You’re not black
India as a future super power? 🇮🇳
- Thread starter ☑︎#VoteDemocrat
- Start date
I have no idea what work you're trying to do in this thread. I know little about the history of violence between Sikhs and Indian government forces and/or Hindus outside of what I read on the Internet. I have no sides in that fight, I'm sure there's been violence both ways. But that just supports my original claim that most of the violence in India has been perpetuated by non-Muslims.
Whether or not Sikhs were disappeared by the state (I wouldn't be surprised if they were), that doesn't change the fact that numerous acts of Sikh terrorism clearly did occur. It's quite likely that anti-Sikh oppression occurred as well, but that's irrelevant to my point that most political violence in India has nothing to do with acts by native Muslims.
And what about the quotes I just posted of serious anti-Muslim Sikh terrorism as well?
The point is not "Sikhs are bad people". The point is that anyone who tries to point to Indian Muslims as a source of violence in India has to deal with the fact that they've been less connected to political violence than numerous other groups, including Sikhs, Communists, high-caste Hindus, and numerous regional separatist movements in the Northeast and South.
Since you seem very focused on Sikhs right now, I assumed you're talking about Indira Gandhi, as opposed to the other two Gandhis who were assassinated?
Indira Gandhi was killed as retaliation for storming the Golden Temple in her military operation against Sikh separatists. It was meant to punish her for storming the temple and make any future leader think twice about doing it again. How is that not terrorism?
How are so unfamiliar with a culture you contributed to?
Didn’t save multiple Indians and get them healthcare processes?
Not one of them shared they had beef with Sikhs?
This one was last year:
55 children among 135 killed in Morbi bridge collapse: Official data
According to the final list of victims complied by the district administration, 39 boys and 16 girls were among those killed in the bridge collapse on Sunday.
indianexpress.com
2018:
Death toll rises to 3 in Kolkata's Majerhat bridge collapse
One more body was recovered today from the site of Majerhat bridge collapse in South Kolkata, taking the death toll to three. An NDRF official said the search and rescue operations for the survivors have ended.
2016:
21 dead as Kolkata flyover collapses
Scores of people inside vehicles trapped; Army called in
2014:
5 die as slab of under-construction bridge falls
The work of removing the debris was continued till late in the evening, as several people were feared trapped in the debris.
indianexpress.com
2010:
Commonwealth Games in crisis after bridge collapse
• Collapse of footbridge to main stadium injures 23• National teams doubt work will be completed• Games could be called off 12 days before start
www.theguardian.com
These aren't shyt collapsing from being too old. These were practically all either under construction or brand new bridges. There is MASSIVE corruption which includes cutting corners by saving cost on building materials or construction plans, and these are the results.
Okay, first of all it's hysterical that Nap made this thread. Second; I've never been to India. I only know what people who have been there have told me and what the internet has exposed me to. I would also like to recognize that there are places in the US where the infrastructure is 
and there is poverty. I also know that pollution is a problem but there are whales swimming in NYC rivers and harbors now. The US has made progress on that front. India seems to be in a whole different pot of shyt with the problems I just mentioned. I'm not saying the problems are insurmountable. Humans are very resourceful if nothing else but they are not on the cusp of superpower status by any stretch of the imagination. Russia collapsing will bring them up a rung by default without India lifting a finger but that's just looking at it relatively. India needs to make tangible progress on multiple fronts.
and there is poverty. I also know that pollution is a problem but there are whales swimming in NYC rivers and harbors now. The US has made progress on that front. India seems to be in a whole different pot of shyt with the problems I just mentioned. I'm not saying the problems are insurmountable. Humans are very resourceful if nothing else but they are not on the cusp of superpower status by any stretch of the imagination. Russia collapsing will bring them up a rung by default without India lifting a finger but that's just looking at it relatively. India needs to make tangible progress on multiple fronts.Isn’t turkey dealing with this same issue?This one was last year:
55 children among 135 killed in Morbi bridge collapse: Official data
According to the final list of victims complied by the district administration, 39 boys and 16 girls were among those killed in the bridge collapse on Sunday.
2018:
Death toll rises to 3 in Kolkata's Majerhat bridge collapse
One more body was recovered today from the site of Majerhat bridge collapse in South Kolkata, taking the death toll to three. An NDRF official said the search and rescue operations for the survivors have ended.www.indiatoday.in
2016:
21 dead as Kolkata flyover collapses
Scores of people inside vehicles trapped; Army called inwww.thehindu.com
2014:
5 die as slab of under-construction bridge falls
The work of removing the debris was continued till late in the evening, as several people were feared trapped in the debris.
2010:
Commonwealth Games in crisis after bridge collapse
• Collapse of footbridge to main stadium injures 23• National teams doubt work will be completed• Games could be called off 12 days before start
These aren't shyt collapsing from being too old. These were practically all either under construction or brand new bridges. There is MASSIVE corruption which includes cutting corners by saving cost on building materials or construction plans, and these are the results.
I've heard there's bridge collapses there, I don't know the root issue.
We had a project years ago in another country in that general India/Turkey region and I saw some buildings built with US Aid funding that were already falling apart after just 3-4 years. Most of them weren't even in use. I was told the exact same shyt that I had been told about the Indian bridges - the contractor charges for high-quality material A, but then actually uses much cheaper low-quality material B, then pockets the difference. And the shyt doesn't last at all. The person who told me about that suggested that the buildings were probably never meant to be used for much of anything long-term anyway. They were just a money grab the whole time, a way to attract foreign investment that could then be distributed among the contractors and organizing officials.
I didn't want to specify the country because I would bet shyt like that goes on in most countries, and anyone who spends enough time in the developing world will hear similar stories. As fast as nations have been industrializing, how many really have foolproof anti-corruption control and building inspection procedures that would catch that sort of shyt, or a strong culture of business ethics which would prevent it from happening?
I saw the earthquake in turkey leading to a bunch of civil engineering and construction allegations of fraud etc
India’s diaspora is bigger and more influential than any in history
Adobe, Britain and Chanel are all run by people with Indian roots
India’s diaspora is bigger and more influential than any in history
Adobe, Britain and Chanel are all run by people with Indian roots
Jun 12th 2023
HAVING JUST surpassed China as the world’s most populous country, India contains more than 1.4bn people. Its migrants are both more numerous and more successful than their Chinese counterparts. The Indian diaspora has been the largest in the world since 2010.
Of the 281m migrants spread around the globe today—generally defined as people who live outside the country where they were born—almost 18m are Indians, according to the latest UN estimates from 2020. Mexican migrants, the second-biggest group, number just 11.2m. Chinese abroad number 10.5m.
Understanding how and why Indians have secured success abroad, while Chinese have sown suspicion, illuminates geopolitical faultlines. Comparing the two groups also reveals the extent of Indian achievement. The diaspora’s triumphs advance India and benefit its prime minister, Narendra Modi. Joe Biden will host talks with him on June 22nd as part of Mr Modi’s forthcoming state visit to America.
Migrants have stronger ties to their motherlands than do their descendants born abroad, and so build vital links between their adopted homes and their birthplaces. In 2022 India’s inward remittances hit a record of almost $108bn, around 3% of GDP, more than in any other country. And overseas Indians with contacts, language skills and know-how boost cross-border trade and investment.
Huge numbers of second-, third- and fourth-generation Chinese live abroad, notably in South-East Asia, America and Canada. But in many rich countries, including America and Britain, the Indian-born population exceeds the Chinese-born (see chart 1).
India’s people are found across the world (see chart 2), with 2.7m of them living in America, more than 835,000 in Britain, 720,000 in Canada, and 579,000 in Australia. Young Indians flock to the Middle East, where low-skilled construction and hospitality jobs are better-paid. There are 3.5m Indian migrants in the United Arab Emirates and 2.5m in Saudi Arabia (where the UN counts Indian citizens as a proxy for the Indian-born population). Many more dwell in Africa, other parts of Asia and the Caribbean, part of a migration route that dates back to the colonial era.
India has the essential ingredients to be a leading exporter of talent: a mass of young people and first-class higher education. Indians’ mastery of English, a legacy of British colonial rule, probably helps, too. Only 22% of Indian immigrants in America above the age of five say they have no more than a limited command of English, compared with 57% of Chinese immigrants, according to the Migration Policy Institute (mpi), an American think-tank.
As India’s population grows over the coming decades, its people will continue to move overseas to find jobs and escape its heat. Immigration rules in the rich world filter for graduates who can work in professions with demand for more employees, such as medicine and information technology. In 2022 of America’s H-1B visas, for skilled workers in “speciality occupations”, such as computer scientists, 73% were won by people born in India.
Many of India’s best and brightest seem to prepare themselves to migrate. Consider the findings of a paper soon to be published in the Journal of Development Economics by Prithwiraj Choudhury of Harvard Business School, Ina Ganguli of the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Patrick Gaule of the University of Bristol. It considered students that took the highly competitive entrance exams for the Indian Institutes of Technology, the country’s elite engineering schools, in 2010. Eight years later, the researchers found that 36% of the 1,000 top performers had migrated abroad, rising to 62% among the 100 best. Most went to America.
Another study looked at the top 20% of researchers in artificial intelligence (defined as those who had papers accepted for a competitive conference in 2019). It found that 8% did their undergraduate degree in India. But the share of top researchers that now work in India is so small that the researchers did not even record it.
In America almost 80% of the Indian-born population over school age have at least an undergraduate degree, according to number-crunching by Jeanne Batalova at the mpi. Just 50% of the Chinese-born population and 30% of the total population can say the same. It is a similar story in Australia, where almost two-thirds of the Indian-born population over school age, half the Chinese-born and just one-third of the total population has a bachelor’s or higher degree. Other rich countries do not collect comparable data.
Part 2:
Indeed Indian migrants are relatively wealthy even in the countries they have moved to. They are the highest-earning migrant group in America, with a median household income of almost $150,000 per year. That is double the national average and well ahead of Chinese migrants, with a median household income of over $95,000. In Australia the median household income among Indian migrants is close to $85,000 per year, compared with an average of roughly $60,000 across all households and $56,500 among the Chinese-born.
The might of the Indian diaspora is increasingly on display at the pinnacle of business and the apex of government. Devesh Kapur and Aditi Mahesh at Johns Hopkins University in Washington, DC, totted up the number of people with Indian roots in top jobs, including those born in India and those whose forebears were. They identified 25 chief executives at S&P 500 companies of Indian descent, up from 11 a decade ago. Given the large number of Indian-origin executives in other senior positions at these companies, that figure is almost sure to rise further.
It is only recently that Indians abroad have begun to win such prestigious posts. Vinod Khosla, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, a computer-maker, recalls how difficult it was for Indian entrepreneurs to raise money in 1980s America. “You were people with a funny accent and a hard to pronounce name and you had to pass a higher bar,” he says. Now Adobe, Alphabet, Google’s corporate parent, IBMand Microsoft are all led by people of Indian descent. The deans at three of the five leading business schools, including Harvard Business School, are of Indian descent, too.
In the world of policy and politics, the Indian diaspora is also thriving. The Johns Hopkins researchers have counted 19 people of Indian heritage in Britain’s House of Commons, including the prime minister, Rishi Sunak. They identified six in the Australian parliament and five in America’s Congress. Vice-President Kamala Harris was brought up by a Tamil Indian mother. And Ajay Banga, born in Pune in India, was selected to lead the World Bank last month after running MasterCard for more than a decade.
The Chinese diaspora is the only other group with comparable influence around the world. The richest man in Malaysia, for example, is Robert Kuok, an ethnic-Chinese businessman whose vast empire includes the Shangri-La hotels. But in Europe and North America, people of Chinese descent do not hold as many influential positions as their Indian counterparts.
This mistrust of China percolates through policy. Huawei, a Chinese telecoms-equipment manufacturer suspected in the past of embargo-busting and of being a conduit for Chinese government spying, has been banned in America. Some European countries are following suit. Stringent reviews of foreign investments in American companies on national-security grounds openly target Chinese money in Silicon Valley. Individuals found to be doing China’s bidding, including one ex-Harvard professor, have been punished. Indian firms do not face such scrutiny.
The Indian government, by contrast, has been—at least until Mr Modi and his Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) took over—filled with people whose view of the world had been at least partly shaped by an education in the West. India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, studied at Cambridge. Mr Modi’s predecessor, Manmohan Singh, studied at both Oxford and Cambridge.
India’s claims to be a democratic country steeped in liberal values help its diaspora integrate more readily in the West. The diaspora then binds India to the West in turn. The most stunning example of this emerged in 2008, when America signed an agreement that, in effect, recognised India as a nuclear power, despite its never having signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (along with Pakistan and Israel). Lobbying and fundraising by Indian-Americans helped push the deal through America’s Congress.
The Indian diaspora gets involved in politics back in India, too. Ahead of the 2014 general election, when Mr Modi first swept to power, one estimate suggests more than 8,000 overseas Indians from Britain and America flew to India to join his campaign. Many more used text messages and social media to turn out BJP votes from afar. They contributed unknown sums of money to the campaign.
Under Mr Modi, India’s ties to the West have been tested. In a bid to reassert its status as a non-aligned power, India has refused to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and stocked up on cheap Russian gas and fertiliser. Government officials spew nationalist rhetoric that pleases right-wing Hindu hotheads. And liberal freedoms are under attack. In March Rahul Gandhi, leader of the opposition Congress party, was disqualified from parliament on a spurious defamation charge after an Indian court convicted him of criminal defamation. Meanwhile journalists are harassed and their offices raided by the authorities.
Overseas Indians help ensure that neither India nor the West gives up on the other. Mr Modi knows he cannot afford to lose their support and that forcing hyphenated Indians to pick sides is out of the question. At a time when China and its friends want to face down a world order set by its rivals, it is vital for the West to keep India on side. Despite its backsliding, India remains invaluable—much like its migrants. ■
Softly, softly
Joseph Nye, a Harvard professor who coined the phrase “soft power“, notes that it is not automatically created by the mere presence of a diaspora. “But if you have people in the diaspora who are successful and create a positive image of the country from which they came, that helps their native country.” And, as he notes “India has a lot of very poor people but they are not the people coming to the United States.”Indeed Indian migrants are relatively wealthy even in the countries they have moved to. They are the highest-earning migrant group in America, with a median household income of almost $150,000 per year. That is double the national average and well ahead of Chinese migrants, with a median household income of over $95,000. In Australia the median household income among Indian migrants is close to $85,000 per year, compared with an average of roughly $60,000 across all households and $56,500 among the Chinese-born.
The might of the Indian diaspora is increasingly on display at the pinnacle of business and the apex of government. Devesh Kapur and Aditi Mahesh at Johns Hopkins University in Washington, DC, totted up the number of people with Indian roots in top jobs, including those born in India and those whose forebears were. They identified 25 chief executives at S&P 500 companies of Indian descent, up from 11 a decade ago. Given the large number of Indian-origin executives in other senior positions at these companies, that figure is almost sure to rise further.
It is only recently that Indians abroad have begun to win such prestigious posts. Vinod Khosla, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, a computer-maker, recalls how difficult it was for Indian entrepreneurs to raise money in 1980s America. “You were people with a funny accent and a hard to pronounce name and you had to pass a higher bar,” he says. Now Adobe, Alphabet, Google’s corporate parent, IBMand Microsoft are all led by people of Indian descent. The deans at three of the five leading business schools, including Harvard Business School, are of Indian descent, too.
In the world of policy and politics, the Indian diaspora is also thriving. The Johns Hopkins researchers have counted 19 people of Indian heritage in Britain’s House of Commons, including the prime minister, Rishi Sunak. They identified six in the Australian parliament and five in America’s Congress. Vice-President Kamala Harris was brought up by a Tamil Indian mother. And Ajay Banga, born in Pune in India, was selected to lead the World Bank last month after running MasterCard for more than a decade.
The Chinese diaspora is the only other group with comparable influence around the world. The richest man in Malaysia, for example, is Robert Kuok, an ethnic-Chinese businessman whose vast empire includes the Shangri-La hotels. But in Europe and North America, people of Chinese descent do not hold as many influential positions as their Indian counterparts.
Binding Delhi and DC
As America drifts towards a new cold war with China, Westerners increasingly see the country as an enemy. The covid-19 pandemic, which began in the Chinese city of Wuhan, probably made matters worse. In a recent survey of Americans’ attitudes by Gallup, a pollster, 84% of respondents said they viewed China mostly or very unfavourably. On India, only 27% of people surveyed held the same negative views.This mistrust of China percolates through policy. Huawei, a Chinese telecoms-equipment manufacturer suspected in the past of embargo-busting and of being a conduit for Chinese government spying, has been banned in America. Some European countries are following suit. Stringent reviews of foreign investments in American companies on national-security grounds openly target Chinese money in Silicon Valley. Individuals found to be doing China’s bidding, including one ex-Harvard professor, have been punished. Indian firms do not face such scrutiny.
The Indian government, by contrast, has been—at least until Mr Modi and his Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) took over—filled with people whose view of the world had been at least partly shaped by an education in the West. India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, studied at Cambridge. Mr Modi’s predecessor, Manmohan Singh, studied at both Oxford and Cambridge.
India’s claims to be a democratic country steeped in liberal values help its diaspora integrate more readily in the West. The diaspora then binds India to the West in turn. The most stunning example of this emerged in 2008, when America signed an agreement that, in effect, recognised India as a nuclear power, despite its never having signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (along with Pakistan and Israel). Lobbying and fundraising by Indian-Americans helped push the deal through America’s Congress.
The Indian diaspora gets involved in politics back in India, too. Ahead of the 2014 general election, when Mr Modi first swept to power, one estimate suggests more than 8,000 overseas Indians from Britain and America flew to India to join his campaign. Many more used text messages and social media to turn out BJP votes from afar. They contributed unknown sums of money to the campaign.
Under Mr Modi, India’s ties to the West have been tested. In a bid to reassert its status as a non-aligned power, India has refused to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and stocked up on cheap Russian gas and fertiliser. Government officials spew nationalist rhetoric that pleases right-wing Hindu hotheads. And liberal freedoms are under attack. In March Rahul Gandhi, leader of the opposition Congress party, was disqualified from parliament on a spurious defamation charge after an Indian court convicted him of criminal defamation. Meanwhile journalists are harassed and their offices raided by the authorities.
Overseas Indians help ensure that neither India nor the West gives up on the other. Mr Modi knows he cannot afford to lose their support and that forcing hyphenated Indians to pick sides is out of the question. At a time when China and its friends want to face down a world order set by its rivals, it is vital for the West to keep India on side. Despite its backsliding, India remains invaluable—much like its migrants. ■