https://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/1v6k8vq/several_injur...

South Asian Muslims often want it both ways. When India got rid of triple talaaq divorce, south Asian Muslims at my American college demanded a protest to criticize Indias supposed religious discrimination. Meanwhile, you act as if Bangladesh has not given India and Indians reasons to dislike it

This is the problem with discourse about India. The expectation is always that India needs to change and it's neighbor's behavior, regardless of how unhinged, is just seen as a simple matter of unchangeable fact.

> Your claim that Jews “never made such an argument” makes the selectiveness more apparen

You took no time to read or understand what I said and instead assumed I was talking about European Jews. I am not

I am talking about Indian Jews. In that sentence about neither Christians nor Jews nor parsis not sikhs nor jains claiming to be separate nations, I was referring to Indian christians, Indian Jews, Indian parsis, Indian sikhs and Indian jains.

None of these religious groups claimed they were not part of the cultural nation of India. No one made arguments like Jinnah who claimed that Indian Muslims and everyone else (who he called Hindus.. he called all non Muslims Hindus) constituted two distinct nations.

Not everything is about Europeans and European Jews. India has its own Jews. While some were sympathetic to Zionism, most were integrated into Indian society writ large and many participated in the independence movement for India.

> saying that Americans cannot understand Islamist extremism

These sorts of things (terror attacks) are of course awful, but in India it's a different story. Firstly there's just more, and more fooled plots. But more than that, it's the aggressive nature of the religion. It's the loud calls to prayer, the public street takeovers, the slaughter of animals in the streets full of blood, etc (much of which is banned in Muslim countries) that annoy the hell out of people.

Up until recently Muslims could claim any piece of private land and then privately judge whether such a claim had legal merit. Landowners were left without any possibility of appeal. Imagine such a thing in america, lol.

American communities that have seen large influxes of Muslims smaller than the population of Muslims in India by a lot have lodged similar complaints. I mean, when the government tries to stop the streets from being filled with lambs blood, Indian Muslims complain that it's discrimination. Americans would quickly become radicalized if that happened in an American city.

Europe is a great example. The Muslim population of Europe is miniscule but Europeans are even more vitriolic against them than Indians. And even European liberal parties have seen the issues. Of course it's only when India takes actions against this that claims of islamophobia arise. When macron bans the burqa, people default to it being for cultural preservation and safety.

Modern day Hinduism is a post-hoc reconstruction. That's not to say Indian religious beliefs and doctrines don't exist -- they do. There are just a wide variety of them and they deserve their own mentions.

You're applying modern standards to a time and place where they would have been incomprehensible

As countries such as Norway and China show, you can have development with or without a police state. The issues have nothing to do with each other

There is a racial component to it that the American settlers did not have.

Gandhi and the original nationalists were English barristers who spoke English, believed in English institutions, were educated in England, and saw themselves as Englishmen and loyal subjects of the King.

That is how they've always seen themselves and how the average educated Indian saw themselves.

Gandhi's experiences in South Africa made him realize that no amount of education was going to make the English treat him the same simply because his skin made him not blend in. Gandhi is not the only person to see that. Lee yuan kew thought the same.

His first reaction was thinking he should prove Indian loyalty to the crown and this would win him points.

When that didn't work, he threw away all his tailored English suits and adopted (by show... It was all show) the habits of a Hindu holy man to lead his movements.

One can debate the efficacy or whatever but there was no great resistance to English rule. Many old Indians are neutral about it. That generation is dying though and the younger ones have a mythologized past.

So yes the degrees in this situation really mattered. The American settlers were seeking to forge a new nation with new institutions. The Indian nationalists just wanted to perpetuate English ones but were unable to do so under English rule.

It's reasonable to distrust a neighboring country with distinct interest, even if they went to war for you, sure. You don't owe them anything.

Similarly, it's actually also normal for India to have concerns about illegal migration, similar to Europe, America, Australia, and Canada.

But the propaganda coming out of Bangladesh is purely religious in form, and it's pretty clear that that is the main reason why they dislike India. Pakistan literally slaughtered them and they're all bhai-bhai with them now.

The article cites the CAA as a reason for Bangladeshi distrust, except the data show that India is acting as a humanitarian in this disaster. Non-muslims are physically persecuted in both Bangladesh and Pakistan. Pakistan particularly is an apartheid state where non-Muslims have fewer political rights. Bangladesh is slightly better but violence against non-Muslims is rampant. People like to paint India as having high rates of religious violence, which is true, compared to America, but not true compared to Pakistan or Bangladesh. Pakistan regularly executes Christians for blasphemy. India doesn't. Non-Muslim refugees should qualify for extra protection from secular nations given the on-the-ground realities of South Asia. Literally the cited reason for the creation of Pakistan is that South Asian muslims constitute a distinct nation from every other religion in the subcontinent. Neither the Jews nor the Parsis nor the Christians ever made such an argument.

Well regardless, countries cannot get angry over other countries making immigration policy (and yes, this also applies to Indian migrants to America, blah blah blah)

> Explaining the Hindutva moment as a genuine counter reaction to anti-Hindu sentiment rather than a politically motivated movement seems to be misguided, even if not actively propogating the propaganda.

If you read about the history of Savarkar, then I think this is exactly what you see. He was kind of meh about everything until he witnessed anti-Hindu extremism from Muslims, and then went off his rocker. Before that, he was a relatively benign nationalist and humanitarian. Well anyway, more to the point of it really being just the Muslims, Savarkar was defended by an Indian Christian barrister.

Are you an American or South Asian, out of curiosity? I feel like Americans don't really have the ability translate South Asian politics. Not that I'm some expert, but I can report personal on-the-ground experiences.

To put it in perspective, many Indians (of all religions) died and fought in a bloody war to secure Bangladesh's (then East Pakistan's) freedom from what was a genocidal regime in West Pakistan. Decades later, the typical Bangladeshi muslim still hates Indians because any non-muslim Indian they consider 'Hindu', thus polytheist, and thus worthy of death. One thousand five hundred Indian soldiers died only for their neighbor to hate them in return for the 'crime' of not being born part of their religion. While Hindu nationalists are fucking insane, I honestly think many have been driven to it by the insanity of South Asian Islam.

Meanwhile, America has a relatively peaceful and cooperative neighbor (Mexico), which only has a crime problem on the border, and the average American seems ready to give up almost every civic right to deal with that. There are barely any terror attacks of note coming from these Mexican gangs, and congress has already ceded many constitutional rights (such as the right against unreasonable search and seizure) near the border zones. Anyway, imagine Mexicans hated everyone in America for the crime of being 'gringos' (even the non-whites) and that's basically what India has with all their neighbors.

If people in the west want India to liberalize, which we really should want to do, Western nations need to work on dismantling Pakistan and limiting Islamic extremism in the region.

People always forget that Gandhi's first actions as a 'nationalist' were attempting to raise an army to fight on behalf of Britain. The idea that the Indian nationalists wanted to be a new nation from the get go is a modern day invention.