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> In India, the Judiciary has primacy over legislative.

You should read the Constitution before making random statements like these. The Parliament is supreme because every part of the Supreme Court (size, age of the judges etc) is in the hands of Parliament.

Unfortunately, like most countries including the United States, politicians prefer to use the Supreme Court to tackle knotty political issues. So, from the outside, it looks as if these courts are all powerful. Till someone proves that they are not. Like Indira Gandhi did during the Emergency.

The US has Marbury v. Madison. We have the Basic Structure Doctrine. The SCI invented a "Collegium" in the same way that they did the BSD. I am not going to go into whether these things are good or bad.

If the President asked the judges to go pound sand, there is nothing can can do about it except hold a press conference.

I consider the striking down of the NJAC to be illegitimate. If the government of the day had a backbone, every single judge would have been impeached.

Under the new tax regime, individual income up to ₹750,000 is tax free due to a combination of standard deduction and 87A.

Given that many small businesses often accept UPI payments in multiple names (husband, wife, mother etc), a small family can actually manage ₹1,500,000-3,000,000 in (legitimate) tax free income.

That is about $18-36,000.

Which is a lot in India.

> “Because despite everyone’s best efforts, sometimes the food spills into the delivery boxes. In those cases, the smell of the previous order travels to the next order and may lead to the next order smelling of the previous order,” Goyal reasoned. “For this reason, we had to separate the fleet for veg orders.”

Would dog-lovers take umbrage if their food orders are delivered from the same bag that also contains dog-meat? Would Jews and Muslims do that if their package was drenched with juices from an order for pork? The answer is obvious. When it comes to Hindus and Jains however, the argument is that their sentiments should not be respected because of "caste" or "purity."

However, I think that shelving the separate uniform colors idea is a good thing. In parts of the country, riders in green uniforms would be prime targets for hooligans of the jihadi-left variety.

> Persecuting your own citizens who worship minority religions is not decolonization in any way.

Reclaiming your own temples, after giving the injured party land to rebuild their mosque, is not persecution in my book. I would argue that building a mosque after demolishing a temple at the place Hindus believe their Lord was born was a deliberate provocation, and the other party refusing to let it go for 500 years was persecution of Hindus and their faith.

No other mosque in Ayodhya was touched when this particular mosque was demolished three decades back. If Hindus were truly supremacist, every single one would have been.

> minority

There are more than 600,000 mosques in India and over 200 million Muslims. They are a second majority.

From Catherine Nixey's The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World:

> When modern histories describe this period, this time when all the old religions died away and Christianity finally became pre-eminent, they tend to call it the “triumph of Christianity.” It is worth remembering, however, the original Roman meaning of the word “triumph.” A true Roman triumph wasn’t merely about the victory of the winner. It was about the total and utter subjugation of the loser. In a true Roman triumph the losing side was paraded through the capital while the winning side looked on at an enemy whose soldiers had been slain, whose possessions had been despoiled and whose leaders had been humiliated.

> A triumph was not merely a “victory.” It was an annihilation.

> ...

> For before it preserved, the Church destroyed. In a spasm of destruction never seen before—and one that appalled many non-Christians watching it—during the fourth and fifth centuries, the Christian Church demolished, vandalized and melted down a simply staggering quantity of art. Classical statues were knocked from their plinths, defaced, defiled and torn limb from limb. Temples were razed to their foundations and mutilated. A temple widely considered to be the most magnificent in the entire empire was leveled. Many of the Parthenon sculptures were attacked, faces were mutilated, hands and limbs were hacked off, and gods were decapitated. Some of the finest statues on the whole building were almost certainly smashed off then ground into rubble that was then used to build churches. Books—which were often stored in temples —suffered terribly. The remains of the greatest library in the ancient world, a library that had once held perhaps 700,000 volumes, were destroyed in this way by Christians. It was over a millennium before any other library would even come close to its holdings. Works by censured philosophers were forbidden and bonfires blazed across the empire as outlawed books went up in flames.

> two random writers

You know just as well as I do that these positions are not those of two random writers, but that of the ideological Left in each country.[1][2][3] I have seen these discussed at length on tv, youtube and in print in both countries.

[1] https://www.npr.org/2021/06/10/1002594108/a-growing-number-o...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/12/us/politics/electoral-col...

[3] https://scroll.in/article/1049779/modis-new-parliament-could...

The American Left:

> The most obvious result of this scheme is that individual voters in small-population states tend to have more power in choosing the President than individual voters in high-population states, and that difference can skew an election.

The Indian Left:[1]

> enlarging the numbers of lawmakers in relation to population growth in a way penalizes those states that have achieved more in terms of slowing down their demographic growth

Completely inconsistent, self-serving arguments which basically want to change the electoral system because their side is losing.

[1] Equality or Fraternity? Challenges of India’s New Constituency Delimitation (https://thediplomat.com/2021/11/equality-or-fraternity-chall...)

Per capita figures do not matter in such comparisons when the population involved is massive. YouTube is huge in India.

There is an anecdote that is often used in India about how the Parsis (Zoroastrians who escaped the Islamic conquest of Persia) came to India and assimilated into the society.

When a group of Parsis landed in Gujarat (Western India), the local chieftain posed a question to the leader of the group in the form of a glass of milk. The leader responded by adding a spoon of sugar to the glass and stirring the contents. The answer was found to be acceptable and the Parsis, the tiniest of the minorities, continue to live and prosper in India to this day.

Would they have managed this if the leader had smashed the glass, danced on the fragments, and then taken a hammer to the face of the principal deity at the local temple?

Immigration wiped out Native American tribes, and many other peoples, because the people who immigrated were different and were in no mood to assimilate. Europe is facing this kind of immigration, not the Parsis.

A father who wonders if his daughter will be stabbed in school today may not vocalize such sentiment, but when the time to cast a vote comes, that vote will go to Geert Wilders.

> When the BBC released a documentary ... authorities raided the broadcaster’s offices for allegedly evading taxes

"Allegedly."[1]

Western media has a basic competency/honesty problem when it comes to reporting on India. If you want to situate the October 7 terror attacks in Israel within a particular "context," maybe you should do the same when it comes to reporting on communal rioting in India.

[1] BBC admits to underreporting Rs 40 crore income tax in India (https://www.newindianexpress.com/nation/2023/jun/06/bbc-admi...)

The Hyprland guy argues like a free speech absolutist while Drew wants him to join the neo-religious cult of perpetual rage and victim-hood.

Genocide is a tactic. Like nuking, flooding, fire bombing cities. Or beheading people. Or setting them afire. Or punishing entire tribes/clans for the crimes of one individual.

Universal morality does not exist. Whether something is "right" or "wrong" depends on the context in which it is used.

> Everyone and their dog knows that lead is dangerous.

If the article were truly written by someone whose heart bleeds for those suffering from lead poisoning in the Indian subcontinent, they would restrict themselves to that single issue. These potshots at the leaders together with the emphasis on "foreign expertise" and ""effective NGOs" shows two things:

- the colonial supremacist mindset is alive and well. It is merely adopted a new form conducive to this era.

- NGO-fronted regime change operations are not doing so well in this part of the world.

> Most of these governments are corrupt to the bone.

As are most governments in the West. Lobbying and campaign contributions is bribery by another name.

Parts of every Western power center are for sale at the right price. That does not mean that it is acceptable for their enemies to initiate regime change operations in these places.

> lots of it is pseudoscience.

I can get behind the feeling of the word, but I absolutely hate this word as it has generally been used in the sense that everything modern (science, technology, people) is smarter/more advanced than anything that is old.

If something was produced as a result of a rational thought process (no ghosts, demons, Gods involved), I would be loathe to call it pseudoscience even if it didn't work most of the time. For e.g. building, clothing, weaponry that works in one climate/area may not work if you transplant it to another place on Earth. That does not mean that the techniques used are pseudoscientific in nature. They were the science of that place and time.

> If you visit a traditional doctor he feels your wrist for a while and is able to create diagnoses with that along with looking at you and talking.

A lot of traditional medicine practitioners today are probably quacks. It is possible that something of import was lost over hundreds of generations of knowledge transfer. As we have access to modern medicine that can quickly relieve symptoms, looking into what was lost might be considered to be a waste of time by some when an easier alternative is available.

> geocentrism

The culture that gave the world Ayurveda and the Surya Siddhanta and the Nasadiya Sukta is very different from the ones which believe that God has said that the Earth is flat or ones where God's agents on Earth harassed/murdered scientists because their theories were in conflict with their interpretation of their belief.[1][2]

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

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasadiya_Sukta

> What does ingesting mercury or lead fight against?

This is a question for those who are experts in the field of Rasa Shastra.[1][2] Just like questions regarding which poisons/toxins are injected into the human body as treatment, why, and for which illness are questions for experts in the appropriate specializations of modern medicine.

[1] A Text Book Of Rasa Shastra(Iatro-Chemistry And Ayurvedic Pharmaceutics) (https://chaukhamba.co.in/index.php?route=product/product&pro...)

[2] Introduction to ‘Rasashaastra’ the Iatrochemistry of Ayurveda (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3252715/)

> But it also means the most vulnerable in our society are actually able to buy things.

Forcing banks and digital wallet providers to provide users a prepaid card/digital balance in exchange for cash is a good alternative. This should be a part of the charter/license under which such organisations operate.

> I'm very sad and hopeless

Well, the entire Armenian population of Nagorno-Karabakh was driven out of the region by Azerbaijan as the world watched in utter silence.

These things happen.

Morality and ethics are purely theoretical constructs that are meant to be used against your opponent in order to get them to back down. At least that is how they are normally employed in the real world.

> huge number of scammers who targets US people

Scammers, as a category, target everyone. You think Indians don't get conned into sharing their OTP/passwords or financial details?

> They are too short-sighted to not see that the "industry" is damaging India's global reputation

India has one of the lowest police officers to population ratios in the world. They are so swamped with day-to-day crimes and other nonsense and providing protection to events and politicians that India's "global reputation" is simply not on their radar.

You cannot buy a SIM for your phone or open a bank account without providing ten types of identity documents but these scammers seem to have an infinite supply of phone numbers and bank accounts. That is just the way things are.

> I find "logs off" as a euphemism for passed away to be quite poor,

Irreverence has been part of the El Reg reading experience since I can remember. Someone always complains about them writing about "boffins."

> Not all nations became colonizers though, war and annexation of some neighborhood land is not "colonization",

True.

However, forcing the invader's culture and practises on the conquered people and taking steps to replace the local language, culture, politico-legal systems and social structures is. Did or did China not do this to the people it conquered?

> But it was Europe who conquered the world and colonized the so called new world, not China.

A Chinese emperor once famously said to the British: “Our celestial empire possesses all things in abundance and lacks no product within its borders. There is therefore no need to import the manufactures of barbarians in exchange for our own products.”[1]

Old civilizations are deeply connected to their geography, and once they settle down in a fertile area, they generally don't feel the need to colonize or fight people beyond their immediate neighbourhood. Barring a couple of exceptions, the Chinese and Indian experiences are very similar.

The only reason Europeans went out on their ships was to find a sea route to India after their traditional routes were blocked by the Turks and the Arabs.

[1] The Second Opium War (https://origins.osu.edu/read/second-opium-war)

> It’s time it leans on immigrants

Uncontrolled immigration without assimilation can have disastrous consequences. And assimilation is a polite way of saying "give up your culture and adopt ours."

Unfortunately, without assimilation, all the politics and problems of the homeland will follow the diaspora to the new host country. It has been seen time and time again:

- Italian and Irish emigration to the US

- Migration from the Indian subcontinent as well as Muslim countries of Africa and the Middle East into Europe and North America

If you cannot solve this but still want immigrants, the numbers have to be reduced massively and some kind of pause between waves will be required so that gradual assimilation can be achieved.

> The only sustainable way forward is to form artist-driven, bottom-up, non-profit organizations to nurture communities like BandCamp.

It will only work if there is laser-like focus on the primary organizational objective: letting artists make a living.

Falling of a cliff when blindly chasing growth is just one problem. In the current era, the probability that they will get involved in policing the politics of their members and issue statements on everything from the state of rain forests to Palestine is close to 1.0. The organization will thus be torn apart by internal rivalries.

Cancellation might cause financial harm to a person, but it creates a feeling of victimhood. It is incapable of changing someone's views.

The letter by Harvard groups:

"We, the undersigned student organizations, hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all the unfolding violence.

"Today's events did not occur in a vacuum. For the last two decades, millions of Palestinians in Gaza have been forced to live in an open-air prison. Israeli officials promise to "open the gates of hell," and the massacres in Gaza have already commenced. Palestinians in Gaza have no shelters for refuge and nowhere to escape. In the coming days, Palestinians will be forced to bear the full brunt of Israel's violence.

"The apartheid regime is the only one to blame. Israeli violence has structured every aspect of Palestinian existence for 75 years. From systematized land seizures to routine airstrikes, arbitrary detentios to military checkpoints, and enforced family separations to targeted killings, Palestinians have been forced to live in a state of death, both slow and sudden.

"Today, the Palestinian ordeal enters into uncharted territory. The coming days will require a firm stand against colonial retaliation. We call on the Harvard community to take action to stop the ongoing annihilation of Palestinians.[1][2]

> Some of the protests I've seen are things I'd rather not hear from anyone involved in the legal system.

These people are primarily religious/political activists. When some of them enter the legal system, that facet of their personality is going to overpower the rest.

[1] https://www.thecrimson.com/widget/2023/10/10/psc-statement/

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20231017222129/https://www.pales...

To use a marriage analogy, autonomy (bounded) is consensual separation where the injured party has initiative and control over their actions. Apartheid would be the husband restricting the wife to a certain area of the house and beating her everyday.

Autonomy is the best way to preserve culture. A tiny minority living among people who do not share their values will eventually lose any connection to their past due to assimilation unless they adopt extreme orthodoxy like the Amish/Mennonites/Haredim (who too have to form ghettos to achieve their goals).

The most expensive home in the world, if you ignore still-occupied old palaces, is Antilia in Mumbai.[1]

It has a estimated market value of USD 1.5-2 billion.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antilia_(building)

> You found a small example

What are you talking about?

> atrocities committed in the name of ethnic nationalism

If you are referring to the Hindus, they are not a single ethnicity.

> apartheid

It is autonomy, not apartheid. There are many ethnic/religious communities around the world who have fought for autonomy to varying degrees of success.

Why is an autonomous state (a grander version of the outstation idea) within the bounds of the Australian constitution not considered?[1] Allot a certain percentage of the federal budget to the state for the next 50/100 years and let them manage their affairs (including internal conflicts)?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outstation_(Aboriginal_communi...