Hi Jay; re: India:
You said, two years ago:
<India is a mishmash of ethnic groups speaking a bunch of distinct languages, divided along caste, education, socioeconomic, political and religious lines, governed by an ostensibly democratic system, but where the leadership is in fact always the same bunch, beholden to the same class of big, long lasting and in effect feudal family groupings. There is ample precedent that truly revolutionary changes are invariably accompanied by bloodletting, where the existing order is swiped away.>
Interesting things are happening there.
First, they have suddenly gotten a lot more "user-friendly" to Global Capital. The experiment in autarchy has been abandoned.
Second, the BJP Party is trying to weld India together, with a radical (and bloody) redefinition of Indian Nationalism. The secular socialist pacifist ideas of Gandhi and Nehru are Out. In, is the idea that being Indian means adhering to one of the Eastern religions: Hindus, also Buddhists, Sikhs, Jains, are the in-group. The Western Monotheisms are the out-group. Most nationalisms define themselves by a common language. If India did that, they would go the way of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. India seems to be accepting English as their national language, rather than Hindi. Focusing on a Hated Other, is a tried and true way to unify any group. If successful, this will unify all 1B people in India, except for the 120M Muslims, and a few Christians.
As long as they can keep their recurrent conflicts with Pakistan non-nuclear, and limit the extent of the Muslim insurgency to the Kashmir Valley, the rest of the country can be unified and steadily more prosperous. Does this sound like a workable plan? |
