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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 19, 2022

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For a while now, I have been irked by the 'bothsidesism' around South Asian communities, or honestly what is hindu vs muslim discourse in English media (Indian or Western).

  • The division of India eventually saw the formation of 3 nations : India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Hindus in Pakistan and Bangladesh were continuously persecuted, as the Hindu communities in either country sought refuge in India. On the other hand, Indian law protects muslims with rights that exceed those of the resident majority hindus. The percentage of muslims in India keeps rising and even the idea of equal-laws-for-all (uniform civil code, equal regulation of all religious institutions) are abandoned by both the Congress and the so-called-fascist BJP.

  • Somehow, lobbying for issues of muslim concern is not considered Islamist, but lobbying for hindu concerns is actively considered far-right-hindu-extremist.

  • Hindus, when they've immigrated to foreign nations, have quickly integrated, become major contributors to the economy and haven't had a single instance of religious terrorism while there. On the other hand, irrespective of the peacefulness of the median muslim, marginal muslims have certainly contributed to terrorism, violence and ghettoization within foreign nations. Even in India, Muslims (and communists) constitute nearly 100% of terrorist attacks within the borders. (2 directional sectarian riots have occured, but they become incredibly hard to decipher chicken-n-egg questions)

  • Hindus do not proselytize, do not go around calling other religions blasphemers or heathen and reject tests of religious purity.

  • There are 3 majority Hindu majority nations and all 3 are true secular democracies. Each country at its worst, is still more liberal and religiously open-minded than any large muslim country in the world. (RIP Kemal Ataturk's Turkey)

  • India has a 'no first use' nuclear policy while Pakistan has a 'first use' nuclear policy.

I could go on and on.............

Hindus has time and again shown to have different sociological group traits than muslim immigrants from the subcontinent. Bodesideism here is visibly incorrect, and the greater emphasis on hindu violence is even more so. This is a big part of why Indians dislike the term South Asian. The differences between Hindu and Muslim communities in the subcontinent are salient. The differences between Indians (likely coded hindu) and Pakistani/Bangladeshi (surely coded muslim) are therefore salient too.

yet I hope also that all those here who consider themselves to have a more clear-eyed understanding of masculinity than the progressive orthodoxy can recognise that the anger of listless young men who seek a flag to rally around is a trait shared by every swathe of humanity that lives under modernity.

Spend long enough down that train of through, and you'd realize that Nehru truly was the first woke-liberal leader the world had ever seen. (and the resulting fallout is a very clear indication of why ideologically blinded woke leaders are terrible in roles that require pragmatism)

On the other hand, Indian law protects muslims with rights that exceed those of the resident majority hindus. The percentage of muslims in India keeps rising and even the idea of equal-laws-for-all (uniform civil code, equal regulation of all religious institutions) are abandoned by both the Congress and the so-called-fascist BJP.

Somehow, lobbying for issues of muslim concern is not considered Islamist, but lobbying for hindu concerns is actively considered far-right-hindu-extremist.

This paper points out that most of the Indian elite have been educated in Anglosphere (American and British) universities. And these ideas that you mention sound suspiciously familiar to the social justice ideas, common in those universities, that the majority (White in the West) is the oppressor and it is good to advocate for the minority or encourage them to operate as a cohesive group, but fascism to do the same for the majority. It sounds like the same principle is just being applied to Hindus and Muslims.