Pratap Bhanu Mehta legitimizing the bastard progeny of unholy buggery.

Writing in the Indian Express, Pratap Bhanu Mehta tells us that-

The noose is tightening around all independent institutions in India.

Can he give even one example of this happening? Nope. Not a single one. Yet he writes-

The episode featuring sedition charges against eminent writers and directors — now belatedly withdrawn — is a reminder of the peculiar nature of the crisis of liberal institutionalism in India.

This is nonsense. A small town lawyer who has specialized in bringing nuisance cases against celebrities, brought a nuisance case against some senile hacks. The Police have recommended that the silly lawyer be charged with submitting a false affidavit and that the sedition case be dropped. This is a reminder that silly people are silly and that they should be ignored. If they go to court or take some other such action which proves a public nuisance, the Law should step in and curb such activities of theirs.

India does not have any 'liberal institutionalism'. Nor does any other country under the Rule of Law. What obtains is Institutions, subject to judicial oversight, which must operate in a non-ideological manner.

The true register of the crisis is not that liberal ideas might be losing, or that elites identified with liberalism might be discredited.

Pratap Bhanu Mehta does not have ideas. He has dogmas. He may believe he belongs to an elite and that it is identified with anything other than cretinism, careerism and corruption. However, everybody else thinks he is a stupid windbag.

There is more than one crisis in India. But Mehta is blissfully unaware of any of them. What gets him worked up is that the present Administration, like everybody else in India, ignores him completely.

Both those phenomena have occurred in the past. What is new is the choking up of the channels of protest in the time of civic oppression. Where does a politics of resistance to civic oppression go?

How is Mehta 'oppressed'? He is ignored because he is stupid and tells stupid lies. Who cares about a 'politics of resistance' practiced by tossers whom nobody bothers to oppress?

We cannot rely on the law.

There is nothing else we can rely on. Mehta knows it, that's why he immediately contradicts himself.

A liberal polity relies on unglamorous institutions and processes to keep open the windows of light against the darkness of untrammelled power.

It is those institutions and processes which have improved under Modi. Good Governance is a prerequisite for sustainable Development which raises up the condition of the masses.

We have often relied on some putative motivating power of the law to deliver a modicum of protection, if not justice.

Nonsense! We rely on the Law, not its 'putative motivating power'. That is why we pay for Law Enforcement. If 'putative motivating powers' actually existed, a Government would not waste money on a Police Force and Penal System.

The law has often disappointed deeply; and it often protects elites more than others. But the cowardly, almost impeachable, abdication of the judiciary in the face of threats to civil liberties has now made an appeal to the law akin to an appeal to the majestic benevolence of an odd judge at best, and a laughing joke at worst.

Can Mehta give even one example of this happening under Modi? Of course not. He is an ignorant windbag. 

We cannot rely on discussion.

No one can rely on people like Mehta in a discussion because they will suddenly start babbling nonsense about 'putative motivating powers'. All we ask of his ilk is that they don't masturbate in public- or that they confine themselves to circle jerks in which they jizz only in each others' eyes. 

The liberal faith in discussion is not so much that liberal ideas might win, as it is a faith that there is something addictive about the commitment to discussion itself; it is the habit itself that is the triumph of a liberal sensibility.

Why do cretins like Sen and Mehta not get that discussion is a feature of every type of Regime and Enterprise? Hitler's minions spent a lot of time discussing how to commit genocide more economically. A 'one dimensional' discussion- i.e. one where there is only one aim- tends to reinforce commitment to that aim. A 'multi-dimensional discussion', by McKelvey's Chaos Theorem, features a struggle for 'agenda control'. However, it is likely to quickly degenerate into Djikstra concurrency deadlock.

Why do senile shitheads like Mehta and Sen not know of stuff like this- which most undergraduate Economists learn off in their second or third year?

This is why authoritarian politics disdains discussion.

Nonsense! They have discussion groups at every level where people learn, by Tardean mimetics, to express their gratitude to the Supreme Leader and to extoll his achievements.

On the other hand, no effective regime permits discussion to hinder necessary action. Thus, when Truman decided to drop the Atom bomb on Hiroshima there was zero discussion. Obama had Osama killed without any discussion. The US Supreme Court affirms the 'doctrine of political question' such that many Executive actions are non justiciable. In other words, discussion regarding them, even after the fact, are wholly inconsequential.

Again, this space will privilege some more than others, but its availability is a form of insurance against worse evils.

Justiciability is a type of insurance. However, because of Executive privilege, the more comprehensive type of insurance has to do with a Democratically elected Legislature.

It is true that smart people can discuss things in a manner which causes the Executive to change its policies. However, Mehta and Sen and the rest of that gang aren't smart. Their public discourse invites derision because they rely on stupid lies and are incapable of expressing a coherent thought.

So long as there is a commitment to “politics through speech,” some basic norms of reciprocity will be preserved.

Hitler did 'politics through speech'. He rose from being a Corporal in the Political Wing of the German Army, to being the Fuehrer to whom the entire German Army swore a personal oath of loyalty, while Hindenburg, the official Head of State, was still alive. How did he achieve this? Purely on the basis of his oratory. 

But the idea of public discussion is itself under severe threat.

An idea can't be under any sort of threat unless it is an obviously stupid idea. The fact is a public discussion between smart people about how India should be run could influence the Executive- provided a smart guy like Modi is in charge. 

There is direct intimidation using law and violence.

In Bengal under Mamta. Her TMC is an offshoot of the Congress party.

The main channels of public debate — the media — are now, for the most part, supply-side driven propaganda.

The Indian Express is owned by Viveck Goenka. Other major newspapers and TV channels are owned by similar oligarchs. When asked to bend, by the dynasty, they preferred to crawl. Their 'supply-side' driven propaganda, however, could not disguise the incompetence and corruption of Sonia's regime, nor the arrant imbecility of the Clown Prince, Rahul.

Social media can accelerate tribalisation even faster than it accelerates democratisation.

No it can't. It can merely waste our time. 

We cannot rely on artfully using fragmentation of power.

Mehta can rely upon nothing save our derision and ridicule.

Let power check power.

No. Let the Law prevail.

But the fragmentation of power that we took for granted as a check against undue concentration no longer holds.

There was no 'fragmentation of power'. There were Constitutional checks and balances. Power remained unitary.

Regional parties are as likely to navigate with this authoritarianism, as against it.

Regional parties either support the Center or they don't. If Authoritarianism exists then Regional Parties cease to exist or have to go underground. 

India’s fragmented social identities are now available for new forms of reconfiguration in the nationalist project; they are fuelling nationalism as much as they are resisting it.

India does not possess fragmented social identities. Indians have diverse social identities but those identities are not 'fragmented' at all. On the contrary, they are so cohesive that one can speak of caste 'vote banks'. 'Jati' in philosophy means a universal. Sociologically it means an endogamous group which may have had a common occupation in the past but which is bound together by distinctive customs and which is capable of acting cohesively in various important respects. If it were the case that these 'jatis' were at war with each other, then one could say India had 'fragmented' social identities. However, history shows that Indian jatis want to, and do, act collusively so as to create a common regional and national identity. Indian social identities are evolving along similar trajectories because social identity in India has never been 'fragmented' nor displayed 'anomie'. Urbanization did not extinguish 'jati'. It extended its field of operation. Even 'globalization' has had this effect. The most successful Indian immigrants are those whose families continue to identify with their 'jati'. This is not to say there is no intermarriage. There is, but the Indian side predominates if it represents greater success and upward mobility. The patriarch looks kindly on the Gora son-in-law or Gori daughter-in-law, precisely because they can see which side their bread is buttered on. Of course, many Indians don't want to maintain an Indian social identity once abroad. But they run the risk that their progeny will experience a 'reversion to the mean' and get assmmilated to the local lumpen proletariat, that too under the burden of a duskier complexion.

Mehta says 'social identities' are 'available' for new forms of 'reconfiguration'. But, a guy who can 'reconfigure social identities' must be very smart.  To counter such a person, we would need to listen to equally smart people- not shitheads like Mehta. Why does he not 'reconfigure' his own social identity as a worthless windbag? Why does he not turn himself into a Bollywood star whom the masses will adore and listen to?

What does Mehta mean when he says fragmented Social Identities are 'fueling' just as much as they as 'resisting' Nationalism? Is he saying Nationalism has neither risen nor fallen? If so, why worry about it?

In any case, a fatalistic belief in sociological determinism to save us was the Left’s version of anti politics, as if there were ready-made coalitions of minorities and other oppressed groups who will automatically appear to resist.

Why did the Left fail? Was it some 'fatalistic belief'? No. It failed because it was crap.
Almost everybody in India wanted a Left which was not crap. Indeed, we also wanted a Right which was not crap. All we have is a Center which is not entirely crap. But that's all we can say about it. 

But if social power is not fragmented, in the same way neither is the power of money — Indian capital was seldom a defender of liberty.

Mehta first says 'social identities' in India are fragmented. Now he says 'social power is not fragmented'. How is this possible?

The power of money, unlike social identity, is fragmented. Why? Money's power is exerted to create, sustain and capture rents. But rent contestation is dissipative and reduces the cohesiveness of the moneyed class. That's a good thing. In the US, the rich in the North opposed slavery which was necessary to the rich in the South. Currently, some rich people are for Trump. Most are against him. Similarly, the rich, in the UK, are deeply divided over Brexit which, however, is supported by the Poor because they feel threatened by immigration.

In India, there is a consensus amongst both rich and poor that only the BJP can govern the country coz Rahul Baba is a cretin and Congress won't let anyone else do a good job of running the country lest the dynasty is permanently eclipsed. This does not mean the rich are happy with Modi. Indeed, the rich are never happy with a clean politician. They remember what V.P Singh tried to do to them. They fear the Enforcement Directorate. They all have their boltholes prepared in London from which they will fight extradition by claiming that they are being persecuted for their political views by a Fascist administration. In this context, it makes sense for them to finance the BJP while hedging their bets by propping up cretins like Mehta.

Indian capital, like every other type of capital, has an interest in promoting Liberty over Fraternity. However, it has an even stronger interest in demanding better and more effective governance. 

But now its taciturn silences are being replaced by a demonstrable alignment with not just state power, but the ideology of the state.

Indian Capital financed the Indian freedom struggle. It gained substantial rents by capturing the Agencies meant to regulate it. It enjoyed 'the best of monopoly profits- a quiet life'. However, the rising generation found they could do nothing in India and had to go abroad to make a fortune. Thankfully, Ambani showed how corruption could be used to unleash private enterprise. He opened a path which others have not been slow to follow. But this path is wholly pragmatic. There was a time when the scions of Big Business Houses studied at places where Professors gassed on about 'ideology'. This has long ceased to be the case.

It is having to devote all its capital, political funding, philanthropic commitment, media ownership, and even its symbolic capital, to the BJP and RSS.

Then who is paying for this article? Is it not a scion of the Goeknas? The Hindustan Times is owned by a Birla heiress who was a Congress MP. The Hindu is owned by a dynast whose sympathies are on the Left.

The Media finds itself obliged to give favorable coverage to popular leaders. Otherwise it loses market share. 

The BJP’s insurgency against the Congress was always sustained by deep material support, from Nusli Wadia in the Eighties to regional capitalists more recently.

Wadia is Jinnah's grandson. He fought a war with Dhirubhai Ambani using the Goenka's Indian Express. It so happened that an RSS man provided useful ammunition. But Wadia did not give the BJP any money because they had a microscopic presence in Parliament. A little later, the entire Capitalist class united against V.P Singh, Rajiv's Finance Minister, who was cracking down on tax evaders. Rajiv, very foolishly shifted Singh to Defense where Singh could find evidence of the dynasty's corruption and thus bring down Rajiv and become Prime Minister himself. This threw a scare into the plutocrats. However they still didn't finance the BJP though it was Singh's move against Advani which brought him down.

The reason the BJP rose and rose is because it couldn't tap into Corporate money and thus grow fat and complacent in the manner of its rivals.

No opposition, political or in civil society, can now count on that kind of material support.

That kind of material support is counter productive as Hillary discovered. Volunteers do a better job than hired goons. 

It is undeniable that advocates of liberal institutionalism in India have always been uncomfortable with the grammar of civic protest.

Civic protest does not have a grammar because it isn't a language any more than shrieking horribly and shitting oneself incessantly is a type of discourse. On the other hand, it is undeniable that advocates of liberal institutionalism are always uncomfortable because of all the shit leaking out of their anus and sliding down their thighs. 

The preference for process over protest, discussion over organisation, law over civil disobedience, order over a fear of anarchy, petition over movement, individual authenticity over social solidarity, leaves it open both to the charge of passivity and elitism.

Everybody leaves their self open to such charges because there is no point defending oneself against people who keep slipping on the shit leaking out of their anus and thus can't get out of their padded cell to confront anybody.

It is irrational to prefer protest over process. Imagine going into McDonald and asking for a Big Mac. The Staff promptly being a fast-unto-death protesting your lack of that tasty meal. Do you stick around in the hope that the Government will take notice of this protest and intervene to ensure you get a burger? No. You go down the road to Burger King where process, not protest, is relied upon to ensure 'last mile delivery'.

Suppose you want to find a cure to some terrible new disease which is killing your loved ones. Would you spend all your time discussing how to do it with all and sundry or would you support, or create, an organisation which can take the required steps to discover a cure?

Mehta is a cretin if he thinks 'civil disobedience' is to be preferred to law abiding behavior. Order is genuinely better than anarchy. It is better to be an authentic individual rather than pretend to care about every fashionable cause. Otherwise you might end up as utterly worthless as Mehta and his ilk.

But it could survive these preferences when the institutional windows through which this sensibility could do some moderate work, were open. But that time seems to be long gone.

That time never existed. Mehta is pretending that there was ever a time when any influential section of society behaved like a stupid adolescent at her first year in a Liberal Arts College where she can't make any friends or get to hang out with anybody at all unless she pretends to be a political like the other losers and misfits on campus.

It is a fair criticism of liberals that they have seldom aligned with social movements: Farmers, labour, Adivasis, Dalit etc.

Yet some farmers leaders- like Sharad Joshi- were liberals. The same is true of Labor leaders, Adivasi leaders, Dalit leaders etc. In the Indian context, any other sort of Liberal has had no influence and thus it is pointless criticizing them, fairly or unfairly.

Often, they have worked against them, in weakening the legitimacy of their claims.

The Legitimacy of a claim is not decided by a shithead like Mehta. It is a matter for the Judiciary and the Legislature and thus, ultimately, the voter.

In the lead up to protests against the Emergency, many of these movements were the disruptors that fuelled a general sense of discontent.

People like Subhramaniyam Swamy, helped by the RSS, did protest and actively resist the Emergency. The Dalits and Adivasis did not. Nor did the pro-Moscow Communist party Unions.

But now there are two challenges that make it difficult to enlist these demands in a broad-based protest against civic oppression.

There is only one difficulty facing those who want to challenge the present administration. That difficulty is that they people who want to do it are utterly shite. 

There is no mechanism by which these movements translate into electoral politics and prove a threat to the ruling party.

Only because it takes a non-shite person to design an effective mechanism.

And, it is actually easy for the government to satiate the demands that fuel these movements. For instance, each time there is the hope that Dalit discontent will translate into a movement, whether over SC Atrocities Act or something else, the government can satiate demands; each time there is a farmers’ movement, the government can announce a policy change.

In other words, there is no oppression here on the part of the State. On the contrary, the State is anxious to help.

A movement centred on policy change does not necessarily translate into a movement for defending civic freedom.

More particularly if civic freedom requires no defense. 

That is how the government has outmanoeuvred those who thought social discontent will erupt.

There is no need to out-manoeuvre people backed into a corner with their head up their butt.

The protest against civic oppression does not have a focal point.

Because those doing the protesting are utterly shite. It does not matter that civic oppression does not exist. Non-shite protesters could make people believe it exists and that it is going to fuck them in the ass any day now.

Nationalism has a single focal point, one thing that keeps BJP supporters and organisations united.

Anti-nationalism too has a single focal point. The trouble is that the great mass of Indian people know that focal point will fuck up their lives.

Gandhi’s organisational acumen, feel for organisation and exemplarity is invoked a lot these days.

As opposed to when exactly?

But it is sobering that even those techniques worked largely in the context of nationalism.

Urm... Gandhi was the 'Il Duce and Fuhrer' (in the words of Govind Vallabh Pant) of the Indian National Congress. He succeeded in getting rid of the British minority which many Indians perceived as 'the enemy within'. It must be admitted, however, that the Brits were glad to leave because they thought the country would turn into a shithole. Interestingly, millions of Indians arrived at the same conclusion.

Civic freedom does not seem to give that focal point for this reason.

Sheer nonsense! Civic freedom means not being incessantly fucked over by the authorities. People get behind this and, in a democracy, prevail sooner or later. 

The government engages in what you might call serial authoritarianism, picking out targets one by one.

You might call it that if you are a cretin. A mass murderer is not a serial killer because he kills a lot of people simultaneously. A Liberal may engage in 'serial authoritarianism'- i.e. selectively violate liberal principles on suitable occasions. An authoritarian may engage in 'serial liberalism'- i.e. selectively adopt liberal solutions from time to time. But it is foolish to say a Liberal is engaged in 'serial liberalism' or an authoritarian is engaged in 'serial authoritarianism'. All one can say is that the presence of some constraint means that the Liberal, or the Authoritarian, can act according to her principles only under limited circumstances.

The advantage of this strategy is not just that others are complacent that they will not be the victims of civic oppression. It is also that it tires out protest, by making each transgression require a separate and discrete form of protest.

Mehta's assumption is that human beings are stupid. Thus, if you come home and see that your neighbor has been raped and murdered, you will assume 'it can't happen to me'. The next day you hear that the guy down the road was sodomized and decapitated. Do you still remain complacent? Of course you do? Prof. Mehta says such behavior is perfectly natural and Prof. Mehta is not a cretin who eats his own shit because, as everybody can see, pigs have wings are are flying all over the place. 

So we don’t yet have a contest between democracy and authoritarianism. What we have are protests against individual transgressions — sedition, lynching, NRC, Kashmir. These are still seen as individual transgressions in a system that is still, overall, legitimate.

Mehta will not accept that the majority of Indian people don't consider these to be 'transgressions'. They want beef eaters to be punished, if beef eating is against the law in their Province. They want illegal migrants to be deported. They want the Muslims of the Valley to be prevented from harming Indian soldiers or policemen. They laugh themselves silly when 'prominent intellectuals' soil themselves when some small town lawyer tries to get the Court to go after them for sedition.

But even as we prepare our legal challenges, write in public, organise protests, mobilise and look for slivers of social resistance that can be harnessed in the service of civic freedom, we should be prepared that things will have to get worse before they get better.

The trouble is things are getting better as far as the majority is concerned.  What Mehta & Co should start preparing for is being excoriated by their own circular firing squad of virtue signalling shitheads. Indeed, what Mehta is doing in this article, is scoring off some other type of equally worthless liberal- whose names thankfully are unknown to us.

Consider the paranoia evinced by the following sentence-

After all, if we still have the luxury of acting as if the system is legitimate, the system will hoist us with our own petard of legitimacy.

Some great evil is described- viz. being 'hoist by the petard of legitimacy'- but what does it actually mean? If one goes to court, one has to play by the rules of the court. If I charge you with libel, but I have lied then I can be done for perjury. Is there some such risk if I act if the system were legitimate? No. I would have 'played by the rules'. Thus, I would be entitled to the protection given by those same rules. It is true that a insane tyrant may, simply out of perversity, choose to destroy me. But insane tyrants are not legitimate. It is foolish to go anywhere near them.

The truth is that people like Mehta are incapable of acting in any meaningful way because they have made it their life-mission to pose as intellectuals and to talk ignorant nonsense. They considered 'acting' to be a luxury preferring to concentrate on the basic task of shitting higher than their arseholes. They pretend that they can discriminate legitimacy from being, as they are, the bastard progeny of unholy buggery.

This is not a counsel of despair, only an analytic judgement, that the crisis will have to be projected as deep, systemic and wide-ranging, before resistance finds a focal point.

This could be a 'dialectical' judgment. It can't be an 'analytic' judgment. On the other hand, it is reasonable to say 'Modi is doing a better job than any feasible rival. Thus it is pointless to oppose him- more particularly if we burble pseudo-intellectual shite. Instead, we must wait till a better alternative to Modi appears at which point we can pretend we still matter by claiming credit for that rival's victory.