The Modi Government as an Exponent of BJP Secularism

(Now that the Annual Conference of the American Academy of Religion is only a few days away, let me present the abstract plus explanation I sent in for last year's conference. It was written in February 2015 and draws attention to an important phenomenon with a strong and hitherto unrefuted predictive power, viz. the BJP variety of secularism. The AAR's "experts" were not interested, preferring their prestigious delusions to the hard facts.)

AB Vajpayee's NDA Government (1998-2004) heavily disappointed the experts who had predicted "all Moslims into the Indian Ocean" or similar doomsday scenarios -- or rather, it put them squarely in the wrong. Hindu "fascism" as a threat to democracy? When Vajpayee narrowly lost a confidence vote, he meekly stepped down. War against Pakistan? Though Pakistan unilaterally invaded India (Kargil 1999), Vajpayee forbade the Army to strike at the invaders' base across the border, and later opened a peace process, making symbolic concessions which Congress had always refused. Isolationism? He threw the Indian media market open to foreign media ownership, a move opposed by India's entire political spectrum. The only "Hindutva" thing the NDA ever did was HRD Minister MM Joshi's clumsy overhaul of the recommended history schoolbooks, changing nothing dramatic and easily reversed. When the Government created a Chair for Indic Studies in Oxford ("saffronization!"), it selected an outspoken opponent for the job, in the vain hope of receiving a pat on the back from its declared enemies.

With the hindsight knowledge of historical reality, it would be embarrassing to reproduce the predictions by Indian and foreign experts. Today, anti-BJP discourse is less shrill, but still confidently classifies the BJP among the "Hindu Right". This implies a prediction that once in power, the BJP would pursue distinctly pro-Hindu policies. However, in the light of our experience with the Vajpayee Government, it is no surprise that the present Government led by Narendra Modi fails to live up to this learned prediction, at least for now. (Of course, this paper will be updated by November as new developments take place.)

In spite of having a more homogeneous majority, it is reluctant to do anything pro-Hindu or perceivable as anti-minority. On the contrary, one of its first acts was to decree a new subsidy to Islamic schools. The stray Hindutva statements by loose cannon (Akshay Maharaj, Jyoti Niranjan) were followed by retractions, condemnations by Government spokesmen, and indignant innuendos by Modi-friendly journalists (Tavleen Singh, Swapan Dasgupta). Public reconversions by the allied VHP, heavily publicized and demonized by the media, were promptly discouraged by the Government. Having learned from Vajpayee's 2004 defeat, though, Modi does “keep the pot boiling”, does regularly throw crumbs of inconsequential Hindu symbolism to his support base, all while not formally changing anything. 

However, if many BJP workers are disappointed with this Government, is not for what it does but mainly for what it persistently fails to do. Thus, it inducted no figures with a strongly ideological profile (Arun Shourie, Subramanian Swamy). Likewise, some public figures who had crossed the floor (e.g. Madhu Kishwar) were conspicuously not rewarded -- a fact not considered here for disgruntled ego reasons but for illustrating the BJP's lack of strategy: it doesn't put people who have actually sacrificed for the BJP to any use, while awarding positions of influence to unreliable newcomers motivated by sheer opportunism. While some things on the Hindu agenda are either useless to Hinduism (e.g. declaring a "Hindu Rashtra") and others would arouse violent protests for which the media are sure to blame Modi (e.g. a Common Civil Code, though "secular" par excellence), others are perfectly feasible and, moreover, turn out to be the most consequential for the flourishing of Hinduism.

In particular, the amending of Constitutional Articles 28 and 30, which (de facto c.q. formally) discriminate against Hinduism in education, does not take away any rights from the minorities, yet lifts an enormous burden from Hindu organizations investing in education and eliminates a major reason for Hindu sects (Arya Samaj, RK Mission, Lingayats, Jains) to have themselves judicially declared non-Hindu minorities. Similarly, eliminating the legal basis of the discrimination against Hinduism in temple management, with rich temples (but not mosques or churches) nationalized and their income pocketed by politicians or diverted to non-Hindu purposes, would give an enormous boost to Hindu religious and cultural life, without impinging upon the rights of the minorities. It has to be noted, however, and it buttresses my case for "BJP secularism", that temple management is partly a competence of the States, and that BJP State Governments have not made the difference. At any rate, there are meaningful things a BJP Government could do specifically for Hinduism without endangering its non-religious agenda (development, cleaning India etc.) or its international standing, yet it chooses not to do them.        

As for the Hindutva fits and starts of some BJP members, now considered extremists but in fact only representative of what the erstwhile Jan Sangh (1952-77, predecessor of the BJP) stood for, it should be easy to bring them in line around a more reasonable but still credibly pro-Hindu programme. It is here that the BJP is most conspicuously failing -- conspicuous at least to insiders, for 99% of the outside literature about the BJP never mentions this phenomenon. Contrary to a consensus among academic and journalistic India-watchers, the supposed “Hindu extremist” party has no Hindu agenda. It relies on pro-Hindu workers to do the campaigning legwork, but once in power it cold-shoulders them, it publicizes and pursues an agenda of economic development only, and it tries to curry favour with the secularists.

The main reason is the long-standing deliberate lack of investment (pioneered by MS Golwalkar) in an intellectual and strategic vision of its own, the spurning of any analysis of the forces in the field and of the potential and limitations of the situation. It therefore also lacks competent personnel for the ideological struggle, e.g. for a textbook overhaul or, now, for nominating politically friendly new Vice-Chancellors. Consequently, most BJP leaders have an enormous inferiority complex vis-à-vis the secularists and, even when in office, try to live up to the norms laid down by their opponents.

This is hardly the impression created by most experts; but the primary data, the only source to which this paper pledges loyalty, tell a clear story: the present BJP is only termed a Hindu party in deference to the distant memory of its initial orientation.

Abstract

Like the previous BJP Government, the present one fails to live up to the oft-heard predictions of strident pro-Hindu and anti-minority policies. This is due to a phenomenon insufficiently realized by most India-watchers: a desire to live up to the norms upheld by the secularists and an interiorization of the disinterest in "outdated" Hindu concerns, not just among the numerous opportunists who have flocked to the new party in power, but even in the loyal core of the BJP's personnel. Based on insider sources, this paper enumerates the data establishing the reality of "BJP secularism" and analyses the reasons for this emerging phenomenon.

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Savarkar and Modi, beginning and end of Hindutva

(Hindu Human Rights, 1 June 2015; India Facts, 1 June 2015)
 

 

Hate mongers

Hate mongers often need concocted stories to buttress their political message. In India, these are most common in that peculiar Indian form of hatred: anti-Brahminism. As the local counterpart to what anti-Semitism has been in the West, it fantasizes about how Brahmins have only domination over us lesser mortals as their uppermost concern. Everything a Brahmin does, just has to be a wily stratagem to manipulate others. With their greater book-orientedness and heavy overrepresentation in the writing professions, they control public discourse and make others look at the world through Brahminical glasses. No matter how you try to gain autonomy, they manage to outwit you, even to the point of taking control over progressive movements, even over anti-Brahminism itself.

 

Against such a formidable enemy, any means are justified. That may well be the reason why Abheek Barman chose to write the misleading opinion piece: “Why did PM Modi skip mentioning Savarkar at the Mathura rally?” (Economic Times, 27 May 2015). Alternatively, given the preponderance of borrowed, deformed and simply mistaken historical ideas in the anti-Brahmin movement, he may only have been misinformed.

 

For starters, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar did not found “the ‘parivar’, that he started and which now holds the reins of power in New Delhi”. He was president of the rivalling Hindu Mahasabha in 1937-43, though not its founder: when it was created (1915 or 1922, depending on the definition), as also in 1925 when the RSS as backbone of the Parivar (family) was founded, he was in jail and barred from participating in politics. He did, however, launch the concept Hindutva as a political category common to several Hindu Nationalist organizations, and indeed adopted as central to the RSS worldview.

 

Much is made also of Savarkar’s plea to the British for a lenient treatment, and his pledge of loyalty, after he had been confined to the Andaman Penal Colony. Anti-Hindus let on their secret fear of Savarkar as a Hindu leader when they assert that he should have locked himself up in stern but sterile opposition, merely being heroic and dying – the very policy that the Rajputs pursued, ultimately to the detriment of the Hindu cause. The truth is that Savarkar was too intelligent for that. He played his cards well and managed to actively serve the Hindu cause once again after his early release. It is this strategic acumen that Nehruvians like Barman cannot forgive him for.

 

It must be admitted, though, that the anti-Hindu camp is very savvy in its use of arguments developed by anyone, as long as they are useful for the anti-Hindu cause. Seeing that Savarkar was being lionized by the Hindus, someone at the Communist fortnightly Frontline decided to belittle Savarkar as essentially a coward who had others do the killing that he planned, moreover a toady of the British. In reality, the British gave Savarkar two life sentences and many years of actual imprisonment for his proven anti-British opposition, much harsher than anything that the luxury inmates Gandhi and Nehru have had to endure, let alone the caviar Communists at Frontline. Their attempts to cut him to size only draw attention to the fact that they aren’t qualified to touch his feet.  Yet, ill-conceived as this anti-Savarkar mudslinging was, it has been taken over by all anti-Hindu spokesmen and is now being used to maximum effect. This contrasts with Hindutva behavior: when any new pro-Hindu argument is launched, the Hindu Nationalist movement will ignore it and fall back on the same worn-out outpourings of long-dead stalwarts like Guru Golwalkar, blind to the proven impotence of this outdated rhetoric.

 

 

 

Gandhi

indu cause once again after his release

 

Then, we see Mahatma Gandhi for the umpteenth time called the “Father of the Nation”. Though quite vain (as when he condoned the crowd demanding that MA Jinnah address him as “Mahatma” rather than “Mister”), Gandhi himself would have rejected this epithet. It stems from the new-fangled Nehruvian notion that India is a “nation in the making”  conceived by the political unification under Queen Victoria, whereas Gandhi saw himself as a son of an age-old nation. This falsehood is a cornerstone of the Nehruvian rhetoric, but then nobody in his right mind had considered falsity and Nehruism incompatible.

 

Gandhi is also termed an “implacable opponent of the British, who won independence for India”. Though admittedly very common worldwide, this myth crumbles when you investigate it properly. His love of the British came out several times in successive wars when he organized military or humanitarian support for the British camp, or when he forced the apparent Congress candidate for the first Prime Ministership, Sardar Patel, to step down in favour of the anglicizer Jawaharlal Nehru. The confused and contradictory course he charted, actually caused serious setbacks to the freedom movement. Ultimately it was Britain’s weakening in World War 2 and India’s heightened self-confidence through its wartime record that convinced the British to withdraw. As the decolonizing British PM Clement Attlee later confided, Gandhi’s role had been “minimal”.

 

 

Trinity

 

That Narendra Modi singled out Deendayal Upadhyaya, co-founder of the Jan Sangh, predecessor of the BJP, as “one of the three pillars of Indian politics”, together with Mahatma Gandhi and Ram Manohar Lohia, would be a fit topic for criticism, for it is indeed an ill-conceived choice. Lohia launched casteism in politics, a tendency here flatteringly referred to as opposition to “upper-caste domination over subalterns”. Gandhi’s policies of strict non-violence and economic primitivism, if followed, would have finished India long ago.

 

Upadhyaya had the merit of coining the phrase “Integral Humanism”, which in a nutshell says everything Dharmic politics should be. It would still be a good thing if the BJP today would highlight “Integral Humanism” as its real ideological commitment, instead of weasel terms like “Nationalism”. Call it “Dharma” for Indians and people with a vivid Indian connection, “Integral Humanism” for foreign consumption or in English-language media.

 

Unfortunately, in his elaboration of this bright idea, Upadhyaya proved too attached to the RSS fixation on a “national soul” (ultimately stemming from European Romantic thinker Johann Herder), which took up all the space in his booklet with the promising title. People who knew him confided to me that he was an all too ordinary man, which corresponds to the verifiable mediocrity of his ideas. But for Barman, these are trifles pertaining to the contents of his ideological work, unimportant next to the damning indictment that he was “a Brahmin” and “an early member of the RSS”. What much of ideology he does consider, is sweeping and inaccurate (“hostile to the all ideas of individualism, capitalism, democracy and communism”), but we can put that down to the space constraints of a mere column.

 

 

Why not Savarkar?

 

Anyway, the crucial question for him is also crucial for us: “But why did Modi skip Savarkar, whose image in Parliament he paid homage to, soon after becoming PM? The RSS celebrates him as ‘Veer’ or ‘valiant’. From the 1920s, he was the main ideologue of the RSS that came into being on Vijaya Dashami, 1925. Savarkar wrote its basic text, ‘Hindutva’ in 1923.”

 

Indeed, though Savarkar was formally not one of them, his Hindutva ideology was all-important to the RSS and its daughter organizations, including the present ruling party. Why did Modi not even mention him? Has he been superseded by more recent Hindu ideologues, such as that other Jan Sangh president, Balraj Madhok, or by historian Sita Ram Goel, or by later converts to Hindu politics like Arun Shourie and Subramanian Swamy?

 

And it is not that Modi was shy about naming names. Mentioning Gandhi may have been in deference to the actual moral aura that the Mahatma still enjoys worldwide, and Upadhyaya may have been unavoidable for an RSS loyalist. But he lionized Lohia of all people, the stalwart of the divisive casteist poison that has so long paralyzed Indian politics. He actually preferred the socialist caste-monger Lohia to Savarkar, as well as to all other unnamed Hindu leaders and thinkers.

 

Could the reason be that Modi partakes of the intellectual culture of the RSS: borrowing from Nehruvian sources, playing by the rules laid down by the enemy? But such considerations are outside the Nehruvian worldview, which catalogues anything done by any Hindutva hate figure as wily, fanatic, part of a tough secret plan motivated by Hindu interests. It just doesn’t occur to Barman that nominal Hindu Nationalists are really obedient playthings in his own side’s own hands. Not that they themselves fail to treat Hindus as enemies, but Hindus refuse to see this and treat them as their own standard, as their Guru. Even when securely in power, Hindu Nationalists still crawl before the secularist standard.

 

 

Savarkar’s sins  

 

Anyway, Barman puts it down to a belated recognition of Savarkar’s own sins. The worst is of course that he was “a Chitpavan Brahmin”. At age 12 already, young Savarkar took a leadership role in a communal riot. That he was an accomplice in the assassination of a British official should count as relatively good (if not the means, at least the purpose) for an avowed admirer of “implacable” opposition to the British. Ah, but that admiration was only meant for Gandhi, the man responsible for many thousands of deaths during the Partition massacres, the man who let others do the killing (described as an act of cowardice in Savarkar’s case) all while keeping his own hands clean even to the point of becoming a by-word for non-violence.

 

Barman also claims that Savarkar “wrote of the ‘unity’ of all Hindus, but his writing had no place for Muslims, Sikhs or other communities”. It is only a dogma of the Nehruvians, including the separatist section among the Sikhs, that Sikhi is a separate religion. From a scholarly viewpoint, of course Sikhs are Hindus: all Indian “unbelievers” were called just that by the Muslim invaders who introduced the very term “Hindu”. And at least Barman should know that from a Hindutva viewpoint, Sikhs are Hindus just as Buddhists, Tribals and other Indian religionists are. That precisely is what “the unity of all Hindus” means. Barman is a frog in the well who projects his own limited and ignorant Nehruvian worldview onto more mature views.

 

Then, Barman accuses Savarkar (and another Chitpavan Brahmin, prominent freedom fighter BG Tilak) of having espoused the Aryan Invasion Theory. This is the cornerstone of British rule in India, of missionary propaganda and of the anti-Brahmin agitation among Tribals, Dalits, Dravidians; indeed, of Barman’s own anti-Brahminism. And it is true that Savarkar was wrong in this regard, having been mesmerized by the then all-powerful belief that linguistics had somehow proven he Aryan invasion and thus overruled Hindu tradition, which knows of no Aryan invasion but only of several “Aryan” emigrations. (But while Savarkar was wrong 90 years ago, under several constraints, the anti-Brahmin movement entertains the same mistake even today.) Contrary to Barman’s claims, it was not exported from India to Europe but had been invented in Europe ca. 1820, after several decades of assuming that the newly-discovered Indo-European language family had originated in India.

 

Let us face the fact here that Savarkar’s worldview was influenced by the then Zeitgeist (spirit of the times), which no longer obtains. Likewise, Mahatma Gandhi is badly outdated, as are Ram Manohar Lohia (though sinister disintegrationists including Barman try to keep his legacy alive) and Deendayal Upadhyaya. It is one of the worst traits of Hindu Nationalism that it refuses to grow and just keeps on hero-worshipping long-dead leaders without making their inspiration evolve with the times.

 

 

Savitri Devi

 

And then Barman gets really off track: “Savarkar’s story has a sinister follow up. By the late 1920s, a European woman called Miximiani Portas travelled to India, where faced with deportation, she married Asit Krishna Mukherji, then the only Indian supporter of Nazism and Japanese expansionism across Asia. (...) Inherently racist, but with a mystical awe of ancient Hindu and Egyptian civilisations, Savitri gobbled up Savarkar’s bizarre Aryan theories. (…) ideas of Aryan racial supremacy, and the inherent ‘sub-humanity’ of other people, travelled via Savitri Devi to Adolf Hitler. She believed that Hitler was the divine power that would deliver this world from the Kali Yuga. Savitri Devi – and Savarkar – helped Hitler form his bizarre racial theories.”

 

Having devoted a few hundred pages to the sad case of Savitri Devi (chapters in The Saffron Swastika, 2001, and  in Return of the Swastika, 2007), I will not fill up this limited space with the many reasons why Barman’s version is worse than imaginary. The reader merely has to consider the chronology to see that this is impossible. Adolf Hitler wrote his Mein Kampf, full of “Aryan racial supremacy and the inherent ‘sub-humanity’ of other people” in 1923, when Maximiani Portas was a young student and Savarkar a prisoner. Until then, Savarkar had only written a few books about Indian history, which didn’t interest Hitler, and about the anti-colonial struggle, which Hitler strongly opposed. So no, Savarkar did not influence Hitler and did not give him the very European idea of the Aryan race. (But at least, Mein Kampf and Savarkar’s Hindutva were written at the same time and both in captivity, a likeness about which astrologers and fantasy writers like Barman could certainly think up a good story.)  

Maximiani Portas brought her Aryan theory with her into India, as she had learned it in Europe. She only took Indian ideas with her back to Europe when she could leave India at long last in 1945, too late for Hitler to learn anything from her. Incidentally, she had taken the name Savitri Devi shortly after settling in India, years before she married Mukherji. It is but one of the many mistakes of detail accumulated in Barman’s brief column. She did have a peculiar veneration for Hitler as well as for Genghis Khan and for Pharaoh Akhenaten, the founder of monotheism and iconoclasm (a tradition that has particularly victimized Hinduism through Islam). She prefigured the many Westerners who have travelled to India to brew their own combination of Hindu and Western ideas, and who often ended up getting sun-struck.

What Barman strategically omits, is that after the outbreak of World War 2, Savarkar immediately offered help in the anti-Nazi war effort and started recruiting for the British-Indian Army. Indeed, Gandhi would deride him as a “recruiting officer”, forgetting how he himself as a British loyalist had recruited Indian volunteers for the British war effort in the Boer War, the Zulu War and World War 1. Of course, in Barman’s game, it is “heads Hindus lose, tails anti-Hindus win”: if Savarkar had sided with the Axis against the British (as the secular Leftist Subhas Bose did), he would have been denounced as a proven Nazi, and now that he worked for the opposing camp, he is denounced as a British toady. In reality, he had only India’s best interests at heart, which he thought were best served by enlisting in the British-Indian Army, just as Bose thought that enlisting in the Axis Armies was the best course to India’s independence. Barman with his puny divisive ideas would not understand, but Savarkar and Bose, for all their differences, were first of all patriots.

 

Conclusion

Why did Narendra Modi not enumerate Savarkar, as the coiner of the political category Hindutva, among his political role models, when he did include the whimsical Mahatma, the divisive Lohia, and the mere follower Upadhyaya? For a reason that doesn’t figure in Barman’s worldview: BJP secularism. Whereas Nehruvians like to portray the RSS-BJP as a formidable enemy mercilessly pursuing the Hindu agenda, the fact is that most BJP stalwarts prefer to keep the Hindu agenda as far removed from their policies as possible. They serve their time in government and enjoy the perks of office, meanwhile hopefully cleaning up the economic mess that Congress has left behind, but never touching a serious Hindu concern with a barge-pole.

This even counts for the Prime Minister, whom Barman and his ilk have spent a dozen years demonizing as a Hindu fanatic. The Hindutva once espoused by the Jan Sangh (1952-77) should be updated, the old formulas should be allowed to evolve, of course. But most BJP stalwarts are not interested in any evolution of their ideology, the only evolution they can conceive of is betrayal. They have never developed an ideological backbone; instead, they have continuously borrowed conclusions from the Nehruvians and others who did their own thinking for non-Hindu purposes. They had the pick-pocket mentality of getting things on the cheap, of being mentally lazy and borrowing their ideas from elsewhere.

That is why both BJP Prime Ministers thus far, Atal Behari Vajpayee and now Modi, have professed their secularism. No, not age-old Hindu “secularism” (in the sense of religious pluralism) but the anti-Hindu ideology that is falsely called “secularism”. They essentially live up to the standards set by their enemies because their movement has never seriously developed a perspective of its own.

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Answering the VHP's questions to Swapan Dasgupta

(VHP top official Ashok Chowgule has reacted to a recent column by Swapan Dasgupta, effectively a representative of the dominant wing in the BJP, viz. the economic rightists. Many of them regularly pooh-pooh the other wing of the BJP, viz. the cultural nationalists. It might be useful, for those interested, if I give my viewpoint to the same questions as put to Swapan Dasgupta, posed after his
NDTV column of 22 December 2014: "Some in RSS Have Profound Distaste for PM". Here goes: )

 

1.     How many in the BJP have a profound distaste for the RSS?

 

It is not for me to give numbers here, but after the Rama Janmabhumi agitation, which the BJP tried to shake off after reaping the dividends in the 1991 elections, my impression was of a constant growth in  the number of BJP men who wanted to distance themselves and the party from the RSS and from any Hindu ideology. The hegemonic ideology of secularism made ever deeper inroads among the members of a party started for the sake of Hindu interests. It reached a symbolic culmination when LK Advani, the face of the Ayodhya movement, called the demolition on 6  Dec. 1992 "the blackest day" of his life. The present government and its dependencies are full of time-servers and opportunists who don't want to be bothered with ideology and just want to make hay while Modi's sun shines. Those who cared for Hinduism were not always the most sophisticated either. I remember a conversation with BL Sharma Prem, BJP MP from Delhi, where he talked loosely about "teaching Muslims a lessen" and all that. Many Hindu activists confuse toughness and ideological commitment with a willingness to use unprovoked violence. They are the best allies of the secularist propaganda equating Hindu activism with violence against the minorities.

 

2.     Given that the BJP seeks and gets the support of the total Sangh parivar at the time of the elections, should not their concerns be addressed by the BJP? 

 

The argument used by the economy-wallahs is precisely that the BJP should do its voters' bidding, and that it won the elections on a development platform. No, it won the election because numerous Hindu voters finally believed there was a pro-Hindu among the serious candidates, namely Narendra Modi, and that is why exceptionally they bothered to go cast their votes. They never would have done that just for the BJP. Baba Ramdev is but the most famous of the numerous people who assured me that they voted for Modi, not for the BJP.

 

3.     You say that Narendraji made the VHP irrelevant in Gujarat.  Apart from being factually wrong, and assuming that the effort was made, was it the right thing to do in terms of the cause of a Hindu resurgence?

 

It is truly bad for a BJP man to treat the VHP as an enemy, on a par with the Nehru dynasty or the Naxalites. Indeed it is they who should and do treat the VHP as an enemy whom they mean to destroy. That the VHP was virtually destroyed in Gujarat, I heard in tempore non suspecto from a Gujarat BJP man, so I guess it may well be true. The infighting inside the Sangh Parivar escapes most secularist "studies" as these are meant to uphold the image of a "fascist" monolith, but we know that it is there. 

 

4.     Suppose the attempt was indeed made, and had it been successful, would not an important part of the Sangh parivar been organisationally destroyed?  And would this have benefited the cause of a Hindu resurgence?

 

Destroying a part of the Sangh Parivar is bad for the Sangh Parivar, but I would con,done it if it was somehow beneficial to the Hindu cause. But nothing indicates such an outcome, nor such a concern. If the present BJP acts against the most ideologically committed member of the Sangh Parivar, viz. the VHP, it is invariably an attempt to shake off ideology.

 

5.     You have talked about the Hindu Mahasabha.  Is this a member of the Sangh parivar? 

 

Originally, the difference was that it was a political party, while the RSS was not. It is on this ground that Nathuram Godse crossed over from the RSS to the HMS. After the founding of the Jan Sangh in 1952, then the BJP in 1980, this distinction has become irrelevant. The only difference in discourse is that the Hindu Mahasabha openly supports Nathuram Godse and the Mahatma murder, while the Sangh Parivar condemns them, in vain. The secularists are correct in pointing out that Godse has had his ideological education in the RSS, but the RSS is correct in stating that its strategy does not include targeted murders. In that sense, Godse acted on his own and made a very individual applicatio of the Hindu nationalism he had learnt. 

 

6.     You say: “There is also a media environment that is conducive to the fringe. It simply requires some 50 individuals, a controversial cause and a few TV cameras to give otherwise irrelevant people notoriety, publicity and even secure political impact.”  Is this not a bad reflection of the profession that you are associated with – namely journalism?

 

Is this a reference to my talk at the India Ideas Conclave, much filmed and talked about, especially to highlight the anti-Islamic element in circles associated with the Modi government? It is at any rate true that I am "irrelevant". None of my books or opinions personally communicated to Hindutva bigwigs during interviews or on group occasions has made any impact, and secularists have taken even less notice. If Swapan knows of a journalistic way to transmute this irrelevance into "political impact", he is welcome me tell me about it.

 

7.     During NDA 1, you had said that there are many in the BJP that are seeking a certificate of secularism from the very people whom they have labelled as pseudo-secular.  I wonder if this malice has not already become prominent in NDA 2.

 

BJP people seeking secularist certificates is still a problem now that they have an absolute majority. They have never elaborated an analysis of their own, so they are still dependent on the worldview furnished by the secularists.

 

8.     You say: “There is a feeling in government circles that the present controversies that led to the disruption of Parliament were wilfully triggered by VHP's Dr Pravin Togadia, an individual who has an acrimonious relationship with Modi.”  I really hope you are not serious.

 

I have no idea of personal relationships. I do notice, however, that the people who triggered the ideological controversies which Modi put down, have not done their homework. Rather than achieving pro-Hindu reforms, they merely ruffle feathers and create commotion by talking about them. Where is the strategy for pro-Hindu reform?

 

9.     Let me ask your personal opinion.  Should Ghar Vapasi programme be undertaken or no?

 

Ghar Wapasi is the only solution for the Dying Race. It should not be stopped or postponed for any other political goal. Any other strategy to stop the aggressive onward march of the minorities is doomed to failure, e.g. "teaching Muslims a lesson" or demographic mobilization. It follows, however, that there is no ground for an anti-conversion bill, which doesn't work anyway (cfr. China), antagonizes world opinion, and belongs to the mindless repressive policies (cfr. book-banning) with which Hindu activism is already too associated. 

 

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Romila Thapar mistakes Hindu impotent rage for a pro-Hindu power equation

 

According to retired history professor Romila Thapar, “academics must question more” (The Hindu, October 27, 2014). She was delivering the third Nikhil Chakravartty Memorial Lecture, eloquently titled: “To Question or not to Question: That is the Question”. The problem addressed by her was that “academics and experts shied away from questioning the powers of the day”. So, she “urge[d] intellectuals to resist assault on liberal thought”. In particular, she “asked a full house of Delhi’s intelligentsia on Sunday why changes in syllabi and objections to books were not being challenged”.

She was, hopefully, misinformed. (I shudder to think of the alternative explanation for this obvious untruth.) The recent changes in syllabi and objections to books by pro-Hindu activists, both phenomena being summed up in the single name of Dina Nath Batra, have met with plenty of vocal objections and petitions in protest, signed by leading scholars in India and abroad. I myself have signed two such petitions. At the European Indology conference in Zürich, July 2014, we were all given a petition to sign in support of Wendy Doniger’s book The Hindus: an Alternative History, which Batra’s judicial challenge had forced the publishers to withdraw. The general opinion among educated people, widely expressed, was to condemn all attempts at book-banning.

 

Selective indignation

To be sure, the intellectuals’ indignation was selective. There have indeed been cases where they have failed to come out in defence of besieged authors. No such storms of protest are raised when Muslims or Christians have books banned, or even when they assault the writers. Thus, several such assaults happened on the author and publisher of the Danish Mohammed cartoons, yet at its annual conference, the prestigious and agenda-setting American Academy of Religion hosted a panel where every single participant, including the speakers from the audience, supported the Muslim objections to the cartoons.

This trahison des clercs (“betrayal by the intellectuals”) is aptly explained by Thapar herself: “There are more academics in existence than ever before but most prefer not to confront authority even if it debars the path of free thinking. Is this because they wish to pursue knowledge undisturbed or because they are ready to discard knowledge, should authority require them to do so?”

The point is that the intellectual’s selective indignation shows very well where real authority lies. Threats of violence are, of course, highly respected. The day Hindus start assaulting writers they don’t like, you will see eminent historians like herself turning silent about Hindu censorship, or even taking up its defence -- for that is what actually happens in the case of Islamic threats. Even more pervasive is the effect of threats to their careers. You will be in trouble if you utter any “Islamophobic” criticism of Islamic censorship, but you will earn praise if you challenge even proper judicial action against any anti-Hindu publications. This, then, safely predicts the differential behaviour of most intellectuals vis-à-vis free speech.

 

Box-type religions

A wholly different point is that she shows her partisan affiliation by adopting a secularized Christian framework when talking about Indian schools of thought. According to the newspaper report, “tracing the lineage of the modern public intellectual to Shramanic philosophers of ancient India, Prof. Thapar said the non-Brahminical thinkers of ancient India were branded as Nastikas or non-believers”. The division in Astika and Nastika already had different meanings at the time (not even exhausted by the two main ones: Vedic vs. non-Vedic, theistic vs. non-theistic), and did not coincide with the division in Brahmana vs. Shramana. Ancient Indian thought was never divided in box-type orthodoxies on the pattern of Christians vs. Muslims or Catholics vs. Protestants. It is only a Western projection, borrowed as somehow more prestigious by the Indian “secularists”, that imposes this categorization on the Indian landscape of ideas. Buddhist thinkers were never treated as dissenters, and even less so when Buddhism was politically in the ascendant.

She added an interesting image: “I am reminded of the present day where if you don’t accept what Hindutva teaches, you’re all branded together as Marxists.” The heavy-handed Marxist predominance in Indian academe is a historical fact of which she herself is a product as well as an icon, but now the notion is a bit dated. Today, many opportunists have shifted their loyalty to more fashionable new trends dictated by American universities, such as postmodernism, postcolonialism, multiculturalism, feminism and the more native contribution of subalternism. It is true that many Hindutva votaries are not up-to-date with the latest academic fashions, frozen as these outsiders are in old slogans. At any rate, the vibrant interaction of ancient India’s intellectual landscape, where free debate flourished, was nothing like the modern situation where her own school has locked out the Hindu voice and the latter has reactively demonized her.

 

Power equation

In her view, “public intellectuals, playing a discernible role, are needed for such explorations as also to articulate the traditions of rational thought in our intellectual heritage. This is currently being systematically eroded.” True, many intellectuals are not guided by what is true or “rational”, but only by what company they land up in if they get associated with a particular viewpoint. Numerous persons in academe and the media have loudly sung the anti-Hindu or “secular” tune when that was fashionable. Depending on how close their institutional position is to the new Narendra Modi government, you interestingly see many of them reposition themselves as somehow always having been pro-Hindu.

As she aptly said: “It is not that we are bereft of people who can think autonomously and ask relevant questions. But frequently where there should be voices, there is silence. Are we all being co-opted too easily by the comforts of conforming?”

But the power equation is such that the comforts of conforming still lead most to the anti-Hindu side. The opportunists changing sides are still a minority, the anti-Hindu discourse remains the dominant one. The best proof is that the ruling BJP, supposedly a Hindu party, is still acting out the worldview of the “secularists”. They are not actively challenging it or changing the intellectual power equation. It is perhaps fortunate for the Hindu side that the “secularists” have denounced it for so long as a Hindu party, for that is what makes the opportunists turn superficially pro-Hindu now.

So far, the ruling party is not repeating Murli Manohar Joshi’s attempt (ca. 2002) to rewrite the officially recommended history textbooks. That adventure ended in a demonstration of Hindu incompetence, a complete reversal once the “secularists” were back in power, and a strong reaffirmation of their intellectual predominance. Even though the BJP is back in power now, it still hesitates to challenge their conceptual framework.   

 

Moral authority

According to the newspaper: “Prof. Thapar stressed that intellectuals were especially needed to speak out against the denial of civil rights and the events of genocide.” Yes, the genocide accompanying the birth of Pakistan and later of Bangladesh are two events that should not be forgotten, eventhough her own school has tried to whitewash, minimize or obscure them. The largest religious massacre of independent India’s history, that of the Sikhs by the Congress “secularists” in 1984, also comes in for closer scrutiny and for a demythologizing analysis about the true nature of Congress dynasticism. On a smaller scale, Hindus have also misbehaved, either out of smugness or out of desperation, and that too deserves study; except that it has already been made the object of publications so many times while the former subjects remain orphans.

The eminent historian is quoted as observing: “The combination of drawing upon wide professional respect, together with concern for society can sometimes establish the moral authority of a person and ensure public support.” Indeed, the impartisan nature of proper academic research would confer the moral authority to intervene, sparingly, in ongoing public debates. It is therefore a pity that so many scholars of her own school have squandered this moral authority by being so brazenly partisan.

 

No reaction?

Finally, she reiterated her main point, namely “the ease with which books are banned and pulped or demands made that they be burned and syllabi changed under religious and political pressure or the intervention of the state. Why do such actions provoke so little reaction from academics, professionals and others among us who are interested in the outcome of these actions? The obvious answer is the fear of the instigators — who are persons with the backing of political authority.”

Again, Prof. Thapar was misinformed. When Batra and other Hindus put publishers under pressure to withdraw Wendy Doniger’s book or AK Ramanujan’s Three Hundred Ramayanas, the publishers buckled under the fear of the Hindu public’s purchasing power. Apart from ideological factors, entrepreneurs also have to take into account the purely commercial aspect of a controversy. In this case, they took into account the only power that Hindus have: their numbers. But the Hindu instigators did not inspire “fear”, and definitely did not have “the backing of political authority”.

It is strange how fast people can forget. Modi has only very recently come to power. At the time of the Ramanujan and Doniger controversies, Congress was safely in power. If the publishers were in awe of any powers-that-be, it was of the Congress “secularists”.

More fundamentally, changes in government do not necessarily entail changes in the dominant intellectual framework. The accession to power (or rather, to office) of a nominally Hindu party does not mean that the ideological power equation has changed. In spite of the lip-service paid to Hindu self-respect by a few fashion-conscious opportunists, anti-Hindu “secularism” still rules the roost. Even now it furnishes the set of assumptions that most intellectuals, and even most ruling BJP politicians, go by.  

 

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A Marxist critique of the Modi government’s ICHR nomination

 

 

 

 

Retired historian Romila Thapar has written an opinion piece (“History repeats itself”, 11 July 2014, India Today) giving the standard secular reaction to the appointment of equally retired historian Y. Sudershan Rao as chairman of the Indian Council of Historical Research. It gives the predictable (indeed, predicted, see K. Elst: “A Hindutva historian in office”, 11 July 2014) show of indignation hiding an inside reaction of satisfaction at the BJP’s renewed display of incompetence in reforming the field of history.

 

   

Status

 

“The appointment of a historian whose work is unfamiliar to most historians shows scant regard for the impressive scholarship that now characterises the study of Indian History and this disregard may stultify future academic research. Given that the writing of history in India over the last half-century has produced some of the finest historians, recognised both nationally and internationally, one is surprised at the appointment of Professor Y. Sudershan Rao as chairperson of the Indian Council for Historical Research (ICHR). Professor Rao's work is unfamiliar to most historians, with little visibility of research that he might have carried out. He has published popular articles on the historicity of the Indian epics but not in any peer-reviewed journal, and the latter is now a primary requisite for articles to be taken seriously at the academic level.”

 

Here we have, at some length, the usual status-mongering. It says, in short, that Prof Rao is not “eminent”. It is a rather sophomoric argument: outsiders (such as politicians) and beginners imagine that academic status has a whole lot of meaning, and that you can’t be a serious scientist unless you have this kind of status. Insiders, however, have a far lower opinion of this academic status. Sometimes, indeed, it is only given to people of exceptional merit. From these highly visible cases, outsiders extrapolate to all others. But in many more cases, it is the mediocre minds and the faithful followers who get promoted, while the really talented people are blocked or are encouraged to seek more lucrative employment outside academe.

 

The mechanics of the presence or absence of status is as follows: the Indian Left jealously guards its power position in academe and decides who gets status within the Humanities, or who is blacklisted and kept out. Then the politicians select their sources of authority or their interlocutors by the status they “have” (i.e. which the Left has conferred on them), which is turn enhances their status. And then the India-watching circles abroad go by the status which individuals turn out to have acquired in India, and further increase their “eminence”. Thus, Romila Thapar’s own nomination to American chairs after her retirement in India crowned her career of being an ever more eminent historian in India.

 

The focus on status is a long-standing practice of the Indian Left, and for a good reason. As Sita Ram Goel already remarked in his anti-Communist days, the Indian Communists made sure to create status for those loyal to them. If you were a writer, they would arrange for you to be invited to a writers’ conference in Moscow and get an award there, and then you would be introduced in India as an “internationally acclaimed writer”. This was all the more important because people in general base their judgment on status, but no one more so than the Hindus. Indeed, the fabled Hindu moneybags will rather sponsor an enemy with status than a friend without it. The BJP will rather nominate a “secularist” with status than a proven Hindu loyalist without it. So, in the case of our Communist writer, they will honour him for his status, not realizing that this status has purposely been created for him by their declared enemies. And they will shun a pro-Hindu writer because he has no status, ignoring or disregarding the fact that he has been denied any avenue that might have led to status. The last thing they think of is to make an effort and create status for people who are perceived as belonging to the Hindu camp.

 

 

The BJP role in education

 

To be sure, there are provincial universities where the Leftist lobby’s power in limited. Education is largely a matter for the States, so BJP State Governments control a fair number of second-rank but nonetheless real nominations. Indeed, if they had meant business, they could have created a centre of excellence developing a more objective counter-narrative to the dominant Leftist version of history. Still, they do get to fill vacancies for history professors once in a while. These do not confer the kind of status that Jawaharlal Nehru University can offer, but they should at least be sufficient to groom a set of historians outside the Left’s sphere of influence. And indeed, even as an outsider, I can off-hand enumerate a handful of credible and competent non-Left historians, among whom a new ICHR chairman might have been picked. India is a big country, and non-Left historians may be seriously underrepresented, but in absolute figures they are still a force to be reckoned with. Prof. Rao himself is a veteran of one such little-known university in Warangal, Andhra Pradesh.

 

As for the process of peer review, upheld by Romila Thapar as a key to academic status, it has come under criticism for being highly susceptible to corruption. Thus, Indians might think of Northwestern Europe as much cleaner than awfully corrupt India, but right on my doorstep, Tilburg University in the Netherlands has been through a sensational fraud scandal in 2011-12. Social psychologist Prof. Diederik Stapel had built a whole career on much-applauded papers, nicely peer-reviewed, and in their conclusions very welcome among the “progressive” crowd. But then it transpired that he had a long-standing practice of making his research data up, so as to suit his preconceived “conclusions”. The investigative commission appointed for the case not only discovered large-scale fraud affecting the work of other researchers as well, but specifically reprimanded the reviewers who had okayed Stapel’s work so often. This was but an extreme case of a general phenomenon: papers get easy acceptance from peers if they support the dominant view, but are held to far more demanding standards if  they are at odds with it. In India, just imagine what it would take for a history paper with “communal” conclusions to be accepted by a Leftist-controlled review panel. So, of course Prof. Rao cannot boast of many peer-reviewed publications, but that says little about the quality of his work.

 

A serious look into his output, however, reveals that he is indeed not the man from whom we can expect an overhaul of the Indian history sector with respect for the normative methods of history scholarship. Here we have to concur with Romila Thapar: “Rumour has it that since he is working simultaneously on various projects, a recognised monograph has still to emerge. The projects are linked to spiritualism, yoga, the spiritual contacts between India and Southeast Asia, and such like. Whatever connections there may be between these themes and basic historical research, they are at best tenuous, and it would require a mind of extraordinary insight and rigour to interweave such ideas.”

 

For a professor teaching lessons about historical method, it is rather poor to base herself on “rumours”. I have remarked before that the dominant scholars are often “fishwives”, who believe and then propagate mere gossip. Nevertheless, an internet search and our limited findings there give a first confirmation of her impression.

 

Historicity of the Epics

According to the eminent historian: “The two issues that he has highlighted in his statement to the press as the agenda for his chairmanship are also prominent in the Hindutva view of Indian history. One is that of proving the historicity of texts such the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, and establishing the dates of the texts and their central event.” At least in the case of the Mahabharata battle, we are on fairly solid ground in assuming that it was a historical event. The same is true of the Trojan war, although Ilias enthusiasts also have had to struggle against skepticism before this was generally accepted. On the other hand, many embellishments as well as unrelated stories and discourses are of other dates.

She observes: “This is a subject on which there has been endless research for the last two centuries. Indologists and historians have covered the range of possible investigation discussing philology, linguistics, archaeology, anthropology and even astronomy to try and ascertain a definitive chronology for these texts. But to no avail, as a precise date eludes them. To go over the ground again in the absence of new hard evidence would merely be repeating familiar scholarship- but it may not be familiar to Professor Rao.”

The available investigations have brought us much closer to a serious chronological assessment than she seems to assume. Only, it does not favour the historicity of “the” Epics. They confirm that traditions were collected and expanded over centuries, and additions made even after a redaction meant as “final”. Only believers treat the Epics as a divinely revealed text that has to be dated as a single whole. From the wording in the newspaper’s rendering of the interview, it seems that Prof Rao belongs to the believers rather than to the historians, but then again, most Indian papers are not above manipulations.

After her defeat in the Ayodhya controversy, she still uses the present ICHR discussion to fool the world once more with her negationist thesis: “Professor Rao's other statement to the press of there being archaeological evidence to support the theory that there was once a temple where the Babri Masjid later stood, is largely a political statement as the report of the excavation at the site in Ayodhya is not publicly available. Those few who have had the chance to read the report may not agree with the statement.” Are we to suppose that her own interventions in this debate were not political? The negationist stand against the pre-existence of the Ayodhya temple was an extreme example of how the Humanities often serve to provide a scholarly veneer to theses that arise purely from political motives.

 

The ICHR’s chairmanship

An interesting point is this: “Again, according to what was published in the newspapers, Professor Rao's second comment was regarding his objection to the introduction of Marxist tools of research by the ICHR during the chairmanship of Professors R.S. Sharma and Irfan Habib. Professor Rao should be more familiar with the ICHR since he was appointed to the Council by the first BJP government of 1999-2004. He should know that for the most part of its existence, the ICHR has been under the chairmanship of non-Marxists such as Lokesh Chandra, S. Setter, MGS Narayanan and so on. So if they had wanted to remove the so-called ‘Marxist tools of research’, there was nothing to stop them from doing so.”

The ICHR chairmanship is largely a ceremonial and administrative post. If the holder of the title is not particularly dynamic, not much power inheres in it. That is why the Left didn’t mind giving it to non-Leftists once in a while. They themselves are interested in real power, i.e. the power to change things according to one’s own designs, whereas most Hindus are only interested in office. (I thank Arun Shourie for correcting me when I once parroted the usual complaint that most politicians “only want power”. The right expression was: “they only want office”.) Office means you get all these photo opportunities and TV appearances, a fat salary and glittering perks to show off. A child’s hand is easy to fill.

I doubt that the enumerated ICHR chairmen ever had the instruments to remove the Marxist influence from their institution. But at any rate, there is little signs that they ever tried. The Marxists, by contrast, only desire office to the extent that it is an avenue to real power. Indeed, the history of their acquisition of cultural and educational power is one of a division of labour: Congress politicians, originally around Indira Gandhi, would get the glamorous offices, whereas their Communist allies would do their long-term moles’ work in the less conspicuous cultural-educational sector.

The good element in this sobering assessment of the ICHR chairmanship is that Prof. Rao may perhaps not be the best historian, but he can still do a fine job is what the post in meant for: put the right people in the right places and inspire them to do the research needed. Prime Minister Narendra Modi is known for having a low opinion of diplomas and having more respect for achievement. That is why he nominated Smriti Irani, underqualified but a proven hard worker, to the Human Resources Development ministry, who in her turn thought of Prof. Rao as the right choice for the ICHR. Let us hope that she knows of qualities of his that we have yet to appreciate.  

 

Real Marxism

The eminent historian, who is not known to have protested when Tom Bottomore’s Dictionary of Marxism describes herself as a Marxist, takes issue with the loose use by Prof. Rao and many others of the term Marxism: “It is perhaps worth pointing out that the kind of history that is often dismissed by Hindutva ideologues as Marxist is not actually Marxist but bears the stamp of the social sciences. The distinction between the two, despite its importance to the interpretation of history, is generally glossed over by the proponents of Hindutva. This is largely because they have scant understanding of what is meant by a Marxist interpretation of history and therefore fail to recognise it. For them, a Marxist is simply someone who opposes the Hindutva ideology. Consequently, a range of historians unexpectedly find themselves dubbed as Marxists.”

It is not just Hindutva ideologues who point to the preponderant influence of Marxism on India (which is simply a fact), and neither is it only them who use the term Marxism a bit inaccurately. And here, she does have a point. What she calls “the social sciences” is her name for the scholarly veneer that the Leftists in academe give to their own ideology, but that ideology is indeed not always Marxist, and these days less and less so. Marxism was one specific school of thought in the Leftist spectrum, and after it has been abandoned in the Soviet Union and more gradually in China, it has had to give way in India too. Nothing ever dies in India (as Girilal Jain observed), and Indian Marxism will take a long time to wither away, but it is a fact that postmodernism, potcolonialism and other forms of egalitarianism are taking over where Marxism once flourished. To the average Hindutva observer, whose understanding of these ideological distinctions is blurred at best, these remain all the same.

Let me give a single example of the difference between Marxism and the more current forms of Leftism, one that Prof. Thapar will certainly recognize. The Marxist historian Shereen Ratnagar asserts: “if, as in the case of the early Vedic society, land was neither privately owned nor inherited by successive generations, then land rights would have been irrelevant to the formation of kin groups, and there would be nothing preventing younger generations from leaving the parental fold. In such societies the constituent patrilineages or tribal sections were not strongly corporate. So together with geographic expansion there would be social flexibility.” (in Romila Tapar, ed.: India: Historical Beginnings and the Concepts of the Aryan, National Book Trust, Delhi 2006, p.166)

Nowadays it has become fashionable to moralize about the caste system, with evil Brahmins inventing caste out of thin air and then imposing it on others; Neo-Ambedkarites give a lead in spreading this view. But hard-headed Marxists don’t fall for this conspiracy theory and see the need for socio-economic conditions to explain the reigning system of hierarchy or equality. In particular, it is pointless to lament the inequality of “feudal”, pre-modern societies, as the socio-economic conditions for equality didn’t prevail yet. Socialism (or, to name a fashionable instance of egalitarianism: feminism) simply couldn’t exist or emerge in a feudal society. However, the pastoral early-Vedic society did have the conditions for a far more equal relation between individuals. In the later Vedic period, the caste system emerged, first with mixing of castes (caste was passed on in the male line, but the father was free to marry a woman of another caste, see the Chandogya Upanishad or still the Buddha), then with endogamy. So, the Marxist, materialist and “scientific” analysis is quite distinct from the “petty-bourgeois” idealistic view.

 

Real history

Prof. Thapar feigns bad memories of the AB Vajpayee government, when the established historians laughed without end at the sight of the Hindutva crowd’s incompetence: “During the BJP/NDA government of 1999-2004, there was a frontal attack on historians by the then HRD minister M.M. Joshi. (…) The present HRD minister, who unfortunately is unfamiliar with academia beyond school level, gives the impression that in this case she may be doing what she perhaps was appointed for: Carrying out the programme of the old history-baiters of the BJP who now have a fresh innings.”

It should not surprise us that the august professor, in spite of her Marxism, so openly disdains the proletarian HRD minister. It is the old glorification of status all over again. While her Marxist school has waged a very long attack on real history, so that a lot is to be cleaned up now, she is right to have a low opinion of MM Joshi’s tenure and initiatives. Marxists were at least sophisticated in their distortions, and hence could win over most of the India-watchers abroad, but the Hindutva history-rewriters were clumsy and disdainful of quality control. It is as yet too early to know whether Mrs. Irani or Prof. Rao are willing and able to do better.   

Her final point sums up her judgment of the new situation, and I need not comment on it: “Again, rumour has it that the ICHR did send a shortlist of its recommendations for chairmanship to the HRD ministry. The list had the names of historians who had helped construct the ICHR into a viable research body. But that list seems to have conveniently got lost in the ministry. Therefore, a different name was pulled out of another hat and the person appointed. If this is so, then the prognosis is both predictable and drear.”

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