"India is the land which the Roma fled aeons ago."
Yes, due to Muslim colonizers and conversion-by-the-sword policies. But I don't see the relevance of 1000 years ago.

Steve Shaw, it's right-wing ethno-nationalism, and it's been going on for a very long time. Some Keywords: "Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh" "Hindutva" "2002 Gujarat riots."

If there's one book you'll find in book shops all over India it's _Mein Kampf_. It's really not too much of a stretch to compare people in government to the Nazis. And British Imperialism can't be used to excuse that any more than losing WWI can soften Germany's conduct in #2. It's that ethnonationalism totally jibes with ancient Indian institutions.

I don't get why Westerners romanticize Indians as warm and cuddly (which seems to be implied by being surprised how conservative and communalist that many Indians can be). Is it because hippies thought yoga and guru stuff and walking barefoot was groovy? Peace, man! Or is it from the .1% of Indians that are geniuses, vibrant family people who emigrated to Western countries? They don't represent India's majority.

At best, there's a baseline for good and bad in balance. At worst, millennia of ranking people according to their birth, persistent belief in absurd religions, and an enormous rural population of people still fully entrenched in patriarchy and feudalism suggest that... yeah... you're gonna find some ugly Indians in the bunch somewhere. The last 5 years the government has been aligning to connect those people, like Trump's US administration has aligned some really nasty citizens.