NEW DELHI — India’s opposition party swept to victory in India’s national election Friday, setting the stage for Hindu nationalist and economic reformer Narendra Modi to become India’s next prime minister.

Modi, 63, chief minister of the western state of Gujarat, ran a ruthlessly efficient months-long campaign, spreading his message of hope and revitalization at thousands of rallies around the country. Ultimately voters overwhelmingly chose his message of change, with the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party and its allies garnering well over the 272 seats needed for a clear majority in Parliament.

The “Modi wave” as it was called, meant crushing defeat for the governing Congress Party and its 43-year-old scion, Rahul Gandhi, its chief campaigner. Across the country, voters heading to the polls said they were unhappy with corruption scandals and ineffectual leadership after 10 years of Congress Party rule under Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/hindu-nationalist-narendra-modis-party-heads-to-victory-in-indian-polls/2014/05/16/c6eccaea-4b20-46db-8ca9-af4ddb286ce7_story.html

Like Tupac at Coachella, Modi, who is almost certain to be the next prime minister of India, sent his hologram to rallies of supporters in 1,400-plus locations across the country this election season, according to a spokesman for his Bharatiya Janata Party. Indians filed in from towns and villages to look up as the lights blinked on and the candidate from the Hindu nationalist opposition suddenly appeared before them. In one notable address last month, Modi told the crowds that he thought God had “chosen” him for the task of bettering the country. It might be difficult for an audience member not in the know to tell the facsimile on the stage from the real man:

Modi girl Meghna Patel

Modi is a lifelong member of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a paramilitary Hindu nationalist organisation inspired by the fascist movements of Europe, whose founder's belief that Nazi Germany had manifested "race pride at its highest" by purging the Jews is by no means unexceptional among the votaries of Hindutva, or "Hinduness". In 1948, a former member of the RSS murdered Gandhi for being too soft on Muslims. The outfit, traditionally dominated by upper-caste Hindus, has led many vicious assaults on minorities. A notorious executioner of dozens of Muslims in Gujarat in 2002 crowed that he had slashed open with his sword the womb of a heavily pregnant woman and extracted her foetus. Modi himself described the relief camps housing tens of thousands of displaced Muslims as "child-breeding centres".

Such rhetoric has helped Modi sweep one election after another in Gujarat. A senior American diplomat described him, in cables disclosed by WikiLeaks, as an "insular, distrustful person" who "reigns by fear and intimidation"; his neo-Hindu devotees on Facebook and Twitter continue to render the air mephitic with hate and malice, populating the paranoid world of both have-nots and haves with fresh enemies – "terrorists", "jihadis", "Pakistani agents", "pseudo-secularists", "sickulars", "socialists" and "commies". Modi's own electoral strategy as prime ministerial candidate, however, has been more polished, despite his appeals, both dog-whistled and overt, to Hindu solidarity against menacing aliens and outsiders, such as the Italian-born leader of the Congress party, Sonia Gandhi, Bangladeshi "infiltrators" and those who eat the holy cow.

Modi exhorts his largely young supporters – more than two-thirds of India's population is under the age of 35 – to join a revolution that will destroy the corrupt old political order and uproot its moral and ideological foundations while buttressing the essential framework, the market economy, of a glorious New India. In an apparently ungovernable country, where many revere the author of Mein Kampf for his tremendous will to power and organisation, he has shrewdly deployed the idioms of management, national security and civilisational glory.

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/may/16/what-next-india-pankaj-mishra

Obligatory dead kids

aerdil posted:

cool. cant wait for world war three, the war of liberalism v fascism redux minus the communism. no one to root for and no one will win.

it's becoming increasingly obvious to me that we're already basically there

littlegreenpills posted:

i remember someone here (i think) dismissing the naxalites as "not really maoists cos the real motivations that drive their rank and file are based on a patchwork of rural, parochial grievances" or somesuch. yeah duh theres a form of praxis developed in the 1930s to harness these grievances to drive revolutions, its called maoism

Lessons posted:

An real thorough-going thirdworldism requires effectively analyzing how global class structure, labor aristocracy and unequal global exchange are actually affecting politics on a practical level. That is, it's not sufficient to point at relative militancy and lack thereof, you have to actually provide an explanation for that differential and provide some evidence. And when you look at the actual struggles Baby Poopy is citing it's really clear that they aren't very good evidence for a third worldist analysis, the Maoists in India or the Philippines aren't super-exploited workers at all, they're mostly peasants and in fact some of the few people left on earth that haven't been absorbed fully into the global capitalist economy. That makes it extremely hard to argue that their militancy is a result of imperialist exploitation and unequal exchange because the militants are not actually parties within that framework. These are much more national struggles, mostly minority and indigenous groups with an agrarian basis resisting attempts of national governments to deprive them of land and generally destroy their way of life, and at BEST you can argue that this is a sort of ancillary effect of imperialism, not a direct result. In fact I'd argue against the idea that the labor aristocratic system leads to the growth Genuine Revolutionary Movements in the capitalist periphery, in fact it's probably the opposite, and rather the existence of large labor aristocracies in the West serve to sustain the illusion that reformism and social democracy are viable paths for development and thereby stifle the growth of radical militancy among the global working class, (though to a lesser extent than it does in the West itself).

Of course this is all still better than getfiscal's mealy-mouthed equivocation and deploying scumbag reformist coward libtards Laclau & Mouffe, who can get shot for all I care, but it's still mega stupid in a different way

littlegreenpills posted:

i remember someone here (i think) dismissing the naxalites as "not really maoists cos the real motivations that drive their rank and file are based on a patchwork of rural, parochial grievances" or somesuch. yeah duh theres a form of praxis developed in the 1930s to harness these grievances to drive revolutions, its called maoism

i see HK already found the post, i remember that was thug lessons posting @ me. this is the kind of shit i have to deal with from trotskyist CIa agents on these forums