Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by square_usual 2038 days ago
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.

3 comments

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.

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.

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.

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

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.
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.

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.

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.
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.
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.

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.

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

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".