Keep in mind, however, that I am not a Republican/conversative. And neither am I a Democrat/liberal. Often, I'm just politically detached. Both annoy me to boredom and back.
Here's the thing: it's not just "outside forces", but also those from the inside that aren't really helping. Yes, you read that correctly---both non-Hindu and Hindu groups don't really help, especially not the ones that we are familiar with. Hindutva groups, for example, are often Victorian in their outlook.
Believe it or not, they are mirrored by a post-Colonial perspective while keeping in line with many Victorian-centric views (e.g., they despise what colonialism entailed but didn't think too much about various Indian laws that were of British origin---like the anti-homosexual marriage law and its uproar last year; wear boyish, Western boy-scouts looking outfits in groups such as the RSS while lambasting about women and men in urban areas being too modern; groups such as the Shiv Sena that have a tendency to go into bars and harass and strike women that choose to drink, or hold hands with their boyfriends at parks, all in the name of tradition [and unbeknownst to many Shiv Sena members, Maharashtra, the land many of them come from, used to have a time when both men and women didn't wear that much clothing---and this wasn't that long ago]).
And outside forces come in a variety of flavors: there are right-wing Christian-centric establishments that go cuckoo when it comes to gathering souls for Jesus in, say, areas like South India (V-dada can tell you all about them) and the Northeast; and there are left-wing secular-centric establishments that have a habit of arbitrarily dictating what passes as progressive and what does not (case in point: regardless of the fact that a majority of Indians voluntarily voted for Modi, it still wasn't democratic since it entailed the defeat of their beloved, but highly corrupt, Gandhi dynasty; another example: Kashmir is all of India's fault, regardless of the reality that was the Kashmiri Hindu Exodus). These are the very same establishments that usually give leeway when it comes to Pakistani, Islamic extremist aggression (i.e., your average "
Let's be nice so we don't come across as Islamophobic") but lambast India over the most irrelevant and unrealistic of things (e.g., see Aup-dada's India-Pak Sparring thread in the Dharmic DIR and the links to various articles therein).