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human_murda

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Posts posted by human_murda

  1. 3 hours ago, tadmjones said:

    I know even less about Kashmir , is it correctly described as a territorial dispute between Hindu and Muslim populations, as a consequence of the creation of the Muslim state of Pakistan ?

    This is partly true. I tried writing a detailed answer, which turned out to be too long, so I created a separate topic. The answer is complicated because India, China, Pakistan, Pakistani tribesmen, kingdom of Jammu and Kashmir, United Kingdom and even the former country of Tibet (as well as pre-CCP Xinjiang) are all involved in the creation of the Kashmir conflict. Kashmir is a Himalayan region and multiple religious groups (Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Buddhists) and different ethnic groups (Kashmiri, Ladakhi, Pahari, Dogri, Balti) etc are also involved.

  2. Here is the gist of how the Kashmir conflict started in India:

    British India consisted of regions that were directly controlled by the British as well as ~500 kingdoms that were subsidiary to the British:

    MG-British_Conquest_of_India_1753_to_1890.thumb.jpg.bd82161f7cb0a9c3bab089eadfb8d8e8.jpg

    Myanmar was separated from British India in 1937. When they left, the British partitioned the regions that were directly controlled by the them into a Muslim majority Pakistan and a secular India (mostly Hindu but also included non-Hindu, non-Muslim areas). The ~500 kingdoms were allowed to join India or Pakistan or remain independent. In some sense, British India was divided into ~500 countries. However, almost all of these 500 kingdoms chose to join India or Pakistan except a few:

    - Gwadar (controlled by Oman, annexed by Pakistan)
    - Khanate of Kalat (annexed by Pakistan)
    - Hyderabad State (remnant of Mughal Empire, annexed by India)
    - Junagadh (annexed by India)
    - Goa (Portuguese colony, annexed by India)
    - Puducherry (French colony, annexed by India)
    - Jammu and Kashmir

    indep.thumb.png.2ef517a8978419d29f6486e5eb46c6f4.png

    I think there were other smaller kingdoms as well that didn't join India/Pakistan. I'm from a region which was the Kingdom of Travancore. We initially declared independence, but joined India after threats of assassination.

    Declaration of independence by the kingdom of Jammu and Kashmir was the most problematic, since it's located on the border between India and Pakistan. Jammu and Kashmir (or just Kashmir) was a multi-ethnic, multi-lingual and multi-religious kingdom. Overall, it was Muslim majority, but had a Hindu ruler (Hari Singh). Kashmir also had a significant Buddhist population in the Ladakh region. This is what the kingdom looks like now:

    290520dda9d6126c42024021d743ceb8.jpg.0d6b189680e093f714b92d0941e1a43f.jpg

    When the partition of India along religious lines was announced, massacres of Hindus and Sikhs in "would be Pakistan" regions started (with the opposite happening in border regions in India). After Hindus and Sikhs were massacred in Rawalpindi, the news reached Jammu and led to the "Jammu massacres" in Jammu under the rule of the king (Hari Singh). Hearing news of this, Pakistani tribesmen invaded the kingdom, which resulted in the king, Hari Singh, acceding the kingdom to India. By the time Jammu and Kashmir acceded to India, the kingdom had already lost a significant chunk of territory. The following regions are now controlled by Pakistan:

    - Azad Kashmir ("free" Kashmir) or AJK. Ethnically Pahari (similar to Punjabis)
    - Gilgit Baltistan or GB. Ethnically Balti (tibetic).

    These two regions are Muslim majority and want to be a part of Pakistan. However, Pakistan maintains them as semi-autonomous regions and claims that they support the Kashmiri independence movement and want to hold a plebiscite in the whole region (except the regions claimed by China). Since a lot of the other regions in Kashmir are Muslim majority, Pakistan also claims them as part of Pakistan. I think Pakistan also claims Jammu, even though it's Hindu majority.

    The rest of the kingdom became the semi-autonomous Indian State of Jammu and Kashmir. Since legally the kingdom acceded to India, India also claims the rest of the kingdom that was invaded by Pakistan as a part of India. The regions controlled by India are:

    - Jammu: Hindu majority. Ethnically Dogri.
    - Kashmir valley: Muslim majority. Ethnically Kashmiri, speak Koshur.
    - Ladakh: around 45% Muslim and 40% Buddhist. Ladakhis are tibetic.

    Most Jammuites and Ladakhis want to be a part of India. Kashmiris from the valley want to be an independent country (neither India nor Pakistan). However, if they became independent, Pakistan will almost definitely invade them (or turn them into a puppet state).

    There was another region that India controlled that was part of the kingdom called Aksai Chin. The North-Eastern part of Aksai Chin was bounded by the Ardagh–Johnson Line during British rule. India inherited this border with Tibet when the J&K kingdom acceded to India. The border was originally drawn when Tibet was a separate country. After China invaded Tibet and the CCP took over Xinjiang, China invaded India in 1962. China also doesn't recognize the McMahon Line which the British agreed as the border with Tibet. China invaded Tibet (and stopped recognizing agreements made by Tibet), the British left and India has inherited that border dispute. China now controls the following region which was part of the J&K kingdom:

    - Aksai Chin. Almost no one lives there.

    China also claims Ladakh as a part of Tibet and threatens to invade occasionally, most recently two weeks ago.

    After Kashmir acceded to India, Pakistan started sending militants to Indian Kashmir to blow themselves up, which resulted in Indian Kashmir becoming increasingly militarized. This eventually led to an insurgency in the Kashmir Valley and increasing attacks on Kashmiri Hindus, who got kicked out in 1990. Recently (2019), India revoked Kashmir's autonomy, removing the separate constitution for Jammu and Kashmir guaranteed by Article 370 of India's Constitution. Kashmir and Ladakh were turned into Union Territories. Three weeks ago, India's supreme court upheld repeal of Kashmir's special status. This is a Scottish vlogger talking to a local Kashmiri Muslim who lived through most of this.

    India follows the Israel's West Bank model for governing Kashmir, to some extend. India bulldozes the houses of Kashmiris suspected to be terrorists. Reports of rape and torture by the Indian military are common. Mass graves (most likely of Kashmiri Muslims) were found in Kashmir that weren't identified or investigated. Local Kashmiri Hindus are still being killed by terrorists. The Indian government is subsidizing migrations of Hindus from poor states to Kashmir (some of these migrants are killed by terrorists).

    Insurgency in Kashmir is dying:

    Insurgency_Terror-related_Fatalities_of_Civilians_and_Security_Forces_in_Jammu_and_Kashmir_India_from_1988_to_2013.thumb.png.d4a9fdcb792d7cd18139f9795f9e1003.png

    Tourism and economic activity have picked up. Here is an interview of a former Kashmiri Muslim activist (Shehla Rashid used to be a "communist" student activist at JNU, but is now slightly more favorable to the Indian government). However, it's still the most militarized region on the planet. Pakistan and China are also involved and the issue isn't easily solvable, apart from recognizing the Line of Actual Control or LAC as the international border.

    Recognizing LAC is also not completely realistic. Pakistan's military controls their civilian government. Any civilian government that suggests the recognition of LAC as an international border gets "couped" by their military. Kashmiri independence also part of Pakistani nationalism and is a cause championed by Pakistan in international forums. The largest river in Pakistan (Indus/Sindhu) also flows through Indian Kashmir. China's belt and road initiative for Pakistan also goes through Pakistani Kashmir (so China is also interested in Indian/Pakistani Kashmir, apart from Aksai Chin and Ladakh).

  3. 25 minutes ago, tadmjones said:

    I don’t have any say in the matter and not much personal concern

    Why did you ask me if Israel practiced apartheid?

    I'm not from West Asia or from a Muslim family but I'm interested in the Kashmir conflict in India which has some parallels to what's happening in West Bank.

     

    24 minutes ago, tadmjones said:

    ... I think the region would be ‘better off’ if Jordan gains control of most of the West Bank and Gaza gets incorporated into Israel ‘proper’. The current population of the strip can make individual decisions to either give up or ‘renounce any Palestinian citizenship’ and try somehow to assimilate or relocate.

    It seems evident the idea of establishing an actual Palestinian state in that immediate region pretty much died at last as recently as the seventies. 

    Sure, but it would be easier to incorporate West Bank into Israel than Gaza.

  4. 1 hour ago, tadmjones said:

    Are Arab Israeli citizens maltreated in Israel by its government?

    Arabs don't have the same rights as Jews. They don't have "Birthright Israel" (and related travel/migration rights), for example, even if they were actually born there and got kicked out. They also don't have the same experience with law enforcement as Jews.

    This is also a meaningless question. The Muslims who used to live in Israel and whose rights have been violated the most are not physically there, because they have been kicked out by Jews (1948 Palestinian expulsion). Just because they're not physically in Israel now doesn't mean that the rights of Muslims who had lived in present day Israel hadn't been violated. So yes, the property rights of "Israeli Muslims" have also been violated, but you won't find them in Israel.

    The reason you won't find as many "maltreated" Muslims in Jewish majority regions is because the Israeli Muslims whose rights were violated were also ethnically cleansed and no longer exist, not because they weren't maltreated. Acting like the rights of Muslims in Israel weren't violated is equivalent to saying that the rights of murdered (or deported) people weren't violated because they no longer exist (or exist in the same place). Just because these people don't have Israeli citizenship because of being Muslim doesn't mean they aren't from Israel or that their rights weren't violated.

     

    1 hour ago, tadmjones said:

    Does Israel practice apartheid within its borders/jurisdiction?

    Where are Israel's borders?

    If you mean the Jewish majority areas with citizenship, there used to be Muslims there who got kicked out (1948 Palestinian expulsion). The rights of Muslims who used to live in Jewish majority regions still got violated, even if they're not physically there now (and don't have Israeli citizenship, even though they're from Israel). Jews took over homes of Muslims using laws such as "Land Acquisition (Validation of Acts and Compensation) Law (1953)". This is a violation of rights "within Israel's borders".

    If you mean West Bank, Israel occupies it militarily. Israel is also continually expanding into the West Bank and Jews living in the West Bank have Israeli citizenship, but Muslims don't. Israel de-facto controls West Bank and still kick out Muslims from their homes, as of 2023 (these homes are then taken over by Jews who have Israeli citizenship with help from the Israeli police force and military). What's happening in West Bank already happened in "Israel".

    If you mean Gaza, Israel has no direct military control over it, but controls their economy and resources.

    Israel doesn't just practice apartheid. It's a mix of ethnic cleansing (in Israel, 1948), apartheid (in West Bank, ongoing) and imperialism (in Gaza, ongoing).

  5. 4 hours ago, whYNOT said:

    Conservative intellectuals ask (and answer) the right question: how did the secular, radical Left get into bed with Islamic fundamentalists and terrorists to enable the comeback of virulent Judeophobia?

    I guess when you have room temperature IQ, it's easy to answer that Muslims having rights is equivalent to Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism.

    And of course, Judeophobia never existed when Conservatives were chanting "Jews will not replace us", but Jews are virtually genocided as soon as some leftist says Muslims have rights.

  6. @whYNOT is a symptom of disgusting White people who have lived a privileged life, think oppression has no consequences, live in their own Aryan/Übermensch fantasies and think that Jews should have "pulled themselves by their bootstraps" in the middle of the Holocaust and should have simply "chosen not to be victims".

  7. 57 minutes ago, whYNOT said:

    Jews in Israel successfully rose above their dark and recent past.

    "Envy/hatred of the good for being the good". Heard that?

    Palestinian individualists could rise also. Few have.

    You can keep cosplaying as Übermensch, will yourself out of genocides, own the left and do other White shenanigans. The rest of us will be out here doing our non-Aryan things in the real world.

  8. 27 minutes ago, whYNOT said:

    Anyone who claims that anyone else, due to an ancestral/personal background of repression, victimization etc. can do little to nothing to help themselves, to value their life and those close, put productive energy into it and make it worth living, probably is a determinist.

    And anyone who thinks that repression and victimization have zero negative effects and that every single person can "pull themselves up by their bootstraps" no matter what happens to them (even in the middle of a genocide or bombing) is worse than a determinist. You believe in a mystical concept of human will and have no concept of morality.

    32 minutes ago, whYNOT said:

    Hearing this is what riles Leftist "racialists"

    Keep riling up leftists and doing absolutely nothing to solve real world problems. That's easy when you pretend that the world doesn't have rules and you can solve everything by sheer human will.

  9. 17 hours ago, whYNOT said:

    Visibly, pro-Palestinians out there demonstrate the "soft bigotry of lowered expectations" directed at Palestinians.

    "But what are those poor victims of Israel supposed to do?!"

    How about stop being "victims", practise courage, begin to assume self-responsibility for your lives and start to thrive? The exemplar of that, Israel, would be only glad to help an honest attempt at Gaza's independent coexistence.

    Keep being ignorant of social realities. Power structures and hierarchies exist and humans function within it. You're living in a fantasy land where you think people are, by their own moral failures, responsible for their oppression by others and deserve it.

    I don't blame you for your opinions. Not the first time you've echoed White nationalist (or in this case, the adjacent Zionist) talking points. You know what those evil "anti-racist" commies say: "Scratch a liberal and ... ".

  10. 41 minutes ago, whYNOT said:

    Oh sure. Then we all (excepting the indigenous people) must all return to the places we came from.

    First proving who and what "indigenous people" in pre-history and later times actually are today, after their nomadic wanderings, settling here and there, slave trade, early empires and their wars of conquest and expulsion - and so on.

    Infinite regress? Everybody finishes up in Southern Africa. Happy?

    Who is talking about returning people to their ancestral homelands? Not me. Whatever migration there was, already happened (and I believe everyone has a right to migrate anywhere, as long as the land/house is properly bought/leased).

    The only minor issue is regarding some claims that Israelis stole houses from Palestinians (if proven, they must be kicked out from those homes). I don't know why you're even bringing this up (I never mentioned it).

  11. On 10/17/2023 at 12:29 AM, whYNOT said:

    Sickening, the justifications presently made in the aftermath for Hamas/the Gazans. Some in the West openly anticipate an welcome the genocide of "the Zionists".

    The only alternatives are: either Israel genocides Palestinians or Israel doesn't genocide Palestinians. Hamas is not capable of genociding "the Zionists", no matter how many babies they allegedly beheaded.

    On 10/17/2023 at 12:29 AM, whYNOT said:

    What came first? This "open-air prison", import embargoes, check points, walls and fences so vilified by the mindless had a primary rationale before the 'imprisonment' of Gazans, the protection of Israel -- first.

    Israel is much older than Hamas.

  12. 4 hours ago, Jacob Smith said:

    Being an Ayn Randist, I am not endorsing Christianity, out of question – and as far as Libertarianism is concerned, I have read only a little bit about their theories – but I believe that the clue to FFs’ achievement was their major policy which was close to libertarians.

    I'm not American (and not completely familiar with American politics), but this sounds like recycled conservative+libertarian talking points from 2016.

    Christianity isn't individualism for low IQ people. White Christians are a vote bank created by Republicans. Republicans spend billions of dollars peddling White-Christian identity politics and narratives, including but not limited to:


    1)    Crap about how Judeo-Christian values built Western civilization, which was supposedly completely disconnected from Eastern civilizations.
    2)    Racial arguments for discontinuing welfare: this include claims about how certain populations have innate deficiencies and how leftists will rip-off White people with an endless pit of welfare (and this need for welfare can never be fulfilled because the deficiencies are innate)
    3)    A more politically correct version of the above involves replacing race with racial culture (resulting in claims like “Black culture leads to poverty”, which is mostly bullshit). Some variants of this narrative claim that race leads to the creation of a racial culture. The usual implication is that “White culture” is the right culture.
    4)    Claims about how multiculturalism will destroy America, since it’s not consistent with “White Christian culture”.
    5)    White genocide, possibly mediated by Jews, leading to the destruction of White culture and America.
    6)    Any opposition to White identity politics or “Whiteness” is White genocide.
    7)    Opposition to White identity politics is also supposedly a euphemism for Communist / anti-Capitalist politics (since “White culture” = Western civilization / capitalism = America) and will lead to the destruction of America.
    8 ) Leftists are spreading the Gay and destroying Christianity and hence, America.
    9)    Leftists are also the “real racists” since they don’t believe in deficiencies of a race or racial culture and will destroy America with their affirmative action ways, which is another form of White genocide.
    10)    Immigration from non-European countries will probably also destroy America.
    11)    Academia and cultural Marxism are destroying traditional gender/racial roles, deplatforming White Christians and eventually destroying America.
    12) White Christians are special and necessary for the future of "Western civilization". Or, as the White kids say these days: "you cannot rebuild your civilization with somebody else's babies"


    Republicans stroke the egos of White, Christian people and in return, they vote Republican. White atheists who are dumb enough to believe that some stone age religion is necessary for the future of America may also peddle the same narratives. Also, not all these narratives are coming from republicans. Narrative 2) is probably funded by libertarians. Libertarians are pushing a narrative that some populations have some innate deficiencies in order to try to get some welfare schemes removed.


    The fact of the matter is that Judeo-Christian values didn’t build America. It was capitalism and wealth that gave a voice to Christians. Christians didn’t create the Republican Party. The Republican Party created and molded White, Christian people as their vote bank (and no, you're not going to get your individualist utopia by voting with Christians). If they had spent billions of dollars trying to mold left-handed people as their vote bank, you’ll be writing essays about how left-handedness is essential for the future of Western civilization.

     

  13. On 7/9/2023 at 9:47 PM, human_murda said:

    Economically, BJP follows Dirigisme. In 2014, BJP promised to bring ‘Minimum Government and Maximum Governance’. BJP is planning to invest over 1 Trillion USD on transport and other infrastructure in the near term. They want to replicate the successes of North East Asian economies. In 2020, BJP tried to deregulate the agricultural markets in India with the Farm Bills, but millions of people protested and it was repealed. Air India was privatized in 2022. They have  a general policy of privatizing public companies which were nationalized decades ago. In 2016, the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) was launched by the government for easy digital payments (making up over 50% of digital transactions in India now and is starting to be accepted internationally, along with ‘India Stack’, a system for authentication and online identity). BJP has significant collusion with the Adani Group (a significant number of airports and sea ports in India were sold to Adani by BJP). When Adani shares crashed after the Hindenburg report, BJP made the public LIC Corporation buy Adani shares to prop up their market value. India plans to start manufacturing chips in the near future with US collaboration. India is projected to be the third largest economy by 2030. Goldman Sachs projects India to be the second largest economy (nominal GDP) by 2075, but such long term projections don’t have much meaning.

    Here is S&P Global's August 2023 predictions for India's economy in 2031. They predict India's economy to be $6.7T by FY 2031. There's some policy uncertainty and potential problems associated with climate change (floods) but otherwise nothing remarkable. GDP capita PPP would be around $15,000 ($4,500 nominal) by 2031 (US is $80,000 currently).

  14. There are two additional indices about democracy: 1) Freedom House’s “Freedom in the World” that changed India’s score to from ‘Free’ to ‘Partly Free’ after BJP won re-election in 2019. 2) Polity data series that gives a ‘Polity Score’ to countries:

    Polity1.thumb.PNG.f427ccef24eff1662216be034c973c58.PNG

    On the polity index, India gets a near-perfect score, 1 point below countries with the highest score (and a 0 on autocratic score), ahead of countries like Belgium, South Korea, UK, US, etc which are less democratic than India:

     Polity2.thumb.PNG.f71de0a4f5602e966abc74d05ec5bab2.PNG

     

    All four indices are subjective indices that aggregate the feelings of experts (like Rottentomatoes, but with less number of “critics”. They don’t even ask the experts to rate anything on a scale). Extreme ends of the indices imply consensus. Countries that are in the middle are a result of disagreements among experts.

    On one index, India is more democratic than South Korea, UK, US, etc; on another index, India is in the same category and sub-category as the US; on the third index, India is slightly less democratic than the US and on the next index, India is a dictatorship (and most Western media regularly preach about India’s score on this last index). Unless India is in a quantum superposition that collapses into a dictatorship when Swedes look and a democracy when Anglos look, these indices are objectively incorrect. There’s no way to look up what data they use to classify India as a dictatorship because they don’t use data. They publish some narratives to justify their scores but that’s done independently of the opinion survey and doesn’t mean much. BJP has also made a response to these indices (saying pretty much the same thing).

    Western media and diplomats regularly bring up these scores when all it says is that “we’ve surveyed our opinions and determined that we don’t like you”. That’s not even paraphrasing, that’s literally all it is. “Freedom” and “Democracy” are meaningless buzzwords they use to describe their feelings.

    A recent (2023) attempt was made to use real data to rank countries. Using actual data, India’s score slightly improved after BJP got elected. However, these people have extremely low quality data (and some countries with little to no data, like China, occasionally get perfect scores for democracy). Two months ago, V-Dem made a response to the previous paper. However, it doesn’t seem like they would change their methodology since that would make their 30 years of non-data obsolete.

  15. To elaborate on the two commonly cited indices:

    These are the 2020 and 2022 Liberal Democracy Indices by V-Dem:

    LDI2020.thumb.png.0925d89e1fed26231ac8af8242cb5213.png

    LDI2022.thumb.PNG.ddcdfe381634cb11893c2cdea438fae9.PNG

     

    These are the 2020 and 2022 indices by EIU:

    EIU2020.thumb.png.a2e8fe365797f39dd640f684e405b263.png

    EIU2022.thumb.png.0d66a00ec00273cee1d365a868d9f444.png

     

    Contrasting the two 2020 indices, the V-Dem one makes no sense. They claim Myanmar is as democratic as Malaysia and more democratic than Thailand, which is total bullshit. They fixed Myanmar in 2022, but EIU’s index never had that problem. Another issue is that V-Dem claims that Bangladesh is less democratic than Nepal and Pakistan, which again makes no sense (and the issue doesn’t exist with EIU). Another discrepancy is that Iraq is more democratic than Turkey according to V-Dem, but that’s not the case with EIU.

    Of course, one of the biggest discrepancy between the two indices is India (India is in the same sub-category as the US in one index and a dictatorship in the other).

     

    Understanding why BJP actually uses Hindu nationalism is difficult to comprehend. To add more context, the last attempt to transition India into a more capitalist economy was in 1991. This happened after leftist governments nationalized major companies and banks culminating in the 1991 economic crisis. The 1991 reforms were incomplete because they didn’t liberalize banking and finance. Soon after, USA sanctioned India for trying to develop nukes but the sanctions didn’t work due to the growth spurt from the recent partial economic liberalization and were repealed. INC’s reward for the 1991 reforms was loss of votes (they lost the 1996 elections).

    Post 1991 (especially, after losing elections), INC’s strategy was to drag out India’s transition to a capitalist economy over a period of a century or more and pray that leftist intellectuals don’t notice or call them out on it. BJP is much more blatant about their desire to transition into a more capitalist economy. They don’t try to hide it like INC. However, BJP has backed down from many economic liberalization policies because they’re afraid of losing elections. The more unpopular their economic policies become, the more they lean on Hindu nationalism for winning elections. BJP also receives a lot of negative press from leftist intellectuals within India as well as from the West. This partially explains BJP’s Hindu nationalism: it’s part of their election strategy (there’s no point in preaching about Capitalism if you can’t win elections).

     

    Regarding the EIU index, from an opinion piece by a conservative Australian journal (written by Salvatore Babones):

    Spoiler

    The magazine itself was historically a classically liberal publication, but in recent decades it has taken on more of a liberal internationalist identity. The Economist has taken a strong editorial stance against India’s current BJP government, running collectively-authored articles under headlines like “Narendra Modi Threatens to Turn India into a One-Party State” (November 28, 2020) and “The Organs of India’s Democracy Are Decaying” (February 12, 2022). The EIU’s rating of Indian democracy reached an all-time low in 2021, when the organisation warned of “democratic backsliding under the leadership of Narendra Modi … whose policies have fomented anti-Muslim feeling and religious strife [and] damaged the political fabric of the country”. As primary evidence to support this claim, the EIU cited “the Citizenship (Amendment) Act 2019 [CAA] … [which] introduces a religious element to the conceptualisation of Indian citizenship, a step that many critics see as undermining the secular basis of the Indian state”.

    The CAA created a path to citizenship for non-Muslim religious refugees from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Pakistan. All three of these countries are Islamic republics in which Islam is the official state religion and non-Muslims face serious official and/or societal persecution. In Afghanistan and Pakistan, the threats faced by non-Muslims are constant and extreme; in Bangladesh, they are episodic but nonetheless serious. Prima facie, it seems quite sensible for India to grant blanket protective status to non-Muslim immigrants from countries where non-Muslims are widely persecuted, but to continue to require Muslim immigrants from those countries to give specific evidence of persecution in order to qualify for asylum. It is hard to see why Muslim immigrants from officially Muslim countries should automatically qualify for refugee status upon immigration to India.

    I oppose CAA but comparing CAA (which is temporary) to refugee laws in other countries, it doesn’t make sense why USA, Japan, European countries, etc aren’t considered dictatorships (when they don’t allow everyone to qualify for refugee status).

    EIU slightly increased India’s score in 2022:

    Quote

    In its 2022 report, the EIU found a slight improvement in the quality of India’s democracy, citing “year-long protests by farmers [that] eventually forced the government to repeal the farm laws that it had introduced in 2020”.[7] This seems to show the EIU taking a political position on lawful legislation; an evaluation of the quality of democracy should be agnostic with respect to agricultural policy, wherever the sympathies of the evaluators may lie. The EIU explained that “the victory of the protesters, as well as some election defeats for the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, showed that there are mechanisms and institutions in place to allow government accountability to the electorate between national elections”. This assumes that the protesting farmers represented the opinion of the national electorate, an empirical claim that is far from certain.[8] As for the implication that BJP electoral defeats demonstrate democracy in action, the EIU seems to be unaware that the BJP holds only 303 of the 543 seats in the lower house of India’s parliament (the Lok Sabha) and 91 of 245 seats in the upper house (the Rajya Sabha). India’s politics are highly competitive, and although the BJP is currently the country’s governing party, its proportional hold on power is in line with that of governing parties in other liberal democracies.

    Thus becoming less liberal (but perhaps more democratic because BJP listened to farmer’s protests and repealed the farm laws despite having a parliamentary majority) has allowed India to be in the same sub-category (7.01-8.00) as the US in their 2022 index.

    Because “the West” regularly (and potentially falsely) accuses India of being a dictatorship (because of the BJP), BJP has sort of taken an anti-Western stance (although they’re more pro-capitalist than leftist parties). Leftist political parties in India get more positive press (or at least, don’t get accused of being a dictatorship), which is part of the reason BJP considers them Western stooges. Leftist parties in India care about political freedom but don’t openly care about capitalism. Hindu nationalists think that leftists will destroy India’s economy to make the West happy.

    Regarding foreign policy, US wants India to be subservient to them, which BJP won’t agree to (and they’re considered to be dictators without human rights by Western countries anyway, so there’s also no incentive to be allies with India from the side of Western countries as well). According to Irfan Nooruddin, the current sentiment from the West is that India should be grateful to the West (perhaps for not being bombed for being a "dictatorship") and that India owes the West because they haven’t made India their vassal state yet.

  16. 5 hours ago, Doug Morris said:

    Has anyone compared the BJP to Pinochet in Chile?

    I don't know about comparisons to Pinochet specifically, but BJP is often compared to populists worldwide who have attempted to consolidate and centralize power within the framework of a democracy. The general narrative I've seen is that political parties worldwide have "figured out democracy", in the sense that they've figured out how to consolidate power, with little to no challenge from opposition parties, within a democratic system and without significant opposition from the West (by paying some homage to neoliberalism).

    Some comparisons could be made with Pinochet but the army does not interfere with elections in India and India is still functioning within the framework of a democracy (Modi hasn't really tried to topple democracy and doesn't need to. He has extremely high approval ratings, one of the largest in the world ).

  17. On 12/27/2022 at 1:47 AM, Eiuol said:

    I should add that India is the only country there that arouses my suspicion as not worth considering a dictatorship. But I don't know much about Indian politics, and that probably means their political system is worse than I thought. 

    This question was asked in another thread ("About the Russian aggression of Ukraine"), but that thread's too big and I want to answer this question about what's going on in India (or at least prompt a discussion).

    As an introduction: India is governed by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), a Hindu-nationalist party under the leadership of Narendra Modi. Before BJP, Indian electoral politics was dominated by pressure groups involving thousands of castes and ethno-linguistic groups who wanted their share of political influence and tax collections. BJP recently came to power in 2014 and got re-elected in 2019 (the next national election is in 2024 and they’ll probably win again). The principal opposition is the Indian National Congress (simply, Congress), considered to be puppets of Western leftists/elites by the BJP, under the leadership of Rahul Gandhi (the heir of the Gandhi dynasty), commonly referred to as Pappu (name associated with a child or a stupid person).

    Modi simplified the electoral politics of India into “Hindus vs. Muslims” and sprinkled it with some utopian notion of a cultural revival of Hindu civilization after centuries of Muslim, European and leftist rule.

    BJP sees East Asian countries such as Japan, South Korea, Singapore, China, etc as the ideal, especially in terms of their homogeneity (or domination by one group, in the case of Singapore). They think the lack of homogeneity in India is the reason for identity politics in India and the reason India is so poor compared to North-East Asia (they make exceptions for Hindu vs. Muslim politics).

    BJP claims to dislike electoral battles between upper castes and lower castes and claims to want to end affirmative action quotas for lower caste Indians and minorities. In most states, around 50% of seats are reserved for various communities in most government institutions (educational or otherwise). Some states (like Arunachal Pradesh) has 80% reservation for some communities, with the rest of the population competing for the other 20%. BJP wants to make Hindi the national language of India (India currently doesn’t have any national language). They sort of want to create a pan Indian ethnic group. They claim that Indo-European migrations into India (esp. North India) did not happen and have their own Out of India conspiracy theory. Using this, they claim that there are no differences between North Indians and South Indians and that Aryans and Dravidians don’t exist/never existed (and any difference, if it exists, are gradual and doesn't suggest anything about history). They want to construct a narrative that Hindus (unlike Muslims and Europeans) did not invade any part of India and are indigenous to India and always has been. India has Sharia for Muslims which were implemented by previous leftist governments. BJP wants to introduce a Uniform Civil Code, a common personal law for Muslims, Hindus and everybody else.

    BJP wants to make Hindus the dominant group in India. In 2019, they passed the Citizenship Amendment Act, which gave citizenship status to non-Muslim undocumented migrants (this was partially inspired by Israel). This sparked protests all over India, resulting in 27 deaths. There are allegedly around 30million undocumented Bengladeshi migrants in India. BJP is in the process of creating a National Register of Citizens, which can be used to deport everyone not on the list, particularly Muslims. They have created detention centres to round up Bengali migrants. Another BJP policy inspired by Israel is the bulldozing of homes/shops primarily belonging to Muslims. Muslims suspected of being “anti-national” are accused of having no documents to prove ownership of their land/house and have their homes bulldozed by the government. In 2022, BJP spokesperson Nupur Sharma called Prophet Mohammed a pedophile. This resulted in protests, some killings and a beheading (of Kanhaiya Lal). Modi presided over the 2002 Gujarat Riots as Chief Minister (of the Indian state of Gujarat). Rana Ayyub, who is a Muslim journalist from Mumbai claims that the 2002 Gujarat riots was a genocide and thinks more is to come.

    Propaganda songs and movies are also on the rise. Songs asking Hindus to harm or kill Muslims have become more common. In 2022, a movie called ‘The Kashmir Files’ was released accusing Kashmiri Muslims of genociding Hindus in 1990. The movie was made tax exempt by the BJP in many states and became the third highest grossing Bollywood movie of 2022. In May 2023, a movie called ‘The Kerala Story’ was released, accusing Muslims in Kerala of converting Christian and Hindu women in the Indian state of Kerala to Islam and turning them into ISIS brides. It’s the third highest grossing Bollywood movie of 2023 so far. Another movie, ‘72 Hoorain’ just got released two days ago.

    Regarding free speech, BJP has recently passed laws to give themselves power over what can be written online. In 2023, BJP banned the BBC documentary ‘India: The Modi Question’ which was about the 2002 Gujarat riots and later raided BBC offices in India, accusing them of tax avoidance.

    Economically, BJP follows Dirigisme. In 2014, BJP promised to bring ‘Minimum Government and Maximum Governance’. BJP is planning to invest over 1 Trillion USD on transport and other infrastructure in the near term. They want to replicate the successes of North East Asian economies. In 2020, BJP tried to deregulate the agricultural markets in India with the Farm Bills, but millions of people protested and it was repealed. Air India was privatized in 2022. They have  a general policy of privatizing public companies which were nationalized decades ago. In 2016, the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) was launched by the government for easy digital payments (making up over 50% of digital transactions in India now and is starting to be accepted internationally, along with ‘India Stack’, a system for authentication and online identity). BJP has significant collusion with the Adani Group (a significant number of airports and sea ports in India were sold to Adani by BJP). When Adani shares crashed after the Hindenburg report, BJP made the public LIC Corporation buy Adani shares to prop up their market value. India plans to start manufacturing chips in the near future with US collaboration. India is projected to be the third largest economy by 2030. Goldman Sachs projects India to be the second largest economy (nominal GDP) by 2075, but such long term projections don’t have much meaning.

     

    Now coming back to question of electoral autocracy and dictatorship in India: India has considerably centralized its powers since 2014. Some criticism of V-Dem’s characterization of India as an “electoral autocracy” has been provided by Salvatore Babones from the University of Sydney. Many leftists consider him to be on the BJP payroll. According to him, the reason India scores low on V-Dem’s democracy index is because its results are derived from opinion surveys of experts and he claims that the expert intellectuals in India are anti-India. He claims that the low score for Freedom of the Press in India is because they don’t normalize the deaths of journalists in India by the country’s population. If we did that, he claims that India is between Western Europe and USA in terms of journalist safety (and one of the safest countries in the world for journalists). Alternatively, according to the Economist’s democracy index, India gets a score of 7.04, the 46th most democratic country in the world and the 7th most democratic in Asia (including the Middle East). USA is #30. I’m not sure how India is among the freest quarter of the world in one index and a “dictatorship” in another index (I guess those are the perks of being one of the poorest countries in the world and where nothing really makes sense).

    My personal opinion is that the BJP is definitely becoming more autocratic but they’re liberalizing India’s economy to some extent. They’re called “neoliberal fascists” for a reason.

     

  18. 2 hours ago, TruthSeeker946 said:

    She laments the "savage tribes of Asia and Africa" being "granted the sovereign  "right" to slaughter one another in racial conflict"

    Not sure what she's referring to.

    Compared to the racial conflicts Euro savages had with Native Americans, Aboriginal Australians, Jews, Gypsies, Sub Saharan Africans, Indians, Japanese, Chinese etc, were there bigger, non-religious, racial conflicts in Asia? Did China secretly genocide India? Did Saudi Arabia secretly genocide Japan? Did Singapore bomb half the population of the Middle East, like the savage Euros? Maybe she's talking about Israel, but I don't think they can compete with the savage tribes from Europe (correct me if I'm wrong). Israel also had a little "help" from these Euro savages.

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