It's not so much Western notions of what liberal democracy should look like, but rather the Western notion that liberal democracy is superior/sacrosanct.
"Liberal democracy" has a very specific meaning — or at least, it has to, or else there's no common language to describe these things. What India is engaging in is objectively not liberal democracy, it's illiberal democracy[1], but that can be okay. The fact that "illiberal democracy is bad" is the Western notion / post-colonial imposition on an independent India.
I personally disagree with most Indians, and tend to prefer liberal democracies, but that's my Western notion (and I say that as an ethnic Indian that went to high school in India, but has settled down in America).
[1] Poland, Hungary, and arguably Turkey are also notable examples of increasingly illiberal democracies
"Meanwhile, Hindu nationalists have been courting allies against their Leftist antagonists, which sometimes results in strange connections to Western white nationalists", writes the Taki's Magazine contributor. Perhaps in this one instance, the West's notion of what liberal democracy should look like is correct. Not every idea the liberal west has is, but the alternatives to these two ideas are horrible.
The connection to white nationalism is specious. Everyone in this story is brown. The differences are about beliefs and culture, not skin color.
It also projects western circumstances onto places where it doesn’t make sense. Multiculturalism is a cultural adaptation to America being a post-colonial, post-slavery, immigrant nation. In the rest of the west it’s an adaptation to post-colonial immigration patterns. The moral connotations are very much tied up in the fact that those other cultural groups are in western countries because of the stuff western people did that wasn’t so nice. That doesn’t have any force when you’re talking about Hindus in India or the Japanese in Japan. Indeed in India it probably cuts the other way. My surname didn’t make its way 3,000 miles from the Middle East to Bangladesh through a process that was very nice.
In the rest of the west it’s an adaptation to post-colonial immigration patterns.
I don't think even a cursory look at the history of Europe in the last few hundred years bears that out - you can probably start at the peace of Westphalia and keep going to the current war in Ukraine. The connection to white nationalism is not specious, it's precisely because it's a form of ethno-nationalism.
Just to be clear: Razib Khan makes the connection to white nationalism, not me. It happens that Razib Khan is himself probably a racial supremacist. But I didn't even have pull any of this in from Khan's background; it was in the article you chose to cite.
Yes, I'm old enough to remember the 1971 war of independence; I was wondering about Rayiner's surname that he mentioned as having migrated from the Middle East. (I could hazard a guess ....)
