What Putins Russia, China and the Indian elites (including Modi) are fixated on is nothing but victimhood, distorted sense of pride/honor/glory. The common threads that bind them together are historic wounds and those responsible for it as they perceive. Pankaj Mishra is right on the money. Despite his overgeneralizations, Mr. Naipaul’s mapping of the upper-caste nationalist’s id did create a useful meme of intellectual insecurity, confusion and aggressiveness. And this meme is increasingly recognizable again. Today a new generation of Indian nationalists lurches between victimhood and chauvinism, and with ominous implications. As the country appears to rise (and simultaneously fall), many ambitious members of a greatly expanded and fully global Hindu middle class feel frustrated in their demand for higher status from white Westerners. Such crude xenophobia, now officially sanctioned in Mr. Modi’s India, seems only slightly less menacing than the previous R.S.S. chief’s wishful thinking about one more Mahabharata against demonic anti-Hindus. Japan’s expansionist gambles in China and the Pacific in the last century and, more recently, Russia’s irredentism in Ukraine show that a mainstreamed rhetoric of national aggrandizement can quickly slide into reckless warmongering. Certainly, the ruling classes of wannabe superpowers have spawned a complex force: the ideology of anti-imperialist imperialism, which, forming an axis with the modern state and media and nuclear technology, can make Islamic fundamentalists seem toothless. One can only hope that India’s democratic institutions are strong enough to constrain yet another wounded elite from breaking out for geopolitical and military manhood.
Posted on: Sat, 25 Oct 2014 04:43:14 +0000
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