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Comment by lordleft | Hacker News Reader

This is ridiculous. India is a democracy. Spirited debate and criticism is salutary and necessary. I am deeply disappointed by this decision. It only strengthens those voices in the subcontinent that equate critique to betrayal.

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> India is a democracy

That makes it sound like it's a binary thing. There's an ever-mutating spectrum that all countries are placed on. There's always some "democratic" countries that have so little generational experience being one that they still don't quite understand how to behave like one. Corruption and authoritarianism comes so easily. Arguably the same is true for the other end of the spectrum: countries that have relished the pleasures of democracy for so long that they forget why it's a big !@#$ing deal to protect free speech in all its forms.

You end up with countries with a natural inclination to shut John Oliver up and other countries who don't realise they need to be very upset about, and resistant to the forces that push for that.

An update on India: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/12/09/blood-and-soil...

(I have no independent knowledge, but it seems things are pretty bad?)

How Hitler's 'Mein Kampf' Became a Bestseller in India [1]

Hitler’s Hindus: The Rise and Rise of India’s Nazi-loving Nationalists [2]

[1] https://www.mic.com/articles/120411/how-hitler-s-mein-kampf-...

[2] https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/hitlers-hindus-indias-nazi-l...

Germany and especially Japan, during ww2, were ardent supporters of indian independence for obvious reasons.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Legion

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_National_Army

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azad_Hind

So Hitler doesn't have as negative a connotation in india and most of the non-western world just like Churchill doesn't have as negative a connotation in israel or the west as he does in india or the rest of the non-western world.

History is much more complex than we are told it is. It isn't black and white. That's why traveling is so important. You realize that everyone is living in their own little bubble.

Please tell me exactly how India’s stance on prioritizing Christians, Buddhists, Hindus etc is worse than the US stance of prioritizing just Christians

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/02/07/most-refuge...

Edit: instead of downvoting, engage in conversation.

Both are bad? I'd think most people who disagree with Modi's government's policies also disagree with the policies of the Trump administration. Both countries are pluralistic democracies without state religions.

Treating unequally suffering refugees as equal is discriminatory.

There is nothing like an "unequally suffering refugee."

The citizenship law is against the vision, articles, ideals and ethos of Indian constitution. Its nothing but thinly veiled Islamophobia.

> unequally suffering refugees

Lolwut? Is there a standardized suffering scale?

You're assuming the state had a role in this

The state does not always have to directly constrain speech to create an environment hostile to free expression. Though they've certainly censored media connected to controversial topics like Kashmir before. In a sense, this sort of voluntary self-censorship is even more concerning, because it reflects a certain political temperature.

I believe they shut down all internet access in Kashmir, for months, following the conversion of Kashmir from a State into a Territory. Internet is now "back", in the sense that only 300+ white sites are now accessible again. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/26/world/asia/kashmir-intern...

So yeah... India is a troubled democracy with a tenuous relationship with freedom of speech.

So how to draw the distinction between this sort of self-censorship and the self-censorship that has often been seen as a positive outcome by those who defend it with the rational that the company is a private organization and isn't beholden to offer any concepts such as freedom of speech?

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