Appadurai & why pussy cats turn into chocolate eclairs

Arjun Appadurai left India as a teenager five decades ago. Consequently, he is wholly ignorant of India. However, the Indian Wire magazine has thought fit to put his imbecility on display. He writes--

We are witnessing India’s first mass movement since the movement for national Independence, which began in the 1880s and ended in 1947.

Had Appadurai not hightailed it to Amrika, he would have seen the Janata Morcha mass movement in India which brought down Indira Gandhi in 1977. It remains the single most important political convulsion in independent India's history. 

At no time since 1947 have we seen such an inspiring show of democratic dissent, bringing together students and workers, old and young, Hindus, Sikhs, Muslims, Christians, Parsis and other faiths, Marxists, liberals and traditional nationalists, government servants and corporate leaders, men and women.

But the vast majority of non-Muslims support the Government in this matter. That is why it will prevail. Marxists scarcely exist as a political force. As for 'nationalists' they are solidly behind Modi. 

In this mass movement, women, students and youth in general are the leaders, with Muslims speaking their minds with a courage born out of the sense that other options are non-existent. The Emergency had some of these features, but the broad opposition to Indira Gandhi then recognised that she had some ability to listen, learn and respond, by comparison to the current regime.

This is nonsense. Indira listened to the RAW Intelligence Chief who told her she would win the elections. That is why she released the Opposition leaders. The outcome was a shock to her. She had no ability to listen. But, she and her sons had a great ability to split opposition to her by propping up ambitious people like Charan Singh or, later on, Chandrashekhar. Now her daughter-in-law is propping up the Shiv Sena in Maharashtra. In the end, the dynasts will stick together or risk 'dying nasty' on their own.

At a time when many of us are on the barricades, either physically or politically, it is easy to be caught up in the news of the day, the week or the month. At such times, we need to bear India’s long history in mind and put our apocalyptic moment in long-term perspective. In this light, I have three observations to offer.
Gujrat’s history and today’s India
The first has to do with the long history of the connection between Gujarat, the state which nurtured the careers of Narendra Modi and Amit Shah over decades, and the Godhra train burning of 2002, a connection which helped them to leverage a national platform for their vision of a polity cleansed of Muslims.

How come there has been no migration of Muslims from India? Why did the Muslim population of Gujarat increase under Modi? 

But these events in Gujarat have a deeper history which goes back to 1956, when the Gujarati-speakers of Bombay lost the city to Maratha regionalists and the states of Maharashtra and Gujarat were born. From the Bombay Gujarati point of view, Bombay was the city built by Gujarati and Parsi capital, but was also the long-term home of many Marathi-speakers (whom the Gujarati mercantile elite stigmatised as lowly domestic workers and factory serfs) and Muslims (whom they already feared and disliked because of the long Gujarati and RSS historiography of the Muslim ravaging of the Hindu temples of their region).

But the RSS started life as a Maharashtrian outfit. Gujarat was solidly Congress. 

Thus, the loss of Bombay in 1956 was a double loss for many Gujaratis, which was only redeemed in part by the ascendance and royal status of people like the Ambanis.

But the Ambanis were based in Mumbai and only came up much later. They had no 'Royal Status' till the Eighties. Had V.P Singh prevailed their patriarch would have rotted in jail. Congress was their salvation. 

The southern end of Gujarat meets the northern end of Maharashtra on the Arabian Sea, in a belt that runs from Mandwa to Daman and Diu, always a zone of struggle between Gulf pirates, coastal Marathi-speaking magnates and state functionaries, and Gujarati merchants and smugglers. Though many in Gujarat do not identify strongly with Bombay (and its loss in 1956), for ideologues and strategists like Shah and Modi, the mutual traffic between them, the Adanis, the Ambanis and other smaller Bombay tycoons, is the key counterweight to the power of Maratha regionalism, which has become openly anti-BJP and anti-Gujarati again, in the weeks since Udhav Thackeray became chief minister of Maharashtra.

Sheer nonsense! Mukesh Ambani backs Congress's Milind Deoria in South Bombay. Now Ambani is happy that Congress is propping up the Shiv Sena in Maharashtra.
Adanis are a different kettle of fish. They developed the Mundra port in Gujarat and were a big player in Gujarat's rapid economic ascent. They are not greatly concerned with Maharashtra.

In short, the Modi-Shah regime is built on its whipping up of regional angers and hatreds in Gujarat from 2002 to 2014, and this Gujarati power base for Modi is a key part of the current BJP effort to impose a reign of terror on much of the rest of India.

Gujarat has only 5 % of the Indian population. It is irrelevant. What matters is that Modi is a good Hindi orator and has been elected from Benares. It is the Hindu vote in the cow belt which has brought him to power. Rahul Gandhi, by contrast, has lost his ancestral seat and has been elected from Kerala by people whose language he does not know. 

Gandhian non-violence is not simply a product of the deep strain of Jaina ahimsa in Gujarat. Rather, Gandhi flew in the face of the massive propensity of Gujarati populations in Surat, Baroda, Ahmedabad and other cities in Gujarat to turn to violence against Muslims since at least the late 18th century. The Modi-Shah combine has leveraged this long-term Gujarati history into a national programme for ethnic cleansing.

This man is utterly mad. He says Gujeratis, for some reason, like killing Muslims. Gandhi had some magical power which stopped them from doing so. But that magic faded. So now the Gujeratis are back at their old tricks. They are using black magic to get non-Gujeratis to kill Muslims. Strangely, the Muslim population of Gujerat has increased. Probably, these so called Muslims are actually zombies. 

The second observation about the long-term history of the subcontinent pertains to the nature of caste, class and power in this region over two millennia. No serious anthropologist or historian of India can claim to have decisively answered the following basic question: why has caste – as an ideology, a social formation and a cosmology – spread and survived over two millennia or more without any sort of central political authority, bureaucracy or continental religious organisation of priests, monks or clerical staff?

Economists like Akerloff have answered this question. 'Serious anthropologists' are seriously fucked in the head. Incidentally, Ambedkar had studied anthropology at Columbia. He gave what he thought was a decisive answer to this question. 

The spread and persistence of this unique form of racial, ethnic and economic stratification has been studied in all its avatars, variations and disguises but its remarkable region-wide tenacity has not yet been accounted for adequately.

Except by Ambedkar and Akerloff and other people who understand Economics. 

The fact is, caste functions in a cellular, metastatic and decentralised manner, in which some sort of social and political DNA replicates itself successfully across a remarkable range of ecological, social and historical contexts, extending from Pakistan to Bangladesh and from Nepal to Sri Lanka.

This is not a fact. It is an ignorant metaphor. Why not embrace Social Organicism wholeheartedly and say 'Miscegenation is the reason for all India's ills' ?

White Man must return to assume his burden of ruling those disgusting darkies. The Aryan strain in the Indian D.N.A should be purified of the nigger taint. Selective breeding programs and forcible sterilization of darker skinned people, or those with snub noses or thick lips must be carried out.'  While many of my readers may feel I should be sterilized, what about Appadurai who looks a bit like me?

Whatever the answer to this massive puzzle, it casts an unexpected light on the BJP-RSS organisational structure and might let us see the current regime as not a smooth machinery of media savvy, populist militarisation, and xenophobic mobilisation, but as a blundering, uncoordinated and poorly run series of initiatives, policies and programmes. The actual roll-out of every major BJP policy since 2014 has been a chaotic instance of shoot now, check targets later.

As opposed to what? Checking the target before you have fired off your weapon? What would be the point to that? How stupid do you have to be to qualify as an anthropologist? 

Some of this blundering, ad hoc quality is visible in demonetisation, in the hot and cold moves in relation to Pakistan, in the ridiculously ambitious housing and sanitation policies of the state, in the chaotic enforcement of the new population policies in Assam and so on. In truth, the only place where the Modi-Shah machine has shown anything like a centralised organization is in the elections of 2014 and 2019, and even that success is in the process of eroding and unravelling, in Rajasthan, Bengal, Kerala, Maharashtra, Jharkhand and other states. The biggest series of clownish manoeuvres was in Maharashtra, where Modi and Shah were brilliantly outmanoeuvred by Sharad Pawar, Uddhav Thackeray and others who nursed grudges against the BJP. So much for brilliant central organisation.

And so much for Congress which has allied with Thackeray. It seems Rahul's 'vichar dhara' or ideology, consists of demanding the killing of Muslims and the ejection of South Indians and Biharis and other such undesirables. 

In short, the BJP-RSS power machine works in the same way as caste has worked for millennia,

 i.e. in a 'cellular, metastatic' manner which re-writes DNA coz that's how DNA works- right?

not because there is a brilliant central machine in which the parts and the whole are tightly meshed, but because there is something in the BJP formula of xenophobia, anti-minority rage, anti-secularism and promises of a quick fix, which helped it succeed from place to place and gave it the longish run it has enjoyed in Delhi. This is cellular, metastatic fascism, and not vertebrate or coordinated fascism. Herein lies the big difference between Nazi Germany and today’s India.

In other words, the BJP is bound to win. Modi will go from strength to strength. Hitler, by contrast, shot himself. 

Hindu India and powerful persons
My third long-view observation is about how Hindu India has traditionally regarded powerful persons.

Is it different from how Muslim Pakistan has regarded powerful persons? If not, why mention the thing? 

Modi evidently has a massive charisma surplus, both in relation to others in the BJP-RSS world and the whole array of opposition leaders, most of whom would make the claim that they are colourlessness a hyperbole. He is a Hindu samrat full-blown, often wearing the turbaned headgear of royalty,

Oh dear! This cretin can't tell a farmer's puguree from a royal turban strung with pearls and adorned with rubies.

who also picks up on the iconography of the militant sadhu and the celibate ascetic. These images have long cohabited in the Hindu imaginary and they operate in an economy of gifts, ritual deference and tribute, which has nothing to do with civility, law or due process.

Does this cretin imagine that people are paying dakshina to Modi?  Royalty is based on the hereditary principle. Congress and the NCP and Shiv Sena etc. are dynastic. Modi is not promoting his nephew, like Mamta. He stands for meritocracy not nepotism.

In this cosmology, the king upholds the dharmic order and does whatever is needed to accomplish this, including the expansion of territory, the extraction of tribute, the personal settlement of disputes, the distribution of titles, honours and fiefdoms and the triumphalist elimination of enemies.

This cretin is describing the Congress party currently ruled by a lady of Italian origin. 

This is the Hindu rashtra,

as opposed to what? Sonia Gandhi's reign as Il Duce?

and what Modi and Shah have done is to capture enough of the resources of a modern nation-state to perform the drama of a Hindu theatre-state (the phrase is from the anthropologist Clifford Geertz) with enough force and fakery to capture a major part of the electorate for the past six years. Modi, in particular, has gained tremendous mileage by annexing the means and procedures of an electoral democracy to the messages, icons and rituals of an ersatz Hindu kingdom.

But Hindu Kingdoms are dynastic. Why hasn't Modi anointed a nephew as his successor?

This is a hard trick to pull off and its fuel could well be running out. India is not Gujarat-Pradesh (Gujarat plus Uttar Pradesh),

Gujarat is a Pradesh. The word means State. 

Modi is not Nehru or Vikramaditya, Ajay Mohan Bisht is a pathological distortion of Gorakhpanthi ideals.

Says who? Not the people he represented in Parliament for 20 years. What does this Tamil dude who settled in America long ago know about 'Gorakhpanthi ideals'? Their big issue was cow-protection. Is Yogi Adityanath handing out beef burgers to all and sundry? 

Furthermore, the politics of hate, stigma and killing do not draw on renewable emotional resources.

Which is why Pakistan is such a lovely place for non-Muslims to live. 

The demand for satisfaction is always ahead of the fulfilment of these dark desires and sooner or later, enemies return to being neighbours, sub-humans reclaim their humanity and differences cease to be triggers of anxiety.

Demands are always ahead of the fulfillment of the relevant desire. Appadurai, being an anthropologist, may feel this is a very profound discovery. Speaking generally, an anthropologist first shits himself before he demands to be directed to the nearest toilet. By contrast, non-anthropologists, demand things they want before, not after, they get them. 

Furthermore, Indians of every type have had more than six decades in which they have gotten used to the idea of some sort of everyday amity, to the notion that they need not stick to their aukat

aukat means 'hereditary station in life'. It is the notion that Rahul should be P.M because his Daddy and Granny and Great Grand daddy held that office. Modi should fuck off and go back to serving tea. 

and to the idea that the state has to be accountable for jobs, food and health. India has lived too long with these ideals to fall for a Hinduised fantasy of macho violence, ethnic cleansing and hunting for new minorities to demonise. India is a land of a million minorities and no majority.

Hindus represent 80 percent of the population. That's a big majority. Why pretend otherwise? 

Indeed, the care of minor populations is strictly identical to the care of us all. There is some evidence that this realisation is the glue and the fuel that is driving the remarkable efflorescence of civil disobedience that we see across the country today.

But this has only lasted a month and will disappear after the Assembly elections. There is no 'efflorescence'. There is merely some localized muscle-flexing and a few scattered turf-wars.

This will not be an easy struggle because it is a battle between dreams. And somewhere in that battle, a better reality will and must emerge.

Because that's what happens, right? Dreams start fighting each other. My dream of a pussy cat which turns into a chocolate eclair beat up your dream of standing up in front of the class for show and tell and suddenly discovering you are completely naked.  Then we both wake up to discover that the world has changed. A new, better reality, in which pussycats turn into chocolate eclairs has come into being. Then Appadurai bursts into the room. 'I've just shat myself' he explains- though the thing is self-evident- 'this means I needed to use the toilet. However, because I am an anthropologist I did not know that demands should be made before they are fulfilled, not after.'

It is good to know that even in a world where pussy cats turn into chocolate eclairs, somethings remain the same. Anthropologists will shit themselves no matter who rules India. The Wire will publish their shitty little screeds. Meanwhile our dreams will get into more fights. Pussy cats will turn into chocolate eclairs which are revealed to be completely naked when they stand up for show and tell. This is because of evil Gujeratis tampering with India's D.N.A.