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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.
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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.
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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 ??
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