Government orders GitHub to remove Bluetooth-based chat app Bitchat: Jack Dorsey

PART 1:

Most of this does not answer what I wrote. You do not address Teesta, border killings, India’s support for Sheikh Hasina, the CAA’s religious filter, or the fact that Savarkar explicitly excluded both Muslims and Christians from his conception of the Hindu nation. Instead, you move to the UCC, some students at your American college, Waqf property, burqas, loudspeakers and animal slaughter.

> The UN declaration is retarded because Indian law is not and has never been neutral to religion. If you believe it should be, then you are on the side of the BJP.

The fact that Indian personal law has historically not been religion neutral is not an argument against making it more neutral. It also does not follow that anyone who supports religion neutral law must support the BJP. Equality before the law, prohibition of religious discrimination, freedom of religion and the aspiration towards a uniform civil code all exist together in Articles 14, 15, 25 and 44 of the Constitution [1]. The BJP does not own the concept of equal law merely because it invokes it selectively.

I have no issue saying that instantaneous triple talaq should not have legal effect. That is separate from supporting every provision of the BJP’s legislation. The 2019 act does not declare triple talaq void but also it makes pronouncing an already legally ineffective divorce a criminal offence punishable by up to three years in prison [2]. Someone can support getting rid of triple talaq while questioning why an ineffective utterance requires that particular criminal penalty. Presenting the only options as either supporting the BJP’s complete policy or supporting discrimination against Muslim women is a false dichotomy.

> South Asian Muslims often want it both ways. When India got rid of triple talaq divorce, South Asian Muslims at my American college demanded a protest.

You are at an American college reporting what some South Asian Muslim students supposedly said. I am at an Indian college and do not see Muslims behaving in the way you keep describing. Neither experience proves much. My experience cannot establish that no Indian Muslim behaves this way, and your experience cannot establish that South Asian Muslims generally behave this way. You are repeatedly moving from some people you met, to South Asian Muslims, to Indian Muslims, and then to the inherent character of Islam. One campus anecdote should not carry that much weight.

> You took no time to read or understand what I said and instead assumed I was talking about European Jews. I am not. I am talking about Indian Jews.

Your clarification narrows the claim, but also makes the comparison nearly meaningless. There were only 22,480 Jews in India in 1941 [3]. They were an extremely small and geographically scattered minority. They could not reasonably demand a Jewish territorial state carved out of India in the manner that a community numbering tens of millions and concentrated across entire provinces could. Their failure to demand an Indian partition does not prove that they possessed some fundamentally different religious or moral character. It largely proves that no such political project was demographically possible.

Indian Jews also did exactly the broader thing you were presenting Jews as having rejected. After Israel was established, most Bene Israel emigrated there. The Hebrew University estimates that there are now around 80,000 Bene Israel in Israel and only about 3,000 in India [4]. This was large-scale migration by Indian Jews to a Jewish nation-state.

That does not make Indian Jews disloyal, nor does it make their migration identical to Jinnah demanding that India be divided. It does, however, destroy the idea that Indian Jewish integration proves Jews had no interest in religiously framed national self determination. They could be integrated into India and still migrate to Israel when a Jewish state became available. Both things can be true.

So the comparison fails in both directions. They were far too small to demand a viable Jewish state inside India, but when a Jewish state existed elsewhere, most of the community migrated to it. You cannot use them as a control group proving that Muslims uniquely politicised religion.

You have also basically stopped defending what you initially said about Savarkar. Your original description was that he had been a relatively benign nationalist and humanitarian until Muslim extremism caused him to snap. I then quoted his own definition of Hindutva, under which India must be both a person’s fatherland and holy land, and the passage in which he explicitly explains why Christians and Muslims are not Hindus in the relevant national sense [5].

Muslim violence does not explain his exclusion of Christians. Christians did not collectively persecute Savarkar into declaring them outside his cultural nation. Your answer that later Hindu nationalist rhetoric was not especially anti-Christian because Christians are a small minority does not defend his ideology either. If anything, it concedes that the groups emphasised by the movement depend upon political usefulness and demographic threat rather than some neutral humanitarian reaction.

You initially gave a psychological account of Savarkar as a humanist driven into extremism by what he witnessed. When confronted with what he actually wrote, you did not explain it. You simply moved to other subjects. The quote still stands, this was a worked out political definition of national belonging that explicitly distinguished Hindus from Muslims and Christians.

> Up until recently Muslims could claim any piece of private land and then privately judge whether such a claim had legal merit. Landowners were left without any possibility of appeal. Imagine such a thing in America, lol.

This is not an accurate description of the old Waqf Act. An individual Muslim could not simply point to someone’s house, privately declare it Waqf and award it to himself. Former Section 40 allowed the statutory Waqf Board to collect information about property it had reason to believe was Waqf property and decide the question after an inquiry [6].

There was a valid criticism here, the board was an interested administrative body being allowed to make the initial determination. I do not need to pretend that was a good arrangement. But the act expressly stated that the Board’s decision was final only unless it was revoked or modified by the Waqf tribunal. The tribunal had the powers of a civil court. Although the act excluded an ordinary appeal from the tribunal, Section 83(9) allowed an aggrieved person to ask the High Court to examine the record and confirm, reverse or modify the tribunal’s determination [6].

"No ordinary appeal" and "no legal remedy whatsoever" are not the same statement. Your quote removes the regulatory bodies like the tribunal and High Court revision, and replaces all of them with "Muslims could claim anything and privately judge it themselves". That is far more rhetorically useful, but it is not what the statute said.

America also does have a proecudre in the same broad family, called adverse possession, where a person possessing somebody else’s land can eventually acquire legal title without the original owner’s consent if state-specific conditions are met which has to be hostile, open and continuous for the statutory period [7].

Adverse possession is not identical to the old Waqf process and requires physical possession over a long period and eventual legal proof, it is not a religious board making an initial property classification. But that is precisely why the careful comparison matters. "Imagine a legal mechanism by which somebody can obtain title to another person’s property in America, lol" is not a devastating point you think it is, because America has one, the procedures and justifications are different, which is what should actually be debated.

[1]: https://www.indiacode.nic.in/bitstream/123456789/19150/1/con... [2]: https://www.indiacode.nic.in/bitstream/123456789/11564/1/a20... [3]: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4464913 [4]: https://cris.huji.ac.il/en/publications/the-bene-israel/ [5]: https://archive.org/stream/essentials-of-hindutva-veer-savar... [6]: https://www.indiacode.nic.in/bitstream/123456789/15941/1/the... [7]: https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/adverse_possession

Which one is that?

Random allocation of citizens to seats might actually make for a better government.

We could try that one, since the MBAs-and-lawyers clique with money/influence have been doing a poor job lately.

Your source is a site called "Unherd" and the story doesn't exist on any other platform.

When you say expansive ideologies within the last 1300 years, did you mean religiously-motivated American colonial settlement, genocide and expansion under manifest destiny? Or did you mean religiously-motivated Israeli colonial settlement, genocide and expansion under Zionist doctrine?

I just want to make sure I understand which expansive ideology we're calling innate, because again I know you are not claiming that a sovereign nation's desire to rid itself of foreign colonial oppression and apartheid is "expansive".