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As always Zafar comes through with citizen journalism so detailed and thoughtful it puts Ricochet (momentarily!) in the same league as The Economist or the South China Morning Post. Thank you for intelligent insight we’d be unlikely to see anywhere else.
The overlap between outlawing beef sales and Hindu political strength is visually striking. It’s another reminder that this is still a rather illiberal world in most respects.
North Sentinel Island is pretty illiberal, even though they, apparently, allow beef sales.
Regarding saffron: Cutting edge Sixties political commentary by Donovan.
Do they even have cattle? Is there any way to safely find out without getting an arrow to the eye?
The parts of the country that don’t have beef bans are also majority Hindu. I’ve chucked up a possible explanation, but here is another (possibly related):
Also: Citizen Journalist sounds very flash. I’m not sure it applies as I’m not in India reporting from the ground. Perhaps Citizen Armchair Theorist?
No cows, no money.
Sounds like my problem. 😁
I wonder if anyone in India ever says, “A lakh crore here, a lakh crore there, pretty soon you’re talking some real money!” If anyone does, is it considered funny? Clever? Hackneyed?
Speaking of funny, I clicked the Daily O’s Humour link. A phrase which will never catch on in the U.S. is “You don’t even have the skill to fry pakodas.”
I’ve never heard of a lakh crore!
That’s 10,000,000,000,000. (Ten billion?)
For this election:
“The New Delhi-based Centre for Media Studies (CMS) estimates almost $8.6 billion will be spent on this year’s vote, roughly twice the 2014 election.
“The figure would surpass OpenSecrets.org’s estimate that $6.5 billion was spent in the 2016 U.S. presidential and congressional elections.
“Recent reforms under Modi may have fueled the spending spree: Companies can fund parties anonymously through new ‘electoral bonds’ and they no longer face a donations cap. Activists say that gives corporations too much sway and obscures ties between politicians and businessmen.
“About 95 percent of electoral bonds snapped up in a first tranche offering last year went to the BJP, according to data reviewed by Reuters through a Right To Information request and BJP filings.”
////
Which is a lot of pakoras.
Whether they have them or not, they appear to be allowed to sell them.
It must make being a poll worker there somewhat difficult. Who’d they vote for in the election?
Thanks, Zafar!
I’ve been curiously following the development of nationalism in India through digital technology. It’s an amazing world to watch &, provided that Modi is anywhere as great as he thinks he is, India has a future both as an Asian power, needed by America, not just itself in need, & a worthy rival of China. Now, there are certain obstacles along the way. Political organization at the level of the BJP obviously includes bunches of criminals & people who should be called criminals, but they’re not. On the other hand, it’s not obvious to me that the people who have the technological skills required to help along the change in India could ever become adepts of Indian nationalism or even semi-skeptical servants of it. But that seems to be the only way for Indians to even have politics!
So a few dangerous thoughts, if you have time to think about them & answer. My sense is, most Indian languages will be wiped out in a generation or two, at any rate, they will become insignificant.
I think the religious side of nationalism is likely to increase, including its moral interdictions & the pious cruelties already mentioned in the conversation. All things considered, I think that’s preferable. I’m not sure how, without moral bonds far stronger than anything liberalism can offer, would it be possible to control politically some of the obscenely rich people going around in India, who don’t strike this outsider as any more patriotic than, say, Silicon Valley elites are in America…
I’m not sure you’ve ever read or cared for Kipling’s Kim, but it strikes me as both wonderful & wise. It certainly shows that Kipling saw that India is not just a country–not only because it wasn’t at all a country then–but a world, in a way America is, China is, but almost nothing else. I get the sense that much of the wonderful variety of India will go away soon, to be forgotten as though it had never existed–I am not enthusiastic about this. But I also get the sense that tech-powered commerce is now capable of lifting a lot of small towns & even villages (tier 3 & 4 cities at least) out of poverty & getting them, in a sense, moving. Indians have powers that are far less unusual out of India than within India; if the dogmatic slumber is over & people will get doing things, I get a sense that nationalism will be both attractive & necessary to them. I see far more likelihood of actual improvements in people’s lives & economic growth, too, among BJP-India, so to speak, than whatever might turn out to become anti-BJP India.
Looking forward to your thoughts & thanks, as always, for your impressive reporting & analysis!
Nobody’s that great, but he is an indicator of what much of India aspires to.
Or even if they are, it doesn’t seem to be a disqualification.
What is more disturbing is that some crimes are actually vote getters. In some ways we feel like Europe in the 1930s. Lots of Autobahns and then war, if it goes badly, but India moderates all things (Islam, Communism, Fascism, Nationalism) by its nature – so maybe not.
That hasn’t been the case. Or to put it another way, educational qualifications don’t seem to immunise people against political coarseness.
India has over 400 languages, and most of them will dwindle.
The major languages – with their own scripts, media, cinema and literary history – are unlikely to dwindle so fast; Hindi (for eg) has over 500,000,000 speakers, though I do notice that people mix English in with their Hindi much more than the used to across a broader economic spectrum.
So perhaps? Though language and tradition is preserved by religion, and religious practice is stubbornly diverse across the country.
The States are based on language areas, so each of the big ones has a political arena for expression and patronage. Also – speaking more than one language at a conversational level seems like less of a big deal in India, which leaves space for more than one language in the social environment.
Right now “nationalism” is giving these people exactly what they want. (Lower taxes, economic growth that focuses on profits for capital.) Of course Indian economic elites are nationalists!
[And like Germany in the 1930s, India has its communists, and for the same reasons.]
On a broader scale India is increasingly re-discovering itself – or recovering from colonialism (including Muslim colonialism). It is quite often doing this in (Indian) English, but it has the advantage of an essentially in tact culture, it is not turning into a version of the West. India is (like most large countries) hugely self-obsessed and remains deeply socially traditional (perhaps as a reaction to the incredibly rapid changes since 1947). Hindu Nationalism isn’t responsible for that, in fact it depends on catering to it.
Kipling was right in seeing India as a world unto itself – a civilisation as much as a country. But far more than by Kipling, the heart of India is expressed in the stories that still captivate it – prime among them the Ramayana (and the Mahabharata) – which is not just re-enacted across the country in traditional performances, but which have started to spawn a series of ‘re-tellings’ – some of them surprisingly engaging. (Seriously, even as an interaction with the outer world – this one is delightful.)
It feels somehow significant that India still prefers movies made in Bollywood and the regional versions (Tollywood, Mollywood, etc.) to dubbed Hollywood products. Ditto with music and dance. (Not to mention the food.) There has to be something going on if a country keeps producing and overwhelmingly consuming its own culture by preference.
Maybe some of this will change as the country becomes richer and more engaged with the wider world, but I think the core of it will remain as it is. I think that the world will become more like us more than we become like the rest of the world. Is that cultural confidence or delusion? Only time will tell.
Excellent observations on this complex topic. Through work, I have spent 4 weeks a year in India over the last 8 years. Since I am traveling on business, I mostly interact with the middle class and politics don’t often come up as it is a work context. But I have seen tremendous growth economically and a spirit in people that seems to show that anyone can succeed if you work hard enough (perhaps with the help of some jugaad).
In this election, it seems to me that the appeal to nationalism was partially a reaction to the opposition. In several states, notably West Bengal, the opposition banded together to be the anti-Modi. If you are going to oppose that sort of attack, how better to fight it than to make yourself the embodiment of the country, putting your opponents in the position of being anti-India?
On beef, while slaughter of beef is banned in Maharashtra (the western state where Mumbai is located), you can still get beef in some restaurants.
On language, unlike in the US or particularly France, no one cares if you mispronounced something. This makes it hard to learn the local languages, but reflects the tremendous linguistic diversity. As long as two people mostly understand each other, they don’t care about pronunciation.
My business associates in India are overjoyed by the election result.
Clavius – where do you usually go in India?
I had heard that while it is legal to serve beef in Mumbai (or at least not specifically illegal) it is against the law to slaughter cow, bullocks or calves and also illegal to possess their meat. Which seems contradictory and an invitation to graft. Though this article reports that it depends on where the beef is sourced. Maharashtrian beef is illegal, Bengal beef is okay.
I always visit Mumbai and Bangalore as that is where the main teams are. We have added a team in Gandhinagar (next to Ahmedabad) so that has become a regular stop. Every 18 months I will visit Chennai. I have had two trips to Bhubaneswar. At the start of this stint, we made sure we a reason to visit Dehli so we could take a side trip to the Taj Mahal in Agra. Before my travel became regular, I had a business trip (these are all business trips actually) that included Pune, Hyderabad, and Kolkata.
The one specific example of beef that I can recall in Mumbai I believe was imported from Australia. It was at the Italian restaurant in the Grand Hyatt.