Aishwary Kumar on Ambedkar- Part I

Ambedkar is the sole senior political and constitutional figure, anywhere in the world who combined expert knowledge of both Law and Economics. This means his thought is easily recoverable and appropriable from the perspective of 'Law & Econ'. This is a highly utile type of research and is vital for improved 'Mechanism Design'. Unlike Gandhi, Ambedkar should be studied by Economists- more especially in the Coasian/Mechanism Design tradition and within the framework of Hohfeldian analysis.

No doubt, there is a game-theoretic component to Ambedkar's thinking. Essentially, he was engaged in signalling so as to affect 'Shapley values' and thus we can easily integrate his political trajectory with his intellectual history.

Sadly, over the last decade, various Indian origin, American, academics have interpreted Dr. Ambedkar- a very sensible and pragmatic thinker and politician- in bizarre, Deluzean, ways. They father a foolish 'onto-theology' upon a progressive thinker and accomplished statesman, who interpreted the vernacular Indic Socio-Political tradition in the progressive and potentially universalist manner of Pierce, Dewey and what would become the Warren Court.

What makes this type of pseudo-intellectual activity particularly appalling is that Ambedkar denied that any super-natural element presented itself in life or nature.

Ajay Skaria is one such offender. Aishwary Kumar is another. I found this Chapter of his on the web.

In the Void of Faith: Sunnyata, Sovereignty, Minority

It is on account of sunnyata that everything becomes possible … it is on the impermanence of the nature of all things that the possibility of all other things depends.
Ambedkar, The Buddha and His Dhamma
Or that revolutionary daring which flings at the adversary the defiant words: I am nothing but I must be everything.
Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right

 Ambedkar and Marx have a simple message- viz. the most oppressed- the 'social zeros', the 'nothing men'- alone can enable Society to realize its maximal possibilities. St. Jerome put it differently- fex urbis, lex orbis- from the scum of the City, the Law of the World. Victor Hugo popularized this slogan. It captures the notion that those at the bottom are the least prejudiced and the most open to cooperative solutions which turn ideals into reality.

I suppose, if the Aristos were all inbred nitwits and the Bourgeoisie were
a bunch of hypocritical stuffed shirts, then it made sense to valorize the  poorest because they were less judgmental about one's penchant for cottaging or Communism or taking up with Colored folk.

Prof. Kumar takes a different view-

For someone who has been for so long and so decisively consigned among the incorrigible secularists of his time, it is fascinating that Ambedkar himself rarely speaks in the language of secularity (or invokes the trope of tolerance) without an immense reserve, if not downright reservation.

Ambedkar is classed as a 'secularist' because he denied the existence of God and the Supernatural.  He held that Buddhism was atheistic and thus better than any other Religion. Thus he denied the equal venerability, or equal worthlessness, of all Religions. In this sense, he was not what some Indians mean by the word 'secular'. All this is common knowledge.

Because of his outstanding political role as the champion of the 'Untouchable' Dalit Class, Ambedkar has millions of followers in India. Many consider him a Boddhisattva and converted to Buddhism because of him.

 By contrast, only a handful of academics, generally with little genuine sympathy for the subject, write books about Ambedkar. What they 'consign' him to does not matter because everybody else has consigned those academics to obscurity. One reason this happens is because these academics write in an unintelligible manner. Speaking generally, everything they say about him could either be said about everybody or could never be said about anybody. In other words, their tortuous verbiage is either vacuous or untrue.

Consider the following-

If he does fall back on that grammar at all, it is more often than not meant to reveal the limits of religious tolerance and equality in their doctrinal forms, and, ipso facto, the desire for theological and political sovereignty upon which the humanist rhetoric of secularism has itself come to thrive.

What does it mean? Kumar is saying- 'If Ambedkar talks of secularism it is generally so as to reveal something.' What is that something? 'The limits of religious tolerance and equality in their doctrinal form'. What are those limits? Kumar won't tell us. The fact is religious tolerance comes in many flavors. Whatever you say is its limit can immediately be overcome. You may say 'I draw the line at infidels coming into my place of worship and forcibly sodomizing the priest'. Some other nutter will immediately reply- 'True Religion requires us to actively invite infidels into our sacred places and to ordain our babies so that they may be buggered to death by those infidels. Only thus can we show we are truly Holier than Thou'.

 The same thing applies to the doctrine of equality. You may say, 'Forcing people with two eyes to pluck out one so as to be equal to the Cyclops is going too far'. Some other nutter will insist that everybody must not just poke out both of their eyes but also chop off their own heads and shove them up their respective arses so as to achieve true equality with the blind. Doctrines are stupid precisely because they know no limits. Ambedkar was a very smart guy and he was very busy doing important work. He did not waste any time 'revealing' some stupid limit which does not exist because some other nutter could immediately demand its transgression.

The fact is, the 'humanist rhetoric of secularism' is done by pedants and presstitutes. Guys like Ambedkar, who had tremendous expert knowledge as well a huge popular following, didn't need to bother with it. Things might have been different had be been obliged to spend a lot of time in jail- like Nehru. As things stood, everything he wrote was pointed, pragmatic and- even when highly polemical- politically efficacious in a high degree.

More strongly than any other thinker in the anticolonial tradition, Ambedkar detects in anxious nationalist concern with secularism – in India as elsewhere – a

bunch of bullshit. The thing was a con. Rich barristers belonging to the upper castes only spoke of Religion or Secularism because they wanted to step up from being brokers to being principals in the business of Power.

Unlike the Irish freedom struggle, where there was a genuine threat- which did in fact come to pass- that the Catholic Church, which was superbly organized- would take over the new State, in Indians there was no great fear of theocracy because Religion had never been as organized as the State. Equally, unlike in Ireland, the Indian freedom struggle was led by men of the highest moral reputation. It had not Parnells. Thus there was no 'anxiety' about secularism- though fear of Socialism or Modernism did figure.

Some stupid pedants may have had 'anxious nationalist concerns' but they weren't the guys who were getting their hands on power and moving into the big mansions and Ministerial berths. If India featured any such people, history has forgotten their names.

Kumar thinks there were-

paradoxical response to the moral exigencies of republican democracy founded on the logic of numbers (a logic that lies at the root of all religious and theocratic fanaticism, majoritarian and otherwise, rather than being their solution) and the correspondingly mutating forms and desire for transcendence and sovereign power (a desire that comes to be tethered to the grammar of national integrity and security as the postwar reality of stateless religious and racial minorities unravels worldwide).1

All this is sheer bullshit. Republican democracy means the majority gets to say what is normative- including the fact that the form of Government will be Republican rather than Monarchical. It may chose to have a separation of Church and State- because it distrusts its own priestly class, or that class is not cohesive- but it will definitely ensure that the majority community is hegemonic.

Some stupid pedants may fantasize about 'mutating forms' and 'the desire for transcendence' but they have no role in politics. Nobody understand what they are getting at- because, the truth is, they are shitting higher than their arsehole, not saying anything meaningful at all.

Secularism as an institutional program and secularity as a cognitive, linguistic, and normative condition (or proposition), Ambedkar insists, is not an antithesis but rather constitutive of the theologico-political foundation of modern democratic culture anchored in the nation-state (and its sacrosanct rules of counting and measure).

When did he insist on this? He knew that this had not been the case in America. First there were 'Pilgrim Fathers' and only much later do you get guys like Franklin and Jefferson. The 'theologico-political' foundations of American democracy were laid when witches still got burned in Salem.

In India, Ambedkar knew very well that Gandhian religiosity and Khilafat religiosity had laid the basis for mass politics.  He himself led a mass conversion to Buddhism before his death.

Why is Kumar pretending that Ambedkar was a cretin who didn't know American history- though he had a PhD from Columbia- or British history- though he had a PhD from the LSE and had qualified as a barrister- or even contemporary Indian political history to which he was a witness as well as a forceful participant?

The answer is that he wants to father his own worthless nonsense on a great intellectual. Whitey may be fooled, but what sort of Whitey? The answer is it is only those 'flak catchers' (to use Tom Wolfe's phrase) employed to oversee 'intellectual affirmative action' in shite University Departments.

Consider the following. It might possibly apply to Aurobindo, but it can't at all to Amdbekar.

And at its empty center is not the truthful equality of faiths but an unraveling project to manage the insurrectionary force of the outnumbered minority, held in its place by a peculiarly modern pact between constitutional restraint in the political realm and fanatical populism in the social.

Aurobindo came from a minority- that is why Bengal was partitioned. His younger brother and other Jugantar associates certainly represented 'the insurrectionary force of the outnumbered' bhadralok minority. By contrast non-landowning Dalits neither posed any credible threat nor were at risk of ethnic cleansing or, indeed, any significant reduction in status. As a case in point, West Pakistan banned the exit of Hindu 'bhangis' at the height of the population exchange.

Sri Aurobindo was certainly capable of writing vacuous shite. He had withdrawn from politics and, when not engaged in mystagogy, sometimes vented his frustrations in a cynical vein. Still, not even he would have considered 'constitutional restraint' to be capable of sustaining a pact with 'fanatical populism'. Why? Aurobindo was educated in Britain where there is no written Constitution and, prior to 2009, no Supreme Court capable of subjecting Parliamentary prerogative to judicial review. Nobody alive during the Thirties, even in the US, would have thought 'constitutional restraint' was worth a tinker's fart in the face of 'fanatical populism' in the social realm.

Kumar lives in America and comes from a country where, over the last thirty years, the Supreme Court has become activist. But he is projecting a very modern sense of 'constitutional restraint' onto a historical figure who did not and could not share it. 

“To diehards who have developed a kind of fanaticism against minority protection, I would like to say… Minorities are an explosive force which, if it erupts, can blow up the whole fabric of the state,” Ambedkar warns in November 1948 as he presents the draft constitution to India’s Constituent Assembly. “The history of Europe bears ample and appalling testimony to this fact.”

Ambedkar knew he was lying, but he had to make the threat anyway. That's what happens in politics. The weaker you are, the stronger your language has to be. By November of '48, it was obvious that minorities- even the martial Sikhs- got slaughtered. At that time, Ambedkar's friend- J.N Mandal- was still a minister in Karachi. But Namasudras would soon be ethnically cleansed just like High Caste Hindus in East Pakistan. All this was common knowledge. Ambedkar was talking a good fight but the fact is that the next decade saw a turning of the screws on Dalits.  Muslims, of course, lost much more, but Dalits scarcely saw any gains.

Kumar now repeats the Gandhi-Nehru line-

Yet, there is something exemplary about the grammar and structure of Indian secularity, difficult as it has been to separate it from both the minoritarian struggle for equality, on the one hand, and the majoritarian rhetoric of civilizational antiquity, on the other. This suturing of secularity with civilization (and, by implication, civilization with citizenship), a gesture that characterizes Indian intellectual traditions of all hues, marks the insurmountable limit on what, minutes earlier in the same speech in the Constituent Assembly, Ambedkar calls “constitutional morality.”

Ambedkar's contribution to the constitution, which he dismissed as hack-work, could be said to have had two different aspects
1) A rejection of the British tradition of Parliamentary supremacy, also expressed by autochthony on the Irish pattern, which Indians could feel good about as it was a 'cutting of the apron strings' with a vengeance.
2) A pragmatic strengthening of the Center and the laying of the basis for due process activism.

Admittedly, Constitutions don't matter very much. The Bench can't push its luck too far because the Polity has a high tolerance for large scale extra judicial killing. Still, Jurists are welcome to gas on about this sort of stuff because lawyers earn good money and pay taxes. Thus Law Professors- though as stupid as History or Poli Sci Professors- don't destroy the earning power of their students.

What is abominable about Kumar's shite is that he keeps saying there are 'sovereign limits' to things which everybody knows have no limits that we can conceive of. The technical reason for this has to do with co-evolved complexity. Essentially, either there are 'run-away' processes which grow faster in ways whose limits are not constructible, or else that 'form of life' is not on a critical path- i.e. it does not matter.

But there is no reason to get theoretical. It is easy to show that Kumar is talking nonsense-

In fact, the anchoring of citizenship in a civilizational construction marks the sovereign limit on the thought of freedom itself.

This is bullshit. The thought of freedom isn't anchored in a 'civilizational construction'. Economic, Aesthetic, Intellectual and even Legal conceptions of Freedom may have a mimetic component, but they are not civilizational at all. In any case, back in 1994, Vagina Dentata Choothopadhyaya apodictically proved that the thought of freedom is cankered by a designational Destruktion of the mise en abyme of its own alienated freedom of thought. In other words, the acme of nonsense was achieved decades ago. Why even try to compete in that field at this late hour?

Where in Europe, secularism is seen to constitute an inaugural moment in the history of early modern statecraft,

I live in Europe. Secularism is not seen in any such light. Why? It's coz we got the Tudors on Netflix. We know that early modern statecraft is what drove the Huguenots out of France and the English Jesuits into priest-holes and the terrible devastation of the Thirty Year War. It was only towards the end of the eighteenth century that anything corresponding to the word 'Secularism' (which is mid nineteenth century) was discernible in the West.

a point of descent of divine will into human capacity and its constituent power

Sheer nonsense! Christendom considers that 'the descent of Divine Will into Human capacity' occurred at the Annunciation. God alone knows what this stupid fellow is babbling about.

(before statecraft and Christian humanism eventually become inseparable from republican ideals of liberty, equality, and perpetual peace),

Which is why Britain and Canada and Australia are all Republics just like Belgium and Sweden and Spain and so forth. What religion does this cretin think the English practice? Voodoo? No! This is an Anglican country.

in India, something else happens. Here, secularism lays the groundwork for a metaphysics of moral ascent and transcendence – a flight from freedom – itself.

Nonsense! Secularism has no such power. It signifies something negative- a constraint on public policy; though, no doubt, some might say it arises organically out of something peculiar to Indic culture and spirituality.

The repercussions of this secularization of transcendence – imbuing secularism with a civilizational value practiced by the majority of the land – have been profound.

No. The claim is that the thing is an epiphenomenon arising out of an innate, organicist, tropism of a quintessentially Indian kind.

Secularism in India, it is thus claimed for instance, cannot be dated.

In which case it can have no repercussions whatsoever at this late hour. The thing is hardwired. It defines all existing conatus. T

Like the structure of religiosity along whose walls it has grown for millennia (but which it has never overthrown), a certain ethos of secularity – beyond innumerable semantic variations and dynastic vicissitudes – has always been present in India’s ancient pastures and hamlets, among ordinary people and communities, in shared interest and mutual trust of everyday life.

It would be truer to say that a word for which the English language only felt a need in 1850, had no place whatsoever in India's 'pastures and hamlets'. Human Fraternity was a shared Value. But it had a religious, not secular, expression. Justice was a shared Value. But, again, it was dispensed by 'God's annointed'. Even the five members of the Village Council were called 'Panch Parmeshwar'. Come to think of it, this is in the Bible. When Jesus says 'ye are as Gods' he means that members of a Jury are held to discharge a Divine function.

Ambedkar remains thoroughly suspicious of this fiction of classical secularity – not because he is unaware of its immense moral value but precisely because he is aware that this language of secularity itself acquires, across the ideological and rhetorical divisions of anticolonial politics, the moralistic tone of a theological secularism.

Rubbish! Ambedkar knew that Village Councils are deeply Casteist. It is a simply a matter of economics. Give the poor fellow a bad name so as to prevent anyone else bidding up his wages.

Ambedkar knew very well that burbling on about the equality of all Religions was no help at all for Dalits. Indeed, it was harmful. One could not say 'due to my zeal for our common religion, you should treat me better than you would an infidel' because the other would reply 'all religions are agreed that just as there is only one God to be reverently approached so there is only one Social Class which must be treated as 'untouchable'.  The severity of purely ritual exclusions may vary, but social and economic exclusion was an ecumenical matter. Each Religion would acclaim Saints who embraced Dalits- just as they would acclaim Saints who lived with tigers and wolves- and sometimes people would signal their 'secularism' by venerating such Saints despite the fact that they were of  a different creed. However, tigers still were hunted and Dalits still were shunned.

For what emerges from this moral theory of interest rooted in soil and antiquity, habit and trust – its timeless vitality traced here in a Mauryan edict and there in a Mughal farman, its mutable presence invoked here by the conservative right and there by the liberal nationalist (if in different accents) – is not an ethics of faith and neighborliness but rather an abstract equality of religions (sarva dharma sambhava) tethered to the rhetoric of civilizational antiquity or, within certain limits, syncretic medievality – that must, by its nature, transcend the democratic principle – the principle of immanence – in whose name it claims to speak.

This is silly. Ambedkar knew very well that the same problem arose in Muslim majority and Christian dominated areas. Indeed, he was aware that the 'Doms' of India were the despised Gypsies of Europe whom Hitler had sought to exterminate. Thus, even in countries where there was no concept of 'sarva dharma sama bhava', and where Islam or Catholicism or Anglicanism was supreme, still there was Untouchability. Of course, untouchability also existed in Buddhist countries like Japan- but Ambedkar kept quiet about this.

A notion of 'abstract equality of religions' may be a feature of Deist or Jeffersonian thinking. It does not, by its nature, transcend anything. It just puts a wall between Church and State and then ceases to play any role whatsoever. The democratic principle is not a principle of immanence. It is nihilistic. It says that the masses must decline in virtue and every type of potential if they are denied the ability to Govern themselves. Plebiscitary Democracy of the Napoleon III type was no substitute for bottom up, due process, Democracy. But this had no necessary theological dimension.

Perhaps Kumar is speaking narrowly of some dude in India who claimed to speak in the name of the democratic principle. But who was that dude? No Indian of any significance has ever uttered any such nonsense. The thing is a very recent academic availability cascade. One might as well say 'the Indian Politics features the articulation of a doctrine of Democratic immanence through the practice of twerking.' I'm not saying the Mahatma did not twerk with Tagore- of course, they did as can be easily seen from the many rap videos they released on YouTube- but Gandhi and Tagore were articulating a doctrine of post-polyarchic Pluritropism when they stuck their bums out and wiggled them in a suggestive manner.

Beneath the many competing pluralisms and agonistic languages of secularity in India,

Which bore everybody to tears and have no effect whatsoever

thus, is a paradoxical interest rooted at once in identity and transcendence, an unsaid claim of being sovereign by virtue of having always been here. It is an ontotheology of sovereignty that exists as an exceptional paradox, at once drawing from and lending the classical atheology of Hindu nondualism (advaita) its most powerful juridical dimension.

I'm a Smartha follower of Adi Sankara. I can tell that this is not bullshit simply. It is a bunch of stupid lies. Sovereignty, Transcendence, Immanence and other such meaningless words are classed as 'Maya'- Delusion- by Advaita. Indeed, this is the only sensible view, since we can all see with our own eyes that they have no instrumental value at all. Those who shit higher than their arsehole can always find some other bunch of nonsense words to ease their evacuations.

An immemorial law (sanatan dharma) of being and presence – which is to say, the truth claim of having been always on this ground and present here sovereignly – finds its purest, most paradoxical potentiality in the equally timeless law of nonbeing and absence.

Rubbish! Either the Cosmos goes through cycles and dharma changes in each aeon or the whole thing is just Maya and irrelevant for the soteriological project of Moksha.
There is no 'timeless law of nonbeing and absence'. Advaita denies Buddhist Shunyata. There is only a plenum on the one hand and delusion on the other. Paradoxes can't exist because 'Sat-Cit-ananda'- the union of consciousness and Being is in the taste of undifferentiated Bliss.

Here appears the apophatic, nondualist doctrine of neti neti – not this, not that – in its purest linguistic (and yet unbridled legislative) form, as Ambedkar recalls in The Buddha and His Dhamma.

This is nonsense. Ambedkar was simply saying 'Brahman is a figment of the imagination. Nobody really gets united with it. Hinduism is a fraud.' This is a perfectly reasonable proposition- though, of course, Buddhism too is a fraud because shunyata and karma and Boddhisattvas are all equally imaginary. It is a matter of common experience that people who claim to have acquired nirvikalpa-samadhi are stupider than average and more likely to be outed by Me-Too.

What Ambedkar wrote is as clear as daylight-

 12. The question was: Is Brahmana a reality ? The acceptance of the Upanishadic thesis depended upon the answer to this question. 13. The Buddha could find no proof in support of the thesis that Brahmana was a reality. He, therefore, rejected the thesis of the Upanishads. 14. It is not that questions on this issue were not put to the authors of the Upanishads. They were : 15. Such questions were put to no less a person than Yajnavalkya, a great seer who plays so important a part in the Brahadarnyka Upanishad. 16. He was asked: "What is Brahmana? What is Atmana ? " All that Yajnavalkya could say : " Neti ! Neti ! I know not ! I know not ! " 17. "How can anything be a reality about which no one knows anything," asked the Buddha. He had, therefore, no difficulty in rejecting the Upanishadic thesis as being based on pure imagination.

No doubt, the Hindu would say Ambedkar was mistranslating 'Neti'. It means 'Not this'. But we can easily reconcile Buddha and Sankara by accepting that Holy Men who claim to have achieved some high Spiritual State are either deluded or seek to delude others so as to enjoy a parasitic or sexually predatory life style. Don't give them money and ignore their ignorant chatter.

No fucking sovereignty accrues from absurd, self-aggrandizing, lies. On the other hand, I really was bitten by a radioactive leprechaun during the full moon and hence am the true sovereign of Iyerland- as Ireland should properly be called.

Now this sovereignty that accrues from the claim of being here by not being, this power that legitimizes itself by not needing to be at all – this sovereign void, in other words, in which the very duality between being and nonbeing, presence and absence, sense and nonsense, care and abandonment, is overcome to yield an existence even “more than real,” as David Shulman probingly puts it – can be thought neither without the pleasure of speech, nor outside the logic of grammar, nor, above all, beyond the structure of language.4 Nothing escapes the presence of sound (sabd), whose power – like the existence of the listener – resides only in awareness of itself. The nondualism of sound (sabdadvaita) makes no rigid distinction between actuality and imagination, utterance and desistance. This is why in this linguistic and juridical tradition, power at its most intense, most unavoidable, and the highest, comes not necessarily from being itself – that is, from being power – but also from not-being-power; not only from speech but also from silence; not only from saying but also from not saying anything at all.

Ambedkar never bothered with this sort of shite. Not even Aurobindo did. The thing is too foolish. Only being bitten by a radioactive leprechaun during a full moon can invest sovereignty in a person or class of people. I told David Shulman this in Tamil. He backed out of the room hastily. The stupid fellow did not understand I was using a pre-Sangam dialect. He thought I was saying 'Oi, Shulman mate, lend us a tenner wudja?' in a heavy Madrasi accent. These so called Western philologists are completely useless. Everyone knows that Tamil is the root of the English language and the apple can't fall from the tree. Anyway, I have superpowers because I was bit by a radioactive leprechaun.

The casualty here, Ambedkar argues, is political responsibility – or stronger still, “constitutional morality” – which is disseminated so ethereally, in such rigorous gradation of office and duty that any semblance of concert and obligation evaporates into emptiness.

Where does Ambedkar argue anything so silly? Political responsibility is not disseminated ethereally. The Constitution specifies what offices of political responsibility can exist and how those offices can be filled. The actions of such officers are subject to the Rule of Law- itself subject to 'Constitutional Morality'.

Whatever remains of liberty is in manipulative hands and demagogic tongues perverted into license.

Ambedkar was a professional politician holding high office. He was also a great orator. However, his 'manipulative hands' and 'demagogic tongue' did not greatly avail in securing or perverting any type of license. That's why he ended as a religious, not mainstream political, figure.

A transcendent figure – Ambedkar’s favorite is Manu, already established by the third century as the final voice on all matters legal and celebrated author of the classical juridical treatise Manusmriti – thus gives the law of peace in intricate everyday detail, its punitive reason (dandaviveka) finding its legitimacy in violent breach and negation of the everyday trust of the very people in whose name it speaks, its moral law of obedience and social order barely distinguishable from the liturgical “lawlessness” and “police power” of the people’s pastoral habit.5 

This is misleading. Kings governed on the basis of custom and expediency. No other option was available.

It is not surprising that Ambedkar’s critique of the ideological foundations of the modern nation-state, mounted with such force in Thoughts on Pakistan, derives so much of its polemical charge from his relentless focus on the pastoral force field – nomadic hordes, itinerant invaders, shifting frontiers, agrestic antisociality, tribal honor codes, punitive, life-extracting customs – that gives form to social relations and religious conflict in India.

What were Ambedkar's 'Thoughts on Pakistan'? He said Muslims, but not Hindus, should be allowed to vote for Partition. He believed this would help his own people. This was not 'ideological critique'. It was partisan politics of a foolish sort. The fact is, Ambedkar was wrong but since he was considered a lightweight this did not greatly matter. In Hindu majority areas, few Dalit leaders with much popular support had been foolish enough to back the Muslim League. It turned out, predictably enough, that it was even more foolish to back the Muslim League in Muslim majority areas. Mandal's Namasudras were ethically cleansed from East Pakistan and, later on, massacred at Marichjhapi by the Communists. Both Mandal and Ambedkar's career languished. Mandal is regarded as the greater fool because he caused Sylhet to go to Pakistan and actually served as a Law Minister in Pakistan. When he returned to India, he was doomed to obscurity. Ambedkar, however, converted to Buddhism at a time when there was talk of a 'natural alliance' between the Buddhist bhikku- supposedly an atheist who owns no property- and the Revolutionary Communist. Of course, this idea was as stupid as the notion that a Muslim-Dalit coalition won't result in Muslims destroying the Dalits. Still, it secured Ambedkar a legacy as a Gandhi type spiritual figure.

Ambedkar’s problem is not with the pastoral, let alone with the heroic universe of the military and the sacrificial structure of the religious as such. It is the manner in which the pastoral is pulled into the vortex of organized religion and nationalist statecraft that troubles him, their fiscal interest and fanatic street militias annihilating the possibility of a truthful “love of politics” forever.6

If Ambedkar was 'troubled' by 'the manner in which the pastoral is pulled into the vortex' of some shite or the other, he and his followers would  have bought a herd of goats or sheep or whatever and taken up transhumance. He wouldn't have dressed in a three piece suit and joined the Cabinet. Nor would he have founded a new sect of a highly organized Religion.

His followers would be foolish if they eschewed the possibility of forming 'fanatic street militias' in favor of some sentimental or metaphysical shite.

The argument for referendum made in Thoughts on Pakistan is of a piece with Ambedkar’s immense faith in the rational will of the people to resist ecclesiastical interest and political corruption. Yet such moments, when he defers to his commitment to – and faith in – the people, are never too far from his immense, lingering doubt about the integrity of their practical reason.

Ambedkar wanted a Muslim Only referendum to decide the issue. It was obvious that this was because he thought Dalits should not be considered Hindus. He still believed that Dalit plus Muslim could be passed off as a 'political majority' and thus override a 'Hindu' (but not Muslim) 'communal majority'. This was mere word-play. It is the strategy of asserting that Hindus should be wiped out where they are a minority but that they should be under the thumb of an artificial 'political majority' composed of enemies of Hinduism even where they are the majority. Needless to say, Ambedkar was bound to be disappointed. Hindus fucked over both Muslims and anti-Hindu Dalits- though they did not expel them in sizable numbers precisely because they could be economically exploited or, if they were too unproductive to permit exploitation, simply left to their own devices. Ambedkar's own solution was the time honored one- get the smarter members of his community to rise up by adopting Aryan Religion- (Buddhism, in his case)- and investing in education and waxing corrupt and nepotistic in the administration and in Politics. This was a good strategy for the 'creamy layer' but, of course, has left the 'maha-dalit' in the lurch. The BJP, treating these people as Hindu, will be able to consolidate itself further as the Indian Economy develops, Society becomes less segmentary, and caste based dynastic parties succumb to their own factionalism, corruption and criminality.

In the interim, Ambedkar has become a God of 'Syndicate Hindutva' and, in the last General Election, Prakash Ambedkar split the Dalit vote in Maharashtra causing the loss of a few seats to the Congress and NCP. Thus, an Ambedkar dynasty- if only regionally and on a purely casteist basis- lingers on in India. One or two descendants of the Mahatma have tried to compete for political power. They have been even less successful.

 People like Kumar and Skaria picture Ambedkar, a sensible Economist, as some sort of deeply confused Philosophy undergrad who is struggling to get his head around Deleuze & Guatarri while coping with the consequences of inadequate toilet training occasioned by the Neo-Liberal imposition of austerity on Liberal Arts Campuses. Thus we must picture this great man as puzzling over the cathexis of the onto-theological within the context of the mathexis of the post Kristevan Chora while discovering he has shat himself once again coz of inadequate remedial instruction in how to go potty.

What positive political program can this give rise to? The answer, of course, is that JNU students must prolong their strike until all JNU students, not just those from below the Poverty Line, are provided not just with free Toilets but proper training in their use. How can you expect anyone to learn how to use Toilet unless they have at least an M.Phil in Gramscian Grammatology? Furthermore, a stipend of at least 50,000 p.a is necessary to cover cost of buying textbooks and adult diapers.

Not before Ambedkar arrives on the scene of anticolonial politics in the 1920s, at any rate, is the exceptional paradox of India’s struggle for self-determination nailed down with such heretical passion: a paradox in which liturgy and lawlessness, measure and excess, religious aggression and theological denegation work in a calibrated rhythm

while the diapers of those who have to listen to this dreck quietly fill up with shit.

There was no paradox- exceptional or otherwise- in India's, or Egypt's, or Vietnam's struggle for independence. There was one difference. If the Indians were united in wanting the Brits out, they would have gone without a fight. But the Indians weren't united at all. Indeed any cohesion they enjoyed had been provided by the Brits. The INC was itself the creation of British officials like Hume, Wedderburn and Cotton. The trouble was even India's most anglophile Barristocrats had atavistic impulses. For Muslims, the Pan-Islamic doctrine was a superior anti-Imperialist ideology, till it was briefly eclipsed by Socialism, whereas what the Gandhians offered was Kumar or Skaria level vacuous verbal diarrhea. That's why young Hindus too turned to Socialism till the thing crashed as a Scientific Research Program in Economics and it turned into 'Identity Politics' and  'Post Modern' drivel.
Now, of course, everybody thinks Political Philosophy is a pile of shite. 'For forms of Government, let fools contest/ Whatever is best administered is best'

Kumar lives in a parallel world- like that of 'Dark Materials' on Netflix- where 'Transcendence' means Magic exists but Technology doesn't. Ambedkar is represented as a stupefied scholastic observing the rise of a blacker and more ubiquitous type of Occult force.

It is in his work that the sheer violence of self-determination, the deafening consensus around independence from the empire, now fortified even more fanatically by the grandeur of a civilizational telos and territorial aggression, is linked most directly to the specter of transcendence and its secular afterlife. The majority’s relentless desire for power beyond power, law beyond law, measure beyond measure, is nothing if not an arrogant ambition to occupy the place where God once was (and for a majority within this majority, still is). It is this power of transcendence that at once makes nationalist proclamations of democracy possible and compromises democracy from its tragic inside, revealing an abyss of moral indifference – the abyssal void of trust and faith – at its very center.

What a load of cobblers! People think regime change will make them better off- not turn them into Gods. They soon discover that they are worse off in a number of ways. Ideology gives way to a pragmatic consideration of bread and butter issues. The scope of politics narrows to who occupies which office and whose nephew gets the Government Contract.

How to Not Avoid Speaking
This much, one might argue, can be said of many places and traditions in the modern world. For the institution of popular sovereignty has always required a careful management of emptiness of power and deficit of trust, especially a people’s distrust of its own government and its withdrawal from the reality of the political realm.

Fuck off! Where in America or Britain or France or India do we seen any 'careful management of emptiness of power and deficit of trust'? Who is doing this management? Is it homeless people muttering to themselves? Or is it Kumar's own students- who will soon be homeless if they can't make it as barristas?

The question for Ambedkar is not whether secularism, even if anchored in one particular – albeit vindictive – theological worldview, has any value for the protection of minor religions and minorities.

If this was a question for Ambedkar, he lived long enough to see the answer. Pakistan did not protect minor religions or minorities. India was nicer but only because Hindus are nicer- or less cohesive. They were, as Ambedkar says a 'communal majority' but a 'political minority' because dominant castes distrusted the 'Brahman-Muslim-Dalit' coalition which delivered nothing but dynastic cretinism. However, Muslims get it in the neck if they attack and there is no guarantee that some nutters of theirs won't run amok the next time there is a Congress led Coalition Government. Dalit activism too faces a backlash problem. Even the JNU- it seems- is not a 'safe space'. As for the possibility of a mass hijrat to America in the footsteps of Kumar or Skaria- sadly, that was always a pipe dream. The US might take some STEM subject mavens. It needs no more Liberal Arts shitheads.

To this, looking west toward Judaism and Christianity and to their traditions of militant exile and antislavery abolitionist movements, he has no problem in answering in the affirmative.

But to look West is to look at regimes where technological advancement and commercial success are valorized. It is to look at a Society where a Barrister who suddenly decides he is a Mahatma or Boddhisattva is considered a lunatic. It is to see that a guy with a Doctorate in Fiscal Policy and another in Monetary Policy has to be doing Econometric Research and accumulating millions by playing the markets, not talking bollocks about Shunyata.

Looking East- to Japan and then Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore and so forth- would have the same effect.

The truth is Ambedkar had no option but to mythologize himself in the same way that Gandhi did. So, we now have a false but convenient credo- Gandhi delivered Independence through Spiritual means, Ambedkar delivered Dalit Liberation by Constitutional means, Vivek Iyer- who was bitten by a radioactive leprechaun- attained sovereignty over Iyerland and caused a Rasam flavored Guinness to be marketed world wide to increasing acclaim.

And although the French, Pakistani, Israeli, or American situation today might have disabused him of his faith in the ability of monotheistic traditions to transcend their colonial pasts, these societies, too, have simply proven his more fundamental point about – and his distrust of – ecclesiastical and organized religions at large.

How the fuck is the French situation comparable to the Pakistani? Ambedkar was a smart guy. He couldn't be 'disabused' of anything because he did not hold crazy views to start of with.

What does this cretin think is happening in France? It has a strong secular tradition. Macron- who married his divorced teacher- gets the majority of Catholic votes.

This universality of the relationship between religion and violence notwithstanding,

Where? In France? Is this cunt out of his mind? Muslims may kill for religion in France. Christians don't. However, the French may get very violent indeed if they perceive any clear and present danger to themselves within their own country. But this is true of every nation.

there is something exceptional about India.

No there isn't. Majorities ethnically cleanse minorities if they act up. The day may come when majorities in India are sufficiently cohesive to take the initiative. But that is purely a function of socio-economic development and prevailing incentives for violence.

For what gives the elliptical, secretive bond between belief and government, religion and counting, liturgy and debt – or, as Ambedkar writes repeatedly in his critique to the death penalty, the elliptical bond between caste and blood – its exemplarily violent form in the Indian subcontinent (the logic and structure to which in 1945 he gives the name “Indian Political”) is that – unlike the monotheistic traditions and the theories of political secularism to which they give rise in Europe, Middle East, North Africa, and elsewhere – the everyday bond here between religion and mastery is anchored not in the theological injunction of one God but instead in the asymmetrical, spectral twoness of the people itself.

But all Religions have a distinction between the 'pure' and the 'impure' who are dealt with harshly. Ambedkar had studied Sociology at Columbia. He wasn't stupid. He was concerned to show that Hinduism is evil because that increased his own power and, while India was still ruled by foreigners, might conceivably be advantageous to his community. Mandal certainly believed that the Muslims would be nice to the Namasudras. He was wrong and ran back to India- where however he could not revive his political career. Ambedkar too was left out in the wilderness while people like Jagjivan Ram thrived.

There is not one people in a community of imagined equals in India. Rather, there are two promiscuous majorities that, in their spectrality and nonexistence or notness, enable each other to transcend the principles and obligations of the very democracy that gives them birth.

What about the Parsis? They've done well. How about the Sikhs? They don't exactly fade into the background. As for the Tamils and the Assamese and the Nagas and so forth- does Kumar really think they are describable in terms of spectrality?

The fact is India is multi-ethnic. It has linguistic States which themselves may be divided on the basis of regional identity.

Assertions of the 'nonexistence of notness'  in a piece of prose is proof of the existence of pure nonsense.

And it is this residual transcendence or quasi-transcendence (whose structure can only be called theologico-political, if not altogether ethereal) that makes religion constitutively political in India (as opposed to making politics truthfully religious).9

This is sheer fantasy. Ambedkar had no truck with mystagogy. Even an Aurobindo would have recoiled from such grandiose Babuism.

Religion in India has an economic basis- either it has survival value or it perishes for lack of resources. The fact is, the country is very poor. God does not really give Godmen gold or land. Their devotees do.

The theologico-political is a category empty of all but bullshit.

To read Ambedkar is to understand the enormity of this residual transcendence and learn how to not avoid speaking of it, which is to also ask what, for Ambedkar, avoiding means.

Why read Ambedkar at all? Why not simply understand that if 'residual transcendence', or anything else for that matter, is very very big then one can win plaudits for speaking of it to smart people?  Why learn something useless- e.g. how to not avoid something, which one isn't avoiding in the first place?

Currently I am breathing air. I don't need to learn how not to avoid breathing air. And what is this shit about Ambedkar avoiding talking about some worthless shit which only Kumar and Skaria and utter shitheads of that description claim to have discovered? You can't avoid a thing which does not exist unless you are a fucking cretin. But Ambedkar was no such thing no matter how much Kumar and Skaria and other such worthless jhollawallahs pretend otherwise.

There is, firstly, that whose very structure is founded on avoidance.

No such structure can exist in any known school of Indic or Abrahamic Religion. Why? Either there is a hypokeimenon which is the foundation of every structure or nothing complex enough to have structure has any foundation whatsoever.  As for 'avoidance'- how can anything founded upon it be encountered? It is avoided in advance and so nothing can be said about it.

If there is theological unity and truth to Hinduism at all,

it is known to ordinary Hindus like me and bears no resemblance to the ravings of a worthless shithead

it comes from the doxa that there is none;

Fuck off. How? Type theory gives a workaround for Russel's paradox. Every school of Hinduism has a protocol bound juristic process which Acharyas can follow such that doxastic logic has Voevodesky type univalent foundations. Its mathematical representation may be inaccessible under present conditions- but that doesn't matter. We know it must exist.

that there are many gods and no sovereign lawgiving God;

Rubbish! Hinduism simply says that this sort of talk is analogical or instrumental. It is part of Maya or nescience. In Islam the word majazi would be used. Following H.G Frankfurt, we could call it 'bullshit'. Kumar is showing a reckless disregard for the truth so as to persuade us he knows what he is talking about. But he doesn't. He is as stupid and ignorant as shit.

that dharma is not religion in the Latin, European, and Christian (or monotheistic) sense.

This stupid cunt does not know that dharma was translated as eusebia- i.e. pietas- and thus there is Kripkean 'rigid designatior' such that everything in the European concept of 'Religion' has a one to one correspondence with doxastic elements of Hindu Religion.

Ambedkar was interested, for a political reason, in denigrating Hinduism. But he was not ignorant. It is foolish to ascribe beliefs it is convenient for a politician to have to some metaphysical confusion or lack of rationality. At least that is the case when speaking of smart people like Ambedkar.

In this ideological cacophony – “clatter of liberals,” says Ambedkar – about the intransitive notness of Hinduism as religion, in this liturgical unity without unity, God without God, Hindu nondualism or advaita apophatics finds its most punitively dogmatic form.

Fuck off! The most punitively dogmatic forms of Hinduism are Purva Mimamsic, not Vedantic.

It exists by avoiding its own truth, as if it were one unending experiment in truth.

Kumar may exist by avoiding his own truth- viz. that he has shit in his brains and has no business pretending to impart any intellectual skills- but Kumar is not one unending experiment in truth. He is an unending experiment in bullshitting.

There is an element of democracy in Hinduism – or rather an element that resembles in its logic and structure the plurality of a democratic kind – that gives its life-extracting violence less the texture of a sacrificial battlefield and more a touch of rustic, artisanal execution of debt.

At this time, the only Religion or Ideology of which this could be said with any degree of plausibility is Islam.  Every other day our TV screens are filled with images of Islam's 'life-extracting violence'. In some places- e.g. the battle for Mosul, it may be said to have the texture of a sacrificial battlefield. In other places it consists of hacking off heads with rustic or artisanal implements if a ransom or poll tax or other such assessed liability is not remitted. Where is this happening in Hinduism? Nowhere I can see.

“Why this circumlocution?” asks Ambedkar, as he proceeds to unpack the mystical speech and “mystical sacrifice of Purusha” in Riddles in Hinduism.10

Ambedkar says ' There is hardly any Hindu who does not regard the Vedas as the most sacred Book of his religion. And yet ask any Hindu what is the origin of the Vedas and it would be difficult to find one who can give a clear and a definite answer to the simple question. Of course, if the question was addressed to a Vedic Brahmin he would say that the Vedas are Sanatan. But this is no answer to the question. For first of all what does the word Sanatan mean?'

Ambedkar was recycling polemical attacks on Hinduism because he was trying to get Dalits to quit being Hindus in the belief that they could get a better deal by allying with Muslims.

The clear and definite answer to 'what is the origin of the Vedas' is 'Vedamata' as per the Atharva Veda. However to say 'apouresheya' is equally canonical. Still, 'sanatan'- eternal, uncreated- is acceptable. Christianity and Islam also consider their Scripture to be uncreated and eternal.

Ambedkar lived at a time of great stupidity. Naturally, being a politician, he too wrote stupid nonsense. Indeed, politically he was a complete failure. Currently, we like him because he knew Econ. Still,  seeing Skaria and Kumar have mangle his corpse, we have to admit he wrote a lot of shit.

Ambedkar is not unaware that this structure of apophasis – unity without unity, God without God, sacrifice without sacrifice – might take different rhetorical, performative, and confessional forms across diverse political formations and persuasions.

Fuck off. Apophasis is merely a rhetorical device. It has nothing to do with any type of reality- material or theological.
Suppose a politicians says-  'I'm not going to talk about claims that my opponent is fucking his own kiddies. I consider it wrong to dwell on the incestuous private life of an opponent whose sexual orientation is very different from mine.'- would any reasonable person consider that this politician has not in fact done what he said he would not do?

On the other hand, we expect lyrical love poetry and passionate expressions of mystical ecstasy to use oxymoronic language. But that is not what Kumar is talking about.

But he cannot ignore the truth

but he did ignore the truth, which is why he converted from Hinduism

either that this apophatics finds a powerfully shared and equally vital presence in the discourses of Hindu majoritarian, Gandhian, and nationalist constructions of classical Hinduism, all of which obliquely ratify this religion’s spectral life by insisting that it is not.

Kumar's spectral intelligence is ratified by our insistence that it does not exist. The fucker is as stupid as shit.

There is immense risk,

for whom? The reader? Should this worthless shite carry and Health and Safety warning?

indeed an element of perjury, in this denial of the phantasmatic power that Hinduism’s acclaimed nondual nonexistence wields over politics and statecraft.

What would happen if you were convicted on perjury on this account? Would you go to jail? No. Then where is the risk?

It is a risk inherent in all negative theologies, of course, which is perhaps what Ambedkar tries to counter in Philosophy of Hinduism when, in an attempt to save a certain structure of mystical atheism, a certain ethics of religious denegation, he deliberately places Hinduism among the “positive religions” instead.

Ambedkar took the risk of looking utterly ridiculous by converting to an Aryan  Religion which had spread untouchability all the way to Japan. Still, it was the Fifties. Jack Kerouac published the Dharma Bums a couple of years afterwards. It was not then obvious that Buddhism was about ethnic cleansing and genocide. Ayothee Dasan, whose 'Dalits were Buddhists' thesis Ambedkar adopted, would have received short shrift in Sri Lanka once killing Tamils became the fashion.

For it is in this notness – which exists in its own denial – that the ethereal, quasi-transcendental unity between the aggressive fanatics and secular critics of liturgical Hinduism is secretively forged, a unity that blurs with terrifying indifference the lines between India’s “political majority” and its “communal majority.”

The BJP has erased this line. Did it do so by wittering on about 'notness'? No. It attacked casteism and hereditary privilege- more particularly that of the dynastic parties. It succeeded because people believe that the RSS really does not care about caste distinctions and that it does useful work of a socially constructive and patriotic nature.

By contrast, the Left lost the plot. When I was young, a Leftist Professor was likely to be better than a Rightist. In my subject, this meant he knew more Maths. In the 'Liberal Arts', the Leftist was better read and had kept up with the latest developments. The EPW was worth reading from cover to cover. Then, the Leftists played the Race card to get sinecures in the Western Academy. They were now pretending to be 'native informants' who, for some mysterious reason, could only vomit up ill digested Continental philosophy. I'm not saying the Right was any better. But the Right has always viewed the Professor as either a pederast or a priest manque or, more typically, both.

Consider the following sentence-

Nothing escapes the secret, which, by its very name, does not exist except in crypts of unspoken privilege and inheritance.

It isn't really English, is it? The thing has the flavor of translated French. But is it good English translating good French? No. It is Babu English tarting itself up as Sartre at his speed-freaking worst.

Anybody can keep a secret. It is not the monopoly of 'unspoken privilege' or the sort of people who have ancestral crypts. Confidences are betrayed. What is concealed, like a pregnancy, soon burgeons in an unmistakable manner. The grave gives up its secrets to the forensic pathologist. Even that which is trivial or obscene can become the basis of a diagnosis. In the end,  everything escapes the condition of being secret. Truth will out and the truth is the secret never mattered very much. If it had been worth guessing at, it had been guessed by all who wished to do so.

This ability to insinuate itself into the normative language of secularity makes Hinduism a modern religion par excellence, whose only eradication, Ambedkar proposes in a remarkable passage in Annihilation of Caste, lies in making its liturgical order the responsibility of – and opening its priesthood to – the state, which might then appoint the priests through a system of public exams. Such radical transparency alone can possibly regulate Hinduism’s everyday violence – which is otherwise encrypted into laws of primogeniture and succession, purity and reproduction – by rendering its liturgical economy visible and making religious tolerance the formal business of the government, while democratizing the access of the general public to priestly authority at large.11 Nothing irrigates caste more perennially, more unfailingly, more invisibly, after all, than the logic of blood and birth that keeps guard over laws of priesthood and pollution, prayer and property, worship and water.

This is sheer fantasy. The speech Ambedkar was supposed to deliver was to a mainly Arya Samaji audience. They had plenty of 'shuddhi' ceremonies and would perform 'grhasutra' rituals and other havans on their own. The Dharma Vigyan Dept of Benares Hindu Univeristy was awarding Examination based Credentials to 'Shastris' and 'Acharyas' and so forth. The Maharaja of Kohlapur, who had helped Ambedkar, had appointed a non Brahmin Royal Purohit. All this was common knowledge.

Ambedkar was not such a fool as to suppose that any of this would address the problems of the poor and discriminated against. He was an excellent economist, a brilliant lawyer, and had taken a leading role in the public life of his country.

Since caste- to Ambedkar's certain knowledge- was equally present in Islam and Christianity, it would be foolish to take his 'Annihilation of Caste' as other than a useful summary of purely political developments in which Ambedkar was deeply concerned, with the addition of some rhetorical flourishes and the sort of provocative statement which only a great barrister can pull off such that his cause gains maximum exposure without hopelessly alienating the other side.

The truth of the matter is that the Hindu Reformers needed a Dalit ally who was prepared to say he was outside the fold. Ambedkar had the courage and genius for plain speaking which permitted a Social problem with a Religious angle to be tackled in a purely Social, not Theological, manner. The reverse approach led nowhere. Gandhi had been defeated by the Priests at Vaikom.

To approach Ambedkar as a thinker of the Indian majority – a majority at once measurable and mysterious, permanent and fluid, untrustworthy and impregnable – is to approach him as a thinker of this sovereign secret that lies at the heart of democracy.12

No. It is to shit higher than one's arsehole for no good purpose. There is no 'sovereign secret' known to stupid Professors, but kept from the hoi polloi, at the heart of anything- least of all, democracy.

It is to approach him as a thinker of the apophatic structure of emptiness as such.

It is to suggest he was a nincompoop.

Never does he cease to interrogate the paradoxical relationship between majority and measure, transcendence and calculation, scrupulously probing in such essays as “From Millions to Fractions” the logic of ennumeration that encodes majoritarian tyranny at once by lending it the legitimacy of counting and letting it flagrantly exist beyond its own numbers.

Sheer nonsense! 'Millions to Fractions' was about getting a higher percentage counted as Dalit so Ambedkar's own bargaining power might increase. The only 'tyranny' that existed was that of the King Emperor and various Princes and Zamindars. Ambedkar, like Mandal, could do nothing for Dalits in Muslim majority areas. However, by being useful to the Hindu Reformists, he retains a place in the BJP pantheon. They alone can annihilate caste. The Socialists reinforced it. They Dynasties thrive on it. Only a meritocratic, cadre based, voluntarist, Party can transform a Thymotic, Segmentary. Society into one bound together by a Social Contract and the bonds of Law.

In fact, he discerns the logic of this empty center of the Indian political quite early.

What he discerned was a mirage- viz. a Dalit /Muslim alliance which by some sleight of hand was supposed turn the Hindu 'communal majority' into a 'political minority'. The 'center of the Indian political' was indeed empty for all but token Dalits because dominant castes- or Muslims where they were the majority- simply used the Dalits and then discarded them. The Communists were worse. They considered the Dalit to be cannon fodder and nothing more. It was only in the BJP that a Hindu could rise irrespective of caste, because it was concerned with uplifting all Hindus- not the creamy layer which alone benefits from Ambedkarite politics. Everybody else inherits the fate of a Rohit Vemula. They can never be Dalit enough unless their name is actually Ambedkar or Khobargarde and their Daddy or Grandaddy had made great sacrifices- of integrity- in the struggle for advancement in the corrupter departments of the Government or had taken a lot of money to split the vote in a key constituency.

The question is whether this class will itself supply the demand for the sort of shite Skarias and Kumars produce? I doubt it. Perhaps the wool can be pulled over the eye of Whitey.

Which is also why he persistently refuses the normative notion that caste cruelty – in all its mutability and mobility, its tactility and ethereality – might ever be grasped and redressed through mere adherence to the laws of procedural and “mathematical exactitude.”13 Instead, against the ethereal mutability and axiomatic indifference that constitute caste cruelty – caste as cruelty – one must think about, he insists, another emptiness, another faith, another freedom itself.

Sadly, most of the 'caste cruelty' which existed then and which still exists today is inflicted by OBCs and Dalits on lower caste Dalits. Ambedkar could not persuade the millionaire Jatav's of Kanpur to 'inter-dine' with their workers. There is a similar divide between Buddhist Mahars and  the vast mass of that grouping.

Ambedkar's wisdom was to see that rapid economic development based on urbanization and technological industrialization on the basis of private enterprise would eliminate the basis of his own claim to power. Spreading hate is the only true justification for talking bollocks. An eye for eye policy will only succeed in scotomizing the male gaze of the subaltern on Tuesday morning- because that is the only time I can get off work and anyway the Cable guy is coming.

Ambedkar’s most passionate critique of the analytical symmetry between religious conservatism and anticolonial struggle for self-determination, one that lends this axiomatics of indifference its spectral form, appears in Annihilation of Caste.

I've read it many times. There is no 'passionate critique' of anything save all the other hypocrites who were talking bollocks on the subject at that time. But the passion displayed is of an irascible kind. Ambedkar, thank God, wasn't a Religious nutter. He wasn't much of an anti-Imperialist either for the excellent reason that Mahars had initially done better under the British and it was only the rise of Congress which had led to their progressive exclusion from the Army and other such avenues of advancement.

But his own vision of an antifoundational, antiviolent, and anarchic faith grounded in friendship and dissidence, even majesty, appears not before his final essays, especially “Buddha or Karl Marx,” which is also the title of a projected book-length study he never finishes.

Sadly, Ambedkar was in poor health by this time. Still, he was an astute politician. Like other Buddhists he was pretending his creed had no God and thus was compatible with Communism. However, the experience of Mongolia- and Tibet and Vietnam and Cambodia later on, showed Communism was not compatible with Buddhism at all. Its claim to be atheistic did it no good whatsoever.

Ambedkar was also placating the Reds by saying that he hoped for a Communist Revolution. The man knew what happened in Russia and China. Still, there was little chance of any such thing happening in India because the army was recruited from peasant proprietor families and enjoyed killing landless scum. 

What is bizarre is that Kumar, who must know the Communist record of violence, to apply the term 'antifoundational, antiviolent and anarchic' to the following- which is the conclusion to the essay he refers to-

It has been claimed that the Communist Dictatorship in Russia has wonderful achievements to its credit. There can be no denial of it. That is why I say that a Russian Dictatorship would be good for all backward countries. But this is no argument for permanent Dictatorship.

Why? The Poliburo- like that of the CPM in Bengal- would be Upper Caste.

Humanity does not only want economic values, it also wants spiritual values to be retained. Permanent Dictatorship has paid no attention to spiritual values and does not seem to intend to. Carlyle called Political Economy a Pig Philosophy. Carlyle was of course wrong. For man needs material comforts" But the Communist Philosophy seems to be equally wrong for the aim of their philosophy seems to be fatten pigs as though men are no better than pigs. Man must grow materially as well as spiritually. Society has been aiming to lay a new foundation was summarised by the French Revolution in three words, Fraternity, Liberty and Equality. The French Revolution was welcomed because of this slogan. It failed to produce equality. We welcome the Russian Revolution because it aims to produce equality. But it cannot be too much emphasised that in producing equality society cannot afford to sacrifice fraternity or liberty. Equality will be of no value without fraternity or liberty. It seems that the three can coexist only if one follows the way of the Buddha. Communism can give one but not all.

So, in the end, Ambedkar was writing the sort of worthless gibberish which had been Gandhi's trademark. Carlyle, for sooth! Long years in Indian politics had worn away whatever advantages Ambedkar's two PhDs had given him. In the end he deserves no better fate than being a Boddhisattva which, precisely because it is one up on a mere Mahatma, is a yet greater mark of infamy.

As in so many of his later speeches and writings, the theme of death penalty appears in this essay too, increasingly difficult as Ambedkar finds it in his later years to separate the question of the minority’s purported betrayals and infidelities from democracy’s fundamentally sacrificial structure and the majority’s punitive demand that the minority pay back; a logic of debt and demand that is formulated at the same time, he argues, in the tongue of civilizational transcendence and liturgical restitution, moral fairness even.

A man stole because he was poor. The King executed him thinking that if all the poor steal then there can be no prosperity. However, thieves then started chopping off the heads of their victims because urm...Buddhists are really stupid and will believe anything. Then, at some later point, somebody discovers lying which leads to Adultery which in turn leads to not washing behind your ears. Thus we see that killing people causes theft which causes lying which causes adultery which causes not washing behind your ears which causes Buddhism because if you think this shite makes sense let me explain to you that you need to give me a lot of money- coz I'm the tulku of the Dalai Lama see?- so you get reborn as a monk so you too can work the same con.

This is why in nationalist doxa and majoritarian commonsense alike, Buddhism has always represented a chapter of mere civilizational error, to be at once punished and appropriated into the concentric logic of classical belief and juridical order. At best a heterodox remnant of Hinduism whose damage must be repaired by a combination of violence, forgiveness, forgetfulness, and appropriation, Buddhism is also at its worst – in its obverse and yet immiscible resemblance to Islam – a memory of political betrayal beyond restitution. Not surprisingly, within the theological construction of Indian secularity, it has never been seen for what it is: a revolutionary antithesis mounted against the majoritarian economy of debt and mastery, payback and retribution.

Coz giving money to monks so as to get reborn as a parasite of that ilk isn't about a fraudulent type of debt and a swindling type of mastery.

Does The Buddha and His Dhamma continue to remain on the margins of Indian philosophy because it lends political, moral, and performative urgency to that classical and apophatic antithesis, that inappropriable ethics of nonindifference at whose center is not the abyss of blinding theological power but the void of the minor’s “conversion” to unavoidable force (or, as a Madhyamika might say, unavoidable nonforce)?14

Indian philosophy is shite but it is produced by shitheads who are paid for the job. Ambedkar's sad little final squib simply doesn't qualify. The title is good and it had a sort of kairotic 'kshanna sampatti', but Philosophy it aint- thank goodness. Who now reads Radhakrishnan?