Khilnani's crap idea of India

 It is more than 20 years since Sunil Khilnani's 'The Idea of India' came out. It contains no ideas- as opposed to ignorant and absurd assumptions about the unique and magical nature of India- or, indeed, coherent thoughts, whatsoever. It is wholly vacuous. Consider the following- 

In the first instance, the history of independent India can be seen, most narrowly but also most sharply, as the history of a state:

This could be said of any country at any time. But it isn't true. The history of independent India must be seen, most narrowly and most sharply, as the history of  Indian people. The history of the Indian State is merely a minor part of a much bigger story. No doubt, for some specific purpose- e.g. to write a shite book- one may have a more narrow focus. But that focus is misleading and myopic.

one of the first, largest and poorest of the many created by the ebb of European empire after the end of the Second World War.

European empires ebbed at the end of the First World War. India, like Ireland, Egypt and Afghanistan, could have secured independence by 1924. It didn't because of Gandhi- who unilaterally surrendered and thus broke the Congress/Khilafat combine. This meant that Independence would come at the price of partition and it would be Britain which would decide when and how power would be transferred. 

The 'idea of India' started of as the idea of British Raj being turned into an Indian run operation- with at least some of the Indians involved being directly elected by the masses. But first Buddhist Burma, then the Muslim majority areas went their own way. What was left was simply the idea of the Hindu majority areas, with some contested margins, taking over from the Raj, while the 'idea of Pakistan' was the idea of the Muslim majority areas which had been formerly Hindu setting up their own State. 

Thus the only real story here is how Hinduism came to have a National horizon. To cut this long story short, it is sufficient to concentrate on status competition between endogamous sub-castes which could either express itself as superior adherence to highly restrictive rules or else advertise its purity by readiness to make sacrifices in the struggle against foreign, mleccha, hegemony and paramountcy. Everything else which needs to be mentioned applies equally to other countries. It is history, but not specifically Indian history. 

Thus, the reason India abandoned the Monarchical model was because everybody else did. During the First World War, it became obvious that War was no longer the sport of Kings. Thus Nationalism would triumph under either a military junta or, if the Army played no role in the transition, then, it would be under the rubric of democracy. In India, the pay off for the latter was high and had to do so with curbing wasteful inter and intra-caste status competition with respect to holier than thou ritual purity and restrictive rules on women, permissible occupations, overseas travel etc. 

Khilnani, because he teaches a shite subject, is forced to tell a different story- a fairy tale. Apparently, India is unique. It is magical. It isn't like any other country. He belongs to Yakov Smirnoff school of Indian political thought. In other countries, the Social landscape features a State- which can only be as modern as the Society is modern. In India, Society is so hide-bound that any sort of State might make landfall upon its shores without anybody objecting, or taking much notice. 

The arrival of the modern state on the Indian landscape over the past century and a half, and its growth and consolidation as a stable entity after 1947, are decisive historical facts.

No they aren't. Nobody can agree what a 'modern state' is or when it arrives or whether or not it is a 'stable entity'. 

They mark a shift from a society where authority was secured by diverse local methods to one where it is located in a single, sovereign agency. 

Authority is always secured by 'diverse local methods' even if some stupid pedagogue locates it in a 'single, sovereign agency'. 

Seen in this perspective, the performance of the Indian state invites evaluation

by its outcomes for its citizens. That's all that matters. 

by external and comparative standards: for example, its ability to maintain the territorial boundaries it inherited from the British Raj,

this is irrelevant. Maintaining or extending territorial boundaries matters to Empires. It doesn't matter to modern nation states. We don't think less of the Czechs because they parted company with the Slovaks.  

to preserve its domestic authority and the physical security of its citizens,

by itself, this too is irrelevant. A modern state need not be obsessed with maintaining 'domestic authority'. Getting 'mechanism design' right means spontaneous order and the rule of law.  

to act as an agent of economic development,

If the State acts as an agent then agent-principal hazard arises. It is better if it simply sticks to incentive compatible mechanism design.  

and to provide its citizens with social opportunities.

Social opportunities? Like what?- speed dating? What's wrong with just organizing a Collective insurance scheme to maintain a 'social minimum' safety-net? 

Unlike the states of modern Europe, which acquired these responsibilities in gradual sequence, new states like India have had to adopt them, and be seen to pursue them, rapidly and simultaneously.

This is a fantasy. States don't work that way. It takes time and money to build State capacity. True, after the War, State Capacity in industrialized countries could be repurposed because, by 'Wagner's Law, the State was getting a much larger slice of  GDP. 

India, like other similar countries, did not 'adopt' the sort of responsibilities that Atlee's Britain did. It couldn't. It was too poor. It is by telling such bien pensant responsibilities to go fuck themselves that poor countries become less poor.  

The ability of a modern state to meet these heavily instrumental criteria is undoubtedly crucial to the life chances of its citizens.

This is meaningless gibberish. Getting the fuck out of shitholes is crucial to life- chances. In the case of modern India, emigrating to the highly traditional state of Saudi Arabia was a pretty effective way of improving life-chances.  

But these responsibilities have raised expectations often very distant from the state’s practical capacities.

These weren't 'expectations'. They were fantasies. Indeed, it is a fantasy of shite pedants of worthless subjects that States have magical properties. 

Why is India a democracy? The answer is simple. Princes took one look at modern warfare and realized they couldn't do that shit. The First World War showed the Emperors sucked ass big time. India couldn't go the way of the Soviet Union or Fascist Italy because Indians were so stupid they thought the sun shone out of Mahatma Gandhi's back side. But the man was an utter cretin. In February 1922, just when Britain was at weakest militarily and had to concede defeat in Turkey and on the anti-Bolshevik front and was forced to recognize the Independence of Ireland and Egypt and Afghanistan, Gandhi, gibbering with fear and shitting himself incessantly, unilaterally surrendered saying India was not ready, might never be ready, for Independence but, since he himself was as stupid as fuck, could the Govt. just kindly lock him up tell he became slightly less stupid or lost his capacity to work mischief? The Brits were happy to oblige. Congress, under Gandhi, muffed its next two opportunities- the second was when Britain was financially weak due to the Wall Street Crash. This time, Gandhi's great achievement was to unite all the Minorities, not just the Muslims, against the Hindu dominated INC. The Brits stopped talking to Gandhi and just jailed Congress if it didn't play nice while imposing a solution which maximized their 'residuary control rights'. Even with the Japs knocking at the door, Gandhi and Congress managed to fuck up with their last big push. The new question was whether those nutters would stay in jail while power passed to Princes and Sectarian leaders with Commies lurking in the underbrush biding their time.

It was in this context that the Nehruvian 'idea of India' triumphed. What did it involve? The answer is that power should pass to 'the last Englishman in India'- as Nehru described himself in the Fifties. Gandhism was transformed into Macaulayism- instead of barristers pretending they were ignorant peasants, ignorant peasants would pretend they understood whatever high falutin' bureaucratic shite they were obliged to read out, in halting tones, during Ministerial question time. Begging bowl diplomacy permitted the burgeoning of this type of bureaucracy that Kipling had satirized while, in the boondocks, Vinobha Bhave and Jayprakash Narayan and other such nutters pursued Gandhian programs of Social Reconstruction which were purely farcical. 'Bhoodan', it will be remembered, was so successful that the entire state of Bihar was gifted away! J.P's 'sampoorna kranti' involved the replacement of Indira Gandhi by Morarji Desai! This would be like the American Revolution replacing George III with Henry VIII!

 By the time of Independence, it was clear that India could neither be an Empire nor a Dictatorship (because Bose's INA was a miserable failure).  What could it be? Because of the 'Martial Race' theory, it couldn't be run by the Army because recruitment was heavily biased geographically. Thus, the answer was, India had to continue to be whatever it needed to be so as to raise enough in taxes to pay salaries and pensions with a little left over for shite Professorships in shite subjects. It turned out that the Hindus the Brits transferred power to were perfectly happy to stick with the institutions Britain had built or refurbished to suit their own tastes. So, Independent India's story is the story of the success of a British blueprint. But that blueprint was drawn up by people who had turned the sub-continent into a cohesive enough power to project force as far as Europe and Japan. This had never happened before and will never happen again. The simple truth is that 'the idea' of a country does not matter. What matters is what worked there before because, chances are, that's what's making it work now. Khilnani, a cretin by profession, pretends otherwise with absurd results-

For all its magnificent antiquity and historical depth, contemporary India is unequivocally a creation of the modern world.

No it isn't. The 'modern world' didn't create language or ethnicity or religion or any other type of oikeiosis. Contemporary India is only modern in the sense that modernity is contemporary. But this could be said of anything at all.

The fundamental agencies and ideas of modernity – European colonial expansion,

which pre-dates the modern age 

the state,

which existed in India before recorded History 

nationalism,

which was old in the time of Amos 

democracy,

a word which pre-dates Christ 

economic development

which occurred in the Indus Valley five thousand years ago 

– all have shaped it. The possibility that India could be united into a single political community was

fully realized under the Brits. Then the Burmese went their own way as did the Muslim majority Provinces.  

the wager of India’s modern, educated, urban élite,

was lost in 1922 because they had chosen to follow a shithead.  India could not go down the road of Ireland or Egypt. Instead, the Brits decided the pace and scope of the transfer of power while ensuring their geopolitical interests and historic investments were protected.

The Brits needed willing partners for the deal to go through. In the case of Congress, failed mass agitations and long spells of porridge were a necessary precondition. Exhausted volcanoes, like Nehru would keep Britain solvent out of sheer stupidity or laziness. There is nothing like sharing a jail cell with a bunch of old farts to get you to narrow your intellectual horizons and compromise with reality.

whose intellectual horizons were extended by these modern ideas and whose sphere of action was expanded by these modern agencies.

India was as poor as shit. Its 'modern agencies' were inefficient because of politicized management and (in common with the private sector) low productivity and lack of innovation. Fiscal 'headroom' tended to decrease decade after decade. Begging bowl diplomacy turned out to be counterproductive. 

It was a wager on an idea: the idea of India.

No. There was an idea of what had been British India being run by Indians without regard to ancient sectarian divisions. That idea turned out to be shit. There was another idea about a Socialist India which also turned out to be shit. Then there was the notion of a Tiger Economy presided over by technocrats appointed by the Dynasty. That too turned out to be shit. What remains? The reality. There is a Hindu Nation which needs to use Religion and Patriotism to dissolve casteism and do smart things. That's it. That's the whole story. 

This nationalist elite

failed. It wagered on a mass boycott of British institutions and lost in 1922 itself. In the end, there was a much larger 'loyalist' elite which took over the top jobs in the Army and the Bureaucracy and the Academy. Interestingly, these guys would often have one or two 'freedom fighters' in the family. But they had no 'ideas' whatsoever. One or two of their more cretinous progeny, who couldn't get into Med School or IIT, ended up as Khilnani type pedagogues.  

itself had no single, clear definition of this idea,

Nonsense! Congress thought it could take over the Raj as a going concern. What they'd do with it did not concern them greatly. After all, what had the Brits done with it? Something indescribably boring. At least, the Brits got to go back to blighty once they hit retirement age. Having been a Viceroy or a Governor General could get you a tasty gig as Lord High Commissioner to the Church of Scotland or something similarly rad.  

and one of the remarkable facts about the nationalist movement

was that it convinced nationalists, like Jinnah, that Hindus are fucking awful. Muslims need a separate country to get away from those cretins. 

that brought India to independence was its capacity to entertain diverse, often contending visions of India.

which were as boring and stupid as they were absurd. India would be run pretty much the way it had been run though the color of the bureaucrats at the top may have changed.  

‘One way of defining diversity for India,’

is by turning to some wittier nation and ripping off their definition 

the poet and critic A. K. Ramanujan once wrote, ‘is to say what the Irishman is said to have said about trousers. When asked whether trousers were singular or plural, he said, “Singular at the top and plural at the bottom”.’ But Indian nationalism before Independence was plural even at the top, a dhoti with endless folds.

Many Muslims don't wear dhotis. Nor do women. Apparently, Indian Nationalism was based on dehati Hindu misogyny.  

Its diversity was

non-existent. All those fuckers looked and dressed like rustic retards.  

emblematically incarnated in the gallery of characters who constituted the nationalist pantheon, a pantheon whose unageing, cherub-like faces are still on display, painted with garish affection on calendars and posters or moulded into just recognizable statues and figures, in tea-shops and at crossroads across the country.

Very true. Visiting Indologists often mistook representations of Hanuman for some stalwart of the freedom struggle or vice versa. On the other hand, it isn't racist when I do it- coz I iz bleck.  

Khilnani's ignorance of history is stunning. 

In pre-colonial India, power was not embodied in the concept of a state, whether republican or absolutist.

The fact is India had Kingdoms of a more or less absolutist type. So did most other countries- though, I suppose, you could argue that Religion and Mercantile communities had some countervailing power and thus, in practice, 'limited Monarchies' prevailed.

Khilnani, cretin that he is, says 'Politics was thus consigned to the realm of spectacle and ceremony. 

Only by the Brits, and only in peacetime. 'Ornamentalism', however, was merely cosmetic.

No concept of a state, 

Then what the fuck does 'Rashtra' mean? Foreigners found powerful, cohesive, States in India from before the time of Christ.

an impersonal public authority with a continuous identity,

Such as those which made land grants or created Temple and other Trusts which exist to this very day. If Indian Law recognizes that 'impersonal public authority with continuous identity' existed long before Colonialism, why can't Khilnani do so? 

 emerged: kings represented only themselves, never enduring states.  The truth is that kings represented dynasties and those dynasties represented specific territories. Indeed, much to everybody's surprise, democratic politics in South Asia has a significant dynastic component. Some ex-Princes have re-established themselves through the ballot box. The CM of Punjab is the heir to the throne of Patiala. Sooner or later some scion of Scindias will reoccupy the CM's office in Rajasthan. Even the Gandhi dynasty may be revived. 

This is not to say that every part of India was monarchical. There were also some tribal areas with 'republican' features. The magic of the ballot box is that Paretian 'residues and derivations' get conserved. Still, sometimes bullets fly.

 The Brits introduced elections on a restricted franchise and that practice took root. Ceylon got universal suffrage at the beginning of the Thirties. India could have done so at the same time, had the minorities not objected. Interestingly, Indian women got the vote before French women. 

Khilnani thinks India had greater political instability than Europe. The reverse was the case precisely because of economic 'fixity' and 'cultural consistency'.

It was this arrangement of power that explains the most peculiar characteristic of India’s pre-colonial history: the perpetual instability of political rule, the constant rise and fall of dynasties and empires, combined with the society’s unusual fixity and cultural consistency.'

Britain has seen the rise and fall of dynasties and would still see it- if dynasties still mattered. 

Across the subcontinent, varied economies and cultures were matched by an assortment of political arrangements.

Like Germany or Italy at the same period. 

They were nothing like the static ‘oriental despotism’ conjured up by colonial and Marxist historians:

Yes there was. Eastern Rulers were shit. That's how come the Orient got conquered.  

deliberative and consultative forms of politics did exist, but there was no protracted historical struggle to install institutions of representative government, nor (despite a hardly passive rural or urban poor) did large-scale popular movements act to curb the powers of rulers.

But 'large scale popular movements' did not 'curb the powers of' British rulers or Indian rulers or Pakistani rulers or any other type of ruler. Losing a war or getting killed or running out of money is what curbs a ruler's power. Khilnani should know this. He is old enough to remember the Seventies- a time when 'popular movements' caused rulers to fuck over the populace so thoroughly that it shat its pants. 

Most importantly, before the gradual British acquisition of most of India’s territory no single imperium had ever ruled the whole, immense subcontinental triangle.

But three or four had come pretty darn close. The Brits took over the existing Revenue administration and exercised authority and enforced laws pretty much on the same basis as had obtained before.

India’s social order successfully curbed and blunted the ambitions of political power,

No it didn't. Guys with spears and guns did so but only by securing the reality of political power at every level of society. 

and made it extraordinarily resistant to political moulding.

Fuck off! Every time a Turkish Prince got chased out of his Princedom, he'd head for India hoping to set up an Empire there. This is because Indians didn't give a shit about 'political moulding'. In the end, its rulers got the message and sank into lethargy.  

The basis of this resistance lay in the village, and its distinct form of community: the jati.

OMG! Khilnani doesn't get that a village has to have people of different jatis, to provide different services, though one may predominate. But villages did no fucking resistance whatsoever. Unlike China or Europe, no great conscript armies were levied on most of Indian soil. Lack of military training meant 'resistance' was shit.

These groups, numbering in the thousands, were governed by strict rules of endogamy and by taboos about purity, and arranged a social hierarchy: varna.

So what? There had been plenty of absolutist Monarchies over large portions of Indian territory. Jatis had little countervailing power. At best, they could emigrate. By contrast, 'social brigandage' cut across Jati and Varna lines. But such 'rebellions' could themselves create new Dynastic 'Stationary Bandits'. 

Why is Khilnani pretending that Indians had some magical power to resist Turkish or British or other Imperiums? The plain fact is that it did not. True, Hindu majority areas wanted to be ruled by Hindus speaking a Sanskritized language. But they also wanted rulers who were not utterly shit. This is why they preferred smart Turkish or British rulers to shite Indian rulers. The question was, could Hindu India produce less shite leaders? The answer was, Hindus, who have spent a lot of time in jail smelling each other's farts, could, in old age, indeed be persuaded to sign off on Ministerial files without talking too much bollocks. But, it turned out, penniless RSS pravachaks could do an even better job because their brains had not been buggered to buggery by exposure to Khilnani & Co's crap pedagogy.  Rahul baba, on the other hand, may actually have read Khilnani's crap. That's how come the cretin has a 'vichardhara'.