Convenience Big Store: The radicalisation of India’s young Hindus

20 September, 2023

In the headlines

Rishi Sunak plans to soften some of the government's net zero targets, including delaying a ban on the sale of new petrol and diesel cars from 2030 to 2035, and slowing the phasing-out of gas boilers. The decision has divided opinion among Tory MPs, while the carmaker Ford has complained that it sends mixed messages to businesses. Britain's inflation rate fell to 6.7% in August, the lowest level since February 2022. The unexpected drop means the Bank of England is less likely to raise interest rates at its next scheduled meeting tomorrow. The two "alien" bodies recently presented to Mexico's congress have intact skeletons and were not assembled from other bones, according to doctors who scanned the remains. TV professor Brian Cox thinks samples should be sent to 23andMe, the DNA testing company, to prove they're not human.

Comment

Members of the Hindu nationalist group Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh in 2018. Sajjad Hussain/AFP/Getty

The radicalisation of India's young Hindus

A Muslim friend from the central Indian state of Chhattisgarh recently called me "seeking counsel", says Apoorvanand in Al Jazeera. His young daughter's friends had refused to play with her, "after they were warned by other children to stay away from her because of her religion". This isn't an isolated incident. A video recently circulated online of an Indian schoolteacher asking her students to slap their Muslim classmate because he had not done his homework. Children "came up one by one and hit the Muslim boy" as the teacher criticised his religion. Another recent video shows a young Hindu girl being applauded by elders as she sings Desh ke gaddaron ko Goli maro – "shoot the traitors of the country", an anti-Muslim slogan popularised by one of PM Narendra Modi's ministers.

Slurs and insults are nothing new for India's 213 million Muslims (who account for more than 10% of the global Islamic population). But what seems to be developing now is the "radicalisation of Hindu youth". Young people are raised on TV channels, internet platforms and WhatsApp groups "relentlessly spreading anti-Muslim propaganda". Educational institutions run by government-sponsored Hindu nationalist groups tell children that "India has been the land of Hindus, which was infiltrated by Muslims and Christians". Hindu youth see violence against other religions "celebrated or at least tolerated"; they see people who provoke the violence gain social respectability and "get elected to state legislatures and parliament". An entire generation "is being turned into unknowing criminals".

🇮🇳🧐 Members of India's ruling party have tried to have the iconic Taj Mahal – famously built by the Muslim Mughal emperor Shah Jahan – recast as a Hindu temple. Last year a Hindu nationalist ally of Modi, Rajneesh Singh, filed a petition at the Lucknow high court demanding a new archaeological survey to prove that the majestic mausoleum is in fact a temple dedicated to Shiva. "Around 20 rooms in Taj Mahal are locked," he claimed. "It is believed that in these rooms there are idols of Hindu gods."

Architecture

Shortly after World War Two, says Air Mail, the US embarked on a massive embassy-building programme in capitals around the world. They chose ultra-modern designs by top architects like Walter Gropius and Eero Saarinen to portray America as a progressive, forward-looking nation, in contrast to the "repressive, Communist Soviet Union". More than just places where you applied for visas, these buildings were used to establish US soft power, with auditoriums, libraries, and art exhibitions where locals "could learn more about the benefits of an open, modern America". Sadly, after 9/11, and previous terrorist attacks on US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, these "open, porous buildings" became obsolete. The embassies that replaced them are "large, closed, and highly secure compounds".

Inside politics

The Tories have got the working classes all wrong, says Philip Collins in The Times. They think they will win over Red Wall voters by promising to stop the boats and end cancel culture. But working-class conservatism isn't rooted in doom and gloom – it's rooted in aspiration. These people want a better job, a higher income, a nicer house; they'd be "delighted" if their sons or daughters were able to "join the metropolitan elite". Margaret Thatcher understood that, with her emphasis on "thrift, discipline, work and order"; so too Boris Johnson. Rishi Sunak, on the other hand, appears intent on dialling up the hostility towards immigrants. It won't work. Because working-class conservatives are all about hope, not fear.

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Tomorrow's world

Live-streamers who sell products on camera are huge business in China, says MIT Technology Review. The top names can flog "more than a billion dollars' worth of goods in one night" and attain the status of movie stars. But if you scroll through Taobao, a Chinese e-commerce platform, you'll notice that many of them "seem slightly robotic". That's because firms are increasingly hawking their wares using "AI-generated clones of the real streamers". The process, which costs about $1,000, requires only a few minutes of sample video. Your "deepfake" can then be automated to say whatever you want – though they aren't quite advanced enough to lie on a sofa or bed to show off its comfiness. Yet.

Comment

Bernstein (left) and Cooper

Bradley Cooper is right to ignore his critics

"What's in a nose?" asks Stephen Bush in the FT. News that actor Bradley Cooper wore a large prosthetic proboscis to play the Jewish conductor Leonard Bernstein is, to put it mildly, "dividing people". Clips in which Cooper plays Bernstein as a young man looked, to some people at least, like a "racist caricature" – the bogus beak, these critics argue, seems "excessively large" compared with the composer's actual conk. But when detractors took to social media to voice their disapproval, Cooper (who also directed the film) did something highly unusual: he simply stood firm.

It turns out that was precisely the right thing to do. The American Jewish Committee said they didn't think the film "harms or denigrates the Jewish community" at all, a stance echoed by the Anti-Defamation League. Bernstein's three children released a statement "praising Cooper's work and saying that their father would have loved the film". If only, in this dreary age of online pile-ons, more people would do what Cooper did. So much of what we call "cancel culture" is merely the inability to realise that just because someone is "loudly cross online", you don't have to listen to them or let yourself be paralysed by their anger. The whole point of good leaders is that they think an issue through, then, once they've made a decision, stick to their guns. We should learn from Cooper. "You can't placate all your critics: sometimes you just have to ignore them."

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Noted

Enoch Wong/Karman Space Programme

A team of students from Imperial College London are aiming to become the first non-governmental, non-commercial operation to launch a reusable rocket into space. If all goes well, their Aurora rocket will blast off from California later this month and cross the 100-kilometre-high Kármán line, widely recognised as the edge of Earth's atmosphere. The 12-metre-tall craft will be powered by what the group says is the most powerful engine ever built by amateurs.

Letters

Rose Knox-Peebles, au naturel. Monika Rittershaus/Royal Opera House

To the FT:

Your reviewer tells readers that Erda, the earth goddess, was made up to look "quite a fright" ("Das Rheingold, Royal Opera review", 12 September). This is not so. I wore no make-up – the "fright" look is all naturally mine.

Erda (Rose Knox-Peebles), London

Snapshot

Snapshot answer

It's an Azores bullfinch, which has staged a remarkable comeback. Back in the 1990s, says Smithsonian Magazine, the so-called priolo was one of Europe's most endangered songbirds, with only around 100 breeding pairs left on the Portuguese archipelago. But thanks to a dogged conservation effort focused on habitat restoration, numbers are now up to around 1,300, and the population trend has been stable for eight years. "We hope by hearing the story of the Azores bullfinch," says project leader Azucena de la Cruz, "people are inspired to adapt it to species in their own land."