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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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