Bilgrami on Kashmir & the BJP

Akeel Bilgrami has been interviewed in the Caravan Magazine. What does he have to say about Kashmir?

Suhail Bhat: Does the Bharatiya Janata Party’s abrogation of Jammu and Kashmir’s special status by reading down Article 370 endanger the democratic foundations of India?
Akeel Bilgrami: It is an entirely illegal and unconstitutional step, as many jurist scholars have pointed out, not least [the lawyer and political commentator Abdul] Gafoor Noorani.

If Bilgrami is right, why has the Supreme Court- which alone has the right to say what is or isn't constitutional- not taken action? It appears that everything was legal and above board. Noorani is very very old. A 2016 judgment of the Bench has established that his view is wrong. J&K never had even the slightest vestige of autonomy.

The elementary and well-known facts about the abrogation’s unconstitutionalism, are roughly as follows: These articles formulated the provisions of autonomy for Jammu and Kashmir. Though there was some mention of the temporary nature of these provisions in the understanding of those who crafted the Indian constitution in 1949–50, it was also explicit that they could only be overturned with the endorsement of the regional constituent assembly.

But that assembly- in which all National Conference candidates & nominees were elected unopposed because other parties were not allowed to stand- disappeared long ago after voting for unconditional accession to India. All that was required for the extension of any or every provision of the Indian constitution to J&K was the consent of the Legislative Assembly, or- if that was in abeyance- the Governor of the State.

Now, of course, it is in the nature of constituent assemblies that they are dissolved by their own will once their work is done. And when in December 1956 and early 1957, the Kashmir constituent assembly was dissolved, it was on an understanding on the part of the Jammu and Kashmir politicians that the constitution adopted had been made into a stable and abiding arrangement between the centre and the state, with these features of autonomy in place.

Sadly, their 'understanding' was wholly irrelevant. All Princely States acceded on the basis that Rulers would get Privy Purses and Diplomatic privileges and so forth. But the Supreme Court has again and again taken the view that once sovereignty had been lost, no former Princely State had an immunity to any decision made by the Center.

There was a general and an explicitly stated understanding that this stable and abiding arrangement could in the future only be reconsidered and amended by the regional legislators.

No there wasn't. The fact is, the Center had toppled Sheikh Abdullah and thrown him in Jail in 1953. The 'Constituent Assembly' was the result of rigged elections. Its members were pliant tools of the Center. In 1954, those present voted unanimously for unconditional accession to India. In 1957, it dissolved itself at the bidding of Syed Mir Qasim of the Congress Party. Then elections were held for a Legislative Assembly. From the legal point of view, the only importance of the Assembly is that it underlined India's right to the whole of the Princely State of J&K.

And it was this understanding that was preempted by the BJP government’s sleight of hand of first declaring President’s rule in Kashmir, and making the matter of reconsideration (and abrogation) turn on the legislators at the centre, where the BJP has a sufficient majority. [The centre imposed president’s rule in the erstwhile state in December 2018, following six months of governor’s rule.] And, in the short term, if not the long, control of the region via President’s rule is crucial too, so that the normalisation of this cancellation of autonomy proceeds apace without the noise of democracy.

This game has been played continually since 1953. The BJP has simply removed an irritant and the Supreme Court will uphold what they have done. A nuisance has been dealt with. Nothing substantive has changed.

SB: Why is the ruling government feeling this need to take aggressive actions such as the effective revocation of Article 370?
AB: That is a particularly good question because the fact is that autonomy, in most respects, was in any case a merely formal provision once the military occupation got consolidated. De facto, there was not much autonomy. So the question arises, what was the point now behind removing it formally, removing its de jure status?

The point was to give Delhi control over the police in J&K so that it would be free of political interference by pro-Pakistani politicians. What the BJP are doing is reducing spending on Kashmir Valley by disintermediating a wholly useless and discredited bunch of dynastic politicians.

I don’t think we can understand the long-term point of this move in Kashmir, without relating it with other aspects of BJP government policy, such as the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill and the infamous National Register of Citizens. The former is intended to permit residency for non-Muslims who are said to be seeking refuge from oppression in neighbouring Muslim-majority nations.

Wow! Bilgrami thinks non-Muslims are well treated in Pakistan! Is he utterly mad? As for expelling non-Citizens, why was Bilgrami not up in arms against 'deporters in chief' like Clinton and Obama?

The latter, focused at the moment in [Assam], deregisters those—and their descendants—in the population of Assam who lack legal documents and electoral roll status going back to [before March 1971]. In the end, the ones affected by all this are going to be Muslim immigrants from Bangladesh because the Hindu and other refugees will be accommodated by the CAB.

This is because Hindus, but not Muslims get short shrift in Bangladesh. Muslims are economic migrants. Hindus are persecuted because of their Faith.

So the NRC and CAB together basically amount to a pincer movement to change the demography of the northeast region, one arm of the pincer deregistering Muslims and Hindu immigrants to the region, the other arm restoring the Hindu immigrants to citizenship, leaving the Muslims alone reduced to second-class status.

This is accurate. But illegal migrants have second class status in every country. No doubt, Muslims feel this weakens their claim to power in areas where previously Islam had little numerical representation. But, America too deports illegal immigrants from Muslim countries.

It is a formal version of ethnic cleansing.

All immigration enforcement could be considered 'ethnic cleansing' unless illegal migrants of the same ethnicity- without a genuine claim to political asylum- are not deported.

It is not killing people of a certain community, but declaring them to be second class, freezing them out of citizen’s rights and benefits.

This happens in Saudi Arabia. People born in that Kingdom who are not of the right ethnicity enjoy none of the rights and benefits of a citizen. They are not allowed to attend College in the Kingdom. They can be deported as surplus to requirements just like migrant laborers.

Why is Bilgrami not attacking Saudi Arabia? After all, he is a Muslim and the Kingdom has a special importance for Muslims. By contrast, why does he get exercised about the Govt. of India implementing the same policies as the country he has lived in for many years?

Leave the killing to lynch mobs and others who feel sanctioned by this BJP government to do violence on the ground.

The lynch mobs in Assam who forced the Union Govt. to promise to get rid of the illegal migrants back in the Eighties were not associated in any way with the BJP.

The point is that the Kashmir move is similarly part of this transformative demographic plan. The abrogation of the formal aspects of autonomy now allows Hindus to purchase land—shades of the Israeli precedent can be easily detected here—in Kashmir and it also will change the electoral complexion of the Valley in favour of the BJP, which has an increasingly strong presence there in recent years.

Nonsense! Nobody is going to buy land in Kashmir. They will be killed. The Kashmiri Pandits already own land there. They won't be returning any time soon. The fact is Kashmiri Hindu were ethnically cleansed in the Nineties. Currently, Muslim non Kashmiri workers are being terrorized and forced to flee the valley.

This will not happen, of course, if Hindus from outside Kashmir feel it is not a safe place to move to. So military occupation must be further and completely normalised to make it safe for them to do so—again the Israeli antecedent is obvious here too.

The thing is not possible. There simply aren't enough Hindus willing to go to that spite-slum. The Valley is going to get poorer and poorer. It will be a remittance economy- nothing more.

By contrast, Jews were willing to move to Israel and to kill Muslims if they tried to kill them. Why? There was a religious and social benefit in doing so. What few expected was that Israel would thrive economically. But then the Jews are smart.

Going back to your question about how democracy is being subverted by this violation of the constitution, democracy in another sense will be completely demolished if the knowledge of these things—that are known to people who bother to learn the facts and analyse them—remains esoteric knowledge.

What facts is this fool talking about? When has he ever been able to 'analyse' anything?

It must be brought to public light and kept constantly in the public awareness and attention.

There is no point doing so now everybody has access to Wikipedia on their smart phone. Telling stupid lies just makes you look like a stupid liar.

The task of journalists and a wide range of human-rights and other activist organisations today is to keep hammering away at that, informing the public, including the international public, to mobilise opinion and eventually to seek redress by all means possible, including appeals to international law as well as to human-rights provisions in the United Nations declaration [referring to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a historic UN resolution adopted in December 1948].

Did these 'journalists and human rights activists' actually achieve anything? No. Trump is in power in America because people think elite shitheads like Bilgrami propagate only 'fake news'.

The success of that, of course, depends on the willingness of states to listen to and be open to pressure from these international bodies.

But these international bodies are wholly discredited! Who now gives a toss for the UN?

Many states unblushingly refuse to do that. India, on Kashmir, is one such state.

So what? India's standing has risen, not fallen, because it ignores stupid shitheads.

Israel is another—it listens to no one, except the United States on which it heavily depends financially and militarily, and the United States almost never puts any pressure on Israel anyway. Sri Lanka, on the Tamil question, is yet another. But still, one cannot ignore the importance of keeping the issues alive.

So, if everything you do fails completely it is important to keep doing it anyway. This is Einstein's definition of insanity 'to do the same thing again and again hoping for a different outcome'.

The fate of Palestinians, Kashmiris, Tamils in these nations depends on the issues being kept alive despite the states in question working assiduously to make the issues go away, to normalise occupations, curfews, illegal arrests and detentions, round-the-clock surveillance, et cetera.

The Palestinian issue has certainly been kept alive by BDS campaigners. But Israel has prospered- its GDP has doubled and FDI has tripled since 2006-  while Palestinians in the Gaza strip have seen declining real income and the destruction of life-chances.

It’s not just to keep the issues alive that the public has to be kept informed, it is also to counter the brazenly false claims and fallacious arguments that are in the air thanks to the Hindutva propaganda on Kashmir. For instance, many people I know, who have no Hindutva commitments, repeatedly say that Kashmiri autonomy, as articulated in [Articles] 370 and 35A, is an anomaly, and it is about time it is brought to an end.

There was no autonomy. The Supreme Court said so in 2016. People may have pretended otherwise but anyone with eyes in their head could see the truth.

This is something they would not say if they knew the history.

What history? The Indian Army checked the Pakistani invaders. New Delhi rigged elections and toppled Governments as it pleased. The Kashmiris knew they could not defend themselves. Those who tried to rebel were killed or turned by the Security Forces. Some stone pelters could earn a little money- but at the cost of being blinded by pellets. Now even those avenues of mischief are being shut down. The Valley will be a spite slum surviving on remittances. That's it. That's the whole story.

So it is important to give accurate accounts of the history in public forums, not just in scholarly locations. Why was, and is, Kashmiri autonomy important?

Kashmiri autonomy could have existed if Kashmiris had been able to repel Pakistani invasion. They lacked this capacity. Still, if the Muslims of the Valley had been able to get along with the Hindus of Jammu or Buddhists of Ladakh, they could have enjoyed the same level of 'subsidiarity' as Kerala or Tamil Nadu. But this did not happen. Sheikh Abdullah could not get along with his own Deputy- Bakshi Ghulam Muhammad, an able administrator who did get on well with Hindus. Sadly Bakshi was toppled by the foolish 'Kamaraj plan'. Thus, the chance for Kashmir to rise up by constructive policies was lost.

Why did Sheikh Abdulla start demanding Independence in the early Fifties? The answer is that he saw that Pak occupied Kashmir was contiguous with the USSR and Communist China. He thought that his own Socialist credentials had been established by Land reform and that he could use the Reds to become the master of the whole erstwhile Princely State. Jinnah was dead, Liaquat Ali Khan had been assassinated, there appeared to be some support for a Left wing coup in Pakistan. Why should Abdullah not become the ruler of Pakistan?

 America had deep reservations about Abdullah but the Brits, who were still a big player, were more sanguine. After all, the Labor Party was a Marxist Party and it had only lost power a short while before. Thus Abdullah could dream of 'Azadi' with his own dynasty displacing that of the Dogra Kings. Bakshi was a realist. He knew that Abdullah was alienating the Hindus and that he was a bad administrator. But the reason Nehru jailed Abdullah was because the fellow was taking a lot of money from Pakistan and saying very foolish things. The fact is, the mood in India was such that Kashmir Valley could have been ethnically cleansed in retaliation for the continuing exodus of Hindus from the East Wing. Shyama Prasad Mookherjee's death in Abdullah's jail was avenged by, among others, Rafi Ahmed Kidwai who saw Abdullah's vainglory as an existential threat to Indian Muslims. If India lost its one Muslim majority District- or ethnically cleansed it- then no Muslim was safe in the country.

What are the sentiments of the Kashmiri people today and in the past?

We know that Kashmiri Muslims, like other Muslims in the area, want to tyrannize over or ethnically cleanse non-Muslims. But they lack the military power to defend themselves from more martial tribes in the region. Either they can be under the thumb of the Pakistani army or they can be protected by the Indian Army. But, going forward, nobody is going to indulge them. They will have to pay their own way- which means becoming a remittance economy pure and simply.

What ways were, and are, these sentiments ignored?

They are not ignored. People who can shoot back do shoot back and kill Kashmiri Muslims who are seeking to express their murderous sentiments. People who can't shoot back run away or are killed.

For a democracy to work and to make the proper decisions at the ballot box, you have to be informed about all these things, and the role of the press and other public fora is indispensable in making that happen.

Nonsense! For a democracy to work all you have to do is to vote for the candidate who will do the best job for your locality. You must not give a flying fart for what stupid Professors living in America think is important. That way  madness lies. As for the Press- it is a prostitute but it is a Prostitute which can always put on a different wig or different costume so as to pander to your taste.

It is crucial for the rest of us in India to think not from the point of view of the interests of the sarkar, but from the point of view of the desires of the region’s population.

If the Muslims of the Valley want to kill Hindus they must be allowed to do so not just where they are in the majority but also in Jammu and Ladakh.

We owe it to the Kashmiri people.

Why? Is killing Hindus or chasing them away from their ancestral homes really an obligation entailed upon us from birth? Bilgrami is a Muslim. He may hold some such belief. But Muslims are in a minority in India. It may be a matter for great lamentation that any time they start killing Hindus, many more of them are killed. No doubt, one's perspective may change if one manages to emigrate to America. But for Muslims who have no option but to make a life for themselves in India it is not they case that they are obliged to let Kashmiri Muslims kill and tyrannize over non-Muslims just because such are their sentiments.

Let me give you an example of what I mean by this. I was once seated next to PN Dhar, a former high-level adviser to prime minister Indira Gandhi, at a dinner because his wife was a good friend of my sister. This was in the early 1990s when all sorts of abominations by the Indian military presence were being perpetrated and there was tremendous resistance. We got to talking of Kashmir. I pointed out that the militant Islamic element in Kashmiri resistance was a creation of the Indian government in order to undermine the secular JKLF, [the Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front,] which was so influential then. He did not deny it and said, in fact, that things were so bad right now that “the Valley is gone.” I distinctly remember those words. What do you mean, I said, quite surprised. “We should just hand it over to Pakistan,” he said. My surprise turned to shock. “Why?” I asked, “What sort of solution is that?” His answer was memorable: “Because if we don’t give it to Pakistan and give it to the Kashmiri people, we will set a precedent for the northeast to make similar demands.”

So, PN Dhar- like most Kashmiris- had shit for brains. Nobody in India gives a shit about the Northeast. Those guys are welcome to revert to head-hunting. Indian Muslims do care about Kashmir. If it 'goes', then so does their sense of security.

That’s how the sarkar thinks.

Not Modi sarkar. It employs no Kashmiri shitheads. Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi is from U.P. He follows the Kidwai line on Kashmir. Muslim mayhem there must be contained for the greater good. Indian Muslims can't let 5 % of their population destroy the life-chances of the 95 %.

A situation may incline your hand to concede something, (though, of course, no such concession was actually made or ever will be), but even if you do concede it, pay no attention to what the people want. The sarkari point of view alone should determine your decisions, even your concessive decisions.

Does this shithead not understand that 'sarkars'- i.e. Administrations- change? If he thinks the BJP is doing exactly what Congress or Janata Morcha did, then why pretend otherwise?

SB: How do you see the cultural project of Hindutva shaping up in India since 2014? Do you see Hindu nationalism excluding and silencing minorities, especially Muslims?
AB: It is very interesting to compare the Muslims in a slightly earlier period, when Hindutva forces were also very active, and the present, when they are actually in power. For some years following the destruction of the Ayodhya mosque, the Muslims showed some real agency. Some of it was even violent. We can oppose that violence but still you have to observe that the agency was there.

What fucking agency is this cretin talking about? The Mumbai bombings? The Surat bombings as picturized in Shah Rukh Khan's 'Raees'? If that is 'agency', then what is a mortuary?

Moreover, in that period, figures like [the former Indian politician Syed] Shahabuddin, the Delhi Imam Abdullah Bukhari, and others had a voice and prominence, whatever you think of how they used it and what they said.

Wonderful! Shahabuddin did get the Satanic Verses banned. But he couldn't end the Hajj subsidy.  As for the Shahi Imam, he proved quite useless as a vote-getter. Nobody has heard of his successor.

But now Muslims have gone completely into their shells—[Akbaruddin] Owaisi, a member of the Telangana legislative assembly, today has some voice but it is pretty much restricted to his locality and city.

Owaisi inherits the Hyderababad State 'Rezakar' mantle. If he didn't exist, the BJP would have to invent him!

With the BJP in power, there is real fear among Muslims and the fear is widespread, chronic and deep because the menace they face is widespread, chronic and deep.

They fear that some loonytoons will start killing Hindus and that the police won't catch those loonytoons expeditiously enough- thus causing anti-Muslim pogroms. So far, however, it appears the police are on their toes and quickly nab Muslim nutters. Had this also been the case in Kashmir Valley, it would now be flourishing economically.

Everywhere you look, the main cause of backwardness and bad governance in Muslim countries or areas is the presence of murderous nutters. Once these guys are caught and locked up in an expeditious manner, Muslims have nothing to fear.

The Muslims have a clear sense that the lumpen Hindu mobs know with confidence that their violence against Muslims can be carried out with impunity.

Sure. But it can also be carried out by upper class Hindus and by organs of the State. Nobody is going to do any jail time for retaliating against Muslim nutters. On the other hand, it is in Hindu self-interest to lock up their own nutters. Killing people is not good business.

It is informally sanctioned by the very fact that BJP occupies the state and does so with hegemonic support not only from a majority of the electorate, but a large enough section of the population that has accepted ideas of a Hindu nation.

How is 'hegemonic support' different from support from 'a large enough section of the population?

Apart from lynchings and violence, arrests of ordinary helpless Muslims with no access to lawyers are now done daily without any due process and—unlike the illegal arrests of celebrated activists in the recent ‘Urban Naxal’ farce—these don’t even get reported in the newspapers.

But this also happens to wealthy Muslims with access to lawyers. If the fellow is a dangerous nutter he gets 'encountered'. However, in practice, he simply runs away.
The 'Urban Naxal' farce may not seem particularly funny to people like G.N Saibaba. The police reckon he is genuinely implicated. So he isn't getting out of jail despite being severely disabled. It is a different matter that a cat and mouse game is being played with 'celebrated activists'. Sooner or later, a Bench will refuse to overturn such convictions. This is what economists call a 'discovery' process. What is happening is that the Government has learnt that Muslims don't care if Muslim nutters are locked up. Furthermore Dalits and Tribals don't give a fart about 'celebrated activists', though they will turn out in massive numbers if one of their own is interfered with.

It’s just quotidian menace, part of their daily life.
Now, it is interesting to make a further comparison between Muslims in these years of BJP in power, and the Dalits. In recent years, Dalits, in contrast to the Muslims, have shown real agency, even the willingness to resist violence—sometimes with violence. But what is odd and needs further study is that this agency they show is primarily in the long- and mid-term moment, not the electoral moment.

This cretin does not get that the RSS wants Dalits and Tribals to come forward. Incidentally, they are the guys who do anti-Muslim pogroms best.

What I don’t properly understand is why the kind of agency and resistance that Dalits show in the period in between elections changes when it comes to the electoral clock.

The answer is that the BJP, but also some other parties, gives tickets to those who lead 'mid-term' agitations on specific issues. However, Dalit activism can consolidate the dominant caste vote. The Koregoan Bhima agitation seems to have backfired. It seems, it is safer to concentrate on bread and butter issues because poor non Dalits will accept Dalit leadership in these matters.

No doubt, it is due to the fact that the BJP—this is Amit Shah’s manipulative genius, I suppose—is able to exploit the resentment among some Dalits against other Dalits who have gained from other parties in power—Mayawati, for instance— by promising them similar gains if they voted for the BJP instead.

What is Bilgrami saying? Firstly, he understands nothing and secondly even if he could understand a little, still, Amit Shah's 'manipulative genius' would ensure that this understanding was to no avail. Thankfully, Bilgrami's income does not depend on understanding the first thing about India. He is a Professor of Philosophy in America.

But I think it is a rather fascinating fact that the long-term issues of oppression of Dalits surfaces in their resistance and mobilisations in a period when elections are not on the horizon, and then subsides, and different, more manipulable hopes for gains surface during elections. These are differentials well worth studying carefully.

What careful study by this cretin would be well worth a tinker's fart? Dalit 'mobilizations' are about competition between Dalit leaders. It must be suppressed during the election season otherwise an anti-Dalit vote is consolidated.

SB: What is the fundamental or philosophical difference between the politics of the BJP and the Congress?

Congress is dynastic. That is the fundamental difference. It is the reason Maneka and Varun Gandhi are in a different party to Sonia and Rahul.

AB: The Congress, unlike the BJP, is not a quasi-fascist party.

It is a wholly Fascist party based on the primogeniture of the Fuhrer. The BJP is a political party similar to the Republican or Democratic or Tory and Labor parties. It isn't dynastic.

It has become an ineffectual party because ever since the Emergency and its aftermath, it slowly began to lose its grassroots.

The Congress Syndicate had grassroots but it was shite. Mrs Gandhi uprooted those grassroots by turning to the Left. Her son, Sanjay, did preside over a 'Youth Congress' which was supposed to have 'grassroots'. That was a sham. Trinamool was 'grass roots'. But Mamta lost patience with Congress and went her own way- uprooting the 'grassroots' of the Communists along the way.  But an alliance of local gangsters is not really 'grassroots'. The BJP, by contrast, can rely on non-gangsters doing useful voluntary work. This is the RSS which was set up in imitation of the Congress Seva Dal. Last time anyone heard of it, it was headed by one Jagdish Tytler- a true son of the soil and greatly beloved of Delhi's Sikh population- I don't think!

It increasingly, from that time on, became a party that focused on a centralised, more technocratic ideal of governance.

This is sheer fantasy. Nehru was the centralizer and the technocrat. But he failed. Jayaprakash and Lohia and so forth went in the other direction to even worse effect.

After the neo-liberal period that began to get seriously consolidated from 1990, this became fortified in its economic outlook too. In 2004, to a considerable extent because of Sonia Gandhi’s quite remarkable campaign in that election, it came back to power and, partly because it was dependent on Left support, even put in place policies to uplift the poor—however fitfully implemented. To some extent, she and her supporters were a buffer against the nakedly corporate-influenced tendencies—worsened by the pressures placed by international credit agencies—of the then prime minister [Manmohan Singh] and his neo-liberal economic advisers.

Sonia was a duffer, not a buffer. Singh did sensible things- more especially standing up to the Left on the 123 agreement and getting rid of crooks like Natkat Singh and crackpots like Mani Shankar Aiyar. Sadly, Rahul would not step up to the plate while Manmohan had to look like a decrepit old scarecrow should Rahul change his mind. Corruption scandals created administrative stasis. Thus the Corporates- who could get elected themselves directly rather than rely on a Party- ditched Congress for Modi. But Modi was the only candidate for the top job in 2014. The other parties didn't even pretend they had a candidate. The same thing happened in 2019- despite a slowing economy. Modi is, currently, the only person capable of doing the top job. Nobody else has thrown their hat into the ring. There was a time when every two bit- Chandrashekhar type- nonentity dreamed of becoming P.M. Such people have disappeared. It is now obvious that Indians want a PM who can talk sensibly to them. But where are such people to be found? Only in the RSS stables. No where else. Why? The Left's 'long march through the Institutions' has ended in senile dementia. Bilgrami himself is an example.

A fascinating question arises, however, regarding the failure and fall of UPA 2 [referring to the second term of the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance government]. In my view, the deeper source of its failure owed to the predictable effects of neo-liberal economic policies, though, of course, the analysis by which this is made evident is never presented to the electorate by any dominant party in the electoral field.

Hilarious! Bilgrami thinks Aaya Ram, the sitting M.P, should say 'Bhaion aur behenon, Neo-liberalism is having deleterious effects.' Meanwhile, Gaya Ram, his opponent, should say 'Bhaion aur behelon, Neo-liberalism is causing cows to commit suicide'.

Why stop there? Why does not Bilgrami come out and say that Democracy can never function in a proper manner till everybody has completed a PhD in Econ from Harvard on the dangers of Neo-Liberal policies? Furthermore, every Party Manifesto must contain at least 100 pages explaining why Bilgrami's concept of 'Enchantment' means Kashmiri Muslims should be allowed to kill every non-Muslim in the region.

So, the BJP, which promises to adopt those policies with even less constraint, can then get elected.

Does Bilgrami think Indian voters have heard of 'Neo-Liberalism'? Does he really believe that Modi went around promising to remove constraints from its operation? The fact is talk of 'Neo-Liberalism' is a type of open defecation. It creates a public nuisance. Modi is against open defecation. But he is not constraining or removing constraints from it. Why? Nobody has heard of it in India. Anyway, the thing does not exist.

As I said, those are the deeper underlying causes. The more immediate cause—apart from the BJP’s Hindutva-based mobilisation and the Modi personality cult that was pursued by an obscenely expensive public-relations campaign—was that Congress corruption was called and it tainted the party sufficiently to measurably undermine its image.
Here is the question that fascinates me. The fascist ideologue, Carl Schmitt, said that sovereignty lies with those who can “call the exception.” This was essential to his critique of liberalism. He shrewdly pointed out that liberal representative democracy can make all its impeccable claims about the rule of law, claim the high ground for its constitutional codifications, but it always has to have space for the exception to the law and the constitution—the emergency move, the abrogation, et cetera. That is the moment of exception. And he said whoever gets to call the exception, that is where sovereignty really lies.

Schmitt was writing about the Weimar Constitution which, very stupidly, had given the President emergency powers which meant he could rule by decree. In 1925, Germany had elected Hindenburg President. Luddendorff couldn't be elected rat-catcher because he was bat-shit crazy. The Social Democrats cut their own throats by voting to give Hindenburg a second term thus implicitly endorsing Presidential rule. But, by then, Germany's position looked hopeless. People thought only the Army could deliver prosperity through conquest. Since General Schleicher had fallen out with General Blomberg, Hitler took over to advance the German Army's maximal program. The plain fact is, the German people had handed over their sovereignty to the German Army. But the General Staff was divided and Hindenburg was senile. So Hitler killed Schleicher and Blomberg, in gratitude, got the Army to take a personal oath of loyalty to Hitler. That's what made the Fuhrer 'sovereign'. His goons could kill you and his army would defend those goons. This had nothing to do with any juristic process. The Constitution did not matter a flying fart.

Because Schmitt was a cretin he didn't understand any of this. He babbled nonsense about 'the state of exception' which in other jurisdictions is called 'exigent circumstances' or 'doctrine of necessity'. India, sadly, has a provision for Emergency rule- which Indira Gandhi used to imprison her opponents and tyrannize over half the country.

Why is Bilgrami babbling about Schmitt? How is it relevant to India? The fact is Indira did not continue the Emergency. Politicians realized that what gives them power is votes. You may lose an election, but- like Indira- you can come back to power when the other side fucks up.

Or I suppose it is better to say, that is where it really underlies.
By analogy, what I think we should be asking about the Indian society and polity and economy today is a related question: who gets to call corruption?

The answer is any guy with a smartphone who secretly films anyone at all taking a bribe.

In the current relation of capital to politics and government, pretty much every party is corrupt. This is widely believed by all. The electorate is not naïve about it either. But who gets called corrupt and who gets to do the calling is the deep question.

No it isn't. Everybody calls everybody else corrupt. Those who- like Modi- can point to their family members living humbly get a clean chit. Those who can't- like the dynasty and its minions- lose votes.

Since governments can be toppled by the effective and persuasive call of corruption, there is a kind of middle-level sovereignty that lies in whoever gets to call it.

Calling it is not enough. You need proof which Courts can act on. The whole Lokpal agitation was about having ombudsmen all over the country empowered to take cognizance of any and every complaint brought before them and to go after even the highest in the land.

Where does this peculiar form of sovereignty lie in Indian society? This is a question worth exploring.

No it isn't. The answer can be found within ten seconds of a Google search.

Is it big business, which decides and gets everyone—media, especially, but the courts as well— to taint someone with the call of corruption?

No. Don't be silly. We know from the Nina Radia tapes that even the high and mighty Tatas have to produce evidence of corruption. Why? The thing is justiciable.

If so, which part of big business? Surely not all of big business. Is it the crony capitalists around the prime minister, the Gujarat capitalist mafia? But then why isn’t the rest of the corporate sector—surely a measurably larger fragment of the corporate sector—resisting the domination of these very few corporate houses?

Modi's crony capitalists are doing a good job- that's why. Other enterprises need good ports and Electricity generation and so forth. Mukesh Ambani and the Adanis and so forth have some actual core competence. Vijay Mallya or Mehul Choksi etc. were not competent. Let them be extradited and left to rot in jail.

Do they not have a concern that other political parties, like the Congress, must not be allowed to disappear from the scene, since one cannot be wholly dependent on one party that favours only a small segment of the corporate sector? These are some of the aspects of current capitalism that are shrouded in obscurity.

They are shrouded in obscurity only to the incredibly obtuse.

SB: Could you say something about the BJP, then?
AB: A good question to ask is why the BJP seems so compulsively authoritarian when it has fairly widespread support in the electorate in so many regions of the country.

A better question to ask is how it is helpful to call the BJP authoritarian when it is no such thing.

Since you asked about the difference between the Congress and the BJP, one way to pursue your question is to explore how BJP’s current authoritarianism is different from and more willful than past authoritarianism—the state authoritarianism against radical peasant agitations of the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Emergency, et cetera.

Radical peasant agitations? Is this fuckwit talking of Naxals chopping of the heads of class enemies? It was Jyoti Basu who licensed the police to go after those nutters- after they killed a policeman and started going after judges.

Indian authoritarianism is about extra-judicial killings and arresting all the family members of the culprits and torturing the fuck out of them till the fellow surrenders or tops himself. The BJP isn't going in for that. Why? It wants 'Vikas'- Development and better Governance. That's what will get it re-elected.

I think the answer lies in the fact that far more political will and muscle is needed now than it was in the past to have the one-party domination of the form that BJP seeks.

Nonsense! The best solution is to have a large 'competitive fringe' of regional or caste based parties whose more promising leaders can be co-opted. Political 'will and muscle' are useless because your muscle-men will abandon you for a better prospect- as the Left Front discovered in West Bengal.

The Congress’s one-party domination came initially from its pedigree as the dominant party in the freedom struggle and such grassroots that it laid during that long period. When that began to wane, it sought it by more authoritarian means such as the Emergency.

That was Indira's, not the Congress's, decision. Unlike Modi- who has no fear of his cabinet colleagues- the dynasty, precisely because it is incompetent, looks with dark suspicion on smart members of its own inner circle. Rajiv was toppled by V.P Singh and his cousin Arun Nehru.

The problem with authoritarianism is the same as the problem with autocracy. The thing is too easily tempered by assassination.

But in the 1980s, politics, both at the federal and the regional level, became far more democratic and demanding.

What? Politics was 'democratic and demanding' under Indira & Rajiv? Are you kidding me? How could a senile woman and a blundering young man have kept the top job for a decade if this were true?

That is, the demos was more demanding.

Nonsense! The demos was terrified. Anybody, from the PM down, could be killed by anybody.

All sorts of diverse interests emerged, identity politics became a defining force.

That was in the Nineties because of V.P Singh's backing of the Mandal Commission which in turn meant 'Mandir vs Mandal' and so forth.

One-party domination requires a far greater assertiveness, therefore, both via sheer authoritarian force and via manipulation of the electoral forces.

One-party domination requires that party to have the best CM or PM candidate. It thrives most where 'discovery' is done by a large 'competitive fringe' of regional and caste based parties. What follows is co-optation and horse trading. But that's how Congress itself functioned. It was constantly picking up able people from the Right and the Left.

In short, as the noise of democracy increases, the more authoritarian and manipulative the requirements of one-party domination have to be.

Says the biggest cretin ever. He lives in a noisy democracy. No doubt he thinks America is very 'authoritarian' and 'manipulative'. That's why he doesn't want to return home to India.

That is one source of the difference between the BJP today and the Congress in its heyday.

The difference between the BJP and 'Congress in its heyday' is that the BJP is anti-caste while Congress was opposed to a transactional view of the Social Contract. Instead, it believed in an accommodation between fixed, caste based, thymotic roles regardless of how badly this hobbled Governance and Development. It was inevitable that Congress would turn into a dynastic vehicle with a ritualistic doxology- the 'Gandhi-Nehru' ideology- and shibboleths like Non-Alignment and 'Secular Socialism' and so forth. Of course, this never meant it would refuse to join hands with outfits like the Shiv Sena- as it has now done in Maharashtra- because of 'vichardhara'- which is Rahul Baba's term for ideology.

My own view is that India needs a cadre based Muslim party which runs schools and Colleges and Dispensaries and so forth. Instead of advertising commitment to Religion by indulging in crazy behavior, or harping on symbolic topics, Muslims need to get on with the job of rising up and helping others to rise up. Why should a Muslim party not be the lead partner in an alliance of caste based parties? We know the Indian Muslim has solid virtues. We want to be able to vote for the best candidates belonging to that community because we believe they are less likely to be drunkards or to have a string of mistresses or to simply be entitled dynasts.

If Muslims, purely on the basis of merit, rise to the top in the Film Industry and in Sports and so forth, why not in Politics? Similarly, let Kashmir Valley be separated from Jammu and let it run itself using its own revenues. Sooner or later, some sensible people will come forward and the youth of the valley find occupations better paying than stone pelting.