to suppress dissent as “anti-national”.In other words, they govern in the interests of those who elected them. That's how Democracy works.
Civic nationalism, on the other hand, emphasises the procedural aspects of democracy, and through its stress on liberal constitutional values tries to use the pre-commitment of a foundational document to bind the hands of subsequent generations against majoritarian tendencies curbing basic civil rights.Either it succeeds, in which case Bardhan has nothing to complain of, or else it is not fit for purpose. Indeed, it probably does not exist because the thing is not incentive compatible. The trouble with constitutions is that they can be amended and reinterpreted. Civic nationalism too easily gets hoist by its own petard. That is a good reason for smart people to have nothing to do with it. A better course is to create and maintain incentives for 'positive sum' correlated equilibria in which preference diversity is dammed up as capacitance so that it can be released when most useful in accordance with the shifting fitness landscape.
If we lose this ideological battle in India, the foundational values of our multi-cultural society that our earlier great social thinkers adored will be in serious danger.This is what Rahul is saying. We must all continually wail and shit ourselves so as to impede 'vikas' (Development) in the name of purity of 'vichar-dhara' (Ideology). The problem here is that the more Rahul and his ilk wail and soil themselves, the more people feel there is no alternative to 'vikas-purush' Modi. That is bad for Democracy. In the United States, as Obama says, the Democratic party must get rid of its 'circular firing squad' and disintermediate its radical fringe. Otherwise, come 2020, a lot of marginal voters will feel there in no alternative to Trump.
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