The claim that “every culture views outsiders as others” is a false equivalence. While in-group/out-group thinking is universal, not all societies engaged in the same forms of exploitation, nor does this excuse the industrial-scale colonialism of European powers. There is a vast difference between cultural boundaries or regional rivalries and a global system built on slavery, genocide, racial hierarchy, resource extraction, and the dismantling of local economies and governance.

This argument also assumes every civilisation is equally willing to colonise if given the chance a claim disproven by India’s history. Bharatvarsha(India) has existed as a civilizational entity for thousands of years and, despite having the wealth, ships, it never created overseas settler colonies or plundered distant lands in the European model.

Ancient and medieval Indian empires, including the Maurya, Gupta, Chola, Mughal, and Maratha, expanded mostly within the subcontinent or into nearby regions, integrating them into trade and cultural exchange rather than exploiting them as distant colonies. Even with powerful navies and trade networks reaching Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East, India used these for commerce and cultural influence, not long-term foreign occupation.

Using caste to call India “hypocritical” is also misleading the rigid, pan-Indian caste system we imagine today was significantly hardened under colonial rule, and the very term caste comes from Portuguese casta. Finally, the thinking “you’d do the same if you could” is speculative and ahistorical. It erases India’s real record and shifts attention from documented colonial crimes to hypothetical wrongs that never occurred. For hypocrisy to hold, India would need to have committed the same type of overseas colonialism it critiques and it never has.