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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left%E2%80%93right_politics#Us...

"right wing" in the US has a very different meaning than the rest of the world. At its core, left/right is a statement about social (in)equality and the government's involvement in the same. It often is tied with conservative or nonsecular politics (inextricably so in the US, less so elsewhere), but that does not define it.

India's government is pretty heavily involved in trying to break down social inequality. Whilst people disagree about the intentions and/or impact; we have plenty of policies trying to break down this inequality. We're also more on the socialist side of the capitalist-socialist spectrum (the constitution, for example, explicitly calls India socialist).

As far as cross-party agreement on government "interference" in equality is concerned, India has it much more than the US AFAICT. Whether this makes the main parties left-wing; I don't know, but it's not clearly right-wing. Then again, Wikipedia seems to call the BJP right-wing.

.... terminology sucks.

(IMO this dichotomy isn't particularly useful in India.)




Especially when the Sangh is for Swadeshi and actively for Protectionism. RSS happens to Hindu Nationalist but have Fabian socialist tendencies.


> India's government is pretty heavily involved in trying to break down social inequality.

Is the current BJP administration trying to do that, or is that the long-term trend? Also, is the BJP trying to help the Muslim minority or only Hindus?


It's a long term trend.

As far as the Muslim minority is concerned, there haven't been any changes in law that I am aware of regarding them (besides, India has a bunch of laws that make it hard to remove laws pertaining to minorities without involvement from minority leaders. Or something like that).

There probably have been internal policy changes. I don't know. One would expect them to focus on fixing "Hindu rights" issues over Muslim rights, sadly. I'm not sure what they have done so far in that direction (and there's a lot of debate over this right now; whether or not the atmosphere in the country has changed due to them). I'd rather not get into that debate here.




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