The sight of a sombre Manish Tiwari denouncing Narendra Modi in hushed tones of angst, for suggesting the ailing imported empress abdicate in favour of her befuddled son, illustrated poignantly the ignominy to which the GOP has descended. The party that fought for Indian independence is now in the thrall of an uneducated and greedy foreigner of no noticeable merit. The Congress party is a mere appendage to her utterly vacuous imperious airs that hint at innate supremacy. The bevy of nauseous courtiers like Tiwari, Khurshid and Ramesh and others, less versed in the Queen’s English, but perfectly capable of shocking obsequiousness in Hindi, have sunk to the lowest possible depths. Modi is having a lot of fun puncturing the inflated egos of these degraded court jesters and their absurd leaderene, while precipitating delighted mirth in his vast audiences.
You would imagine that she might have the nous to identify competent speechwriters who would get basic facts right. But her recent piqued Chhattishgarh litany, in wooden Hindi, recited otherwise from the Latin scriptis; something was profoundly amiss. It seems their only qualification is shameless obeisance and unctuous obedience, hence the serial hilarity the speeches of mother and son invariably provoke. Rahul Gandhi may have been awarded the M.Phil. Degree by Trinity, Cambridge, tutored by an earnest Bangladeshi economist and, no doubt, monitored solicitously by the family’s own Nobel laureate, its President at the time. But his autistic patter reveals he gained little from it. Either the degree had become worthless by the time he had supposedly studied for it and evidently passed three of its four component papers, or there is something profoundly amiss. It is unlikely the truth will ever be known.
The Congress is really no longer a political party at all. It is entirely a vehicle for the perpetuation of a clapped out dynasty that has outsourced itself socially and culturally from India. It supreme leader and her family party abroad, enjoy healthcare in elite foreign hospitals and spend like owners of Pharaonic wealth, while hypocritically feigning concern for India’s poor. Their wasteful programmes for alleged upliftment are a form of double jeopardy. It robs India of painfully accumulated savings, in shameless attempts to bribe the electorate, while the political incumbents loot simultaneously without respite. It is a disgrace bereft of moral limits, cynically bolstered by a corrupt, anti-national media and a retinue of politicians who behave no better than domestics. Their plunder would have made Nadir Shah blanch and its intolerable brazenness prompts rage in anyone with a modicum of honesty and insight!
The dynasty enjoys the support of a fetid chorus of arrogant Stephenian and other obnoxiously pseudo Westernized anchors and journalists who control communications in India, as if it was their birthright. The main purport of this scandalous of colonial subversion seems to deprive individuals of the capacity for independent thinking and adopt instead, dangerous anti-national, ideological conformism. Most of these half-educated journalists are apt to rabbit on endlessly, on any and every subject. There seems to have been no exposure to any serious thinking beyond the tendentious rubbish on India published by the likes of Penguin and OUP and lightweight airport drivel by the likes Ramachandra Guha. Of course they are also self-consciously impervious to anything that might offend their political patrons as India Today’s nincompoop chief editor demonstrates day in day out. Just recently he confronted Sushma Swaraj with witless nonsense about an alleged Narendra Modi faux pas on Indian history, unaware or unwilling to face up to the chapter and verse rebuttal replete on the Internet. Perhaps he could have the temerity to put a few embarrassingly anodyne questions to the Congress President though that may lose him his comfortable sinecure masquerading as a journalist!
In the end, none of this would matter, in the grand scheme of things, were it not for the fact that India’s parochial elites–intelligentsia being an unduly elevated ascription–and its imbecilic political class seem unaware of the chaos in their geographical vicinity. Nor do they seem conscious that such fearful turmoil has been the historic norm for most societies. The Anglo-American-French imperial grand masters are currently busy redrawing the map of much of the Middle East, to the accompaniment of prodigious quantities of blood spilling. This was achieved in Africa during the past decade, with more than 5 million dead in the Congo alone. It is unlikely that India in the throes of suicidal provincialism, riven by religious fracture and every division their Indian surrogates can muster, is not also a candidate for their attentions?
Most of its allegedly cosmopolitan intelligentsia, breathless when invited to a foreign seminar, though travelling economy class, in keeping with their now modest social status, will happily turn into coolies and catamites. Much of the political class will evaporate into the rural backwaters where they mostly originate, tending buffaloes and busy spanking their hapless womenfolk.
The author taught International Political Economy at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Dr. Gautam Sen taught international political economy at the London School of Economics and Political Science for over two decades.