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The problem is that the Brahmins could not control their own poor. This is what I have come to believe is the foundational problem of modern India. Land reform is impossible, because the peasants will revolt. Behavioral reform is impossible, because the peasants will revolt. Even political reform is impossible, because the peasants will revolt. Why did your tribe, your caste, grant them endless reservation, government employment, political power? Because you could not stand against it! I have met many extremely intelligent higher caste Indians, far more intelligent than me. This is clear by their extraordinary success in the West, especially by niche subgroups like the Tamil Brahmins, the Iyers and Iyengars and so on.
But in the homeland, they were too weak to conquer their own common people. This is the ultimate failing for any ruling class. You must save India before you can do anything else. I respect that your religion neither destroyed you nor saved you, but it is not important now.
Brahmins supported the usurpation of feudal kingdoms to extract more power as they believed that exams and a democratic regime would favor them, it made us powerless and them homeless where the highest Tamil Brahmin can ever be is an employee and not a divine saint the way they could before. Iq is an important factor but not the most important, you can ce exams and have some outlier geniuses but that's not enough to have a functional sovereign society.
Yes, the focus is on saving what can be saved, though I'd much rather support a neo pagan than a Muslim Indian.
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The problem is that the Brahmins created their own poor. Enforcing a caste system is intrinsically anti-meritocratic; it's not a surprise at all that the various castes specialized culturally for space-filling internal competition rather than competition across the entire breadth of the roles available in a society. It's accurate to point out the high performance of indian elites exported elsewhere, but compare the relative performance of the exported euro-american middle class, not even the elites, over the 19th and 20th centuries and even today. The british soldiers that conquered india weren't from a special military caste, they were farmers and the urban poor. Britain had an ingrained system for assigning social roles by ethnicity, but by its permeability succesfully channeled the impulses of its poor toward competing within rather than against the system. India, meanwhile, is caught in a power struggle. If every caste somehow agreed to stop viewing itself as a unitary cultural group overnight it could make much more progress; as it is, I find it unlikely to settle down until either interbreeding becomes commonplace or another coalition of castes finds themselves on top.
Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh are inherently worse than India despite the only major difference being lack of Hinduism and castes.
India needed castes to create smarter outliers at the cost of dumber underclass which is a better deal than Bangladesh.
The world has natural order which wants the blue blooded to be with the blue blooded, the son also rises as they say. Why are castes bad? Do you prefer a slightly higher median with a way fewer smart people. Castes are religious but I'll only defend the sociological factors here.
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