Christians hide in forests as Hindu mobs ransack villages.
I’ve enjoyed watching the US political circus this week and will comment on Monday. But, there are a number of other stories from the week that are hugely important, not least this one which speaks to the ongoing struggles India faces to balance the benefits of its huge economic growth and continue to manage it’s ethnic and religious diversity. While it may still be true that when the US sneezes, the rest of the world catches a cold, it is also true that India has become, in so many ways, a barometer for the health of our global culture.
Fernando Gros is a guitarist, composer, photographer and writer based in Hong Kong. Born in Santiago de Chile, Fernando grew up in Sydney and has also lived in London and Delhi.
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I was thinking about that too today, and how the stories of Darfur, Tibet, Zimbabwe seem to have got a bit lost in the noise in recent weeks — but then I realised that the view of whoever the President of the USA is has the ability to bring to bear massive positive or negative influence to change that situation. What’s going on in India is horrendous — is it symptomatic of an inability to enforce the rule of law over cultural norms do you think? Having been there this summer, I began to see that much of the caste system and Hindu fundamentalism is still having a massive impact on Christians, particularly in the north of India.
No doubt that the US government has a tremendous power to influence the health of the world. That story needs to be covered in depth and in this campaign there are a lot of ideas floating around that could effect all of us, not just those in North America.
Legal enforcement is a complex problem in India, but my feeling is that what is going here has more roots in economics and culture. In some ways it is a glocal clash. India’s biggest problem right now is that the economy is moving at such different paces for the different groups of people. Orissa has a lot of poverty and my understanding is that it is a net exporter of young people to the growing cities. Add to that the perceived threat of “foreign” religions (Christianity and to a lesser extent Islam) and it becomes a volatile mix.