If mankind had a common enemy they would have a common goal! Even in India where hunger is prevalent, people find time and reason to do destructive things. Not evengod can help us from ourselves, sick sick animals that we are!

Given the new and more or lessomnipresent conventional wisdom--American hegemony is dead because the US economy is doomed to be left in the dust by China and India--this piece very usefully reminds us that China and India have staggering problems of their own,generally much worse ones than the Americans face. It is interesting to speculate about which alleged challenger has worse (and generally underreported) problems: China, with its relative absence of effective law, kleptocratic elites, ecological catastrophes, looming demographic crisis and probable legitimacy crisis, or India, with its multiple nationalities and languages, simmering rebellions and radical inequality. My sense is that other than the first problem, which is not one China shares to anything like the same degree, India has the edge, with more rule of law, at least some elite political accountability, and a working federal system. And who knows how much underreported disorder occurs in China? The anecdotal evidence can be startling...Maybe Standpoint could run recurring features on the underreported bad news from both India and China. This was a fine piece of reporting.

There has never been a moment in India's history where some crisis has not been rumbling: famine, secessionist, environmental or sectarian. India has weathered them all. And India's democracy is not a gloss. It has a higher voter turn-out than the US, with the poor more likely to vote than the middle-class. The Maoists are not fighting for the poor - they are happy to exterminate them. A country with such levels of poverty and illiteracy will always be vulnerable to ideologues and messianic politics. But this insurgency, like the others, will end as the rebels terrorize and alienate the very population they gain their support from, who will themselves be given a greater stake in the Indian polity. The Maoists offer the people nothing - only a primeval existence with a marxist narrative. Only the govt can provide development, which in time it will. India's problems, like everything in India are immense - but resolvable.