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India, China, and the future

With a few exceptions, my fellow “bet India” partisans seem oblivious to a disturbing reality in 21st-century India, one that may eventually weaken, even threaten, the Indian renaissance.

(Image: CHUTTERSNAP/Unsplash.com)

The September 2 issue of The Spectator featured a cartoon of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak riding an ascending rocket. Inside, the lead article – a preview of the G-20 Summit in New Delhi – was headlined “India’s Century.” The G-20 gabfest was later billed by much of the global commentariat in similar terms: this was India’s coming-out party as a 21st-century superpower, one that might challenge China as the Asian colossus of the future.

For years now, I have been saying to friends that, if you’re betting long-term, bet “India” rather than “China.” I first became aware of the economic dynamism of the subcontinent some twenty years ago, when, in trying to fix everything from errors in tax forms I received to mistakes on my credit card bill to computer glitches, I found myself talking to people in India, a country that seemed to have figured out that the world, for economic purposes, had become a single time-zone. Then there was the positive legacy of British rule in India: a military that stayed out of politics; a professional civil service; democratic institutions; and, above all, the rule of law, which is essential for economic growth and social order, especially in such a complex society, now the world’s most populous.

By contrast, the Leninist totalitarianism deep in the DNA of the Chinese Communist Party [CCP] would, I thought, eventually prove too brittle to solve serious problems (as has been the case with the outbreak of COVID, the sputtering Chinese economy, and the country’s demographic decline, itself a direct result of the draconian one-child policy the CCP brutally enforced for decades). The paranoid national security state the CCP is building, which has led to everything from the genocide of the Muslim Uyghurs to the abrogation of civil liberties in Hong Kong to ever-increasing pressures on the Catholic Church and other Christian communities, also struck me as an indicator of a regime in decline.

So, I kept saying, “Bet ‘India’ rather than ‘China’”. Now others have joined the bandwagon. But with a few exceptions, my fellow “bet India” partisans seem oblivious to a disturbing reality in 21st-century India, one that may eventually weaken, even threaten, the Indian renaissance. And that is the fact that India is becoming increasingly intolerant, even violently intolerant, of religious differences.

Prime Minister Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party [BJP] promotes “Hindutva,” an ideology of Hindu nationalism, which for some radicalized Indians means persecuting those of other faiths. Hundreds of Christian churches have been burned in recent months by fanatics who presumably vote BJP. The party does not actively promote these outrages, but it seems to tolerate them and is certainly not doing enough to distance itself from them. That raises grave questions about Mr. Modi’s determination to promote an “Indian model” of 21st-century society.

For the foreseeable future, India will remain a country in which Hindus are the overwhelming majority. But an India that cannot live religious tolerance cannot be a universal model of social stability and progress. Nor is an India in which Christians are at peril of their lives and property going to commend itself to those countries – including the United States – whose security assistance India needs to counter an aggressive China. Those projecting (and celebrating) an India pulling ahead of China in the contest for Asian leadership might press these points on Mr. Modi and the BJP, rather than just celebrating his and the party’s achievements.

It would be helpful if the Holy See would be more publicly assertive in its defense of embattled Catholic communities in India, although the continued Vatican kowtow to China does not induce much hope for a stronger line on India. The Pope’s recent admonition to Chinese Catholics to be “good Christians and good citizens” was, in the abstract, unexceptionable. The problem is that, in present reality, being a “good citizen” in China means swearing allegiance to Xi Jinping Thought (including the “Sinicizing” of all religion), and that is incompatible with fidelity to the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

While we’re on the subject of China, let me pause and pay tribute to my friend Jimmy Lai, the world’s most prominent Catholic prisoner of conscience. As you read these musings, Jimmy has been marking his 1,000th day in solitary confinement in Hong Kong’s Stanley Prison. His wife is allowed to visit twice a month. His children haven’t seen him in three years. They all await a public word in defense of this white martyr from Rome.

And like the refugees at the beginning of that great film, Casablanca, they wait. And wait. And wait…


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About George Weigel 515 Articles
George Weigel is Distinguished Senior Fellow of Washington's Ethics and Public Policy Center, where he holds the William E. Simon Chair in Catholic Studies. He is the author of over twenty books, including Witness to Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II (1999), The End and the Beginning: Pope John Paul II—The Victory of Freedom, the Last Years, the Legacy (2010), and The Irony of Modern Catholic History: How the Church Rediscovered Itself and Challenged the Modern World to Reform. His most recent books are The Next Pope: The Office of Peter and a Church in Mission (2020), Not Forgotten: Elegies for, and Reminiscences of, a Diverse Cast of Characters, Most of Them Admirable (Ignatius, 2021), and To Sanctify the World: The Vital Legacy of Vatican II (Basic Books, 2022).

1 Comment

  1. About India, the partition of northwest and northeast India into the separate nation-state of Pakistan (1947, and later the separated Bangladesh) came about when these Muslim concentrations could not see themselves flourishing in a Hindu-dominated Indian parliament. Gandhi’s appeal for peace fell on deaf ears as peaceful Islam and peaceful Hinduism combined to exterminate probably one million people (some say 5-10 million), many while trying to switch places over the new border.

    Which brings us to the problematic side of majoritarian [!] parliaments. We are informed that, within the Church, synodality “is not a parliament.” What, then?
    A collage of all partisans, including even the LGBTQ and female-priestess uprisings in the West? Historically and on this inclusive model, we have the Council of Nicaea [!]. The challenge was not so much to exclude a direct heresy (which it was), but to not allowing the “pluralism” of polytheism to worm its way into the Church—as if equivalent with the totally unique Incarnation.

    So, what are we to think about any invertebrate distortion of synodality?

    What will history [!] say about the bellwether Pachamama, a Marxist crucifix from Peru, substitution of the crozier with a Wiccan stang (at the 2018 World Youth Day), and the ambivalent language in the Abu Dabhi Declaration? An ideology with the intention to reject “ideological colonization,” or the wisdom of the Holy Spirit?

    About “taking a stronger line with China,” synodality meanwhile mud-wrestles with the demand for a feminized clergy when we already have C.S. Lewis’ “men without chests.”

    Yours truly is also “waiting, waiting,” as Weigel notes—for the Church to fully and truly [!] find its compass on how to do engagement (aggiornamento) without “walking [away] together” from spiritual depth and memory (ressourcement). “Backwardist”? The path already sketched out by the Council in its four Constitution serves as pulse check for any self-validating (?) Synod on Synodality:

    “Christ the Lord…by the revelation of the mystery of the Father and His love, [ALSO] fully reveals man to himself [!] and makes his supreme calling clear” (Gaudium et Spes, n. 22), as so often quoted by both St. John Paul II and Benedict XVI, for some reason or other…

3 Trackbacks / Pingbacks

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