I stood on a hill and I saw the Old approaching, but it came as the New…. Bertolt Brecht

It is my opinion now that evil is never “radical,” that it is only extreme, and that it possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension. It can overgrow and lay waste the whole world precisely because it spreads like a fungus on the surface. It is “thought defying,” … because thought tries to reach some depth, to go to the roots, and the moment it concerns itself with evil, it is frustrated because there is nothing. That is its “banality.” Only the good has depth and can be radical. Hannah Arendt, The Jewish Writings, p. 471. Emphasis added

Good is self-existent, evil is not. It is like a parasite living in and around good. It will die of itself when the support that good gives it is withdrawn: Mahatma Gandhi, September 1947, after his Calcutta fast

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Dear readers, in a note above an earlier post, Electoral Inquisition, I mentioned the outstanding features of the ruling establishment:

This is a hypothesis, which requires much research. I place it for a wide readership for two reasons: first, because it is of utmost importance for us to think about the historical factors which have poisoned public life – over and beyond character defects; and second, because the hypothesis needs to be thought through by numbers of people – it is a matter beyond my individual capabilities.

In short, I offer it as a basis for public discussion. My argument is summarised below and does not proceed chronologically but thematically. (I shall enlarge it gradually)

Essential features of the current regime:

Many of us still don’t understand that this is an RSS government which has no politics except (1) the rectification of history (defeating the Mughal Empire three centuries after its demise); and (2) grabbing control of public funds for sectarian purposes and for its corporate backers.

In brief: culture wars for the public; and number-crunching for the corporations. For them, an alliance with the USA & Israel is a pavlovian reflex because they see Israel as a machine for the extermination of a certain community. There’s no other reason for their choices. So in a nutshell, the Sangh has:

This was always the sum total of their reason for existence. For four decades -1986 to 2026, they flew the flag of ‘hurt sentiment’ about a ‘disputed structure’. Soon after the project was completed, it was discovered that vast sums of money were embezzled from an emblematic place of worship.

Historical observations:

India has an old fiscal tradition of formal payments being augmented by extra-legal gratification: this means simply that many officials at all levels expect unofficial payment for performing their functions. They are paid for what they are, rather than what they do. I don’t mean this as a sweeping judgment.

The East India Company obtained the diwani (tax collecting rights) of Bengal (including Bihar and Orissa) at the Treaty of Allahabad between the Company and the Mughal Emperor, Shah Alam II in 1765. The treaty followed the Battle of Buxar (1764) and the Battle of Plassey (1757) at which Nawab Siraj ud Daula was defeated by EIC troops aided by Mir Jafar, Omi Chand, Jagat Seth and others. From the outset, some Indians collaborated with the colonialists.

The Diwani of Bengal led to the plunder of Bengal’s resource base in the form of excess taxations; localised grain monopolies held by the company’s English officials and their Indian assistants or gomasthas. These factors, along with the drought and smallpox epidemic of 1768-9 culminated in a Great Bengal Famine of 1770. Estimates of mortality range from one to ten million

The endowment of private property rights (via Cornwallis’ Permanent Settlement of 1790) to the zamindars (landlords) of Bengal; and rapacious revenue extraction payable in cash rather than in kind, impoverished the peasantry and artisans in the areas conquered by the EIC. The enforced cultivation of opium and indigo had long-term effects.

After 1857, the British Crown replaced the EIC with direct rule. By late 19th century some 45% of Indian revenue was being spent on the Indian Army, which was regularly deployed for colonial expansion. There was also the payment known as Home Charges, payable to the colonial power for the benefit of being colonised by them: and which included India Office administration costs, pensions and salaries, interest on bank loans from British sources.

The Permanent Settlement led to the commercialisation of agriculture; and the phenomenon of sub-infeudation, which meant the faming out of revenue collection to several layers of subordinate revenue collectors. This contributed to the heavy burden on the rural population and the emergence of a middle class dependent upon land rent.

Although the structure of land revenue collection was altered in other parts of colonial India as in the Ryotwari Settlements in Bombay and Madras Presidencies, wherein a direct relation between the administration and the peasant was envisaged, impoverishment and land alienation to wealthier land owners continued. This was due to a high tax demand in cash, distress sales and the subsidiary alliances the EIC forged with princely states, which added to the layers of intermediaries between peasants and the government.

The phenomenon of layered exactions from the poorest sections of the agricultural population became endemic.

Mahatma Gandhi’s vision of the centrality of socio-economic reform

During the Indian national movement, there had come int being an association called Gandhi Sewa Sangh, established in 1923 in Wardha by Jamnalal Bajaj. Its aim was to promote constructive programs (rachnatmak karyakram); provide support for volunteer satyagrahis, and develop skills in spinning, rural industry, and new curricula in education for the people, called Naye Taleem.

In two significant speeches to the Gandhi Sewa Sangh in May 1939, and February 1940, (volumes 69 and 71 iin the Gandhi Heritage Portal) Gandhi spoke of his distress at the growth of factional sectarianism, corruption and inadequate commitment to ahimsa in the Congress at large and which had also infected the GSS. He expressed the view that it would be better to bury the Congress than let it continue in this fashion. Participation in politics after the GoI Act of 1935 had brought out the worst in some Congressmen, he opined. This showed that the tallest leader of Indian nationalism was alert to the danger that power and proximity to power was a corrupting force.

In Lord Acton’s words, power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Gandhi knew this.

In an important speech on a ‘rational approach to ahimsa’ in November 1945 (vol 82, p 141) Gandhi said: If constructive work is not carried on keeping non-violence in mind and accepting it rationally, India will not achieve swaraj as a result of it. A lot of work always went on in our villages but it was not informed by the knowledge and the vision of non-violence. So all we achieved was that we did not become as bankrupt financially as we are today. And when foreign invasion started, we abandoned the village industries one after another. Work for eradication of untouchability, uplift of Adivasis, equal rights for women, imparting training and bridging the gulf between the poor and the rich and so on had never been taken up. When we realized that to achieve real freedom the only royal way was that of nonviolence and truth, our range of vision extended to the whole of India and beyond it to the whole world, and despite India being a slave country its fame spread in the world. I am firmly of opinion that if, as stated in the question, we forget all other aspects of non-violence except non-killing of human beings, non-violence will not remain non-violence, it will become bereft of truth, its universality will be lost and we shall never achieve swaraj. If ahimsa includes destruction of others’ property, boycotting Government servants, going underground and so on, then, we can neither awaken the crores of people nor give them the correct training in fearlessness. (Emphasis added)

I am firmly of opinion that if, as stated in the question, we forget all other aspects of non-violence except non-killing of human beings, non-violence will not remain non-violence, it will become bereft of truth, its universality will be lost and we shall never achieve swaraj. If ahimsa includes destruction of others’ property, boycotting Government servants, going underground and so on, then, we can neither awaken the crores of people nor give them the correct training in fearlessness. (emphasis added)

हफ्ता वसूली: Extortion as entitlement.

Indian civil society’s relations with officialdom are – more often than not – grounded upon the regular extortion based on rank, or hafta vasuli. Hafta here refers to a calendar week, but extortions could be based on monthly payments as well. The medieval convention of salami and nazarana (informal cash gifts) also left their mark on state – society relations, wherein formal requests often require what is crudely known as speed money or palm grease.

Simply put, the attainment of an official position, no matter how minor, is treated as a potential source of illegal gratuities. That is the norm, even if there are exceptions. There is a related though separate factor: proximity of corporate bosses to political power can result in vast losses to the public exchequer. India’s public sector banks (PSBs) have written off bad loans amounting to ₹12.08 lakh crore from FY16 to FY25.

There is also the phenomenon of parallel book-keeping, which saturates the relations between small and medium scale businesses and the state and is the well-spring of untaxed wealth, donations to political parties and the unaccounted holdings in Swiss banks and other safe parking spaces for criminals. A useful entry into this labyrinth may be found in this article on black money; and this report on the shadowy electoral bond system.

An important related component of this fraudulent practice rests in the relations between workers and their employers / labour contractors. This is especially true of informal workers, who form over 90% of the labour force. More on informal labour and the systemic nature of extortion and wage theft etc, may be read in the following research essay:

The Currency of Sentiment: An Essay on Informal Accumulation in Colonial India

Further material on business and political power:

The dehumanisation of the spirit:

The cumulative impact of a rank-ordered society, where certain forms of work are treated as demeaning, and where, by an inversion, the human beings who do that work are themselves regarded as ‘unclean’ persons, children of a lesser god, so to speak – leads to an attitude of contempt of the ‘high’ for the ‘low.’ Vast numbers of people begin to be regarded as bio-mass. This is what leads persons of rank to refer even to distressed people as cockroaches.

We are a nation wherein millions are regarded by the rich and powerful as vermin and insects. India’s Home Mnister refered to illegal immigrants as termites. This was the rhetoric used by Nazi propaganda against Europes Jews, which resulted in genocide. It is an attitude which was repeated in the behaviour of American slave-owners and racists towards Native Americans and the descendants of African slaves; and in that of settler colonials in Australia, Southern Africa, Latin America and other places in their treatment of indigenous peoples.

This racism, casteism, antisemitism, and inhuman stance toward poor, helpless, displaced people is crystallised as the perverted ideologies of domination in India and in the sub-continent as a whole. The contempt with which our ruling elites look upon our unfortunate peoples is transformed into divisive propaganda which makes citizens fight one another in the name of caste and community. Popular unhappiness becomes a weapon to preserve the status-quo; and explodes in repeated instances of state-supported massacres and mob-violence to keep India in eternal turmoil.

Our rulers speak of national unity, but are determined to preach and practice injustice and division for decades, even if this results in complete disintegration of state and society

This is the fungus which – to use Hannah Arendt’s term – has spread over the surface of Indian society and politics. This is the new East India Company: a system of organised loot, violence and plunder which we have created for ourselves. It is lubricated by available communal and caste sentiments; and a party system which manipulates popular emotions and piety for gaining control of state institutions for the benefit of the ruling class.

The Abolition of Truth

One hundred and eighty-five years ago the philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach made the following observations on Christianity. They are as applicable today to the entire apparatus of ideological control of the public sphere:

But certainly for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality, the appearance to the essence… illusion only is sacred, truth profane. Nay, sacredness is held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illusion comes to be the highest degree of sacredness ― Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity; 1841

The crucial difference between the current Indian regime and those that came before it, is this: the present masters of our self-incubated East India Company have gone so far down the road of limitless plunder, unconstrained violence and non-stop lying, that they have actually come to believe their own propaganda. They believe they have discovered the secret to eternal power; that the people under their control are mindless beasts of burden and blind to the crumbling reality of the Indian Union.

But let us never forget that this system has been incubating for a very long time, in much the same way as a poisonous fungus spreads slowly but surely over the entire surface of a living organism. This is nihilism come alive: the worship of power, the dissolution of meaning; the discarding of all morality and all limits to political conduct

Our home-grown colonisers have clothed the worship of Money and Power with the name of the Divine, and replaced Truth with Perception. In the dream world of this new East India Company, political life is a vast theatre, the people of India are a mass of clay to be moulded as they wish; illusion only is sacred, truth profane.

Now they are being taught the difference between sleep and wakefulness

Related readings:

Domination and Chaos: India’s radical conservatism

‘Here lives the monster’s brain’: the man who exposed Switzerland’s dirty secrets

Adani Bribery Scandal Originated in a Dubious Solar Power Auction That Modi Government Scripted

Money as Empire?

India’s Blinkit Democracy: Betrayal as a Business Model

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