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read about the landscape of Indian American politics!

“You can tell that an ethnic group is really flourishing in the United States when they start to produce prominent xenophobes and racists, particularly of the anti-Black variety.” With this opening line, Jeet Heer dives into his feature [[link removed]], out now in the Nation, on Indian American politics and politicians.

Heer looks at the “significant cohort” of Indian Americans who seem poised to “join this long standing trend,” pointing in particular to Vivek Ramaswamy and Nikki Haley’s attempts to win the Republican party’s presidential nomination.

Heer notes that Indian Americans overwhelmingly vote for Democrats, which means “the rise of candidates like Ramaswamy and Haley is a good news/bad news joke. The good news is that Indian Americans, whose prominence in American public life is relatively new, are now fielding multiple political candidates on the national stage. The bad news is that two of the most visible of these openly embrace the most rancid forms of white supremacy, including neo-Nazi talking points and neo-Confederate historical mythology.”

Still, Heer warns against dismissing this minority of a minority, writing, “Even as the majority of Indian Americans currently sit comfortably within the technocratic liberalism of Biden and Harris, a significant minority are being tugged toward a very different politics.”

Dakar and Democracy

Writing in Africa Is a Country, Florian Bobin looks at [[link removed]] the University of Dakar, which has been closed since June of 2023 — and which, Bobbin writes, is a symbol of the collapse of Senegalese democracy.

The university closed amid clashes [[link removed]] between armed forces and supporters of the political opposition. As Bobin writes, this is not the first time the university has been closed, but this blockade is the longest, and is in some ways unprecedented: “It is not the result of localized student protests, ranging from material demands to aspirations for sociopolitical change, as part of a power struggle with the authorities. Rather, it is an expression of the current regime’s desire to disintegrate the politicized student body, even at the cost of the collapse of the university itself.”

Bobbin also writes that the closure “can certainly be seen as a reflection of the class war being waged by the current regime against the most disadvantaged sections of society. The university faculties targeted are those with the highest enrollments (humanities, law, medicine, etc.) and the most underprivileged students, many of whom are scholarship holders.” Those who are better off, after all, have the options of private institutions or leaving for education abroad.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] The Elephant in the Room

Elizabeth Oriel, who lived in Sri Lanka in 2018 and 2019, writes [[link removed]] for Noema about human-elephant conflict. “Though this conflict is an ancient one, in recent decades, it has gotten tenser. Elephants are eating and damaging crops at higher rates. Though it is illegal to harm an elephant and doing so can also upset a tacit code of interspecies conduct, farmers sometimes retaliate,” she explains. She models her writing after journalist Svetlana Alexievitch so as to let Sri Lankans speak in their own words.

The people with whom Oriel spoke describe elephants’ aggression — but not only their aggression. They also detail their social hierarchies and how elephants work to minimize conflict with one another. One elephant is even described as a kind of politician, an ambassador, going back and forth between humans and other elephants.

There is also an acknowledgement that part of the problem is that there isn’t enough land as a buffer between the national park where the elephants live and villages. Further, today, elephants don’t have enough food, whereas in the past they did, which exacerbates conflict between humans and elephants, who have done things like line up at fruit stalls to try to get enough to eat.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] DEEP DIVE Identity and Ideology in India

In “Declining Clientelism of Welfare Benefits? Targeting and Political Competition Based Evidence from an Indian State,” authors Pushkar Maitra, Sandip Mitra, Dilip Mookherjee, and Sujata Visaria looked at [[link removed]] the claim — made for the past decade — that, under the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), India’s ruling party, welfare benefits “have become better targeted and less prone to clientelistic control by state and local governments.”

Some scholars attributed the BJP’s increased support, particularly in states where legislatures were long dominated by regional parties, to “the declining effectiveness of clientelism as traditionally practiced via welfare schemes, the growing importance of economic and governance concerns in the minds of voters, and the central government’s increased success at claiming credit for both the older schemes and the new welfare schemes introduced after 2014.”

But the authors decided to test this by examining data from 3,500 rural households in the Indian state of West Bengal – and they didn’t find evidence that the post-2014 “central programs” are “better targeted than traditional ‘state’ programs,” nor did they find proof that suggested improvement in state programs since 2014. Rather, the BJP’s growing popularity is thanks to “more important factors,” including political ideology and identity politics.

The authors argued that West Bengal was a “particularly interesting case.” Because left-center parties commanded such influence in the state since the late 1970s, it became a commonplace argument that local governments doled out benefits to those who voted for them.

The BJP has had historically little support in the state, but “its vote share has increased dramatically in the recent past, from 6% in 2009 to over 40% in 2019. This provides a setting to examine whether the rise in the support for the BJP is the result of the mechanisms discussed above.”

The data they used was collected in 2013 and 2018 in two West Bengal districts, both times ahead of parliamentary elections (in 2014 and 2019, respectively). “In particular, we use households’ own reports of benefits received, and examine their association with various indicators of their socioeconomic status. This provides a more accurate depiction of actual targeting performance than administrative data,” the authors explain.

The authors compared “central” and “state” benefits and found that “data do not suggest clearly that the distribution of the central programs was always more progressive than that of the state programs during the period 2014–18, or that all state programs became more progressive after 2014.”

They also considered “the extent to which changes in the scale, composition, targeting and effectiveness of welfare programs can explain the increase in voters’ support for the BJP and the decrease in support for the (incumbent) regional party the Trinamool Congress (TMC) between the 2013 and 2018 polls.”

They did not find that state benefits were less effective at generating votes in 2018 compared to 2013; what’s more, “the combined effect of changes in the scale of state and central benefits and their respective effectiveness at generating votes for either party predicts a net decline in the BJP vote share and an increase in the TMC vote share in 2018.”

This meant that the reasons for increased support for the BJP lie elsewhere. The authors found, as other studies have, that “demographic characteristics, caste and religious identity were the key predictors of support for BJP.”

LEARN MORE [[link removed]]

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] SHOW US THE RECEIPTS

Anne-Gaëlle Lissade wrote about [[link removed]] Haiti’s “gastro political standing in Latin America. “Haiti has long struggled to fit in the Latin American conversation despite its shared histories and heritage, and even sharing the island of Hispaniola with the Dominican Republic. The country has struggled to create allies and support regionally, mainly due to linguistic differences and regional politics,” wrote Lissade, who argued that the place to “reconcile and appreciate shared experiences” is the kitchen.

Jayshree Borah looked at [[link removed]] the limits of Chinese-brokered peace deals in Myanmar. For two decades, Borah explained, China has played a significant role in Myanmar’s peace process. Results, however, have been decidedly mixed. However, per Borah, the failure of a recent ceasefire showed that “Beijing’s solutions did not mesh with the complex reality on the ground.” Borah wrote that the terms of the ceasefire were far-fetched, and that “the sharp rise in fighting left the agreement entirely obsolete.” China, Borah predicted, will thus “push to restore calm in the borderlands” instead of trying to resolve territorial issues, working on an event-by-event basis — whether or not that actually brings peace to Myanmar.

Manuel Rueda considered [[link removed]] the case of Venezuela, where public sector workers are forced to take on multiple jobs to survive. From 2013 to 2020, the country was in a dire economic crisis. “The economy improved somewhat after the pandemic, as the administration of President Nicolás Maduro took measures that slowed down inflation and ended product shortages,” wrote Rueda. There is food on supermarket shelves and inflation has been somewhat tamed. “But most Venezuelans are still struggling to get by, including hundreds of thousands of government workers who are paid some of the lowest wages in the entire hemisphere.”

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] WELL-PLAYED

To whom it may concern [[link removed]].

That’s cinema [[link removed]].

India does exist, though [[link removed]].

She’s playing something [[link removed]].

To the tune of Big in Japan: Oh, you’re big in … Tirana [[link removed]].

The pun never sets on the steppe [[link removed]].

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Critical State is written by Emily Tamkin with Inkstick Media.

The World is a weekday public radio show and podcast on global issues, news and insights from PRX and GBH.

With an online magazine and podcast featuring a diversity of expert voices, Inkstick Media is “foreign policy for the rest of us.”

Critical State is made possible in part by the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

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