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The Monolith of Mediocrity: How White Christian Nationalism and Hindutva Trade Excellence for Exclusion

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I write from Aotearoa New Zealand, where the land itself—whenua—whispers a truth the world keeps forgetting: diversity is not decoration. It is the operating system of life.

Yet halfway across the planet, two mirror-image movements are busy flattening that truth into a single, suffocating slab of grey.

One calls itself white Christian nationalism.

The other, Hindutva.

Both promise greatness. Both deliver mediocrity.

Not the mediocrity of low IQ or bad haircuts. No. This is the mediocrity of supremacy—a structural laziness that mistakes exclusion for excellence, homogeneity for harmony, and loudness for leadership.

From New York Times

The Core Lie: Inheritance is the Original Sin

Let’s name the lie plainly.

White Christian nationalism is not about Christ. It is about whiteness—and the quiet, murderous belief that white skin is the measure of all things.

Hindutva is not about Hinduism. It is about Brahminical caste hierarchy—and the ancient, murderous belief that birth in a "pure" lineage is the measure of all things.

Both are birthright ideologies. You don’t earn them; you inherit them. And inheritance is the original sin of mediocrity. It requires no proof of competence, only proof of purity.

The Monolithic Operating System

Mediocrity, when weaponized by supremacy, runs on three lines of code:

Erase difference.

Celebrate the average.

Punish the excellent if they don’t fit.

This is why Trump’s rallies were not policy seminars; they were purity pageants. This is why Modi’s Mann ki Baat is not governance; it is caste karaoke.

Both men, shielded by myth and surrounded by sycophants, never had to deliver. They only had to perform. And perform they did—with walls, with slogans, with statues, with demolitions. Meanwhile, the bodies piled up.

A Tale of Two Failures: The Cost of Incompetence

When your national goal is purity, not progress, competence becomes a threat. The brilliant Muslim scientist? Suspicious. The Dalit engineer? Quota case. The Indigenous climate expert? “Anti-national.”

So, you purge. You ban. You bulldoze. And the nation atrophies.

Let's look at the receipts:

Trump’s America: The Infrastructure Week That Never Was

COVID: 1.2 million dead. The worst response in the developed world.

Jobs: Lost 3 million. The worst since the Great Depression.

Infrastructure: Promised for 1,461 days. Delivered zero miles of new rail.

Modi’s India: The Development That Wasn’t

Unemployment: 45% among youth (CMIE, 2024).

Health: Bodies floating in the Ganga. Oxygen plants built after the second wave.

Farms: Farmer suicides at a 20-year high after laws were written in boardrooms and withdrawn in blood.

Education: IITs slide in global rankings while “cultural education” teaches that airplanes were invented in the Vedas.

These failures are not accidents. They are design features of a system that rejects expertise in favor of lineage.

Why the Monolith Cannot Innovate

Innovation is messy. It needs friction. It needs failure. Most importantly, it needs foreigners.

The iPhone was designed by a Syrian immigrant’s son. The COVID vaccine was built by Turkish Germans. The technology revolution was seeded by immigrants who migrated as international students.

But the monolith says: No.

No to the Brown physicist.

No to the Black coder.

No to the Adivasi ecologist.

And so the nation starves—not of food, but of ideas.

The global grammar of supremacy is converging.

The slogan "Make America Great Again" is mirrored by "Akhand Bharat." Both traffic in nostalgia for a golden age that never existed, weaponize the grievance of the most privileged, and ultimately collapse under the weight of their own fundamental incompetence.

The Alternative: A Politics of Radical Inclusion

Imagine the opposite. This isn't charity; this is competence.

A Dalit woman as India’s science minister, funded by a caste equity budget.

A Black Muslim immigrant rebuilding America’s bridges in redlined neighborhoods.

A trans Indigenous coder designing climate models rooted in oral memory.

Diversity is infrastructure. It is the only system that has ever truly worked.

To every scholar, artist, organizer, and dreamer reading this: Do not debate the supremacist on their stage. They speak in slogans. We speak in seeds.

Build counter-monuments:

Dalit rap cyphers over bulldozer noise.

Black gospel remixes of abolitionist hymns.

Adivasi seed songs encoded in blockchain.

Build counter-futures: Not by shouting louder, but by growing deeper.

The monolith will crack. Not from our rage, but from its own hollowness. We are in the soil. We are in the code. We are in the chorus. We are in the seed. And we are rising.

Jai Bhim. Black Lives Matter. A Luta Continua.

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