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Comment by rishav_sharan | Hacker News Reader

I don't have much hope left in India. We deserve the people we vote for. India has chosen fundamentalism and fascism.

The worst thing is that despite all data and stats around their failures, the current regime enjoys immense popularity. The opposition is irrelevant, the media and news portals are completely subservient to the regime. And even the SC, once the champions of our democracy are pretty much a laughing stock for whom issuing contempt cases over twitter posts to comedians is too much important.

India finally has single issue voters. And this issue isn't poverty, corruption, progress or anything like that. It's just Hindutva. This religious fundamentalism is what will finally end the great Indian experiment.

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I will start with a quibble to make a point. India has a republican form of govt just like the US not a Democracy. Republican forms of governance have existed in India for over 2000+ years [1]. They will survive whatever foreboding you have real or imagined that will befall the "great indian experiment" which is not an experiment except for those whose history starts in 1947.

Hinduism has been present in India for over 3000 years. Hindu kingdoms welcomed Jews (~900BC), Christians (52 AD), Zoorastrians (600AD), Muslims (550 AD), Armenians (1500AD) who have lived and prospered without molestation for millenia because of the pluralistic nature of Hinduism. Zoorastrians who were wiped out in Persia (Iran) by their own kith and kin who converted have prospered in India to the point that this tiny minority (less than 100k) leads several of the top-20 conglomerates (e.g. Tata). Hinduism is not just tolerant but pluralistic because it acknowledges multiple paths to god unlike any other religion.

Pluralism >>> Tolerance.

Multi-religious, multi-ethnic India will survive because of Hinduism not in-spite of it. Case in point, the neighboring states of Pakistan and Bangladesh are both Islamic and the non-muslim population has dwindled precipitously from 20% in 1947 to less than 10% and they are well on their way to becoming 99% Muslim the next couple decades.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ga%E1%B9%87a_sangha

Indonesia is a highly diverse Muslim majority country, with a political system inspired by Indian secularist values, and it has seen much less conflict than India has in recent years. All of your assertions fall flat. To give an example from the Muslim side, Jewish refugees escaping from Spanish repression in the 1550s-1600s escaped to the Ottoman Empire, where they were welcomed and shepherded into the bureaucracy.

Hinduism and it's openness may have been responsible for letting people live in harmony for close to 3 millennia, but what we see is not the Hinduism of those times, but a rabid bastardization of it, akin to Islamic radicalization we see in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Hmm Indonesia may not be the best of examples ? https://www.theweek.co.uk/103382/is-indonesia-becoming-a-sha...

Did they pass it? I don't see anything, apart from it being draft legislation. AFAIK, Aceh is the only place (shithole tbh) which actively promulgates Sharia Law. And even then, violence in Indonesia is nowhere near that in India in recent years.

> And even then, violence in Indonesia is nowhere near that in India in recent years.

Crime stats indicate a very different picture of Indonesia, even with a disproportionate population ratio of India[0]

>I don't see anything, apart from it being draft legislation. AFAIK, Aceh is the only place (shithole tbh) which actively promulgates Sharia Law.

AFAIK there are legal provisions for a parallel legal system to adjudicate,override dutch-roman legal system across all regions of Indonesia. [1][2]

[0]: https://www.numbeo.com/crime/rankings_by_country.jsp

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application_of_Sharia_by_count...

[2]: http://factsanddetails.com/indonesia/Government_Military_Cri...

I can bring up unreported crimes in India which are a whole another animal. At least the rule of law is followed to a much higher degree in Indonesia (except for Aceh).

And is the Dutch-Roman system a perfect legal system to be followed by their former subjects? Sometimes the folks on this site are laughable. Those provisions exist because the rules of that period, and of the former colonial power are barely applicable in any part. In fact, India and Singapore are some countries that still suffer from the imposition of outdated British laws under an "Anglo-Roman" legal system (eg: the sedition laws which can be used to silence any opposition). Colonial laws were very different from the laws imposed in the home countries. And very discriminatory too. Of course, if they're going to directly port the legal system (to maintain a semblance of order during transition), they might also incorporate caveats so that BS laws can be revised.

Jews in Ottoman Turkey? Sharia law in Indonesia? What do they have to do with India? I wish you would google these things before posting such bizarre notions.

The word secular was only inserted into the Indian constitution in 1977. How did it inspire Indonesian "secularism"? As for the vaunted Indonesian secularism you tout - is it letting the other religions live and practice or actually allowing them to prosper? How many non-muslims reach higher office in Indonesia. How many non-muslims in Indonesia have a shot at becoming president?

Once a country's population reaches more than 40-50% Islamic, Sharia law and eventual annihilation of the non-muslim population is just a matter of time. The data shows this again and again - Copts in Egypt, Northern Nigeria, Hindus in Kashmir, Bangladesh, Turkey (Armenians/Assyrians/Greeks), Iraq (Assyrians)......

The Jews of Europe developed into a professional class because of forced urbanization in Europe. They were very desirable immigrants in the 16th century like the highly educated technology class that is courted by every country. What about the pogroms against Jews that were prevelant in most of Arabia from Morocco to the Arabian peninsula? The Arabic pogroms against Jews were less severe than European pogroms against Jews but hardly a virtue.

Islam explicitly sanctions capture, trading and sexual slavery of non-muslim women and trading and ownership of slaves in general. Did you know historians have compiled price indices of the price of non-muslim women sold in the markets of the Ottoman Empire over hundreds of years? Sexual slavery for women and non-muslim men being castrated was the norm till Ataturk (20th century!) and about 50% of the boys died during castration. If you want to talk of the Ottoman Empire as a beacon of tolerance you can watch this truly disturbing video of slavery in Islam and the Ottoman empire [1]. On second thought, don't watch the video as it is truly disturbing.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XIjPPRf0YZk&t

You're so intelligent, you're actually sharing a channel that's named "Apostate Prophet". Clearly they don't have an agenda and are totally impartial right? You must be so brilliant!

Maybe next time use actual history books for reference, instead of YT channels. Maybe then you won't numb your grey matter willingly.

Brilliant. Ad-hominen attacks because you cannot stomach the facts. Would those facts be more palatable if they were from a channel called GodIsGreat?

You could have watched the video and rebutted the facts that are inconvenient to your version of reality.

Because it's very likely that the channel decides to selectively choose facts and spit out nonsense, leading to its entire content to be worthless?

I can give out a million channels that will talk about how glorious the Ottoman Empire and the Mughal Empire were without highlighting the massacres or corruption within them. I'm not, because that would be as distasteful as you are.

Not to mention, every one of your comments here on this thread seems to be about advancing an agenda that is very much aligned with that of the Hindu-nationalist party.

This is the problem with woke kids today. The narrative is more dear than the facts. Only facts from "approved" sources and affiliations. 1984 has arrived.

Instead of attacking me and called me names take that video and challenge any of the facts in there. Or go back to reddit.

This is not Twitter. Please do not make personal attack on others.

The subcontinent will always have people. The experiment failing doesn't mean people and place won't survive. The state however may not, partition was 70 years ago. And what if it merely survives but do not thrive. What if experient caps India as a lower middle income country, or worse, regress.

If people in US can be misled by fake news, India stood little chance. Facebook and WhatsApp have been used effectively to brainwash the general public in India.

As Barack Obama described in his new book 'Promised Land', the chances of democracy surviving in a multi-ethnic, multi-religious poor country like India was precarious at best. BJP and RSS has effectively made sure that democracy dies in India

This is a problem in all cultures where proscriptivist philosophies have enough currency that people will actively oppose general purpose freedom. Democracy requires a willingness to tolerate differences of opinion and behavior.

> BJP and RSS has effectively made sure that democracy dies in India

That's a weird statement to make, considering that the current PM is a self-made man without any old money, family name or ivy league connections. Infact, most of the high ranking people in his cabinet are self-made men like him. The current Home Minister of India for example started his career as a polling-booth level canvasser in the party.

If a poor self-made man rising to the top in free and fair elections (results accepted by everyone) is a murder of democracy, then you need to find the correct definition of democracy.

> Infact, most of the high ranking people in his cabinet are self-made men like him.

We hear a lot about how the current government is less corrupt and less dynastic. But their actions say otherwise[1][2][3].

[1] https://m.thewire.in/article/politics/bjp-congress-political...

[2] https://www.thenewsminute.com/article/electoral-bonds-contro...

[3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrest_of_Kafeel_Khan

There are many examples of fascists who were self-made men. It doesn’t have anything to do with democracy at all.

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