Observations From India

In November 2024, I traveled to India as part of a delegation hosted by the India Foundation. The foundation is a part of the new nationalist establishment steering Indian society. As they see things, India’s relationship with America has been mediated by hostile parties for too long. On the Indian side you have Congress-sympathizing functionaries; on the American side, a set of intellectuals and diplomats who can neither speak for nor to the American right. Direct links between Indian and American nationalists are needed.

So I was invited to India.

        For most members of the delegation with was our first exposure to India outside of textbooks and Bollywood films. We first visited New Delhi. There we met numerous government officials, think tankers, and journalists. We journeyed then to India’s eastern reaches, traveling to both Assam and Arunachal Pradesh. At fifteen thousand feet we saw PLA soldiers guarding the Chinese border—or as our local Tawang guides called it, India’s border with “unfree Tibet.” We finished our trip at a big to-do in Bangalore called the India Ideas Conclave, with many leading businessmen and BJP bigwigs in attendance.

One must be wary on such trips. I have seen the harm done to my homeland by businessmen seduced by the charms of Chinese junkets. I do not wish to repeat their blunders. I tried to go into this with eyes open: my hosts wanted me to like India and to like India’s governing class. They hoped this liking might help their country.

It probably shall.

I went to India already believing that there was much the American right might learn from their Indian counterparts, and that Indian and American national interests align on many fronts. This is a relationship that I want to work. My trip to India gave me many reasons to think it shall. But it also exposed me to many sore points in our relations that might not be easy to resolve. Most of these issues have been given little thought in Washington, considered only by a small group of India hands.

 I probably could write four or five essay-length pieces on each of these topics. I am not going to do that here—rather, I am going to quickly move through nine observations I made in India worth exploring more in the future. These are:

1. Republicans should carefully study the foundations of the BJP electoral success. There are surprising structural similarities between Trump’s coalition and Modi’s. If you are an operative eager to keep newly won voting blocs within the Republican tent, you should ponder how Modi and his team managed to maintain demographic inroads over multiple election seasons.
   
   
2. Many writers, thinkers, and politicians have speculated on a “post-liberal” future for the West. None of them discuss the Hindutva program. This is a mistake. It is perhaps the only example of actually existing post-liberalism in the world today.
   
   
3. I went to India expecting that the Indian elite would be preoccupied with Pakistan. They are instead preoccupied with China. China is the object of New Delhi’s mimetic desires—just as the United States is the object of Beijing’s.  
   
   
4. Indian elites are overly preoccupied with how the Western media portrays them. This preoccupation will do them no good. The New York Times matters less than they think.
   
   
5. The Indian ‘China watching’ community is very small. Its analytic talent is exceptional.
   
   
6. Many problems in the Indo-American relationship can be easily solved—they are more a matter of perception, assumption, and style than true issues of substance. There are three issues of substance that might derail relations.  
   
   The first of these is Bangladesh. Here American actions have largely been in the wrong and should be reversed as soon as Trump comes to power.
   
   The second of these is the problem posed by Christian missionaries sponsored by American congregations. This one is tougher. I do not think any member of the delegation came away more sympathetic to the Indian perspective on this point. But if presented in a different way, one that provides more historical context for Indian concerns, the Americans might see the Indian position in a more sympathetic light.
   
   Third is the matter of extrajudicial assassination squads operating on American and Canadian soil. On this one I think the Indians have entirely unrealistic expectations from Washington DC. From New Delhi’s perspective the best that can happen is for India to drop the matter and trust that the new administration won’t bother with the issue in the future if the Indians let it lie.
   
   
7. If you are an evolutionary anthropologist who studies religion, you should consider making a field site in northeastern India. A live experiment in the various theories of religious evolution is occurring there in real time. This will not be true three decades from now.
   
   
8. Aesthetically, Indian futurism is very pleasant. It fares well in contrast to Chinese futurism, which is raw and ugly.
   
   
9. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) is an extraordinary and understudied organization. Its existence, persistence, and power speak directly to debates I have had here at the Stage on the relationship between self-sacrifice, transcendence, and political power.

I will not give equal attention to all these points. I lay them out in miniature above so the interested reader can skip to the points of greatest personal interest.

1. When American conservatives go searching abroad for inspiration, they journey to all the wrong places. Consider the recent obsession with Hungary. Hungary’s population, economy, and territory are all smaller than North Carolina’s. What Hungary does or does not do has no bearing on the world economy, matters little to the future of global technology, and is completely disconnected from the hard geopolitical questions faced by greater powers.

I wish the American right took Asia more seriously. Its peoples face geopolitical, economic, demographic, and technological dilemmas on a scale closer to our own. In a few of these countries conservative/nationalist parties have been immensely successful. Japan and India are especially interesting case studies here: both have been governed by electoral machines that consistently deliver victory to rightwing forces. The Japanese right maintained governing power for decades. The Indian right has not had that longevity, but it did weather the global anti-incumbency wave that threw just about everyone else out of power last year. The Sangh Parivar has revolutionized Indian elections—and managed to accomplish much of their agenda in the meantime.

There are obvious cultural and economic differences between America and India. There are also similarities.

Imagine a nation governed by a “deep state” mandarinate. Imagine further that this class of administrators has the sort of worldview expressed best in viral Tumblr posts from 2012. This mandarinate is closely allied to and in general sympathy with this nation’s premiere center-left political party. In an extremely diverse nation, this party views itself as a coalition of the marginalized and disadvantaged. Even though the party elite are far more secular and progressive than the average member of any of these groups, the party still manages to collect most of their votes. They have won most of the popular elections held over the last few decades.

Arrayed against the left is a group of ineffectual nationalists who struggle to win support outside of the upper middle class. They only win after they field a charismatic nationalist as their party head. He is a natural born populist who unexpectedly steals great swathes of the progressives’ traditional voting base. His election hints at a general electoral realignment that favors an enduring nationalist majority.

Which country am I describing here? Is it India in 2015? Or is it America in 2025?

For our purposes there is one key difference between the India of Modi and the America of Trump. Modi and his coalition have kept the voters they wooed over. Whether our coalition will be able to keep Trump’s new voters is yet to be seen.

How Modi did all that is worth careful study. The BJP coalition is led by a small voting bloc of committed ideologues. They seek to transform political power into cultural influence. They have largely been successful in this aim. But this is not the glue that holds the BJP coalition together. That has much more to do with economic and development policies pursued by the Indian government, as well as the specific long-term mobilization tactics of the BJP.

There is a lesson here—I hope to explore it further in a separate essay. I am almost done with Nalin Mehta’s The New BJP. When I have finished it I will probably write a book review somewhere that discusses these parallels in more depth. For now it is enough to state that these parallels exist. There are lessons to learn here, and Republican operatives should consider which apply to their own party.

2. As for the BJP, so for the larger Hindu nationalist movement.

In the West, conservatives and reactionaries constantly bicker. Which parts of modernity can be rolled back? Is liberalism embedded in the Western tradition? Can anything durable be forged out of the heritage of pre-liberal times? When did the poison enter the apple—in the 2010s? The 1960s? The New Deal? The Enlightenment? The Reformation? With Christianity itself? Around and around we go.

 I follow these debates with interest and have even joined in on occasion. One of the curious things I have observed in these discussions is the number of self-declared post-liberals who idealize countries like China and Singapore as model anti-modern polities. I have always thought this view somewhat cooky.  The People’s Republic of China is the hyper-modernist state par excellence. Chinese communists are quite taken with their slogans about “Chinese style modernization,” but this mostly amounts to standard modernization but with a Leninist party in charge.1 If there is a country whose leaders are more inspired by Enlightenment rationalism than China, I have not found it.

India is different. In fact, India is the only country I have visited where a post-liberal polity seems plausible. Hindu nationalists conceive of their project much the same way Western post-liberals do—they aim to create a country animated by a “non-Western worldview,” to strip away the hegemony of Enlightenment ideas on the Indian mind, and to find a separate path toward wealth and power. As Nehru’s India was liberal in conception, a successful Hindutva program means an actual post-liberal order.

Is that possible? I am not sure. The Indian nationalists propose that Enlightenment ideas have penetrated the Indian masses more shallowly than they have soaked through the peoples of Europe, America, or East Asia. They believe that their country has a greater claim to cultural continuity over the last two millennia than any other region of the world. Claims like that make historians wince. But in a relative sense—that is, in comparison to the civilizations founded in China, Europe, the Middle East, or the Americas—that last claim is almost certainly true.

Whether this will remain true for much longer is yet to be seen. Modernization is a funny thing. It is tricky to disentangle which social transformations are inherent to modernization and which ones are incidental to it. Western business suits are almost certainly incidental; if the industrial revolution was pioneered on the Kanto plain then kimono, not tuxedos, would be today’s global high attire.2 But could the Japanese have developed modernity without chancing on something like the Western concept of human rights? What about Western attitudes towards religion, the individual, or scientific authority? These are much harder questions to answer.

Most post-liberals can approach these questions only through thought experiment. Post-liberal fantasy lands proliferate. Real world experiments do not. India is embarking on such an experiment. Whether the RSS can de-Westernize Indian society, and how India fares afterwards, should interest every soul who wonders whether there are escape hatches from “liquid modernity.”

I am not prepared to say more on this point. I suspect that more of Hindutva thought is reliant on Western ideas than its champions admit, but I am willing to reserve judgement here until I understand their thought better. Likewise, I hesitate to draw direct parallels between Hindu nationalism and any of its Western counterparts. I do not yet have a good enough grasp on it. I hope to have a better grasp in the future.

My minimum reading list will be Ram Madhav’s The Hinduvta Paradigm and Because India Comes First; J. Sai Deepak’s India that is Bharat and India, Bharat, and Pakistan; and Swapan Dasgupta’s Awakening Bharat Mata: The Political Beliefs of the Indian Right. In addition to those contemporary statements, I suppose I will need to read something by Deendayal Upadhyaya and Vinayak Damodar Savarkar as well.

Once this reading is done perhaps I will have something more insightful to say about the lessons and the limits of the Hindu nationalist example for the Western world. (Also: If any of my Indian readers have a better suggested reading list, please sound off in the comments.)

3. Our rivals define us. Choose them carefully.

I was struck on this trip by how clearly India’s chosen rival is no longer Pakistan, but China. It does not matter if we are talking in military, technological, economic, or even cultural terms. The default comparison Indians make is with China.

This is interesting because in many ways the Chinese and Indians are engaged in fundamentally different projects.

 I made this observation first in my 2015 essay, “Why Was There No May Fourth Movement in India?”3 To summarize that essay in two paragraphs: the five decades between 1890 and 1940 were crucial to the foundation of the governing ideologies of both India and China. The key difference between the two nations was their relationship with the imperial powers. One the imperialists wanted; the other they had already got. The Chinese were in the ‘wanted’ category. For the Chinese intellectual devoted to “Saving China,” nation building meant state building. China could only be saved from imperialist encroachment by creating and sustaining the military power needed to protect Chinese sovereignty. The leaders of the New Culture Movement and May Fourth Movement stood ready to tear out any part of traditional Chinese culture that might slow the birth of a stronger state. They were willing to destroy whatever they needed to destroy to keep the nation whole.

This would never fly with the Indians. For them the key issue was not political sovereignty but spiritual sovereignty. They had already lost political independence. In India, nation building meant building a shared national consciousness. The goal of Indian intellectuals and activists was to foster a distinct sense of Indianness strong enough to endure British control. The leaders of the INC understood they could only gain the power needed to force the British out by first uniting India’s many millions around a shared cultural core.

What I did not appreciate when I wrote that essay is the extent to which all of this still holds true today.

After spending many decades at war with all vestiges of old China, China’s communists now work to rehabilitate and harmonize traditional Chinese philosophy with their 21^st century national goals. While sincere, this effort does not have deep roots. I am quite sure that if the Standing Committee ever perceives a contradiction between any traditional Chinese social structure and the demands of modernization it will not hesitate to dismantle it.

The Indians are different. For them the entire purpose of modernization is to protect and fortify cultural structures that might otherwise be lost. In India modernization is a means. In China it is an end.

4. The Indian political elite are preoccupied—I am tempted to say obsessed—with foreign, and especially Western, perceptions of India. As with many of their fellow obsessives across the globe, this often takes the form of a particular hatred of the New York Times. By far the easiest way to bond with a politician in the BJP is to insult the Grey Lady.

This is an understandable but unfortunate impulse. I say that only because I’ve seen this story play out so many times: among members of my faith, among wider American conservatives, and among the Silicon Valley tech elite. The basic pattern has been clear since gamergate. Liberal journalists, disposed by personality or ideology to mesh better with some members of a community they cover than others, identify those most similar to themselves as sources. They combine the narratives of these dissidents with their own preconceived notions of right and wrong to create a larger narrative about the community they cover. The resulting story is alien to the median member of this community. He sees no relationship between the reality he experiences day to day and the story told in the newspaper.

It is a very human thing to get worked up by this. We have evolved to be acutely attuned to care what others say about us. Our minds are built for the village. In the digital age the village is a large one.

A reaction being natural does not make it wise. Almost all preoccupations with what the New York Times reports work more ill than good. Yes, dissenters gain prestige with outside reporters and those who read them. But this prestige does not translate into more power within the community itself. Despite all the coverage they have received the “progmos” do not run the LDS church.  Silicon Valley is still the beating heart of the American economy. No VC has been denied the attention of hungry founders because of their right-wing leanings. And of course, the GOP now controls all branches of the federal government despite a decade of media invective. 

Here likewise. What the New York Times has to say about Hindu nationalism neither changes the realities of power inside India nor the strategic interests that have slowly been drawing America and India closer together.

Far more important to American perceptions of India than media narratives are the realities every visitor to the country encounters. My wife was very nervous that I might catch some debilitating disease on my trip to India. That worry was not altogether unfounded: Assam is a malarial state. There was much consternation among the delegation about whether we all had the antimalarial pills we needed for this trip. I have been to China many times. Never have I needed to give second thought to malaria precautions (nor, I imagine, did any of those businessmen charmed by Shanghai junkets).  

Some of the Indians I met with wondered why Westerners take China so much more seriously than they take India. This is why. (Certainly it is not favorable coverage in the New York Times that makes Westerners view China with respect!) Western perceptions of India are less dependent on what the New York Times has to say about Hindu-Muslim relations and more dependent on simple facts of Indian development. The Chinese capital is clean and safe. New Delhi is not. India hosts a dozen dangerous diseases; many can be picked up in large cities like Kolkata. There is zero chance of contracting malaria or encephalitis in Nanjing, Shenzhen, Chongqing, or Xian.

I do not want to be unfair to the Indians. By all accounts material conditions in India have seen great progress. Those who visited India a decade ago report that they could not escape the stench of human waste. That was not true in any of the four cities we visited, nor does it describe the countryside of Assam or Arunachal Pradesh. Things are changing in Modi’s India. Perhaps a decade hence malaria will no longer menace.

I bring all this up not to harp on India’s lack of development, but rather to suggest that the Indian leadership must not allow itself to get distracted. Practical problems of health, wealth, and safety matter more to Western investors than the anti-BJP tilt of the New York Times.

One of the great afflictions of Western political parties is that they care more about opinion management than management. Their operatives are absorbed with problems of public relations. India’s national elite should not fall into this same trap. Perceptions will change in tandem with realities on the ground. Do not repeat our mistakes.

5. I had the opportunity to meet representatives of India’s China watching tribe. Most of this community is locked away within the Indian government. It does not produce publications that the rest of the world has access to. I left these meetings very impressed.

Without violating the Chatham House rule set binding these discussions, I will simply note the following: military officers who have personal experience monitoring the PLA and responding to its maneuvers are the key pillar holding up India’s China watching apparatus. One of the things that surprised me most about these officers was their ability to speak authoritatively across the gamut of Chinese affairs. It is very rare to find a military officer in the United States who can speak with insight on the Chinese housing market. It is difficult to find a financial analyst who has much to say about Chinese military logistics. The Indians I met could do both.

There are not very many of these people in India. The circle of American China watchers, stocked with specialists of many stripes, is probably two orders of magnitude larger than its Indian counterparts. But the Indians were very good.  I was both surprised and a bit ashamed that I was unaware of this center of excellence.

I asked one of these fellows what he thought the largest blind spot was in American analysis of China. I found his answer thought provoking. “The problem with you Americans,” he said, “is that you care too much about the headline of the month and too little about the trendline of the year. It seems like discussions of China and the United States swerve back and forth as the headlines change month to month. In reality the trends that matter most play out on five-to-ten-year timelines. Those are the timescales that your policies should be most reactive to.”

6. I’m afraid I’m going to break my promise and reserve discussion of this point for a separate piece. This essay is long as it is. As some of my arguments on the three subpoints outlined above will prove controversial, I will save them for a future essay where I can explore each with the length they deserve.

7. One of the highlights of our trip was an unscheduled invitation to the home of a local government official in Tawang. His family and several of his staff joined us for dinner. Only part of our delegation attended.

Like most Monpa, the people of Tawang are Tibetan Buddhists. But the Monpa are only one of the peoples of Arunachal Pradesh; others are not Buddhist, but animist. Or as my host put it, “those people worship the sun, the moon, and the grain themselves.”

This is changing. One of my dinner companions described to me how the RSS was sending teams out to these villages to transform the religious structure of animists. According to his report they work with local leaders to restructure otherwise inchoate animist traditions into something closer to our idea of religion. Shrines would be built; weekly rituals would be held; deities would be created to personify the various natural forces the animists held in awe.

Why do this? The RSS discovered that animist villages who have had their traditions fortified with regular worship ceremonies, formal religious leadership, and personified deities were more resistant to Christian conversion.

It is not entirely clear to me the extent to which these RSS-sponsored organizations are Hinduizing local beliefs versus simply rationalizing them. They are clearly engaged in a sort of race with Baptists and Pentecostals across the northeast. This region is geographically distant from the rest of India and culturally out of step with the rest of Indian life. It is home to hundreds of distinct tribes with their own languages and beliefs. For many decades Christian missionaries have had unusual success among these tribes.

In this race I see a unique research opportunity for the budding evolutionary anthropologist.  The events in the northeast speak directly to a debate now wracking the anthropology of religion. The essential question in this debate goes as follows: are there communal advantages to believing in “powerful, omniscient, interventionist deities concerned with regulating moral behavior”—what Ara Norenzayan calls “big gods?”4 In the historical record the collapse of animist beliefs is correlated with the rise of large empires. But why? Why do the amorphous traditions so characteristic of small-scale societies disappear once devotional religious traditions show up on the scene?

I’m not going to summarize the various arguments and counter arguments in this debate. I will simply note that most of these arguments are based on historical case studies from the distant past. But here we have a living example of these dynamics playing out right now. ‘Big gods’ belief systems like Christianity and Hinduism seem to have some sort of memetic advantage over the local animist traditions. What is it? Why are Christian conversions so successful in these areas? Why does the rationalization of animist religion make villages and tribes that have experienced it less susceptible to conversion? The answers to these questions are relevant to the larger anthropological debate.

Were I an evolutionary anthropologist studying religion I would head to northeast India while the opportunity lasts. I expect that within a generation or two this process will have largely wrapped up. Everyone in the region will be some sort of Christian, Buddhist, or Hinduism-influenced animist. If the anthropologists wait a few decades to study what is happening they might never get the chance.

8. This point is inspired by a remark that Bill Drexel, a fellow delegation member, made to me. Drexel has lived several years both in India and China. He pointed out that even when Indian architecture and interior design aims for the futuristic and modern it still favors natural materials and tones. “Where the Chinese build with glass, steel, and concrete, the Indians prefer wood, bamboo, and stone.” The Bangalore airport is a case in point. Here is a video tour of its interior:

Contrast that with this video of the Shanghai-Pudong airport:

Or this airport in Shenzhen:

Bangalore is famous as the center of Indian high technology. I found it generally much more pleasant then New Delhi. I was struck, however, at the amount of greenery inside New Delhi proper. New Delhi felt like a garden capital. A smog-chocked, trash-strewn garden, but a garden nonetheless. No one would ever say that about any quarter of Beijing.

I wonder if there is a connection between the Indian drive for cultural continuity and the architectural choices that make Indian resorts and public spaces aesthetically pleasant. It is not hard to weave a story that connects the Chinese quest for modernity to the Chinese love affair with glass, steel, and plastic. But this might be too neat a tale—a just-so story that matches my earlier judgments on the respective priorities of the Chinese and Indian elites.

In any case, I hope the Indians maintain and further develop their unique spin on public beauty. The world does not need more of the sleek steel or bleak concrete so characteristic of the Chinese metropolis. A world where “futuristic” aesthetic principles are set by Indian designers is a world to look forward to.

9. In the essay “Questing for Transcendence” I pondered the different routes humans have for finding purpose and power.5 Of special interest are movements and organizations that ask people to sacrifice everything for a higher good. Few things feel more wonderful than total consecration. To those so committed, even the most mundane moments of daily life—brushing your teeth, say, or eating a well-rounded dinner—gain special significance. Every small thing contributes to the cause.

Those who so consecrate their fate and fortune often accomplish great deeds.

However, total consecration has its problems. It is difficult to sustain over time. It exists most easily in moments of pressing danger or terrible disaster. In times of peace and plenty the spirit of consecration falters. It is difficult to square this spirit with family life—but without children it is hard for any vanguard group to last more than one generation. The vanguard must win the respect of the people it leads without becoming too mired in their daily run of things. One solution to this is charismatic authority—but that solution does not scale. Another is religious fervor—but many of the problems most in need of a committed vanguard elite are not spiritual in nature.

This problem is not mine alone. In some ways it describes the history of spectacular firms like Space X. It is the special obsession of Xi Jinping, who has never stopped worrying that his cadres lack the commitment of their forefathers. I enthusiastically recommend Yuri Slezkine’s portrait of the Bolshevik revolutionaries in House of Government as one of the best explorations of these themes.

The third chapter of Slezkine’s book wanders across the entire breadth of human history in an attempt to discern patterns common to our kind. But Slezkine does not mention the RSS. Perhaps he should have. Here is an organization of consecrants—men who have taken vows of sacrifice and celibacy for the greater cause. But their cause is not religious: the have vowed to save the nation. Theirs is a nationalist monkhood, a sort of Hindu Bene Gesserit.

Born as a handful of men conducting rituals in a Nagpur backroom, the RSS has been forced underground twice, yet persists. A century after its founding it has grown to its six million members. There is hardly a part of Indian life it does not touch. They are entangled in the largest Indian unions, farmers’ collectives, youth groups, religious conferences, and charities—to say nothing of the country’s governing political party! They look almost like a traditional Leninist party—but unlike the Leninists, they wove themselves into the fabric of all society without totalitarian violence. Their influence has also proved more enduring than most Leninists can manage. They have discovered how to keep their cadres loyal and mission-minded several generations in.

They understand something about the quest for transcendence that I do not. I would like to find out what that something is.

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Your support makes this blog possible. To get updates on new posts published at the Scholar’s Stage, you can join the Scholar’s Stage Substack mailing list, follow my twitter feed, or support my writing through Patreon. If you found the ideas explored in this piece interesting, you might also enjoy In addition to the pieces written linked to above, check out “The Silicon Valley Canon: On the Paıdeía of the American Tech Elite,” “The Madrassas and the Modern,” “Questing for Transcendence,” “Why Was There No May Fourth Movement in India?,” “Thoughts on Post Liberalism,” and “Lessons from the 19th Century.”

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