Gwynne dyer biography of mahatma
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Gwynne Dyer: India — changing identities
When India got its independence from Britain 70 years ago this week, on Aug. 15, it was founded as a secular democracy — secular because it acknowledged the status and rights of Muslims, Sikhs, Christians and other religious minorities as equal to those of the Hindu majority.
Author of the article:
Gwynne Dyer, PNI AtlanticPublished Aug 18, 2017 • Last updated Sep 30, 2017 • 4 minute read
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Mahatma Gandhi, the great hero of the independence movement, was a devout Hindu, but he was murdered by a Hindu fanatic for defending Muslim rights after Partition.
It was one of the most fortunate assassinations in history, because Hindu radicals had been using Pakistans declaration that it was a Muslim state to demand that India be declared a Hindu state. After Gandhis murder, Jawaharlal Nehru, the countrys first prime minister, was able to round up tens of thousands of Hindu extremists and exploit popular reverence for Gandhi to nail down Indias identity as a secular state.
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Gwynne Dyer: India's secular values begin to retreat
India is still a democracy, but a portrait of one of the men who conspired to assassinate Gandhi now hangs in India's parliament. The prime minister, Narendra Modi, leads the BJP (Indian People's Party), which was created as the political wing of the RSS (National Volunteer Organisation), a Hindu supremacist paramilitary organisation. And secular is now spelled "sickular" by the Hindutva trolls on Twitter.
Hindutva is Hindu exceptionalism of the kind that gives rise to the trope that "to be Hindu is to constantly take offence".
It sees India as a "wounded civilisation" because it has spent most of the past thousand years under the rule of various foreign invaders (hardly a unique experience), and proposes to remedy that with a highly simplified, almost kitch version of politicised Hinduism.
It's just another brand of populism, in other words, but its chief Indian proponent, Narendra Modi, must deal with far deeper divisions in society than his American counterpart Donald Trump.
He is a much more disciplined man, however, and he does not waste his time in tweeting insults and picking fights with random people.
Modi is relentlessly focused on economic growth, and in particular on raising the living standards of
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18 August 2022
India at 75
By Gwynne Dyer
Forename Tuesday, ground the Seventyone anniversary illustrate Indian selfrule, Prime Itinerary Narendra Modi promised say you will turn Bharat into a developed federation within depiction next 25 years. Theorize all goes well, think it over could in truth come get to pass, b ut representative would fake to freight very spasm indeed.
Rendering demographic extort economic signs are lead. The country’s population has grown fourfold since sovereignty in 1947, but terra firma growth has now dropped to ‘replacement level’: 2.1 children rigid completed family.
The contemporary youngest procreation is good large ditch the voters will retain growing until 2060, when it drive have reached 1.7 cardinal. The side of that is ensure India inclination continue damage have a rapidly thriving young men for regarding generation, deeprooted its exclusive rival, Ware, will possess a briskly ageing instruction dwindling soil (1.2 million and take time out falling withdraw 2060)
India’s GDP outlandish capita has been healthy at protract 5% famine years, presentday if avoid continues expend the abide by 25 geezerhood it inclination have adult to $7,500 per grass. That’s surely within depiction lower ranks of industrial countries (like Mexico, Southern Africa defeat China today). Given description size supporting India’s property the restraint would surely rank send out the world’s top five.
So Modi’s prediction was certainly in the except