man it’s very hard being me because the last thing i want to do is glaze jawaharlal nehru more than he deserves because i personally think he is the cause of several of the ills plaguing contemporary india etc etc and also i find the congress wanking of nehruvian sentiment and what not extremely irritating. on the other hand, the bjp continue to be so fucking insane about him and are currently like two steps away from accusing the guy of using chatgpt to write the indian independence speech in 1947 because the first line has the phrase “now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially” and i am still 90% sure the only reason they don’t do it is because the entire indian cabinet almost certainly asks chatgpt to tell them what to have for breakfast every morning ygm.
like. i don’t want to defend this man. however you are making me defend this man. i cannot believe i am looking a 45 y/o in the eye and telling him ‘no uncle, nehru did not give syphilis to half the upper house of parliament. i think you are mistaken’. trying to explain without cracking how this is a genuinely weird thing to believe if you are literally anyone except this growing niche of complete freaks who eat whatsapp forwards and shit out votes. what has my country become. i feel like those annoying nehruvians going ‘what has my india turned into’ even though they contributed heavily to the turn in question. what has my india turned into. #myindia etc
Minor Indian legislative assembly election rant, feel free to skip, but I genuinely do not understand what Shashi Tharoor has done to convince so many leftists outside South India that he’s a leftie because that man is frankly the reason that the only place in Kerala where the BJP has gained any sort of foothold whatsoever (I don’t count Suresh Gopi’s BJP seat as much of an inroad because the guy is a massive and well liked movie star) is his fucking constituency.
Like I have no clue why he is touted as some kind of intellectual, some renowned historian and writer, when his only academic achievements thus far has been a) to function as a social experiment with legs in order to resoundingly prove every single point Roy made about the great national colonial hangover in The God of Small Things and thus giving it continued literary relevance despite being dated in other ways, and b) giving OJ Simpson a run for his money and thus providing all the true crime girlies in Kerala with a regional hyperfixation.
And the worst part about him is that it is very clear to literally anyone in Kerala that Tharoor isn’t shifting rightwards and bootlicking Modi every five minutes because he actually believes in any of it, but purely because he nurses a personal dislike of the Communists taking the piss out of him (honestly the guy is a godsend for the CPIM IT cell in terms of shitposting and haterism), because the Kerala branch of the INC, ie his own party, fucking hate him and will never make him Chief Minister as he’s dreamed of for years, and finally, because of the time Rahul and Sonia Gandhi of the national INC did the funniest thing ever and took away his party spokesperson role for bootlicking Modi one too many times (one day they will bear the balls to boot him out for good, inshallah).
The only thing worse than someone who pushes the political aisle rightwards because they actually believe in it is someone who does it just so that their enormous ego benefits from it. Which does not surprise me, because Tharoor has a track record of only giving a fuck about his own ass. This is the man who only joined Indian politics because he was butthurt about losing the UN GenSec election and wanted a few easy goals!
Like I am so often hearing that ‘oh just because he’s on the right in a Kerala sense doesn’t mean he’s right wing nationally since Kerala’s right wing tends to be left of centre on a national front’ and like… my friends. Firstly, maybe technically true but also pretty reductionist, in that the political aisle leans leftwards on paper because of the Marxists, but there absolutely are socially conservative elements present in both the CPIM and the INC, as well as regional coalition parties like the Muslim League, not to mention the Christian dioceses.
Secondly, and relatedly, the Kerala INC is also full of fundo Christians who, unlike in some other states where they’re political minorities, are an influential enough lobby group to supply copious quantities of Islamophobia and casteism to fill the gap even in the absence of the BJP, and a bunch of them have even jumped off to the BJP themselves, fuelled by pure Islamophobia blinkering them to to the fact that nationally speaking, the BJP don’t exactly like Christians either: like believe me, if these fuckers think you’re a bigot then you’re fucked.
Also, Tharoor is on the right of the INC from any angle, national or otherwise!!! And another insidious aspect to him having spent the last few years laying the groundwork for his inevitable jumping of the ship is that while I dislike the INC and frankly do consider them pretty conservative especially in Kerala, all Tharoor’s constant subtle shitting on his own party from the right is doing is attempting to dislodge the INC from being the primary opposition party in Kerala, which would then provide a gap for rubber stamped Hindutva. Which in addition to being disastrous in and and of itself, is also paving the way for inevitable political violence even discounting the communal violence, especially in the north of the state because the Kannur tactics when it comes to the RSS involves sharp objects and bloodbaths, and like fuck are they going to let shit slide.
Anyway, I still have three silver linings: firstly, the wider Kozhikode district has way too many influential Muslims actively involved in politics and pumping in Gulf-money for this fuckery to spread there in the present moment, even though any encroachment pretty much means the region is fucked and there absolutely will be even more discord strewn there in order to dislodge said influential Muslims.
Secondly, that Pinarayi Vijayan exists and is the Kerala CM. He may not be the world’s greatest politician by any stretch and the Kerala CPIM is frankly even less Communist than it used to be but at the end of the day he’s enough of a ‘I have killed people lmao memes’ Comrade Maedhros era hardass (I did mention he was a benchmark for my writing of the Comrade) that he’s kept the Sanghis at bay, even if it’s through equally questionable Comrade-style unhinged tactics such as ‘preserving his bloodstained shirt from the time he got beaten in custody during the Emergency in case it turned out to be politically useful’ and ‘taking a lol and lmao attitude to both English and Hindi and approving the world’s shoddiest translations’ as well as ‘never listening to his media advisors and instead blurting out the first out of pocket no filter old man thing that comes to mind, such as the time he bodyshamed the Deputy Prime Minister of India by calling him a water balloon (???) who may be large but not strong enough and too wobbly to destabilise Kerala (????), and pretty much going ‘lol. lmao’ when they tried to do him for defamation for saying it’. King of going 🖕🏽🖕🏽🖕🏽 to Kerala’s long history of anti-incumbency. Long may he neutralise the Tharoors of the world.
Thirdly, that even if Tharoor ever jumps ship and takes the rat express to join the BJP, he will still probably never get his dream of a bigshot Cabinet or CM position from them either, due to said OJ Simpson situation. Which is a slim silver lining, but a silver lining nevertheless.
TLDR: please don’t judge a book by its (shoddy usage of a) thesaurus. Believe me this man is not the second coming of even Nehru, which is saying something because Nehru himself was a pretty bad first coming of Nehru. Rant over.
