Shruti Kapila writes in Print-
I have been in a decade-long debate with a German friend and historian at Cambridge University, and it remains visceral and all too timely.
It is foolish. Germany had a bellicose General Staff because it had only been able to go on to the Gold Standard after getting French reparations in 1870. It believed it needed to conquer territory to its East to feed itself- a view held by Keynes. India has never believed it could get rich or more secure by conquering anybody. On the other hand, Hindus did decide to unite so as to prevent Christians, Muslims and Communists using 'salami tactics' against them. That is why no Hindu majority area of India is secessionist whereas every non-Hindu majority area - except some small islands- has a secessionist movement.
It concerns the grim theme of violence and its experience in our respective societies and histories.
Punjab may have had a 'grim theme of violence' because of the substantial numbers of Muslims and Sikhs . Hindu majority areas may have a bit of a Naxal problem but, otherwise, they have seen very little violence. Most Germans would have a relative who died in a World War. Very few Indians can say the same thing. Punjab is a bit of an outlier in this respect but Punjab represent about 2 or 3 percent of the population.
Germany seems to haunt certain Indian political fantasies. Only the other day, Haryana Chief Minister M.L. Khattar prophesised that like Germany, today, India too could be reunited with Pakistan and Bangladesh!
What Khattar said was
' Partition should not have happened. Some people in Congress maybe wanted to grab power quickly. If they had let go of some power, then it could have been possible that 5, 10 or 20 years later, Partition would not have happened. We want that we have good relations with our neighbours".
"East Germany and West Germany can unite, then can’t India, Pakistan and Bangladesh unite?… it happened not that long ago… around 1990-91 I think. People came and tore down the [Berlin] Wall… so there are different ideologies, he added.
Khattar was speaking of the peaceful reunification of a country divided by the Great Powers. Since he was addressing his Party's minority wing, his meaning was 'Congress created sectarian differences. They were greedy for power. They haven't changed. Don't vote for them.'
Unification or not, my German historian-friend remains staggered that a million Indians killed each other in a single year during Partition with basic and household weaponry and without State apparatus.
Why? The Rwanda genocide happened in 1994. A tenth of the population was killed with agricultural implements. Partition deaths could not have been more than 0.3 percent.
Our debate is not simply about which violence is more ‘inhuman’ — the one carried out with kitchen knives by erstwhile neighbours or the other that was done in industrialised gas chambers, matched by brutal bureaucratic machinery of mass death. Though we also often argue about that.
Both are fools. Rwanda showed that genocide is cheap. But Hitler's people knew this already from the Armenian genocide. Incidentally, one of Hitler's mentors had been a witness to it. Indeed, he had raised his voice against it.
As contemporaries, I am as far removed from the civil war that accompanied our Independence
there was no Civil War. Punjabis may have slaughtered each other but few Indians are Punjabis. Hindus don't go in for that sort of thing on any large scale.
as my German friend is from the Holocaust, which remains the exceptional horror of human history.
Unless you are Ugandan. Still, Hindus have historic memories of genocide at the hands of non-Hindus which is why they chose to stick together.
Our debate has no real winners given the topic is how two different societies manufactured and operationalised deadly hatred.
This is foolish. Hitler & Co thought they'd get richer through genocide. Punjabis may have been motivated by religion and 'land hunger'. But politicians and Princes could have worked out an orderly population exchange of a type familiar to Europe since the treaty of Lausanne.
What remains moot is the role of the State in managing antagonism and protecting the vulnerable against violence.
Fuck moot. The plain fact is that Gandhi, Nehru, Jinnah etc. were shit. Anyway, it wasn't their own people who were killing or getting killed. The vast majority of Hindus were entirely unaffected by Partition. In Tamil Nadu, it was the refugee from Burma who received sympathy. Nobody gave a fuck if Punjabis chopped each other up. What was important was that in independent India, neither the verbose Bengali or the bellicose Punjabis would have much role. There was a peaceful handover of power from the Brits to the INC.
I will come to that in a minute, as this is indeed critical to the state of peace in India today.
Shruti is from the Punjab which isn't critical to the peace of India at all. Consider the Khalistan unrest. Perhaps as many as 50,000 were slain. Nobody outside the Punjab greatly cared.
My friend and I only agree that our societies dealt with the aftermath of mass violence entirely differently with lasting consequences.
Germany did well. Punjab may improve under AAP. I'm kidding. Still, you have to admit that Punjabis have better food, better music, and a much better sense of humor.
He grew up being schooled in collective guilt and responsibility for the crimes of his forefathers
his country was occupied.
with the aim to learn that hatred towards the other is not only inhuman but, above all, cannot and should not be repeated.
because it leads to poverty and humiliation. Concentrate on making good cars and selling them for a good price.
By contrast, in my Indian education, Partition violence came first into view for my generation via State television and the Doordarshan series Tamas.
The Ramayana and the Mahabharata had people glued to their screens. Tamas bombed. The plot premise was crazy. When you need a pig carcass to fling in a mosque so as to trigger a riot, you don't buy a pig and then pay some other guy to butcher it unless you happen to live in Birmingham or Boston.
People at JNU may have pretended to have watched Tamas. But the anti-Sikh violence in Delhi had shown that the thing was a naive Leftist fantasy. After the anti-Sikh pogroms, nobody was talking about 'communal harmony'. Rajiv had sent a clear and direct message with the result that he won the elections by a landslide.
In this series and countless other accounts, Partition violence is still understood widely as emotional but collective suffering in which everyone was a victim of a moment of violent madness.
Everyone except Punjabis and some Bengalis
Neither the State nor any people have taken responsibility for those mass killings.
Shruti certainly hasn't.
The lesson is that since there has been no responsibility or culpability for it, Indians, arguably, have been condemned to repeat a bad history.
Shruti is repeating bad history. Shame on her!
Recent Indian headlines
like any other headlines
only affirm the power of repetition that gives any traumatic history, and especially that of violence, its force.
You’d be forgiven if newspaper headlines seem to teleport you back into the 1920s. The themes are eerily similar. Confrontations over blasphemy: Check.
Charlie Hebdo- right?
Mob policing of inter-faith intimate relations between men and women: Check.
This didn't happen in the 1920s. Pimping existed. Policing didn't.
Heated polemics over religious conversions: Check.
Gandhi's son converted and then re-converted thanks to the Arya Samaj
Fear based on fiction or downright lies on demographic takeover by a religious minority: Check.
But Muslims in Pakistan started off as a minority. There genuinely was a demographic takeover there. That's why Hindus and Sikhs had to run away.
Obsession with who is praying where in public: Check.
Did not exist in the Twenties
Demolitions of homes or small shrines to create religiously segregated neighbourhoods: Check.
Again, this did not happen.
A century apart and the repeated pattern bears the same controversies. The violence that accompanies each of these controversies remains tightly bound to the social fabric of communities in India even today.
But this has spread to Europe.
To take one instance, in the 1924 case of Rangila Rasool,
why not the 1988 case of Satanic Verses when Muslims tried to storm Westminster?
votaries and protagonists of that infamous blasphemy controversy and consequent violence appealed to the courts and the State to determine the ‘truth’ of one religion and also to dispense justice between two hostile groups.
Nope. A Hindu was killed. Is that Shruti's point? Muslims are bad-ass? But her side of Punjab ethnically cleansed Muslims with vim and vigor.
But unlike then, when foreign masters tightly held the reins of the State,
There way dyarchy. Elections had been held the previous year.
today’s political institutions are entirely Indian but deploy a law designed by the British.
It was proposed and passed by Indian legislators.
The violent hatred that has propelled recent religious controversies in India, however, is misidentified as debates about freedom of expression.
It is about an equal freedom for Hindus to abuse missionary sects which have a long tradition of abusing Hinduism when not killing or forcibly converting them.
Whether or not you are a free speech absolutist, a proper contextualisation of this clutch of laws is essential.
Laws are meaningless save in context.
British imperial imperatives deliberately miscast this relationship as one of freedom
This is wholly false. British imperialism never held freedom of expression to be a sacred cow. If the thing did not exist in the home islands, why the fuck would they impose it elsewhere? Shruti may live in England but she does not know about the Lord Chamberlain's office or the strict laws on blasphemy and obscenity. America's First Amendment had no European parallel till relatively recently.
and with deadly consequences to date.
Deadly consequences arose because some people like cutting off the heads of other people who might decide to kill before they are killed.
Simply put and to cut a very complex and long history short, after the Rebellions of 1857, the British empire made a U-turn on its prevailing social policies and decided against any activism in Indian religious affairs.
Nonsense! Britain banned missionaries till 1813. Suttee was banned in 1829 but Raja Ram Mohan Roy had lobbied for this. Other than this, there was no 'activism in India's religious affairs'. After 1857, however, the Brits cracked down on what they called 'Wahhabis' and took sides in religious matters so as to favor 'loyalists'.
Consider the fact that prior to the rebellions/mutiny, intervention in religion — the abolition of Sati (1829), followed by the Hindu Widows’ Remarriage Act of 1856 — had formed the centrepieces of British imperial rule and law.
These only applied in directly ruled territory. The latter was permissive merely and rarely availed of. The centerpieces of British imperial rule were the Army and the Navy. Nobody gave a shit about widows.
With the activating of the Indian Penal Code in 1861,
which merely codified what had previously obtained
the imperial State took a so-called ‘neutral’ stance of intervening in religion only to maintain ‘public peace’.
This had always been the case. Nothing very dramatic happened in 1862. The IPC merely made things easier for Judges and advocates.
This had three major and enduring consequences.
There was no change and thus no consequences.
First, the domain of religion, as opposed to the political arena, afforded relative freedom to colonised Indians.
But, the domain of religion has always afforded freedom of a particular type even to slaves or outcastes. How fucking stupid is Shruti not to understand this?
Religion was thus easy to mobilise, especially by conservative politicians given to exclusivism such as Bal Gangadhar Tilak.
Tilak was radical. Gokhale was moderate. Conservatives opposed both. Indeed, both Tilak and Gokhale were considered 'acharabrashta' because they had 'crossed the black water'. Shruti is wholly ignorant of India. One could say 'Revolutionaries, like Tilak, Vivekananda, Amba Prasad Sufi etc., used religion to mobilize the masses'. Conservatives didn't want the masses to be mobilized.
By contrast, newspapers and pamphlets were heavily censored for political writings and especially any criticism of government policies.
This was equally true of religious literature with 'seditious' content.
The Sedition Law (IPC 124A),
specifically put in to deal with the supposed 'Wahhabi' threat
further policed and ensured this.
It merely turned customary practice into 'black letter law'.
It was not that the State was entirely removed from religion or distant from it.
The State was entirely removed from Hinduism and Islam and Jainism. The UK has an established Church. The Raj had none.
But rather, it strongly defined its intervention in terms of maintaining peace between communities.
and preventing a repetition of the Mutiny. The Brits were more concerned with protecting their own skins, not to mention their investments, than with preventing darkies of various creeds slicing each other up.
Second, and in so occupying the role of a ‘neutral mediator’, the colonial State set up Hindus and Muslims as legally competitive and antagonistic entities.
Islam, like Christianity, was antagonistic to Hinduism. But Muslim rulers tended to back their co-religionists against their Hindu subjects. The Brits did not extend the same protection to darkies who had found Christ because, let's face it, they were niggers just the same.
Finally, the law increasingly judged theological issues of religion
Nonsense! British Courts in the UK did not judge 'theological issues'. Why the fuck would their Courts in distant Ind do so?
but displaced and named them after freedom of expression.
This is wholly false. You could go to Court and say 'shebait of such and such temple is not performing such and such ritual correctly. Kindly transfer management to me as I am the next heir.' Orthopraxy is justiciable. There is no 'freedom of expression' when it comes to the proper management of certain places of worship. Shruti is wholly ignorant of Indian law.
The colonial State went on to not only arrogate the power to judge the life of a prophet or doctrine
This is wholly false. The British were requested numerous times to prosecute the founder of the Ahmadiyya movement but they always refused. It wasn't till the Seventies that Bhutto passed a law stating that the Qadianis were not Muslim.
but also significantly legalised religious competition and antagonism.
Religious competition may have been illegal under Aurangazeb but that was a long time ago. As for 'antagonism', it declined under Pax Brittanica and resurfaced as Empires around the globe began to crumble.
To say that this has been toxic would be an understatement.
There may be competition between the Swami Narayan sect and the Arya Samajis or other branches of Hinduism. But such competition has been salutary. It is not toxic in any way. By contrast, what happens to Hindus in Muslim majority areas has nothing to do with competition. It has to do with running away or having your throat slit.
The postcolonial State and the much-celebrated Indian Constitution, while being radical in endowing individual rights,
Individuals had rights under the Brits. There was nothing particularly radical or innovative about the Indian Constitution in this respect.
has failed to dismantle this colonial relationship of law and religion that has effectively set up a hostile competition between groups.
Shruti is utterly mad. There was 'hostile competition' between Muslims and Hindus. Then people like Shivaji and Guru Gobind Singh rose up and the picture changed. Had Hindus managed to unite and put aside their dynastic squabbles, India might have built a strong navy and protected its own commerce and thus risen up economically and technologically. Pretending that the Brits stopped Hindus and Muslims kissing and cuddling in the streets is simply stupid. Why not go the extra mile, like Divya Dwiwedi, and say 'Brits invented Hinduism in 1916'. Previously everyone was Muslim. Evil White peeps got some stupid darkies to worship Ganesa and Hanuman instead of doing namaz and wearing hijab. The BJP is very evil because instead of scolding Hindus and asking them to return to Islam, it is pretending that India was originally a Hindu country. '
Shruti makes this point forcefully in her latest article for Print.in.
Is India’s political order today best described as a party state?
BoJo's Britain could be described as being in a state of having a terrible hangover after too much partying. India, sadly, is a serious place where the PM puts in long hours at his desk.
I am all too aware that A for ‘Authoritarianism’ is the favoured currency of commentary and analysis for describing it.
Come to think of it, 'Authoritarianism' would translate to 'Anushasan' which Indians want. Modi is authoritative. Rahul is adolescent. This remains the choice facing the voter
If authority is the hallmark of today’s political culture, then the absence of liberty is its manifest and lamented condition.
Who the fuck is lamenting 'encounter killings' or the locking up of gangsters of the bulldozing of their homes? Shruti writes as though Yogi wasn't re-elected.
The branding of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government as authoritarian only amplifies its power if with a negative shade or two.
Negative for professors living in Oxford- sure. But there is nothing positive we can say about them.
However, in what is usually the weakest moment in a government’s cycle of power or the dreaded ‘mid-term’, the ruling Bhartiya Janata Party appears to be stretching out rather than curling into its comfort zone.
Under Modi, the BJP has been proactive.
I am not even a novice at martial arts
martial farts are a different matter
let alone an expert, so my gambit here is not to use the power of the opponent against them.
she is going to use their power for them because she is as stupid as shit.
My newfound suspicion of ‘authoritarianism’ as a label to describe Modi is not to underestimate his power.
So, it is to overestimate it- right? The problem here is that shitty authoritarianism can exist- i.e. the dictator can give orders and everybody falls about laughing if not, like Shruti, farting in his face.
It’s simply inadequate.
In which case it is an appropriate label which must be reinforced with a strong adjective like 'merciless' or 'punitive' or 'savage'.
I am spending this summer researching for a new book and devoting long hours in the University Library’s China section that has brought a thought I can’t quite shake off—India’s new political trajectory shares remarkable features with its outsized Himalayan neighbour.
Shruti is as stupid as shit. She doesn't get that Mao's party conquered the country after chasing away General Chiang Kai-Shek. No political party in India had the military capacity to do anything similar. Thus India can't have a trajectory similar to China.
If modern China could give the world capitalism without democracy,
Neither Holland nor Britain was democratic when they gave the world modern financial capitalism. Shruti is a Professor of a subject she knows zero about.
then, is India set to give the world a one-party state in a multi-party polity?
Shruti does not know that China has nine recognized political parties. Eight of them are so useless that they are headed by Professors.
The party-state is synonymous with China
It was a Leninist invention. There are other such one-party states.
as it refers to its one-party rule. But that is not of the essence.
That is absolutely of the essence. A country where everybody belongs to the 'Lets have a Party' Party is not a one-party state unless the office-holders of that Party exercise power over the apparatus of the State.
Instead, party-state refers to a relationship between State and society.
But the relationship between the State and Society is the same wherever you go. In America, it is the State which runs the police and the courts and the penal system. The same is true of China or France or anywhere else.
More precisely, party-state implies the absence of boundaries between state, society, party and indeed cadre.
But such boundaries exist in China just as they do elsewhere. A person may be deprived of party membership while continuing to be employed by the State. The reverse is also true. The Chinese invented bureaucracy. There is a chain of command. Within a particular Bureau there may be a technocrat in charge of day to day operations but the Party cell within the Bureau may dictate strategy or intervene in particular matters.
By contrast, modern liberal states prize and thrive on the distinction between the different organs of government
The Chinese make the same distinctions. Like 'modern liberal states', people within 'different organs of government' may consult each other and take a coordinated approach. Thus, the response by both the public and private sector to the Ukraine crisis in the UK, where Kapila lives, has shown remarkable homogeneity.
and their policing via checks and balances
In China, those 'checks and balances' may involve kleptocrats getting a bullet to the brain.
and, above all, seek to represent rather than overwhelm society.
The Chinese Communist Party is successful because it does do a lot of 'representing'. The question is whether it can change tack quickly as the popular mood changes. But this is equally true of 'liberal states'. COVID has shown that we are all more similar than we used to think.
The difference between modern China and India’s political order—best captured by its two founders, M.K. Gandhi and Mao Tse Tung—
Gandhi was a subject of the British Crown. Mao was rebelling against the KMT which was indigenous. But India's 'political order' is almost exactly what the Brits bequeathed. It isn't really Gandhian at all. By contrast, under Chairman Xi, we have seen that the spirit of Mao continues to animate and inspire the Chinese leadership.
is now perhaps becoming less distinct.
It is becoming much more distinct. China isn't even pretending to do minority accommodation or 'grass roots democracy' or 'human rights' any more. Meanwhile, in India, participatory democracy has gained in strength. Look at what has just happened in Shruti's own native Punjab. A party which did not exist ten years ago has swept the polls thanks to ordinary people taking power into their own hands.
To be sure, this distinction is not about violence or ideology alone but is crucially about the relationship between the political party and society that they forged.
but that relationship was entirely a function of violence and ideology.
Mao rose to power first by overwhelming the formidable Chinese liberal, nationalist party, Kuomintang or the KMT.
It wasn't liberal in the slightest. The plain fact is, Sun Yat Sen only came to power through a military rebellion. The loyalist Yuan Shi-Kai was given the Presidency in return for getting the Emperor to abdicate. But he declared himself Emperor. When Sun returned to China it was as a military leader, not a 'liberal' or 'democratic' politician. He saw that Chinese national unity could only be achieved by the sword. He allied with the Communists to achieve this. His successor was a professional soldier who had married the sister of his wife.
The KMT was dominated by intellectuals, westernised men and women primarily from southern China, with Shanghai as its locus, as embodied in its cosmopolitan leader Sun Yat Sen.
But the KMT could only dominate China by military conquest- which was only possible with Soviet help.
At the same moment, Gandhi converted a sleepy but noisy, and an all too elitist, Congress Party that was dominated by English-speaking lawyers of Bombay and Calcutta into the world’s largest mass party.
But it was dedicated to non-violence- in other words, its job was to make the life of the British official safer and easier. Congress may have been the largest mass party but it was also the most useless.
Both Mao and Gandhi made this dramatic change by courting and privileging a restive and highly mobilised peasantry as the prime and correct agent and mover of history.
Fuck off! Gandhi refused to back a 'no-rent' campaign. Nehru too was skeptical about 'land to the tiller'. But the big landlords disappeared anyway- unless they could turn into gangsters.
By contrast, Mao was the son of a peasant. He knew what the peasants wanted was land. So, he first gave it to them and then took it away and laughed heartily as they starved to death.
But to divergent ends. By 1950, both had kicked out foreign powers, and while India became the largest democracy, China became a revolutionary state thanks to the surging cadres of Mao’s peasant army or the People’s Liberation Army.
In other words, China actually became Socialist while Indians just talked bollocks about Socialism.
Over the next sixty years, as India became a multi-party democracy,
It had had multi-party elections since 1923. China had restricted franchise elections in 1912 but the Assembly was soon sent packing. Come to think of it, China did have a Presidential election in 1923. It was a farce. In 1948, Chian Kai-Shek won (indirect) elections by a landslide. Everybody immediately understood that the fellow would soon have to flee.
The plain fact of the matter is that the Brits created multi-party democracy in India and the Hindus, for their own reasons, chose to bolster it. This is because Hindus feel they have to unite against the salami tactics of the Muslims and Commies and Christians and NGO nutters and so on. But that unity can't come at the point of a bayonet. Only elections confer legitimacy same as in good old Blighty.
China became a party-state,
under first the KMT and then Mao's Communists.
notably under Deng Xiaoping and Xi Jinping, who decisively updated Mao’s vision at critical moments.
Deng didn't do crazy shit. Xi may yet do so.
At least four core features of China’s party-state resonate with India in the Modi Age.
in the opinion of a cretin.
It is not about any institutional capture or the now pliant mediascape alone.
Is Shekhar Gupta or Print India 'pliant'? If so Shruti is being paid by Modi to make Oxford look bad. 'Make in India'- don't go all the way to Oxford to shit on your own country.
Significantly, the ruling BJP is producing a tight coalition that seeks to brook no boundary between society, culture, ideology, and the State.
There is no boundary between a society and it culture and the ideology of that culture or, in a democracy, that of the State. British society is indivisible from British culture and the British way of looking at things. One may say 'I don't feel I fully belong to British society because my right to chop the heads off infidels is not being respected'. But, if one is tucking into a bacon sarnie and wearing a 'bring back Boris' t-shirt, people tend to assume you are Jacob Rees-Mogg unless you iz bleck in which case people assume you are Jacob Rees-Mogg and Nanny left you out in the Sun too long.
In installing Draupadi Murmu as the first tribal woman to India’s highest office, Modi did much more than create the current off-the-charts inspirational (or is it aspirational?) buzz. The BJP is breaking the barrier between party and society via full-spectrum assimilation of social order.
Nonsense! It was high time we had an S.T President. Smt. Murmu joined the BJP 25 years ago. She served on the National Executive in 2013 and held other Party posts till 2015 when she became Governor of Jharkhand. Shruti is extraordinarily ignorant if she thinks various political parties had not been doing 'full-spectrum assimilation' of STs. The fact that they have reserved seats is enough of an incentive.
If India’s Other Backward Class (OBCs) parties
dominated by one particular 'dominant' OBC
competed against and blocked the rise of the BJP thirty years ago,
this was because Congress had turned to shit while the Commies were too gerontocratic and elitist to get in on the action
a re-branded BJP is on the path of their aggressive assimilation.
Shruti thinks tribal people should be shunned.
India’s social order, which is in fact a series of sub-castes, offers rich pickings for a political machinery attuned to it.
Congress had perfected that machinery. Then it became dynastic and turned to shit.
The absorption of selective sub-castes from Dalits to the tribals now, and increasingly, the Muslims (the Pasmandas, for instance) while not challenging upper caste power, is deepening the party’s social footprint.
I wouldn't be so sure of the Pasmandas.
The BJP now poses the greatest challenge to India’s regional and smaller political parties not only because of the Enforcement Directorate.
But Kejriwal has shown that a new party can rise up out of thin air and completely marginalize the big established players.
But precisely because regional parties have effectively been caste parties and primarily OBC parties.
Nothing wrong with that if they are good at governance rather than gangsterism.
Pacification of social opposition through incorporation has been key to the endurance of China’s party-state too.
Only if, by 'incorporation' you mean incorporating a bullet into the back of a head. Slaughtering people or 're-educating' them en masse is what China is good at. But, China is ethnically much more homogeneous than India. 92 % are Han and even Han Muslims are nationalists. Christians could have posed a problem but they are lying low for the moment.
This form of social engineering reflects a BJP-led party-state in the making.
in the imagination of a cretin. The BJP is merely becoming what the INC used to be before it turned to shit.
It implies more than mere voting behaviour.
because the person doing the implying is a fucking cretin.
This is already leaving India’s much-indulged data crunchers (who double up as political analysts) reeling for answers.
Prashant Kishore aint reeling. He is laughing all the way to the bank. The plain fact is that he- not some Professor at Oxford or Harvard- has changed Indian politics for the better.
While data surveyors and commentators breathlessly declare each such move to be a BJP ‘masterstroke’ they are unable to identify the big picture, let alone explain its effects on India’s polity.
Shruti's idea of a 'big picture' for India is that it should involve 'fraternal violence'. If you happen to have a male sibling and are Indian, you really ought to stick a knife in him. Otherwise Prof. Kapila will look a fool to her colleagues. They will make fun of her at faculty parties. She will cry and cry. Don't be mean. Stab your brother already. You know you want to.
Authoritarian regimes are marked by leaders who routinely confront the civil service or the faceless figures of power behind any government.
Why the fuck would an authoritarian regime need to confront some fucking clerk? If he doesn't obey orders, he will get a fucking bullet in the back of his head. As for 'faceless figures', they don't exist.
As a well-honed good cop/bad cop routine, this conflict between political leaders and bureaucrats allows for both whistleblowing and the airing of grievances essential to any but especially authoritarian governments.
Fuck is this word salad supposed to mean? If authoritarianism exists, bureaucrats jump to obey or else run the fuck away. There are no 'whistleblowers' though, no doubt, there may be a whistling sound as the wind tunnels through the bullet hole in the back of your head. No 'airing of grievances' is essential to an authoritarian government. Hitler didn't say to Goebells, 'kindly round up some people with grievances so that they can air them for me. I can't get a good night's kip unless such airing occurs.' Stalin, on the other hand, was notorious for popping into Gulags to ask if any of the inmates had any grievances about the food or quality of entertainment.
Recall the near-daily fracas between Anthony Fauci and Donald Trump at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Why? What has it to do with India? Fauci has been head of NIAD- a Federal Agency- since 1984. He did not serve at the will of the President. Modi is no Trump. He is a sensible man who listens to experts and supports the heads of Agencies in their professional role. By mentioning Trump's relationship with Fauci, Shruti is highlighting the sanity and constitutional propriety that has been the hall mark of Modi's term of office. True, he had to sacrifice Harsh Vardhan- a Medical Doctor- as Health Minister but there were no recriminations over this.
Closer to home, the rise of the cult of T.N. Seshan, for instance, was directly owed to the preceding era of Indian Emergency’s political excesses.
Nonsense! Seshan was appointed Chief Election Commissioner under Chandra Shekhar (though Subramaniam Swamy, whom Seshan knew at Harvard, claims credit) a full thirteen years after the Emergency had ended.
Seshan was rather pugnacious but a great devotee of Sai Baba. I think this helped him in Delhi at a time when Rasgotra, another devotee, had Madam's ear.
By contrast, Modi’s eight years of rule has produced a supplicant bureaucracy.
No. It has produced a productive bureaucracy which has been disintermediated from the lucrative side of things. That's why many babus want to return to corrupt home states where they can rake in the moolah. But Kejriwal, too, can run a tight ship. It was he who decided to make an example of my old pal Sanjay Pratap Singh. When I say 'pal' obviously I mean we all hated the bastard. He transferred to Modern School. Not a good sign.
Tellingly, Modi has rarely chastised India’s civil service.
Why chastise guys whom you can transfer if they are lazy or corrupt? The fact is plenty of people join the Civil Service because they actually want to serve Civil Society.
It would be too conspiratorial to imagine that Indian bureaucrats are fully paid-up members of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh.
BJP politicians don't want babus who outrank them in the Sangh hierarchy.
Even if this were the case, the proof of complete political alignment with the bureaucracy lies in policymaking and its enactment. Look no further than India’s foreign policy, which, having been steadfast over changing political dispensations, has now gone saffron.
Jaishankar, like his Dad, is a practitioner of realpolitik. The family are typical Lutyens Delhi Tambrams. Some, when talking to nice blonde ladies like Kira Huju, say what they think the lady wants to hear. But, take it from me, they all think Mani Shankar Ayyar is a fucking Commie nutcase. Nehruvian shite is for the birds. As for Israel- which was the reason Sujatha Singh was sacked- the plain fact is the place is- as an Uncle of mine told me back in the Nineties 'the holy land of three world religions- and the Indian Army'. It was Abdul Kalam who revealed the depth of the strategic partnership India had established with Israel. The IFS was slow to change its old habits so Modi had to ease out Sujatha even though she was a pal of Sushma Swaraj. But this does not mean Jaishankar is 'saffron'- his last job was with the Tatas!
New prestige or liberalism as (bad) westernism
What is bad about 'westernism' is that, in Obama's words, it has been doing stupid shit all over the place. The War on Terror was a gift to Iran, Russia and, most of all, China. Now there is a big Eurasian power block taking the war to the West. Twenty percent of Ukraine is gone. Taiwan will soon fall. Meanwhile the liberals continue to Magnitsky anything which moves and thus the West will soon get a declining share of the global economy and suffer worsening terms of trade for its high value adding exports. American policy makers no longer have any confidence in 'quad' or in Turkey returning to the fold. Maybe Europe, under French leadership, can get a proper Army of its own. If it can't then NATO unravels because the Biden doctrine is 'we won't put boots on the ground unless you can defeat all your enemies on your own without endangering their human rights.'
The ruling BJP offers new values of prestige and represents the maturing of a new symbolic and cultural capital.
That's a good thing. Shruti might think that India should be ruled by a party which says 'this country is a shithole. Please feel free to fuck us in the ass if you are anywhere in our neighborhood. Also, all Hindus should immediately convert to Islam and behead anybody they suspect of disrespecting the Prophet.'
The image and culture wars in India today are less about freedom of expression and more about creating a dominant political culture that desperately needs its anti-hero.
Shruti means villain. An 'anti-hero' is still a hero though he may appear to lack some conventional heroic quality.
Be prepared for more controversies on history wars,
which the Left started but lost
name changes of cities or streets,
which occurred plentifully under the dynasty. I now alight at Indira Gandhi airport and take the metro to Rajiv Gandhi Chowk. But Curzon road, where I grew up, was already Kasturba Gandhi Marg.
and cases against naked actors
the guy was not showing his dick! That's what outraged not just modest women but a lot of gay dudes. Incidentally, the guy who filed the complaint was a 50 year old Sindhi man. You go girl!
and dancing divas because the now-dominant political culture demands not merely fear but uniformity.
Shruti's writings are uniformly shite. This is fault of Modi sarkar.
Daily denunciations of India’s so-called ancien regime
so called only by Shruti. India's ancien regime was Casteist and feudal just like that of pre-revolutionary France.
through the media, and cultural output are further geared towards shoring up the ruling party’s self-identity.
Denunciations of the Dynasty may do so. But that has nothing to do with Ranveer Singh's coy refusal to display dick which is causing outrage to modest women, and maybe some Sindhi dudes, in Mumbai.
As BJP and Hindutva become the default political setting in India,
where? Punjab? Tamil Nadu? Kerala? West Bengal?
liberal ideals are being dismissed as habits of the old elite
their liberal ideal had to do with liberally helping themselves to goodies by foul means or fair
rather than hard-won political virtues or first principles of a democratic polity.
India's first principle was 'first get shot of Muslims if you want a democratic polity where Hindus can live safely'.
Liberalism is now deemed a cultural artefact.
Because every ideology is the artefact of a particular culture. Perhaps Shruti means 'antiquity' or 'fossil'.
It is not only associated with the West, and therefore not native, but is above all, scorned as downright odious for its association with a declined and decadent old elite.
that should be 'decayed' or 'moribund'. Shruti's English is poor. They must be laughing their heads off at her in Oxford. I recall being befriended by Old Etonians at my first job with a Merchant Bank. Then it slowly dawned on me that they were trying to perfect their Peter Sellers accent and 'head wobble'. I was deeply chuffed. Sadly, my attempts to sound more desi backfired. I ended up sounding posher than the Queen's tits. Thankfully, I was soon fired because, it turned out, I was utterly shit at my job. Apparently 'double entry' isn't something sexual. Who knew?
This has crucially allowed the BJP to emerge as a party of protest or of the underdog—and not only of identity—even as it has been nothing but aggressive in its pursuit of majoritarian power.
Clearly this stupid woman has never heard of Mahatma Gandhi- whose big shtick was 'wear dhoti and speak Hindi'- or Ram Manohan Lohia who had a German PhD in useless shite and who said 'Agnrezi goli se zyada khatarnak hai Angrezi boli. Haan ji haan. Chashme buddoor.' This was funny because he had a thick German accent. The fact is everybody has been protesting against Indians wot spick Inglis and pamper their pet dogs instead of kicking those curs anytime they have a chance. Gandhi, of course, went further. He claimed that killing dogs was Ahimsa. Failure to kill every bow wow you chance upon is a terrible sin.
The 2014 election that installed Modi’s BJP was dubbed an ‘economy election’.
No. It was considered an anti-corruption election. Anna Hazare and his merry band had succeeded in making Congress look utterly kleptocratic as well as incompetent.
Throughout that long campaign, the decibels on Hindutva were low if muted.
Muted means low. Why does Shruti not know that? She tells us that she was ' was born, educated and made in India. I graduated from Panjab University Chandigarh with top honours followed by a Master's in Modern History at JNU, Delhi and received my doctorate from SOAS, London University.' This means she was educated in both India and Britain. Sadly, what she didn't study in London was the English language. Also she is as stupid as shit. JNU made tatti inside her head.
Oscillating between the two poles of Hindutva and on the other, a commitment to a new economy or technology softens the totalising power of the party that demands loyalty.
How? Totalization is a Hegelian or dialectical term. Defining poles between which there is oscillation permits the understanding of 'disparate and unrelated phenomena' by connecting them with a larger complex totality.
This could potentially drain out political opposition.
How? Defining 'poles' has the opposite effect. In this case it would unite those who are against Hindutva with those who are against 'a new economy' or those who hate technology.
In a series of articles in The New York Times, political scientist Ming Xia argues that both Chinese elites and the aspirational are increasingly anti-political.
Because peeps don't like having bullets fired into the back of their heads. The question facing scholars like Ming Xia was whether China would actually allow a smidgen of democracy at the Provincial level or, more recently, through Local Legislative Outreach Offices. The answer was 'no. Don't be silly. Would you like a bullet in the back of your head or would you prefer to just shut the fuck up?'
Even though Communism is but hyper-nationalism in China,
This simply isn't true. The Chinese actually read Marx who said 'to each according to his contribution'. But that contribution must be to the resources of the Party.
ideology has been supplanted by a fixation on infrastructure and technology.
as opposed to a fixation with talking bollocks about 'fraternal violence' or 'maternal eye-gouging' or other such shite.
As global successes, these are attributed to the Chinese party-state that, in instilling pride, help discount political debate.
But America had lots of infrastructure and technology at a time when political debate was plentiful. What discounts political debate is bullets in the back of your fucking head.
Modi’s India is marked by a zeal for infrastructure and connectivity.
Manmohan hated infrastructure. He wanted to shut down the transport system.
Whether it is expressways or Digital India—they look imposing and can be awe-inspiring.
There speaks the soni kudi from the pind. She will show Ranveer Singh awe-inspiring expressway and then pull down his pants so as to outrage her own modesty.
What is less clear and worth investigating
like Ranveer's dick
is whether this fixation on the digital and infrastructure like China is allowing technology to trump political debate in the ‘new India’.
Shruti is training to be a Lacanian psychotherapist. God alone knows what fixations or hers she discusses with her training Analyst. My bet is it is Ranveer's dick. But I could be wrong. It may be that it is awe-inspiring expressways that get her motor running.
Whether or not these four key features of the party-state
neither the 'key features' nor the 'party-state' actually exist. On the other hand, Ranveer probably does have a dick, not an awe-inspiring expressway. That is what Shruti should focus on. Or perhaps that is what she is focused on while typing out this garbage.
will strip all social and political agency essential for true democratic politics
Stripping is not enough. Ranveer stripped. But he didn't show his dick. Rahul Baba must take action!
will depend entirely on India’s opposition parties.
Rahul, that means you! Tell Ranveer to show dick or else you will become President of the INC once again.
Democracy is defined by deliberation, debate and above all, conflict of views and visions.
No. Deliberation and debate and conflict of views and visions can occur under any sort of political system. Democracy is defined by whether or not voters can boot out the current administration and replace it with something more appealing or less appalling.
A giant lotus currently seems to be on course to envelop India.
Unless Ranveer shows his dick to awe-inspiring expressways.
If India is to avoid the fate of the party-state,
or the gate of the farty-mate, not to mention the hate of the tarty-date or the plate of the smarty- tet Punjabi soni kudi who was made in India
its opposition parties will first and foremost have to forge a new political language that can capture and contest the zeitgeist.
So, Shruti's old political language simply won't do. Shocker.
Otherwise, like the original party-state of China, authority in India will soon be considered a political virtue
In all countries, it is considered virtuous for a holder of political office to exercise their authority rather than sit around with their thumb up their ass.
and coercion will be experienced as voluntary submission
If Shruti beats Ranveer and forcibly pulls down his pants, Ranveer will experience this as 'voluntary submission'
and national duty.
thinks nobody at all. The fact is if 'voluntary submission' is occurring- e.g. Ranveer displays dick so as to forestall the outrage of modest women and maybe one or two elderly Sindhi dudes- then no coercion is needful. Shruti may think otherwise but only if we use the word 'think' in very loose terms indeed. Meanwhile let us leave Shruti to her Lacanian loose motion oscillating between the two poles of party-state and tarty-mate or Ranveer's occulted dick and awe-inspiring expressways or whatever other bug has crawled up her ass.
