The American Empire is alive and well.
(Anglo-)India is of the Anglophones, by the Anglophones and for the Anglophones for all practical purposes.
That's why laws etc. are mandated to be written in this foreign language that's incomprehensible to the majority, and why there's a strict near-apartheid like barrier preventing higher education (and with it, higher employment) to non-Anglophones.
The only reason I imagine we don't hear about this systematic discrimination that prevent downstream material development like industrialization (as opposed to the ethereal one like caste) is perhaps because Western institutions have vested geopolitical interest in having such a large vassal, intellectually if not politically.
I am sure people from the Northern belt would be happy if the laws were written in Tamil (my mother tongue).
In my opinion, these are just excuses for continued colonial-era English-imposition - because it's often only the aforementioned section that makes such brain-dead arguments.
For all the politically-ostentatious love of their own mother-languages there's not a single technical-university of any great reputation in either of these (it's worse in other Indic languages). The economic-value of these languages is close to zero if not negative.
Sheldon Pollock notes that, even in classical studies and literature, the institutions have turned utterly incompetent and filled with political retainers who can barely hold a mantle to people from previous generations who were experts in linguistics and manuscriptology.
So much for "Hindi/Tamil..." pride...
1. Protection of Language and Script (Article 29)
Article 29(1): "Any section of the citizens... having a distinct language, script or culture of its own shall have the right to conserve the same.
Article 29(2): "No citizen shall be denied admission into any educational institution maintained by the State or receiving aid out of State funds on grounds only of religion, race, caste, language or any of them."
Article 30(1): "All minorities, whether based on religion or language, shall have the right to establish and administer educational institutions of their choice."
Article 350: "Every person shall be entitled to submit a representation for the redress of any grievance to any officer or authority... in any of the languages used in the Union or in the State..."
Article 350. Language to be used in representations for redress of grievances- Every person shall be entitled to submit a representation for the redress of any grievance to any officer or authority of the Union or a State in any of the languages used in the Union or in the State, as the case may be.
Article 350A. Facilities for instruction in mother-tongue at the primary stage - It shall be the endeavor of every State and of every local authority within the State to provide adequate facilities for instruction in the mother-tongue at the primary stage of education to children belonging to linguistic minority groups; and the President may issue such directions to any State as he considers necessary or proper for securing the provision of such facilities.
Article 350B. Special Officer for linguistic minorities-
There shall be a Special Officer for linguistic minorities to be appointed by the President.
It shall be the duty of the Special officer to investigate all matters relating to the safeguards provided for linguistic minorities under this Constitution and report to the President upon those matters at such intervals as the President may direct, and the president shall cause all such reports to be laid before each House of Parliament and sent to the Government of the States concerned.
Article 351. Directive for development of the Hindi language- It shall be the duty of the Union to promote the spread of the Hindi language, to develop it so that it may serve as a medium of expression for all the elements of the composite culture of India and to secure its enrichment by assimilating without interfering with its genius, the forms, style and expressions used in Hindustani and in the other languages of India specified in the Eighth Schedule, and by drawing, wherever necessary or desirable, for its vocabulary, primarily on Sanskrit and secondarily on other languages.
Amendment Act Year Languages Added Resulting Total
Original Constitution 1950 14 Original Languages 14 languages
21st Amendment Act 1967 Sindhi 15 languages
71st Amendment Act 1992 Konkani, Manipuri, Nepali 18 languages
92nd Amendment Act 2003 Bodo, Dogri, Maithili, Santhali 22 languages
96th Amendment Act 2011 "Oriya" to "Odia" 22 languages
Try using these "laws" and "rights" when you're trying to apply for a university, or asking a IIT to teach you in Hindi/Tamil LOL. These provisions are mostly used to skirt around the (generally onerous) laws by so-called "minority institutions" (eg. Manipal).
It's very disingenous to make such arguments by anyone with their eyes open in India. It's almost like the classic quip (almost a criticism of proto-liberalism) about the British empire: everyone is free in it as long as he's British!
Indians will go to Germany and learn German; go to Japan and learn Japanese; but will resist building anything of value with the culture/language of their own states of residence. The Anglophone-Indians will religiously preach a particularly seductive form of nationalist-liberalism internally for India that continues all the colonial structures of the British empire, because it helps them optimize for their own economic outcomes (ofc. they do this internationally too).
Absurd state of affairs tbh - and it has (eg. Blume Ventures' report) and will keep India poor with the wealth limited to ~5-10% of the population.
Also India's wealth is always going to be limited to 5-10℅ of the citizenry. India is pretty much USA on steroids at this point - a handful of capitalists controlling a lot of public infrastructure, ministers openly indulging in corruption, routine exploitation of the working class, piss poor healthcare and education provision where they try to skirt around the evolution question and Gandhism. The bowing down of India to the US is no surprise, given all of these other factors already playing around in the background.
I did submit a non-German language document to get my German citizenship.
At the end, whatever you say - India is f*ked up by regional politics. With English a poor person from region A can go to B and find some job/livelihood.
Are you against it? I understand you want homogeneity - it is not there.
But people like you creating divisions by telling
>>>> It shall be the duty of the Union to promote the spread of the Hindi language, to
will promote more chaos. Good for rest of the rich world especially west and China.
Like my physics teacher used to say in Chennai... We don't need foreigners to mess us - We Indians do it for us.
All you want is India to fight like Arab states - internally. Divide and conquer. Thank you from the West and China.
Making it 45 languages etc will not solve issues. The point is not master or slave. Stop that victim mindset.
If people follow law and order all will be fine. Telling reputation etc is all good. Foreign people study and celebrate Indic languages better. Foreign institutes spend more grants in that.
> there's not a single technical-university of any great reputation in either of these (it's wor
It was tried in S.India - Anna University. Very few people joined to do B E in Computer Science Engg.
The real question is every ruler wants to keep population stupid.
You still celebrate people like NarayanaMoorthy or L& T chairman. biju or ola CEOs lying in public.
At the end, there is endemic corruption. Blaming UK or West will not solve anything.
My wife is from south India, and I’m a frequent visitor to India.
It’s evident that Hindi nationalism is to the benefit of the north, while southern culture is slowly being replaced.
I assume it does have advantages. The common law of the ex British colonies are all broadly compatible, so there's the possibility of having judges from other countries decide cases. Trade and maritime law is/ was basically British law. I would guess it also helps foreign investment if the law is in a language those investors understand.
Yes, these were probably better reasons in the past though.
Indian kings made deals with the East India Company. What did the people got out of it? Destitution?
So no, I am not being melodramatic. India has a history of the State betraying the Nation. Sadly, this is but the latest chapter in a very old saga.
https://indhospitalsolution.com/blogs/keralas-hospital-gold-...
> The research from the United States — which is a decade further down this road — is sobering. Studies of PE-acquired hospitals document consistent patterns: non-revenue-generating services reduced, staff-to-patient ratios cut, ancillary charges inflated, and a systematic shift toward high-margin procedures.
https://jeswinjos.medium.com/someone-is-quietly-buying-keral...
Their SEC filing mentions they engage in "deregulation advocacy" which is no doubt a hilarious euphemism for lobbying the brazilian government so it relaxes quality standards for medical schools. No doubt they're responsible for much of the enshittification here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exorbitant_privilege
I don’t want international private companies controlling payments, better have my own elected government manage it.
What I actually wanted was for the cryptocurrency dream to become reality, but it turned into stocks instead.
Some have a more hands off approach, including size of transactions and flagged behaviour as indicators of when payment processors must report to the government.
The Goverment should absolutely have no idea who spends what, where. Warrants and court orders, check values should be required before anyone can know. The potential to suppress political opponents, to squelch legitimate protest, to interfere with elections, is too dangerous.
Simply because some countries, like the US after 9/11, decided to give up this aspect of a free people, does not make it right.
In anycase, the governments have the capability, what remains is just the intend. And we see how intends could change at the whim of a leader.
Cryptocurrency solves that problem well, which is why governments have moved hard to effectively nerf it everywhere.
The idea that visa and mastercard provide these ...
This fear of government services is toxic americanism.
Direct government services typically have a universal mandate. The government won't be able to stop doing business with you.
Fixed it for you. You had left some extraneous quotation marks there.
Either way, while governments should not get free pass and should be scrutinized by its citizens, we definitely should not allow corporations with ties to hostile governments (such as the case of Visa and Mastercard) any oversight of payment infrastructure.
Yeah, what if?
You didn't provide any argument, didn't point to any real problem. You just hinted at a "terrible bad thing". Would we have monsters under our beds or bad guys in corners to ambush us?
This sounds like VISA/Mastercad/Apple Pay playing FUD[1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear,_uncertainty,_and_doubt
I think arguing "but it's a democratic monopoly" is little comfort in this situation. Maybe you trust your government not to ever be incompetent or to use the powers granted by this monopoly in a way you disapprove of. Maybe in the short term you'd even be right to do so. But I think history has proven that over the long term that's a very foolish assumption to make.
The end result is private entities taking money out of the system at some stage, and it doesn't shield you in any way from government incompetence or malice.
An example of one that doesn't would be a global decentralized protocol for transferring money. You're standing in a coffee shop in LA and want to pay for a coffee so you tell your bank to transfer $5 to their bank. It works the same if your bank is in Brazil and their bank is in Switzerland as if both banks are in Nebraska, involves no intermediary other than each party's bank, and their bank shows them the transfer immediately so they know to give you the coffee.
Then the panzers roll into Washington and der Führer wants to reintroduce financial surveillance to make sure nobody is covertly buying a computer that doesn't censor the internet. Obviously they can force the bank in Nebraska to inform on the dissidents, but your bank is in Brazil and the seller's bank is in Switzerland.
Unless the system allowing that is dismantled ahead of time so the dystopia can be switched on overnight instead of needing years to erode entrenched decentralized infrastructure.
This is to say: All currency is about control and convenience (you trade "invisible transaction" for "easily able to resolve payment") because those in power want to know/control the money and everyone else wants convenience.
Right! Like all the other monopolies that governments already have: public security (police and courts of law), external security (armed forces), public healthcare in many civilized countries, inspection of health regulations and consumer safety, monetary policy, etc.
> you trust your government not to ever be incompetent
Oh, I don't. But Apple, Visa, Mastercard and Google Pay aren't very "competent" either.
> history has proven that over the long term
History has proven that privatization of many of government monopolies are disastrous: Roman generals making private armies and destroying the Republic, abuse of forced labor from inmates in private prisons, exorbitant fees from payment providers (Visa, Mastercard), food dangerous for public consumption because the governments didn't inspect them, etc.
Your examples are things that aren't inherently monopolies and are significantly worse if you try to make them such. It's better to give people the right to self-defense than to put them in jail for violating a "public security" monopoly for not allowing someone else to kill them when there were no police around. It's cruel to prohibit someone from paying for their own healthcare in cases when the procedure exists but the public system won't spend the money. What argument could you even make for prohibiting private inspections of products and services the likes of Consumer Reports?
The things that are better as a monopoly are so rare that they plausibly don't exist.
The article doesn't say and I know nothing about India. I could guess consumers are oaying using their smartphones. So Google/Apple duopoly are still the gatekeepers to use UPI making huge profits. Of course using one of the American backends would make their control and profits orders of magnitudes bigger.
The main thing that makes card transactions more expensive is the merchant bank assuming chargeback risk, but that's because card payments are an entirely different transaction type. Pix is digital cash. You typically cannot get refunded for any reason. Cards are not digital cash. You can get refunded for fraud and unauthorized transactions.
This is not factually accurate. Pix also has fraud controls built into the platform, and does fine doing far more volume than credit card rails in Brazil. It is an objective success, having avoided US financial service firms from skimming hundreds of basis points of total economic activity out of the Brazilian economy.
Brazil's Pix payment system faces pressure from Visa and Mastercard - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48052371 - May 2026 (383 comments)
Brazil's Pix ‘much cheaper' than card payments, paper by central bank economists shows - https://www.reuters.com/article/business/brazils-pix-much-ch... - March 23rd, 2022 ("Brazil’s Pix retail instant payment system is “much cheaper” than card payments for merchants, according to a paper published Wednesday by the umbrella body of the world’s central banks, highlighting its growth potential for businesses after its vertiginous rise among individuals. The paper, which was co-authored by economists at the Brazilian central bank for the Bank of International Settlements (BIS), says Pix costs an average of 0.22% of a transaction’s value for merchants, whereas debit cards cost slightly above 1% and credit cards reach 2.2% in Brazil.")
Payment technology complementarities and their consequences on the banking sector: evidence from Brazil’s Pix - https://www.bis.org/publ/bppdf/bispap152_c.pdf - December 2024
> In this paper, we employ an instrument and individual-level banking data in Brazil to examine the effects of a novel payment technology, Pix, on the use of other payment technologies and its impact on the banking sector. We find evidence that Pix increases use of the four most common payment technologies in Brazil among individuals and firms. Furthermore, our empirical evidence suggests that Pix contributes to an increase in the number of bank accounts, their use and access to credit, benefiting different types of banks. The findings indicate that the implementation of new payment technologies yields advantages not only for firms and individuals but also for the broader banking and payment industry.
Whereas if you give other countries the obvious win that they can stop paying ~3% of their entire economy to a foreign payments network then you lose the fees anyway and that other stuff on top of it.
To be fair:
- 3% is on the higher end of the fees amounts. In the EU they are now capped at 0.3% for example
- part of the interchange fee goes to the issuing bank, which is usually local
What global payments system? We have the worst payment systems in the developed world.
The US money transfer situation is so bad that all the major banks got tired of The Fed's incompetence...and simply bypassed The Fed. That's how we ended up with Zelle, which actually does instantaneous (or at least within minutes) transfers.
In 2026 it is virtually impossible to quickly move money from one account to another because every single bit of it has to pass through the US Federal Reserve's ancient systems. We're the laughing stock of the rest of the world's banking systems. Thirty years ago europeans could walk into a store, do a fund transfer to pay for something, and walk out. We still can't do that.
Literally the only way to buy something expensive in a store in the US is via credit card.
You can't use a debit card because of transaction limits and lack of consumer protections.
You can't use any of the "app" payment methods.
You can't do wire transfers.
You can't do checks because the US check clearing system is so bad, a check can initially clear (after a day or five), and then weeks later, bounce.
You can't do cash because it's now legal for cops to consider having an unusual amount of cash to be enough for reasonable suspicion and they've done some gymnastics that allow them to seize the cash and keep it even if the person is not charged or charges are dismissed.
Zelle made it through by having various limitations that make it hard for it to displace credit cards, and even that took decades before it happened.
My debit card is branded Visa so it has the Visa Zero Liability protections, and I can raise the purchase limit from $6k to $25k using the app.
“Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.”
Europe Fights to Loosen America’s Grip on Payment Systems - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-06-16/europe-fi... | https://archive.today/o699I - June 16th, 2026
China nears launch of mBridge as alternative to Swift – report - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48636931 - June 2026
Which is the reason the US is also shooting itself in the foot every time it rug pulls them.
If you want people to trust and rely on your thing then you kind of need to avoid being untrustworthy and unreliable.
There it is! Behind every revealed shittery and fuckery, there's one name that constantly come up. As for this example, I'll give you a clue: it's not India.
Correlation is not causation. Banks have demanded this (getting rid of Zero MDR) for many years, even prior to Trump assuming office. However, it may have momemtum now due to the impending trade deal. But that's speculation either way, and the burden of proof rests with whoever is making that assertion.
What the government conceded (or gained, which could be a boring topic relatively) would make an impactful story. Unfortunately, newpapers today mostly rely on correlation rather than doing the hard work of finding someone who'll spill the beans. There's very little of Tehelka-style "Operation West End" (or "All the President's Men" for a movie equivalent) going on these days.
Unfortunately, current Modi govt is compromised due to Adani and the Epstein files. It can only hop and jump to whatever Trump orders.