Dileep Padgaonkar - India's 2nd Biggest Intellectual Moron

(This is a MaxiPost)

I consider it a serious insult if someone calls me an “intellectual” in our political context. I have come to loathe that description over the years. Gin-soaked in their Leftist ideology, nothing is real to them. People who think differently or people who demonstrate some common sense are a hindrance to their way of life and their politics. If only they could kill all such people who stand in their way, as the Commies in Bengal do, their life would have been one large cup of joy. Unfortunately, we do happen to exist and that does bother them immensely. Take a look at this:

Why do well-educated anti-war activists call the president of the United States “the new Hitler” and argue that the U.S. government orchestrated the September 11 attacks? Why does the Princeton professor known as the father of the animal rights movement object to humans eating animals but not to humans having sex with them—and why does PETA defend that position? In other words, why do smart people fall for stupid ideas? The answer, Daniel J. Flynn reveals in Intellectual Morons, is ideology. Flynn, the author of Why the Left Hates America, shows how people can be so blinded to reality by the causes they serve that they espouse bizarre, sometimes ridiculous, and often dangerous positions. The most influential social movements have spawned ideologues who do not care whether an idea is good or bad, true or false, but only whether it can serve their cause. It is startling how many Americans—and particularly how many media, academic, and political elites—fall for bad ideas. The trouble is, their lies become institutionalized as truth, and we all suffer as a result. How our universities have become hothouses of leftist ideology. How historians and journalists have airbrushed history to turn a racial separatist into a civil rights icon.

All that sounds familiar? Hitler? Airbrushing history? Universities cramped with Leftist ideology? That’s from the book “Intellectual Morons” in the pic above. Hmm… I had some time back recommended the book “How India’s intellectuals spread lies” by Ravishankar Kapoor. He doesn’t call the Leftists intellectuals morons but explains how they float terrible theories and notions which are passed off as gospel by our Commie media. Kapoor’s book in India is closest to “Intellectual Morons” by Daniel Flynn. The book explains how people like Nehru, Chidambaram, Mani Aiyar, Kuldip Nayar, Arundhati Roy and others spread lies and bogus theories to serve their own causes. There is a particular case of Suzy Roy that is hilarious to say the least. She recalls the Pokhran nuclear test of 1974 by Indira Gandhi and that it was followed by the Emergency in 1975. Therefore, she argues, in one of her 108786-word articles in Outlook Magazine of the past, that AB Vajpayee’s 1998 nuclear test would also be followed by Emergency. Oh yes, she’s an intellectual for our media. The only difference between the American and Indian intellectual morons is that they are uniformly anti-Hindu.

Surprisingly, such a long-time IM has been off the radar and he travels by the name of Dileep Padgaonkar (DP). He was the editor of TOI during the time TOI’s owners made the editor a worthless piece of furniture. Post-elections 2014 DP has had a sudden attack of conscience or he is being playfully sarcastic but he wrote his confession blog on May 30 (A missive to distraught liberals). It’s open defecation. Err… I mean like an open letter, which is the flavour of the season since Modi became PM. And he writes it to some imaginary “sentinels”. Here are some excerpts:

Dear Sentinels of the Republic,

We goofed. Every assumption we made during the election campaign has been savaged. Each one was premised on the values we cherish — freedom, justice and fraternity. Yet all that we did to promote them was to create fear in the minds of voters: fear of Hindu nationalists gaining control of levers of the state… We also reckoned that BJP-led NDA would fail to reach the halfway mark. This would compel it to rope in ‘secular’ non-Congress, non-Left regional parties to take a shot at governance. The latter, we took for granted, would extract their pound of flesh: deny Narendra Modi any role in the new dispensation.

Towards this goal we added our two-penny bit. We missed no chance to harp on Modi’s RSS background. Time and again we raked up the 2002 violence in Gujarat. We pooh-poohed the ‘clean chit’ the Supreme Court-appointed Special Investigation Team and a lower court in Ahmedabad had given Modi. We picked gaping holes in his much-vaunted development model. And when this was not enough to corner BJP’s prime ministerial candidate, we latched on to Snoopgate. On all these counts, we came a cropper. So why did we lose the plot? The plain answer is that we misread the nation’s mood. We didn’t gauge the depth and sweep of the rage against UPA. The dread possibility of ‘communal’ forces coming to power, we believed, would override all other concerns of the electorate, including the lacklustre leadership of the UPA government and of Rahul Gandhi, Congress’s undeclared mascot… At the same time, we must not lower our vigil to ensure that casteist, communal, sexist, hyper-nationalist and regional chauvinist forces of all shades do not threaten the fundamental rights of citizens. These rights are the foundation on which rests the edifice of our Republic. And we remain its steadfast sentinels.     

On the face of it that looks like a confession but when read closely it’s more of regret and bile on having failed to stop Modi. And like the typical coward DP uses “WE”. Who is WE? Why not “I”? Why not admit “I” was wilfully blind? DP dreamed that BJP wouldn’t reach the half-way mark so that there’s a hung parliament and that would at least leave a door open for the Congress to somehow worm its way in or have a powerless govt which will allow scumbags like him to still roam its corridors to curry favours. A true confession by DP would have said he is a pathetic ass-licker of the Congress and Gandhi family. That would have been honest. And sentinels? If DP and his clan of bootlickers were truly sentinels would this country have come to such a pass under Congress-UPA? Would they have indulged in so much corruption and destroyed so many institutions? I doubt a coward like DP has ever questioned SoniaG considering he chose luxury assignments from the govt (as Kashmir interlocutor). Since when do sentinels accept assignments from a corrupt govt? See the line I have underlined in the excerpt. The IM also expects people to be idiots to overlook all the terrible misdeeds of Congress in the misbelief that “communal forces” will come to power. By what logic or reason does he conclude BJP is a “communal” force? Just because all the fake secularists say so? The media will use the same terms that political opponents use to describe parties?

Since when is seeking to remove Article 370 or seeking a uniform civil code communal? Since when is seeking a Ram Temple communal? This is the idea and language of intellectual morons. When they don’t get their way, their language becomes even more colourful. On August 15, 2013 when Modi made a speech after the PM and made comparisons this is what DP had to say (Read his blog):

“The tenor and tone of Manmohan Singh's address were in keeping with the office he holds. Those of Modi were akin to the rants of Hyde Park cranks or, better still, to the often obscene fulminations of Bal Thackeray at Mumbai's Shivaji Park or those of Akbaruddin Owasi in Hyderabad. Indeed, there are times when you detect disturbing similarities between the oratorical style of Modi and, Heaven forbid, of Hafiz Saeed: the same venom, the same conceit of a Saviour-in-waiting, the same promise of redemption from enemies. The result is that even when Modi makes sense - which he does once in a while - he goofs”.

Hyde Park cranks? Akbaruddin Owaisi? Hafiz Saeed? What level of hatred can make Padgaonkar draw such comparisons? You may dislike or hate Modi and you’re free to lampoon him (DP argues Modi makes sense only once in a while). You may not like the fact that Modi made a speech and compared it with the PM or whatever your problem is but you would equate a democratically elected CM with a wanted terrorist like Saeed? But, of course, DP is an intellectual. You see, he was such a gullible “useful idiot” that even the ISI had identified him as a tool to be used by Ghulam Nabi Fai, who is now in prison in the US. So Saeed plays with the ISI team and DP gets used for the ISI indirectly. Who is the anti-national? Who has more in common with Hafiz Saeed? When they spew nonsense they forget to look at their own deeds. There are many such IMs who are “useful idiots” for ISI and other enemies of the State. Oh, in case you tried the link to the article above, it has disappeared from the TOI pages. But you can read DP’s garbage in this cache here. When your mind is preoccupied with so much filth how do you expect to read what people are thinking? When the UK moved to re-establishes ties with Gujarat and Modi, DP couldn’t help pouring more scorn:

“Some might be tempted to compare the British government’s decision to reach out to Modi to prime minister Neville Chamberlain’s infamous Munich Pact in 1938. The appeasement of Hitler, ostensibly to ensure that he would be content to subdue the Czechs and spare Europe a devastating war, came a cropper. But to describe Narendra Modi as a Hitler, or to argue that David Cameron has acted like Chamberlain, or to suggest that today’s Gujarat can even remotely be compared to Nazi Germany is not very enlightening. Such comparisons are worse than odious: they are misleading. What however the changed stance of the British government does suggest is a certain continuity in its foreign policy approach. It is Adam Smith who summed it up in ‘The Wealth of Nations’: ‘To found a great empire for the sole purpose of raising up a people of customers may at first sight appear as a project fit only for a nation of shop-keepers. It is, however, a project altogether unfit for a nation of shop-keepers; but extremely fit for a nation whose government is influenced by shop-keepers.”

The intellectual trickery of DP is to first make the comparison with Hitler and then cleverly suggest it’s not very enlightening. I make the comparison and then imply others are doing it and it’s not a great argument. Not just that, DP ends up ridiculing the British govt for its actions. That is not a problem; you can ridicule them if you want. But it NEVER occurs to this IM that the British action in boycotting Gujarat or Modi in the first place itself was WRONG. All his eloquent crap is spent on ridiculing the UK but I wonder if DP ever wrote an article criticising the UK for boycotting a state in India for reasons based on the same hateful campaign that people like him had run. Today Modi is PM; would these same IMs seek UK or USA to boycott India? Such is level of their intellectual moronery. They had no clue that their behaviour was as bad as traitors and anti-nationals.

Some of our IMs speak, write and act in a manner that we have to now question what exactly their motivation is and who motivates them with what. Someone reminded me of this quote of Cicero yesterday:

We put these editors on a pedestal and respected them a long time. Events and discourses have proved they neither deserved nor earned such respect. They aren’t even half as bright as the ordinary people who vote. The kind of lies, filth and hatred they brought to the public domain with their writings and utterances is unmatched in our history. Dileep Padgaonkar once grandly quoted that he held the second most important job in the country after the prime minister. In the past few years he has proved he is the second biggest intellectual moron in the country. He should be looking after Number One.