[manifestdissent]

The nationalism in these comments isn’t surprising. But it is disappointing.

Several comments are implying that HuffPo is an influence operation or conspiracy... ???

There’s a clear boogeyman (the Chinese) and a grand arching conspiracy stopping the country from being great. This is fascism 101

[square_usual]

From personal experience, most Indians in the tech space are conservative-leaning. I don't network a lot, but I do talk to people enough to know that "liberal" in the western sense is a very rare viewpoint in this industry.

E: I should mention that I am Indian.

[justforfunhere]

I would go one step further and say that most Indians in the tech space come from Upper Caste, well to do Middle Class families with enough money to give them a comfortable chance at getting into a decent college in India/Abroad. This gives them a sense of entitlement that is very hard to shake off.

This also makes them partially blind to the kind of hardship most poor Indians have to face and live with for the entirety of their lives.

Income inequality has been diminishing in India, but it still a major force as it tends to drive the kind of demographic that would end up in certain type of jobs or positions within bureaucracy.

[boruto]

I completely disagree with this comment. I am from the so called privileged upper caste who father had to ride a rickshaw to send me to college. I still remember thinking to join some other college because the fee was raised in 2008.

Take your propaganda to somewhere else.

Before I am name called I would say I am not a BJP supporter.

[justforfunhere]

Please read my comment again. I was talking about Upper Caste, well to do middle class.

Also this is not about supporting any political party. This is a problem embedded in our social culture. Income equality is a menace that hurts all those who are not well-off, irrespective of their caste or religion.

[ashleshbiradar]

sure, whatever your personal experience may be. You can not deny the existence of caste based inequality in a country like India. It exists.

[boruto]

> You can not deny

Where in my comment did I deny it. I agree it exists. Should I list my every other belief in this comment. So you do not accuse me of something which I did not say?

I just makes me angry when people say all uppercaste are rich and powerful. It belittles the experiences my father had during my childhood.

I usually ignore threads like this, But this is HN turning into twitter threads. I would not comment in this anymore.

[poma88]

Exactly this: where is that exaggerated sense of entitlement coming from? Who else finds it insane? It is not only caste. It is a sense of superiority.

[lotsofpulp]

It comes from not wanting to share their wealth with those who have less, and helps maintain or increase their standard of living.

I know business owners that will vote for lower taxes as a single issue. They could not care less that their own nieces and nephews were being screwed by the labor laws their “low tax” politicians were supporting.

What is most important is enhancing the relative position of themselves and their children in society.

[manifestdissent]

The country has become nationalistic to a nonsensical degree. I’ve met multiple people who have refused to use PayTM because they think it is Chinese.

This won’t end well.

[kranner]

Another instance is a spate of recent 1-star reviews on Amazons with comments like "Great product, works as described and value for money, but I'm giving it 1 star because it's made in China". Seems to me Amazon is letting this slide because that's where the wind is blowing now.

[square_usual]

That is really funny to me, because PayTM's founder is supposedly very tight with the BJP, and they also rode the demonetization wave hard with the full-page ad featuring Modi.

[manifestdissent]

Fascism rarely has any internal consistency or meaning. It’s an ideology of hate towards the other and sucks to be you if you’re the other.

It’s not surprising that they turned on him. If he had bothered to read history, he’d have read what happens to most supporters and collaborators of such regimes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_of_the_Long_Knives

Fascists are an ouroboros of hate. They all eat themselves.

[naruvimama]

You are the one labelling them, different countries have different histories.

People usually labelled "Hindu right wing" by the english media have nothing in common with the western idea of conservative.

They are strongly pluralistic, believe in smaller communities and tribes preserving their identity, nature loving, sympathetic to vegetarianism, not homophobic, not against abortion, strong believers in climate change and eco friendly policies.

[kondu]

"pluralistic", yet the current govt seems to want to impose Hindi in the non hindi-speaking-majority states.

[manifestdissent]

Hitler was a vegetarian and the Nazis established nature preserves. You had to ask for permission to experiment on a worm not the untermenschen. They funded programs to populate the forests of Europe with Big Game like Bison

All political movements take the shape of the territory they occupy. When fascism arises it uses symbols of its host society. Indians won't use a phyrgian cap they'll use saffron

[naruvimama]

Would they be more "liberal" if they went around carrying out genocides, ethnic cleansing, destroying ancient temples and idols.

Indians are pluralistic and have preserved their unique pluralistic identities for 1000s of years against all odds. The world has seen the erasure of almost all the ancient civilisations and cultures.

How "liberal" of people who claim to stand with the rights of "red Indians" to preserve their identity and turning around to tell the "brown Indians" that they do not deserve an identity.

I am truly shocked by the hypocrisy/shallowness/ignorance of the self appointed "liberal elite".

[FlyingSnake]

I find it highly amusing that the same HN hivemind that rallied behind Peter Thiel's takedown of Gawker are calling a legal move by a sovereign democratic country fascism. Perhaps we need to drop this western gaze when analyzing events in the East?

> They(Gawker) have no moral high ground, noble principles, or higher purpose. They're scum, and it's pure karma that they're being destroyed by someone they outed.[1^]

[^1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11774716

[puranjay]

As an Indian, I'm just disappointed that we seem to have wholeheartedly chosen a side - USA - in the upcoming Cold War 2.0 instead of staying a bit more neutral. I don't think we chose well.

[FlyingSnake]

It's a choice between rock and a hard place for India for Cold war 2.0. I have no love for the current govt. (or the past ones, if that matters) but Indian situations simply can't be seen by US-colored-goggles. There are multiple factors at play and there is not much common apart from democracy.

[naruvimama]

"Fascism" is a strong word, I hope people can be a bit careful with using it.

It is not like these comments are supporting the beheading or stoning to death of journalists or trying to protect grooming gangs or institutions involved in child sex scandals.

[manifestdissent]

From Umberto Echo's famous hierarchy, we have a group that has an obsession with a plot for e.g. here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25207458 and here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25208543 You've implied multiple times that there's something spooky going on without evidence

The broader plot involves the identification of an outsider, in India's case it is muslims. The Other is identified as the source of the problem and is highlighted as being a part of the plot against the majority. The classical example is the "they're raping our women and planting demon babies" plot https://www.economist.com/asia/2020/11/19/indias-ruling-part...

The outsiders are Muslims' who are simultaneously the root of the problem and weak degenerates. https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2020/02/04/...

It is assumed that mixing with the untermenschen will dilute the superior ethnic group. There's a desire to "purify" the country. The majority forms paramilitary groups to enact the process. All disagreement towards this is taken as treason. Dissent is forbidden. https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/who-is-an-urban-naxal... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unlawful_Activities_(Preventio...

A xenophobic movement with a paramilitary organization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rashtriya_Swayamsevak_Sangh that is obsessed with a plot to undermine the majority that has heavily implied racial/ethnic subtext. The movement implies that they will take the country back to an unspecified time when it was greater. They identify the minority as the obstacle. They clamp down on all dissent and attempt to induct children and the young into their cults through a focus on service and death in the service of the nation.

If the shoe fits

[Dharmakirti]

> You've implied multiple times that there's something spooky going on without evidence

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. HuffPo is no saints and in the world of global info warfare, I wouldn't be so quick to give them a clean chit. See how Al Jazeera etc operate with a state backed agenda for an example.

> A xenophobic movement with a...

This is such an incoherent rant riddled with falsehoods without any evidence. RSS is no xenophobic movement even if the biased wikipedia page paints it that way. If you have grassroots Indian experience, you'll know that they want to revive Hindu right, while preserving Dharmic values. I don't agree with all their attempts, but it's laughable how brown sepoys quickly jump to it's criticism without substantial data.

You seem to have a fixed agenda and reiterating the same unsubstantiated claims against imaginary bogeymen. The economist links you've mentioned can be easily summarized as an opinion piece and I can provide several more similar links from SwarajyaMag that say otherwise.

[ashleshbiradar]

SwarajyaMag doesn't sound like a credible source. It was recently black listed from Wikipedia, and isn't allowed as a source there.

plus https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/swarajya/

[iamshs]

HN has been flooded by Hindu Nationalists. Every topic about India I comment on, not only it gets downvoted pretty heavily but typical conspiracy theories get thrown. It is really disappointing, you are right.

[naruvimama]

As a "Hindu nationalist" I can assure you that no such thing is happening considering the only news to hit the front pages are usually negative news about India.

And I normally see a lot of the 'caste, cow & curry' crowd commenting quite "liberally".

[Dharmakirti]

> Every topic about India I comment on, not only it gets downvoted pretty heavily

Playing a devil's advocate here, would you think there's another side to the debate? India is no binary system like US and is a thriving and functioning democracy. I understand the penchant for people to downvote dissent, but could there be another side to the argument rather than "Indian's are Hindu Nationalists"?

[addicted]

Even if that’s true then close Huffpost by finding evidence for those claims.

Not by adding a retroactive FDI cap and destroying foreign future investment.

Of course, the fact that the government didn’t do the correct thing indicates that Huffpost is hardly an influence operation, but that this government wouldn’t survive too long with independent media dominating the airwaves and Whatsapp as opposed to their lackeys.

[Dharmakirti]

> close Huffpost by finding evidence for those claims.

HuffPo closed operations on it's own, the India Govt didn't force them to do so.