Right-wing populism is the global political backlash du jour. Cultural, religious and ethnic competition are the prime causes. They, in turn, are directly traceable to the swift and societal-altering changes flowing from economic and demographic globalization.
India -- home to the world's second-largest population, more than 1.25 billion people, just short of 80 percent of them Hindu -- certainly has not escaped this trend.
At play in India is a slow decline in the Hindu population growth at a time when the Muslim population of about 14 percent is growing. That's a scary proposition for Indian Hindus, who have been in conflict with their Pakistani Muslim neighbors since the 1947 partition.
That, plus a Hindu nationalist backlash against India's increasing secularization and an overall Western cultural tilt, also thanks to globalization, have produced the right-wing backlash that's comparable to what we are also seeing in a host of nations -- from the Philippines, across Europe, to our own United States.
Read this Times of India analysis that explains the connection between Indian right-wing populism and what's happening elsewhere.
Indian Christians -- who for Hindu nationalists become conflated with Western inroads into traditional Indian Hindu culture -- are caught up in the larger Indian Hindu-Muslim competition, even though they account for only about 2.3 percent of the population.
I've written about all this before, including one of my earliest GetReligion posts that focused on Hindu criticism of Saint Teresa of Calcutta, perhaps still better-known as Mother Teresa.
So why rehash the above info?
