Group items tagged

Stripping the region of its special status had long been a goal of India’s Hindu nationalists.

Kashmir has been disputed between India and Pakistan since the end of British rule in 1947. In the late 1980s, a Kashmiri separatist movement, which received support and training in Pakistan, intensified the targeting of the region’s Hindus, known as Pandits. A mass migration of tens of thousands of Hindu families — perhaps 300,000 people in all — followed.

At the Vessu camp in the same district, where Mr. Raina and his family live, one-third of the 900 families have fled their modest two-bedroom houses.

The organization said that there had been more than a dozen targeted attacks, some fatal, recorded against Hindus since 2020. The Indian news media said a total of 18 Hindus had been killed since the 2019 change in the region’s status. Many Muslims seen as supporting the government have also been killed.

“Don’t force Kashmiri Pandits to pelt you with stone,” Mr. Jotshi is seen in a video telling the police, referring to an act that young local Kashmiri Muslim sometimes resort to against the region’s heavy security forces.

“We want to leave, at any cost,” Mr. Jotshi said. “We do not want to die here.”

a lot of people who came out of third-world countries felt, “We are never going to catch up with the West if we just wait for the market to work its way over hundreds of years.” They looked at, in the ’30s, the Soviet Union and thought, “This is a way to accelerate modernization, industrialization.” They all were much more comfortable with the idea of something that sped up the historical process of modernization.

Milton Friedman used to say that there are two groups of people who don’t like the free market. Academics, intellectuals because they think they can do it better than the market, and businessmen because they don’t like competition. What they really want — this is a variation of the Peter Thiel argument — what they all really want is to be monopolists. That former part is, I think, what explains the Bengali intellectuals.

I think that the reality is, the market is much more powerful than they are in these areas. To give you one simple example, they decided, “Okay, we need to be making high-end chips.” Who do they bet on? They bet on Intel, a company that has failed miserably to compete with TSMC, the great Taiwanese chip manufacturer. Intel is now getting multi-billion-dollar grants from the United States government, from the European Union, because it fills all the categories that you’re looking for: big company, stable and well-run, in some sense, can guarantee a lot of jobs.

But of course, the reality is that chip making is so complicated

Who knew that, actually, it’s Nvidia, whose chips turned out to be designed for gaming, turned out to be ideal for artificial intelligence? That’s a perfect example of how the Hayekian market signals that come bottom-up are much more powerful than a political elite who tries to tell you what it is.

COWEN: What did you learn from the Anglican Book of Common Prayer?

One was a reverence for tradition, and in particular, I loved the hymnal. I think Britain’s great contribution to music is religious music. It doesn’t have anything to compete with the Germans and the Italians in opera and things like that. Religious music, I think the Brits and the English have done particularly well.

The second thing I would say is an admiration for Christianity for its extraordinary emphasis on being nice to people who have not been lucky in life. I would say that’s, to me, the central message of Christianity that I take, certainly from the Sermon on the Mount, and it’s imbued through the Book of Common Prayer: to be nice to the people who have been less fortunate than you. Be nice to poor people. Recognize that in God’s kingdom, the first shall be last and the last shall be first.

There is an enormous emphasis on the idea that those things that make you powerful in this world are not the things that really matter, that your dignity as a human being doesn’t come from that. I think that’s a very powerful idea. It’s a very revolutionary idea

Tom Holland has a very good book about this. He’s a wonderful historian in Britain. I think it’s called Dominion.

He points out what a revolutionary idea this was. It completely upended the Roman values, which were very much, the first shall be first. The powerful and the rich are the ones to be valued. He points out, here is this Jewish preacher coming out of the Middle East saying, “No, the first shall be last, the last shall be first in the kingdom of heaven.”

COWEN: I went to Amritsar the year before, and it was one of the most magical feelings I’ve ever had in any place. I’m still not sure what exactly I can trace it to — I am not a Sikh, of course. But what, for you, accounts for the strong, powerful, wondrous feeling one gets from that place?

I think there’s something about it architecturally, which is that there is a serenity about it. Sometimes you can find Hindu temples that are very elaborate. Sikhism is a kind of offshoot of Hinduism. The Hindu temples can be very elaborate, but very elaborate and ornate. This somehow has a simplicity to it. When you add to that the water — I’ve always thought that water adds an enormously calming effect

Hindi and Urdu are two Indian languages, very related. They both have roughly the same grammatical structure, but then Hindi derives its vocabulary entirely from Sanskrit, or almost entirely from Sanskrit, and Urdu derives its vocabulary almost entirely from Persian. Urdu is a language of Indian Muslims and is the official language for Pakistan. It’s a beautiful language, very lyrical, very much influenced by that Persian literary sensibility.

If you’re speaking one of the languages, there’s a way to alternate between both, which a lot of Indian politicians used to do as a way of signaling a broad embrace of both the Hindu and the Muslim communities. Nehru, India’s first prime minister, used to often do that. He would say, “I am delighted to be coming here to your home.” He’d repeat the word home, first in Urdu, then in Hindi, so that in effect, both constituencies were covered.

Modi, by contrast, India’s current prime minister, is a great Hindu nationalist. He takes pains almost never to use an Urdu word when he speaks. He speaks in a kind of highly Sanskritized Hindi that most Indians actually find hard to understand because the everyday language, Bollywood Hindi, is a mixture of Hindi words and Urdu words

I think the partition of India was a complete travesty. It was premised on this notion of religious nationalism. It was horrendously executed. The person who drew the lines, a man named Radcliffe, had never been to India. He’d never been east of the Suez and was given this task, and he did it in a month or two, probably caused a million-and-a-half to two million lives lost, maybe 10 million people displaced. It broke that wonderfully diverse, syncretic aspect of India.

If you look at cities like Delhi and Lahore, what was beautiful about them is that they mix together all the influences of India: Hindu, Muslim, Punjabi, Sindhi. Now what you have is much more bifurcated. If you go to Lahore, Lahore is a Muslim city in Pakistan, and it has a Punjabi influence. Delhi has become, essentially, much more Indian and Hindu and has lost that Muslim influence. To me, as somebody who really loves cosmopolitanism and diversity, it’s sad to see that. It’s almost like you’ve lost something that really made these places wonderfully rich.

I feel the same way when you read about the history of Europe. You think of a place like Vienna, which, in its most dazzling moment, was dazzling precisely because it was this polyglot population of people coming from all over the Habsburg Empire. A large segment of it was Jewish, and it had, as a result — think about Freud and Klimt and the music that came out of there, and the architecture that came out at the turn of the 19th century. And it’s all gone. It’s like, at this point, a somewhat beautiful but slightly dull Austrian city.

I remember once being asked when I was a graduate student at Harvard — Tony Lake was then national security adviser, and his office called and said — I’d written something in the New York Times, I think — “Mr. Lake would like you to come to the White House to brief him.”

I think, in a sense, Islam fit in within that tapestry very easily, and it’s been around for a while. When people talk about cleansing India, Hindu nationals talk about cleansing India of foreign influences. Islam has been in India since the 11th century, so it’s been around for a long time

I was amazed that America — it wasn’t America; it was where I was at Yale and Harvard and all that — that nobody cared where I came from. Nobody cared.

the syncretic nature of India, that India has always been diverse. Hinduism is very tolerant. It’s a kind of unusual religion in that you can believe in one god and be Hindu. You can believe in 300. You can be vegetarian and believe that’s a religious dictate. You can be nonvegetarian and believe that that’s completely compatible with your religion. It’s always embraced almost every variant and variation.

I walked in and there were five people around the table: Tony Lake; Deputy National Security Advisor Sandy Berger; George Stephanopoulos, who was then director of communications at the White House; Joe Nye, who was a senior professor at Harvard; one other person; and myself. And I kept thinking to myself, “Are they going to realize at some point that I’m not an American citizen? They’re asking me for my advice on what America should do, and I am on a student visa.” And of course, nobody ever did, which is one of the great glories of America.

My thesis topic was, I tried to answer the question, when countries rise in great power, when they rise economically, they become great powers because they quickly translate that economic power into diplomatic and military power. What explains the principal exception in modern history, which is the United States?

My simple answer was that the United States was a very unusual creature in the modern world. It was a very strong nation with a very weak state. The federal government in the United States did not have the capacity to extract the resources from the society at large because you didn’t have income taxes in those days.

COWEN: What put you off academia? And this was for the better, in my view.

ZAKARIA: I think two things. One, I could see that political science was moving away from the political science that I loved, which was a broad discipline rooted in the social sciences but also rooted in the humanities, which was rigorous, structural, historical comparisons. Looking at different countries, trying to understand why there were differences.

It was moving much more toward a huge emphasis on things like rational choice, on game theory There was an economist envy. Just as economists have math envy, political scientists have economist envy. It was moving in that direction

COWEN: After 9/11 in 2001, you wrote a famous essay for Newsweek, “Why Do They Hate Us?” You talked about the rulers, failed ideas, religion. If you were to revise or rethink that piece today, how would you change it? Because we have 23 more years of data, right?

He had a routine, which is, he’d get up about 6:00 a.m. He’d go down to the basement of his townhouse, and at 6:30, he would start writing or working on whatever his next big research project was. He’d do that, uninterrupted, for three hours at least, sometimes four. Then, at about 9:30, 10:00, he would take the subway to Harvard.

His point was, you got to start the day by doing the important work of academia, which is producing knowledge. All the rest of it — teaching, committee meetings, all that — you can do later. He was so disciplined about that, that every five years or so, he put out another major piece of work, another major book

I looked at that, and I said to myself, I do not have the self-discipline to perform at that level. I need to go into something that has deadlines,

It’s all within you, and you have to be able to generate ideas from that lonely space. I’ve always found that hard. For me, writing books is the hardest thing I do. I feel like I have to do it because I feel as though everything else is trivia — the television, column, everything else.

The second piece of it was actually very much related to Huntington. Sam Huntington was quite an extraordinary character, probably the most important social scientist in the second half of the 20th century. Huge contributions to several fields of political science. He lived next to me

ZAKARIA: Yes. Not very much, honestly. The central point I was making in that essay was that if you look at the Arab world, it is the principal outlier in the modern era, where it has undergone almost no political modernization.

The Arab world had remained absolutely static. My argument was that it was largely because of the curse of oil and oil wealth, which had impeded modernization. But along with that, because of that failed modernization, they had developed this reactionary ideology of Islam, which said the answer is to go further back, not to go forward. “Islam is the solution,” was the cry of the Islamic fundamentalists in the 1970s.

COWEN: I’m struck that this year, both you and Ruchir Sharma have books coming out — again, Fareed’s book is Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present — that I would describe broadly as classically liberal. Do you think classical liberalism is making a comeback

the reason these books are coming out — and certainly, mine, as you know, is centrally occupied with the problem that there’s a great danger that we are going to lose this enormous, probably the most important thing that’s happened in the last 500, 600 years in human history, this movement that has allowed for the creation of modern liberal democratic societies with somewhat market economies.

If you look at the graph of income, of GDP, per capita GDP, it’s like a straight line. There’s no improvement until you get to about, roughly speaking, the 17th, 18th century in Europe, and then you see a sharp uptick. You see this extraordinary rise, and that coincides with the rise of science and intellectual curiosity and the scientific method, and the industrial revolution after that. All that was a product of this great burst of liberal Enlightenment thinking in the West.

If you think about what we’ve gone through in the last 30 years — and this is really the central argument in my book — massive expansion of globalization, massive expansion of information technology so that it has completely upended the old economy. All of this happening, and people are overwhelmed, and they search in that age of anxiety. They search for a solution, and the easy solutions are the ones offered by the populists.

They’re deeply anti-liberal, illiberal. So, I worry that, actually, if we don’t cherish what we have, we’ll lose what has been one of the great, great periods of progress in human history.

COWEN: Why does your book cover the 17th-century Dutch Golden Age? ZAKARIA: The Dutch are the first modern country. If you think about politics before that — certainly with the exception of ancient Greece and Rome — in modern history, the Dutch invent modern politics and economics. They invent modern politics in the sense that it’s the first time politics is not about courts and kings. It is about a merchant republic with powerful factions and interest groups and political parties, or the precursor to political parties.

It’s the beginning of modern economics because it’s economics based not simply on land and agriculture, but on the famous thing that John Locke talked about, which is mixing human beings’ labor with the land. The Dutch literally do this when they reclaim land from the sea and find ways to manage it, and then invent tall ships, which is, in some ways, one of the first great technological revolutions that has a direct economic impact.

You put all that together, and the Dutch — they become the richest country in the world, and they become the leading technological power in the world. It was very important to me to start the story — because they are really the beginnings of modern liberalism

COWEN: Circa 1800, how large were the Chinese and Indian economies?

Circa 1800, the Chinese and Indian economies are the two largest economies in the world, and people have taken this to mean, oh, the West had a temporary spurt because of colonies and cheap energy, and that the Chinese and Indians are just coming back to where they were.

First of all, the statistic is misleading because in those days, GDP was simply measured by using population. All society was agricultural. The more people you had, the larger your GDP. It was meaningless because the state could not extract that GDP in any meaningful way, and it’s meaningless because it doesn’t measure progress. It doesn’t measure per capita GDP growth, which is the most important thing to look at.

If you look at per capita GDP growth from 1350 to 1950, for 600 years, India and China have basically no movement. It’s about $600 in 1350 and $600 in 1950. The West, by comparison, moves up 600 percent in that period. It’s roughly $500 per capita GDP to roughly $5,000 per capita GDP.

You can also look at all kinds of other measures. You can look at diet. There are economic historians who’ve done this very well, and people in England were eating four to five times as much grain and protein as people in China and India. You can look at the extraordinary flourishing of science and engineering. You can look at the rise of the great universities. It’s all happening in the West.

The reason this is important is, people need to understand the rise of the West has been a very profound, deep-rooted historical phenomenon that began sometime in the 15th century. The fact that we’re moving out of that phase is a big, big deal. This is not a momentary blip. This is a huge train. The West define modernity. Even when countries try to be modern, they are in some way becoming Western because there is no path we know of to modernity without that.

One other way of just thinking about how silly that statistic is: in pure GDP terms, China had a larger GDP than Britain in 1900. Now, look at Britain in 1900: the most advanced industrial society in the world, ruling one-quarter of the world, largest navy in the world, was able to humiliate China by using a small fraction of its military power during the opium era. That’s what tells you that number is really meaningless. The West has been significantly more advanced than the rest of the world since the 16th century at least.

Lingaraja in Bhubaneswar, the Jagannath temple

Southeast Asian countries, many of which were ruled by Indian monarchs saw the construction of many marvelous temples in the region between 7th and 14th century AD that are popular tourist attractions till his day, the most famous amongst them being the Angkor Vat temples built by King Surya Varman II in the 12th century.

Today, Hindu temples across the globe form the cynosure of India's cultural tradition and spiritual succor. There are Hindu temples in all almost countries of the world, and contemporary India is bristling with beautiful temples, which hugely contribute to her cultural heritage.

superior weaponry, a strong profit motive, and Eurocentric confidence.

At first, the European powers in Asia were solely interested in trade, but over time, the acquisition of territory grew in importance. Among the nations looking for a piece of the action was Britain.

Britain had been trading in India since about 1600, but it did not begin to seize large sections of land until 1757, after the Battle of Plassey. This battle pitted 3,000 soldiers of the British East India Company against the 5,000-strong army of the young Nawab of Bengal, Siraj ud Daulah, and his French East India Company allies.

Heavy rain spoiled the Nawab's cannon powder (the British covered theirs), leading to his defeat.

The East India Company traded in cotton, silk, tea, and opium. Following the Battle of Plassey, it functioned as the military authority in growing sections of India, as well.

heavy Company taxation and other policies had left millions of Bengalis impoverished. While British soldiers and traders made their fortunes, the Indians starved.

Indians also were barred from high office in their own land. The British considered them inherently corrupt and untrustworthy.

Many Indians were distressed by the rapid cultural changes imposed by the British. They worried that Hindu and Muslim India would be Christianized.

new type of rifle cartridge was given to the soldiers of the British Indian Army.

Rumors spread that the cartridges had been greased with pig and cow fat, an abomination to both major Indian religions.

During World War I, Britain declared war on Germany on India's behalf, without consulting Indian leaders.

It should be noted that the British Raj included only about two-thirds of modern India, with the other portions under the control of local princes. However, Britain exerted a lot of pressure on these princes, effectively controlling all of India.

Queen Victoria promised that the British government would work to "better" its Indian subjects. To the British, this meant educating them in British modes of thought and stamping out cultural practices such as sati.

The British also practiced "divide and rule" policies, pitting Hindu and Muslim Indians against one another.

Muslim League of India in 1907. The Indian Army was made up mostly of Muslims, Sikhs, Nepalese Gurkhas, and other minority groups, as well.

Following the Rebellion of 1857–1858, the British government abolished both the Mughal Dynasty, which had ruled India more or less for 300 years, and the East India Company. The Emperor, Bahadur Shah, was convicted of sedition and exiled to

When World War II broke out, once again, India contributed hugely to the British war effort.

The Indian independence movement was very strong by this time, though, and British rule was widely resented

. Some 30,000 Indian POWs were recruited by the Germans and Japanese to fight against the Allies, in exchange for their freedom. Most, however, remained loyal. Indian troops fought in Burma, North Africa, Italy, and elsewhere.

In any case, Gandhi and the INC did not trust the British envoy and demanded immediate independence in return for their cooperation. When the talks broke down, the INC launched the "Quit India" movement, calling for the immediate withdrawal of Britain from India.

The offer of independence had been made, however. Britain may not have realized it, but it was now just a question of when the British Raj would end.

violent fighting broke out between Hindus and Muslims in Calcutta. The trouble quickly spread across India. Meanwhile, cash-strapped Britain announced its decision to withdraw from India

Sectarian violence flared again as independence approached. In June of 1947, representatives of the Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs agreed to divide India along sectarian lines. Hindu and Sikh areas stayed in India, while predominantly Muslim areas in the north became the nation of Pakistan.

“This is very weird, this exam,” said Komal Srivastava, an official for the India Knowledge and Science Society, a nonprofit educational group.

India is 80 percent Hindu, but it is also home to large Muslim, Sikh, Christian and other religious minorities. Since Mr. Modi came to power in 2014, his party has embarked on a steady, intense and divisive campaign to make India more of an overtly Hindu state.

Cows have become a special flash point. Since Mr. Modi came to power, Hindu nationalist lynch mobs have killed dozens of people in the name of protecting cows.

In 2019, Mr. Modi’s government established the National Cow Commission with the express purpose of protecting cows. Its website lists, among other objectives, “proper implementation of laws with respect to prohibition of slaughter and/or cruelty to cows.”

The study material in the new course was designed by the cow commission, which falls under the Ministry of Animal Husbandry and Dairying, and was widely circulated online in several languages, including English.

The material has chapters on cow entrepreneurship and sayings from Hindu scriptures.

The material that students were asked to absorb for the exam, however, made baseless claims, like one that inside the hump of the Indian cow “there is a solar pulse which is known to absorb vitamin D from the sun’s rays and release it in its milk.”

The test was not made mandatory, but India’s University Grants Commission, a federal agency, encouraged students — in fact, all citizens — to study the material and take the exam as an extracurricular activity.

Nivedita Menon, a professor of political theory at one of India’s premier educational institutions, Jawaharlal Nehru University, said the government was trying to “completely undo research and critical thinking.”

Souls can move not only among different levels of human society but also into other animals - hence the vegetarianism of many Hindus. Within a life cycle, people had little social mobility. They had to strive for virtue during their present lives in order to attain a higher station the next time around.

The three key areas of life dominated by caste were marriage, meals and religious worship

Marriage across caste lines was strictly forbidden; most people even married within their own sub-caste or jati.

At meal times, anyone could accept food from the hands of a Brahmin, but a Brahmin would be polluted if he or she took certain types of food from a lower caste person. At the other extreme, if an untouchable dared to draw water from a public well, he or she polluted the water and nobody else could use it.

If the shadow of an untouchable touched a Brahmin, he/she would be polluted, so untouchables had to lay face-down at a distance when a Brahmin passed.

People who violated social norms could be punished by being made "untouchables." This was not the lowest caste - they and their descendants were completely outside of the caste system.

Mohandas Gandhi advocated emancipation for the Dalits, too, coining the term harijan or "Children of God" to describe them.

Curiously, non-Hindu populations in India sometimes organized themselves into castes as well.

The Bhagavad Gita, however, from c. 200 BCE-200 CE, emphasizes the importance of caste. In addition, the "Laws of Manu" or Manusmriti from the same era defines the rights and duties of the four different castes or varnas.

Thus, it seems that the Hindu caste system began to solidify sometime between 1000 and 200 BCE.

The caste system was not absolute during much of Indian history. For example, the renowned Gupta Dynasty, which ruled from 320 to 550 CE, were from the Vaishya caste rather than the Kshatriya.

From the 12th century onwards, much of India was ruled by Muslims. These rulers reduced the power of the Hindu priestly caste, the Brahmins.

When the British Raj began to take power in India in 1757, they exploited the caste system as a means of social control.The British allied themselves with the Brahmin caste, restoring some of its privileges that had been repealed by the Muslim rulers. However, many Indian customs concerning the lower castes seemed discriminatory to the British and were outlawed.

During the 1930s and 40s, the British government made laws to protect the "Scheduled castes" - untouchables and low-caste people.

The untouchables did work that no-one else would do, like scavenging animal carcasses, leather-work, or killing rats and other pests. They could not be cremated when they died.

India's new government instituted laws to protect the "Scheduled castes and tribes" - including both the untouchables and groups who live traditional lifestyles. These laws include quota systems to ensure access to education and to government posts.

Over the past sixty years, therefore, in some ways, a person's caste has become more of a political category than a social or religious one.

The series “debunks the myth of a Hindu orthodoxy as being the only classicism we have,” said Arshia Sattar, an independent scholar and translator in Bangalore. “In a strange way, the editors are creating a new canon.”

When it gained independence in 1947, India had a pioneering generation of homegrown classicists of the first rank. But today, scholars say, its universities produce and retain few classical scholars with the interpretive skills required by a project like the Murty, which has drawn its entire advisory board and most of its translators, South Asian and Western alike, from American and European institutions.

The untouchables are also known as dalits or harijans.

Samurai, the warriors; Farmers; Artisans; and finally Merchants.

As with India's untouchables, some Japanese people fell below the four-tier system. These were the burakumin and hinin.

The burakumin served essentially the same purpose as untouchables in India; they did butchering, leather tanning, and other unclean jobs, but also prepared human burials.

The hinin were actors, wandering musicians, and convicted criminals.

India's caste system arose out of the Hindu belief in reincarnation. A soul's behavior in its previous life determined the status it would have in its next life. Castes were hereditary and fairly inflexible; the only way to escape a low caste was to be very virtuous in this life, and hope to be reborn in a higher station the next time.

In the feudal Japanese social system, the shogun and the imperial family were above the class system. Nobody was above the Indian caste system, though. In fact, kings and warriors were lumped together in the second caste - the Kshatriyas.

Japan's four-tier social system came out of Confucian philosophy, rather than religion. According to Confucian principles, everyone in a well-ordered society knew their place and paid respect to those stationed above them. Men were higher than women; elders were higher than young people. Farmers ranked just after the ruling samurai class because they produced the food that everyone else depended upon.

India's four castes were actually sub-divided into literally thousands of sub-castes, each with a very specific job description. The Japanese classes were not divided in this way, perhaps because Japan's population was smaller and much less ethnically and religiously diverse.

In Japan's class system, Buddhist monks and nuns were outside of the social structure. They were not considered lowly or unclean, just detached from the social ladder.

In the Indian caste system, in contrast, the Hindu priestly class were the highest caste - the Brahmins.

farmers were on the second tier of Japan's four-tier system,

In the Indian caste system, however, merchants and land-holding farmers were lumped together in the Vaisya caste,

In both the Japanese and Indian social structures, the warriors and rulers were one and the same.

Both the Indian caste system and Japanese feudal social structure had unclean people who were below the lowest rung on the social ladder.

there continues to be discrimination against people who are perceived as belonging to these "outcast" groups.

In other words, the space between the first and second rungs on the social ladder was much wider than that between the second and third rungs.

Finally, both the Indian caste system and Japan's four-tiered social structure served the same purpose: they imposed order and controlled the social interactions among people in two complex societies.

Initially, Angkor Wat was designed as a Hindu temple, as that was the religion of the region’s ruler at the time, Suryavarman II. However, by the end of the 12th century, it was considered a Buddhist site.

As Angkor Wat’s significance within the Buddhist religion of the region increased, so too did the legend surrounding the site. Many Buddhists believe the temple’s construction was ordered by the god Indra, and that the work was accomplished in one night.

However, scholars now know it took several decades to build Angkor Wat, from the design phase to completion.

Although Angkor Wat was no longer a site of political, cultural or commercial significance by the 13th century, it remained an important monument for the Buddhist religion into the 1800s.

The compliment can likely be attributed to the temple’s design, which is supposed to represent Mount Meru, the home of the gods, according to tenets of both the Hindu and Buddhist faiths. Its five towers are intended to recreate the five peaks of Mount Meru, while the walls and moat below honor the surrounding mountain ranges and the sea.

Unfortunately, although Angkor Wat remained in use until fairly recently—into the 1800s—the site has sustained significant damage, from forest overgrowth to earthquakes to war.

When Cambodia fell into a brutal civil war in the 1970s, Angkor Wat, somewhat miraculously, sustained relatively minimal damage.

BJP-associated Facebook groups also began to push the message that Hamas represented the same Muslim threat facing India in the troubled, majority-Muslim region of Kashmir and Palestinians were sweepingly branded as jihadis.

A turning point came in 1999 when India went to war with Pakistan and Israel proved willing to provide arms and ammunition. It was the beginning of a defence relationship that has grown exponentially. India buys about $2bn-worth of arms from Israel every year – its largest arms supplier after Russia – and accounts for 46% of Israel’s overall weapons exports.

it was the election of Modi that marked a fundamental sea change. While previous governments had kept their dealings with Israel largely quiet, due to concerns of alienating foreign allies and its own vast Muslim population, Modi’s Hindu nationalist BJP government had very different priorities.

ssa said: “The narrative they were pushing was clear: that India and Israel are these ancient civilisations that had been derailed by outsiders – which means Muslims – and their leaders have come together, like long-lost brothers, to fulfil their destiny.”

The ideological alignment between the two leaders was certainly more apparent than in the past. The BJP’s ideological forefathers, and its rank and file today, have long regarded Israel as a model for the religious nationalist state, referred to as the Hindu Rashtra, that the Hindu rightwing in India hope to establish.

While Modi was also the first Indian prime minister to visit Ramallah in Palestine, much of the focus of his government has been on strengthening ties with Israel, be it through defence, culture, agriculture and even film-making. This year, Gautam Adani, the Indian billionaire businessman seen to be close to Modi, paid $1.2bn to acquire the strategic Israeli port of Haifa.

Modi’s foreign policy has also overseen a transformation in ties with Arab Gulf countries including Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, which has been of great financial benefit to India and laid the foundation for a groundbreaking India-Middle East economic trade corridor, running all the way to Europe, which was announced at the G20 forum for international economic cooperation this year but has yet to be built.

Cricket is a national obsession in India. Some Kashmiris root against the Indian team because of resentment from decades of national policies there, including routine arrests of pro-independence figures and thousands of disappearances.

India and Pakistan, once part of the same country, violently divided in 1947 and have since fought three wars, two of them over Kashmir, a region divided between the two countries. Pakistan has been the source of repeated terrorist attacks in India, including one in Mumbai in 2008 that killed more than 160 people.

they're a sign of a broad acceptance and appreciation of Jewish culture. Outside of New York City, Jews are generally rare in terms of numbers. Yet in spite of this, they've become seen as normal—and popular—by the population at large.

respondents were much more likely to report feeling "warmly" toward the religious group they were part of; Catholics were all about other Catholics, evangelicals were enthusiastic about evangelicals, etc.

There's generalized cultural cachet, which is a little hard to pin down, but from doting articles about deli food in The New York Times to Adam Sandler's famous ode to Hanukkah, staples of Jewish culture have become ubiquitous and adored. 

white evangelicals rated the faith more highly than respondents from other religions; they were more enthusiastic about Jews than anyone besides Jews themselves. This is not a coincidence; evangelicals have typically been strong supporters of Jews and Zionism, citing the group's status as God's "chosen people" in the Bible and the prophesied future of Israel as the site of Jesus's second coming. 

Buddhists and Hindus were given decidedly chillier ratings than their Jewish brethren, and Muslims ranked the lowest out of all religious groups, including the ever-despised atheists. People of these faiths are more likely to be first-, second-, or third-generation immigrants; they haven't been around as long as Jews. 

63" out of 100 was the mean rating for the most popular group in the survey (and I'll say it again, just because it brings me pleasure: that would be the Jews). Americans from all groups, it seems, feel pretty lukewarm about anyone who isn't like them.

the A.A.P.’s startling victory is a turning point because it marks the advent of a new kind of politics in India.

Most of the 102 people died when the building where the fireworks were stored collapsed, Chandy told reporters at the temple complex.

Local TV channels broadcast images of huge clouds of white smoke billowing from the temple, as fireworks were still going off in the night sky. Successive explosions from the building storing the fireworks sent huge chunks of concrete flying as far as a half mile, according to resident Jayashree Harikrishnan.

The temple holds a competitive fireworks display every year, with different groups putting on successive light shows for thousands of devotees gathered for the last day of a seven-day festival honoring the goddess Bhadrakali, a southern Indian incarnation of the Hindu goddess Kali.

This year, district authorities denied permission for the fireworks display, Chief Minister Chandy said. advertisement The state's High Court had earlier mandated that fireworks must be stored more than 100 yards from temples — orders that were flouted at the Paravoor temple, said Loknath Behera, a top police official.

The HKH region runs from Afghanistan to Myanmar and is the planet’s “third pole”, harbouring more ice than anywhere outside Arctic and Antarctica.

the monsoon is also becoming more erratic and prone to extreme downpours. “One-in-100 year floods are starting to happen every 50 years,” he said.

from the 2060s, river flows will go into decline. The Indus and central Asian rivers will be most affected. “Those areas will be hard hit,” said Wester.

the most serious impact will be on farmers in the foothills and downstream

Limiting the global temperature rise to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels requires cutting emissions to zero by 2050. This is felt to be extremely optimistic by many but still sees a third of the ice lost, according to the report. If the global rise is 2C, half of the glaciers are projected to melt away by 2100

Political tensions between neighbouring nations such as India and Pakistan could add to the difficulties. “There are rocky times ahead for the region. Because many of the disasters and sudden changes will play out across country borders, conflict among the region’s countries could easily flare up,”

The cross between a white man and an Indian is an Indian; the cross between a white man and a Negro is a Negro; the cross between a white man and a Hindu is a Hindu; and the cross between any of the three European races and a Jew is a Jew.

What is judged extremist today was once the consensus of a powerful cadre of the American elite, well-connected men who eagerly seized on a false doctrine of “race suicide” during the immigration scare of the early 20th century. They included wealthy patricians, intellectuals, lawmakers, even several presidents.

Madison Grant. He was the author of a 1916 book called The Passing of the Great Race, which spread the doctrine of race purity all over the globe.

Grant’s purportedly scientific argument that the exalted “Nordic” race that had founded America was in peril, and all of modern society’s accomplishments along with it, helped catalyze nativist legislators in Congress to pass comprehensive restrictionist immigration policies in the early 1920s. His book went on to become Adolf Hitler’s “bible,” as the führer wrote to tell him

Grant’s doctrine has since been rejuvenated and rebranded by his ideological descendants as “white genocide

“Even though the Germans had been directly influenced by Madison Grant and the American eugenics movement, when we fought Germany, because Germany was racist, racism became unacceptable in America. Our enemy was racist; therefore we adopted antiracism as our creed.” Ever since, a strange kind of historical amnesia has obscured the American lineage of this white-nationalist ideology.

When Nazism reflected back that vision in grotesque form, wartime denial set in.

In 1853, across the Atlantic, Joseph Arthur de Gobineau, a French count, first identified the “Aryan” race as “great, noble, and fruitful in the works of man on this earth.”

In 1899, William Z. Ripley, an economist, concluded that Europeans consisted of “three races”: the brave, beautiful, blond “Teutons”; the stocky “Alpines”; and the swarthy “Mediterraneans.”

Another leading academic contributor to race science in turn-of-the-century America was a statistician named Francis Walker, who argued in The Atlantic that the new immigrants lacked the pioneer spirit of their predecessors; they were made up of “beaten men from beaten races,” whose offspring were crowding out the fine “native” stock of white people.

In 1901 the sociologist Edward A. Ross, who similarly described the new immigrants as “masses of fecund but beaten humanity from the hovels of far Lombardy and Galicia,” coined the term race suicide.

it was Grant who synthesized these separate strands of thought into one pseudo-scholarly work that changed the course of the nation’s history. In a nod to wartime politics, he referred to Ripley’s “Teutons” as “Nordics,” thereby denying America’s hated World War I rivals exclusive claim to descent from the world’s master race. He singled out Jews as a source of anxiety disproportionate to their numbers

The historian Nell Irvin Painter sums up the race chauvinists’ view in The History of White People (2010): “Jews manipulate the ignorant working masses—whether Alpine, Under-Man, or colored.

In The Passing of the Great Race, the eugenic focus on winnowing out unfit individuals made way for a more sweeping crusade to defend against contagion by inferior races. By Grant’s logic, infection meant obliteration:

The seed of Nazism’s ultimate objective—the preservation of a pure white race, uncontaminated by foreign blood—was in fact sown with striking success in the United States.

Grant, emphasizing the American experience in particular, agreed. In The Passing of the Great Race, he had argued that

Teddy Roosevelt, by then out of office, told Grant in 1916 that his book showed “fine fearlessness in assailing the popular and mischievous sentimentalities and attractive and corroding falsehoods which few men dare assail.”

President Warren Harding publicly praised one of Grant’s disciples, Lothrop Stoddard, whose book The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy offered similar warnings about the destruction of white society by invading dusky hordes. There is “a fundamental, eternal, inescapable difference” between the races, Harding told his audience. “Racial amalgamation there cannot be.

Calvin Coolidge, found Grant’s thesis equally compelling. “There are racial considerations too grave to be brushed aside for any sentimental reasons. Biological laws tell us that certain divergent people will not mix or blend,” Coolidge wrote in a 1921 article in Good Housekeeping.The Nordics propagate themselves successfully. With other races, the outcome shows deterioration on both sides. Quality of mind and body suggests that observance of ethnic law is as great a necessity to a nation as immigration law.

On Capitol Hill debate raged, yet Republicans and Democrats were converging on the idea that America was a white man’s country, and must stay that way. The influx of foreigners diluted the nation with inferiors unfit for self-government, many politicians in both parties energetically concurred. The Supreme Court chimed in with decisions in a series of cases, beginning in 1901, that assigned the status of “nationals” rather than “citizens” to colonial newcomers.

A popular myth of American history is that racism is the exclusive province of the South. The truth is that much of the nativist energy in the U.S. came from old-money elites in the Northeast, and was also fueled by labor struggles in the Pacific Northwest, which had stirred a wave of bigotry that led to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882

He blended Nordic boosterism with fearmongering, and supplied a scholarly veneer for notions many white citizens already wanted to believe

When the Republicans took control of the House in 1919, Johnson became chair of the committee on immigration, “thanks to some shrewd lobbying by the Immigration Restriction League,” Spiro writes. Grant introduced him to a preeminent eugenicist named Harry Laughlin, whom Johnson named the committee’s “expert eugenics agent.” His appointment helped ensure that Grantian concerns about “race suicide” would be a driving force in a quest that culminated, half a decade later, in the Immigration Act of 1924.

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court was struggling mightily to define whiteness in a consistent fashion, an endeavor complicated by the empirical flimsiness of race science. In one case after another, the high court faced the task of essentially tailoring its definition to exclude those whom white elites considered unworthy of full citizenship.

In 1923, when an Indian veteran named Bhagat Singh Thind—who had fought for the U.S. in World War I—came before the justices with the claim of being Caucasian in the scientific sense of the term, and therefore entitled to the privileges of whiteness, they threw up their hands. In a unanimous ruling against Thind (who was ultimately made a citizen in 1936), Justice George Sutherland wrote:What we now hold is that the words “free white persons” are words of common speech to be interpreted in accordance with the understanding of the common man, synonymous with the word “Caucasian” only as that word is popularly understood.The justices had unwittingly acknowledged a consistent truth about racism, which is that race is whatever those in power say it is.

Grant felt his life’s work had come to fruition and, according to Spiro, he concluded, “We have closed the doors just in time to prevent our Nordic population being overrun by the lower races.” Senator Reed announced in a New York Times op-ed, “The racial composition of America at the present time thus is made permanent.” Three years later, in 1927, Johnson held forth in dire but confident tones in a foreword to a book about immigration restriction. “Our capacity to maintain our cherished institutions stands diluted by a stream of alien blood, with all its inherited misconceptions respecting the relationships of the governing power to the governed,” he warned. “The United States is our land … We intend to maintain it so. The day of unalloyed welcome to all peoples, the day of indiscriminate acceptance of all races, has definitely ended.”

t was America that taught us a nation should not open its doors equally to all nations,” Adolf Hitler told The New York Times half a decade later, just one year before his elevation to chancellor in January 1933. Elsewhere he admiringly noted that the U.S. “simply excludes the immigration of certain races. In these respects America already pays obeisance, at least in tentative first steps, to the characteristic völkisch conception of the state.”

Harry Laughlin, the scientific expert on Representative Johnson’s committee, told Grant that the Nazis’ rhetoric sounds “exactly as though spoken by a perfectly good American eugenist,” and wrote that “Hitler should be made honorary member of the Eugenics Research Association.”

What the Nazis “found exciting about the American model didn’t involve just eugenics,

“It also involved the systematic degradation of Jim Crow, of American deprivation of basic rights of citizenship like voting.”

Nazi lawyers carefully studied how the United States, despite its pretense of equal citizenship, had effectively denied that status to those who were not white. They looked at Supreme Court decisions that withheld full citizenship rights from nonwhite subjects in U.S. colonial territories. They examined cases that drew, as Thind’s had, arbitrary but hard lines around who could be considered “white.

Krieger, whom Whitman describes as “the single most important figure in the Nazi assimilation of American race law,” considered the Fourteenth Amendment a problem: In his view, it codified an abstract ideal of equality at odds with human experience, and with the type of country most Americans wanted to live in.

In 1917, overriding President Woodrow Wilson’s veto, Congress passed a law that banned immigration not just from Asian but also from Middle Eastern countries and imposed a literacy test on new immigrants

it has taken us fifty years to learn that speaking English, wearing good clothes and going to school and to church do not transform a Negro into a white man.

The authors of the Fourteenth Amendment, he believed, had failed to see a greater truth as they made good on the promise of the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal: The white man is more equal than the others.

two “rival principles of national unity.” According to one, the U.S. is the champion of the poor and the dispossessed, a nation that draws its strength from its pluralism. According to the other, America’s greatness is the result of its white and Christian origins, the erosion of which spells doom for the national experiment.

Grantism, despite its swift wartime eclipse, did not become extinct. The Nazis, initially puzzled by U.S. hostility, underestimated the American commitment to democracy.

the South remained hawkish toward Nazi Germany because white supremacists in the U.S. didn’t want to live under a fascist government. What they wanted was a herrenvolk democracy, in which white people were free and full citizens but nonwhites were not.

The Nazis failed to appreciate the significance of that ideological tension. They saw allegiance to the American creed as a weakness. But U.S. soldiers of all backgrounds and faiths fought to defend it, and demanded that their country live up to it

historical amnesia, the excision of the memory of how the seed of racism in America blossomed into the Third Reich in Europe, has allowed Grantism to be resurrected with a new name

Grant’s philosophical framework has found new life among extremists at home and abroad, and echoes of his rhetoric can be heard from the Republican base and the conservative media figures the base trusts, as well as—once again—in the highest reaches of government.

The resurrection of race suicide as white genocide can be traced to the white supremacist David Lane, who claimed that “the term ‘racial integration’ is only a euphemism for genocide,” and whose infamous “fourteen words” manifesto, published in the 1990s, distills his credo: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.” Far-right intellectuals in Europe speak of “the great replacement” of Europeans by nonwhite immigrants and refugees.

That nations make decisions about appropriate levels of immigration is not inherently evil or fascist. Nor does the return of Grantian ideas to mainstream political discourse signal an inevitable march to Holocaust-level crimes against humanity.

The most benignly intentioned mainstream-media coverage of demographic change in the U.S. has a tendency to portray as justified the fear and anger of white Americans who believe their political power is threatened by immigration—as though the political views of today’s newcomers were determined by genetic inheritance rather than persuasion.

The danger of Grantism, and its implications for both America and the world, is very real. External forces have rarely been the gravest threat to the social order and political foundations of the United States. Rather, the source of greatest danger has been those who would choose white purity over a diverse democracy.

Although he was a Muslim, Babur followed a rather loose interpretation of the Quran in some ways. He drank heavily at his famously lavish feasts, and also enjoyed smoking hashish.

His eldest son Humayan fought off an attempt to seat his aunt's husband as emperor and assumed the throne.

Humayan was not a very strong leader. In 1540, the Pashtun ruler Sher Shah Suri defeated the Timurids, deposing Humayan. The second Timurid emperor only regained his throne with aid from Persia in 1555, a year before his death, but at that time he managed even to expand on Babur's empire.

Akbar defeated the remnants of the Pashtuns, and brought some previously unquelled Hindu regions under Timurid control. He also gained control over Rajput through diplomacy and marriage alliances.

he was a committed Muslim, Akbar encouraged religious tolerance and sought wisdom from holy men of all faiths.

Akbar's son, Jahangir, ruled the Mughal Empire in peace and prosperity from 1605 until 1627. He was succeeded by his own son, Shah Jahan.

The 36-year-old Shah Jahan inherited an incredible empire in 1627

his beloved wife, Mumtaz Mahal, died during the birth of their fourteenth child.

As an expression of his love, Shah Jahan commissioned the building of a magnificent tomb for his dear wife. Designed by the Persian architect Ustad Ahmad Lahauri, and constructed of white marble, the Taj Mahal is considered the crowning achievement of Mughal architecture.

Shah Jahan's third son, Aurangzeb, seized the throne and had all of his brothers executed after a protracted succession struggle in 1658.

Shah Jahan spent his declining years gazing out at the Taj, and died in 1666.

The ruthless Aurangzeb proved to be the last of the "Great Mughals." Throughout his reign, he expanded the empire in all directions. He also enforced a much more orthodox brand of Islam, even banning music in the empire (which made many Hindu rites impossible to perform).

A three-year-long revolt by the Mughals' long-time ally, the Pashtun, began in 1672. In the aftermath, the Mughals lost much of their authority in what is now Afghanistan, seriously weakening the empire.

Increasing peasant revolts and sectarian violence threatened the stability of the throne, and various nobles and warlords sought to control the line of weak emperors. All around the borders, powerful new kingdoms sprang up and began to chip away at Mughal land holdings.

The British East India Company (BEI) was founded in 1600, while Akbar was still on the throne. Initially, it was only interested in trade and had to content itself with working around the fringes of the Mughal Empire. As the Mughals weakened, however, the BEI grew increasingly powerful.

After this victory, the BEI took political control of much of the subcontinent, marking the start of the British Raj in India. The later Mughal rulers held on to their throne, but they were simply puppets of the British.

In 1857, half of the Indian Army rose up against the BEI in what is known as the Sepoy Rebellion or the Indian Mutiny. The British home government intervened to protect its own financial stake in the company and put down the so-called rebellion.Emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar was arrested, tried for treason, and exiled to Burma. It was the end of the Mughal Dynasty.

The prince revolted against his father but was defeated after four years. Aurangzeb and a brother were sent to their grandfather's court as hostages.

The 15-year-old Aurangzeb proved his courage in 1633. All of Shah Jahan's court was arrayed in a pavilion, watching an elephant fight when one of the elephants ran out of control. As it thundered towards the royal family, everyone scattered - except Aurangzeb, who ran forward and headed off the furious pachyderm.

This act of near-suicidal bravery raised Aurangzeb's status in the family.

When Aurangzeb's sister died in a fire in 1644, he took three weeks to return home to Agra rather than rushing back immediately. Shah Jahan was so angry about his tardiness that he stripped Aurangzeb of the Viceroyalty of Deccan.

Relations between the two deteriorated the following year, and Aurangzeb was banished from court.

Shah Jahan needed all of his sons in order to run his huge empire, however, so in 1646, he appointed Aurangzeb Governor of Gujarat.

Although Aurangzeb had a lot of success in extending Mughal rule north and westward, in 1652, he failed to take the city of Kandahar (Afghanistan) from the Safavids.

As his condition worsened, his four sons by Mumtaz began to fight for the Peacock Throne.

Shah Jahan favored Dara, the eldest son, but many Muslims considered him too worldly and irreligious. Shuja, the second son, was a complete hedonist, who used his position as Governor of Bengal as a platform for acquiring beautiful women and wine. Aurangzeb, a much more committed Muslim than either of the elder brothers, saw his chance to rally the faithful behind his own banner.

Aurangzeb craftily recruited his younger brother, Murad, convincing him that together they could remove Dara and Shuja, and place Murad on the throne. Aurangzeb disavowed any plans to rule himself, claiming that his only ambition was to make the hajj to Mecca.

Aurangzeb had his former ally Murad executed on trumped-up murder charges in 1661

Aurangzeb's 48-year reign is often cited as a "Golden Age" of the Mughal Empire, but it was rife with trouble and rebellions. Although Mughal rulers from Akbar the Great through Shah Jahan practiced a remarkable degree of religious tolerance and were great patrons of the arts, Aurangzeb reversed both of these policies. He practiced a much more orthodox, even fundamentalist version of Islam, going so far as to outlaw music and other performances in 1668.

Both Muslims and Hindus were forbidden to sing, play musical instruments or to dance - a serious damper on the traditions of both faiths in India.

Aurangzeb also ordered the destruction of Hindu temples, although the exact number is not known. Estimates range from under 100 to tens of thousands. In addition, he ordered the enslavement of Christian missionaries.

Aurangzeb expanded Mughal rule both north and south, but his constant military campaigns and religious intolerance rankled many of his subjects. He did not hesitate to torture and kill prisoners of war, political prisoners, and anyone he considered un-Islamic. To make matters worse, the empire became over-extended, and Aurangzeb imposed ever higher taxes in order to pay for his wars.

Perhaps the most disastrous revolt of all was the Pashtun Rebellion of 1672-74. The founder of the Mughal Dynasty, Babur, came from Afghanistan to conquer India, and the family had always relied upon the fierce Pashtun tribesmen of Afghanistan and what is now Pakistan to secure the northern borderlands. Charges that a Mughal governor was molesting tribal women sparked a revolt among the Pashtuns, which led to a complete breakdown of control over the northern tier of the empire and its critical trade routes.