Tuesday, August 6, 2019

The Eastern World, It Is Exploding

As messed up as the United States is these days, I believe that the most worrisome story in the headlines is the vote in the Indian parliament to change the status of the Kashmir state. Kashmir, being disputed territory between India and Pakistan, has been a perilous region of the world for over half a century. By changing the Muslim-majority state to a union, with closer ties to New Delhi, Hindu-nationalist Prime Minister Modi will ratchet up the sectarian violence that has plagued Kashmir. With India and Pakistan both possessing nuclear weapons, a conflict over the Kashmir is horrifying to contemplate. Even a proxy war fought with conventional weapons will exacerbate a global refugee crisis which has already destabilized Western Powers. If you think the worldwide right-wing backlash is bad now, it can only get worse as another region becomes a war zone from which people must flee.

I really can’t think of a single region on the planet which is stable these days... Barry McGuire, from whose best known song I took the post title, is more right than he was when he wrote the song.

3 comments:

Infidel753 said...

I really can’t think of a single region on the planet which is stable these days...

Antarctica? No, I guess, too many collapsing ice shelves.

I don't claim to know a lot about India, but the Modi government does seem weirdly parallel to the Trump regime, with explicit majority-religion nationalism stirring up and benefiting from long-smouldering prejudice against minorities, and creating provocations on the Pakistani border as Trump is doing on the Mexican border.

We can't claim that the world's two largest democracies are equally corrupt, though. India doesn't have an Electoral College to award victory to the loser.

mikey said...

Trump. Putin. Xi. Modi. Erdogan. Bolsonaro. Duterte. Orban. Duda.

And yes, today Imran Khan announced retaliatory moves against India. This is a fight they both want, and will very likely get...

Big Bad Bald Bastard said...

This might be the most worrisome international story out there, though Bolsonaro’s war on indigenous people and the Amazon rainforest is up there!