Ruchir Sharma Profile picture
Jan 7, 2022 9 tweets 4 min read Read on X
Liberalism does not exist in post-colonial states, as that would require a native bourgeoisie, not merely a comprador class.

In India, there are 5000 people who understand liberalism.

Of which 4000 despise it, 900 adopt it for Anglosphere approval, and the rest are journalists.
"Indians had an even lower regard than Pakistanis for civil rights that protect people’s liberty as being an essential part of a democracy.

The share of Indians who thought that a strong leader was ‘very good’ for the country was higher than in any other country — even Russia"
"India was below the median of countries that believed it was very important for human rights organisations to operate freely in their country without State interference, as compared to European nations, which valued this highly."
"‘NGOs [or charities] are out to defame the country.

They take money from foreign countries and from the Church and they instigate poor tribal people against the government,’

Manu Koda, a twenty-four-year-old from Raipur in eastern India’s Chhattisgarh, told me."
"India joined Tunisia and Lebanon at the bottom of the list of countries that believed that it was important for the media to be able to report and people to be able to talk on the internet without censorship."

🇮🇳🇹🇳🇱🇧💪🏽
"Three-fourths of respondents expressed what the survey described as a majoritarian form of nationalism.

Only about 6 per cent subscribed to a strongly liberal nationalism and a further 17 per cent took a weak liberal nationalist position."
"The highest proportion of respondents with this majoritarian nationalist position were those with a graduate or postgraduate education.

These positions included the belief that the state should punish those who do not ‘respect’ the cow...or eat beef."

Malala would be proud. 😄
"About two-thirds of respondents supported the view that the State should punish those who engage in religious conversion.

Younger people [are not more progressive]:6 out of 10 respondents supported banning movies which hurt religious sentiments, even more so among Muslim youth"
"This is not a ‘liberal’ country,nor do most Indians likely see liberalism as a virtue.

Under 17 per cent of respondents described themselves as ‘modern'.

A majority of all respondents,young or old,rural or urban,uneducated or graduates, described themselves as ‘traditional’."

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More from @ruchirsharma_1

Oct 22, 2024
Biomass firm poised to clear Bornean rainforest for dubious ‘green’ energy:

3 villages have signed over at least 5,000 hectares of their land to a biomass company. Much of this area, locals say, is covered in rainforest to be cleared for the project.

news.mongabay.com/2024/10/reveal…
Despite its billing as sustainable, research has shown that burning woody biomass emits more climate change-causing CO2 than coal per unit of electricity produced. The company in Borneo, moreover, has said it plans to export the wood pellets to be produced on its plantation.
As the nation strives to make good on its pledges to cut fossil fuels, President Joko Widodo has promoted biomass energy, derived from burning plant and animal products, as a sustainable alternative. His administration, whose term came to an end on Oct. 20, has set ambitious targets to increase the burning of biomass alongside coal in power plants, a method known as cofiring, which is used extensively in Japan and South Korea.
Read 6 tweets
Aug 7, 2024
Wikileaks - US Consulate General Kolkata*, 13 February 2007:

"On February 12, [the US] Consul General spoke with Nobel Prize winner Dr. Muhammad Yunus about his plans to enter Bangladesh politics.

Yunus, on a two-day visit to Kolkata, expressed a strong interest to enter the political fray and said that he was reviewing his options. He expressed support of the present Caretaker Government and its decision to declare a "State of Emergency," saying it had averted a possible civil war."

*This message was cleared with AmEmbassy Dhaka.

wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/0…Image
"Yunus felt that Muslim fundamentalists represented a fringe and that while the dominant parties had developed ties with fundamentalists for political gain, most Bangladeshis did not favor the extremism."
"During a lunch hosted by the Calcutta Chamber of Commerce (CCC) for its 175 th anniversary, ConGen spoke with Dr. Yunus about the present political situation in Bangladesh.

On February 11, Yunus had issued an open letter saying that he was seeking support from Bangladeshis to launch a political party to reform the violence and corruption in Bangladesh."
Read 6 tweets
May 15, 2024
Cargo cult: Why America cannot have nice things

Every society must cross its river of denial and pain to reach the shores of modernity. America is no exception.

Biden’s saving grace is that most Americans do not know that they don’t have nice things.

asiatimes.com/2024/05/cargo-…
Few Americans lament the lack of high-speed rail. How can you miss what you never possessed?

If you’ve never experienced 300 Mbps download speeds,you won’t question AT&T marketing 100 Mbps as 5G.

If every student goes $40,000 into debt,it’s not considered a burden on the young.
The US successfully twisted Japan’s arm in the 1990s, forcing them to build local factories. China forced all multinationals to manufacture domestically through local JVs. The US, however, might not be able to pull off something similar this time around.
Read 4 tweets
Mar 21, 2024
Just weeks after the import policy was introduced, US Trade Representative Katherine Tai, during an August 26 meeting, told Union Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal privately that Washington wants New Delhi to "rescind the requirement", as per a USTR briefing paper.

theweek.in/news/biz-tech/…
Travis Coberly, a US diplomat for trade in New Delhi, reportedly told his US colleagues that India's IT ministry "understands they (India) screwed up. They admitted as much. American companies here have been hammering them about this," he wrote, according to the news agency.
However, Indian officials, who preferred to remain anonymous, told Reuters that the Centre did not reverse its policy because of US pressure but rather made the decision after realising that local manufacturing of laptops and other devices was not significant currently.
Read 6 tweets
Oct 31, 2023
Friedman has accidentally answered the question 'why do Indians support 🇷🇺 or 🇮🇱 online?'

It is a form of bitter self-critique.

Living in a soft state that has, in exchange for 'good boy points', consistently refused to stand up for them, people live vicariously through others. Image
“I myself pressed at that time for immediate visible retaliation” Shivshankar Menon wrote.

“But on sober reflection and in hindsight, I now believe that the decision not to retaliate militarily and to concentrate on diplomatic, covert and other means was the right one for that time and place.”
Image
Chief among the reasons, Menon said, was that any military response would have quickly obscured just how outrageous and terrible the raid on Indian civilians and tourists was; “the fact of a terrorist attack from Pakistan on India with official involvement on the Pakistan side” would have been lost.
Image
Read 7 tweets
Jun 5, 2023
Germany: Leipzig forbids fresh far-left demonstration after 2 nights of unrest:

Police arrested nearly 30 people during the weekend protests, which followed the conviction of a left-wing activist for physically attacking neo-Nazis.

dw.com/en/leipzig-for…
The underpinning legal rationale for the decision, they said, was a broader restriction for any protests in the city this weekend connected to the conviction earlier in the week of left-wing activist Lina E. for her part in violent physical assaults on neo-Nazis.
On Saturday, around 1,500 people turned up to the demonstration, even though several courts had refused to authorize it. Police first tried to accommodate the protest, but broke it up when officers came under attack.
Read 7 tweets

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