When some commentators termed the numerical outcome of the recent Indian election historical, it reminded a bit of the pompous theatrics of North American democracy: There, every election is of “historical” dimension until the next item in the news cycle kicks in. But one can find a grain of truth in the comparison: Like for the current Unitedstates president, Modi´s biggest achievement is not being his predecessor. And with India having tasted gold austerity and women´s liberation, it is an easy temptation for any empty agitator to keep his loyalists happy with frog-marching “bitter clingers” through the global village until the rest of the world has better things to do with its time, such as it is an obvious clue that this very tactic has arrived at a dead end in Unitedstates where the phoney klan blamefest is over and any appearance of charisma finally spent. The farce set to follow the tragedy would be futile from its very outset. But in a deeper sense, the Indian election rather resembles an European pattern: The “winning candidate” is only the second choice, the religious conservative could take the ballot because the openly fascist “first choice winner” was spoiled out of it, in this case though not by splitting the vote along some virtual fault line but by material force of armed insurgency (see May 29, 2013). The place of the assassinated “Salva Judum” leader was taken by a replacement mirroring the same hierarchy in the state religion. Instead of an organiser of genocide came an apologist of genocide. As history knows when the automatic spy planes of imperialism saw that tactic, the first thing they did was to copy it, targeting their guns along succession speculations. The only remarkable thing about the predicted outcome of the Indian election is that the Naxal decided it a year ago.
On the background of this asymmetric conflict one comparison invoked by some Asian commentators stands out as a particularly revealing explanation of the true nature of the sentiment of the Indian national democracy, the parallel drawn to the French exile regime of the German occupation, which in the post-WWII diplomacy was appeased as if it had played a similar role in the defeat of Hitler as Stalin, Churchill or Roosevelt. De Gaulle´s “nationalism on demand,” which was later identified as an horrendous obstacle to the country´s intellectual development and self-esteem, has been so bad an astroturfing campaign that together with the German “renazification” of the 1950s it froze the postwar diplomacy, inducing the first “cold war” with Russia. And in fact nothing remains of De Gaulle a generation later other than the conclusion that he was the expression of an unspoken humiliation, namely that over the fact that France had not been able to liberate itself from the Nazis such as its smaller neighbours. Hence, for these who pretended to handle it on equal eye level, the France of De Gaulle was the dog so busy with barking so that it could not bite.
For the India of Modi this could mean that the Hindu nationalism whose noise is drawing attention from a distance is the expression of the fact that, when it comes to the challenges approaching the emerging generations, the Delhi regime is a toothless guardian. More than that, with the replacement candidate´s odd fixation on destructive industrialisation, neoliberalist deception and capitalist speculation it appears a part of the problem repeating mistakes others have already begun to correct. Indian politics is coming to religion like the drunkard comes into the church, not to find its purpose but to rearrange it for its own party. Given the record of their politicians desire to be mistaken for religious leaders across icon-determined cultural border lines, this case carries a particular odour though. It reminds of the North American ego cultism of the early climate chaos era even though its military-industrial complex has not devoured it to a similar extent, because it is based upon child labour, only in that instance not merely in the military but in the religious institutions.
The new face of the Delhi regime is expressing this contradiction in its entire performance. Like the Christian claim of Papal infallibility, the Hindu tactic of denominational supremacism which is glueing together the hierarchies of the religious conservative movement that produced the phenomenon is a 19th century construct born out of the escalated antagonism with British imperialism at its zenith before the American period and the current era. The 19th century Hindu formation which influenced the European Theosophists that paved the way into the 20th extinction waves was, like the French exile regime of the Vichy years, a fatally flawed conservative attempt to mix up the impossible, conflict with colonial occupation and collaboration with colonial occupation into one. On one hand, the hierarchical one per cent of the culture were arranged around a movement that would later serve as a role model for Gandhi among others, but on the other hand that arrangement was based upon child labour. With the decline of native tradition under colonialism in India it was the pilgrimage economy that became the primary indicator of that change. As that sector was losing, on the background of industrial child labour being an unchallenged element of colonialism, even in its own homelands, it turned to child labour in its own realm, which shaped the influential Hindu figures of the time by determining their careers far beyond childhood.
This congenital error of modern Hinduism – and partly Buddhism as well – can be recognised in one form or another in any element of Hindu culture that presents itself to the external observer these days. From that perspective, the child labour issue and its expression in the broken balances of mundane administration display a particular pattern, such as the child labour that would be in an export product which might be influenced through world market choices is only an indicator of child labour in the entire subsistence economy that grows around such a “bump in the signal.” Where child labour was present enough to influence the Theosophists, and produce the scenario how they finally ended up with a child labour defector who was then replaced by a superficially akin genocidal apparatchik, a constellation that discredited their symbolism for generations, it had already been a decisive ingredient of the Hindu formation of the time and permeating any thought and idea of the occupied religion.
It might be a topic in itself how it came about that Gandhi, having seen the colonialist blowback against it in form of the “white supremacism” of the apartheid regime, came to the erroneous position that ending the occupation would be sufficient to repair the damage of imperialism. The known result however is that it became this movement which killed him before he resolved the issue. The Indian isolationism of the post-colonial years which otherwise might appear mysterious is stringently explained from this background. From a point of view of dialectic materialism, the observer is looking at a culture which never threw the tables of the money changers in the temple, that is, which never came to the point of turning the issue of child labour in the religious institutions inside out before it is too late. (Only second to that comes the often emphasised fact that many impressions of Hindu culture, the most prevalent ones more likely than not, come to the world relayed through the narrow stratification of North America, where the Hindu approach fell on fruitful ground among a handful of children of the ruling class, expressing only a very limited representation of a much broader culture.) As a result, the Hindu supremacism which is echoing in the public could itself appear as an infantile delusion, in the sense that a child which is unpacking a present does not think about what will be in many generations but only about the present.
The new face of the Delhi regime speaks the language of the pilgrim economy, but it represents the interests of destructive neoliberalist consumerism, and that discrepancy is so crass that even Christian liberation theology in the most outmatched constellations argues more consistent. (Indeed, many of the obvious political flaws of “Modiism,” such as its labour fetish and ideology of civilisation, resemble the deformations Christianity underwent under similar material circumstances e.g. in the “enslavement theology” of colonialism.) If the policies of the replacement genocide organiser were not originating from the the so-called karma of child labour emanating from the entire denomination, they would not be revolving around exploitation, consumption and wage slavery to the existential extent they do, existential indeed not only for these for which these hierarchies do not fit but also for the coming generations of the close future who in this scheme risk to end up with spent resources, empty reservoirs and deprecated land. Of course, once the background of child labour is taken into attention, the ignorance and penetrance with which such characters are propagating an increased dependency on employment becomes a veritable sign of alarm. There might be all the jobs of the next three centuries done within this generation, so for the next one there remains nothing but empty promises. The radioactive reactors, the toxic open cast mines, the suffocated temple rivers and the future projections of all that are more than too much for the land to survive, it is just as fragile as in other parts of the world and might be spent if capitalism with all its mentioned effects is not reversed soon enough.
The most predictable element in the Indian political configuration is the population feedback cycle. The 19th century colonialism has already induced a demographic surge and this has increased the vulnerability towards the world market and so forth. At a large extent, the social base of the ideological supremacism is mere population grown without a conscious cause. Under the rule of capitalism, after all a person who does not submit to a job is starved. But the focus of perception is not on the removal of such destructive feedbacks and the transformation of the apparatus into a common economic compensation for the exploitation, instead the religious movement is misguided by the ideology of the capitalist exploitation itself. In this sense the religious replacement carries the inherent contradiction of its fascist prototype. Yet the challenge of the future is to open the land for life without dependency on commercial labour and totalitarian democracy. It is this indisputably the most sinister aspect of the propagation of child labour – where it is not being favoured for its results any more, but in a merely ideological sense that aims to make the labour market a part of the family. In that ideology, child labour is revered to introduce a totalitarian cult of labour encompassing all walks of life, whose results are historically proven.
It is certainly an irony of history that the capitalist state represents the totalitarian cult of labour, while the Marxist opposition represents the perspective of a society less dependent on such hierarchies. The exhibited Hindu supremacism in reaction to the attack against the “Salva Judum” is not a purely religious but a commercial phenomenon: The murderous speculation, which has been hiding under the disguise of impenetrable corruption, that contamination and land devastation would remain small enough for long enough for these who brought it about to receive the blessing of the indigenous religion, has now been forced to openly reveal its flawed intention. It should be noted that the child labour in the heart of Hinduism was tacitly arranged by the class rule, under violation of any legal standard that later could be referred to as an explanation, and that the same people who were powerful enough to force their children into religious roles at the threat of starvation were not so to have it openly prescribed by existing religious authorities.
One might argue that this was later corrected in the case of Tibetan Buddhism, and its “homoeopathic prescription” of child labour at the top of its hierarchy, but that only led to fresh irritations with the Chinese who argue that their occupation of Tibet was like the secularist abolition of European feudalism, while in the Tibetan narrative the occupiers themselves resemble the European feudalists as they behaved outside Europe. Hinduism, on the other hand, as the immature victim of its own strength, is to itself what Buddhism finds as a secular antagonist. It is Hindus in the name of Hinduism who are looting and squandering the irreplacable treasures of generations, such as it were Christians in the name of Christianity who did the same and ended up as the military-industrial complex India experienced a century ago, whose remainder now is begging to be finally dismantled in its entirety. It certainly is a weird understanding of supremacy if it practically comes to mean the imitation of the mistakes of others, for instance polluting the world just like “Western civilisation.”
What makes the religious legacy of India such a big issue is first of all its nature as an intermediate step on the spectrum of external perception. In the analysis of colonialism, its causes and its consequences, as well as the roots of the problem, one fundamental observation is that the representative of the colonialist state religion is like a river that dried out, while his counterpart from whatever indigenous society that gets targeted by it is like the natural river in its free flow. In this picture, the practitioner of the Hindu faith is like the muddy rivulet that swells with the Monsoon once a year – at times this tradition is closer to what was lost to imperialist extinction, but at others it is just as empty a system of theatrics as the doctrine of the latter. On how it develops from the contact with imperialism onwards, it will depend whether it survives – but so much is clear, the middle ground between Hinduism as an empty facade of consumer capitalism and Hinduism as a tribal heritage incompatible with the oppressive system is rapidly eroding. The largely unconscious “Modi surge” behind all the superficial explanations is a mere symptom of this historical fissure.
With nuclear war declared upon India – or more precisely, the low intensity war of possible atomic contamination by excess reactors declared upon all the world, the collapse of the last bridge between the two stances on that vital issue has begun. Organised religion will find itself on this or that side of the “nuclear divide”, for it or against it, but there is no credible compromise any longer, not even in the most isolationist cultures. When the Naxal killed the fascist, it was not only because the fascist was hunting it, but it also was for the historical tragedy in the electoral system to make way for the farce. That electoral farce approaches the issue of the conservation of the Earth as it it was the time before the Nonproliferation treaty, in other words entirely devoid of any experience since “peak nuke.” If peak nuke is defined not as peak uranium, but as the point where disadvantage becomes bigger than advantage, and therefore the maximum usefulness of that technology has been passed, the in the event of a radiological catastrophe rather embarrassing ideology of supremacism behind the current Hindu formation can be read as a silent acknowledgement that the biggest atomic power outside that treaty has never developed sufficient understanding of what it holds in its hands.
* * *
See also:
- Why is the Nonproliferation Treaty Failing? (9.1.) -
https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2014/01/514650.html
- The Death of the Inclusion Policy in the East Asian Shelf Waters (16.1.) - https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2014/01/514789.html
- Triple Treason in the Caucasus (23.1.) - https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2014/01/514946.html
- NATO. Obituary to a Nukepool (27.1.) - https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2014/01/515002.html
- Obey or Die - The Pathology of Organised Treason in Europe (21.2.) - https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2014/02/515538.html
- The Suicide Attack Against indymedia and its Cause (28.2.) - https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2014/02/515677.html
- What does the Invasion of Yalta Mean for the European Peninsula? (8.3.) - https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2014/03/515828.html
- Why is Poland a Nazi Client State? (15.3.) - https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2014/03/515949.html
- Palestine, the United Nations and the Refugees (21.3.) - https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2014/03/516041.html
- The External Cost of Spying (28.3.) - https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2014/03/516118.html
- How Deep Is the Atlantic Divide Really? (8.4.) - https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2014/04/516271.html
- Boko Haram – An Image From The Future (4.5.) - https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2014/05/516551.html
- The Pacific Fata Morgana and its Imperialist Origins (12.5.) - https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2014/05/516662.html
- The German Sustainability Scam and its Fascist Purpose (21.5.) - https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2014/05/516731.html
For the India of Modi this could mean that the Hindu nationalism whose noise is drawing attention from a distance is the expression of the fact that, when it comes to the challenges approaching the emerging generations, the Delhi regime is a toothless guardian. More than that, with the replacement candidate´s odd fixation on destructive industrialisation, neoliberalist deception and capitalist speculation it appears a part of the problem repeating mistakes others have already begun to correct. Indian politics is coming to religion like the drunkard comes into the church, not to find its purpose but to rearrange it for its own party. Given the record of their politicians desire to be mistaken for religious leaders across icon-determined cultural border lines, this case carries a particular odour though. It reminds of the North American ego cultism of the early climate chaos era even though its military-industrial complex has not devoured it to a similar extent, because it is based upon child labour, only in that instance not merely in the military but in the religious institutions.
The new face of the Delhi regime is expressing this contradiction in its entire performance. Like the Christian claim of Papal infallibility, the Hindu tactic of denominational supremacism which is glueing together the hierarchies of the religious conservative movement that produced the phenomenon is a 19th century construct born out of the escalated antagonism with British imperialism at its zenith before the American period and the current era. The 19th century Hindu formation which influenced the European Theosophists that paved the way into the 20th extinction waves was, like the French exile regime of the Vichy years, a fatally flawed conservative attempt to mix up the impossible, conflict with colonial occupation and collaboration with colonial occupation into one. On one hand, the hierarchical one per cent of the culture were arranged around a movement that would later serve as a role model for Gandhi among others, but on the other hand that arrangement was based upon child labour. With the decline of native tradition under colonialism in India it was the pilgrimage economy that became the primary indicator of that change. As that sector was losing, on the background of industrial child labour being an unchallenged element of colonialism, even in its own homelands, it turned to child labour in its own realm, which shaped the influential Hindu figures of the time by determining their careers far beyond childhood.
This congenital error of modern Hinduism – and partly Buddhism as well – can be recognised in one form or another in any element of Hindu culture that presents itself to the external observer these days. From that perspective, the child labour issue and its expression in the broken balances of mundane administration display a particular pattern, such as the child labour that would be in an export product which might be influenced through world market choices is only an indicator of child labour in the entire subsistence economy that grows around such a “bump in the signal.” Where child labour was present enough to influence the Theosophists, and produce the scenario how they finally ended up with a child labour defector who was then replaced by a superficially akin genocidal apparatchik, a constellation that discredited their symbolism for generations, it had already been a decisive ingredient of the Hindu formation of the time and permeating any thought and idea of the occupied religion.
It might be a topic in itself how it came about that Gandhi, having seen the colonialist blowback against it in form of the “white supremacism” of the apartheid regime, came to the erroneous position that ending the occupation would be sufficient to repair the damage of imperialism. The known result however is that it became this movement which killed him before he resolved the issue. The Indian isolationism of the post-colonial years which otherwise might appear mysterious is stringently explained from this background. From a point of view of dialectic materialism, the observer is looking at a culture which never threw the tables of the money changers in the temple, that is, which never came to the point of turning the issue of child labour in the religious institutions inside out before it is too late. (Only second to that comes the often emphasised fact that many impressions of Hindu culture, the most prevalent ones more likely than not, come to the world relayed through the narrow stratification of North America, where the Hindu approach fell on fruitful ground among a handful of children of the ruling class, expressing only a very limited representation of a much broader culture.) As a result, the Hindu supremacism which is echoing in the public could itself appear as an infantile delusion, in the sense that a child which is unpacking a present does not think about what will be in many generations but only about the present.
The new face of the Delhi regime speaks the language of the pilgrim economy, but it represents the interests of destructive neoliberalist consumerism, and that discrepancy is so crass that even Christian liberation theology in the most outmatched constellations argues more consistent. (Indeed, many of the obvious political flaws of “Modiism,” such as its labour fetish and ideology of civilisation, resemble the deformations Christianity underwent under similar material circumstances e.g. in the “enslavement theology” of colonialism.) If the policies of the replacement genocide organiser were not originating from the the so-called karma of child labour emanating from the entire denomination, they would not be revolving around exploitation, consumption and wage slavery to the existential extent they do, existential indeed not only for these for which these hierarchies do not fit but also for the coming generations of the close future who in this scheme risk to end up with spent resources, empty reservoirs and deprecated land. Of course, once the background of child labour is taken into attention, the ignorance and penetrance with which such characters are propagating an increased dependency on employment becomes a veritable sign of alarm. There might be all the jobs of the next three centuries done within this generation, so for the next one there remains nothing but empty promises. The radioactive reactors, the toxic open cast mines, the suffocated temple rivers and the future projections of all that are more than too much for the land to survive, it is just as fragile as in other parts of the world and might be spent if capitalism with all its mentioned effects is not reversed soon enough.
The most predictable element in the Indian political configuration is the population feedback cycle. The 19th century colonialism has already induced a demographic surge and this has increased the vulnerability towards the world market and so forth. At a large extent, the social base of the ideological supremacism is mere population grown without a conscious cause. Under the rule of capitalism, after all a person who does not submit to a job is starved. But the focus of perception is not on the removal of such destructive feedbacks and the transformation of the apparatus into a common economic compensation for the exploitation, instead the religious movement is misguided by the ideology of the capitalist exploitation itself. In this sense the religious replacement carries the inherent contradiction of its fascist prototype. Yet the challenge of the future is to open the land for life without dependency on commercial labour and totalitarian democracy. It is this indisputably the most sinister aspect of the propagation of child labour – where it is not being favoured for its results any more, but in a merely ideological sense that aims to make the labour market a part of the family. In that ideology, child labour is revered to introduce a totalitarian cult of labour encompassing all walks of life, whose results are historically proven.
It is certainly an irony of history that the capitalist state represents the totalitarian cult of labour, while the Marxist opposition represents the perspective of a society less dependent on such hierarchies. The exhibited Hindu supremacism in reaction to the attack against the “Salva Judum” is not a purely religious but a commercial phenomenon: The murderous speculation, which has been hiding under the disguise of impenetrable corruption, that contamination and land devastation would remain small enough for long enough for these who brought it about to receive the blessing of the indigenous religion, has now been forced to openly reveal its flawed intention. It should be noted that the child labour in the heart of Hinduism was tacitly arranged by the class rule, under violation of any legal standard that later could be referred to as an explanation, and that the same people who were powerful enough to force their children into religious roles at the threat of starvation were not so to have it openly prescribed by existing religious authorities.
One might argue that this was later corrected in the case of Tibetan Buddhism, and its “homoeopathic prescription” of child labour at the top of its hierarchy, but that only led to fresh irritations with the Chinese who argue that their occupation of Tibet was like the secularist abolition of European feudalism, while in the Tibetan narrative the occupiers themselves resemble the European feudalists as they behaved outside Europe. Hinduism, on the other hand, as the immature victim of its own strength, is to itself what Buddhism finds as a secular antagonist. It is Hindus in the name of Hinduism who are looting and squandering the irreplacable treasures of generations, such as it were Christians in the name of Christianity who did the same and ended up as the military-industrial complex India experienced a century ago, whose remainder now is begging to be finally dismantled in its entirety. It certainly is a weird understanding of supremacy if it practically comes to mean the imitation of the mistakes of others, for instance polluting the world just like “Western civilisation.”
What makes the religious legacy of India such a big issue is first of all its nature as an intermediate step on the spectrum of external perception. In the analysis of colonialism, its causes and its consequences, as well as the roots of the problem, one fundamental observation is that the representative of the colonialist state religion is like a river that dried out, while his counterpart from whatever indigenous society that gets targeted by it is like the natural river in its free flow. In this picture, the practitioner of the Hindu faith is like the muddy rivulet that swells with the Monsoon once a year – at times this tradition is closer to what was lost to imperialist extinction, but at others it is just as empty a system of theatrics as the doctrine of the latter. On how it develops from the contact with imperialism onwards, it will depend whether it survives – but so much is clear, the middle ground between Hinduism as an empty facade of consumer capitalism and Hinduism as a tribal heritage incompatible with the oppressive system is rapidly eroding. The largely unconscious “Modi surge” behind all the superficial explanations is a mere symptom of this historical fissure.
With nuclear war declared upon India – or more precisely, the low intensity war of possible atomic contamination by excess reactors declared upon all the world, the collapse of the last bridge between the two stances on that vital issue has begun. Organised religion will find itself on this or that side of the “nuclear divide”, for it or against it, but there is no credible compromise any longer, not even in the most isolationist cultures. When the Naxal killed the fascist, it was not only because the fascist was hunting it, but it also was for the historical tragedy in the electoral system to make way for the farce. That electoral farce approaches the issue of the conservation of the Earth as it it was the time before the Nonproliferation treaty, in other words entirely devoid of any experience since “peak nuke.” If peak nuke is defined not as peak uranium, but as the point where disadvantage becomes bigger than advantage, and therefore the maximum usefulness of that technology has been passed, the in the event of a radiological catastrophe rather embarrassing ideology of supremacism behind the current Hindu formation can be read as a silent acknowledgement that the biggest atomic power outside that treaty has never developed sufficient understanding of what it holds in its hands.
* * *
See also:
- Why is the Nonproliferation Treaty Failing? (9.1.) -
https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2014/01/514650.html - The Death of the Inclusion Policy in the East Asian Shelf Waters (16.1.) -
https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2014/01/514789.html - Triple Treason in the Caucasus (23.1.) -
https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2014/01/514946.html - NATO. Obituary to a Nukepool (27.1.) -
https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2014/01/515002.html - Obey or Die - The Pathology of Organised Treason in Europe (21.2.) -
https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2014/02/515538.html - The Suicide Attack Against indymedia and its Cause (28.2.) -
https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2014/02/515677.html - What does the Invasion of Yalta Mean for the European Peninsula? (8.3.) -
https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2014/03/515828.html - Why is Poland a Nazi Client State? (15.3.) -
https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2014/03/515949.html - Palestine, the United Nations and the Refugees (21.3.) -
https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2014/03/516041.html - The External Cost of Spying (28.3.) -
https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2014/03/516118.html - How Deep Is the Atlantic Divide Really? (8.4.) -
https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2014/04/516271.html - Boko Haram – An Image From The Future (4.5.) -
https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2014/05/516551.html - The Pacific Fata Morgana and its Imperialist Origins (12.5.) -
https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2014/05/516662.html - The German Sustainability Scam and its Fascist Purpose (21.5.) -
https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2014/05/516731.html 
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