The New York Times carries some excellent writing, but has the unfortunate habit of often being patronising and hectoring when it comes to India and Indians. I’ve had reason to complain about that before, here.

While rich East Coast liberals can be remarkably insular, they occasionally require “native informants” to do the job for them. Pankaj Mishra, a studious epigone and left-wing mirror image of VS Naipaul’s writing style and philosophy, fits the bill perfectly.

Mishra is characterised by a fastidious distaste for anything Indian (or shall we say anything Indian and modern, with the possible exception of Arundhati Roy). He has been true to form in his latest NYT oped, titled “The Incendiary Appeal of Demagoguery In Our Time”.

Rants like this do great disservice to the quality writing NYT can carry elsewhere. It’s flat and uninteresting, with no new discoveries to be made. Anyone and everyone is part of a giant “neo-liberal” conspiracy. Anything that doesn’t hew to political correctness is swatted down.

Thus Mishra arraigns everyone on the ground of thwarting democracy, but doesn’t like it if democracy throws up leaders like Modi and Trump. Democracy isn’t good if it throws up people not ordained by some self-appointed champions of democracy. Mishra doesn’t like the neo-liberals, but he doesn’t like the neo-illiberals either who use the same sort of rhetoric as him against the neo-liberals.

His is a Manichean vision where “money talks, power seduces and success eclipses morality”. Only Mishra has seen the light, along with maybe Arundhati Roy, Jean Paul Sartre, Frantz Fanon and Gandhi (although Gandhi himself would be extremely uncomfortable in the company of advocates of “Gandhians with guns”). While Mishra sees Fascism everywhere this is as Fascist a vision, if you ask me, as anything else.

It’s astonishing the degree to which Mishra’s article reflects the same character traits that he accuses others of. For example he reveals his own ressentiment, as well as that of rich New York liberals, when he cavils about how “rich Indian-American businesspeople … were naturally attracted to the promise of a wealthy India allied to the United States.”

But what is wrong with Indians aspiring to be wealthy? Such bogus moralism can only appeal to the ressentiment of some rich white people and of Mishra himself who has come up in the world, but doesn’t want other Indians to come up like him. He prefers lecturing to them from a self-righteous pedestal. Shades of Trump’s worst supporters, if you ask me.