India and China both face a significantly more difficult geopolitical reality than the USA.
Some of the world's most westernized and developed countries (Spain, Israel) are starting to use violence and suppressive tactics now that they are faced with even the smallest amount of secessionist unrest.
Kashmir is one of the most militarized border zones alongside the West Bank. I fully agree that there might be better and less suppressive methods that the Govt. can use to deal with the Kashmir issue, but to act as though a USA like policy would work in countries with very different ground realities is being willfully arrogant.
At the risk of sounding too cold, if the choice was between death of a few million people (which India has a long history of) and complete destruction of communication frameworks. I would choose that latter.
Now the big problem with what the Indian Govt. is doing, is that this has been going on for almost a year and they are making no efforts to bring Kashmir back to "normalcy". Such draconian policies should only come into place for very short durations with measures for removal, the second unrest goes below a certain point.
I'm not convinced one is being traded for another... possibly quite the opposite.
We have?
One of the problems when giving a government powers like this for a “short duration” is they tend to end up sticking a lot longer than that.
Shutdown hundreds of critical newspapers. Suspended habeus corpus. And war.
https://wiki.lincolntelegrams.com/index.php?title=Lincoln_an...
Not to mention an unrealistic threat of secession led to the deportation of up to 2 million mexican americans.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican_Repatriation
Which was tied to
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zimmermann_Telegram
and accelerated due to the Great Depression.
Of course the fear that japanese americans may try to secede and align with japan got them put in concentration camps.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_Japanese_America...
> India and China both face a significantly more difficult geopolitical reality than the USA.
Both of them face separatism funded by foreign nations which adds an extra level of concern.
> but to act as though a USA like policy would work in countries with very different ground realities is being willfully arrogant.
If you think this is ignorant, go look up US views on free trade and protectionism. In the media, you'll see everyone say the US has always been pro-free trade. History shows otherwise.
President Abraham Lincoln declared, "Give us a protective tariff and we will have the greatest nation on earth." Lincoln warned that "the abandonment of the protective policy by the American Government ... must produce want and ruin among our people."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protectionism_in_the_United_St...
Almost all the commonly held beliefs we've been brainwashed to accept by the media are simply lies. Democracy? Ask the bolivians, venezuelans, iranians, etc. Freedom? Ask the slaves in libya or the poor slaving away in saudi arabia, kuwait, etc.
We are much more connected now than he was in the 1800s, so the stupid people have enough voice to demand the freedom to make secession speeches. It is an unheard of concept in history and until we kill the idea of a nation state, secession is always a threat to societal fabric. But try to make a rabid liberal "muhhh democracy" crier understand this and they'll retort with nonsensical and false moral equivalents.
Let's not associate the third-world with authoritarian or fascist.
In addition, the term itself is outdated.
Even the wrong-yet-common definition of "poor" doesn't fit here, because internet censorship isn't a function of wealth: Saudi Arabia is rather rich yet unfree. Russia and China area also not "third world".
Russia, a leading internet censor, actually happens to be the (current version of) a country that used to be the definition of either "first" or "second" world.
You mean the one involving outsourcing IP law enforcement to private cartels amid increasing calls to remove 230 protections from public-facing internet companies?
Yes some things need a lot of work, but it's hardly "cut off everyone from the internet" level... not even close.
The American formula allows foreign agents to conduct elaborate, micro-targeted psyops campaigns to manipulate our elections; enables a dramatic resurgence in previously fading extremist ideologies; and facilitates one of the largest expansions of economic and regional inequality in American history?
I don't know if we can really assert we have this figured out. These are all especially areas of concern for governments like India and China, where fear of balkanization, civil war, and severe communitarian violence are either contemporary problems or have been fairly recently in their political histories.
But it takes strong laws, a strong / independent judiciary... and politicians who want to maintain the rule of law regardless of how convenient it is for them personally. Sadly it's not just a thing you "have" and keep.
India and China don't have those things.