 Welcome to our first lecture of this semester. My name is Betsy Gardner, and I am the president of this wonderful organization. I'm going to be standing up there before you every lecture to give you announcements, as well as to tell you, please turn off your cell phones. Please. So my first announcement, I regret to say that the tour that was described in the brochure, we were going to go to Justin Morrill's home. We're not able to get that together, and it's been canceled for this semester. Channel 17, the handsome man in the aisle is filming, and they hope to take every one of our lectures and then broadcast them on their TV channel. And so you can tell your friends, the people who don't have the pleasure of being here in person, they can listen to and watch the lecture. Today, I want to introduce Bjorn Nwudsk. Bjorn is our new AV technician, and he is the project manager and a nonprofit by the name of Technology for Tomorrow. Now, the salary that Bjorn receives from us does not go in his pocket. It goes to fund and provide technology education program for refugees and immigrants through the collaboration with the United States Committee on Refugees and Immigrants. As Bjorn had said, this represents the very best of collaborative partnerships. We are very happy to be part of it. One last announcement, and this you've heard over and over. It's my pitch for volunteers. Our new publicity chairman is Dorothy Lugering. She's looking for folks to resupply libraries and other venues where we have distributed our brochures. If you have a few minutes every other week or so, it doesn't take long. You stop in, see, carry some brochures. Please see, Dorothy, Omi, after the lecture. We would really appreciate it. And now, Beth, we'll introduce the speaker. On behalf of the program committee, welcome to our fall semester. I think we'll enjoy the series of presentations that we have planned for you. And we have as a kickoff today a returning speeder that we're very happy to welcome back, Pablo Bows. Pablo was born in Calcutta, India. And he grew up in Vancouver. He attended and earned his bachelor's from the University of British Columbia, his master's from Simon Fraser, also in BC, and his PhD at York University in Toronto. In 2006, he came to the University of Vermont, where he is now an associate professor of geography and also the director of the Center for Global and Regional Studies. His current research focus topics include refugee resettlement, so it's very appropriate today, environmental displacement, and transforming cities. And he's here today to talk to us about contemporary India. So welcome back, Pablo Bows. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. We should bring for television so that those who are actually here can see you. Ah, I mean, I can try. I'm going to be blocked some way. I can just move around. I'll try to do it. I'll move around. So I wanted to thank you. I feel like I said, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. So I wanted to thank you again for inviting me to come and join you. I really enjoyed my opportunity to come and speak about a different element of my work as was just mentioned, which is on refugee resettlement. And I actually remember your organization, I think, coming and speaking at the risk that we did, the refugee immigrants, yeah. It's fantastic, so it's really great. So, but today I'm really excited to come here and speak to you about another topic that is very near and dear to me, both in terms of my research and my home. So the personal life, which is looking at India today. There are many, many, many things that I could focus on in talking about India today and especially in terms of this set of challenges and opportunities, what's going on in the country today. I'm gonna look at only three. I could certainly look at some of the really pressing issues around sexual violence and women and children around kind of broadly understood climate change and the floods in Kerala. Many of you may have been seeing on the news, the dust storms in the Northwest, all sorts of things that have been going on across the country, but I'm really gonna look at three particular things. I realize I have 45 minutes, so I'm gonna try and stick as much as possible to the little chunks for these three particular issues. And I'm gonna start off by showing three images and I'd like to get your sense of what you think these are pictures of, just to take it away. So the first is this, it doesn't show up particularly well, any guesses as to what this is? Big man, yeah, big man. Picture a big man. Big man. A big Russian apple, yep, that's about right. And this. An angry monkey coming along the lines of an angry monkey. East Germany car. East Germany cars, it's actually a roadie Suzuki, which is a joint venture between an Indian car company and Suzuki motors. That is correct for all three of these images. However, they are not perhaps in the places that we might expect to find them. They might mean different kinds of things. The first picture is indeed a big Ben, but it's a reconstruction of Big Ben in the middle of a highway in Kelkow. So when I got off, I'll show you some images in this presentation from the trip I took to India in March of this year, which was my first time back in a few years. And it was the first time with my wife and my daughter and with my in-laws. So I have a big kind of extravaganza. One of the first things that greeted me as I got off the airport in Kelkow was this monstrosity. I sat there and I thought, why is Big Ben in the middle of a highway? It doesn't even, it's not even a cross-attractions. Literally in the middle of a highway in Kelkow. When we went to go up, I was confronted everywhere with Russian. And I was trying to figure out why are all these signs in Russian? Why are hawkers actually speaking to tourists using a few Russian words? They all assume that my mother-in-law is Russian. I do not understand what you're talking about. And the third image is this image that all through, especially Northern India when we were in Delhi, we saw images of this again and again and again, this angry monkey, this stylized angry monkey. For my daughter who was five, this was very exciting. And my in-laws and my wife didn't really understand what it signified to me. It was very clearly a symbol of the Hindu right. It's a very aggressive nationalist symbol. It's something that you see along with the colors very much in the streets during demonstrations, but more and more as a way of kind of marking or branding. It is not as aggressive as one might find with some other kinds of symbols, but I think that it's been used in different sorts of ways to identify who one is and what sort of behavior. So the three things that I want to talk about today are these three sort of big issues that drip India in other sorts of ways. The first is globalization of the uses. And really why it is that a Calcutta would build not only a big bend, but the current prime minister or chief minister of the state of West Bengal, of which Calcutta is the capital, wants to build an entire waterfront that mimics London. She wants to build a London Eye. She wants to build a whole range of these different symbols. The second thing I want to talk about to some degree about Russia, but really more about China, is about geopolitics and real life world and India. It's placing. And the last thing which sort of ties all of these together in different ways is the rise of the internationalists. And of the sort of militant Hindu right. Something that is not new, but is a sort of profound particular moment of a kind of populism. We're seeing other sorts of populism all across the world. And I want to talk about this particular one. These are all issues that I've worked on in different ways over many years. As you heard, I was born in Calcutta. My family left when I was 12, and I grew up in Vancouver. But I returned to Calcutta many times as a researcher. I did my PhD research looking at the transformation of Calcutta itself. In 2015, I wrote a book called Urbanization and India. Something like that. I think that sounded about right. The 11 people who read it. I wrote this book called Urbanization and India. And it really looks very much at people like myself and what our relationship with India was. One of the things that is really notable across the world, not only in India, but many, many different countries is the ways in which people who have immigrated abroad participate. They feel this connection to former homelands. And in my case, I was looking at how they were being sort of drawn back into rebuilding of these cities. And even if they weren't the sort of lifestyles that we were supposed to embody, we're kind of transforming the city. So I'll talk about all of those in different ways. So the first thing, it's really to talk about the ways in which cities are changing. When I first went back to India as a researcher, I was going to look at population displacement from big projects. I was going to look at things like dams, railroads, and all these projects out in the rural areas. But what I really saw, that just astounded me. Well, first of all, the different organizations that I was going to go work with said, yeah, we don't want to care about that. What we really want you to look at is how are the cities changing? And the landscapes of the cities are astoundingly different. Bombay, which I went to in this last trip, when my aunt and uncle moved to Bombay in 1970, the population was about 4 million. Today, it's about 17 million. So you have this massive change. Even when my parents lived in Calcutta in the 1930s and 40s, then the population was somewhere around 5, 5 million. Today, it's around 14. So you have these significant rise in population. But you also have a fundamentally different kind of thing. Now, that's been happening. It's not like this has just started in the last 20 years. But what's profoundly different in the last 20 years is the nature of that change. For a large part of its post-independence history, from 1947 onwards, India was at least in name of socialist development. It wasn't socialist, really. But a lot of central planning, a lot of supposedly rational projects, things like that. But over the last 20, 30 years, especially, India has surged ahead in the new global economy, especially the IT economy. There are these wholly new kinds of development in the Indian city that you see all around that are kind of fantastic. There are ways of imagining futures tied very much into that global economy that look very, very different. So you have these growing and modernizing cities all across India. I mean, the city of a million is not a big city. And you have these mega cities. And then you have the state of Uttar Pradesh alone has 300 million people living in that state and many, many of these large cities. What you've seen is, while cities have been growing, and this is true not only of India, but of the world as a whole. This is the first time in the history of the world that more people live in cities than live in a country south. But what we've actually seen is that while the pace of cities has grown, the pace of slums has grown faster. So while cities across the world are growing at roughly 4% a year, slums are growing at about 8% a year. So this kind of informal growth, which has all kinds of profound implications, is really, really big. So we've seen increasing inequality. I'll just give you one really quick example. That before India joined in 1991, it really joined the capitalist economy much more forward. It took high enough to change the whole structure of its economy, engaged in neoliberal transformation, all these kinds of things. One of the things was, when the British controlled India, one of the big things that undermined their legitimacy to rule was that there were these recurring fatties. So if you're a big empire and you're saying, well, we're going to take care of you and we won't get into all these sort of racist frameworks around that, but if you're a big empire and you're saying, we're going to take care of you, and yet you have these recurring families, millions of people die. That really undermines your legitimacy. So when the British left, and India becomes independent, one of the first things the government did was they created this surplus of grain and covered food parameters. So if there was a family somewhere they could redistribute that. That remained in place until 1997. And in 1997, as the Indian economy was transforming and IT was everywhere, they decided, do you have all this surplus grain? We should just open it up to the export market and they did. And what you see now, agricultural economists have estimated that between 1947 and 1997, caloric intake as a measure of kind of nutrition was rising across the Indian country, the Indian population. Between 1997 and 2017, ever since they opened this up to the export market, this has just gone through a nose gap. And we're back to that. So increasing inequality is a really, really big issue. And yet, at the same time, if you go into Indian cities, what you see overwhelmingly is this evidence of a new kind of luxurious building. In many ways, it mimics the playgrounds of IT campuses, the Googles of the Facebooks in North America. This is the campus of Infosys, which is one of these massive global, what they call, business-processed outsourcing. When people talk about outsourcing, there's always this imagining of manufacturing. And there is that. But a lot of it is actually things like financial services and other kinds of services. So Infosys does a lot of this. I couldn't find an actual phone anywhere on the campus. I found this phone booth, which you're supposed to use as your cell phone. But again, it's this sort of fantastical set of images. This is where cafeteria built to look like the Sydney Opera House. This is the communication set built to look like the roof. And this is part of the entrance to the campus. And what's really interesting is, so all of the workers there, they call this the washing machine. I don't remember what it was actually called. But what was fascinating was when you cross this bridge that didn't allow photographs inside, but when you cross that bridge, sorry, this is in the city of Bangalore, which is very much at the hub of the IT world, you cross this bridge and it says on one side where you're looking in, there are letters from a quote from the founder that says, this is the future. On the other side, you look out and you see the sort of dusty landscape of the old town and it says after past. And that's very much this kind of notion of we're moving towards this greener future. I think 80,000 people who work on this campus, the city as a whole has upwards of 3 million people living in it. And it actually looks specifically onto the slopes. Now Bangalore, as I said, is very much one of the cities that's at the heart of the IT revolution in India, but Calcutta as well. Calcutta, at one point, was the capital of India, but that was a long time ago. It's ever since then been mostly noted for its poverty. The board of the brothels, the city of the joy, it's been for a lot of urban theorists, it is the example of urban decay. It's an urban disaster that everything goes wrong. And yet IT, too, has undergone this kind of remarkable change of the last number of years. It's rebranded itself, it's marketed itself as being something new. And all over Calcutta, you see images of this. So this is the sort of Calcutta I grew up remembering. This reminds me in some ways of my grandparents' but as you see right beside it, we all already have these sort of bleeding new structures that are coming up. You have an old city that is trying to very self-consciously rebrand itself as new. One of the things that the city council is trying to do is ban rickshaws because there is a sense that, well, this gives people an impression that they're old. We see here the classic Calcutta car called an ambassador, except that wasn't built in the 1950s. It's a retro car that was built last year. And we see new cars sort of choking the streets all the way around. The chief minister of the state, as I said before, who has this Bengali means business campaign, she's the one who wants to build the London Eye and the Big Ben, because for her, if you want to be global, you have to be right there. And it's an interesting, different way of thinking about this than other places that say, see New York or Paris or Tokyo as an example of what is to be modern, what is to be part of the globalized world. Shopping malls dominate. There's a massive, massive shopping mall. And I always feel very conflicted. For me, going back to India as a child, it was always terribly uncomfortable. It was hot, it was dirty. It was just a real sort of sense of privation, whereas now you can, if you are able to, access spaces like this, these massive new malls, which are sort of a cultural phenomenon, as well as just a place to shop. Global brands sort of appear more and more and more. So we have Starbucks everywhere. And these new buildings sort of dominate the landscape. So the old city on the left here and the sort of horizon city on the right. But all of this is done not through any kind of central planning. It's not as though the city sort of sits down and says, oh, we're going to build all these new apartment towers. Where are all the cars going to go? Where are all the people going to get the services that actually work? And this is especially apparent on the eastern fringes in the city, where we see massive new building projects. This is such a true, if you look at much of India, I mean, Goa. Goa was very much a sort of sleepy seaside site beaches. It's now massive building projects everywhere and Russia is everywhere. I will get back to that later. New metro lines. And these metro lines, highway overpasses, they're meant to bypass the old city. If you have a car, you can get into the metro and so on. New building projects. It's like a city of skyscrapers all over. Including a Trump tower. Although I think they're suing the Trump organization. They stiff them on the money. Trump, anyway. But really I want to finish off this first part by saying there are many different kinds of impacts of these massive new building schemes. Many things. There's more and more, as I said, inequality and more people are displaced as a result of that. And just on the sort of environmental front. This is what the old eastern fringes of the city used to look like. This is what the whole area used to look like. There were wide wet lines. But this is all that sort of left of it. And in 2004, when I went there to do this initial research, nothing had been built. It was just still in the minds of developers. We just wanted to, they dreamt of this. When I went back in 2007, they were already starting to clear these out. And I documented part of this. There were environmental regulations that protected a lot of these sites. But the developers got around them by doing things like this, which is they would hire fishermen to dump these very invasive water liquefied plants into water hyacinth. They would dump these into the ponds. Within three seasons, they'd be overrun like this. And then soon after, they would compact these and fill them in, building these 28, 35-story towers on poorly compacted alluvial soil. I just, I can't even imagine how dangerous this is. And there are many, many effects of this. I'll just say this one thing is, in the last couple of years, we've been experiencing bad heat here. When we go through these hospitals, I don't feel well with the heat at all. I say, oh, it's like an heat. There's nothing like a heat. And in competitive terms, you know, in Calcutta today, there are so many people in deaths that are happening amongst the marginalized and the poor. And it's increased 10-fold. I mean, they've had record high temperatures. There has been all across the world this year. And a lot of this has to do with that city with an increase in concrete and a decrease in windspace. All right, let me move on. So one thing in terms of urbanizing cities. I'll move through this some more quickly to talk about geopolitics. As I said before, you know, I get to go off and I'm looking around and thinking, why are the Russians everywhere? I don't understand this. I had a man in a pool said to me, where are you from, Delhi? And I said, you know, big Russian accent. And I said, no, no, no, I'm from the US. He said, oh, the US. I said, well, I grew up in Canada. Oh, much better, he said. And I said, where are you from? And he said, Singapore. So, that accent really didn't match up, but okay. But one of the things that's interesting about India is that throughout the Cold War, India had always been sort of pushed towards a Russian sphere of influence, mainly because the US didn't believe that it wasn't really socialist. What's happening right now is really, really fascinating. There's still these long-standing ties with Russia. When I began to look into the Russians in Goa, it became very clear that this had become a vacation destination for a lot of Russians, in part because other parts of the Middle East were becoming more dangerous for them. Turkey was more dangerous for them. There had been fluctuations in the ruble. And there were these different sort of relationships that had emerged. But overall, India's actually moving farther away from Russia and in some ways, in some ways not. Everybody is sort of in a state of flux because as with this country, nobody knows what is going on in the world. But what's been interesting is because the US has tried to diminish, unsuccessfully, Chinese influence in the region. The US has tried to build new sorts of relationships with India. And in particular, one thing you will often notice on the news today is the use of the term indopacit. Usually people call it Asia-pacit, not indopacit. But this is a very, very clear attempt to create a new set of relationships. In the case of the US, a lot of that has to do with a direct set of relationships around selling military goods, not in some of the kind of aid or other developmental activities of the past. But in lots of ways, this aligns well with what domestic audiences in India are interested in. When we see India today, it's usually in terms of geopolitics. It's all about its antagonisms with Pakistan. And with good reason, India has fought four wars with Pakistan as the territory of Kashmir is one of the most heavily militarized and the brutal ongoing conflicts with a population that majority of the Hindu country like India is a majority Muslim state of Kashmir. It is not clear that the people of Kashmir want to be part of either India or Pakistan, but it's still a big time of war. India will talk about this, especially when the Hindu right is in power, especially when more kind of Islamic political parties are in power in Pakistan. But really, India is not as concerned with Pakistan as it is with China. India and China is the big sort of contested energy. Much as with Pakistan, India has had many, many border disputes with China before. In 1962, one of the border disputes drove out into a war in which the Chinese army smashed through the Indian army and made it 50 miles from down. And India, to some degree, I would say it's never recovered from that. It's always been really anxious about what China is doing. And you'll see it play out in weird kinds of ways with the tsunami hit. I remember the Indian ambassador who's in the US going on CNN and then saying, so are you asking the US people to send money? And he said, no, no, no, we don't need money sent to us. We wanna be recognized for being the strong Europe region where we are. And in fact, before the Indian government even sent ships to help the south of India, they were steaming off ships to help other neighboring countries. Again, it's all about China. In the last two years, there have been so many border disputes between India and Pakistan that have, they both have large numbers of troops massed along these borders. This isn't a border, you know, you have the space between, in the Kashmir, I always love the fact that Pakistan's sold a part of Kashmir that they technically don't necessarily have control over to China. As a way of, I think I've kept the Indians apart. These disputes kind of go on and on. And in a similar kind of way that if you look at China today, I think, there are all kinds of things I could say about US foreign policy right now and the sort of influence of US foreign policy. But I think some of the things that those in charge fundamentally don't understand is that something like the TPP, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which is, I'm not gonna get into, I don't really like trade deals like this. However, the whole point of the trade deal was to counter China. And in the absence, when the US had stepped back from all sorts of different kind of leadership roles, others have jumped into that vacuum. Russia has jumped into the vacuum to some degree, but China went. If you look at China in Africa right now, if you look at China in Latin America, there is a range of different kinds of development projects, resource extraction, kind of bilateral trade and ties that I would have thought would have been just unthinkable even five years ago, because the US wouldn't have allowed China to sort of venture into the sphere of influence. But that's not what's happened. And we see this in South Asia as well. So China has been building all kinds of infrastructure in Pakistan and Afghanistan, right? Afghanistan is even crazier. I'm not gonna go into Afghanistan, but with Pakistan, so for example, China, the character on the highway, which is the highest highway, I think it's the highest highway in the world, there were a couple of big, there was earthquakes and some landslides. I mean, it wiped out certain parts of the character on the highway. And the Pakistan government couldn't afford to work. They weren't getting around to rebuild it. China stepped in and rebuilt it on their own diet and created a whole sort of new relationship there. There's a trade link, the New Silk Road is a whole other sort of initiative that stretches through Central Asia, but there's a trade link, the building of pork infrastructures in Pakistan by China. It's something that I think bears a lot more attention when we don't really look at it. So lastly, the other big, big thing that I wanted to talk about is Hindu nationalism. So nationalism, as we know, is on the rise everywhere and especially these sorts of, these notions of ethnic nationalism that countries, many of which are multi-ethnic states, are really meant for one type of person. You see it in Hungary, you see it in Poland, you see the rise of these sorts of movements in Scandinavian countries, in Canada, you'll ask all sorts of places, in South Africa, in Turkey, and on and on. In India, this takes a particular kind of route in Hindu nationalism. And Hindu nationalism, it has its origins in the 19th century and really starts as a group of elite, upper-class Hindu men who say, we want better things under the bridge. We don't really care about anybody else. When Gandhi joins the nationalist movement, he really transforms this in a lot of ways and he is, as a result, despised by Hindu nationalists and he is, in fact, assassinated by Hindu nationalists. When Gandhi is assassinated, it actually delegitimizes the Hindu nationalist movement for a long time. But then what happens under Indira Gandhi who is not related, as India sort of preems through this early period of its democracy and it flirts with an authoritarian state. So between 1977 and 1979, there was something called the emergency crisis when the democratically elected government dispensed civil liberties, drove a whole bunch of people in jail and eventually it steps back from this. But one of the groups that had opposed this authoritarian regime were Hindu nationalists. So they regained some power. And in the 1980s, they begin to get more and more popular. And what they do is they feed on the similar kinds of resentments that you see in all sorts of populist grievances. I mean, the reality is that populism doesn't succeed unless there are very real resentments, very real grievances that you can feed into. It's not a, it's not a, it's not a matter of fact to say that the working classes have been disenfranchised by globalization. But is there a response to demonize immigrants? Is that the reason why are there less coal markets? It's not environmental regulations. It's not immigrant stealing jobs. It's, you had mechanization of the industry. There's other things that happen. And in a similar kind of way, Hindu nationalism in the 1980s really begins to reflect the resentment of lower caste men and upper caste men. And they're resentful that as the Indian state starts to, and the civil society starts to develop, and we start to see more rights for marginalized groups, that they're gonna get cut out. So there's a lot of anxiety about that. And one of the things I remember in the 1980s, there was a government commission that came out and said, okay, so we have a caste-based society in India. And the caste is, it doesn't map directly onto class. It divides the Indian society and those who are Hindu, although it actually extends to other religions as well. But it basically says that on the basis of your lineage, that's what your opportunities in life are gonna be. It divides Indian society into priests, warriors, tradespeople, servants, and those without caste. It's actually a lot more complicated than that. So the caste background of my family is like somewhere between warrior and priests, but it's like this spryed caste, basically. So you have these, there's a lot of nuance in there. But the reality is still is that those who are in political power, so until this last prime minister, almost all the prime ministers in India came from the priestly caste. The priestly caste and the warrior caste make up about two to 4% of the population and they make up about 90% of the professional classes in terms of work. They make up the vast majority of politicians and so on. And so in the 1980s, there was a report that came up that said we need to create an affirmative action policy, one that is much, much more teeth than what you have in the US. I mean, in most Western countries, affirmative action means if you have two people who are the same qualifications, you'll prefer one. This was a strict quota system that said we're gonna reserve X number of seats in parliament for women, X number of seats in certain professions, these kinds of things were set these aside. Huge backlash against this. And really, if you look at the Hindu nationalist movement, a lot of its vigor comes from those resentments that I've already brought up. And the other thing about the Hindu nationalism that I think is most alarming is how deeply women is, how deeply embedded it is in Indian society today. When it went underground after the Dilij and Mara's under, after the Gandhi assassination, it really starts to work through civil society on their extensions. So it's not just a political party. It's in fact a movement that is in trade unions and women's organizations and student groups and all kinds of things. It's deeply distrustful of minorities in many ways. The targets have been in the past Christians, the so-called untouchables or Dalits, and most notably Muslims. So Hindutva, which is the sort of expression, it's called the Hindutva way, it reaches back into the 1920s as a more organized movement. It was one that based itself in lots of ways on the fascist principles of organizing. But it's morphed into all sorts of new things today. So the ruling party in India today is something known as the BJP. This is the leader, the Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi, who was previously the Chief Minister of the Western Indian State of Gujarat. Until recently, relatively recently, until he was elected Prime Minister, he was actually banned from entry into the US. Because while he had been the Chief Minister of Gujarat, there had been a program against Muslims, one in which over 3,000 people were killed, there were mass rapes, there were all sorts of atrocities for which he did not intervene. And yet he has proved to be an immensely popular Prime Minister, so far. And the BJP, they can do it right, in part in power, has been also very popular. But Hindutva, as I said before, within the right extends far beyond just a political party. There are these voluntary associations, this is called the RSS, this is a wide network of different kind of social service agencies of different kinds. They go out and do all sorts of things, built on being physically fit and living a Hindu way, et cetera. There's a worldwide organization called the Bishbhavad Viparsha, which is a worldwide Hindu council, which advocates for these Hindu ways and defends Hindu nationalism abroad. Taked together, all of these different kinds of organizations are sometimes called the family of Hindu organizations, and they're sort of scariest manifestation of what are known as the Bajrangal, the army of the monkey god, which is Harkins back to that first image that I showed you. These are mostly young, under-employed men who are at the forefront. Really, people have referred to them as brown shirts of the Hindu-American people. As I said before, their real sort of the fear that they mobilize is around militant Islam. So once again, as we see in many, many countries, we focus a lot on Europe and on North America, and certainly we see elements of Islamophobia there as well, but in South Asia, this motivates. When you think about the India atrocities in Myanmar today, a lot of that is about this fear, this existential fear about radical Islam. It also manifests in its own versions of economic nationalism. So Hindu nationalism is all about made in India. So it's an India-first kind of idea. Even while those in power are very much entangled within the sort of good role of harmony. Politically, as I said, they've become incredibly dull in all across the US. So this is in the last state elections. This is the number of state governments in orange that are run by the Hindu right or its allies. Most notably in the spring, almost all of those in what's called the chicken neck, the little part of India that extends over Baladesh, those are mostly left parties and they've all flipped over to Hindu right. And that was the vote share of the Hindu right in the last national election, the ones in where. So when we think about India today, we see this sort of continuing trends around urban growth, economic development, but at the same time growing inequality, and all of the sort of negative impacts on that growth. Rising communal tensions, especially between Muslim and Hindu populations. And yet at the same time, because I thought, well, I'm not just gonna leave you with that and say, well, it's just not gonna help. It is, at the same time, really, it continues to be an incredibly vibrant and sort of an active environment. One in which while all of these things are going on, they are not going on unopposed. I took the following images just out of protests that were taking place in the last couple of weeks. I said before, one of the ongoing sort of deeply, deeply problematic issues is around sexual violence. And there's lots of questions about the fact that I believe the statistics around sexual violence is reported sexual violence is up about 40% since 2015. But again, that's about reporting. There's still estimates that sexual violence is unreported 90% of the time. Sorry, can you just explain what you mean by sexual violence? So sexual violence of different kinds, so cases of rape and assault of women and children throughout the country. But we've seen a lot of mobilizing, mobilizing in many cities in the countryside to take on the lack of prosecution of those accused, the lack of accountability of police forces, and in fact, the complicity of police forces in some of these, the lack of adequate laws to deal with issues of sexual violence. And that goes on. Some of the biggest mobilizations we've seen in the last little while have been by farmers. So this is from earlier this week. So there have been farmers marching on big, big cities. One of the other things I could have talked about is farmer suicides. It's an enormous, enormous issue in states like underpoorish, other places where these farmers are committing suicide essentially because they're getting into debt. And they're getting into huge debt to seed companies, to fertilizers, to a large-scale agribusiness. But there has been a lot of mobilizing of farmers to say, we need to take this on. We need to deal with things like terminator seeds. We need to look at these kinds of practices that put us in this position in the first place. Massive marchers have been taking place. And we've seen some really significant progress in some regards like that. And finally, student protests. So all across the country. One of the big hallmarks of this human right movement in power has been it's cracking down on freedom of speech and especially cracking down on the same. As I said before, because there's some interpenetrated throughout Indian society, we see on campuses there will be a student group. It's not really a student group, but it's a supposed student group on campus that will often assault the students who are trying to demonstrate for freedom of speech and stuff like this. And yet there's still out there, still out there in the streets. And we've seen some real victories. Yesterday, the Supreme Court in India decriminalized same-sex relations. That is a law that was passed in 1861, I believe, under the British rule and had never been changed. That's not entirely surprising because the Land Acquisition Act that India used to use to seize property was the British Land Acquisition Act of 1890 as well. So India hasn't always updated these things, but it is still a notable gain to be recognized. So I'm gonna leave it there. Again, there are lots of detail I can give you about these different things, but I have no conclusion other than it's as perfectly in the place as India. Thank you for the question and answers. And you tell us about the different languages and their influence on the trade, and so forth. Yes, to some degree, I mean, there's a wealth of languages in India. There's 15 official languages. The lingua franca for most of the country is Hindi and also English. I would say, however, there's a lot of language politics involved. If you go down to the four southern Indian states, you will have a better encounter if you speak English than if you speak Hindi, because Hindi is seen as the sort of the colonial language in the south. The north is often referred to as the Hindi belt, or Hindi belt, because Hindi is so dominant there. Calcutta, which I was showing you images of, is actually a majority Bengali speaker. A lot of the dialects, a lot of the indigenous languages are most definitely under threat, as they are in many parts of the world. They are not spoken as widely. And as the media, sort of the media industries within India are really sort of, they're dominated by Hindi. So that's very much the, almost everyone now in school will learn Hindi in addition to whatever their other language is. I have a quick call, because I've got this one. And I'm practicing, do you consider them a Suri or Shia country? It's most definitely a Suri country. It's a Suri country, thank you. Yeah, and in fact, one of the things we see quite often is a targeting of Shia in Pakistan, so, yeah. Not really you. The nationalist movement got steam not from resentment of the upper classes, who have been upper classes forever, but of the favoritism of the upper classes were showing to the very lowest classes, protecting them as minorities, and that set the middle class off. Because I think that's what we saw here. Very close. Yeah, I mean, that's interesting. I definitely think there's an element of that. I think that there has been a playing of the resentment by some, I would make the same argument here, is that it's not as though some of the actual policies being enacted would help the working class, some of the people who are the most affected by what is said, but the language of it is simply, well, we will play X. It is not as though Dalits or, I mean, it's slightly different at least when it comes to the quota system. If it's in the quota system there, people would say, well, I am unable to attend this school because someone else is walking. And I thought about this a lot when we were just in India, because my cousin's daughter was sitting for her board exams, she wants to be a doctor. And I said, so how, who do you write this with? She said, well, I write with a group of 2,000 other students. And I said, how many spaces are there? She said to do the pre-med. So she had to get through, there was 10,000 people who wrote the first exam. She got through that, so she got to the second one. There's 2,000 writing that. And then, so I said, how many spaces for pre-med? She said 54. And I said, how many spaces for med school? She said 12. So the actual, I mean, the pressure on the kids and their families is very real. But if you don't, I think about it a lot in terms of, the first time I went back to India with my parents, I saw the sort of social networks they left behind. They had a comfortable life in a lot of ways than in Canada, and I really didn't understand at least initially, why would you leave this behind? And I learned later on, it was really much, perhaps less about me, but it was definitely about the opportunities that my sister would not have. Yeah. Can you say something about the environmental issues that have resulted from such a recent unchecked growth in China? Yeah, I mean, major environmental issues, I can't even, I certainly can't cover all of them. I mean, some of them I'll say, the waterways in India, which really are the sort of the water for life in India. The amount of pollution is incredible. And the amount of sort of disease that comes through, rivers being seen as cleansing and yet being polluted. And not simply, people see it as, well, poor people are polluting the rivers. No, industrial pollution is polluting the rivers as much, and then people bathe in them. The Ganges, for example, it's a holy river. I would not go anywhere near the Ganges. There is a horrifyingly, you know, a holy river. But not just those kinds of issues, air quality. I actually wear a different pair of glasses when I go to India, because I know that the particulates in the air scratch up my glasses. When I go to some of the more polluted cities. Now, again, it's not everywhere. And there are also a lot of pretty robust environmental movements that are trying to take up these questions. One of the interesting dynamics I've found is you do have some more kind of Western environmentalism that sort of sees nature without people. But in a place like India, you're not really gonna get away from people. So even when you do conservation efforts, you have to really ask, well, what is the impact on the poor people who use these spaces as well? Yeah, so it's really kind of a fraud. I think water issues, air quality issues, sort of garbage and pollution. One of the other effects of a globalizing world is one of the big hallmarks of going to a shopping mall is getting a plastic bag. So plastic bags are a side of affluence. But then you see these sort of mountains of plastic sort of floating everywhere because it's something that people want to take. So, yeah. Yes, when you're at least in travel in India, people ask you about what's happening in the United States, all the concerns and what were some of their questions and how did you respond to this? So there's a really interesting thing that, and you'll find this in the U.S. as well, especially if you go to, I don't know, Cherry Hill, New Jersey, or a certain part of California, it's like, so at least initially, Donald Trump was fairly popular. And the reason Donald Trump was popular was because, one, there's very much a narrative amongst South Asians and especially Indians, especially non-Muslim Indians, of being the good kind of immigrant. We got here the right way, we're not illegal, and most importantly we're non-Muslim. So there was this like crazy moment amongst all the, I don't even know, I can't even say the word crazy moment anymore, but there was this moment in the political, in the election, leading up to the election, where Trump went to a Hindus for Trump fundraiser in New Jersey. In which he wore, he had a hedgehog, anyway, he had this hedgehog on, but it was topped off by this moment in which these Muslim terrorists came in and took hostages of the Hindu dancing girls and then were defeated by commandos with, for some reason, lightsabers. And anyway, so like that sort of political theater played out a lot before. However now, both in the fact that there have been sort of a widespread, not as much now, but right after the election there was a number of attacks on people of Indian origin. That raised some concerns. And then the other big one was, has been the crackdown on H1D visas, and the fact that this current administration is cracking down much more on legal immigration, or they're trying to crack down on legal immigration, more than undocumented immigration. So it's this, and you know, the idea that like, oh, you know, family reunification, chain migration, what would you ever want to do with the current? Anyway, so, so there's been, there's been something of a different kind of, but I also think that, you know, most of the world has this like, tendency to look at the U.S. and laugh when things are going poorly. Without then looking at themselves and saying like, there's all sorts of things that one could be very critical of, other places as well. So people do ask, mostly they just sort of say, is it true? Did this really happen? Yes. I'm really baffled by the replication of London symbols in India. And the notion, I couldn't figure out why they would want to do that, because that would be a symbol of the British Empire, which they worked so hard to become independent from. But then you said something about this being a symbol of localization, modernity, et cetera. And the irony to me is that London may indeed, by the time we get it rebuilt in India, may not be the local center of economics with Brexit, et cetera. Excellent point, yeah, that's very true. The relationship with London in Calcutta is a very interesting one, because other parts of India, so when India declared independence, Delhi and Bombay, Delhi kept most of its statues, Bombay is so long, and they sold them to Canada. I can actually go home and see George Deliver in Canada. But in Calcutta, it's a different thing. Calcutta was both the heart of anti-British colonialism, but also loves British things. There's this massive, like the biggest tourist attraction in Calcutta, it's called the Victorian Memorial. It's a massive sort of structure built to honor Queen Victoria, which the Japanese somehow managed to not bomb in World War II. They kept trying. I don't know how they missed it. And I see this in my whole family that I had great uncles and people who were, both my grandfather was very involved in the nationalist movement. My great-grandfather was a police commissioner for the British. My mother has the Royal Wedding, like Diana Wedding, on tape on VHX. My sister is actually an official royal expert. She will give interviews about royal weddings and babies. So there's this very conflicted relationship where Calcutta has never given up certain parts of its colonial legacy and really has tried to promote it in all sorts of ways. And so I think it's that, you know, India loves cricket, loves cricket. And so India's cheer for, like, British soccer teams in the World Cup. So it's that very conflicted relationship. Come on, Regigan. Tray problems with almost everybody, but he doesn't seem to have too much of a problem with India. Why would that be? Oh, India got tariffed. India did, in fact, get tariffs. But, I mean, U.S. trade with India is not particularly big. I don't know that he... You know, the kinds of trade and battles that the U.S. has with India is a kind of trade that I don't think he fundamentally understands, which is... Honestly, I think he understands trade to be sort of manufactured goods. And he doesn't understand the sort of services part of it. That said, and I can't remember what it is that there are tariffs on. You know, he doesn't use it. There aren't the kinds of outstanding disputes that there are with Turkey or other things where he's trying to do this. And as a dual citizen of Canada and the U.S., I mean, I will say that the anger over trade is much more so in Canada because it's a very tangible sense of a very integrated economy. The U.S. economy is not integrated with India. There's been some very low-level trade deals that weren't signed, most of them under the Clinton administration. The Obama relationship was a kind of different one. The Bush relationship was actually fairly good, I think in part, again, because sort of neocons in India are all about anybody who is anti-Islam. And so that's always something that's a problem. That's all right, no problem. Would you just say what's happening in a song right now? Oh, yeah, another excellent example. So in a song, what has just happened is four million people have lost their citizenship. So this is part of a bigger trend that we see, just talking about this with my migration class, that this notion of the illegal immigrant, the unauthorized person, in so many ways pushes back against the history of human migration. Borders are new, migration is not. And so what's happened in this case is these are people who have lived, have been born and raised in the state of the song. They have never, these are mostly very poor people. They are Muslim and they speak Bengali. If you are in South Asia and you are poor and you are Muslim and you speak Bengali, everybody tells you in Bangladesh and says you need to be in Bangladesh. Bangladesh doesn't want them. And so what's happened to them is they have been rendered essentially stateless. Because India, so there was a lawsuit to try and actually extend certain kinds of protections and a backfire. And basically what happened was that the government then went through and said, okay, we're going to say that all these people are, they were originally going to do it to 13 million people. Not a 13 million people disenfranchised like that. But it's, yeah, it's a real sort of issue. India is always talking about building a wall between India and Bangladesh. And there's always this kind of fear. The Rohingya, same thing. These have been bothers, they're bothered issues. So that's a common threat unfortunately. In terms of the population breakdown, income loss, how much of a population is still extremely poor living on the street, selling garbage, eating garbage? Yeah. If you've ever read the novelist, I don't know if you've read it. She has a fantastic book called The Cost of Living and she has this really poignant description where she says India is like two trucks moving in opposite directions. You have a truck with three people and a truck with hundreds of people. And that's, you know, income inequality is rising in India as it is in the rest of the world. I don't know the exact breakdown between those, but in terms of, there's enough of a differentiation that you have very poor, extremely poor, there's actually categories of poverty. In the same way that India has 48 different categories of slums. That's also a British legacy that everything was categorized, but certainly, you know, most estimates would say 75% of the population falls into the poor category. So when people say that India has a middle class, a growing middle class, that might be 200 million. For one thing, middle class is a pretty broad and game definition. But even if you have 200 million people in the middle class and some people in a very wealthy category in India, that means you have well over only 1.2 billion people who are not middle class. Thank you.