The Danger of Hindu Nationalism

So, I don’t want to be a downer here, but this is something that’s important, so although I typically don’t write opinion pieces, this is one.  Hindu Nationalism is a vocal minority in the world’s largest democracy, and so it’s a really big deal.  Using the IMF’s numbers, India is the second largest economy in the world.  The UN and World Bank rank them a little lower, but they’re still in the top 10 by pretty much any metric you look at.  India is #3 in terms of real GDP growth rate among countries with over 60 million people.  That’s ahead of touted up-and-coming economies like China, Vietnam, and the Philippines.  India’s rate of 7.3% is three times that of the United States, and they have the worlds fourth largest military (assuming North Korea’s numbers are correct and not over-inflated).

I hope that I’ve convinced you that India and her 1.2 billion people are important, because I’m going to start talking about Hindu Nationalism now.  Sometimes termed “Hindu polity,” Hindu Nationalism really started taking off in the early 19th Century in India, as a sort of response to the British occupation.  Uprisings against increasing British power had taken shape in the form of the Maratha Confederacy (I’ve got a post to do with that on Tuesday), the Sikhs in the North, and the Kingdom of Mysore in the South, but all of these had made little effect against the British Raj.  Indian political theorists began to argue that the only way that India could truly become Indian again would be to unite.

Well, that all sounds fine and dandy on the surface until you start thinking about it.  When had India ever been united?  Never.  Aurangzeb, the great Mughal Emperor, had managed to extend tentative control over the South,  but the speed with which his empire disintegrated after his death calls into question how much control the Mughals truly had.  So, where does the notion of “India” come from?  Well, it wasn’t a uniquely European idea, but it had not historical precedent until 1948, with India’s independence, and what did the Hindu Nationalists do to the man who had brought India’s independence about (Mahatma Gandhi)?  They shot him three times in the chest at point-blank range.  Hindu Nationalists don’t want a united India.  They want their united India, because there’s a right kind of India and a wrong kind of India.

Nathuram Godse, the man who assassinated Mahatma Gandhi, was a member of the RSS (Rāṣṭrīya Svayamsēvaka Saṅgha, or National Volunteer Organization), a controversial group that has admittedly done a number of good things. The RSS is well-known for its blood drives during the Bangladeshi Revolution in 1971 and responding quickly and effectively to humanitarian crises – often better than the government.  In 1975, when Indira Gandhi attempted to suspend the Constitution, the RSS were on the front lines protesting her, despite her unilateral suspension of the right to free speech.  I’m not here to tell you that the RSS is bad because they’re Hindu Nationalist.  I’m saying they’re dangerous and Hindu Nationalist and that there’s a strong correlation between having this far-right perspective and being dangerous.  The fact that the RSS has been associated in some way with almost every major Hindu Nationalist movement in the last forty years or so is concerning.  Its role in the destruction and vandalism of mosques is concerning.

Narendra Modi

The RSS is currently closely associated with the BJP – Bharatiya Janata Party (Indian People’s Party) – the group currently in charge and from which Narendra Modi, the Indian Prime Minister, hails.  Typically the BJP prioritizes the globalization of India and the promotion of a robust, industrialized economy over social welfare (the MO of the Indian National Congress), and, although there’s far more nuance to it than this, one could potentially label the BJP as more similar in terms of economic policy to the Republican Party in the United States and the INC as more similar to the Democratic Party.  Socially, however, the INC would lie somewhere in the middle in the United States, while the BJP lies far to the right.

So a little on Modi now.  He was initially loved by the Western media.  I mean, this was a guy who was going to fix up Indian politics and fix up the economy, just like he had as Chief Minister of Gujarat state.  Economically, India’s done pretty well under him, but since his election in 2014, hundreds of violent attacks on non-Hindus, particularly Muslims, have been carried out with little response from the government.  People like to tout Modi’s success in Gujarat, but they seem to forget about a few little things that happened in 2002, when as many as 2500 Muslims were killed in February and March.

Local volunteers attempt to extinguish a train fire during the Gujarat Riots

Modi was incapable of reeling the violence in, which might lead one to question whether the BJP politician was even interested in stopping the anti-Muslim killings.  Critics will also point out that the violence was cleaned up when the violence started spilling over to Hindus.  Now, none of this can be officially tied back to Modi himself, and he has done a good job of keeping corruption at arm’s length away from him, but still, it happened on his watch.  When BJP politicians such as Manohar Lal Khattar are saying that they think people who eat beef should leave the country, it might suggest that the far right is not so far away from the BJP as one might like to pretend.

In the words of James Carville, “The economy, stupid.”  People don’t really care about civil issues that much when their pocketbooks are suffering.  I’m not saying that’s right – quite the opposite – but it’s also unreasonable to expect anything different, particularly in a country with so many people who cannot survive if their pocketbooks suffer, and when Narendra Modi can offer real economic change like he did in Gujarat, people are going to vote for him, particularly after years of domination by the INC.

Here’s my counterpoint, however.  There is a common-sense correlation, that is backed up somewhat by statistics, but the methods of gathering such data are suspect, between civil peace and economic growth.  Can we really expect people to go out and invest and spend money if they are afraid to do so?  If they are afraid that the government is hostile to their way of life?  Don’t forget that Modi’s successes in Gujarat came after the end of the 2002 riots.  If the BJP wishes to be an effective, uniting voice in Indian politics it is going to have to start reaching across the aisle, and as long as Modi continues to pretend that he has the majority and the mandate in New Delhi that he had in Gujarat, real socio-economic change will not happen.

Top 5 US Presidents Ranked by Foreign Policy

This is probably a dangerous place to start, but why not?  Now, what we’re doing here is strictly Realpolitik; we’re not assessing them based on their moral decisions but rather how well they projected America’s power abroad

1.I think you have to go McKinley here.  He turned the United States into a legitimate empire by winning a fairly cheap war with the Spanish, and by chasing them out, he made the United States essentially the only imperial power with a major presence in the Western Hemisphere.  Meanwhile, by taking Pacific possessions from Spain, he made United States trade with an increasingly weak and malleable China more feasible than ever before.  At the same time, he understood that the US was still incapable of legitimate competition with the other Great Powers, so he instead chose to propose the “Open Door Policy” in which all countries would be free to engage in untaxed trade with China, but no one would violate the territorial integrity of the country.  McKinley contributed 5,000 soldiers to the China Relief Expedition in 1901, which put down the Boxer Rebellion, in order to stabilize the floundering imperial regime, and although it did prop up the emperor a little longer, the efforts would ultimately prove to be in vain.  Perhaps the most lasting influence of McKinley’s foreign policy is his role in passing the Newlands Resolution in August of 1898, which asserted that the United States had legally annexed Hawaii (which is still a matter of legal debate to this day).  Half a century later, the islands became a state and has become a very prosperous area, particularly considering its economic limitations as an island chain.  What should be noted here is that McKinley had one of the easiest Presidencies in terms of dealing with Congress.  For the entirety of his five years in office, he enjoyed a majority in both houses, and moreover, the budget was left in good shape after the fiscally conservative Grover Cleveland had occupied the White House for the previous four years.  McKinley’s advantaged position should be a caveat to this assessment, but there is no denying his effectiveness as a foreign policy President.

2. This is probably a surprise for some, but I have to go with Jefferson on this one.  When one considers the limited resources and political clout the man had, particularly with the French monarchy, previously the United States’ closest ally, having been recently toppled, he was a genius.  Early in his Presidency, he sought to deal with the Barbary problem.  Barbary corsairs from North Africa had been extorting money from US shipping for years, and to deal with it, Jefferson sent his fleet straight to the source – Tripoli.  The city was bombarded five times before the Bey would surrender, but eventually he did, and the United States’ legitimacy instantly increased, after having tolerated piracy for decades.  Jefferson’s masterpiece came in 1803 with the Louisiana Purchase.  Napoleon Bonaparte, who at the time was referring to himself as Consul of France but was the unquestioned leader of the country, had little use for what remained of the French Empire in the New World, and, preoccupied by constant war in Europe and in need of funds, offered to sell the entirety of the remaining French territory in North America for $15 million, and Jefferson accepted, roughly doubling the size of the United States.  Jefferson’s Native American policy was also unique for his time, in that he encouraged them to pursue agriculture, in order to make better trading partners for the United States.  This avoided Indian Wars that the United States could ill afford at the time, while still bolstering the economy.  The lone black mark on his record is his inability to deal with British impressment of American sailors (forcing them into British naval service).  This was left to his successor, Madison.  Jefferson attempted to deal with the issue of impressment by imposing an Embargo on Great Britain, but the reality was that his economic sanctions would have little effect on the British Empire, and in the end, he left the Presidency looking much weaker than he should have internationally.  Part of the reason Jefferson is ranked this highly is that the Presidency came with fewer powers – actual or presumed – in the early Republic.  As a result, he worked much more closely with Congress and with far more questioning of legal precedent than many of his successors had to.  Today, Presidents authorize “police actions” and drone strikes all around the world and the public says little about it, but in the early 19th Century, Presidents were still feeling out the boundaries of their power, which makes Thomas Jefferson’s accomplishments even more impressive.

3. James K. Polk.  The man history shouldn’t have forgotten.  He is the only American President to have voluntarily not run for re-election.  He accomplished every piece of his campaign platform within his first term, and so by 1848, when he was up for re-election, he saw little point in running.  At the time of his election, Polk was the youngest man ever to have been elected, at a spry 49 years old.  He claimed Andrew Jackson as a role model, which is a questionable choice morally, but considering the nature of his goals, he could not have picked anyone better.  Upon his inauguration, Polk named four main goals for his administration, three of which were foreign policy oriented – reduce tariffs, acquire some or all of the Oregon Territory from Great Britain, and acquire California and New Mexico from Mexico.  He quickly passed the Walker Tariff, which solved the first point, but the other two were far more elusive prospects.  Polk got a godsend in 1845, when Texas, which had gained her independence from Mexico in 1836, petitioned to join the Union.  Texas, which at the time had a disputed border with Mexico, proved a perfect excuse for Polk to declare war on General Santa Anna, the President of Mexico, and after a little less than two years of war, Mexico was forced to cede vast swaths of land in what is now the southwestern United States.  This entire time, Polk was in a standoff with the British over the Pacific Northwest.  The popular rallying cry among democrats was “54-40 or Fight!” meaning that they insisted on getting territory that would have extended the United States up to the border of the then Russian-occupied Alaska, and the fact that the United States had already been willing to declare war on Mexico due to a shaky border dispute made the “Fight” part of the slogan far more convincing.  Polk instead proposed a compromise, along the 49th Parallel (the modern-day border), and the British, eager to rid themselves of the crisis, agreed with the 1846 Oregon Treaty.  Thus, by March of 1848, when the Mexican-American War ended, Polk had achieved all of his goals and was ready to retire.

4. Another one-term President (whose re-election effort was ruined by the ticket-splitting Ross Perot) George H.W. Bush managed the most dangerous political situation the world had faced since 1939.  Granted, many of his programs were simply a continuation of his predecessor, Ronald Reagan’s, but the fall of the Berlin Wall, the implosion of the Soviet Union, and the subsequent power vacuum, but he faced over thirty different countries changing governments via non-elective means during his Presidency.  However, his background as the former Director of the CIA likely prepared him for the job more than any previous President.  If the fall of the Berlin Wall was a sign that the Soviet Union was crumbling, the First Persian Gulf War was the death knell.  A coalition of UN member states banded together against a regional power and crushed in a matter of months, and the Soviet Union did almost nothing.  It had spent every last cent of its political capital trying to prop up regimes in Poland, Romania, and East Germany, and now when a major war arose, the Soviet Union had no part to play.  When Boris Yeltsin announced the end of the Union in 1991, Bush swept in and ensured that the Cold War would not resume as soon as it had ended (unfortunately his successor was not so successful in this).  Although he might not have the dazzling accomplishments of a McKinley or a Polk, Bush should be recognized for what could have happened but did not happen during his watch.

5.This list would not be complete without Franklin Delano Roosevelt.  Although Roosevelt’s critics will, not without merit, point out that he had some dictatorial tendencies, it was under him that America’s foreign policy changed permanently.  He mixed in many failures with his successes, which is why he is not number one, but his impact was so great that it would be a travesty to leave him off.  From the Good Neighbor Policy in Latin America, which led the US to exercise more “soft power” in the region instead of the previous policy of occupying countries at will to his famous 1937 Quarantine Speech, in which he described aggressor countries as a “disease” that needed to be quarantined, since they were a public health hazard, FDR was already doing a lot of diplomacy even before the beginning of the Second World War.  FDR also described the United States as the “Arsenal of Democracy.”  A plan that in theory has worked well but has been almost habitually improperly implemented, to the point that the policy now needs to be re-evaluated as a whole.  There is no denying that few Presidents could have accomplished during the Second World War what FDR did, and few would have had the courage to turn so far away from traditional politics to take on a new mantle of responsibility in the world, but FDR’s judgment of foreign leaders was severely lacking.  He chose to align himself with Winston Churchill, who would become highly unpopular in the UK, and, by extension, so would FDR.  He refused to recognize Charles de Gaulle as the legitimate leader of France as well, despite being, for all intents and purposes, at war with Vichy France, and finally, he seems to have greatly underestimated Josef Stalin.  Few would actually claim that FDR trusted Stalin, but allowing Stalin to “reconstruct” half of Europe was foolhardy.  One could also question the wisdom of an oil embargo with Japan, but the logic here is understandable.  Despite his shortcomings, however, FDR was the President America, and really the world, needed during the Second World War.

Honorable Mention: Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon, James Madison, Andrew Jackson, Franklin Pierce, Theodore Roosevelt

Worst of the Worst: Woodrow Wilson, George W. Bush, Jimmy Carter, Zachary Taylor, Grover Cleveland