Pratap Bhanu Mehta legitimizing the bastard progeny of unholy buggery.

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

The noose is tightening around all independent institutions in India.

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

The episode featuring sedition charges against eminent writers and directors — now belatedly withdrawn — is a reminder of the peculiar nature of the crisis of liberal institutionalism in India.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We cannot rely on the law.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We cannot rely on discussion.

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

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

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

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

This is why authoritarian politics disdains discussion.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There is direct intimidation using law and violence.

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

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

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

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

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

We cannot rely on artfully using fragmentation of power.

Mehta can rely upon nothing save our derision and ridicule.

Let power check power.

No. Let the Law prevail.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More particularly if civic freedom requires no defense. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As opposed to when exactly?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Consider the paranoia evinced by the following sentence-

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

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

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

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

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

Ancient Egyptians in Latin America

The passage of millennia has erased almost every trace of the peregrinations of Ancient Egyptian visitors to South America save perhaps that awesome testimonial to Princess Nefertiti's pit stop in the Andes still known to us as Lake Titicaca.

I know about this coz I went to primary school in Africa. Sadly, even graduates of Latin American Studies here in London are totally unaware of this fact.

I may mention that I took a truly colossal dump on my one visit to Turin. I understand there is now a range of mountains to the north of that City known as the Alps.  Apparently people ski down the slopes of my monumental turd. Why  am I not receiving any royalties?  Is it coz I iz bleck?

Amartya Sen interviewed in the New Yorker

Isaac Chotiner has interviewed Sen in the New Yorker. Does Sen say anything sensible? Let us see-

Sen- I remember talking with my grandfather and saying, “Do you think preventive detention is ever going to go away from India?” And him saying, “Not until independence. We have to gain independence for that.” Unfortunately, we have gained independence, and at first the Congress Party introduced preventive detention in a rather mild form.

Mild? Sen is out of his mind! The 1950 Preventive Detention Act was draconian! It permitted the arrest and detention, with no right of judicial review, of anyone suspected of wishing to harm not just 'social stability' but also 'economic development'! To be fair, Government para-military forces and Congress goons were more used to simply killing people rather than locking them up. Sen's Communist pals must have told him about how their people were treated. The Act was supposed to last for only one year but was renewed again and again only lapsing in 1969. But, thanks to the Bangladesh War, the even more infamous MISA was brought in, under which Mrs. Gandhi jailed Opposition leaders and journalists and so forth. The Emergency, which was peak dynastic authoritarianism, was the worst episode in Indian history in terms of mass incarceration, forced sterilization and the unrestricted use of third degree methods on innocent people.

Interestingly, Sheikh Abdullah, who spent long years in prison, himself brought in a Preventive Detention Act once he was in power in J&K. His son and grandson can now thank him for that.

And now, of course, it is very strong. There is an act called the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, which was amended this year to give the government the right to designate someone as a terrorist, without having to provide any proof and without having judicial review.

This 1967 Act has been strengthened or weakened depending on the level of the terrorist threat. It is a bipartisan issue. The fact is, if there were no such Act, what we would have instead is more extra-judicial killing which is counter-productive from the Intelligence point of view.

And that is back again, which I never thought would happen now that we are an independent country.

Why not? Sen was 18 when the Preventive Detention Act was brought in. He was teaching in Delhi, aged 35, when the Unlawful Activities Act was brought in. He had plenty of friends in Delhi who could tell him what happened during the Emergency. Why did he hold such an absurd belief?

Where was your family in 1947, when Partition occurred?
My father was a professor at Dhaka University, so he was teaching there along with quite a few rather good academics. But, in 1946, I think five or six people left because Dhaka University had so much rioting and trouble that there were hardly any classes. Along with my father, there was S. N. Bose, the physicist known for Bose-Einstein Statistics. My father, who was a chemist, moved, after looking for other jobs, to Delhi, and was Delhi’s land-development commissioner. But then he became the chair of the West Bengal Public Service Commission.

So, Sen was very well connected! No wonder he had such a good start in life! I suppose, for someone as cocooned from reality as him, it would be natural to hold absurd beliefs about Indian politics and economics.

What is admirable about Sen is that he had no illusions that the sort of shite he taught could help India in any way. Thus he migrated to greener pastures where he could gain from intellectual affirmative action and pretend to represent the poor and suffering masses of the sub-continent.

Does the turn that India has taken in the past five years make you think differently about the founding of the country, and its constitution, or is that too much hindsight?
I think it is too much hindsight. The Indian constitution was pretty well based on analysis of the Constituent Assembly, which had some of the finest discussion of what the constitution should be. What it overlooked, I think, as a committed secular democracy, is that if there is a political group or party or movement that came to get a huge amount of support, which happened in India with the Hindutva movement, they can manipulate the situation pretty sharply. And here I think the Indian Supreme Court is very slow and divided, and, despite the good it has done, hasn’t been able to be as much of a guardian of pluralism as it could be. 

Previously, one dynasty was 'manipulating the situation pretty sharply' to keep itself in power from decade to decade. Sen may think this meant 'pluralism' triumphed because...urm...well, the dynasty made a point of attending Cambridge- though they didn't always get a degree from there- so, obviously, I mean Cambridge wallahs are quite pukka donchaknow.

 The problem with the dynasty was that it was corrupt, crooked and incompetent. So, sooner or later, the Hindu masses would revolt against their rule. Congress pretended that the BJP would kill minorities and tried to scare itself up a vote bank on this basis. However, other caste-based dynastic parties were doing the same thing so the anti-Hindu vote got splintered and the BJP won.

Today, everything is dominated by a hard-nosed, hard-Hindutva thinking. And the President, Prime Minister, the leadership are all Hindu. But if you compare that to a dozen years ago, 2007, let’s say, we had a Muslim President, a Sikh Prime Minister, a Christian leader of the ruling party.

The Muslim President was appointed by the BJP. Sonia- the 'Christian leader'- didn't give him a second term. The Sikh Prime Minister could not get elected from Punjab or Delhi, he was nominated from far away Assam. He was a faithful servant of the dynasty. Sen ignores the fact that one family had dominated Indian politics and that it had dispensed with the rule of law and locked up its opponents when it found it convenient to do so. He does not say that the current Home Minister is not Hindu- perhaps he is not aware of this fact. What is certain is that no family controls the BJP the way one branch of the Gandhi dynasty controls Congress. The other branch is with Modi.

The majority of the parliamentarians were Hindu, but they were not trying to impose their way of thinking over everyone. And that’s what’s happened. And now we are suddenly in a position where you can chastise a Muslim for eating beef, which is also very nonclassical.

The Constitution has a Directive Principle requiring States to take action to protect the cow. Congress Legislatures introduced draconian laws relating to beef. In large parts of India, the mere possession of beef is a cognizable offense carrying a stiff jail term. This has been true for many years. Sen was subject to such laws when he lived in India- though, perhaps, he was unaware of it.

Whether a thing is 'classical' or 'non-classical' is irrelevant. The law, in some states, says you will go to prison if you knowingly possess or consume beef.

If you go to the very old Sanskrit documents, like the Vedas, there is nothing prohibiting the eating of beef.

Sen comes from Bengal where the Navya-Nyaya school flourished. Their savants explained that the ban on beef was 'apadh dharma'- i.e. required in this age. Vivekananda took the same position. Brahmos, like Sen's parents, did not eat beef.

So there is a decline not only from secularism and democracy in post-independence India but also in the understanding of the heritage even of Hindu India.

There has been a decline in Sen's mental faculties. However, now dynastic rule has ended, democracy is on a stronger footing. Secularism is meaningless. The Rule of Law matters but this requires more resources.

We are also overlooking the fact that India was quite important in the eastern world, and Sanskrit was pretty much the lingua franca of the first millennium A.D., because of the influence of Buddhist thinking.

A lingua franca is a language used in trade. Sanskrit, like Latin or Greek, was a scholarly language known to priests and monks. However, the Buddhist scriptures are written in Pali and it is likely that the relevant 'sprachbund' was based on a sort of creolized Pali

For a thousand years, India was a Buddhist country.

No. India was a Hindu country in which Buddhism, Jainism, the Ajivika sect and numerous others flourished alongside Vedic and Agamic worship. It was frequently the case that members of the same family had different preferences as between Shramanic orders. What unified these families was their Vedic purohit or family priest. To this day we see the Thai and Monarch retains the services of a Vedic priest whose distant ancestors came from South India.  The Cambodian King too has a hereditary Brahman priest.

That is our heritage, too. When we try to revive Nalanda—which is the oldest university in the world, started in the fifth century, to which students came not only from India but from China, Japan, Korea, Indonesia—when we tried to revive that with coöperation with East Asian countries, the government, the Hindu government, made it no longer a prominent Buddhist university, and it was made to look more and more like a Hindu establishment.

Nalanda is not the oldest university in the world. The Muslims destroyed it many centuries ago. With help from Sri Lanka, a successful Pali College was set up in Nalanda. It has long been recognized as a University by the Indian Government. The Nalanda International University of which Sen was the first, and worst, Chancellor, was not Buddhist in the slightest greatly to the ire of the Sri Lankans. By contrast, China's Nanhai is a Buddhist University and is doing well. Thanks to Sen and the VC he chose, Nalanda International University was an utter fiasco. Students complained they could not even get yogurt ! No distinguished academic took up residence. Students had to make do with T.As many of whom lacked even a PhD. Thankfully, after Sen, and Yeo, resigned, a sensible man was appointed and an experienced VC took over the running of the place. But this white elephant was doomed from the start because Sen, very stupidly, insisted it be a Post Graduate College teaching soft subjects. Nobody in their right mind would relocate to a backward part of Bihar to study such shite.

Sen does not understand that Hindu establishments want Jainism and Buddhism and so forth to be well taught. They want the leading Acharyas & Upadhyays of those traditions to come and give lectures and hold symposiums. They don't want some silly American turning up and talking nonsense about Yoga having been invented by the Brits.

I am Hindu, too. [Laughs.] I have nothing against Hinduism. In fact, oddly enough, when I was young, Penguin asked my grandfather to write a book on Hinduism. His English was quite limited. So the first book I had to edit and translate was a book on Hinduism.

This slim volume has a foreword by him. It shows he thought Buddhism and Jainism were sui generis and wholly independent of what went before or what survived along side them. This shows a remarkable obtuseness of mind and explains why Sen's Economic and Philosophical lucubrations are wholly worthless.

He was always saying what’s gone wrong in Nehru’s India was talk about Hindu-Muslim tolerance, but what was important was joint work rather than tolerance between Hindus and Muslim—that was to be celebrated as part of five hundred years of Indian history.

Continually talking shite helps no one- that is true enough. But 'joint-work' is equally useless. What is important is that people buy and sell goods and services they produce by working hard and using appropriate technology. The market can coordinate their actions, well enough. Religion is irrelevant. So is whether or not you sport a mustache or whether you prefer coffee to tea.

The importance of multiple identities is something that comes up time and again in your work, I’ve noticed—
Absolutely. It is very central. And, if you think about that, Bangladesh has been, in many ways, more successful than India now. It used to have a life expectancy lower than that of India. Now it is five years longer. Women’s literacy is higher than in India. And, in terms of the kind of narrowness of Hindu thinking, it is not reflected in a similar narrowness of Muslim thinking in Bangladesh. I think multiple identities have done a lot for Bangladesh.

Bangladesh got rid of most of its Hindus- including Sen's Dacca relatives. No wonder it has done better than West Bengal which continues to accept Muslim economic migrants from across the border. East Punjab got rid of its Muslims. It performs much better than Bangladesh or West Bengal. Gujarat, under Modi, did even better.

It was doing a lot for India, too, until there was a deliberate attempt to undermine it.

The deliberate attempt was made by the Muslim League. It is the reason many of Sen's relatives had to run away from their ancestral homes. Sen, however, thinks the problem was created by the RSS. Yet, there has been no ethnic cleansing in RSS strongholds. Why is that?

That had been present earlier. In the nineteen-twenties, there was a strong pro-Hindu movement. Gandhi was shot by an R.S.S. [Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the Fascist Hindu movement] member, which is the dominant influence on the B.J.P. today.

Godse was not a R.S.S member. He had been associated with the Hindu Mahasabha. Savarkar, not Gowalkar, was his Guru.
The R.S.S, unlike the Communist parties, stayed clean and did useful work. Thus it is now the only organization of its kind which enjoys respect. By contrast, the Congress Seva Dal- set up 2 years before the RSS- is a byword for hooliganism and corruption symbolized by its former head Jagdish Tytler.

But they were not in office. We didn’t feel threatened because they seemed like a fringe.

Sen's people had felt threatened by the Muslim League, which is why they fled Bangladesh- with good reason, it must be said. The RSS poses no threat to Sen. Why does he feel threatened?

But that fringe gradually became more dominant until the latest election, and they had a massive victory, a victory partially based on political effectiveness.

The RSS is a voluntary organization in which members use their own resources, they get no subventions from outside. Since it does arduous social work, naturally its growth has been slow and organic. The late Arun Jaitley is a typical example of the RSS mentality. He was the only barrister to ensure that his staff got their full share of relevant fees and, what's more, paid for their houses and children's schooling. There was an outpouring of genuine grief at his death which no Chidambaram or Kapil Sabil will receive. Indeed, Sabil is now being sued by Barkha Dutt for cheating her and other staff of a TV station he set up to support Congress in the elections. She isn't saying he has himself eaten much of the money provided for the purpose- but then she doesn't have to.

Modi doesn’t have the breadth of vision about India—multireligious, multiethnic India.

That is why he has been elected. We don't want another Nehruvian gas-bag. Every part of India has almost identical problems- these are of an economic or Law & Order nature- and that is what Modi must address. There is no religion or ethnicity in India which needs the P.M to come and lecture them about their own identity. The thing would be an impertinence.

He has been, from his childhood, relating to the R.S.S. and the propaganda of that perspective.

While Sen has been, from his childhood, relating to the Bengali buddhijivi and the vacous shite they prattle.

On the other hand, as a political leader, he is dynamic and enormously successful. So there was the Modi factor. They also got a massive amount of money. I was quite surprised how the business community, not just two or three that are often quoted as the big donors, they got support from the bulk of the business community. They had more money and gumption at the time of the election than any other party. They won an election with a massive majority, but, again, you have to look at the issues I have written about, even in the context in America. The electoral system has its flaws. That massive majority he had was based on less than forty per cent of the vote.

The business community gave him money to improve the business climate. Poor people couldn't give him money, but they gave him their votes because he does 'last mile delivery' better than the other guys. That's it. That's the whole story.

Sen may say- 'Ah! But if the Electoral system was different...' He might as well say, 'Ah! But if India were located between Sweden and Iceland...' Facts are facts. There is no probability that the Electoral system will be changed in India anytime soon. But, Sen may say, does not this undermine the legitimacy of Modi's mandate? The answer is nobody gives a toss about Sen's notion of legitimacy. Only what the Courts say matters in the short term, though, no doubt, medium to long term, it is the people's voice which counts.

Yes, although unlike someone like Trump or Erdoǧan, who struggle to get much more than fifty per cent support, Modi is enormously popular. A large majority of the country approves of him.
It’s not clear that is the case. India is a country of more than a billion people. Two hundred million of them are Muslim. Two hundred million of them are Dalit, or what used to be called untouchables. A hundred million are what used to be called scheduled tribes, and they get the worst deal in India, even worse than the Dalits. Then there is quite a large proportion of the Hindu population that is skeptical. Many of them have been shot. Many of them have been put in prison.

Many Hindus have been shot or put in prison? How come Hindus haven't noticed? In my experience, they tend to get quite vocal when such things happen.

Do the Muslims, or the Dalits or the Adivasis, or 'skeptical' Hindus want the Dynasty? No. Do they want the Commies? Decidedly not. What about the various corrupt, criminalized, Casteist outfits? No thanks. That's why Modi wins.

In these circumstances, to say that a majority supports him would be difficult.

The majority supports Modi because he is the Prime Minister and he is discharging that office in a manner superior to any rival. Sen may not like it, but that's how Democracy works. Preferences can only be revealed over actual alternatives.

It’s a situation where there are many restrictions. The newspapers don’t get government ads, and they probably don’t get many private ads, either, if the government is against you. As a result, it is very hard to have independent TV or newspapers, because of difficulties created by the government.

This means that an 'independent press' would ignore a famine if it paid better to do so. This undercuts one of Sen's central arguments.

The big thing that we know from John Stuart Mill is that democracy is government by discussion, and, if you make discussion fearful, you are not going to get a democracy, no matter how you count the votes.

We can't know anything from John Stuart Mill because he never saw a Democracy in his life. All Government involves discussion. So does the management of any type of Enterprise. Deciding where to dine involves discussion.

And that is massively true now. People are afraid now. I have never seen this before.

Because, during the Emergency, anybody could shout 'Sanjay Gandhi is a cretin' and do so with impunity.

When someone says something critical of the government on the phone with me, they say, “I’d better talk about it when I see you because I am sure that they are listening to this conversation.”

Sen must think we are very naive. A guy who is afraid of criticizing the government would not get on the phone with Sen- because Sen is a critic of Modi. He would not be so foolish as to say 'I'll tell you this in person, coz my phone is tapped'. The secret police would assume he had got hold of dangerous information and would have him 'disappeared' or killed in a car crash or something of that sort.

That is not a way to run a democracy.

But it isn't the way India is run. This is just the paranoid fantasy of a senile serial liar.
The BJP, we know, is Sen's bete noire. Whom does he like?

There is a category called Naxals, who are supposed to be Maoist extremists. There are people who have been accused of that and put in prison for that. 

There you have it. Naxals are falsely accused while Modi's minion's eavesdrop on people who call Sen up on the phone.

You wrote, after the election, “Many might prefer the account that the B.J.P. won what is called ‘the ideological argument’ against the Congress Party. But there has been no particular victory for the philosophy of Hindu nationalism and no noticeable vanquishing of the idea of inclusiveness and unity championed by Gandhi, Nehru and Tagore.” Can you explain what you meant by that, and if you still feel that way?

The explanation is not far to seek. Hindu nationalism venerates Gandhi and Tagore. Nehru's dynasty, however, is not venerated because it has hurt, not helped the country. The same is true of Sen. People thought he was smart coz he'd got the Nobel, but he turned out to be a cretin whose every policy suggestion was idiotic.

I do feel that way. It is very easy to excite people on particular causes, like Kashmir, which I think is a bad cause, because there is no reason Kashmir should not have continued to have the dispensation it had as a part of the Indian regime. But it is easy to increase popular support. That, of course, happened in the general election, in much the way it happened in favor of Mrs. Thatcher at the time of the Falklands War. If you remember, Mrs. Thatcher was losing the election, and then came the Falklands War.
I was born that year, so I don’t remember. But yes, the “Falklands factor.”
The Falklands changed the British into becoming nationalists. It didn’t last very long, but enough to get Mrs. Thatcher a massive victory.

Both Sen and myself were in England at that time. Mrs. Thatcher was not 'losing the election'. She first won the Falklands War and then, after the economy started picking up, she called an election. Labor was in disarray because Michael Foot had initially been gung-ho about the war. After all, the man had been against appeasement and General Galtieri was a genuine fascist.

If you look at the election earlier this year, a part was played by strong propaganda, a part was played by the fear factor, a part was played by the excitement of the war that was going on between Pakistan and India, when there were government claims about a sabotage of an Indian Army convoy. Worse than war was war hysteria. Given that that’s the test of Hindutva being popular, it wasn’t as popular as the vote indicated. Every time there have been attempts to see whether minorities should be crushed, in the rural areas in India, you don’t see that massive desire to crush the minorities.

By contrast, in Muslim countries, crushing minorities seems very popular. What makes India different? Is it the fact that the majority are Hindus?

There is a tolerance of minorities, and that is a strong tradition that continues to this day.
India did elect someone as Prime Minister who presided over massive ethnic violence against minorities.

His name was Rajiv Gandhi.

That is true, yeah. One of his big successes has been to get the court to squash the case against him and the Home Minister, Amit Shah, in the Gujarat killings of 2002.

Modi was acquitted of that before he came to power. Amit Shah was charged with an extra-judicial killing in 2005. He too was cleared because evidence was fabricated.

And so lots of Indians do not believe it. [In 2002, shortly after Modi became the chief minister of the state of Gujarat, more than a thousand people were murdered in anti-Muslim riots.

The anti-Sikh riots in Delhi claimed at least 5000. This was directly linked to Rajiv. Modi, by contrast, brought in the Army to put an end to the violence.

Modi was barred from the United States after being accused of helping incite the violence and failing to intervene to stop it.

This happened after Congress came to power. The thing was done at their request. Modi is the only person to whom this has happened. But it was an own goal for Sonia. She was showing that either she was doing something illegal or else the Indian Courts did not have the courage or ability to punish wrongdoing.

I think if you wanted to say there was a victory of the Hindutva idea, then it has to be the case that everyone has a great chance of finding the truth. More public discussion, more newspaper freedom, more television freedom. And with no one threatened with being in prison.

Then why shouldn't everybody simply tell lies the way Sen does? The answer is that fake news does not matter, cretins discussing shite don't matter. Hindutva prevailed because people stopped voting their caste rather than casting their vote. This meant that dynasties which depended on caste based vote banks suffered while the BJP gained.

So I think I wouldn’t say that there has been a victory. There would have been a victory if there was a press without fear, censorship from government, and the tyranny of advertising control.

Sen is being silly. Why would we be influenced by a mercenary Press only concerned with lining its own pockets? Journalists gain salience when they reject blandishments and threats. People take the Press seriously when some of its members show themselves willing to go to jail. You can't create an independent press by paying it and protecting it. The spirit of independence must be pre-existent in at least some members of the press. Otherwise, the Press loses salience and the sacred flame passes to some other type of actor.

If all this hadn’t happened, and he had won the election, I would have said yes.

It seems to me that it is a longstanding R.S.S. desire to change India in ideological ways.
Yes, they have generated an outlook which is quite effective: “This country has been dominated by Muslim invaders for a long time, and it is our time, and we should destroy that for once and all. And the country is mostly Hindu, and that should be reflected.”

Sen misses out the most important point. India has been dominated by one increasingly corrupt and incompetent dynasty. Getting rid of that dynasty is a noble ideal- 'Congress mukht bharat'.

But it overlooks that, in Hindu history, there is a lot of tolerance of different points of view.

Sen's own history is one of intolerance of criticism.

I once wrote a book called “The Argumentative Indian,” where I discuss how much arguing there was. They have constructed an ideology, which they have sold and which has become very, very effective.

Sen, too, constructed an ideology. Rahul Gandhi adopted it. He explained to a bewildered audience of Indian industrialists that the office of the Prime Minister, even that of an M.P, had lost all importance because his Mum had empowered poor women with all sorts of Rights which they could use to rise up. This was Sen's 'Development as Freedom'. Modi, by contrast, said being Prime Minister was a big deal. If he got the job he'd do a lot for poor people. He made good on this promise and was re-elected. We don't know if he has an ideology. We know Rahul has nothing but an ideology- a 'vichar dhara'. But Rahul's ideology is wholly ineffective. Indeed, it is nonsensical. So is the Communist ideology. But Modi is effective. That's it. That's the whole story. 

It’s a sad story, but I think it is a mistake to play up the sadness too much because it is still in our hands. When I grew up in British India, the British were immeasurably more powerful than the Indians were at that time, than Gandhi was, for example, and yet it became possible to win that war.

When Sen was fourteen, Lord Wavell was telling the British Cabinet that Britain was so weak that he, as Viceroy, needed to make a contingency plan- Operation
Madhouse- so as to minimize White casualties by executing a ' - withdrawal of the British, province by province, beginning with women and children, then civilians, then the army ..."
However, the fact remains, those Indians who supported the Brits were stronger than those who did not during the entire British Raj. That's the only reason it existed. 

In the past month, things have obviously worsened in Kashmir, but Kashmir is also a place where things have been bad since Partition, and especially in the past thirty years. Do you think there was a failure on the part of Indian liberals and intellectuals to speak out about Kashmir during the past several decades?

I think it is certainly part of the story. Kashmir looked like it was Indian-administered, rather than part of India. But, after recognizing that, Indians often carried out very punitive retaliation of the separatist tendencies, sometimes even more than pro-Pakistani tendencies. It was often the case that the separatists got more harmed by the Indians than the pro-Pakistanis, because the pro-Pakistanis could escape to Pakistani Kashmir, whereas the separatists had nowhere to go, and it was easier to destroy them, thereby making the anti-Indian movement turn more pro-Pakistan than for independence. So there were all kinds of political mistakes that were made by the previous governments, too. And, as you rightly say, by a kind of apathy by the Indian majority, even secular majority, to get involved in that story. I think that was a mistake that should have been addressed much earlier.

Indian liberals, or intellectuals, are wholly useless. In any case, they quickly move to the West when they get the chance. What good could they possibly have done? The fact of the matter is that India punishes separatism. So does Pakistan. It does not matter if a mere half a percentage of the population, in a border area, are disaffected. India has more than enough military power to crush any resistance there. The fact that it is only Muslims who are disaffected is all the more reason to do so. After all, non-Muslims- like Sen's East Bengali relatives- have been killed or chased out of Muslim majority areas- or areas that subsequently became Muslim majority. The same thing will happen in the Kashmir Valley. It should have been done earlier- but it was always on the cards.

Do you wish you had addressed it more?
Possibly, but I had enough to do. People had other callings, and often found Kashmir difficult to really understand, particularly because you are dealing with essentially an alienated people. And people kept on saying that there was no way of avoiding the situation, except by tough actions. And that was a mistake. Do I think I, too, should have written more about Kashmir? Possibly, yes. I think the answer is yes. But, on the other hand, can I explain why I didn’t? I can, because with famines and poverty and gender inequality and so many other things, my hands were pretty full. So yes and no.

Sen jumped on the poverty and gender inequality bandwagon somewhat belatedly- when he realized that Economic Journals didn't want to publish any more Social Choice stuff because the thing was nonsensical. His work on Famines, on the other hand, was egregiously false and mischievous. He was saying Democracy could prevent famines though two big Famines had happened in Bengal during his life-time under democratically elected, but corrupt and incompetent, Muslim leaders. These guys also chased his people out of their ancestral homes. By contrast, Hindu Bengal did not retaliate. The Bangladeshi writer, K.Anis Ahmed, has written in the NYT that Muslims who emigrated from West Bengal did so for purely economic reasons. No one was forced out.

The Gates Foundation just announced they were going to give Modi an award. Are you surprised that internationally he is still seen as a statesman?
Yeah, I think the world likes success, and I think the Gateses like success. And Modi is so powerful that he is often seen as a success of some kind. I was surprised and shocked, quite frankly, by the news of the Gates award to Modi.

Gates had previously cosied up to Rahul Gandhi- he spent some time in a village with him- because as he explained on a clip repeatedly aired by NDTV, nobody knew his name in the Indian hinterland. Everybody knew Rahul's. Thus, his Foundation benefited by being associated with that dynast. Gates, it will be remembered, employed a lot of Indians and had a lot Indian customers. However, Gates has now discovered that Rahul is seen as a cretin. Modi, on the other hand, has achieved a lot. So he gives Modi a prize. That is not surprising at all.

You have written a lot about famines and the importance of democracy in preventing famines, the need for democratic accountability, and so on. When you see democracies where institutions get weakened, or respond less, or get captured by non-democratic forces, does that make you think differently on the work you have done on things like famines?
No, I still think famines take place only in the absence of democracy.

Yet the Bangladesh famine happened after free and fair elections had been held and a very popular leader was firmly in the saddle. Indeed, his daughter still rules Bangladesh. It is true that Mujibur Rehman moved in an authoritarian direction- but that was after the Famine was over.

Democracy does not succeed so much in preventing non-visibly explosive nastiness, such as regular undernourishment, regular inequality of women, and so on.

Nor did it succeed in preventing mass famine in Sen's Bengal twice during his lifetime. In both cases, an Army man did better than a democratically elected politician.

It can be used to do that, but that depends on political organization. Democracy isn’t an automatic remedy of anything.

Then why pretend it is?

It isn’t like quinine to kill malaria. Democracy is a way of enabling.

Democracy, in Bengal, was a way of disenabling District Commissioners from declaring a Famine and implementing the Famine Code. The result was that some politicians and associated criminals got very rich while millions starved.

The enabling circumstances are very easy with famine. And that is why, even though British India had famine right to the end of imperial rule, it stopped immediately when press freedom became widely available and there was a multiparty election.

This is completely untrue. Britain had ended Famine in India by 1902. However they devolved power over Food to popularly elected Provincial Governments in 1935. In Bengal, this led to a big Famine sparked by an exogenous shock or 'Food Availability Deficit'. The fact that there was a free press and multiparty coalitions did not matter. Wavell, a soldier, ended that famine.

It was extremely easy to politicize the nastiness of famine.

It is also extremely easy to write stupid lies about Famines and get a Nobel by posing as the 'Mother Theresa of Economics'.

But the nastiness of regular undernourishment, the regular deprivation of women compared with men, and the continuation of bad schooling for children, these are much harder to politicize.

Fuck off! These are extremely easy to politicize. The cry 'roti, kapada aur makan' brought down the Old Congress when Sen was in his thirties writing shite about Utilitarianism in Delhi.

I don’t know if I use the word “democracy” too much. But for some things it is a very easy remedy. For others, it is harder work.

Bengal's experience shows it is no remedy at all for economic ills. 

You seem generally more sanguine about things, and less depressed about the state of the world, than I expected to find you.
I wouldn’t say sanguine, but I am sometimes less hopeless than I am expected to be. [Laughs.]
Why do you think you are expected to be hopeless, and why do you think you are not?
Because as a child I came through an experience where things looked really bad. When I was growing up, all my uncles were in prison, in preventive detention, and there was no hope for when they would be released.

Sen is being silly. These uncles of his wanted to make common cause with the Japs- who would have fucked India over much more heinously if their invasion had succeeded. Keeping idiotic 'buddhijivis' locked up was in their own best interests. They could have easily got released by giving an undertaking not to be so silly in the future. Many did so under the pretext of being Communists and wanting to 'fight Fascism'.

When I was nine, there were things like the Bengal Famine, which I saw, where three million people died. I saw Hindu-Muslim riots, including a Muslim day laborer who had come to our largely Hindu area and got knifed by the local Hindu thugs. I was playing in the garden, and he came in profusely bleeding, and he came looking for help and water. I shouted to get my father and I did get a glass of water. He was lying on my lap. My father took him to the hospital, and he unfortunately died there. He told me in an inarticulate way, and my father in a more articulate way, that his bibi, his wife, had told him not to work in a Hindu area, but he said the children had not eaten anything, and he had to get income to get them a little food.
I had never seen anything like that, and the experience, at the age of ten or eleven, to have someone bleeding profusely, and then my father, from the description he gave, had picked up which thugs had killed him. He told that to the police, and the police in this Hindu area refused to do anything. I experienced that, and I experienced India becoming independent.

Sen did not experience getting knifed by Muslims. On the other hand, his family did lose ancestral property in East Pakistan.

So I have seen big problems and then their being solved.

How were the problems of Hindu refugees from East Pakistan solved? Did they get any compensation? I suppose a few did- in Delhi's Chitaranjan Park. Perhaps people like Sen's father helped, or helped themselves, thanks to their position in the bureaucracy. 

That doesn’t mean that I am sanguine. I am not sanguine about anything. It does mean that I don’t see that one has to be hopeless before such hopelessness is due.
Is there some subject or area you wish you had worked on more?
There are some philosophical problems. I have been so tied up with things that I haven’t gotten back to epistemology, so I have to do more on that.
Because it is important or because it is the type of thing you would like to do?
Both. But I can’t withdraw from politics, especially with what is going on in India. I am a very proud Indian. I am not only a proud Indian. [Laughs.] I am also a proud Asian and proud human being. One of the great advantages of the school I went to, Tagore’s progressive school, was that I was allowed to specialize even as a child of eight or nine, so I studied a lot of history.

This is not apparent in Sen's analytical work. His framework is atemporal.

I once read that you called yourself an “unreformed secularist.” Are you still?
Yeah. That’s not an issue, actually. There should be no need to talk about secularism.

Then why does Sen and his ilk do little else?

No?
Democracy should cover that your origin doesn’t matter. But, if you need to play that up, that is because democracies often fail, and that is why multiple identities become very important.

How does playing up your identity help when democracy fails? What you need to do is get behind a strong Law & Order guy- otherwise, like Sen's people you have to flee your ancestral home and then keep emigrating farther and farther West till you find a safe haven as a parasite on some more productive People.

Do your kids read your work?
Not a lot. [Laughs.] One is a journalist. Another writes children’s books. Another is a musician. And one is an editor of a magazine. I never particularly wanted them to be high-grade achievers rather than doing what they liked doing.

Does Sen think of himself as a 'high-grade achiever'? He is an Indian Economist who has only harmed the Indian economy. He may have written some sophomoric shite fit only Credential seeking swine but that is a less worthy occupation than writing children's books.

I didn’t have any predetermined idea about how they should excel. I was astonished to see some actress going to jail, because she tried to push her child—
Oh, Felicity Huffman.
What she did seems exorbitant. It may be quite important if you think it is important for your child to go to a good school. It can’t be all that important. [Laughs.]

Because people like Sen teach there.

Gloria Steinem scotomizing Akeel Bilgrami

An erudite friend of mine once spoke of Akeel Bilgrami as a Sufi grievously scotomized by Analytical Philosophy. I had no idea what he meant but have recently come to my own conclusions about what must have happened.

This is because I read an article by Gloria Steinem and Bilgrami deploring the Gates Foundation's decision to give Narendra Modi a prize. One may ask- what prompted this award? Was there any ulterior motive? A cynic might reply that Gates was unhappy that Indians associate him with Rahul Gandhi- with whom he went to stay in a village some years ago. NDTV would repeatedly play a segment of Gates saying 'In the villages, no one knows my name. But they all know Rahul's name.' Gates meant that his association with the Gandhi dynasty would enable his Foundation to do more good in India. Since then, a lot has changed in India. Rahul is seen as an entitled cretin. Modi is seen as 'Vikas Purush'- the guy who does last mile delivery of equitable development. Thus Gates- who founded  a company which employs plenty of Indians and which sells to plenty more Indians- is, very shrewdly, jumping on the Modi bandwagon. It is also likely that his Foundation will work directly with the Indian Government- rather than fraudsters like Arif Naqvi- so as to meet its goals.

Steinem and Bilgrami are blissfully unaware of this background. They hate Modi and thus think the Gates Foundation has done something despicable. But do either of the pair have any good reason to revile the Indian Prime Minister? Or are they deliberately shutting their eyes to facts which are common knowledge?

 Let us see-

It is one thing for a political leader to come to power in his country by exploiting the darkest nationalistic instincts of its electorate.

So, Steinem and Bilgrami think people have 'dark nationalistic instincts'. It so happens they are speaking of Indian people who are certainly darker than Europeans. Steinem is a White woman who was born and brought up in a deeply racist country. As for Bilgrami, an Ashraf Muslim, there is a long tradition, in Islam, of despising Indians not just because they were kaffirs but also because they were 'black as crows'. Even within Ashraf Indian Islam, this attitude persisted. Several of Bilgrami's own more distinguished ancestors have displayed this prejudice. However, this biographical detail does not entirely explain his alliance with Steinem in this matter. I refer again to my erudite friend's comment on 'scotomization'. Can 'Analtickle Philosophy' clarify this matter?

 Speaking generally, Democracies under the Rule of Law are able to check authoritarian or otherwise illegal malpractices on the part of the Executive. These are justiciable matters and jurisdiction is local. That is why Democracies don't interfere in the internal affairs of each other. However, if some Democracies are superior to others- for e.g. if darkies have 'darker nationalistic instincts' than White people- then it would make sense for people from a predominantly White Democracy to seek to intervene in the internal matters of another Democracy peopled by those of darker skin.

It is certainly true that Indians have rejected the rule of a corrupt Italian lady so as to elect a much swarthier Gujerati gentleman. Steinem and Bilgrami are resigned to this outcome. What can one do? Them darkies are like that only. Still, it is one thing for darkies to behave in a bestial manner in their own dark sub-continent. It is quite another for White folk to make a fuss over those darkies when they visit Enlightened lands where darkies are obliged to keep a check on their 'darker instincts' and to, at the very least, dissemble compliance with the Moral Code of their Racial Superiors.

It is quite another thing for such a man to be awarded an international prize and embraced as a statesman by the most powerful and influential country in the world.

Why? Is it coz Modi is darker skinned than Trump or Gates? Would it have been acceptable for Obama to embrace him- as in fact he did?

Notice that Steinem & Bilgrami lay a lot of stress on 'power & influence'. Apparently, if you don't have either of these things, you are welcome to give prizes to psycopaths because you are a nobody. What you do does not matter. On the other hand, it is wrong for the most powerful and influential country- no matter what crimes it committed to gain that title- to embrace a statesman from a poorer country.

The sentiment these two elderly shitheads are expressing is nothing new. Churchill was aghast that a 'half naked fakir' should be invited to meet the King Emperor. An elderly white woman like Steinem no doubt feels terribly outraged to see a colored man hugging the President of the United States. An Ashraf Muslim like Bilgrami may be equally indignant that India's Prime Minister is a kaffir from a modest socio-economic background. This being the case, Steinem and Bilgrami are welcome to express their racist views because, after all, they are doing it in a veiled way- and that is all that the law requires. However, what is egregious about their manner of expressing their disgusting prejudices is the veneer of intellectuality- the use of words like paradox- and the pretense of some factual basis for their calumnies.

The former reflects a familiar and vexing paradox of democracy – its deliberate subversion from within.

Steinem and Bilgrami may be 'vexed' and may consider it a great paradox that Voters ignore their own utterly cretinous contributions to public discourse. But why do they think 'deliberate subversion from within' can't be resisted? Surely, Democracy under the Rule of Law has legal instruments to deal with subversion and sedition and deliberate attempts to overturn Democratic processes? Why can't Steinem or Bilgrami point to justiciable issues such that 'subversion' is checked? What is the reason for their defeatism? Do they really not believe Democracy can thrive with proper Mechanism Design? Is it genuinely inevitable that Democracy- at least when practiced by darker folk with yet 'darker nationalistic instincts'- will get scuttled by 'Paradoxes'?

The latter is entirely gratuitous and speaks to the collapse of any sense of international political morality.

Suppose Steinem and Bilgrami slip on a banana peel, while sauntering hand in hand, on the edge of the sand, by the light of the silvery moon, and injure their respective stink-bones. Will they say that this mishap was an entirely gratuitous, wholly deliberate, subversion of the Law of Gravity which speaks to the collapse of any sense of Cosmic morality?

Steinem & Bilgrami may not like Modi. They may feel greatly aggrieved that he has met with such a rousing reception in the USA while they themselves are regarded as cretins by their own students. However, they need to show that there is some objective basis for this prejudice of theirs. Sadly, they are too stupid and ignorant to do so.

The Gates Foundation has announced it is bestowing a prestigious annual award on prime minister Narendra Modi of India.

The prize is for "working to tackle the issues contributing to global inequity," by helping poor people get toilets rather than have to defecate in the open. It is a fact that Modi has done precisely that. Steinem and Bilgrami may like talking shite in public, but they are not currently defecating in the open. They have toilets and, what's more, have received expert instruction in how to use them. I do not say, they are always successful in using them correctly. Still, no expense has been spared in educating them in this matter. Why are they so incensed against Modi for his bid to secure an equal access to toilets for very poor people? Is it because those poor people are dark and have 'darker nationalistic instincts'? Do Steinem and Bilgrami believe that if dark people get to have toilets then their nationalistic instincts will take a yet darker turn?

And in advance of the UN general assembly meeting in New York, Donald Trump flew down to Houston, Texas, to welcome him at an event charmingly dubbed the “Howdy Modi” rally.

Why? Indian Americans are wealthy and their votes matter. Trump was on the stump. He also made nice with Imran Khan because a lot of Pakistani Americans are wealthy and they too have votes. What is wrong in that?

 The Gates Foundation’s award to Modi for starting a sanitation scheme in India seems rather like giving a prize to Mussolini for making the trains run on time.

How? Helping a poor person build an outhouse so her family does not have to shit in the open is an example of the redistribution of wealth and the expansion of needs based entitlements. Trains are supposed to run on time. If they don't the Director of the Railway should be sacked. If Mussolini had given free train tickets to poor people, then he would have deserved a prize. Indeed, if Mussolini had concentrated on improving the life-chances of Italians- rather than fucking up those of Albanians and Ethiopians and Greeks at a huge cost to the Italian Exchequer- he would have deserved a Nobel Peace Prize precisely because he would have turned away from external aggression.

Yet it was less than 15 years ago that Modi was denied a visa to the US, the only person in the world ever to have been banned under the International Religious Freedom Act.

But, this was done as a quid pro quo to the then Indian Administration! The reason this Act has never been used against anyone else is because no other country pretended a leading Opposition politician had committed so heinous a crime and that their own Courts were powerless to do anything about it! Sonia's corrupt regime pushed the Americans and the Europeans to take this action even though it undermined Indian Sovereignty. Sonia herself, having enriched her entire family in a brazen manner, called Modi a 'Merchant of Death' and her minions and sycophants cooked up some bogus evidence. But the Supreme Court found that the Government's witnesses were lying. Thus they had to give Modi a clean chit. Steinem herself once worked with an Indian Chief Justice back in the Fifties. She should know that the Indian Bench would have convicted Modi if he had been guilty of what was alleged. Perhaps, Steinem is now senile. But what about Bilgrami?

Once Sonia's Government collapsed under the weight of its own corruption and incompetence, the Americans changed their tune. No doubt, if Modi pressures them, they will start indicting Congress leaders for financial crimes. But, Modi is not going to take that route. Why? It undermines Indian sovereignty and reduces the standing of the Indian Supreme Court. Crimes committed in India by Indians are exclusively the concern of the Indian Bench. Modi was thoroughly investigated under the previous Administration which cooked up a lot of fake evidence, but the Supreme Court was obliged to acquit him. However, a colleague of his- a lady Doctor who was wholly occupied treating riot victims in a hospital, was falsely convicted of running around distributing swords and baying for blood. Once the Government changed, that evidence was proved to be wholly fabricated. Witnesses who saw the lady Doctor looking after patients, not chopping off heads as was alleged, came forward and their testimony was accepted.

Steinem and Bilgrami are obstinately repeating 'fake news'. They have learnt nothing and forgotten nothing. It is no wonder they have lost all moral authority or even the semblance of scholarly repute. As for the International Religious Freedom Act, it has only been used successfully once- against Vietnam. But that was over a decade ago. It is now quite useless.

That’s because in 2002, when he was chief minister of Gujarat, Modi helped create the conditions for a three-day anti-Muslim riot that resulted in rape, murder and the burning of homes. It has been widely described as state terrorism and ethnic cleansing.

It has been falsely described as such. Modi, with the help of Defense Minister George Fernandes- a Christian Leftist- put an end to the riots by getting the Army to fire upon irate Hindus. There was no ethnic cleansing. The Muslim population of Gujarat went up under Modi because Muslims from other parts of India were attracted there. Indeed, some ex-pat Muslim entrepreneurs relocated to Gujarat to take advantage of the booming economy.

Steinem and Bilgrami were listening to, and are now spreading, fake news. Why do they not admit that- as some Pakistani scholars claim- under George W Bush over a billion Muslims were massacred in America? Is it because they live in the US and can't deny that nothing of the sort happened? Steinem may have no reason to visit India. Bilgrami is of Indian origin. Surely he must know that there has been no mass exodus of Muslims from Gujerat?

Now, as prime minister of India, Modi presides over a culture where acts of hate against Muslims occur daily across the nation, and also against Dalits, the lowest group in the Hindu caste system.

This is crazy. It's like saying 'Hitler encouraged atrocities against Jews and Prussian Junkers'. No doubt, some Junkers were killed, but Hitler wanted them on side.
 It is plausible to say that, since Modi comes from an organization which spoke of the need to combat Muslim aggression, he has an anti-Muslim bias. It is not plausible to say he is against Dalits because his organization wants to recruit Dalits and Adivasis- seeing both as the most active and reliable bulwark against Muslim aggression.

There is a massive record of their humiliation, including repeated sexualised violence against women and young girls from those groups, and frequent lynchings of men, echoing a dark period in the history of the US.

When was this not the case? What is different under Modi is that the Supreme Court's roll back of the draconian Anti Dalit Atrocity Act has been speedily reversed by the Legislature.  Muslims, by contrast, do feel insecure. But, this is true all over the world and has to do with fears and anxieties provoked by outfits like Al Qaeda and ISIS. No doubt, some blame attaches to the complacency and corruption, but also downright criminality, of 'mainstream' Muslim politicians and 'intellectuals' in India. Bilgrami, however, is not a criminal. But he is doing his community no favors by attaching his name to this racist screed which laments the 'darker nationalistic instincts' of a dark people- most of whom are 'kaffirs' to boot.

Not only are these barbarities rarely prosecuted, but those who attempt to intervene to stop them are often punished.

This is not true. It is a different matter that convictions are not secured and that policemen are often in sympathy with lynch mobs. However, the solution is better policing and more thorough preparation of the prosecution's case.

India has historically had a robust free press, but now Modi’s government harasses and closes down media that are critical of his regime.

This is wholly false. The authors are referring to justiciable matters. The difficulty faced by the anti-Modi gang is that they can repeat allegations in plenty but have no evidence which will stand up in Court of any wrongdoing. Thus they pretend that the Indian judiciary does not exist and thus some International forum should condemn Modi solely on the basis of their own hearsay evidence.

On the other hand, as Bilgrami Sahib can personally testify, Modi has sent out teams of deadly assassins to target Liberal Intellectuals like himself by emailing him links to their atrociously illiterate blogposts. I can assure you that anyone who completes reading one of my own posts will immediately suffer a catastrophic brain haemmorhage. That is why I never read over what I myself write- but this in keeping with Indian best practice, as Bilgrami's own oeuvre amply demonstrates.

The same goes for unions, human rights law firms and academics.

Unions? The BJP, like other parties, has a big Union presence. Nobody goes against organized labor, though of course everybody ignores it in practice. Human Rights law firms are struggling, it is true, but that's coz they are crap and Indians won't pay for them to keep going. Thus they have to rely on foreign charity by claiming to be combating Fascism, or Nazism, or the Spanish Inquisition.
Academics are a joke. Their job is to raise the blood pressure of middle aged fat fucks like myself and enrage us sufficiently to go vote for Modi or Trump or BoJo.

His perverse demonetisation scheme has deprived the poor and middle class of savings, and in addition to selling off natural resources to global businesses, he is all set to privatise the railways and public transport on which average citizens depend.

Sheer nonsense! If the poor and middle class had been deprived of their savings they would have voted against Modi. Natural resources were sold off by previous governments. Nobody in their right mind would buy the Indian railways. Private operators on some 20 or 30 routes may be welcomed but this is no panacea. Modi is actually much more bearish on this sort of thing than Manmohan was.

Most recently, Modi has defied the constitution of India by revoking the autonomy it afforded Jammu and Kashmir.

Nonsense! The Supreme Court does not think he has done anything unprecedented or improper. That is why they didn't give the matter urgent attention. It is likely however that they will have some pertinent observations to make so as to dispel certain anxieties which have been aroused.

Why? Because the incessant violence of its military occupation of that region, 70% of whose citizens are Muslim, is quite naturally being resisted by them.

The incessant violence of Muslims- including Pakistani infiltrators- is being resisted by the Indian army. The Hindus in Jammu are sick and tired of Muslim gangsters from the Valley running the show. Ladakh too is happy to go its own way. The Muslims of the Valley may continue to feel aggrieved- the place has turned into a 'spite slum' kept alive on Central subventions and foreign remittances- but their ability to ethnically cleanse the area has been sharply curtailed. Indian Muslims rejoice at this outcome.

He has imposed severe restrictions on internet communication there, thus creating a virtual prison governed by well-armed members of the Indian army.

What is the consequence of these actions? The answer is that Imran Khan does not get to see the 'blood-bath' he so eagerly anticipates. The Muslims of the Valley are welcome to emigrate. Even a 'virtual prison' does not keep the gates flung wide open.

So, has the US government officially criticised this unblushing brutalisation of the people of India?

Has the US condemned Gloria Steinem's, widely reported and wholly unconscionable, repeated anal rape of Akeel Bilgrami? The poor man has, all too evidently, had his brains buggered to buggery by her incessant assaults. It is widely reported, by me, that Bilgrami is now signing his name to deeply racist screeds which fulmine against the 'darker nationalistic instincts' of darker people.

Why is the US government not officially criticizing Gloria Steinem's unblushing brutalisation of a person from India? The answer is that the US gun lobby wants to sell Steinem all sorts of armaments so she can fulfill her vile ambition to anally violate billions of darker people who, she tells us, have 'darker nationalistic instincts'. I need hardly point out that this has been a recurring feature of US history. Martha Washington used to anally rape Native Americans. Susan B Anthony fucked several million Mexicans to death. Hilary Clinton- but let us give Hilary a pass coz, truth be told, I quite enjoyed what she did to me.

On the contrary, under Trump it has pitched the sale of arms to India in order to compete with Russia. And Modi has been paraded as a feted guest in Houston and New York.

America pitched the sale of arms to India under Eisenhower, Kennedy, Clinton,  two different types of Bush, Obama and now Trump. It has always competed with Russia in this market. Modi has been paraded and feted more than Manmohan because Modi is more popular and charismatic.

In the light of this record of wrongdoing, the Gates Foundation’s award to Modi for starting a sanitation scheme in India seems rather like giving a prize to Mussolini for making the trains run on time.
The scheme, in any case, does little to provide sanitation for the most impoverished segments of the population who need it most, and it does nothing to undermine, let alone address, the fact that the most degrading forms of sanitation labour have for centuries been assigned to the lowest rungs in the caste hierarchy.

No. The scheme does a lot for the most impoverished. Manual scavenging is against the law but it is a matter for the State Governments, not the Center, as per the Constitution of India. Still, Modi's washing the feet of sanitation workers at the Kumbh Mela is no substitute for the enforcement of the law.

But such details aside, it is bizarre that a prize intended for those who uplift the poorest has gone to the seediest tormentor of the poorest and most marginalised people of India.

It is even more bizarre that Gloria Steinem is receiving the Buffet-Gates prize for not anally raping Bilgrami when she has been doing nothing else- using a rolled up paperback copy of one of her door-stoppers- for trillions of years in brazen defiance of fourteen quadrillion UN general resolutions!

When will this madness end? Won't someone think of the children?!

We write this opinion piece as citizens of these two biggest and most diverse democracies in the world, the US and India, who have spent years living and working in each other’s countries.

Why does not Gloria not mention that she is making her living by shoving her works up the rectum of a man from another country? I have not personally witnessed any of Gloria's lectures but it is widely reported, by me, that she stands at the lectern vigorously cramming her various publications up poor old Bilgrami's back side. No doubt this is the reason the man now looks quite fair skinned and is thus less subject to 'darker nationalistic instincts'. Still, it is a terrible price to pay.

Governance, in the honourable traditions of liberty and democracy of both our nations, was never intended to begin with: “I, the president” or “I, the prime minister”, as is now increasingly the case. It begins, rather, with: “We, the people”.

Yes, yes. America's constitution enforced slavery and ethnic cleansing under the rubric of working the will of 'We, the People'. Prior to 1965, darker people like Bilgrami were kept out of America by racist immigration quotas. Since then America has greatly changed but only because people like Steinem have been buggering Bilgramis so as to check their 'darker nationalistic instincts'.

So, we ourselves can declare our support for the International Religious Freedom Act and explicitly recoil from both Prime Minister Modi and President Trump’s anti-Muslim bias.

Why not recoil from Imran Khan? What about Chairman Xi? Are they light complexioned enough not to be subject to 'darker nationalistic instincts'?

More to the point, why does Bilgrami, instead of babbling about 'enchantment', not recoil from Steinem's incessant, widely reported (by me) assaults upon his anus? Does he not understand that Steinemism is an auto-cephalic Religion? He can gain protection under the act she mentions unless it is completely useless, in which case why mention it at all?

And we can oppose their shared glorification of an unequal past by vowing to make India and the US live up to their democratic promise.

Yes, yes. Take vows by all means. However what is important is that Steinem desist from, as is widely reported, sodomizing Akeel Bilgrami just coz he's a darkie and thus has 'darker nationalistic instincts'. Give the old boy a break. Turn your attentions to Amartya Sen and then get into a cat fight with Martha Nussbaum which can be broadcast on Pay for View. You know you want to. Just do it already.

Prabhat Patnaik on why we must destroy Science

There was a time when a PhD in Political Science, or Economics, or even Sociology was as highly regarded as a Doctorate in a STEM subject. Since then, because of rapid technological change, the STEM subjects have risen greatly in esteem while 'Political Economy'- more particularly of the Marxist sort- is considered the preserve of cretins. Thus it was only a matter of time before a Professor of that type shite would come out into the open and say that the Natural Sciences must be destroyed. Otherwise, his students will be unemployed. This may cause them to turn to cannibalism- unless they concentrate entirely on just biting their own heads off. The problem with this panacea is that if even one country refuses to destroy science, then- sooner or later- it will dominate every other. In other words, competition always militates for useful stuff- like STEM subjects- to crowd out and bury worthless shite.

Prabhat Patnaik, perhaps the stupidest economist India has ever produced, nevertheless takes precisely this step. He shares his thoughts on Gandhi with us in the Indian Express. Can he say something stupider than any of his academic rivals? Let us see-

I find Gandhi’s thought in at least three areas of abiding relevance for me: His views on nationalism, on capitalism and on solidarity.

Gandhi viewed nationalism and capitalism as evil and unnecessary. History has shown he was wrong. Solidarity is worthless. Ask the Poles.

The nationalism that Gandhi stood for, which informed India’s anti-colonial struggle, differed fundamentally from the nationalism that came into vogue in Europe in the 17th century, following the Westphalian peace treaties.

Nationalism did not 'come into vogue' in Europe till the second half of the Nineteenth Century. The Westphalian peace treaties did not create Nation States. It was only after the First World War that Nationalism triumphed over Imperialism in Europe.

Gandhi's nationalism was of the Wilsonian type. At any rate, that was the policy of the Indian National Congress which he dominated.

At least three differences stood out. First, Gandhi’s nationalism was inclusive; there were no “enemies within” as with European nationalism.

Nonsense! Gandhi wanted the Brits out. They were the 'enemy within'.

Second, it did not see the nation as standing above the people, an entity for which the people only made sacrifices; rather, the raison d’etre of the nation was to improve the living conditions of the people, or to “wipe away the tears from the eyes of every Indian”.

This was also true of European Nationalism. No European statesman in the Twentieth Century said that the people must serve the State, rather than the other way round. Even Hitler and Stalin claimed to be primarily concerned with improving the lot of the German or Soviet people.

Third, unlike European nationalism, it was not imperialist itself; the people whom the nation was to serve treated other people with “fairness”, which is why Gandhi wanted India to give Pakistan the Rs 55 crore that were its due after Partition, despite the bitterness caused by Partition.

European nationalism was only 'imperialist' if an Empire could turn a profit. This ceased to be the case which is why Empires disappeared. India was in no position to conquer territory save from weaker powers like Portugal.

The Indian people did not want to give that money to Pakistan because it had initiated hostilities. Gandhi blackmailed the Government which, secretly, welcomed his assassination shortly thereafter.

This nationalism was not a mere idealist construct, it was based instead on a very practical understanding of what was required for the people’s freedom.

Nonsense! The Indian Government was refusing to give passports to people who wanted to emigrate to the UK. The Judiciary intervened to protect the people's freedom. Sadly, they did not take similar measures against the Government's curtailment of various economic freedoms they people had previously enjoyed. The truth is the Government had no 'practical understanding' of what was good for the country.

If the people were to be free then that required the formation of such a nation.

Nonsense! Freedom was multiply realizable. Arguably, it would have been better served by the formation of a quite different type of nation or association of nations.

Gandhi was also clear that capitalism as we know it, for which he used the term “the English system”, could not serve such a nation.

But the alternative he promoted was much worse and had to be subsidized by the 'English system'- i.e. the Mills operated by his financiers paid for his Khaddar obsession.

It was incompatible with the people’s freedom.

No it wasn't. That's why Indians paid a lot of money to escape from Indian freedom to the 'English system'. Indeed, they still do so.

He wanted a different economic system altogether, where the capitalists could at best be the “trustees” of people’s property.

Robbers want a different legal system where they would be considered to be the 'trustees' of stuff they steal. Rapists want to be considered the legitimate husbands of their victims and, moreover, that 'No!' means 'Yes!'

It is very easy to say 'Inequality will cease to exist if the haves undergo a change of heart and decide to share everything with the have nots'. Similarly, one may say, Famine will disappear if only Sunlight would convert itself into delicious food and prise open our lips and feed us till we are replete.

Patnaik is supposed to be an economist. Why is he praising mere wishful thinking?

He was not a socialist but, in common with the socialists, he believed that capitalism could never solve the problem of unemployment, and the mental dullness it produced.

Nothing can solve the problem of unemployment save enslavement. Mental dullness is produced by the JNU in industrial quantities. Yet its Professors are not classed as jobless.

Since he saw poverty as inextricably linked to unemployment, capitalism could also never overcome poverty.

Anyone who has visited India can see that there are very poor people who are working their butts off. Those who are unemployed are much better off because someone is paying for their food and clothing and housing such that their living standards are higher than those who lack any similar source of support.

The poverty of the laboring population in India is directly linked to their lack of capital. Gandhi thought people could have an adequate standard of living using very little capital. He was wrong. People forced to do so died young- they had worked themselves to death. There was a 'Malthusian equilibrium' but it was moving towards the extinction of this class of people.

Capitalism can overcome poverty if it increases the amount of physical capital at the disposal of the worker. However, there is no certainty it will do so. The same point may be made about Socialism. Still, it is clear that countries which use markets to allocate capital have climbed out of poverty much faster than those which have relied on paternalistic Government regulations.

What we call “development”, whose essence must be the overcoming of unemployment and poverty, was incompatible, therefore, with the institution of capitalism.

Capitalism wants people- even those who won't work- to have more money to buy cool stuff. Marxists may believe differently, but nobody now believes Marxists.

Gandhi’s views on the relationship between capitalism and unemployment, and hence poverty, were deeply insightful.

No. They were simply wrong. Machines don't cause unemployment. They permit people to be employed at a higher wage in some less boring and mindless occupation. True, rural depopulation may occur. Indeed, demographic transition may mean that the overall population begins to fall. But that is preferable to agricultural involution and either a Malthusian disaster or farmers receiving free imported food because they can't grow enough to feed themselves.

It is commonly believed that even though capitalism initially destroys petty production, the displaced petty producers ultimately get absorbed within the growing capitalist sector, and that too at a higher wage than they earned earlier.

This is the common belief because it is demonstrably true. Patnaik now trots out his crazy theory that South Korea is only rich coz somehow it has forced poor agricultural countries to give away their wealth.

This is neither theoretically valid nor historically borne out. The fact that European capitalism was not saddled with massive unemployment arising from the displacement of petty producers, was not because capitalist growth absorbed all those who had been displaced, but because of massive emigration to the temperate regions of White settlement, such as Canada, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand where they drove out local inhabitants from their land and set themselves up as farmers.

Similarly the South Koreans settled the Antarctic, forcibly expelling the native, peace loving, Penguin population. The same is true of the Taiwanese and Singaporeans and so forth.

It is neither possible nor desirable to repeat this historical experience today, so that Gandhi’s rejection of capitalism acquires pertinence.

Burma did embrace something like 'Gandhian Economics'. That's why it is now so poor. South Korea was a lot poorer than Burma. Now its per capita income is 5 times higher.

China and India rose rapidly when they started to emulate South Korea- instead of North Korea. There is a story about Joan Robinson agreeing with Guy Ranis that the Koreans were making remarkable progress. But Joan was thinking of the North, not the South. Everybody can now agree Robinson was wrong. Not Pattnaik it seems. The JNU exists in a time warp.

Gandhi’s rejection of the capitalist mode of production as exemplified by Europe, his rejection of European-style nationalism, and his linking of the two, was also a product of deep insight.

Gandhi got his money from capitalists following the Western model. He was the subject of European Imperialism and was quite right to reject it. However, European Imperialism in India had existed long before there was any Industrial Capitalism to speak of. Indeed, had the Brits adopted the Portuguese model, we would be ruled by people with names like Smith or Jones. At the lower level, these would be quite dark skinned people. But at the top, English brides and grooms would be brought in to maintain racial purity. Gandhi may have had no personal enmity against the Europeans. But he did get rid of them as an element in Indian politics.

It is not surprising that our embrace of unbridled capitalism in the neoliberal era, which predictably has brought in its train growing unemployment and absolute poverty, manifest in massive under-nutrition, has led to a denouement where the prevailing concept of nationalism has undergone a fundamental change.

India does not have 'unbridled capitalism'. Nor does China. Yet the greater role of the market has lifted hundreds of millions out of absolute poverty. Under nutrition has increased- in Venezuela. But that is scarcely the fault of 'neo-liberalism'.

Has there been a 'fundamental change' in the 'prevailing concept of nationalism'? No. There has been a backlash against migrants and a 'Rules Based International Order'.

Is that what Patnaik is getting at?

The inclusive, people-centred and non-aggrandising nationalism that characterised our anti-colonial struggle has given way to the old European-style “nationalism” that sees “enemies within” (indeed everyone opposed to the government is considered nowadays an “enemy within”), that sees the nation as standing above the people, and that rides roughshod over the people, trampling upon their rights as in Jammu and Kashmir today.

Gandhi was alive when massive ethnic cleansing occurred in India. Ask the Pakistani muhajir about the 'people-centred', non-aggrandising' Congress rule in Bihar from which his ancestors felt they had to flee.

The Brits were seen as 'enemies within' and driven out. But it didn't stop there. Any minority ethnicity which appeared to doing better than the 'sons of the soil' got short shrift.

Since then, things have improved. Only illegal migrants are targeted. But this is true all over the world.

The fact that the same government which unblushingly equates capitalists with “wealth creators” and which considers massive corporate tax concessions as a “win-win” situation for 125 crore people, also imposes an indefinite curfew on the people of Jammu and Kashmir, is not an accident.

Nor is it an accident that previous Governments- including the 2004 UPA administration which the Communists supported- did precisely the same thing. Doing sensible things so as to get re-elected is not a matter of happenstance.

This route, however, leads to a perpetuation of unemployment, poverty, strife, and a break-up of the nation. And Gandhi saw this more clearly than almost anyone else.

Poverty has fallen which is why unemployment can go up. There is zero chance that the nation will break-up because even Supreme Court lawyers will kick the shit out of JNU students who raise secessionist slogans.

Whatever it was Gandhi saw more clearly than anyone else, of one thing we can be certain- it was wholly imaginary and delusive.

Gandhi’s solution to the problem of unemployment was a restraint on the rate of technological change, which of course was impossible under capitalism in its spontaneity.

How could stupid Indians stop Scientists and Engineers in less stupid parts of the world 'restrain the rate of technological change'? They could, it is true, go on hunger strike- but they would have starved in great numbers in any case if the USA had stopped PL 480 food shipments which, Patnaik must know, were made possible because of unrestrained technological change.

Gandhi wanted everybody to give up sex. Just say no. Then the human race would die out and thus Unemployment would stop being a problem.

But Gandhi did not advocate state-imposed restrictions towards this end. He wanted instead a voluntary eschewing of consumerism that always privileges technologically-sophisticated goods.

But people without any money would, quite involuntarily, be eschewing consumerism in any case. No doubt, a few Indians who had some money could have stopped consuming cool stuff. But there were very few such Indians and thus the World would not have noticed.

He wanted the development of a “community” among the people where one foregoes the “fineries of Bond Street” so that one’s “brother” the weaver can get employment,

Very few Indians could afford the 'fineries of Bond Street'. How many khadi dhotis could they buy? Not enough to give employment to any substantial community of weavers.

a “community” where every person sees his or her well-being as dependent upon that of others.

That's a capitalist community. The industrialist's well-being depends on the workers' and the consumers' material well-being. A Saint may be well pleased if everybody goes on fast unto death to protest human rights abuses in Nicaragua. She may believe that if everybody dies in this way, all will gain Paradise. But the 'community' will have disappeared.

The need for restraining the pace of technological change for achieving full employment is undeniable

Nonsense! If a country bans science and engineering, it will have more unemployment- or exist from the labor market- not less. Other things being equal, it will come under the military domination of those who have embraced high tech weaponry.

— the only countries which have achieved full employment, indeed labour shortage, in recent times, are the erstwhile socialist countries which restrained technological change and kept labour productivity growth in check.

There are no such countries. Very poor countries may have low unemployment simply because those who don't work either starve or run away.

Gandhi wanted such restraint to be voluntary, embedded in a sense of solidarity with one’s “brethren”.

But this already obtains. There are plenty of people who don't buy new fangled gadgets. But they represent a declining share of the market.

Gandhi’s emphasis on solidarity, on overcoming self-centred isolation, an emphasis reminiscent of Karl Marx’s stress on overcoming alienation through the formation of working class solidarity that would ultimately lead to a transcendence of capitalism, was crucial for his concept of human freedom.

Marxian alienation is not overcome by 'solidarity' but rather by workers seizing control of the means of production. We now know he was a silly billy. Workers are shit at running things. So are Commissars.

While their visions and analyses differed, Gandhi and Marx had this concept of freedom in common, as the development of a sense of community, which capitalism destroys.

People who are stupid tend to talk similar types of shite. Capitalism depends on Civil Society enforcing contracts. Civil Society depends on a sense of community. Talking ignorant shite does not depend on a sense of community, but getting paid to do so does require a host community which will pay a little money so that idiot sons and ugly daughters can get a Credential of a worthless type.