We are a people with pliable moral and ethical standards. Chalta hai, jugaad, we are like this only, kindly adjust, tedhi ungli, patli gully are cute verbal disguises for dishonesty. Taking liberties with the letter of the law has alway been okay. +

To us the law is not a diktat. It's a challenge. Like escaping from a mystery room. We rewrite and re-interpret the laws for ourselves in a more amenable, comfortable, acceptable, practical, convenient, benevolent manner.
+
And then we make abiding by this rewritten legal framework our way of life. In fact, we've made it a very cool thing as well. Giving and getting proxy at attendance, fudging a concession form, traveling by bus and claiming air fare, padding up travel expenses... +
... borrowing petrol and medical bills, copying in exams, getting rent bills from your own Dad, taking payment in a spouse's name, paying part in black, buying without a bill, using peons and office cars for personal work, bribing a traffic cop, ... +
... using the services of a tout at the RTO, greasing a TTE's palm, finding a railway contact to release EQ for non emergencies, buying booze and washing machines from the army canteen, getting fitness and sickness certificates without check ups... +
... getting fake medical liquor permits, writing NA without blinking an eye in application forms... these aren't violations, or even hacks... this is just how it is. This is how we are brought up. +
So when we assume offices of power, we aren't paragons of virtue. Our moral compass is already submerged in a magnetic field polluted by dubious doings. +
An old English teacher (he wasn't old then, but you know what I mean) once told me (there's a thread on this somewhere), 'shit is shit. even if you eat a little bit, it's still shit.' We've all eaten shit. +
IT, automation, and the magic of internet has de-defecated and de-touted the system a great deal. Thank heavens for it. Some dens of dicey dealings have been purged. Many a paper moves from desk to sarkari desk without palm grease. +
If we are indeed the IT wizards we think we are, this is our only hope. We train our machines to function in ways that we haven't been trained to. We code them to be on the straight and narrow. And shift every juicy chance to be dishonest out of our reach. +
So even when a worldly wise Dad tells his son, 'just slip the clerk a pink Gandhi', the son finds no opportunity to do so.

ANTHE

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Hindutva does not belong to Modi nor his party, it belongs to the people as a unifying, decolonial ideology similar to pan-Africanism or Yugoslavism.

His own brand of "positive secularism" is even milder - deepening special rights and welfare schemes for religious minorities.


After the disbanding of the Hindu Mahasabha and Jana Sangh, Hindutva as a political ideology does not even exist, except as a bogeyman in the minds of the Anglophone elite.

Even the BJP gave up Hindutva for civic nationalism, Gandhian socialism, and positive secularism in 1980s.

Under Modi, there has been compete policy continuity on minority rights and welfare from the Congress era, with little to no "Hindutva agenda" coming to see the light of day.

The most radical policy they can dream of is religion-neutral laws and equal rights for equal citizens.

Hindutva was essential in forming a national consciousness, but was abandoned with time. The modern BJP refuses to self-identify as a Hindutva movement, adopting moderates like Sardar Patel, Deendayal Upadhyay, and JP Narayan as their icons, rather than Savarkar or the Mahasabha.

When they say Hindu Rashtra, all they mean is an "Indic polity".

When British India was partitioned into a Muslim homeland and a Dharmic homeland, one state became a 'Ghazi' garrison state, and one the successor state to the Indic

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