India: “Secular”? “Hindu”? or Both?

I had a longish exchange on twitter with a Hindutvadi friend and then just ordered all the tweets by time into this storify story. It’s crude, but you get the drift. I am posting it here so that people can comment on it if they wish.
This is twitter, so one can only say so much in 140 characters. And much is assumed or taken for granted in the background. Please go easy 🙂

And of course, it is a discussion with some more or less Hindutvadi Indians. A discussion with postmarxist Indians would look very different.

The discussion started with reading this article , in which the writer tries to define Hinduism for a young man who is confused (and lives in South India, with it’s peculiar history of this question). He classifies Hinduism as an “aggregate religion”, hence my first tweet asking if “aggregate” will prevail or Christianity will?

Just in case you are wondering why the discussion starts with me asking whether Hinduism or Christianity will prevail (and not metioning Islam), I think the likely Abrahamic faith for most Hindus to convert to (if they convert) in this day and age is Christianity, not Islam. If you think differently, please comment.

And of course, Hindu and Secular are both in scare quotes, so all arguments about what IS Hinduism and what IS secularism are included in those quotes 🙂

Last but not the least, my comment about “those with superior asabiya and means will prevail” if the current system is wrecked is, of course, meant to hint that it’s collapse will not necessarily (or even likely) lead to Ram-Rajya. Muslim and Sikh Asabiya and means will dominate the Northwest (at least). Something like that.

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Razib Khan is a Bangladeshi-American geneticist and writer. He is co-founder of Brown Pundits and runs Unsupervised Learning, a Substack on population genetics, evolution, history, and politics with more than 55,000 subscribers, alongside the accompanying podcast. He has blogged at Gene Expression since the early 2000s. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, National Review, Slate, India Today, Quillette, and UnHerd. He is Director of Operations at FUTO in Austin, Texas, and co-founder of GenRAIT, a life-sciences platform company. Earlier in his career he developed ancestry algorithms for Gene by Gene, the Genographic Project, and Insitome, and was among the first employees at Embark Veterinary. Born in Dhaka and raised in upstate New York and eastern Oregon, he holds degrees in biochemistry (2000) and biology (2006) from the University of Oregon, and undertook doctoral work in genomics and genetics at UC Davis. He lives in Austin.

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