Eric Kaufmann: belief

Transcript context

…Why doesn’t India fragment more politically? Its future as a nation-state seems fairly secure, but if you just read about it on paper, you would think, “My goodness, this couldn’t last.” So many languages, religions, caste system. Right. Again, I think there was partly a cross-cutting cleavage issue there with caste and religion. Even though you have the Muslim-Hindu divide, you then have the caste divide, which to some extent pushes against a simple Hindu-Muslim division. Some lower-caste Hindus will not vote for the BJP, for example. They’ll vote for Congress, along with Muslims. That could be one reason. The other thing, by the way, is the Indian states, as I understand it, have moved more towards being more ethnically delineated. I don’t know, I’m trying to remember when that occurred. It was sometime in the last few decades. The other thing, of course — there is a kind of Hindu overlay. Even though, yes, 80 percent Hindu — so you’re right that there are Tamils, and there are different languages, Marathi and these different languages, but still you could argue that the Hinduism offers a commonality, at least to 80 percent of the population. How should the French rebuild Notre Dame?…

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