“People never thought that we would survive in this country because we were from a more agrarian background,” Vang said.

They had very different visions, one of an agrarian caste nation and the other an industrial power based on class, theoretically open to all races or castes.

That’s devastating for these largely agrarian countries, where farmers rely entirely on the rains.

But his coalition, which ranges from the left to agrarian conservatives, is split over how far to liberalise the law.

That threat is existential and highly documented: namely, the digital revolution has done to the analog world of art, media and communication what the industrial revolution did to agrarian and handicraft economies a century before.