A couple of hours from where I live, religious riots killed 20 last year
Last edited Mon May 4, 2015, 04:02 AM - Edit history (1)
It didn't start over a cartoon, but over a Facebook post of a college kid standing on a shrine (the kid was one of the ones who was killed). Actually then a second round happened over some cartoons of Chhatrapati Shivaji (the 17th-century Marathi king) and Bal Thackeray (the recently deceased editorial cartoonist and founder of the radical right wing Hindu group Shiv Sena -- one of Modi's chief allied parties in this part of India, unfortunately, though he did kind of amusingly screw them out of some seats in the local legislature). The mob couldn't find the offending cartoonist in this second case, and literally walked through the streets looking for someone in a skullcap and beard, and ended up killing a 25-year-old Internet startup entrepreneur.
This wasn't some tiny rural village, but Pune, the ninth largest city in India and one of the top 10 cities worldwide by number of postgraduate degrees held per capita. (Also, I say "a couple of hours" but it's more like 5; it takes 3 hours to get out of Mumbai and then 2 more to get to Pune. It's a beautiful drive though, right over the spine of the Western Ghats and past some amazing waterfalls and wildlife refuges.) The violence also wasn't by Muslims in this case but by Marathi Hindus; and in fact many Indian Christians and Muslims argue that there is currently a new and disturbing pattern of right-wing Hindu violence, mostly vandalism of mosques and churches (not, oddly enough, synagogues) but increasingly violence against people for their religion (or perceived religion).
I also just got back from a trip to Sri Lanka (expect a Lounge thread with pics soon) because John Kerry was going there (the first Secretary-level visit since the place was called Ceylon, it turns out). That's an island that only recently finished a decades-long civil war in which, among other things, the suicide bomb vest was invented (thanks for that contribution to society, LTTE...) Although the Tamil Tigers were primarily a nationalist group, the Sinhalese Buddhist reaction was almost entirely in religious terms; mobs of violent Buddhist extremists (yes, this is a thing) would roam the countryside and kill people who didn't pay appropriate respect to Buddha icons.
Anyways, my point is: people being killed over religious offenses isn't a "strange" idea in a lot of the world. The idea of a cartoon sparking any violence (really, of people caring about any idea enough to kill someone over it) is kind of alien to the US and western Europe, but it's very much alive and (un)well in many places. Here in India, the cartoon contest would never get a permit to begin with (and you seemingly need permits for everything), and even the news that it had been suggested would probably start a "minor" riot. People really care about this stuff, in a way that's hard to relate to from our Playstation-mediated world.
Neal Stephenson, in a very prescient essay from almost 20 years ago (warning: a lot of it is about computer nerdery) touched on this idea of a morally exhausted West incapable of feeling and believing things like the rest of the world could; I suppose I would link it to Nietzsche's or Fukuyama's idea of the "last man" -- a creature that is all consumer, all stomach, no heart or soul. Nietzsche said it even more bluntly: "the ancient Christians showed their love better when they burned us." The change since then was not that Christians loved their neighbors more, but that they got lazy and apathetic like the rest of us and can't be bothered to save a village full of souls by burning the one heretic alive (and, if you actually believe that's what that did, why in the hell wouldn't you?). Nobody wants to put this forward as any sort of ideal life, but maybe that kind of gastroarchy is actually what it takes to keep people from believing in anything enough to kill over it...
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"If we don't fight them over there, we'll fight them over here."
What we didn't fight was torture, debasement, and degradation of humanity.
Now we have it HERE.
After reading your OP, I looked at your profile and see that you live in Mumbai, India. Am thrilled to meet you.
Haven't kept up with India's politics for a long time, since Indira (?) was President (?) and her father (Ghandi) had been killed (?) died...
Do they have socialism there? What's it like as far as ownership and what the government has governance over? So Buddists aren't peaceful after all? Wow, how much we learn here in Du.
And John Kerry managed to find the place? It's hard to believe these places exist until you meet someone who actually lives there.
The only things I know about India are in Indiana Jones movies (Temple of Doom, Raiders of the Lost Ark?) and I'm showing how dumb I am 
I think they were filmed in US but locale of story was India? Religion did play a big part in both movies...
OK, a couple of things.
People do this all the time, but it's "Gandhi", not "Ghandi". And they're not related to "the" Gandhi, though they're more than happy to let people assume they are. Mohandas Gandhi ("the" Gandhi) was killed by a Hindu nationalist in 1948, and was somewhat in opposition to Jawaharial Nehru, the first Prime Minister of India and the patriarch of the Nehru-Gandhi clan. He died peacefully in the 1960s but left a power vacuum that his daughter eventually filled a decade later. He described himself as a "Hindu agnostic", meaning that he felt Hinduism had cultural importance but that superstition, fundamentalism, and sectarianism were preventing India's development -- and to his credit Congress has always had significant support among non-Hindu Indians.
The Nehru-Gandhi family is vast and complicated. Indira Gandhi (born Indira Nehru, daughter of Jawaharial) was PM in the 70s and 80s until her assassination in 1984 at the hands of two of her bodyguards (they were Sikh and she had ordered the clearing of a separatist Sikh temple in Punjab). 3000 Sikhs died in the riots after her death. She took the Gandhi last name after marrying Feroze Gandhi, who was a Parsee (an Indo-Iranian).
Her son Rajiv took over until he was assassinated by Tamil separatists (probably with connections to the Sri Lankan Tamil separatists but that was never definitively proven) in 1991. His widow Sonia is still an Italian citizen but is the head of the Congress party (the party "run" more or less by the Nehru-Gandhi family). Their son Rahul is the politician in the vest who got absolutely spanked by Narendra Modi last year, and who then went off to Burma for six months without announcing it to "find himself" or something. So the family may be somewhat played out at this point because even Congress supporters were kind of silently glad he was gone.
Also, the Presidency in India is pretty much just a placeholder; he's elected by their version of the Senate and just attends ribbon cuttings and state dinners. The power is in the Prime Minister position, which is what the Nehru-Gandhi clan has dominated. (In theory the President can veto laws, but that's about as removed from actual political reality as the Queen's similar theoretical ability in the UK.) There's some kind of byzantine power-sharing agreement the Senate uses to make sure all of the different communities in India get a "turn" at the Presidency; it's a non-partisan position and the votes are traditionally unanimous.
Sorry, I can get long-winded about Indian politics.
TL;DR: the Nehru-Gandhi family that essentially ran Indian politics singlehandedly for four decades has more or less disappeared from political life. And they're not related to the Mahatma Gandhi.
Do they have socialism there?
Yes, explicitly. Many industries are either fully nationalized or (more often) the state owns a controlling or just-under-controlling interest. Labor in most industrial sectors is very strongly organized, and caste, though legally disavowed since independence, still plays a large roll in that organization. As an example, the state I live in, Maharashtra, recently banned the slaughter of bulls and the possession of beef (slaughter of cows had been banned for years, but bulls could still be slaughtered and beef itself was not illegal). Three butchers have since been jailed and -- because this wasn't silly enough already -- the BJP (the right-wing Hindu party that just took over in the state) is actually talking about coming up with an ID-card system tied to something like facebook to track all of the cows in the state. It's still legal to slaughter buffalos, but because all of the butchers and tanners are Quareshis (a Muslim caste), all of the butchers and tanners have downed tools until this is resolved, so Maharashtra's buffalo meat export and leather industries (fairly large parts of the GDP) are essentially all shut down in solidarity with the bull beef butchers.
Housing is heavily socialized, with co-operative associations owning something like 70% of housing stock. Though this also gets into caste/religion, because a lot of that is a way to make sure that Sikhs live with Sikhs, Sindhis with Sindhis, etc.; but the form it takes is your standard old-style socialist housing committees. Health care is done by the state, though the billionaires hire their own doctors. The middle class mostly uses a hybrid system like you see in a parts of Europe: basic state provided coverage augmented by some privately purchased insurance. Doctors do make housecalls, and even bring their X ray machines. I just had to have blood taken for a malaria test, for instance, and the nurse came by my house to do it. Those were the days...
There's also definitely less of a fear of "busy work" than there is in the US. My apartment building has elevator operators, for instance, not because we need help pressing the buttons but because people need jobs. Microsoft just opened a campus in Bangalore but was forbidden from buying a lawn mower so that they could employ a crew of ten to cut the grass with shears rather than a crew of two to mow it.
There's something to be said for that.
Here specifically in Mumbai, the industrial situation is a little depressing. In 1863 after the Emancipation Proclamation was issued, the UK could no longer accept Confederate cotton, and needed a new supply. Dinshaw Maneckji Petit, a Parsee businessman, started a cotton mill in Bombay (as Mumbai was then known); the Mills in Bombay soon grew to be the largest sector of the country's economy and dominated the central part of the city for over a century. In the 1980s and 1990s, however, a series of strikes led to the mill owners' simply packing up and leaving and setting up in Bangladesh and Indonesia, with the result that the government is now the owner of about 40 foreclosed cotton mills (they are slowly redeveloping them; my apartment building is one, for instance). Since then a lot of the younger workers have been more leery of traditional industrial unions.
Orgainzation in the informal sectors is pretty much non-existant (and the informal sector is as much as three quarters of the economy), and organization in the domestic sector is still explicitly illegal. So, socialism in some ways, not in others.
So Buddists aren't peaceful after all?
Sri Lanka isn't even the worst case: Buddhist extremists in Myanmar (Burma, as it used to be known) have killed tens of thousands in recent years.
And John Kerry managed to find the place?
Well, I'm pretty sure his plane has GPS, and he does have staff for that. But more seriously, Colombo, Sri Lanka is a hugely important port on the Indian Ocean rim, and Sri Lanka's agricultural exports are rather important to the world (they're the largest exporter of both tea and coconuts in the world, their coffee is rather important in the global supply chain, and while they aren't the textile powerhouse Bangladesh is, the "high-end" manufacturers tend to source there because the labor force is more skilled). Furthermore, China is spending an absurd amount of money to upgrade Colombo's port, and we would prefer they not have all the influence in the country that that will bring. Plus, the civil war there sparked the Tamil Tigers (LTTE), which was part of a nexus that included Al Qaeda and the IRA back during the Troubles, so the US would like that fighting not to start up again.
The only things I know about India are in Indiana Jones movies (Temple of Doom, Raiders of the Lost Ark?)
Temple of Doom. It's very funny to watch from India: imagine a movie shot in the US that went from the Mississippi delta to the California high desert to the coastline of Maine in one single hike. Also, those aren't vampire bats but perfectly harmless flying foxes like the kind that live in the banyan trees between my apartment and the railroad tracks. Also, Kali is not an "evil" goddess in any way; she's just from a completely different pantheon from Shiva, and anyways she's southern (like the village) and Mola Ram was northern, so they kind of had the theology backwards. Anyways.
