I have immense admiration for cricket commentator Ramachandra Guha. And I have immense compassion for alleged historian Ramachandra Guha. I really do. The edifice of my admiration rests on his ability to churn out columns faster than a microprocessor. Do not underestimate the innate value of sheer volume. And the foundation of my compassion rests on the sorry manner in which he has become unhinged ever since Narendra Modi became Prime Minister. The compassion multiplies especially when you realize that his enduring mania is entirely self-inflicted.
And he’s done a great national service by continuously depositing heaps of evidence that proves his said mania: the piling mountain of his writing. I’ll pick one randomly. It’s a June 2017 article titled “Eight threats to free expression in India that lay the ground for attacks on Taslima, Bhansali.” Published fittingly in the Extreme Left propaganda site, Scroll. We can begin with the very first sentence of that piece:
Some years ago, I characterised our country as a “50–50 democracy”.
And some years ago — actually, eight years ago, I wrote a rebuttal on my defunct blog to one of Ram Guha’s irrepressible banalities woven around his pet themes of hate-Narendra Modi, hate-BJP, hate-RSS, and hate-Hindutva.
But in our era of instant memory and express forgetfulness, eight years is ancient history. But we’re also in vastly better circumstances than we were under the stranglehold of the dark era of the UPA regime. Which also makes it difficult to recall the intensity and viciousness of the nonstop barrage of Modi-bashing back then. In any case, my rebuttal irked Guha so much that he brandished just one sentence from it and dedicated an entire article, which basically reads like his resume written in long form, justifying and explaining his professional accomplishments. Here’s the sentence in question (quoted verbatim from Guha’s piece).
Earlier this week, I was alerted to an attack on me posted on the website of the chief minister of Gujarat, Narendra Modi. “Ramachandra Guha’s impotent anger,” claimed Modi’s website, “is typical of a snobbish but vacuous intellectual who simply cannot tolerate a person from a humble background attaining greatness by the dint of his own hard work, learning and persistence. But Ramachandra Guha, after more than 40 years of Dynasty history writing remains where he is while Narendra Modi has continued to scale up. Which is why Modi can speak about and implement well-considered policies on topics as diverse as governance, economy, environment, industry, infrastructure, solar energy, IT, and tourism while Guha is simply unable to look beyond the walls of 10 Janpath.”
Oh, and the mention about the resume isn’t mine. It’s his.
This paragraph contains a series of innuendos, half-truths, and outright falsehoods. To begin with the most elementary error, my CV as it appears on Modi’s website exaggerates my professional longevity. I have been a historian for a mere 25 years, and a political historian for only the last 10 of those years.
Fine, Mr. Guha. I’m sorry I erred, so let me correct myself now: Ramachandra Guha, after more than 4̶0̶ 25 years of Dynasty history writing remains where he is while Narendra Modi ̶h̶a̶s̶ ̶c̶o̶n̶t̶i̶n̶u̶e̶d̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶s̶c̶a̶l̶e̶ ̶u̶p̶ is currently serving as the Prime Minister of India for a second consecutive time.
Ram Guha devotes the rest of that piece to elaborately justify how he has actually been critical of the Congress dynasty — from Indira to Sonia and Rahul — and has “never entered 10, Janpath, nor met any of its occupants.” I suppose Mr. Guha is an honourable man, so I’ll take his word for it. Actually, my “walls of 10 Janpath” mention was a mere allusion to the larger Congress-Communist-Marxist ecosystem of which Ramachandra Guha remains an engraved art-piece and celebrity-beneficiary.
There’s a reason for recalling this tidbit from the recent past: Prime Minister Narendra Modi
I have largely abandoned writing rebuttals to the Left-Liberal cuckoos because the true rot lies not in their writing and speeches and “debates” but in the unlit abyss of their corroded souls. How do you convince folks who essentially hate and therefore negate themselves? And what has really changed from 2001 to 2019? It has actually gotten infernally more rotten. During the years that Narendra Modi was the Gujarat Chief Minister, Ramachandra Guha and his ilk concentrated their zeal on stopping his ascent to Prime Ministership. Since 2014, they’re doing the same in the hope of bringing him down.
However, a definitive change has occurred in the same period.
Have you noticed that these self-negationists have, long ago, stopped chucking abuses at Narendra Modi… fascist, mass-murderer, “classic case of a clinical fascist,” Hitler…they used to hurl these abuses with the nonchalance of breathing. Now they indulge in viper-like wordplay which essentially means the same thing. For example, “complex interplay of social forces, ideological biases, and political choices that inhibits freedom of expression in India” simply means this: We hate the ordinary Indian voters because they gave an overwhelming majority to Narendra Modi and we’ll use our special version of freedom of expression to bring him down.
And folks like Guha never change. And never stop attacking. Very soon, Ram Guha & Co will start finding fault in the orange colour at sunrise and sunset and blame Narendra Modi for saffronizing the sky. I am willing to wager. No sane, decent, and honest person can beat this ilk at this depraved game whose innate motivation, pulse, and tactic John Milton described so powerfully more than four hundred years ago:
This essence to incarnate and imbrute…
But what will not Ambition and Revenge Descend to?
who aspires must down as low…obnoxious first or last
To basest things…
Some of [the] Serpent kind
Wondrous in length and corpulence involve’d
Their Snaky folds, and added wings…
Of huge extent sometimes, with brazen Eyes…
The Serpent, subtlest Beast of all the Field
Fit Vessel, fittest Imp of fraud, in whom…
dark suggestions hide
From sharpest sight: for in the wily Snake,
Whatever sleights none would suspicious mark(Paradise Lost: Book IX)
This is why free speech is a wonderful thing: the more freely these eminences speak, the more they unravel themselves.
But Ram Guha and others of his species simply can’t help themselves. He describes himself as a “lapsed Marxist,” but it’s my considered view that there’s no such thing as a lapsed Marxist…Marxism and its variants are fatal drug addictions…that needle, that powder, just that one hit…that stuff keeps beckoning you…it’s always within reach. Karl Marx indeed planted an opium that’s far more potent and lethal than the one he sought to destroy.
Therefore, as I mentioned in the beginning of this piece, compassion, and not anger is the proper method of dealing with Ramachandra Guha.
How do you even respond to a typical Guhaism which holds that India is an “unnatural nation and unlikely democracy?” What does this even mean? This alleged historian, this writer of grand fat tomes of unreadable emptiness on Nehru and Gandhi seems to miss the logical conclusion of India as an unlikely democracy: India should have never become free from British colonial rule.
Like thousands of Hindus who inhabit the Marxist coop, Ram Guha is a deeply frightened man who doesn’t want to confront the horrible reality that his own Hindu-Brahmin ancestors were massacred simply because they were Hindus, and wants to whitewash their gory genocides as irrelevant today and brands any attempt at such remembrance as revivalist/revisionist history. Which is also why his history begins and ends with Gandhi and Nehru. But all his stuff passes off largely unexamined and he is hailed as some weighty intellectual… well, he’s actually called a historian. You can’t beat that.
And you can’t change such a mindset.
Which is why in the proper fitness of things, we must regard Ramachandra Guha as a perfumed version of Kavitha Krishnan.
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