This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
The «[if we did it,] he had it coming» attitude is already almost as bad as if Indian state involvement gets confirmed.
I don't predict but weakly suspect that in 10 odd years Western progressives (if they still exist and aren't distracted by the extreme escalation of conflict with China, of course) will think about the Indophilic rhetoric with «fellow/largest/ democracy|«biggest/youngest English-speaking nation|Superpower by 20XX» etc with the same disdain they now express for that kind of stuff applied to Israel or (relative obscurity aside) Turkey or Azerbaijan. The vegetarian smiles of fast-talking wonks will become associated with repulsive alien menace as much as inarticulate, idiomatic Chinese saber-rattling is today. Charisma, managerial acumen and geopolitical alignment are important but can only go so far when there's a billion-strong and swelling mass of dimwitted hubris beneath, bolstered by a populist regime.
India is not Western, not liberal, not a democracy, and not on the track to become more of any of those things (unlike, say, Ukraine, flawed though it is). I don't judge. Were I more friendly to Indians, I probably should have.
I disagree. If you follow news from Western (mainly American) progressive news outlets, it is as far from Indophilic as it can get. Downright Indophobic is a better word.
Progressives have no love for India or its people. The rhetoric pushed by Progressive media already tries to frame relations with the country a la Saudi Arabia. A country America needs to partner out of great reluctance and needs to civilize, sanction wrongthink, fund Activism to teach Indians to vote the right way. Hell! why are we even partnering with this country? Do we even need them? They should be crushed under America's heel just like China.
I don't need to speak about Conservatives. I find their honesty (especially religious conservatives) at least as far as India goes admirable.
The Chinese hate us and even they don't have that bile that Progressives in the American political establishment have on a hair trigger. That the civilization at the core is considered to be irredeemable is only hidden beneath a thin veneer. Our plethora of ethnic fissures is a rich feast for those in search of nails to to wield their Oppressor/Oppressed hammer on.
I don't know what the US government thinks, but they seem to be onboard with the portrayal. Keeping public and political opinion of India under such tension gives the US significant leverage over the country. They can push or pull either way as needed which is harder to do with other "friendly" countries that they cannot give sermons to without being called out.
We're no saints. I am also not fully on board with the current administration. But, I can see the double standards.
Note: For brevity I used Progressives as a single grouping. Perhaps there is more diversity of opinion but in a discussion about Indian geopolitics, it makes sense to focus on the Progressives that are a part of the US Govt. geopolitical policy apparatus.
This meme by Razib comes to mind. You sure have the mentality to cut it in future interactions with Americans. Just like Vivek and Kamala Harris, two politicians of Indian descent with credible chances of running as VPs in the next POTUS elections. Like Sundar Pichai and Satya Nadella, two men in a position to choke the life out of both leading AGI projects on the planet. Like so many other respected and powerful figures in the Anglosphere – prejudice against Indians is curiously impotent – doesn't stop them from reaching authority in any ostensibly prejudiced group. But, I guess, that can be perceived as only speaking to your strengths, rather than to overestimation of your victimization. Anyway, I already see people reflexively stanning India in all cases, even this suspected murder. The Chakra-and-Aum will no doubt become the next Ukrainian Bicolor+Sunflower.
Regarding the US government… Well:
It will abide, at least until the war is over.
The issue for the Indians isn't that the Canadians can overrule the Americans, but rather that the Canadians can refuse to expand alliance-structures that they are a part of to include the Indians. The US has great influence, but there are plenty of contemporary examples of the US being unable to force allies to play ally to partners they really don't want to.
In some respects, Canada isn't at risk of this because it has (deliberatly) stayed out of alliance-like blocks that might have brought it into conflict with China, whose investments it was pursuing for much of the last decade. Canada isn't a part of the Quad, AUKUS isn't intended to encompass India, and India isn't exactly trying to join NATO. This lack of overlap is likely part of why India might have felt free enough to do this, if they did indeed do it- there wouldn't have been much institutional backlash from relevant institutions that India wanted access into.
But on the other hand, Canada absolutely can play the US lobbying game better, more skillfully, and more persistently than India can. The risk here isn't some sort of Indian Ocean reversal, but rather that on any meaningful major concession the Americans might consider to entice the Indians into something, Canada can play to the favor of the people looking for excuses to stop it as not worth the cost, and for any specific concessions the Indians really want, Canada could play the spoiler as well. Both factors limit the potential for integrated relationships of depth and scale, as Canada does have ability to spoil that.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
To be fair though, American elites tend to think that about everyone. They don’t want independent Allies so much as they want subservient obedient client states. Even European countries get this if they publicly go against what America wants to do or believe. When the rest of NATO wasn’t on board with the invasion of Iraq, they were castigated in the media as weak, effeminate and irrelevant. When France more recently questioned escalation in the Ukrainian proxy war, the media attacked them. For us, you either toe the lines we draw or be seen as backward.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Commentators in the west frequently tempt themselves into 'us vs the rest of the world' narratives. Non Christian / Non Anglo-Saxon societies are all viewed from a 1000 ft lens, where all nuance is readily thrown out in favor of stereotypes. India isn't some shallow extrapolation of headlines you've seen over a few years of news. It has layers and layers of nuance, each of which follows millenia long lineages. I couldn't tell you if Indians still like Shahrukh Khan, and you've got external viewers confidently predicting a deterministic path for the country.
From a civilizational perspective, India has the longest history of being a sanctuary state for those persecuted from outside. Jews, Parsis, Buddhists and in fact Sikhs and Muslims (Ismailis, Shia, Ahmediyyas, ex-Muslims) too have found India to be the one country that has welcomed them with open arms. India is the only civilizational state, that has never bothered to proselytize or expand past its borders. Most of India's famous losses have come after being too trusting or too forgiving. Sounds like a liberal place to me.
From a recent perspective, no country has had its democracy tested more often than India. Yet, its democracy has held together. The electoral process is iron clad and no-one dares interfere with the electoral commission. The Supreme court routinely overturns the Govt. of the day, and occasionally even the titular President (Gyani ZailSingh) has refused to fall in line. In the face of much resistance, the institutions have remained strong and healthy. Western nations like Canada and the Scandinavian block have never faced similar existential threats to their democracy. A homogeneous people living under the gentle embrace of Pax Americana. I'd argue that India is a much stronger democracy than any nation barring US/UK & France.
India is not western, yet. I agree and I rejoice. The Indic civilization has undergone 1000 years of erosion at the hands of Turkic people, Brits and some of our very own Coconuts. But, we've preserved some religion agnostic ideas which have shaped the very foundation of life in this subcontinent. Indians haven't fully westernized yet, and there remains some hope to recover ideas that aren't inherent Abrahmic. Not sure where that will take us, but most immediately, that little bit of resistance might be the one thing that lets India maintain a 2.0 fertility rate, unlike the rest of the world undergoing population collapse.
I'm inclined to believe the very concept of a "civilization-state", whether espoused by Hindu nationalists or Chinese communists, is simply historical revisionism - one big cope, since it allows motivated ideologues to pretend in the existence of a timeless core identity, unchanged throughout history, and most importantly unsullied by the presence of pesky minority groups, whether they be Muslims or Manchu or anyone else. For most of this "civilization-state"''s history, there was no such thing as "India", there was just a contiguous landmass occupied by different kingdoms and the occasional empire.
It also seems strange to me that Indian democracy should be considered stronger than most Western states when in living memory, an Indian prime minister suspended the constitution, canceled elections, jailed her opposition and ruled by fiat. And just three years after she was removed from office, she was reelected by the Indian public in a landslide. Is it supposed to be a knock against Canada that nothing of the sort ever happened in Ottawa?
The Hindu fertility rate in India has already declined below 2.0. Among religious groups, only the Muslims have a fertility rate above replacement in India.
I don't think the divide is as big as you think it is. Three years ago the UK Prime Minister loopholed the unwritten constitution into irrelevancy, cancelled elections, jailed opposition, imprisoned the entire population and ruled by fiat under the fraudulent guise of an emergency. It was called lockdowns.I believe some of these also apply to the Trudeau regime but I wouldn't be confident on the specifics. Regardless neither India, the UK or Canada have robust claims to being liberal democracies.
This is a facetious comparison. Indira Gandhi jailed tens of thousands of her political opponents indefinitely and without a trial, and went so far as to forcibly dissolve lawfully elected state governments opposed to her rule and impose direct control of those states by the national government. There's no contemporary Western parallel to such practices outside of actual war conditions, a la Lincoln suspending habeas corpus during the Civil War, or Zelensky banning opposition parties after the Russian invasion. And Indira Gandhi didn't even have the excuse of an ongoing war, she just didn't think anyone had the right to take power away from her.
The UK imprisoned tens of millions of people indefinitely and without trial through 2020-2021. The UK does not have state governments because it's not a federation. However, the executive was granted power to pass laws without the approval of MPs, which was rule by fiat, and could have been used to overrule or forcibly dissolve any sub-national elected positions. It just wasn't used because there was no meaningful elected opposition at the time, and there couldn't be any because elections which could have brought such people in were cancelled.
Indira Gandhi was a tyrant. But so are current Western leaders, so I don't know how western democracy could be regarded as stronger than India's. They're both weak.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
That's exactly why we call it a civilizational state and not a nation state. Until the 1900s, most Muslims on the Indian subcontinent wore the same Hindu clothes and continued practicing the same animist traditions of their ancestors. Large portions of Indian Christianity are also rooted in 3rd century traditions that significantly diverge from western Christianity.
Despite strong divergence after independence, Indian Muslims and Christians continue to believe in what would be considered Hindu belief. (Karma, purity of the Ganga, and reincarnation.
Both China and India are civilizational states. The west is too. Just because the west now successfully exporting their civilization out to the world, does not mean that it is somehow the 'obvious common answer'. It is a highly opinionated view of the world that China and India in particular do not easily agree with.
I often joke that there is no group more Catholic than a atheist woke leftist and no group more protestant than atheist urban careerist. Even when new ideas arise from the west, they're squarely situated within the central axioms of life that the whole western hemisphere believes in. Those central axioms tend to be different in different civilizations, and the same observations can lead to wildly different conclusions when set within these differing contexts.
Indian atheists are nothing like western atheists. Indian secularism looks nothing like western secularism. What respect and soft power mean is fundamentally different. The core axioms of a civilization are the seed, and over millenia, it leads to each civilization converging to different stable states. Not sure why that is so surprising to the average westerner.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
This is a very emotive piece. Such optimism is often hard to find in Indian Anglophilic elite who tend to judge progress as movement towards Western (more particularly American) cultural norms. They are not completely wrong as "Western" culture does have a lot going for it. But you also get weird positions such as the low divorce rate in India being a bad thing as it means a lot of people are in bad marriages.
A minor nitpick. If you go by India in pixels' TFR figures, the 2.0 TFR seems to be mostly due to Bihar and UP working "extra" hard. The other relatively developed states of India seem to be quickly moving towards the TFR of developed countries without attaining even a fraction of their wealth. This is not encouraging since UP and Bihar will also probably follow the same path once they develop more. I remember you or someone else framing this as India implementing Woke policies way before anyone else in world while we are far from an economy that can even support such welfarism. While not relevant in my lifetime, I do worry that India will move from a poor country with some economic significance due its large population to a somewhat poor country with not enough people or industry to be of any significance.
EDIT: The last point is mostly my reflexive pessimism speaking. Given our population we'll reach that point way after everyone else if we ever do.
You got me. My contrarian ass came up with perfectly mirrored response to what I saw as an unreasonably negative knee-jerk reaction from OP.
It's weird. You'd think that an atheist who's seriously dating a white woman, plans to settle in the US and lives in one of the leftist-est zipcodes in the country would be doom-n-gloom about the current state of India.
But idk. I would have been a doom-n-gloomer if I hadn't spent my 4 undergrad years in a smaller town with a diverse population drawn from the lower rungs of society. Congress (Socialist) era India was a nightmare of proportions that my hyper-urban sheltered ass could barely phantom. Starting with the ideas of Vajpayee/Manmohan and finally, the agency of Modi to execute, things have started changing. Sanitation, direct-to-person Welfare delivery, bureaucrat accountability, on-time infrastructure projects....those little things have changed the lives of your average (cripplingly poor) Indian in unimaginable ways.
I have phrased it as such before. There was a reason Nehru was chided as Vishwaguru. (Professor to the world). He should have become an Oxford professor. Would have been excellent for India and the life-expectancy of his progeny.
Mate, my veneer of optimism runs thin. Don't make me face the my true fears. I want to be an optimist. But, I agree with you. Being a cripplingly poor country with billion+ people is a terrible predicament to find yourself in. Especially when the worldwide TFR is dropping rapidly, and India while somewhat insulated, will inevitably see the same decline.
Finger's crossed ??
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link