Back in India again. And behavioral irrigation economics.

I'm back in India. Bet you didn't see that coming! It happened extremely quickly. I literally bought my flights two days before I took off. Highlights of flying Swiss Air through Zurich: free Swiss chocolate and amazing views of the Alps. Highlights of returning to Delhi: catching up with old friends and drinking mango shakes.

Two days ago, my first day back, I met with an agricultural economics researcher. He researches irrigation in Bihar and Gujarat, which is why I was meeting with him. He is interested in the groundwater economy and pumping behaviors. Like me, he finds irrigation fascinating because it lies at the energy-water-food-livelihood nexus.

I learned a lot from this meeting. For one, I learned that economics is really a study of human behavior. I guess that's obvious, but for some reason I never thought of economics that way. This makes econ a lot more interesting than what I had imagined it to be.

As I may or may not have explained before on this blog (I honestly don't remember), in eastern India where pumps are ~85% diesel- or kerosene-run rather than electric, pumps are not installed on a well. Instead, a handful of people own pumps and rent them out to their neighbors on an hourly basis, and pumps are transported on bicycles. These pump owners essentially run an oligopoly. They seem to agree on high rental rates. Interestingly, as more farmers purchase their own pumps and enter the rental business, increased competition has not driven down hourly rates, contrary to what one might expect. This researcher thinks he has learned why: the costs to the pump owner are so high he doesn't have any particular motivation to actually rent out the pump to more customers. He must deliver the pump to the well, which is a pain in the ass. A pump is a pretty heavy thing to strap to your bike. Then, the farmer who is renting the pump may or may not know how to operate the pump, so the owner has to start up the pump for him. Someone has to hang around near the pump to make sure operation is going smoothly and to add more fuel when necessary; sometimes, this someone is the pump owner and not the renter, if the renter is inexperienced with diesel engines. A pump is usually run for several hours at a time, and if the pump owner must babysit the pump for that time, he is losing out on hours that could be spent more productively (in most cases, the pump owner has his own farm to tend to). His time is pretty valuable, so he keeps rental costs high, and often he would rather have that time to do other work than rent out to another customer. Therefore more competition does not reduce prices.

Because of these high operation costs that do not even include fuel cost, according to this researcher, advances in efficiency of the pump would not make much difference to the pumping behaviors of farmers. I'm not taking into consideration all costs involved in operation. Yes, the farmers would spend less on fuel. But the time cost would remain high. Maybe if farmers are getting more water per liter of fuel or per hour, they would be able to irrigate more. But if the farmers want to translate the fuel savings into more hours of pumping, that puts a bigger burden on the pump owner. It is possible that the pump owner would raise hourly rates in response. So even if I make the most efficient pump ever, I might not have any impact on reducing operation costs. (But this doesn't mean a more efficient pump is a bad thing!) In that case, my hope should be that the farmers would get more water for the existing amount of time they irrigate. However, this increased efficiency in operation hardly matters if the pump has a higher capital cost than the cheapest pumps on the market (which, at least at this point, it certainly would). Capital cost reigns supreme over operation costs in financial decision-making. Though all the renters would benefit, the pump owner sees little advantage to his rental business to have a more efficient but more expensive pump--more demand for his pump means more work in renting out the pump, and the rental business is not his only source of income. So why bother spending money on a more expensive pump?

...I really need to learn more about economics.

In addition to enlightening me about pumping behavior and economics, the researcher confirmed something I already suspected: farmers lie about everything when surveyed. (Ok, "lie" might be too strong a word. Stretch the truth, maybe?) But I did not understand the whole picture. I had always thought that I couldn't fully trust people's answers to my survey questions because they were trying to give me the "right" answer. I thought they were trying to come up with the answer they thought I wanted to hear (for example, a woman might lie about keeping her child away from the stove while she's cooking, even if the kid sits right next to her, because she knows I would think the smoke is bad for her child's health). This is true in some cases. However, in many cases, especially when you ask about earnings and expenditures, people exaggerate to make themselves seem poorer. Says the researcher, "They see you, a white woman, or me, a city guy, and they think 'this person works for some NGO and is going to go back to Delhi and write up a report about how we need more subsidies or government assistance.' So they exaggerate how poor they are in order to get more money." Even if a fellow villager is taking the survey, the fact that the survey is taking place at all alters people's answers.

This is a very cynical point of view, and I assume this isn't true for every single person interviewed, but I can believe this does happen sometimes. Probably this behavior stems from a history of NGOs advocating for more government assistance based on field surveys. Like how kids in Kerala constantly ask white tourists for pens because about a decade ago an American group donated supplies to local schools there. (This researcher does not deny that these people are indeed very poor or in need of assistance, by the way.)

So how does this researcher deal with the untrustworthiness of survey responses? "Just add error bars. Uncertainty is part of the fun of social science! See, you want accurate numbers. That's why you're an engineer. You like precision. You don't get the same precision in social science, and you have to be willing to work with that." Well, we use our fair share of error bars in engineering, too. But I guess I see his point.

(To be fair, his research is not all wishy-washy. He gets real numbers when he can: he acquires irrigation data from electricity meters, flow meters, pressure gauges, etc. like an engineer would. But questions of income and costs are a lot trickier to answer in a village where people don't have good records. No receipts, bills, paychecks, etc. Without any paper trail, you have to take people at their word.)

I have been thinking recently about switching into the social sciences (maybe economics or public policy) (this is a topic for another post). But as someone who has training in engineering, will I find the fuzziness frustrating? Or will I find it to be an exciting puzzle to be deciphered, the way this researcher does? I have a lot to think about re: my future.

(As a side note, this researcher got his master's at Princeton and his PhD at Harvard. To those of you interested in studying public policy with a focus in international development, he recommended Harvard over Princeton.)

In other news, I noticed in my blog stats that I get a lot of traffic from a seemingly random blog out there in cyberspace. Apparently, a blogger named Vikram Garg called my blog "the best American in India blog." Thanks for the shoutout, Vikram. Shouting right back at ya! Check out his blog at http://vikramvgarg.wordpress.com/.  

Rare earths mining: what is the just way forward?

As many of you know, the fellowship program that funds my work in India holds weekly seminars. Each week, one or two speakers talks to us about various issues in India or developing countries or discusses a particular methodology (for example, cost modeling or randomized control trials). At yesterday's seminar, a professor in MIT's Department of Materials Science spoke to us about minerals cost forecasting. Specifically, he talked about rare earth elements.

For those of you who don't know about rare earth elements (I certainly knew nothing before yesterday), they are used in a lot of modern electronics, advanced motors, and other automotive parts. China is pretty much the only player on the rare earths market. China produces 97% of the world's rare earths, and India produces the other 3%. India has the world's second-largest reserves of rare earths, but those reserves have barely been tapped. India has tremendous potential to expand rare earths mining, especially in the states of Jharkhand, Orissa, and Chhattisgarh, home also to the largest concentrations of adivasis (indigenous people) and iron ore.

The professor somehow managed to talk about rare earth elements without talking about the sticky politics of mining those elements in India's adivasi heartlands, where a Maoist insurgency has taken root partly due to the perceived illegal exploitation of tribal lands for mines. To be fair, this professor is not a political scientist; he's a resource economist who tries to predict supply and demand curves of various minerals and then uses those predictions to advise mining corporations on how to prepare for future market behavior or engineering firms on which minerals to employ in their products. The point of his talk was not about the politics of mining in Jharkhand, Orissa, and Chhattisgarh, but about how supply and demand forecasting can influence material selection in engineering.

Last night, I briefly chatted with my friend Marena about the sloppiness and fuzziness of environmental justice, and it got me thinking about the rare earths talk. Mining rare earths is good for the global environmental cause: these elements are necessary for the magnets found in the motors of electric vehicles and wind turbines. If we want to ween ourselves off of petroleum-fueled vehicles and coal power plants to reduce carbon emissions and mitigate climate change, we're going to need a lot more of these minerals for our electric cars and wind farms. On the other hand, the mining process of rare earths devastates the local environment. Much like hydrofracking, the process is water-intensive and results in heavy contamination of local water resources. So, do we sacrifice the local for the global? What is the "just" thing to do?

Arundhati Roy would say the just thing to do would be to "leave the bauxite in the mountain." (Yes, I've referenced this quote before.) She feels so strongly about this issue that she declared the 2009 Copenhagen climate talks should focus on mining in eastern India rather than curbing worldwide carbon emissions. Roy is an ardent supporter of the Maoists, who oppose the mining operations. She implies that the Maoists represent the wishes and beliefs of all tribal people in the regions in which they fight. However, this is simply not true. It is difficult to quantify support for Maoism, as the Maoists tend to utilize intimidation techniques to garner support. While certainly there are genuine supporters, many adivasis who show support do so out of fear. Some agree with the Maoist ideology but disagree with their violent methodology. Others disagree with them altogether. Like any population, adivasis feel divided on politics.

I learned during my visits to Jharkhand that the poorest people do see the mines as a lucrative employment opportunity, especially because there are few other opportunities. It is very easy for the Maoists and Roy to paint the government and mineral companies as evil bullies stealing land from helpless tribal people at absolutely zero benefit to them, but it is not that simple. Mines do provide jobs, and jobs that pay well due to the dangers.

I'm not denying that the major mining corporations exploit the local communities. Of course they do. To admittedly simplify the issue: the forest lands belonged to the adivasis, and then the Indian government took those lands away and sold them to outsiders for huge sums of money--and adivasis haven't seen a rupee. But the answer cannot be to completely eliminate mining; the world needs the minerals (Japan definitely wants an alternative supplier to China!), and these impoverished states of India need the money. The answer has to involve some form of inclusive development. How can the benefits to the local communities be maximized and the risks to the environment be minimized? How can the profits be more equitably distributed so that adivasis see more advantages from these mining operations? The local communities need to be included from Day One in the planning of the mines--not just included for the sake of being included, but included as an equal partner with equal power--and the environmental damage needs to be adequately contained. (Ok, maybe I'm asking for a lot that is not realistic...)

For now, major corporations on the demand side, such as GE, are preparing for the potential decline in rare earths availability by trying to design induction motors that do not require rare earth magnets. One supply side player, Molycorp Minerals, has been developing more environmentally-friendly (or should I say, less environmentally-devastating?) mining methods that meet California's environmental regulations so that they can re-open the Mountain Pass rare earth mine (in 2002 California had closed Mountain Pass, the only rare earths mine in the US, due to environmental contamination). Certainly researching ways to reduce the demand for rare earths and ameliorate the environmental impacts of mining is a step in the right direction for environmental justice. But for the foreseeable future, rare earths mining is going to be in high demand and highly dirty--with potential for high profits. Given this reality, what is the just way forward in Jharkhand, Orissa, and Chhattisgarh?

Some further reading:
 
If you want to learn more about mining in India, it is definitely worth reading Roy,* even though I don't think she takes a nuanced-enough approach. She does make some strong points, so click here for her thoughts on mining and Maoists.

India Together's mining news here

Ernst and Young's "Mining India Sustainably for Growth" here

"India bets on rare-earth minerals," Wall Street Journal here

*My problem with Roy, really, is that she doesn't seem to recognize that the modern world has encroached on traditional tribal life. She never offers any alternatives for tribal development; she seems to think India should simply leave the adivasis alone. That might have been fine if they were always left alone, but now they're in this weird limbo between their traditional lifestyle and mainstream society as a result of various British colonial and Indian policies. The adivasis probably cannot revert to their old way of life given modern realities. I'm not saying India should force them to join mainstream society, but they should be included, somehow, in policy-making and be given the tools to make decisions about their own future. (Where I work, former forest-dwelling adivasis have been forced into a settled agrarian lifestyle due to various forestry policies. But they were not farmers before a generation ago, so they lack a lot of the knowledge and skills that are usually passed down from parents to children.) Ok, Roy rant over.

My first poster (an update on my research)

It's been forever since I've posted, and that's because, well, I haven't been abroad in a while. Which means my life is a helluva lot less interesting. But I did recently present my first-ever poster. If you're interested in an update on my research, click on the image below:

Everyone is talking about Hitler.

Remember how I blogged about the new Hitler store in Ahmedabad? Twice? Well, I'm not the only one talking about it. The NYTimes is talking about it, too: click here to read the article and see a picture of the storefront (the picture I couldn't manage to get because I was passing by in an autorickshaw). This quote by the store owner pretty much says it all:

“None of the other people are complaining, only a few Jewish families. I have not hurt any sentiments of the majority Hindu community. If he did something in Germany, is that our concern?” Mr. Shah asked.

He said he thought Hitler was a “good, catchy” name for his shop. In fact, his business plan seems to include cashing in on the name to attract customers. “We have not written anything below the sign or on our cards to indicate what we sell to generate mystery,” he said. “The customers who come in tell me they came in seeing the name.”

Update: Israel plans to ask Chief Minister Modi to force the Hitler store to change its name. Click here to read more.

Red is not the only color in Gumla.

I'm making up for my recent boring, all-text posts with some photos from a week of field work in Gumla District, Jharkhand:

On my first day I visited some villages in Raidih block. It turned out many villages were almost empty because Monday is the weekly haat, or market. People from every village in the area flock to the haat, which sees about 5000 people every week. Adivasi haats are famous for having a party atmosphere and a lot of drinking. I did not witness that here, so I guess that reputation comes from another adivasi region. Here are some photos from the haat:

And photos from my village visits, during which I held group discussions about irrigation:

For some reason the self-help group thought it would be funny if I pretended to be their accountant in the photo.

That man in blue is covering his face because he was sneezing.

Drawing a map of their village.

This house was painted for a wedding back in April. The doorway says "swagatam," or "welcome."

 There was a solar panel store in the district headquarters. Or more accurately, an electronics store that also sold solar panels so that you could actually use the electronics you purchase--because what good is a TV if you don't have reliable electricity? The solar panels are fairly cheap (and maybe secondhand?): Rs 1800 for the small ones, which are rated at 20 W and can power 2 light bulbs for 4 hours (the store also sells light bulbs, of course). 

There are missionaries all over the adivasi regions of India. This village is one of many that has converted to Christianity.

It may be hard to tell in this photo, but this woman has tattoos on her face (note her forehead). Many adivasi women in this region have tattoos all over their bodies. The heaviest tattoos I saw were on women's forearms. I didn't want ask about the tattoos because I thought it might be a sensitive issue. Luckily, I didn't have to: sometimes the women would ask me where my tattoos were! I took advantage of this and asked them why they have tattoos. They believe that the tattoos are required to allow their spirits to leave their bodies after death; without the tattoos, their spirits would be trapped. However, this traditional practice seems to be on its way out, as many of the younger generation do not have tattoos (perhaps because of the influence of Christianity in the region?).

 carrying wood to be used as fuel

typical village house, with an awesome jackfruit tree

And some agriculture/scenery:

animals grazing on land that hasn't been tilled yet

People are finally sowing!! (See this previous post to understand why this is exciting.)

rice paddies--that actually have rice, despite the poor monsoon! here's hoping the yield is alright come harvesting time.

forest near Palkot

forest near Palkot. the terrain was very bouldery, not unlike Hampi in Karnataka.

mango on a tree

 I got around on a motorcycle. See, Mom, I wasn't lying when I said I wear a helmet.

 

...and yes, "red" in the title of this post is referring to the Maoist presence in Gumla. Don't worry, they have given permission to the NGO to operate in the area and do not bother them. Because I was with a Maoist-approved NGO, I was safe. (To clarify, this is not a rebel NGO. They are also friendly with the Indian government. They just do what they need to do in order to get work done in these communities.) To be honest, nothing seemed out of the ordinary and I never would have known I was in a Maoist area if the NGO hadn't told me.

Follow up to Hitler: Opening Soon

I got some interesting responses to my previous post, and I thought I should share:

1) One friend of mine from Delhi thought I was unfairly picking on Hindus by only discussing the Ahmedabad riots.The reason I chose to discuss Ahmedabad is because the Hitler store I saw was located in Ahmedabad--I thought that if my racial politics theory about Hitler's popularity had any legitimacy at all (and I fully admit that it might have zero legitimacy; I'm no expert), then it would make sense that I saw a store celebrating Hitler in a city like Ahmedabad, which is home to particularly tense ethnic relations, as evidenced by the riots.

This friend felt (or at least, I think he felt) that I should have balanced my argument with an example of Muslims killing Hindus. He mentioned the murders of millions of Hindus crossing the border from East Pakistan into India during Partition. However, I think he might be equally unfair as I was with my Ahmedabad example to only mention the devastating massacres committed by Muslims against East Pakistani Hindus. Hindus killed Muslims too, on both eastern and western borders. Muslims also killed Sikhs and Hindus on the western border in addition to the East Pakistanis. Sikhs killed Muslims. Basically, everybody was killing everybody as they fled across newly-formed borders, and millions from all these ethnic groups were brutally murdered. My friend also did not need to go as far back as 1947 to find an appropriate example of Muslims violently attacking and killing Hindus. There are many examples in more recent history, including several bombings. It is a back-and-forth cycle of violence. Wikipedia provides a summary of religious violence in India and gives many examples of various groups killing each other. Read it here.

2) Two other friends of mine thought the fascination with Hitler had more to do with the fight for independence against the British during World War II than with present-day racial politics. Following the age-old adage of "the enemy of my enemy is my friend," Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose, the leader of the Indian National Army (INA), a group of soldiers who broke away from the British army during WW2 in order to fight for their independence, sought the support of Hitler and Mussolini.

A huge percentage, if not the majority, of the British army consisted of Indian soldiers. I visited some WW2 battlegrounds, war memorials, and cemeteries in Northeast India (specifically, in Nagaland and Manipur) in May 2011. At the cemetery in Kohima, there were very few British names among the hundreds of Indian names (even if people had been cremated, they had a tombstone). I soon crossed the state border into Manipur and learned about the soldiers who abandoned and fought against British (really Indian) soldiers such as those commemorated in Nagaland. In Moirang, I visited the INA Museum, which proved enlightening. I knew that the INA worked with the Japanese against the British in Southeast Asia and elsewhere, and I knew that they would basically ally with anyone who was against the British, but for some reason seeing a photo of Bose shaking hands with Hitler was like a smack in the face. I should not have been surprised at all to see this, yet there I was, confronted with evidence of a man fighting against the oppression of his nation joining hands with a man inflicting oppression upon another nation--of an oppressed hand-in-hand with an oppressor. It felt quite unsettling to see someone I had repeatedly heard lauded as a hero with someone I have always thought of as a villain in the context of my own family history. Because I'm a bad daughter who only ever buys her father books as gifts, I purchased a book entitled Bose in Nazi Germany by Romain Hayes (read a review here) from the museum gift shop. I haven't had the chance to read it yet, but my dad said it was very interesting and I should pick it up.

outside the INA Museum in Moirang is the spot where the INA first raised the Indian flag

I admit that Hitler's connection with the INA and the independence movement was my first thought as to the rationale behind Hitler's ubiquity as well. However, there does not seem to be an equally popular fascination with Bose himself or with the history of the INA's role in India's independence struggle. In fact, Hitler's autobiography outsells Gandhi's autobiography (not that Gandhi had much to do with the INA, but he is by far the most popular figure associated with the independence movement--if people are more interested in reading about Hitler than about Gandhi, then they're likely not going to read as much about Bose). This is why I thought there had to be more behind Hitler's popularity than only the Bose/independence tie. Though of course my friends could be right and I could be wrong. Or maybe they're right in the sense that Hitler's popularity simply carried over from an earlier time, even if today most people are not terribly interested in studying that history.

3) One of the above two said something about the middle class admiring Hitler's discipline. I have no comment on this, because I'm totally ignorant about that. He may be right.

Well, I guess I have reached no conclusions on this issue. If you're interested in more takes on Hitler's popularity in India, check out the following articles:

Hitler Usurps Mahatma, NDTV: This suggests that people are looking to learn about strong leadership.

Indian Business Students Snap Up Copies of Mein Kampf, The Telegraph: Business students think they can learn about management skills from Hitler. This article says that students "see it as a kind of success story where one man can have a vision, work out a plan on how to implement it and then successfully complete it." However, an Indian professor "cited Mein Kampf as a source of inspiration to the Hindu nationalist BJP" and thought that Hitler's popularity is due to political tensions.

Hitler Memorabilia Attracts Young Indians, BBC News: Young people admire Hitler's patriotism and discipline. Hitler "is seen as someone who can solve problems. The young people here [in India] are faced with a lot of problems."

The Advent of Hitler in India, Dr. Aafreedi: I disagree with a lot of what this guy says, but he brings up much of what my friends and I have discussed: the rise of race-based political parties and right-wing extremists, the WW2 history wherein Bose allied with the Nazis, and the admiration of strong leadership.

Hitler: Opening Soon!

I'm back in Ahmedabad for one day between salt pan sites (they are quite far away from each other and I had to go through Ahmedabad to travel between them). I took an auto from Law Garden to Bodakdev, and from my auto I noticed a store called "Hitler" with a banner proclaiming "Opening Soon!" The store sign was decorated with a swastika. A swastika in India never has to do with Nazis; it is a traditional symbol in Hinduism and Buddhism. But the connection with Hitler here was more than clear, and it's something I've never seen before. There was no indication about what kind of store this will be or what it will sell.

Anyone who has traveled around India has probably noticed the tremendous popularity of Mein Kampf. The book is ubiquitous: you see pirated copies of it being sold in railway stations and on the street as well as legitimate copies in high-end Western-style bookstores. It seems to be a perennial best seller here. The first few times I saw it being sold by some street hawker, I would feel deeply offended and start yelling at him, how could he sell such a blatantly racist book written by one of world history's most evil figures and perpetuate hateful stereotypes about a group of people Indians otherwise have little to no exposure to? Of course the hawker would stare at me with a blank face and have no idea what I was talking about. The yelling was pointless anyway, because it's not like he was going to throw the book out. Eventually it became too exhausting to yell at every book hawker selling Mein Kampf, because there are just too many of them.

Don't cry anti-Semitism just yet. I'm fairly certain this has absolutely zero to do with Jews. Most Indians who discover I'm Jewish--including Muslims--have no idea what that means. Most either hear "Jain" when I say "Jew" or assume I'm a type of Christian. The vast majority of Indians have never met a Jew before and are unaware of the centuries-old stereotypes. They really have no reason to like or dislike Jews.

Instead, it probably has to do with the racial politics within this country. India has hundreds of political parties, and of its two most dominant, one of them, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), promotes Hindutva, or Hindu nationalism. They believe that pre-Mughal India belonged to the Hindus, and India should be reclaimed by members of its indigenous religion (this is a distorted view of history. Hinduism was brought by the Aryans, who invaded the Indus Valley civilization from the steppes of Central Asia, so that they could impose the caste system to control the indigenous population. The Aryans are no less invaders of India than the Mughals; they just came millenia earlier). Regional ethnic-based political parties have emerged as well, in pretty much every region. It is easy to see why Hitler's theory of racial purity would appeal to these parties, some of which are quite militant. (In one particularly upsetting episode a few years ago, a Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) supporter told me he loves Jews because the Israelis are fighting the good fight of "getting rid of Muslims" to "reclaim the land for its rightful owners." It was a gross misunderstanding of the Israel-Palestinian conflict, not to mention that it was extremely insulting to associate my entire ethnic group with racist politics. I'm sure he finds Hitler inspirational and identifies with Mein Kampf, but he harbored no hatred against Jews.)

If the popularity of racial politics is the true reason behind Hitler's ubiquity, then I should not be surprised to see a store celebrating Hitler in Ahmedabad, which saw the some of the worst Hindu-Muslim riots in Indian history in 2002 and remains an ethnically-divided city. Even after ~2000* Muslims were brutally beat to death and burned alive by Hindu extremists, the people have Gujarat have continued, for the past 10 years, to re-elect the same Chief Minister, Narendra Modi, who is believed to have instigated the riots (or at the very least, even if he did not start the riots, he held back the police from intervening to stop the rioting. He was by no means an innocent bystander). Many consider Modi a mass-murderer; Sonia Gandhi of the Congress Party famously called Modi a "merchant of death." The BJP thinks of Modi as a very serious contender for their Prime Ministerial candidate. It will be a terrifying day for Muslims and other non-Hindu minorities if or when Modi is elected as Prime Minister.

(*This number is contested and highly controversial. I've read figures everywhere from 500 to 5000.)

My Gujarati translator for the past few days was Muslim. I discovered this only after he forgot about lunch--or rather, he was fasting for Ramadan, and I forgot to ask him for a lunch break. After dinner one evening, we were watching the news about the humongous blackout that affected 19 states, and Modi came on TV to, as usual, talk about how awesome his Gujarat is while the rest of India is falling apart thanks to the Congress Party. Javed, my translator, muttered in Hindi, "Modi is full of shit."

Javed then started telling me about his experiences during the riots in 2002. He was 14 years old at the time, and he said it was the most terrifying time of his life. His parents pulled him and his siblings out of school because it was too dangerous for Muslims to go outside. He did not leave his house for six months. He was lucky enough not to live in the main Muslim area that had been burnt to the ground by rioters, but he had several friends from that neighborhood who were killed. When I asked him why his family didn't just leave Ahmedabad, he retorted, "Where would we go? Where else in India would be safer? Hindus and Muslims kill each other everywhere in this country. Look at Assam right now. Hindu Bodos and Muslim Bangladeshis are at war. Ahmedabad is my family's home. We have been here for generations, and we do not want to abandon our home. All we can do is hope for a more peaceful future."

For a more peaceful future, India will have to navigate the tricky ethnic politics that have arisen thanks, in part, to migration bringing communities together that would otherwise have had little contact--and to these communities now struggling to take advantage of the same limited resources. The violence in Assam between the Bodos and the Bangladeshis is, at its core, not a religious disagreement. The Bodos, who are an indigenous group, are pissed off because they feel the Bangladeshi immigrants are impeding on their land rights. Likewise, the militant Shiv Sena has emerged in Mumbai to protect Maharashtrian interests against the influx of Bihari migrant workers. This pattern has been multiplying nationwide due to both internal migration and international immigration.

Many Indians will point out that much of the ethnic tensions started during the British Raj, when the imperialists employed divide-and-conquer tactics to take over the country and control the population. I don't doubt that the legacy of colonialism plays a role in ethnic tensions, but I don't think that's the entire story.

(Of course the US has become less welcoming to immigrants and certain ethnic groups, and I'm not implying that there aren't ethnic tensions at home too. The root cause is actually the same: immigration. I just think these kind of tensions sometimes take on a more violent manifestation in India.)

All of this is to say that I believe Hitler's popularity stems from India's racial politics and has little or nothing to do with anti-Semitism. Or you can read what the BBC had to say about this two years ago here.