Shashi Tharoor, Sunanda Pushkar & Love Jihad

 Dr. Shashi Tharoor is currently on bail, having been charged under Sections 498-A (husband or relative of husband of a woman subjecting her to cruelty) and 306 (abetment of suicide) of the Indian Penal Code, in connection with the death of his wife Sunanda Pushkar. 

Though it seems likely that Pushkar's death was accidental- perhaps the result of taking the wrong dosage of prescription medication- the fact that she had alleged that she had been made the scapegoat in a financial scandal made her husband a suspect. Furthermore, Indian law holds a husband whose cruelty drove his wife to suicide to be guilty of a criminal offense. 

More generally, Indian law differs considerably from Western law in that there is a presumption that women are in a weaker position. Thus India has draconian laws against dowry as well as harassment for dowry or other similar pressure for financial benefit. Furthermore, since suicide to protest an injustice was a feature of traditional Indian culture, the Law takes a serious view of 'abetment to suicide'. 

It may be that such laws should be changed. It may also be argued that people like Dr. Tharoor, who spent his working life abroad, have different mores and attitudes and thus should be free of the presumption of guilt which arises where a disgruntled wife, who has alleged some type of financial exploitation, commits or appears to have committed suicide.

However, as things stand, Indian laws are framed with reference to the Indian reality- not the customs of Manhattan. Dr. Tharoor is certainly innocent till proved guilty in a court of law but he still has to face that judicial trial. 

Tharoor writes too much and Project Syndicate uncritically publishes his highly partisan, but also silly, articles.

This is him writing about 'Love Jihad'- i.e. U.P's decision to strengthen the law preventing exploitation of non-Muslim women by Muslim men who get them to convert on the pretext of marriage. The problem here is that polygamy remains legal only for Muslims though, as a matter of fact, Muslims probably have lower- not higher- polygamy than some non-Muslim communities. Tharoor pretends that this type of law is motivated wholly by Islamophobia. The truth is that some portion of women who enter such marriages end up in prostitution. Even where this is not the case, under new laws, the wife can claim an equal portion of the ancestral property. This means there will be 'honor killing' from a purely mercenary motive. This is because endogamous groups don't want land going out of the 'jati'. In other words, the State acts rationally in curbing a potential source of great public mischief. It is also for this reason that India has draconian laws punishing 'hate speech'. 

Tharoor, a former UN bureaucrat who has lived his whole life in a bubble, takes a different view. He believes there is a 'Culture War' in India. The truth is quite different. The State accommodated the local Culture though it had its own 'safe spaces' or extra-territorial enclaves. It was literally a case of one law for the rulers and another law for the ruled. But even that ended after the British departed. Now, Tharoor himself finds himself in the same sort of Court as ordinary people. Did he enrich himself by exerting control over his wife? Did he drive her to suicide? A Court will decide. Tharoor may say that his love for Sunanda was pure. But, if she committed suicide, the presumption in Indian law is that it was her 'Lord and Master' who drove her to it. 

Tharoor writes in Project Syndicate- 

'India’s ruling Hindu-chauvinist Bharatiya Janata Party has recently whipped up hysteria over the largely imaginary crime of “love jihad,” reflecting the party’s deeply entrenched Islamophobia. 

Tharoor feels he too is accused of an 'imaginary crime' based on a 'psychological autopsy' which is itself founded on a dim view of manipulative Indian men and the manner in which they may exploit, oppress, and cheat their wives. But we can't say India is misanthropic or that Indian men, who- after all- have more power in shaping the Law- are rabid man-hating Feminists. The fact is that some men do engage in a type of crime which is more common in India precisely because of its history and its stage of economic development. 

Similarly, India has strong laws against a type of cheating and exploitation of women in marriage which, perhaps, is more common in India or which, if it isn't common, nevertheless poses a greater threat to public peace and security. 

Tharoor takes a different view. He thinks India was like Manhattan till Modi was elected. Now a 'culture war' is raging across India. What he does not mention is that in Kerala, where he is from, it was the Communist Chief Minister, described as the Fidel Castro of India, who raised the issue of 'love jihad' ten years ago. He proved a true prophet. Victims of 'love jihad' from all over the world were recruited by ISIS to become terrorist brides and to give birth to and to raise up a new generation of terrorists. This resulted in an actual war- not just a 'culture war'. 

The BJP's culture war must be fought in the courts – but even more in the hearts of all Indians.

Tharoor will certainly have to fight the charges against him in the courts. But Tharoor and the Dynasty he serves will have to do better than waffle on about 'culture wars' in order to regain a place in the hearts of Indian voters. Telling stupid lies won't help Congress. They have to show they have a credible and effective leader. Sadly, the prospect of this happening are now more distant than ever. 

Tharoor begins his article in this typically portentuous manner-

NEW DELHI – As if the raging COVID-19 pandemic, a spluttering economy, record-high unemployment, 

which are things which exist all over the world

and massive farmers’ protests

which have been orchestrated by the Congress regime in Punjab- the only State where a small, but influential, minority will be adversely affected

 besieging the country’s capital weren’t enough, India’s ruling Hindu-chauvinist 

as opposed to the feudal and dynastic Congress Party which is increasingly embracing an anti-Hindu and anti-National identity

Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has now incited a new crisis: a culture war.

This is nonsense. There is no 'culture war' nor is there any 'crisis' associated with it. The British left over seventy years ago. Western culture and mores were repudiated. In Hindu majority areas, Hinduism became hegemonic. Muslim majority areas constituted a separate Islamic Republic- save where non-Muslims had more military power. 

In late November, India’s largest state, BJP-ruled Uttar Pradesh, introduced a new law to combat the largely imaginary crime of “love jihad” – a conspiracy theory claiming that Muslim men seduce Hindu women as a ploy to oblige them to convert to Islam through marriage. 

But, under the BJP, the UP is quiet and peaceful. There is no 'war' there. The Hindu majority are firmly in power. All sorts of gangsters and bad characters are whimpering with fear and reforming their ways. Adityanath has chosen a good moment to enact a popular law. 

The Uttar Pradesh Prohibition of Unlawful Conversion of Religion Ordinance stipulates that a marriage will be declared “null and void” if a woman converts to Islam solely for marriage. 

But, under Lily Thomas vs Union of India, this was already true for men. Since women who convert for marriage are at greater risk of exploitation purely by reason of that marriage relationship, it is scandalous that no such protection had been previously afforded them. 

To be clear, Advocate Lily Thomas- who was from Tharoor's own Kerala and who was a Christian- secured protection for Hindu women whose husbands fraudulently 'converted' to Islam. Why does Tharoor object to a law safeguarding women who, on marriage to a Muslim, lose rights, entitlements and statutory protection because of an equally bogus 'conversion'? Either women are superior to men, in India, and thus what is sauce for the gander is not required for the goose, or else Tharoor is talking bollocks. Interestingly, he initially supported temple entry for women to Sabarimala Temple but then did a 180 degree turn when his party decided to oppose it- but only in Kerala!- not at the Central level! In other words, Tharoor is one thing in Kerala and another in Delhi! This may be in line with his peculiar notion of Hinduism. He is flesh here, fish there, and, when writing for Project Syndicate, a simple red herring. 

The bigger problem is Indian men- some of whom were BJP MPs who fraudulently convert to Islam so as to take a second wife. Speaking generally, any type of threat or inducement of a material type renders a religious conversion illegitimate. 

Women wishing to change their religion after getting married need to apply to the District Magistrate for permission, a breathtaking assault on individual liberty that combines misogyny, patriarchy, and religious bigotry.

In the opinion of Tharoor- a man on bail on a charge of harassing his wife till she felt she had to take her own life. It may be unfair for the Law to presume that Sunanda was in a weaker position than Tharoor and that she may have felt she had no recourse but to commit suicide so as to get justice. However, since the intention is to protect a historically weaker and more vulnerable section of Society, the charge of misogyny or patriarchy fails. Bigotry, on the other hand, would involve something more than what the Law requires. 

The measure is the brainchild of Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, a saffron-robed monk whose inflammatory rhetoric has made him one of the BJP’s best-known and most polarizing figures. 

Tharoor is indulging in inflammatory rhetoric. Sadly, it is in English, not Hindi- the Indian lingua franca. It is no wonder that Adityanath, an actual Hindu, beat the pants off Rahul Gandhi- who now claims to be a 'janeodhari' Brahmin. 

And it takes a sledgehammer to the freedom of worship enjoyed by Indian citizens under the country’s constitution. 

No it doesn't. It requires a non-Muslim woman to declare to a Magistrate that she has converted to Islam not purely for the sake of marriage but for genuine spiritual reasons. 

By the first week of December, state police had arrested and filed charges against seven people. Conviction carries a maximum sentence of ten years’ imprisonment.

Seven people in a State with a population of 200 million! Wow! Meanwhile, the really important question for Muslims is whether the Supreme Court will hold polygamy to be illegal. That's going to truly set the cat amongst the pigeons! Tharoor's party will lose the few seats it has in UP to Owaisi. That's the problem with working yourself up about imaginary problems- C.A.A, Agricultural deregulation- because when the real thing comes along everybody wonders why you are standing around silently scratching your arse. 

Much of India has long celebrated the intermingling of Hindu and Muslim cultural practices. 

Except where Muslims were in the majority. They ethnically cleansed the shit out of Hindus and Sikhs who were welcome to go celebrate Ganga-Jamuna tehzeeb across the border. Of course, it must be admitted, Hindi and Punjabi speaking non-Muslims returned the compliment. 

But the Ganga-Jamni Tehzeeb, or “composite culture,” emerging from the interaction of the two faiths’ practitioners is now under assault from officially fomented bigotry. 

True enough. Indira chose to target Muslims, but also Jat Sikhs, to consolidate the Hindu vote. Rajiv went a step further, throwing the Babri Masjid open to Hindu worship. But both Indira and Rajiv were killed. Sonia, Rajiv's Italian widow, held things together for the heir- Rahul Gandhi. But Rahul has turned out to be a cretin and so Tharoor's chance of a Cabinet seat are now about as great as a conviction for driving his wife to suicide. 

The BJP derives its political strength from campaigning aggressively as the vehicle of an assertive Hindu community, and regards stoking anti-Muslim sentiment as a vote-winner.

Indira and Rajiv stole the clothes of the BJP but, because both were killed, they were able to steal them back. But the real story here is that Congress can't put up an electable Prime Ministerial candidate. Rahul is a cretin and does not want the job but Rahul won't let anyone else make good either. He, or his supporters, sabotaged Manmohan's second term even though the old man was careful to appear terribly decrepit. 

The BJP had previously campaigned successfully to build a Hindu temple on the site of a demolished mosque in Ayodhya, 

which Rajiv would have done had he not first lost power because of a Cabinet rebellion against his corruption and then, after he toppled 'Mr. Clean' V.P Singh, and was on the path back to power, he was assassinated. 

criminalize the Muslim divorce practice known as triple talaq,

which Tharoor, no doubt, approves off because what could be fairer to a wife than to dissolve the marriage by saying 'I divorce thee' three times.

 dismantle the special protections afforded to the Muslim-majority state of Jammu and Kashmir, 

This was done by the Supreme Court which held, in 2016 that J&K had no 'vestige of sovereignty'. Incidentally, Sunanda Pushkar was a Kashmiri Pundit whose family was ethnically cleansed by Muslim militants from their ancestral home in the Kashmir Valley. 

and enact a law that excludes Muslims from the fast-track Indian citizenship available to refugees of other faiths. 

This happened in 1948. Even Muslims living in India who had crossed the border to save their lives were not allowed to return to their property or to claim Indian citizenship. 

India did and does give citizenship to some Muslims from Pakistan, Bangladesh etc. However, if those Muslims are accused of 'apostacy' then Indian Muslims put a price on their heads, so they have to flee again. That's what happened to Dr. Taslima Nasrin- a feminist, but not a blasphemer or an apostate. She had to flee from India to Scandinavia.

Tharoor is falsely suggesting that India has not always given citizenship to non-Muslim refugees but has never done so to Muslims from those countries save for some special reason- e.g. artistic eminence or business success. 

All these steps have reinforced the party’s “tough on Muslims” image,

as opposed to Congress's 'tough on Hindus' image which, strangely, did not go down well with the eighty percent of voters who are Hindus.

 and Uttar Pradesh’s new anti-conversion law fits that pattern.

So, once again, the BJP is consolidating the Hindu vote without doing anything very much. Amit Shah must be rubbing his hands with glee when he sees fools like Tharoor doing his P.R for him. 

In recent weeks, other BJP-run states in India’s Hindi-speaking heartland have whipped up hysteria over “love jihad,” 

While Tharoor is screaming hysterically over a Law under which only 7 people have been arrested. This is all very well if he were a professional virtue signaller based in Manhattan. But he isn't. He is a former Minister and a sitting Member of Parliament. By showing himself to be a bombastic fool in the pages of Project Syndicate, he further damages his party. 

India, like other developing countries in the region, does indeed face a 'culture war'. The Supreme Court's decision on polygamy has salience in that respect. But Tharoor does not mention it. Is he even aware of the grenade which is rolling in his direction? Does Congress have a way to keep its share of the Muslim vote in the event of a negative ruling by the Bench? Or will they simply surrender to Owaisi? But, if there is a Muslim Party on the National Stage, who will Congress represent? The BJP has the Hindus. The BSP has the upper Dalits though some are joining the BJP. Brahmins can't identify with the Dynasty because Rahul hasn't taken a wife and his nephew is Christian. No doubt, there will be Congress pockets, just as there are Communist pockets, in places like Kerala. But the younger generation of leaders are going to go the way to Mamta or Biju Patnaik. They get nothing for staying under the wing of a Dynasty dying nasty. 

reflecting the party’s deeply entrenched Islamophobia. 

No governing party is 'Islamophobic'. If the BJP wins again, then all the promising young Muslim leaders will have a choice between joining Owaisi or else replicating the career trajectory of Arif Mohammad Khan. That's a good thing. Muslims are hardworking, thrifty, enterprising and have strong family and spiritual values. The Hindu majority gains when Muslims do well and rise up economically and educationally. 

State governments in Madhya Pradesh and Haryana have announced plans to enact laws to that of Uttar Pradesh.

So, Adityanath hasn't really gone out on a limb here. 

A BJP “youth leader” in Madhya Pradesh has gone further, persuading the police to file a case against two Netflix executives for allegedly offending Hindu religious sensibilities with a scene in the series A Suitable Boy in which a Hindu actress and a Muslim actor kissed briefly in front of a temple.

This is because this 'youth leader' understood that he needs to do things which signal virtue to Madhya Pradeshis, not- as Tharoor is doing- Manhattanites. 

 The leader, Gaurav Tiwari, demanded an apology from Netflix and the removal of “objectionable scenes” that he alleged were also “encouraging love jihad.” Instead of dismissing the case as preposterous, the state’s home minister, Narottam Mishra, ordered an investigation.

You can take a Tharoor out of Manhattan, but you can't take Manhattan out of Tharoor. What he finds 'preposterous' is Indian culture. It is sad that over a billion Indians don't have even a Bachelor's degree from an Ivy League- let alone a Doctorate from Georgetown. 

Even reports that police in Uttar Pradesh have already dropped, for lack of evidence, eight of the 14 “love jihad” cases they had opened are highly unlikely to dampen the BJP’s sectarian ardor. 

The BJP is busy ruling the country. Tharoor's ardor is reserved for hysterical bombast of an unmeaning and deracinated type. 

A few months ago, the jewelry brand Tanishq, 

which is a joint venture between the Tatas (who belong to a religion which bars most products of 'interfaith' marriages from membership) and the State Government of Tamil Nadu. 

which markets itself as the choice of “modern” young consumers, was pressured, including by threats of violence, to withdraw a television commercial that portrayed a happy interfaith marriage between a Hindu woman and a Muslim man.

Advertising agencies often goof up. I used to be a copywriter myself. What sounds cool in an air-conditioned office can kill off a brand in the mofussil towns. 

Tharoor tweeted- '"If Hindu-Muslim “ekatvam" irks them so much, why don’t they boycott the longest surviving symbol of Hindu-Muslim unity in the world -- India?" He seems to be unaware that Muslim men are allowed to marry Christian and Jewish, but not Hindu, women in countries like Pakistan. On marriage- even if the marriage is forcible- a bride must become a Muslim or else there is no marriage. Interestingly, Hindus may soon get the right to legitimize their marriages in Pakistan. But, this might provoke a reaction which will further decimate their numbers.

Although Islam remains its favored target, the BJP’s Hindu chauvinists have taken umbrage at the cultural practices of India’s Christian minority, too. A group of zealots called the Bajrang Dal, one of the BJP-aligned Hindutva (“Hinduness”) movement’s many affiliated organizations, recently threatened violence against Hindus who visited churches during Christmas. Whereas Hinduism teaches reverence for other faiths, those who claim to be its doughty warriors admit no such ecumenism.

In a Hindu majority country, it pays political dividends to be seen as a 'doughty warrior' rather than a limp wristed 'ecumenicist'. Indira knew this. Rajiv knew this. Maybe even Rahul knows this. But he was saddled with deracinated, elitists like Tharoor- who is shaping up to be the next Mani Shankar Aiyar.

Incidentally, Hinduism does not 'teach reverence for other faiths'. It either says all Faith is univocal- quite a different proposition- or that orthopraxy can be diverse. 

Valentine’s Day is another object of Hindutva warriors’ fury. 

It was the Shiv Sena which started that agitation. Congress is now a junior ally of the Sena in Maharashtra. 

Arguing that the occasion is un-Indian because it celebrates romantic love, they have attacked couples holding hands on February 14, trashed stores selling Valentine’s Day greeting cards, and shouted slogans outside cafes while couples canoodled inside.

Congress clearly has no problem with any of this. It is happy to prop up Bal Thakeray's son as C.M. 

Ironically, the Hindutva brigade has no real idea of Hindu tradition 

But Tharoor does! He thought it was cool that his g.f got a lot of 'sweat equity'. Then he married her. Then she was discovered dead in a room in a 5 star hotel.

Wikipedia states- When she was dating Shashi, Sunanda started getting media attention in India, as it became known that she had been given sweat equity worth ₹ 700 million in Rendezvous Sports World. In 2010, the company bid for the Indian Premier League (IPL) cricket team Kochi Tuskers Kerala, which represented Tharoor's native state Kerala. The company was founded in 2009, while Sunanda Pushkar was made a Director of the company on 25 February 2010, just 18 days before the IPL bid. There were allegations that Shashi Tharoor had misused his ministerial position to ask for a free stake in the company, and that Sunanda was acting as a proxy for him. The controversy ultimately resulted in Shashi Tharoor's resignation as a minister. In her defence, Sunanda argued that she had been invited to join Rendezvous because of her "extensive international experience as a business executive, marketing manager and entrepreneur". She also stated that she had been given a similar offer by Karim Morani of Kolkata Knight Riders in the past.[18][19] In April 2010, Sunanda announced that she had relinquished her stake in the company following the controversy. However, she continued to hold the stake, after she was told that there is no provision under the BCCI's IPL rules for surrender of shares at that stage.[20] Later in 2014, after the Twitter controversy (see below) and shortly before her death, Sunanda stated that she had taken upon herself "the crimes of this man [Shashi Tharoor] during IPL".[21]

– their idea of Indian values

the dollar value of the Sunanda's 'sweat equity' was ten million. That's the kind of Indian values Tharoor has a sound grasp of. 

 is not only primitive and narrow-minded,

because over a billion of those damn darkies don't even have a Bachelor's degree from Ivy League

 but also profoundly ahistorical. 

The history of Hindu India is the history of either abject surrender to invaders belonging to different religions or else of militant, and military, success against them. 

India’s culture has always been capacious, expanding to include new and varied influences, from the Greek and Muslim invasions to the British.

The Greek invasion failed. The Muslim and British invasions succeeded. Nevertheless, it is a fact that the Hindus, where they remained a majority, prevailed over these invaders. It seems they are determined to prevail over people like Rahul and Tharoor. But only because both are useless wankers. Indians would gladly appoint a Nicaraguan Lesbian Atheist Prime Minister if the lady were better at Governance than Modi. Politics is about making people better off and more secure. It isn't about telling stupid lies about imaginary 'culture wars'.

The central battle in Indian civilization today is between those who acknowledge that, as a result of India’s historical experience, our culture is as diverse as it is vast, and those who have presumptuously taken it upon themselves to define, in ever narrower terms, what and who is “truly” Indian.

Congress has lost this battle. Tharoor and Rahul live on another planet. No doubt, they are having spiffing adventures there. In this episode, Tharoor beats up evil Hindu fanatics. Meanwhile, back on planet earth, his day in court draws nigh. But for his party, Judgment Day has come and gone. It is no longer the default National Party. The question is will it become the default anti-National party? 

Modern Hinduism has always prided itself on its tolerance of differences. 

But Mummy slaps the black off you if you try to be different. The one truly intolerable thing about Hinduism is its hypocrisy in this respect. 

In fact, the modern era’s most famous Hindu sage, Swami Vivekananda, persuasively taught that the hallmark of Hindu civilization was not just tolerance but acceptance.

Sadly Vivekananda and Aurobindo and so forth did not tolerate and accept British over-lordship. 

 With their narrow-minded bigotry, today’s Hindu chauvinists are fundamentally betraying their faith, as well as assaulting the Constitution.

In the opinion of an opposition M.P facing charges of pushing his wife to commit suicide. 

The issue is not trivial. 

In politics, an issue is not trivial if it gains you votes. But this type of bombastic rhetoric is not helping Congress. It shows the fish has rotted from the head. 

If intolerant bullies, now enjoying the blessing of elected BJP governments, are allowed to get away with their acts of intolerance and “lawful” intimidation, India would suffer violence to an ethos profoundly vital to its survival as a civilization, and as a liberal democracy.

No it won't. Congress will disappear or else find a non-dynastic incarnation. But this would have happened in any case. Why? People like Tharoor were corrupt, incompetent and wholly deracinated. 

Pluralist and democratic India must, by definition, tolerate plural expressions of its many identities.

Nonsense! It must wholly disregard bullshit of Tharoor's sort. Long run, only the Economy matters. But, in the short to medium term, improving Governance- last mile delivery of essentials- is what Parties must get on with. 

 If we permit the self-appointed arbiters of Hindu culture 

says one such self-appointed arbiter

to impose their hypocrisy and double standards 

Like Tharoor's g.f's 'sweat equity' worth ten million dollars

on the rest of us, they will define down Indianness until it ceases to be Indian. 

in Tharoor's fevered imagination. Why not define down Indian Poverty till Poverty ceases to be Indian? Sorry, I forgot. Indira had Economists who did that in the mid-Seventies. One even said 'India is now a developed country. We don't need no stinkin' Foreign Aid'. Indira slapped the fellow down. She was by no means a cretin. She'd never have let Tharoor into her Cabinet. He is the sort of windbag who should be shunted off to the Nehru Center or the ICCR or some other such white elephant. 

The BJP-led culture war must be fought in the courts, 

Tharoor should certainly prepare himself for a fight in the Court. His freedom is at risk. Being convicted of forcing your wife to kill herself is not exactly a recommendation for high office. 

but it will be won only in the hearts of all Indians.

In politics, stomachs matter more than hearts. I thought Congress would have concentrated its fire-power on Modi's handling of the Economy. But they would need to do this in vernacular languages. They didn't bother. Instead they recycle a type of virtue signaling which might sound okay in Manhattan but which is utterly alien to Madhya, or any other, Pradesh. 

Tharoor may have married Sunanda Pushkar for love. He may not have made her a scapegoat for his own sins. But Indian Law is aware that wives are in a weaker position in India. That is why there are draconian laws on things like 'love jihad', subjecting a wife to cruelty or, as in Tharoor's case, 'abetment to suicide'. 

Agnes Callard on 'managing' conversations

By creating 'barriers to entry' into a particular way of earning a living, 'economic rent' is created. This generally corresponds to a 'deadweight loss' to Society. It is true that there are utile fields where we need to have some barrier to the entry of stupid loudmouths. Credentials of a professional or epistemic type may solve an 'information asymmetry' problem and thus prevent 'market failure'.

What about the useless type of discourse indulged in by academics in shite University Departments which we may term 'Grievance Studies'? Should we permit barriers of entry and 'economic rent' into this field? Oddly, there may be some point to doing this. The supply of the nuisance may be less than it would be under open competition. 

Obviously, shite academics will try to argue the opposite. But, because they are shite, the argument they make would apply equally to farts as to speech acts.

As a case in point, Agnes Callard writes in the NYT- 

Suppose a man and I are having a conversation about recent events, and suppose I introduce one of my statements with “As a woman, …”

The guy pays attention. Is the dame going to tell him what he has always feared- viz. women find him repulsive? Indeed, his Mom only pretended to think he was her own cutesy wootsy babykins. Inwardly, she was retching. 

More generally, if someone says 'As an x', where x represents a large class of people, then there is a claim for higher weightage to be accorded to that person's statement because they are presenting themselves as a 'representative agent'. 

He knew that he was talking to a woman from the beginning of the conversation, but now, all of a sudden, I am speaking to him as a woman. What difference does this make?

The difference has to do with

1) representative agent theory. When I speak as a member of a class, the expectation is that I will say something representative of the majority opinion of that class. Thus, I may say 'I personally have no objection to beef, but- speaking as a Hindu- it is an abomination'. It is difficult to verify my personal preferences. However, when speaking as a representative agent, it is possible to use statistical material to refute my contention as false and disingenuous. 

 2) 'preference intensity'. There are some issues where a particular class has a more intense preference. This means, in the language of game theory, that  Uncorrelated Asymmetries arise. Philosophically, this could be said to do with Oikeiosis- ownership/belonging- and represents 'the bourgeois strategy' which a good solution to a class of games. Obviously, this cuts both ways. If your oikeiosis represents no 'skin in the game', then you should be ignored no matter how persuasive your rhetoric.  

Agnes is attributing bizarre beliefs to her interlocutor. On the other hand, it is true that Men have only with thing on their minds. Thus

It may seem to him that

you are begging to suck his cock. But why the fuck should you care how things seem to that dickhead? 

I am attempting to secure an unfair conversational advantage:

Uncorrelated asymmetries aren't unfair. They are a fact of life. Conversations aren't courts of law. The right thing to do is to talk about your bleeding piles till everybody moves away and you can tuck into the buffet to your heart's content.

Instead of asking him to accept my arguments on the grounds of their validity,

Arguments have no validity unless there is a protocol bound juristic or other decision process in which case who is making the argument is highly germane. According to a protocol, a particular person's statement may be decisive and 'buck stopping'. Equally, they may have no locus standi or what they urge may have no probative or other value. 

I am asking him to accept them on the grounds of my status as a woman.

Which is highly germane if the issue in question is one where 'status as a woman' gives an assertion higher probative value or is 'buck stopping' in some other way. 

To take the most extreme reaction, he may feel that I am bullying him,

or he may feel you are saying you won't give him a b.j coz he got a needle dick and his cum is smelly. Fuck you should care?  Let the cunt fellate himself.

using him as a scapegoat to exact vengeance on the basis of some grievance I harbor toward some particular man, some group of men, or men in general.

If I were a woman, I'd have a grievance against all men. How come they get to pee standing up? 

He probably wouldn’t react in the same way if he were discussing a topic that touched on physics,

coz saying 'speaking as a woman, I think superstrings are really hard to knit' is what men want to hear

and his interlocutor said, “As a physicist …” In that case, she has expertise that he is likely to recognize as conversationally relevant.

Nonsense! All physicists talk ultracrepidarian bollocks when it comes to things 'which touch on' but aren't physics. Ask an engineer. Or a mathematical economist. Physicists tend to be stupider than average when venturing outside their metier. 

Even if he knew she was a physicist before the conversation began, he might find it reasonable for her to preface some of her assertions with a reminder that she is speaking from a position of special knowledge.

Only if it were reasonable for her to suppose he had the attention span of a goldfish and he had been talking ultracrepidarian bollocks.  

Being a physicist gives a person a certain standing in conversations that have something to do with physics.

Because to become a physicist you have to study physics for many years and to possess credentials of an epistemic, not biological, type.  

So why shouldn’t being a woman give me a certain standing in conversations that have something to do with gender?

Because being a woman is biological not epistemic. A person with severe mental retardation may be a woman but may not be able to converse about being a woman.  

Let’s distinguish two ways in which the expertise of a physicist might figure in a discussion of some question.

There is only one manner in which expertise of an epistemic sort figures in a discussion of an essentially epistemic type. That manner is epistemological and protocol bound.

Non protocol-bound discourses are anything goes. Credentials or Expertise are irrelevant.  The more paranoid shouter wins.   

Agnes tries to describe what protocols arise in a discussion where expertise is germane

First, it might allow her to introduce facts into the conversation that have bearing on the question. Call this, “informational standing.”

Why? 'Probative value' is a term which already exists.  It is justiciable. Callard's 'Informational standing' is wooly- indeed, it is 'anything goes'. It is not justiciable. How do we know? Because Callard thinks being a woman has 'informational value'. But this is not the case. We could always find a woman to contradict any and every other woman on any point at all. Indeed, we could find women with insufficient mental capacity to communicate any 'informational value'. 

Second, it might put her in a privileged position to manage the conversation: to determine who speaks when, how the question is pursued, when it counts as answered and so on. Call this, “managerial standing.”

That is a Judicial, not a Managerial, function. Managers can let anyone talk any old bollocks in any sequence while quietly making the right decision. Judges, however, are protocol bound. 

For an administrative purpose- e.g. determining whether a candidate should be granted a credential or deciding what should be on the curriculum- a 'manager' may be involved. But this is not the case when it comes to purely epistemic questions. Something exogenous- e.g. a new observation or an experimentum crucis- might 'close' a particular discussion. 

The idea that being a woman can give me informational standing is relatively unproblematic.

No. It is problematic because being a woman is compatible with being mentally challenged or holding antagonomic views.  

For example, perhaps we are talking about the use of alcohol in socializing, and I inform my interlocutor, speaking as a woman, that when you refrain from drinking, people often assume you are pregnant.

Agnes is speaking in proprio persona. It so happens that she is of child bearing age and that when she refrains from drinking it is because she is either pregnant or breast feeding. Obviously, she would only make this remark in a social context where it is normal for people to drink alcohol. She wouldn't say this to a traffic cop who stopped her while she was doing the school run. 

Perhaps this comes as news to him.

How stupid are the men Agnes talks to? 

Informational standing is a version of expertise.

No. A witness has informational standing if they saw what went down. If there is no witness, an expert's testimony may have probative value. But that testimony might be controverted by another expert. 

To see this, apply what we might call the “expert replacement test”:

This is nonsense. We only call in an expert where there is no eye-witness. Only where direct, substantive, knowledge is lacking, do we have to rely upon a hypothesis put forward by someone with domain expertise. 

Could I claim such standing over a male scientist who had extensively studied the relevant domain of the female experience (including first-person reports)? No.

Yes. A Scientist who says he knows more than a woman about being a woman is       not a scientist. He is a shithead.  

And this shows that the demographic fact — in this case, that I am a woman —

that is not a 'demographic' fact. It is, or was, a biological fact. Demography can class a biological woman as a man.

is not essential to the kind of standing I am claiming. When we get heated over the fact that someone is speaking as an X, it is probably not a claim to informational standing that disturbs us.

When we get heated over what a person says when it does not chime with what we believe or what we consider it was appropriate for them to say. This is context dependent and is not related to 'informational standing'. Thus, a General may get heated if a junior officer says 'speaking as an expert on this type of weaponry, I think x'. The junior officer may be reprimanded not because what he said was false but because he spoke out of turn. 

It is important to remind ourselves that conversations include, but are not reducible to, exchanges of information.

Why remind ourselves of something we already know? Conversations are mainly 'phatic'- an exchange of grooming or marking services. 

Some of the things we get by talking to people we could get in other ways

This is not the case. We get 'testimony' by talking to people. What we get in other ways is not 'testimony' though it may relate to what motivates us to seek 'testimony'. 

— this is true of cases in which we take the fact that someone said something as evidence for the truth of what they are saying.

But only in the sense that it is equally true that we may take the fact that someone said she did not want to suck our cock as evidence that she had had told her entire Cabinet that she would yield the Falklands to General Galtieri unless Iyer lets her give him a b.j. What? Shit like that went down all the time when I was a teenager.  

We are treating them as a kind of thermostat for reality,

Reality does not have a thermostat. Engineering does. 

in principle replaceable with finding (credible) slips of paper on the ground, or overhearing them talking to someone else, or having them tailed by a private detective.

No. Nothing replaces 'testimony'.  But 'testimony' is not necessarily alethic. Yet it says something about 'intentionality' which nothing circumstantial can. 

If conversations were information-extraction exercises, we would be

solely concerned with truth, not intentions. 

indifferent as to whether our interlocutor was telling the truth, or lying, as long as we knew which “filter” to apply. (Either way, we can extract data from the utterance.)

Nonsense! There is no 'filter' save in the case of an algorithmic liar. But, such beasts don't exist.  

Spies might be satisfied with information extraction, but in normal conversation it is important to us that our interlocutor make an honest effort to speak truthfully.

Fuck off! I don't want to have a truthful conversation with anyone! I know I'm a fat boring cunt but being told that such is the case tends to reduce my general joie de vivre. 

This is because, when we converse, we have the goal of thinking with our interlocutor, and you only invite someone into your mind to the extent that you are willing to lay it open before them; and because you expect them to do the same.

No. We seek 'suhrit prapti'- the condition for Yoga- 'like-heartedness' because this lightens a common yoke. 

We don't want to 'think with' anyone. We want to do things with others because there are some things- like assembling IKEA furniture- which require such cooperation. But we don't want to have a thought which we can only have with the assistance of someone else. Suppose I understand the Pythagoras theorem only when 'thinking with' Teacher. Then, the teacher hasn't actually successfully taught me that theorem. 

No doubt, there are some feelings which arise out of 'thinking with'- e.g. 'the Oceanic feeling' achieved in the presence of a spiritual preceptor- but even in that case we don't expect or require reciprocity. The psychoanalyst or Guru is not expected to open up to the patient or chela.

The ideas of respect and equality have many applications in civic life,

These may be regulative concepts but they are also essentially contested. Thus they don't have 'applications'. Rather they arise as the expression of friction or factionalism or other types of dysfunction. 

especially in a democracy,

in which case they are the subject to protocol bound juristic or administrative decision processes 

but one of the most basic is conversational: mutual recognition as having equal standing to contribute to the discussion of some question.

A conversation is not, speaking generally, protocol bound. If it is, this is confirmed by a written aide memoire or memorandum of some sort. But, in such cases, the parties to the conversation are accredited in a particular manner such that what is said is scarcely spontaneous or free-wheeling. However, even in Diplomatic conversations where there is a protocol of equality, it is not the case that all parties have 'equal standing' to contribute to the discussion. In theory, Andorra is just as much a sovereign country as America. But when America talks, the world listens. Andorra- not so much. 

Conversational equality is inconsistent with managerial standing.

Nonsense! The Biden/Trump debates showed that management of a scrupulous, indeed ruthless, sort is needed for 'conversational equality'. 

If it’s my job to decide how the conversation proceeds, then our conversational relationship is hierarchical.

No. It is protocol bound. There may be a hierarchy. There may not. A bunch of Anarchists may take it in turn to be Chair. This does not mean that they accept hierarchy. 

I stand over you in the role of a teacher or leader or guide.

But, if we can sack you if you are shit in that role then there really isn't a hierarchy.

When the physicist assumes managerial standing over the conversation,

and you don't like it, you can just walk away 

she is saying that she cannot sincerely converse as an equal with you.

at which point you can ask how come she hasn't got a Nobel- unless she has in which case you ask if that's how come she managed to fit a tardis up her twat.  

The truth is, saying 'as an x, my testimony is y' does not entail inequality. Suppose we are discussing a software package. I say 'as an economist, I find this package seriously flawed'. You say 'as a physicist, I find it a godsend'. This is potentially interesting to both parties. The economist wants to know why this package works for particular models in Physics because this gives him a clue as to how to rejig his own model to take advantage of a cheap type of computation. But, the physicist may also learn why a particular type of computation which is successful at one level of analysis must fail at a different level. 

She could have a farce of a conversation in which she nods along while inwardly groaning, or she can give you some instruction.

Coz the way to learn theoretical physics is by asking some chick at a cocktail party

Given the sad state of your education in physics, these are her only options.

This is entirely untrue. Great physicists have had very productive conversations with poets and carpenters and fishermen and mystics of various stripes. The reverse is also true. Indeed, the path to becoming the best at anything is to have the sort of conversations Agnes does not think possible. 

This brings us, finally, to the kind of speaking “as a woman” that engenders defensiveness and hostility.

Because it comes from a place of offensiveness and hatred. But this can still be useful. As a Right Wing nutjob, I learn all sorts of techniques for nuisance creation and general sociopathy from my 'woke' interlocutors. 

When I adopt managerial standing on the grounds of some demographic fact,

there is an equal and opposite 'managerial standing' for one's alterity arising out of the notion that they can be more 'objective' or dispassionate.

Management is linked to 'appropriable control rights'. Either you have such rights- in which case you decide who speaks or who is listened to- or you don't. There is an 'uncorrelated asymmetry' here which fundamentally changes the nature of the game. But this is a matter of fact, not hypothetical imputation. 

I am saying that given the difference between us with respect to gender, race, sexual orientation, or socio-economic status, we cannot converse as equals — moreover, that in order for us to converse, you have to allow me to be in some way in charge of the conversation. You have to hand me the reins.

Under the Rule of Law, there are issues where you alone 'have the reins'. Hohfeldian immunities obtain in an asymmetric manner. As for mere gabfests, if  you feel yourself slipping out of the saddle, punctuate them with pungent farts.

This demand on my part will sometimes be illegitimate

Not unless the thing is protocol bound. Otherwise it may be silly, mischievous or inconsequential 

— I may, in fact, be a bully, looking for a way to grab power, humiliate you or show off in front of others.

or you may be a person whose silent but deadly farts can clear out a Concert Hall. 

But is it always illegitimate?

Or does it have a loving Mummy and a doting Daddy and a lush Trust Fund? 

If I speak as an X, managerially,

Others can speak as a 'non-X' tasked with managing the importunities of those silly Xs. 

I am saying that a certain ideal kind of conversation — conversation among equals — is impossible for us.

An ideal kind of conversation can occur between creature and Creator- or so Humanity has long believed. 

Could that be, simply, true? Could it be that, as in the case of the physicist, our only option besides putting me in charge is fake conversation?

A fake action is one where it is 'common knowledge' that what appears to be happening isn't actually happening. Just like a fake marriage, a fake conversation may be between equals while a genuine marriage, like a genuine conversation, may be between people who are not equals and where neither exercises a 'managerial' function. Guess which are more stable.

If the answer is, “yes,” this won’t be because demographic membership constitutes a form of expertise.

But the answer is 'no'. 

We can use our expert replacement test:

No we can't because where direct testimony is available, expertise is de trop. 

If you are having a conversation about rape with someone who says, “as a rape victim,” her claim to managerial standing, unlike any informational claim she might make, will in no way be undermined by the presence of a rape researcher.

Sadly, being raped does not confer 'managerial standing'. On the other hand, 'informational claims' may indeed be undermined by 'the presence of a rape researcher'. Sadly, many people who have suffered abuse have been told to their face by 'experts' that they are lying. Whatever one has suffered or one is suffering, if an 'expert' is sitting in, you'd better say what he wants hear otherwise you may be labelled a fantasist.  

Unlike informational standing, managerial standing can be demographic “all the way down.”

But we all know we aren't obliged to listen to shite. 'Managerial standing' arises with respect to your property and your person- though you may have to outsource it to a lawyer or a guy with an M.B.A.

So on what basis might someone claim such standing?

On the basis of the Law or the rules or norms governing the Institution under whose auspices the conversation occurs.   

Perhaps the most familiar case is one in which systematic and entrenched forms of injustice have ossified group relations into ones of unequal respect.

But, if there are entrenched forms of injustice then 'group relations' were worse to start off with.

It would not, of course, follow that individual members of those groups were barred from showing one another equal respect

On the contrary, this was precisely what was disallowed. Miss Scarlet could not show 'equal respect' to Big Mammy Strap-on even after the latter's ministrations  had so wrecked Rhett Butler's rectum that he could no longer give a damn.

 even unknowingly. In such a case, speaking as a member of the disrespected group could be a way of both drawing attention to this fact, and attempting to redress it.

So could farting noisily.  

Such a speaker is saying, given the presence of structural inequality, an unequal conversation is the only sincere, honest way forward.

Or they may be farting noisily to the same semiotic end. 

Anything else would require her to nod along, inwardly groaning.

While letting out silent but deadly farts.

If an argument applies as much to a fart as it does to itself then it is worth only a fart as an argument. 

These issues of structural injustice can be very tricky.

But how smelly are they? That is the crucial question when deliberating on a public nuisance. 

Consider the summer of 2018 controversy that arose around the work of Kathleen Stock, a philosophy professor who argues against redefining the category of woman and lesbian to include trans women.

Who did this controversy help? Women? Trans women? Lesbians? Anybody at all? The thing was a nuisance.  

Why does the terminology matter so much here? Among other things, what is at stake is the question of whether trans women have managerial standing to speak as women.

So, what is at stake is nothing at all. The truth is, I alone have managerial standing to speak as a woman at any symposium I arrange. Sad.  

It is also important to note that not every case of demographic managerial standing will be predicated on injustice.

But any shite can be predicated on any other shite by any shithead.  

Someone with personal experience of a natural disaster might not to be able to speak on that topic without getting emotional.

So might a guy with no such personal experience who gets emotional easily  

Allowing that person to manage the conversation may make it possible for him to be as rational as he can be, under the circumstances.

Or it may lead to displays of public incontinence and everybody slipping in each other's poo.  

It is no sort of argument to say x may entail y if it may equally entail not-y or just everybody shitting into their hands and flinging their feces about. 

One could avoid demographically managed conversations by restricting one’s interlocutors.

No. Even if you are your own sole interlocutor 'demographically managed conversation' will still occur because of the sloppy way Agnes has defined it. Equally, no such conversation will occur for the same reason. Either the thing Agnes is talking about exists in all possible worlds or it does not exist at all. 

You might think that a philosopher would be inclined to do this.

A bad one- okay. 

Philosophers place special value on a specific kind of conversation — those in which strict equality between participants makes possible the no-holds-barred argumentative warfare that is our bread and butter.

and what the rest of us consider to be coprophagy.  

We think that when people refute us, they are doing us a favor.

The problem is that their refutation can be easily made to refute itself or else affirm that all things that are are cats- except cats. Ex falso quodlibet works that way. 

And refutation does not fit comfortably in demographically managed conversation: If you are the manager, my refuting you undermines my acceptance of your managerial standing, and if I am the manager, refuting you might well constitute an abuse of it.

This is a bizarre use of the word 'managerial'. Even a dictator may change his mind after hearing a 'refutation. Good managers don't feel they are 'undermined' when they steal the brainwave of a subordinate.  

But philosophers are also teachers of philosophy, charged with producing the next generation of philosophers.

But the next generation may not get tenure and thus have to stop calling themselves philosophers. 'Barista' sounds like a real brainy thing to be.  

We not only conduct but also induct people into such conversations, and this means that we are interested in the porousness of the boundary that surrounds them.

Does it let in utter cretins? 

We don’t choose our students,

A sure sign of a degenerate research program. Four centuries ago, no respectable alchemist would have taken me as a student. Now, I can become a fully certified Mage of Esoteric Science for $ 9.99.  

we don’t choose our society, and we can’t always choose our conversations.

That's the downside of joining a shite Department. 

For this reason, I think all of us — even philosophers — should be prepared, at times, to accept demographic claims of managerial standing;

in other words, get some of the sweet sweet 'Grievance Studies' green 

but I also think we should aspire to navigate each of those conversations with the kind of intellectual excellence, respect and sensitivity that would allow them to become the full-fledged, unmanaged conversations they aspire to be.

as opposed to what? Aspiring to sink these conversations into a snake-pit of name-calling and hair pulling and face scratching?

Agnes thinks philosophers should 'manage' conversations. Nobody else does. Scientists and Lawyers and Diplomats and Economists and Accountants and Engineers and Administrators have highly utile conversations all the time. They don't call in a Philosopher to do the managing. 

It may be that a few academics in shite departments can get a little publicity by pretending to be 'woke' or pretending 'wokeness' is the new McCarthyism. But that doesn't mean the thing isn't a public nuisance. 

Circa Regna tonat

Assuaging Bitter Waters till they Slumber, Abashing Boisterous Breezes till they hide

Irene yet daughters Wonder & Elektra- Dad's amber-tinged bride

Around Thrones- Thaumas' bones- Wyatt's but Art's thunder rolls

 Not Ocean's brooding disquiet at its Heart's blunder and own goals.

Envoi-

Prince! Not mind but tongue to un-convince

Gargle Vrat, Vakr, Varuna & rinse. 

Megalopsychia

Granted, you were taught it was wrong to adore God yet scorn your fellow Man

Yet, in view of the latter's filing a restraining order,

Learn your place in the Big Boss's cosmic Plan

Fluffing donkeys for porn across the border.

Agnes Callard's two secrets

What is a secret? It's something you ought not to reveal as a matter of protocol. Nobody wants to hear- unless they are paid to do so- about how you were fucked in the ass by your priest even though you were his Bishop. Similarly, we don't want to hear about how your brain is wired differently. It is obvious that you, like me, have X ray vision and can see that most dudes in authority wear lacy French underwear under their three piece suits, but let's just keep that under our hat, shall we? 

Agnes Callard, writing for the NYT, takes a different view- 

I am not a private person — quite the opposite — but I do have two secrets. The first concerns some Bad Events that happened to me long ago (yes, it’s the sort of thing you are thinking of), and the second is an unrelated Fact about my neurological makeup.

Everybody has secrets of this sort. Some people may want to hear them but they aren't really your friends. They will laugh about you later on. In any case, it is extremely inconsiderate to mention the time you shat yourself in Swahili class just when everybody is digging into aloo gobi at the dinner table.  It is also wrong to dwell on the fact that you are totes autistic like that dude in Rainman and so could everybody please chip in a couple of bucks so you can play online roulette.

Speaking generally, secrets aren't facts but rather a relationship between facts which may not itself be factual even if it is 'common knowledge'. Revealing it is to break a protocol- nothing more and nothing less. 

Let me be clear: I am not ashamed of either of these things. Keeping them secret creates, in me, an uncomfortable feeling, as though I were hiding something, as though I were ashamed, and that bugs me all the time, like a scratchy tag in my clothing.

But you don't get naked even if your clothes feel scratchy- do you? That would be to break a highly utile protocol.  Nobody wants to see your dangly bits. Put them away. 

But I can’t tell you what The Fact is, because you won’t believe me;

We can't believe this statement of Agnes. Why? She is telling us something we don't believe- because to do so entails having to believe every false or wholly nonsensical statement. The 'truth-maker' for her statement is that there exists at least one speech-act of hers which is conditional on an alterity's credence. If Agnes has a 'neurological quirk' such that she can know in advance whether she will be believed then this is plausible. But, if such 'neurological quirks' exist, then we can't possibly have evolved on an uncertain fitness landscape. So, if you can believe that then you can believe any other shite you are told. 

and I can't tell you about The Events, because you will. 

By this stage, we are taking bets on whether Agnes shat herself on a regular basis in her Tensor Calculus class or, more sadly, was diddled by her Uncles. The real reason Agnes can't tell us 'about The Events' is because we will believe much much more about their gross and sordid nature than she is capable of articulating. I mean, how could li'l Agnes not have shat into her hands and flung feces at the School Marm every time she apostrophized Emmy Noether shouting 'eat Aryan shit, you dirty kike' even though, ironically, Agnes herself is Jewish? I mean, what happened to Agnes in her Tensor Calculus Lecture was pretty much the same thing as happens to peeps wot shit themselves during Mrs. Mwanga's Swahili class- right? I mean, this is like the classic Karl Abrahamian entelechy of the Jungian archetype of the self-hating Guj-Jew, right? 

The reason it is not a good idea to tell all and sundry about various Uncles wot diddled you is that they are all convinced you were literarily swimming in the entire neighborhood's semen and loving every minute of it. 

I have barely told you anything about The Events, but I suspect that you have already started believing.

That you shat yourself in the Tensor Calculus equivalent of Swahili Class? Sure. It could happen to anybody. 

You want to be someone who believes women;

Fuck off! Nobody wants to be gullible w.r.t anything other than faked orgasms and assurances that nobody thinks any the less of you just coz you shat yourself in Swahili class coz, truth be told, you were sitting next to a Gujju. It was the Gujju what shat himself- not you- at least, that's what everybody thinks, so you needn't hide at home but can go back to School and reclaim your job as Head of Modern Languages. 

The truth is, we always did and do believe women and kids when they speak up on certain matters- unless it is more convenient not to. 

you see this as the belief-challenge you have been waiting for; you want to rise to it.

Fuck off! This is bogus, virtue signalling, shite. Nicole Kidman is supposed to spend six episodes knitting her eyebrows in perplexity over the fact that her hubby is squeezing his dingus into any and every available orifice or light fixture even though some of those orifices belong to other women who call him a vicious rapist. Even if Kidman rises to 'the belief-challenge' that her rapist husband also rapes poor women of a different race, she is still a mere figment of the Libtard imagination. 

On the other hand, there are protocols re. what we admit as true, or probable, and what we denounce as vicious lies, which are based on uncorrelated asymmetries- i.e. individuating self-interest. 

When I first told a therapist about The Events, she said: “Of course. In retrospect it makes perfect sense of so many things …”

Coz this 'therapist' was paid to listen to a stupid cunt because she herself was too stupid a cunt to make money any other way. If both had had dicks, they could have had like a sword-fight with those dicks and filmed it on their smartphones and put it up on Pornhub and then their wives would have divorced them and they'd have become homeless and ended up giving blowjobs at the back of the KFC on North End Road and, anyway, that's what happened to all the other boys who didn't shit themselves in Mrs. Mwanga's Swahili class and who went on to get degrees in Accountancy or Pharmacology and their daughters are all like Priti Patel and their sons are all Rishi fucking Sunak and sod this for a game for soldiers I'm going out to get a proper drink.

Can't. COVID. Fuck me. Must I read the rest of Callard's crap?

Later she apologized for this as therapeutic overreach.

Which it definitely was if digital penetration occurred. Take it from me, if your therapist has a finger up your butt-hole, she has definitely overreached herself. This entitles you to 25 % off and a complimentary change of underwear. 

Even therapists can’t help themselves — they are off to the races, believing and believing.

Are they though? They have a shitty job and are one malpractice suit away from bankruptcy. Agnes is indulging in an ego-centric, false, diairesis- i.e. making bogus distinctions rather than overcoming divisions through 'oikeiosis'- i.e. generating ties of belonging.

 The alternatives for the therapist here aren't 'believe Agnes' or 'dismiss Agnes as a time-wasting fantasist'. They are 'keep this crappy client and pay the mortgage' or 'don't keep this crappy client and end up homeless.'

On this topic, so much gets packaged into “being believed”

being x means belonging to a group called x according to certain protocols. The thing isn't necessarily epistemic. It is more like a legal fiction. Nothing except the relevant Hohfeldian rights and obligations gets packed into 'being believed'. 

that I fear the more I tell you, the less you will understand me.

We understand you well enough. You have shit for brains and teach a shit for brains subject to shitheads who, probably because they were epistemically raped, now demand a Credential by way of Societal compensation. 

I don't want you to think you know the meaning of The Events;

though you told us their meaning for you was traumatic and equivalent to shitting yourself in Swahili class while getting your first hard-on coz Mrs Mwanga was hot and, unlike Mummy's, her slaps were sweeter than Fanta...

I don’t want to be classified as damaged;

as opposed to being classified as a retarded pedagogue whose shtick is how like Philosophy helps her students to recover from having been buggered senseless as babies by every epistemic authority in the vicinity 

I don’t want you to feel good about yourself for believing me;

As opposed to feeling bad about ourselves for making fun of this needy, greedy, credential seeking cretin 

I don’t want you to feel sorry for me; and most of all, I don’t want you to praise my courage for “coming forward” or for “surviving.”

But, you do feel that we ought to feel sorry for you, don't you? Why? The Holocaust? Gypsies died too. They don't make a meal of the thing. 

The prospect of receiving praise or honor for this revelation fills with me with rage — when I imagine your admiration, I immediately imagine throwing it back in your face.

Kids getting diddled and shrieking horribly coz it hurts... that fills me with rage. Sadly, I am not currently incarcerated. I can't relieve my feelings in this respect by kicking in the head of a 'nonce'. 

Why would anyone want to 'admire' a stupid, ignorant, pedagogue who has got a gig writing for the NYT coz she is soooo not a perfectly coiffed Multi-tasking Wonder Mom whom we all secretly want to see locked up like Martha Stewart...or Hilary Clinton. 

The Fact I’d like to tell you has to do with a difference between how we — you and I — think.

You think like shit. I don't.  

But to get specific about this difference, I have to use a word you associate with people who don’t talk, who can’t take care of themselves, whose inner lives seem utterly obscure to you, people who harm themselves, people you struggle to see as human, people whose existence you see as a tragedy.

Drooling cretin is the word we associate with you and everybody else in your line of work. 

And you will find this comparison preposterous.

No we won't. 'Fire that drooling cretin!' is our motto. 'Shut down that entire department of drooling cretins.'  

You will tell me I shouldn’t use “that word,” you will helpfully offer me milder alternatives.

Like shithead.  

You might acknowledge that I’m “quirky” or “idiosyncratic”

no. We will stick with drooling cretin. 

— in a good way! — and that a few of those quirks may superficially resemble those people. But I have a professional career, a family. I can’t be like them. (Ask yourself: how much knowledge would you need, really, to be certain of this?)

or else drooling cretins can teach other drooling cretins and reproduce within family units of drooling cretins 

You might be willing to budge a little if you could hear it from some medical professionals — though one might not be enough.

This is true. Having been certified a drooling cretin by a board of medical experts may indeed entitle you to Disability benefits and a bigger office or, which is just as good, the right to push Akeel Bilgrami down in the playground and steal his lunch. 

You’d need a second and third opinion. Notice that if I told you I had cancer or diabetes or depression,

or all three if you really want to make our day

or for that matter that I was left-handed, you would not insist on seeing my papers. You would not be inclined to think I was faking my left-handedness by having trained myself to use my left hand; or that I resembled depressed people only “in some respects.”

But we would accept your self-certification as a drooling cretin because we can check on the internet that you write stupid shite

In the case of The Events, you are eager to assign victim status to me;

no. We are eager to snigger about how you kept shitting yourself or kept swimming in semen or whatever.  

in the case of The Fact, you are wary of assigning it to me.

Only if it entails our having to provide you with a disabled ramp and toilet and so forth.  

For you, there is only one question: how much suffering can she legitimately lay claim to?

Such a question only arises if a protocol obliges us to grade and reward levels of suffering. But, if so, we immediately claim to be cosmic empaths who feel, at great amplification, all the woes of the Multiverse. Essentially, if you aint getting paid big bucks for grading other's suffering you tell those losers to fuck off and die unless they are bigger than you in which case you start moaning about how Uncle keeps diddling you and shitting yourself in Swahili class was a cry for help. In a world full of refugees and homeless people with tragic mental health histories we all need to invent horrible maladies for ourselves so as to compete in the Pity Olympics.

You are so busy trying to answer this question — trying to serve as judge in the pain/suffering/disadvantage Olympics — that you cannot hear anything I am trying to tell you.

Which is a small mercy because you are a drooling cretin 

And that means I can’t talk to you.

Works for me. 

No one can sincerely assert words whose meaning she knows will be garbled by the lexicon of her interlocutor.

Rubbish! We all speak sincerely at some time or the other even if there are people around who will think we are asking to suck their dick.  

I don’t want privacy, but you’ve forced it onto me.

I sympathize. I don't want celibacy but decent women tend to force it onto me. This is one reason I feel there is hope for the human race.

You might wonder why I have to tell you these things. Couldn’t I find a supportive community of people who endured similar Events, and wouldn’t I be believed by other Fact-Bearers? Yes, and individual connections of this kind are very valuable, but at the group level this kind of support has never worked for me.

In other words, other drooling cretins think they are better than you and politely suggest you join a group for drooling cretins who shit themselves so incessantly other drooling cretins will have nothing to do with them.  

Being surrounded by people who are supposedly like me inevitably leads me to feel maximally “different.”

Because you are the only one sitting in a puddle of your own poo. That's one reason I quit Chartered Accountancy.  

Probably my failure to benefit from such communities is a sign that I have not suffered so much, and deserve very little victim credit. So be it!

But you are a victim of the direst possible epistemic self-abuse.  

Solidarity is not my thing, openness is. It is a consequence of The Fact, for me, that I lean toward transparency in all contexts: I have to consciously prevent myself from oversharing (even more than I do), and I am honest from necessity rather than virtue.

So, Agnes has no 'filter'. Lots of boring people are in the same boat. Sadly, they don't want to talk to each other. They need non-boring victims. I may be unedumicated, but there are some traits I share with Agnes.  

There is a reason for all of this, which is that I am bad — really bad, you cannot imagine how bad — at figuring things out on my own. If I take too many steps in reasoning without the intervention of another person, I go very far wrong. So I have accustomed myself to reasoning in public as much as I can, to making sure to expose my mistakes to correction.

while boring the shit out of your interlocutor. The workaround for this is to earn money by talking boring shite as a Philosophy lecturer and then pay some of that money to a stupid as shit Therapist whose credentials are equally worthless. In Callard's Utopia, extreme disability of an imaginary kind will entitle one to a tenured position in the Dept. of Grievance Studies. Every boring cunt will then be able to pay a quack to listen to their stupid shit. 

I know that I don’t know what corner assistance might come from. I don’t want to confide in a select group of people who grumble among themselves about how you misunderstand “us.” I want to talk to you, any and all of you, freely, so you can help me stop misunderstanding myself.

But why should we care? With genuine grief or suffering there is a common 'Structural Causal Model' such that finding a mechanism to ameliorate more extreme pain also helps those who experience it only moderately. But with imaginary grievances, there is no such pay off.  

The truth is that I don’t know the meaning of The Events, for my life. Isn’t it at least possible that they simply don’t have any meaning? Or maybe the meaning will change once I am allowed to speak them out loud? Perhaps I really am scarred for life, but do we have to assume that from the outset?

One way forward is to find someone you can help and actually help them. Keep doing so till you have either learnt a way to help yourself or no longer care about identifying your major malfunction.  

If I could talk it through, I might have a hope of figuring this out.

No. Chances are you'll just go around in circles.  

Because that is mostly how I figure out all the difficult problems of my life: I talk about them to whoever is available, whenever the problems seem relevant to something else I am thinking about; I listen; I rethink; I write; I circle back and write something else; over and over again; and over time I develop a stable picture.

But that picture is still shit. 

With The Events, I am at sea. For so long I did not even allow myself to speak them to myself. Now that I can, it chafes at me that you have decided that if I want to talk about them with you, I have to follow your rules, and let you trample all over me. Perhaps more people who have experienced Events would talk about them with you if they thought you would do less “believing” and more listening.

Pay for the listening and jabber away.  

Factwise, this is what I want to know: what, if anything, ties together the “superficial” differences in how I dress, how I talk, how my mind jumps around, my repetitive movements, my sensitivities, the kinds of patterns I see and the kinds I miss, my obsessions, my literal-mindedness, my odd oscillations between needing to be alone and needing to be with others, between striking you as charming and coming off as unbearable.

You are suffering from glaucoma or whatever else it is which entitles one to medical marijuana.  

Why do I struggle so much to understand which emotion I am feeling?

PMS 

Why am I so bad at predicting what you will find offensive?

PMS or just not having a penis. I have a penis. Like most people with a penis I am good at predicting that pretty much everybody will find it offensive if I whip it out and jizz all over them. I wasn't born with this knowledge but acquired it painfully within the first half century of my life. 

The Fact makes me part of a group of people whose boundaries are amorphous; we do not all recognize one another, and even when we do, we are not sure what we have in common. You would like to manage this situation in a very specific way: First, carve off what you take to be the “most severe cases,” and find a cure that prevents any more of them from arising.

This is how come Mankind has overcome death. We take the 'most severe cases' of almost being dead and cure them. Then we fix those who are quite close to being dead and then those who are moderately close and so on.  

Second, assimilate the rest — people like me — as “normal,” or as normal enough, so long as you are sufficiently tolerant and accommodating.

The alternative is to treat them as highly abnormal and give them a wide berth.  

But I suspect all the tolerance and accommodation in the world won’t make me normal.

Yes, dear. You are a very special flower.  

Do we have to pretend that I am?

Your employers do. Otherwise they could be sued by the students they have conned. It is one thing to hire drooling cretins as Philosophy Professors. It is another to acknowledge that you hire drooling cretins to enstoopidify paying customers. 

Is that the condition on which you are willing to engage with me?

Engagements are protocol bound. A therapist may have to put up with a client gassing on about Uncle diddling them so much they incessantly shat themselves at work but that same therapist has the right to chuck out that client if she starts fisting herself. The reverse may be the case if a prostitute rather than a therapist is involved. 

And couldn’t a group of people have something in common even if “degree of suffering” isn’t that thing?

Sure. They could be concerned with mutual support and advancement.  

I could use your help — not your support, not your approval, not your reassurance but your help as an open and thoughtful audience for these difficult questions.

An audience which boos or runs away is teaching you an even more valuable lesson.   

But you won’t help me, because you won’t listen to what I’m trying to say, because all you care about is how much victim status I deserve. You are really letting me down.

Because we feel we have suffered enough. The fact is, there can be no 'general equilibrium' of nuisances.  Either coercive means are used to curb them or else Society dissolves. Life reverts to a condition of being solitary, brutal and short. This is not to say that choosing ontological dysphoria is not a rational strategy. Being batshit crazy may be the price you pay for your kin's reproductive success. But only while you are alive. The certainty of death is the only Theodicy we need. 

Namit Arora on the Emergency

 In the Seventies, both Indira Gandhi and Ted Heath declared a State of Emergency. Heath was defeated by the Trade Unions and replaced, as Tory leader, by Mrs. Thatcher. Indira, on the other hand, showed the world how the thing should be done. This was a good thing. As with the Bangladesh War, Indira was sending the World a message- 'India is not a 'soft state'. It is well hard. Don't fuck with us'. 

On the other hand, Indira's strategy was not without risk. Her good buddy, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, declared a State of Emergency a few months before Indira did (which is why Siddhartha Shankar Ray may have suggested this expedient- Mujib having declared for a One Party Socialist State) but was assassinated along with most of his family soon after.  In Sri Lanka, the equally Lefty, Mrs. Bandarnaike had been ruling under a State of Emergency since 1971 but had faced a Trotskyite insurgency which was only quelled with Indian and Pakistani military help.  Pakistan itself was always slipping in and out of such states but at the Army's behest. However, it must be said, India was not in the same boat as its neighbors- or indeed its former Colonial Master. There was no real internal threat- just some domestic nuisances- and Indira was more than capable of the sort of deft footwork needed to jiu-jitsu her opponents into submission or irrelevance. This was because they looked to senile shitheads like Jayprakash Narayan or Acharya Kripalani for leadership despite the fact that both of those geriatrics had been so lacking in bollocks they couldn't even fuck their own wives- let alone fuck over Indira Gandhi.

Why did India have an Emergency? The answer is that it was the fashion to have one. But it was also a reality check. People needed to see that there always was an alternative to parliamentary muddling through- but the alternative was worse coz your goolies might be chopped off. Still, there was the hope that a South Korea or Taiwan type authoritarianism could lead to quick 'export led' catch-up growth. Sadly, Indira was not the person to deliver any such thing.

The Seventies was a period of great stupidity all over the world. In India, mutters like Jayaprakash Narayan had got it into their heads that they could topple State Governments by launching Gandhian agitations. Indira needed to remind those cunts that, politically speaking, the skeletal Mahatma had been a big fat loser. India had not been liberated from the Colonialism by 'dharnas' or 'gehraos'. The Indian political class, as well as the craven Judiciary and 'Fourth Estate', soon got the message. The only cloud on Indira's horizon was her gormless son and his sociopathic sycophants. That fucker might kill Mummy if sufficiently egged on by his cabal. Indira gambled on holding free and fair elections- a gamble which paid off because the only reason she got the top job in the first place was because everybody hated Morarji, which is why the always idiotic Jayaprakash & the even more cretinous Kripalani anointed that urine drinker thinking this would increase their own influence. Morarji, predictably turned on his patron, declaring J.P dead a few months before that old fool kicked the bucket. But once J.P actually died, the Janata Morcha was bound to collapse. Indira returned within three years of her defeat- but this time her party was cravenly dynastic. 

The Seventies was exceptional because it was the fucking Seventies dude! Stupid shit was going down all over the place. India's tragedy is that Indira could have used the Emergency to take the South Korean or Taiwanese route. Instead she was content to preside over economic stagnation. 

Namit Arora, surely the stupidest hog in the 3Quarks pig pen, writes of the Emergency in the Baffler-

Often cited as a cautionary tale in Indian political discourse, it is generally seen as an “exceptional” period from which India recovered admirably well, thanks in large part to the resilience of its democratic institutions and ethos.

India could have course corrected in the Seventies. But its Gandhian legacy- which consisted of talking bollocks and doing stupid shit- was too strong.  

Two new books powerfully challenge this consensus. In India’s First Dictatorship, Christophe Jaffrelot and Pratinav Anil expose the chronic weaknesses in India’s democratic culture prior to the Emergency, revealing the role that other actors—businessmen, the middle class, even trade unionists and some communists—played in enabling Gandhi’s authoritarian rule.

If so, they also enabled Janata's chaotic rule. But it isn't so. To 'enable' something means to 'make it possible'. Businessmen had no power to make anything possible. The middle class was largely the creation of the Government. Trade Unions had no countervailing power because workers who went on strike starved to death. Mill owners did not. The Railway Strike may have looked promising. But Indira gained popularity by crushing it. As the Mensheviks discovered in 1917, peasants think the 'industrial proletariat' has it easy. They cheer when strikers get their heads kicked in. 

As for Communists- Indian Communists- they are and always have been completely shit. Like Indonesia, India could have united Hindu and Muslim by slaughtering the Reds. Seriously- nobody likes those cunts. 

In Emergency Chronicles, Gyan Prakash considers how aspects of the modern Indian state, particularly its Constitution, enabled a demagogic takeover.

The Indian Constitution didn't mean shit. On promulgation, it was immediately amended. The Supreme Court was already licking Indira's boots. The question Gyan Prakash should ask is why did Ted Heath's Emergency fail while Indira's succeeded? The other question is why Indira bothered with this particular expedient, rather than taking the office of President under a new Constitution.  Indira herself answered this in the message she sent Mujib. If you become Commander in Chief, some General might think he could do that job better than you. Remain a PM and you are safer from the Army.

 The answer to the other question has to do with Sanju. That cretin was quite capable of bumping off Mummy in the belief that the Masses would obey him. For Indira, the triumphalist Gauhati session of Congress in the winter of '76 was the moment of truth. This was a naked Fascism which required no Socialist fig leaf. Mummy- who kept changing her costume each day to represent a different one of the Seven North Eastern States- suddenly realized that she was once again a 'goongi gudiya'- a dumb doll dressed up in exotic costumes while sonny boy and his sycophants ran things. The US might decide that Sanju was a guy they could do business with so Mummy would have a convenient accident and he'd consolidate power on the back of a 'sympathy' vote. 

In asking fundamental questions about the relation between state and society in India

these cretins are out of their depth. They don't know Economics.  

and exploring its many fault lines,

There are no 'fault lines' in Political Economy. Fuck are these wankers trying to do? Geology? 

these books cut through the boosterism that generally occludes the “world’s largest democracy.” Rather than viewing the Emergency as an aberration, they present it as a logical outcome of certain social and political tendencies of independent India.

So, how come Heath had an Emergency just before Indira did? Were 'social and political tendencies' in the UK the same as those in India? The fact is 'Socialist' Prime Ministers- like Bandarnaike and Mujib- had declared Emergency. Why not Indira too? It was quite the fad. But, only where you had a charismatic leader (or relict of the same) presiding over an economic shambles while at the helm of a 'party' composed of opportunists and gobshites. Naturally, such a leader wants to cling on to power and, hopefully, transmit it to his or her kiddies (though in Sri Lanka, Mummy and daughter fell out). This is because the 'leader' has no loyalty to his or her party colleagues and vice versa.

It is foolish to compare Modi with Indira. Modi is loyal to the RSS and, to that extent, loyal to the BJP. He rose by merit, promotes on merit and is not afraid that people in his Cabinet are scheming against him. Moreover, Modi and the BJP benefit from the nuisances created by Libtards and Muslims and, now, the rich farmers who have hoist Captain Amarinder by his own petard. 

Both books are written with an eye to the present. Since coming to power in 2014, Prime Minster Narendra Modi has presided over a kind of undeclared emergency: rejecting constitutional norms;

not in the opinion of the Supreme Court which, according to the Constitution, has the sole right to decide what those norms are 

jailing thousands of peaceful dissidents,

no 'peaceful dissident' has been jailed. On the other hand, by a law passed by Sheikh Abdullah, his son and grandson were under detention of some type. But that's Kashmir for you.  

journalists, and activists;

Sadly, this is not the case. The fact is these 'journalists and activists' have done a good job only in turning Hindus against the dynastic, casteist, parties. Modi would be a fool if he curbed a nuisance from which he and his party have profited so much. 

undermining the press;

which was and remains a prostitute of an insanitary and toothless type whose public displays of affection all respectable folk shun 

retracting the last shards of Kashmir’s autonomy.

It was the Bench which declared in 2016 that Kashmir had never had 'a shred' of autonomy. 

While preserving their democratic veneer, he has weaponized civic institutions including the intelligence agency and police force;

The States politicize their own police forces- in Maharashtra and Bengal and Kerala etc. it is pro-Modi journalists who are prosecuted- and the CBI has always been partisan. However, nobody says that 'Intelligence Agencies' have been 'weaponized'. Namit does not know the country he is writing about.  

the central bank, judiciary, and election commission; and even public universities and the Indian Council of Historical Research.

The Central Bank has never been independent. The Election Commission remains independent. Universities are shit as is the ICHR.  

Most strikingly, like Gandhi, Modi has embarked on a series of misguided and needlessly punitive policies—from banning certain currency notes with almost no prior notice

this paid electoral dividends. Why did Congress not try it? Because it was known to be corrupt. The BJP still is not perceived as corrupt.  

to overseeing a militarized Covid-19 lockdown

like France and England and America- but not like Pakistan. 

that, lacking planning or preparation, prompted a mass migration on foot.

Because States have been dragging their feet on 'one nation, one ration card'. 

The ease with which he has done this has once again raised questions about what Prakash describes as Indian society’s “troubled relationship with democratic values.”

Prakash is a Marxist. He has a troubled relationship with non-crazy values of any type. Namit is simply a virtue signaling cretin. Perhaps he hopes to become the next Pankaj Mishra. But Mishra is actually quite well read. 

These books allow us to evaluate how today’s gathering liberal-democratic deficits stack up against the mid-1970s. Is India today less, or more, vulnerable to tyranny than it was back then?

This is a foolish question. Few in the Seventies would have been able to foresee how badly the law and order situation would deteriorate in not just Punjab and Kashmir, but also Bihar and large parts of U.P. What Bengal went through during the Naxal troubles looked tame in comparison. Tyranny would have been welcomed by millions whose lives were wrecked by 'jungle Raj' anarchy. Sadly, assassination is a great solvent of autocracy. Tyrants are in short supply when suicide bombers are dime a dozen. 

The state of independent India was forged in a crucible of violence.

Nonsense! The handover of power was entirely cordial. True, Muslims killed a lot of non-Muslims, some of whom retaliated with vim and vigor, but we are now quite used to such things.

Between 1947 and 1950, the years during which the constitution was drafted, the subcontinent faced the ordeal of Partition,

which only affected a small minority of Hindus-  

a war over Kashmir,

which had no effect whatsoever on almost all Hindus 

feuds with princely states,

which were quickly settled to the advantage of the Hindus 

and various regional conflicts and discords.

which were resolved without any bloodshed whatsoever 

These experiences only strengthened the desire that various Indian leaders—Jawaharlal Nehru, other senior Congressmen, and also B.R. Ambedkar—had long harbored for a strong, centralized state that could maintain order and stability and (more nebulously) forge national unity.

There was no alternative because no Province had stable boundaries. There had to be linguistic reorganization and then further division of States for economic and other reasons.  

Luckily for them, the departing imperial government had just such an edifice with vast executive powers, which the nationalist elites took over with few changes.

Luck had nothing to do with it. The Brits had tried to create a Federal machinery but they had failed because its components had highly contested borders. Hindu India had no choice but to pool sovereignty at the Center. Muslims might rise up to the call of Jihad, but Hindus needed a professional Army.  

As Prakash points out, “there was no revolutionary overthrow of the old social order, economy, law, police, and bureaucracy.”

Revolutions are shit. India did not have one because Indians didn't want their lives to become even shittier.  

The new state preserved much of the spirit and the basic structure of the colonial era judiciary and civil administration.

Which is why it still exists. 

A major difference was that fundamental rights, such as freedom of speech and expression, were added to the constitution.

And then immediately rescinded by the first Amendment.  

But the state retained the right to make any law to “impose reasonable restrictions” on such rights on vague grounds, including “in the interests of” preserving “public order, decency or morality” and more. An emergency could be imposed merely because of a threat of war or “internal disturbance.”

Just like in the jolly old U.K. Sadly Heath's Emergency ended in a shambles. The head of his Civil Service took off all his clothes and started rolling around the floor of Number 10 screaming hysterically about a Communist plot.  

The constitution essentially allowed a crooked leader to legally wreck the democracy it was designed to safeguard.

Just like the American Constitution which, as Godel- and plenty of Republicans of the period- pointed out could be turned into a Fascist Dictatorship. That's why the Twenty Second Amendment was passed.  

To be fair, the American Constitution did mean something to Americans. The Indian Constitution had no meaning whatsoever. It was anything goes. 

B.R. Ambedkar—India’s foremost Dalit leader and the chief architect of the constitution—supported some of these provisions.

He dismissed his contribution as 'hack work'. The man was nobody's fool.  

But he did not share the other nationalists’ obsession with a strong motherland, which pushed them to criminalize seditious speech and curtail privacy rights.

A 'strong motherland' is one which can enforce its laws and safeguard its borders. Ambedkar was for it. The question was whether criticism of an official could constitute an offence. The answer the Indians came to was in keeping with the English, not the American, tradition. 

Growing up in a community deemed “untouchable,” he understood better than any other national leader just how deeply hierarchical and divided “Indian society” was.

This is also the reason he had no influence whatsoever in Independent India once the first General Election was called. Why? He couldn't get elected or get others elected. The poor fellow had to turn into a 'Boddhisattva'.  

Democracy in India, he famously said in 1948, was mostly “a top-dressing on an Indian soil which is essentially undemocratic.”

Which is why he did well under the Brits but did badly after universal suffrage was introduced.  

The state had to fertilize this soil

by shitting copiously on it 

to make democracy bloom, through vigorous social and economic intervention. “Convinced that Indian society lacked democratic values,” Prakash writes:

Ambedkar placed his faith in the political sphere. There was something Tocquevillian in this belief in the reconstitution of society by politics.

Nonsense! Ambedkar was an economist. He had observed genuine democracy- that of America- and knew that it meant that 'low castes' would be fucked over by Woodrow Wilson type pi-jaw merchants. That's why he worked with the Brits so as to increase the bargaining power of his people. Also, Gandhi was a hypocritical nutjob. Better the British lion than the Bania python. 

Accordingly, he wrote a constitution that equipped the state with extraordinary powers.

But those powers existed in every other Westminster style polity. But Constitutions don't matter at all in such places. Britain never bothered with a written one and didn't get a Supreme Court till a dozen years ago on the insistence of Brussels. 

He and his fellow lawmakers expected that the state would accomplish from above what the society could not from below.

Nonsense! They may have been worthless blathershites but they weren't that stupid. What the Constitution was about was telling the Muslims they were fucked. They weren't going to get a share in power. Hindi would completely replace Urdu. Only Hindu Dalits would get reservations. 

To that end, Ambedkar’s constitution emphasized “equality and fraternity in all spheres of life” and included provisions to safeguard marginalized groups. Over the decades, he has deservingly received much credit for his role in crafting the document. But in the early fifties, he expressed his disappointment with the final product. His vision of a pedagogic state promoting “constitutional morality” required “the leaders’ moral commitment to democratic procedures”, writes Prakash. “It envisioned that the elite would somehow overcome class and caste pressures from society. Here, the record is an abject failure.”

Gyan Prakash is an abject failure. Subaltern Studies turned out to be a cheap way to get a Green Card. It didn't help the Reds any.

Ambedkar wasn't a failure. Why? He played his hand well- when he had a hand to play. Then Universal Suffrage came and power passed to those Dalits who had worked within Congress and whose ability led to their getting important Ministries.  

After the departure of the white sahibs, upper-caste elites, like so many post-colonial elites elsewhere, took over as brown sahibs, as Ambedkar feared they would.

J.N Mandal made the mistake of throwing in his lot with the Muslim League. Appointed Law Minister of Pakistan, he had to flee along with millions of his fellow Namasudras to India. Ambedkar knew that white sahibs could do nothing for his people. Nor could brown sahibs. The fate of the Dalit was determined by backward castes in the boondocks. His brand of politics was useless. Thus the Dalits need to give up meat and alcohol and convert to Buddhism, a prestigious Aryan religion which had spread untouchability as far as Japan, and learn English and wear suits and make a lot of money like the Jatav millionaires of Kanpur. 

Was there one single Indian lawyer or politician who believed that Constitution's have magic powers? No. Otherwise it would have clauses on everybody being nice and real smart and having lots of money and being capable of giving and receiving multiple orgasms to their significant other. 

The halo of the freedom struggle led by Congress nationalists helped Nehru and his party during the fifties.

No. The Congress grass-roots organisation, built up over decades, helped Nehru & Co. more particularly because it had embedded itself within the Administration at every level.

The two pillars of Congress support at the time were rich landlords and big businesses.

Rich landlords supported Zamindar parties which, however, melted away with the advent of Universal Suffrage. Big Muslim Businesses backed the Muslim League. Some Parsi and almost all Gujerati Hindus and Jains, along with Marwaris, backed Gandhi.

This oligarchy

did not exist. That's why the Indian Liberal Party ended up clutching Gandhi's dhoti tails. However, after Independence, Nehru coopted Right wing industrialists because he knew his own people were useless. But it was people like Deshmukh and TTK who were gung ho for the Planning Commission. Nationalisation was considered a good thing. Japan had first set up public sector enterprises and then privatized them thus creating the zaibatsu. Nehru himself hoped to create an all India cadre of technocrats. Sadly, the IAS 'generalists' strangled this scheme at birth. Still, Nehru's planners made three mistakes

1) they didn't back a 'Green Revolution' based on hybrid seeds. 

2) they strangled the textile and wage good sectors

3) they got hooked on American 'free money' which turned out to be inflationary. 

Still, Nehru's economic performance was way better than Indira's. 

not only scuttled Nehru’s plans for land reform and nationalization,

there was land reform, a State subject, where the thing was feasible, while at the Center there was nationalization in plenty 

it easily got away with being corrupt and nepotistic; even Nehru allowed his daughter to become Congress president in 1959.

That isn't nepotism. A political party is not an organ of Government. The fact is Nehru said he wanted to retire in 1958. Congress twisted his arm by threatening to bring in his daughter- or rather her husband, whom Nehru loathed- which is why a tired and ageing Nehru had to march on toward humiliation at the hands of his Chinese 'brothers'.

Far from driving a program of socioeconomic justice (as in many East Asian countries)—say, land reform, universal education, fighting caste discrimination—elites consolidated their hegemony over politics, the economy, education, cultural institutions, and the media. India was effectively a democracy of the few, by the few, for the few.

In other words, India remained India. Some parts of it did land reform and universal education and so forth. Some did not. This has nothing to do with 'hegemony'. It has everything to do with what people wanted. The fact is, rich people get richer if the population is well educated and not divided up into castes. Land reform is great if peasants get land which they can sell so as to get the fuck out of involuted agriculture. 

This was the kind of country that Indira Gandhi inherited from her father in 1966.

Nehru died in 1964. Indira became P.M after Lal Bahadur Shastri died. Why? Everybody hated Morarji. This was also the reason the Janata coalition collapsed. 

In this period of social ferment, popular movements of various ideological orientations broke out across the country: Maoism erupted in the Bengal countryside,

Jyoti Basu called in the police to kill them. This was a further split within the Communist fold.  

nativists railed against South Indian migrants in Maharashtra,

those guys are now in bed with Congress  

middle-class youth protested assaults on academic freedom and rising prices in Gujarat,

rising prices, yes. Academic freedom? Don't make me laugh. 

and a broad coalition of interests opposed corruption in Bihar.

because Biharis prefer crime- especially kidnapping- to corruption coz u got to be edumicated to do corruption. Thankfully- this was the Lalu compromise- kidnapping of corrupt officials became Bihar's leading industry so everybody was happy. 

These uprisings are perhaps best seen as

stupid shit 

the outcome of rising aspiration and political awareness among subaltern and semi-franchised demographics.

Nope. Stupid shit is all it is. Rising aspirations translate into people working harder and saving money and setting up businesses and taking control over the local government so it makes it easier for them to rise up. This is the story of the rise of the 'dominant' backward castes who make sure their kids get STEM subject education though, no doubt, one or two hopeless cretins have to go in for Subaltern shite. 

More and more, Indians now saw themselves as citizens of the state, not its subjects.

While they were seeing themselves as such, Neo-Liberalism sneaked up behind them, took down their trousers and sodomized them with vim and vigor. That's how this story ends- right?

But the elites that ruled them remained largely callous and apathetic.

Very true! Masses are constantly saying 'ow! It hurts when Neo-Liberalism buggers us to buggery. Please, please, Mr & Mrs Elite, help our sore assholes by telling Neo-Liberalism to fuck off.' 

Does the Elite listen to this piteous plea? No. It is largely callous and apathetic.

“Able to mobilize the population against British rule

though the British continued to rule till Uncle Sam pulled the plug

but incapable of accommodating popular demands and aspirations,”

like the demand to be able to levitate and the aspiration to be a porn star 

reflects Prakash, “the elite was compelled to rule with a heavy dose of coercion.”

Coz that's how rulers roll, yo. 

Already in 1958, the Nehruvian state had enacted the Armed Force Special Powers Act (AFSPA), modeled after a British era ordinance, which gave legal immunity to security forces for atrocities like rape, murder, and torture. Such crimes would later be perpetrated in the north-east, Kashmir, Punjab, and the indigenous belt of central India: all regions, crucially, with Hindu minorities. “The hand of AFSPA has fallen where the reach of Hinduism has stopped,” Perry Anderson notes in his book The Indian Ideology.

Since India is largely Hindu, the Act didn't matter one jot to the great mass of the population. To suggest otherwise is as foolish as to suggest that what happened in Northern Ireland during the Troubles affected the freedom of people in England. 

During her early years in power, Gandhi cleverly swept away the party’s old guard

because they were crap. Also a lot of those old fuckers simply keeled over and died.

and centralized control in herself. Touting a version of “democratic socialism,” she nationalized fourteen commercial banks that held 85 percent of all deposits and abolished the “privy purses” of the heirs of former rulers of princely states—they had previously been entitled to receive up to eight percent of all revenues in perpetuity from their territories—both actions the Supreme Court resisted.

Not for long. She soon packed the Bench. 

The Court also thwarted her ambitions of land reform,

Indira chopped its goolies off- not that it ever had much in that department. They couldn't thwart shit.  

arguing that property ownership was a fundamental right and that parliament couldn’t seize anyone’s land for redistribution (so much for “Nehruvian socialism”).

The Judiciary only exists so as to provide an excuse for executive inaction. It could always be ignored. 

Angered by this, write Jaffrelot and Anil, Gandhi resolved “to liberate parliament from the vice-like grip of conservative justices,” setting in motion a long battle of wills.

It was short. She packed the Bench. What had deterred Nehru was the threat of mass resignation of Judges. But Indira would have welcomed the chance to put in her own sycophants.  

She toughened existing regulations and bureaucratized controls over businesses, later called the “license raj,” which further deepened India’s economic stagnation and worsened public corruption.

The main reason Indira's Economic policies were shit was because the Left had a stranglehold on Academia. Anyone who did not toe the party line was either chased into exile or else, like Subramaniam Swamy, found his own way to imbecility.  

In 1971, billing herself a messiah of the poor, Gandhi won by a landslide on the populist slogan garibi hatao (“remove poverty”). She was still riding high that December after beating Pakistan in war and securing the liberation of Bangladesh. Her cause was righteous, and she thumbed her nose at the American bullies who, rather than doing the right thing, had supported their Cold War ally Pakistan. In India After Gandhi, Ramachandra Guha reports that “even opposition politicians were now speaking of her as ‘Durga,’ the all-conquering goddess of Hindu mythology.”

This is because fucking over the Pakistani Army is a good thing- especially for Pakistan. 

But things soon got worse. Two underwhelming monsoons and the 1973 global oil crisis led to droughts, price inflation, recession, high urban unemployment, and rampant corruption—troubles that often formed the backdrop of the arthouse cinema of the day, such as in films by Satyajit Ray and Mrinal Sen, and even an occasional Bollywood film, like Manoj Kumar’s Roti Kapda Aur Makaan (“Food, Clothing and Shelter”).

History reached a turning point in 1968 but failed to turn Left. Why? The Left was shite. The Seventies was a stupid time to be alive because the utter shittiness of the Left was not obvious to all.

Industrial growth, land redistribution, and poverty reduction stalled, falling even below their previous anemic levels.

Because the Left was in the driving seat. 

Nor had the Congress done much to alter the upper-caste domination of power and resources.

Because the upper-caste was Leftist and leftists be shite. 

Strikes, rallies, and protests teemed with sloganeering youth and students, including future regional leaders like Laloo Prasad Yadav and Nitish Kumar.

Which is why Bihar is still a shit-show.  

Along with peasants and workers, they hitched a host of frustrations to the rousing call of Sampoorna Kranti (“Total Revolution”) issued by the freedom fighter and Gandhian socialist Jayaprakash Narayan, or JP. They railed against public corruption, official apathy, and state repression.

Then the State repressed the fuck out of them. Sadly, they were soon let loose to corner the market in corruption, apathy and being utterly shite.  

Though national elections were just months away,

 months? Elections were two years away- Namit can't count

they demanded Mrs. Gandhi’s resignation. Not since the freedom movement had such large protests been organized. Anand Patwardhan’s documentary Waves of Revolution (1974) offers a moving glimpse of this uprising as it played out in Bihar.

Sadly, the 'Revolution' these fools were clamoring for further impoverished Bihar.  

For her part, Gandhi vehemently denounced these agitations.

Which was a big surprise because normally politicians lavish praise on their competitors. 

This exposed her “unease with electoral competition, the plurality of interests, and representative politics—the very stuff of democracy,” write Jaffrelot and Anil.

How stupid are those two cunts? Do they not get that Indira was a big 'vote catcher'? She loved electoral competition because her strength came from her capacity to precipitate nation-wide 'Indira waves'. What she, like her son Rajiv, wasn't good at was stamping out intrigue within her own Cabinet or Party machinery. 

It didn’t help that JP himself disliked secularism and collaborated with the Hindu right wing, including the paramilitary Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), rehabilitating these fascists after years of stigma from their association with Mahatma Gandhi’s killer.

This stupid prejudice against the RSS was the excuse on which the Janata Government fell apart so Indira could return to power.  

The feebleness of Mrs. Gandhi’s democratic instincts had met its match in the incoherence of JP’s social vision.

Indira owed her power to her 'democratic instincts'. JP's 'social vision' may have been incoherent but so was that of every other party. The BJP believed in 'Gandhian Socialism' while the CPI believed Indira Gandhi was delivering Socialism. 

The trigger for the Emergency is widely seen as a judgment made by the Allahabad High Court in 1975. Finding Gandhi guilty of relatively minor electoral misdeeds in 1971, the Court had voided her election to the parliament and barred her from contesting elections for six years. The case went to the Supreme Court, and Gandhi considered resigning until her appeal was resolved.

Krishna Iyer, a Lefty, let Indira continue as P.M. Since the pro-Indira demonstration in Delhi was bigger than that of J.P, Indira got the plaint President to declare Emergency the very next night.  What took journalists by surprise was how popular Indira's harsh tactics proved to be. I suppose one reason officialdom rallied to Indira was the Sanjay factor. The feeling was, he would protect his own. 

In the end, she decided against taking chances. Instead, she gathered her lackeys in the police and foreign intelligence to plan a covert war on democracy.

This is nonsense. There was nothing 'covert' about what she did. Krishna Iyer had given her the constitutional power to do anything she liked. What was strange was the enthusiasm this evoked in Delhiites. Senior Journalists were flabbergasted that the very people who had financed J.P's rally were expressing satisfaction that Indira had restored public confidence with the 'smack of firm government'. Actually, the thing was easy to understand. Delhi's people have always known that if rustic retards start marching down the streets, sooner or later the dacoits will show up and rob them and rape their daughters.

The State can make life better for those who pay taxes and in Indira's India, where there were only one lakh 'dissidents' and about seven lakh policemen and paramilitary personnel, it is good economics to curb the nuisance they pose. But not curbing that nuisance too has electoral dividends. In Indira's case, Janata's getting a turn in power was a blessing in disguise. Her big mistake was to think that Sikh grievances were similar to the grievances of stupid shitheads like JP or Kripalani. Religion is something genuine. Indira's advisers thought Sikhism was about caste- Jat 'kulaks' lording it over 'proletarian' Ramgarhias and Mazhabis. This was nonsense. There is no caste or Marxian class struggle in any Religion. 

It was by no means inevitable that the BJP would become the de facto National Party. It was only when Hinduism was denounced by darbari intellectuals that Hindus suddenly realized that there was only one party which would defend their Religion. Since Hindus represent some 80 percent of the population, the BJP- as the Hindu party par excellence- has become the default Governing Party. It has no need for extra-Constitutional shenanigans. But, precisely for that reason, it is under no great pressure to deliver the sort of fundamental reform the Nation needs.