Consider Elon Musk’s tweet from January 2025: “They prioritised DEI over saving lives and homes.” He was responding to the Los Angeles Fire Department’s four-year-old ‘racial equity action plan,’ which, in his view, contributed to the spread of the fire.
Similarly, consider the recent controversies surrounding ‘grooming gangs’ in Britain. These were labelled as Asian gangs. However, it did not stop there. An Indian lawmaker, Priyanka Chaturvedi, went so far as to state on her X account: “Repeat after me, they aren’t ASIAN grooming gangs but PAKISTANI grooming gangs. Why should Asians take the fall for one absolute rogue nation?” Indians seem to have developed a penchant for making such remarks. During his 2024 election campaign, Narendra Modi made anti-Muslim comments, referring to them as ‘those who have more children.’ However, such racist remarks are not exclusive to Muslims or Pakistanis.
The trend is escalating in various other contexts too.
The notion of political correctness – the use of language in a way that does not cause offence or insult to particular people or groups – became prominent in political and cultural discourse over the past four decades. In Western societies, however, these debates were not entirely new. British society, for instance, grappled with racism during the 1980s and sought to curb it by giving a platform to marginalised voices through film, media, and institutional representation. This phenomenon gained global prominence with the rise of globalism after 1991, driven by the emergence of the United States as the sole superpower, which championed democratic values such as inclusivity, equity, and diversity.
The Britain of the 1980s was also defined by Thatcherism – a liberalisation policy advanced by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (1979–1990) – which divided the country into North and South. The former, home to most factories and manufacturing, became a predominantly working-class region, while the South (with London at its centre) dominated business and commerce. One might argue that the world order, and later globalism, which emerged after the fall of the USSR, owes a great deal to Thatcherism: a world divided into manufacturing hubs and regions controlling markets and monetary systems. Manufacturing was largely outsourced to developing Asian nations, primarily China, while the United States controlled the global financial system. Other Western nations maintained dominance in business and commerce. Among European nations, Germany managed to retain its manufacturing base, while Russia took more than a decade to reactivate its industrial strength after the collapse of the USSR.
The turn of the 21st century introduced the internet revolution, which connected the world and was widely celebrated as the advent of a global village. It was envisioned that the world would soon become a homogenous entity, possibly resembling the US and the West. In my MPhil dissertation (2004/05) at Glasgow University, I argued that while the growing internet opened nations to each other, it also exposed their differences. This, I suggested, would heighten self-consciousness and feelings of otherness, fostering exclusion rather than inclusion. Now, 20 years later, we find ourselves with more divides than harmony, more differences than agreements.
The Hindutva ideology of the ruling BJP government, led by Narendra Modi, has successfully convinced its Hindu majority supporters that Pakistan is for Muslims and India is for Hindus
The internet revolution has effectively divided the world along digital lines.
In this fragmented world, political correctness is fading. Borders are being redefined, and world powers are claiming territories that have remained disputed or unclaimed for decades. We have witnessed this in Europe with the annexation of Crimea, the expansion of Israeli borders, Trump’s claims over Canada and Greenland, Chinese settlements in Ladakh (a territory claimed by India), and Pakistan’s assertion over the Wakhan Corridor – a buffer zone left between the Russian and British empires in the 19th century, and perhaps erroneously shown as part of Afghanistan on maps all this time.
These changes are not limited to geographical boundaries but extend to cultural boundaries once thought to be blurring or overlapping.
India is a case in point. Since independence, the Indian narrative maintained that Pakistan was wrongly created because the Two-Nation Theory was flawed, arguing that there were no significant cultural divides between Hindus and Muslims or between India and Pakistan. However, the Indian position has now shifted entirely. The Hindutva ideology of the ruling BJP government, led by Narendra Modi, has successfully convinced its Hindu majority supporters that Pakistan is for Muslims and India is for Hindus. Ironically, this proves Jinnah’s Two-Nation Theory correct while undermining the secular politics of India’s founding fathers.
What was once politically incorrect is now deemed correct in India.
This change can be attributed to the rise of populist politics and nationalism in India, the United States, and other parts of the world. These forces have fuelled regionalism and separation, often at the expense of political correctness – a concept that gained prominence in international politics after the fall of the USSR and the subsequent new world order.
Former US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice recently lamented the dismantling of the world order created by the US. She pointed to Russia’s military incursion into Ukraine and China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) as major disruptors of this order. However, she may have overlooked a fundamental fault line in the global world order project: outsourcing manufacturing to the Indo-Pacific region while maintaining control over the global financial system. Once the manufacturing nations accumulated sufficient capital, they made moves to challenge US hegemony over the financial system, particularly its monopoly on trade through the dollar. The BRICS nations have directly challenged this dominance by proposing de-dollarisation.
The new Trump administration faces this challenge in its second term. It struggles to compete with China on trade and economic fronts and lacks the capacity to produce sufficient ammunition to support Ukraine against Russia. The only viable option for the Trump administration is to exert its power in neighbouring regions – such as the Panama Canal and Greenland – to secure resources and trade routes. Alternatively, the US could accept China’s proposal for economic partnership rather than exhaust its waning influence in direct conflict. Once this transition is complete, the US project of transforming the world into its image will effectively end, along with its efforts to export democracy and promote numerous rights movements worldwide.
In other words, what was once deemed politically incorrect may soon become the norm.
This post was originally published on here
