77% of respondents rate the PM's performance as "outstanding" or "good."For those of us in the diaspora who get our news re: India primarily from American/British news services and "South Asian" commentators in the west, we need to ask ourselves whether this number conforms with https://twitter.com/sardesairajdeep/status/1291752375074594816

what we'd expect. Given the general tenor of western coverage of India in particular, I'd venture not. I don't say this to make a political point, but rather to highlight the growing divergence between the "South Asia" of the diasporic imagination and India the place.

The former is an ideological projection, an image of what India should be based our own political predilections in the societies where we are based. The resulting mental model is exceedingly narrow, and is fundamentally ill-equipped to deal with the complexities

that naturally arise in a hugely diverse society with an ancient history. What we get is a broken discourse where inconvenient facts are simply ignored, elided, or brushed under the carpet lest they complicate matters too much. Easier to simply explain away whatever is happening

as "symptomatic" of "global forces" that we use to explain corollary events at home.The liberal use of "fascism" to describe current political trends is an acknowledgment that the values, aspirations, and preferences of hundreds of millions of actual Indians are no longer legible

to us. Where once existed a mournful sense of separation and a longing to understand, we now only find resentment and embarrassment that the the natives back home don't conform to our values. This is an especially strange reversal considering the diaspora's overt obsession with

"cultural authenticity." We want to be arbiters of a culture while also distancing ourselves from the society and the people from whom we received this heritage in the first place. In other words, we just want to appropriate. Yes, it's true, we are collectively the white girl

wearing a bindi, but in brown face-- a sad state of affairs. This is not meant to be read as an endorsement of any particular view, just a hope that we can move beyond redeploying the "western gaze" against our own and instead develop a public sphere of our own making where

meaningless grandstanding can be replaced with authentic understanding. In the absence of such a shift, the distance between the diaspora and India will only continue to grow, and resentment will fill the void.