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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. neoliberalism? Hindutva dates to Savarkar. The BJP's modern incarnation dates to the Emergency. It has oscillated between harder nationalism and pro-business cosmopolitanism multiple times; its most neoliberal moods are correlated with its least ultranationalist ones. Until Shastri forced the language issue, for a long time Hindu nationalist identity politics survived in the INC rather than as another main opposition coalition. The entrenchment of an awkward pro-Hindi pro-Hindutva alliance with pro-English pro-cosmopolitan business conservatives stems, ultimately, from both of these groups being pushed out of the INC under the Emergency.
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Jan 5, 2016 07:27
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the attitude of Hindu nationalists wrt Bangladesh is .... complex, and vice versa. India went to war to liberate Bangladesh from Pakistan, after all. Also, Greater India blah blah blah.
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Jan 5, 2016 07:35
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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. 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 fucked around with this message at 15:58 on Jan 5, 2016 |
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Jan 5, 2016 09:01
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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 fucked around with this message at 04:28 on Jan 6, 2016 |
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Jan 6, 2016 04:02
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I confess I don't have good answers to any of those three questions. My sense of how policy and consensus is actually manufactured in the federal government is tenuous at best. As you can guess from my language, I don't follow India closely (I'm not using typical Indian English terms for their own institutions). India is to host the next BRICS summit so if Modi has surprises to spring, that'll be an opportune time to do it. I think Modi has the political capital to entrench Hindi, but won't do it - beef and poking Muslims in the eye over Kashmir and mosques are bigger nationalist priorities. As I noted, a lot of Hindus don't speak Hindi-family languages, whereas most Indian Muslims do. Also, Muslim-poking doesn't make the campuses and judiciary automatically hostile to you. The INC and its allies still control a lot of state governments. I think they'll be back. I don't know whether the shock of 2014 has been enough to diminish enthusiasm for the Nehru family tree, however.
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Jan 6, 2016 14:55
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