quote:

Break up India into roughly America population chunks if you really hate Hindu nationalism, but you'll just get violent resource wars instead. In all likelihood.

Squalid posted:

Prior to the election of Modi the big trend I'd heard of in Indian politics (admittedly mostly from Salmon Rushdie's novel Midnight's Children) was towards increasingly regionalism.

fishmech posted:

Break up India into roughly America population chunks if you really hate Hindu nationalism, but you'll just get violent resource wars instead. In all likelihood.

fishmech posted:

Break up India into roughly America population chunks if you really hate Hindu nationalism, but you'll just get violent resource wars instead. In all likelihood.

Nonsense posted:

Some have credited Modi with recent friendly gestures towards Pakistan's civilian government. Are these actions genuine, or something else? Was this a continuation of policy from the previous INC government? The recent militant attacks on the border are likely not helping relations I imagine.

Aliquid posted:

This is true based upon past electoral results. Smaller parties have increasingly used India's generous PR system over the last few decades to slowly chip away at the INC.

Bro Dad posted:

....Lord Mountbatten?

Cymbal Monkey posted:

[blind conjecture]I almost suspect he's going to try to open up Pakistan to ship off India's remaining muslims.[/blind conjecture]

icantfindaname posted:

India's Muslim population is larger proportionally today than it has been since 1949, and is closing in on the ratio of the undivided british raj in 1947

Shbobdb posted:

It's been a while since I've paid any attention to the BJP (used to have an outspoken Indian coworker who would bitch about them all the time), but they never really seemed worse/different from other nativist parties like the Republicans in America or the Front National in France -- they are all part of a super creepy trend based on people reacting to the effects of neoliberalism. It adds an extra wrinkle since my coworker thought they would be a lot more willing to escalate conflict with Pakistan which adds a lot of corn kernels to this particular poo poo sandwich. But I'm not sure the west really can or should do anything. As an American, I would have been fine with an international coalition having prevented Bush from taking office but most people don't share that view. In fact, bush's unpopularity with the rest of the world (especially continental western Europe) was used as a selling point in the 2004 election. I imagine foreign meddling would strengthen rather than weaken the BJP.

Shbobdb posted:

This is a view I haven't heard before. Talk to me like I'm a total ignoramus since 90% of my view comes from a clearly biased source and the other 10% comes from what passes for international news coverage in the US.

mcclay posted:

So 100% of your views come from a clearly biased source then?

Anyways, its nice to see what the social impact of Modi is. Everything I've got on him is from the Economist which oscillates between "Oh man lookit this big manly strongman to save India" and "Tut tut oh those Indians, they never will fix their economy"

Absurd Alhazred posted:

That's unfair to the Economist. They have repeatedly brought up concerns in relations to his treatment of Muslims as Chief Minister of Gujarat, and the effects of the Hindu nationalism he champions on the lives of Muslims throughout India since his ascent to power.

CalmDownMate posted:

Modi and his party seek to disconnect India from foreign influence. It is no surprise then that some of his first acts as Prime Minister were to ban many non-profit organizations such as Doctors Without Borders, Amnesty International, Mercy Corps, Greenpeace and multiple other environmentalist groups; as well as Christian and Muslim Missionary organizations.

Shbobdb posted:

This is a view I haven't heard before. Talk to me like I'm a total ignoramus since 90% of my view comes from a clearly biased source and the other 10% comes from what passes for international news coverage in the US.

Smudgie Buggler posted:

Look, I'm sure this guy's a bad dude and all, but unless your above claim that those organisations have been banned is a simple mistake due to English being your second language or something, it's an outright falsehood that you shouldn't be allowed to get away with simply because Modi's an rear end in a top hat.

MSF, Amnesty International etc. have absolutely not been banned from operating in India, and the article you linked in no way backs up your claim that they have.

CalmDownMate posted:

Sorry what I meant to say was they banned reception of foreign funds by the groups

fishmech posted:

Hmm, how did that end up happening?

ronya posted:

Blaming the "foreign hand" for assorted ills has a long and storied history in India, and the specific focus on funding speaks to old anti-capitalist anxieties (compare e.g. being accused of un-American or un-Islamic sympathies; in some other countries, merely being mercenary is a lesser rather than a greater threat)

India certainly does have rich countries and individuals interested in influencing its politics, although the choice of alleged illegitimate involvement varies. When Indira Gandhi was railing against the foreign hand (again: not unreasonably, given the assassinations and the US/Chinese/Sri Lanka-aligned conflicts), Soviet money was excepted from such condemnation.

Such subjective enforcement means that attackong foreign funding is not apolitical. However, it is also not new to Indian politics.

ronya posted:

the INC, like many other independence parties across the former Empire, was a coalition of diverse interests whose main unifying theme pre-independence was to kick the British out, and and main unifying theme post-independence was having successfully kicked the British out on acceptable terms. The British tended to favour British-trained English-speaking intellectuals for its negotiating partners, which (given the era) tended to favour broadly moderate Fabian socialists who are personally more secular than the religious/nationalist causes they would champion (you can see this with both Jinnah and Savarkar).

India's a large place. The use of Hindi or related Indo-Aryan languages is most favourable in the north; the southern areas speak assorted Dravidian languages (Tamil, etc.) - roughly 2/3 of the country spoke Indo-Aryan languages like Hindi, Urdu, or Bengali in 1951 (post-Partition). A Hindu affiliation is correlated, but not very closely, with speaking a Hindi-family language (with the disjunction most prominently with the large Bengali-speaking group concentrated near the border with East Pakistan, now known as Bangladesh; note that Pakistan today also speaks an Indo-Aryan language). A lot of Tamil- and Telugu-speakers are Hindu but don't speak Hindi. Because these languages belong to entirely different families, attempting to switch is especially difficult. Nonetheless, broadly speaking, Hindi-speaking Hindus formed, and continue to form, the largest bloc, even when including what is now Pakistan and Bangladesh. It's not so ridiculous to imagine India conceiving of itself as a Hindu nation in attempting to build a nationalist and socialist identity, despite large minorities; after all, the Raj spoke an entirely alien English and knelt to a Christian monarch.

as the first generation of post-colonial leaders began to fade, a lot of the issues that had been postponed in 1947 (sometimes literally, like the choice of federal government language, which was delayed by twenty-five years) began to pop up. English switched from being the humiliating language of the colonial power to being (for the south) the unifying language of the country, the language of economic prosperity, and, crucially, the bar to Hindi domination. As communal demographics and power evolved over time, concessions to the princely states and guarantees of minority representation began to chafe (for the Hindu nationalists). The decreasing secularity of communal leaders meant that traditional proscriptions began to be taken more seriously - e.g., Savarkar himself, sitting at a table of fellow British-trained intellectuals, condemned the regard of the cow as sacred as a backward superstition that would hold the country back; his successors have been less skeptical. The Emergency forced the opposition blocs together, including the middle classes (who had been the driving force of anti-imperialism, but were now increasingly disenchanted with socialism, especially socialism as practiced by a populist, authoritarian, repressive government that had suspended elections and civil liberties) and the Hindu nationalists (who either had politically survived the three odd decades of irrelevance from Partition to Emergency, or had ditched the INC over its turn away from old nationalist promises).

that coalition then collapsed once the Emergency crisis was over, but that's where the BJP springs from, more or less. Like all large parties in large countries, there's a propensity for its state parties to be more or less extreme than its national messaging, like Republicans running in Massachusetts vs Arkansas, so to speak. In Sikh areas the BJP even positions itself as the party of religious freedom, as opposed to the secular INC.

ronya posted:

ronya posted:

Sri Lanka-aligned conflicts

lllllllllllllllllll posted:

Does Hindu nationalism have a specific quirky quality about it, like certain limitations on how people should lead their life or is it just like any other conservative you're-not-one-of-us-go-away attitude?

Silver2195 posted:

YECs

Rocko Bonaparte posted:

YECs?