Come the Plague.
Most of the "upper class" no longer lived in daily constant heat. The heat that Kipling spoke of so luridly about India. India had discovered air conditioning in the 1990s and taken to it with abandon. At least if you could afford the enormous electric bills.
But.
Nice cool air-conditioned offices meant nice places for H5N1 to hang out for a bit longer. Yes, the "upper class" had gotten vaccinated. Most of the strains that hit India were mutated binding sites.
The upper class of Indian society got hit nearly as hard as the very poor. It wiped out whole families that were proud of the fact they could trace their ancestors back five thousand years.
It also took out about 30% of India's college graduates. Which was bad. But it tended to take out the ones with degrees in "English" and "Literature" and "Marketing" and "Social Finance."
The less well paid "Engineers" and "Mathematicians" and such like had a much lower death rate since they tended to spend less time in air-conditioned environments.
Before the Plague, despite all the changes, India was a fairly sharp financial and social pyramid. That is never good for a society.
After the Plague the tip had gotten sliced and a big chunk of the base had gotten sliced. That made it a much more functional country than before.
Oh, it was a maelstrom at first. Everywhere was. But it recovered faster than most of the rest of the world (including us). Well, there were still "issues" even when they were shipping us grain. "Restive local populations." (Read Moslems.) A nutball in Pakistan had seized that country's nukes. Various other "issues." (Including an abortive invasion by a Chinese general that never really amounted to much.)
But India was, and is, a comer. Are they ever going to be a "super-power" to rival the age of Pax Americana? Well, when they do send "blue water" task forces over to play with the Navy, they still end up towing some ships home and often cancelling part way through. Nor can they field a supercarrier to save their ass. They still can't get what is called in the military "systemology."
But they're a comer. And, hell, we're not exactly out of the play-pen.
But I'm getting ahead of myself again.
Thing is, India was doing better than the U.S. in 2021. Part of that was they didn't have an idiot like The Bitch in charge. Part was environmental. But they were definitely doing better than us.
However, they were also friends. It's not only okay, it's a good thing, when friends are strong. They were strong friends in our hour of need and I'm glad we're on such good relations. Hell, I helped to make some of them, I've got a vested interest. But I digress, again.
I'm basically avoiding talking about Detroit.
The economy hadn't started booming by any stretch, but people were "cautiously optimistic." Coming out of the Great Depression had required WWII. Coming out of the effects of the Plague only required a stable business environment. People wanted to get back to work and there was work to be done. It's just that nobody wanted to invest in anything when they couldn't be sure the government wouldn't seize it.
But there was another problem. The cities.
Many of the cities, especially in "red" states, were back up and functioning at some moderate level. They were, at least, as secure as they'd been pre-Plague. (Some more so since people were less forgiving of criminals. A lot of the stupid had been beaten out of the surviving tofu-eaters. And unless it was a religious thing, they were all willing to eat meat if it was available.) Red states had eventually sent in their own "security forces" to reestablish order.
However, there were some cities that remained free-fire zones. Where gangs or even whole small organized "governments" held power that refused to recognize the authority of the feds or the states. Generally, those hadn't voted. You had to be under state and federal authority to vote. If you weren't, you didn't vote. Most of them were functional dictatorships, or de jure dictatorships, anyway.
The list of cities that were definitely functional city-states is small. Chicago, Boston, Hartford, Newark and most especially Detroit. There was a list of others where order had broken down and never been reestablished. But that's different from "we have order, and we are the order."
Detroit was a very special case. It was . . . touchy. It shouldn't have been but it had a number of "political correctness" factors associated with it.
The group that had taken over Detroit was the "Islamic Caliphate of the 9/11 Martyrs." Now, right there most people like me were thinking "There's no better group to take out."
Problem was . . . Warrick and the MSM had treated the IC9M with kid gloves. Why?
The leader of the IC9M was Mullah Ali . . . sigh, here goes, don't get pissed if I screw it up . . .
Mullah Ali Al-Kirbi Aqal ibn abu Meiri Al-Haj Amani El-Haddi abu Saleh Al-Ahad ibn Mohammed Al-Rashid Al-Kuwukji abu Kahdra Al-Wohoush Akim ibn Tamud ibn Bakdash Abu Saeb.
I had, as part of a lot of briefings, an explanation in detail of his name. I cannot for the life of me recall any of it.
Call him Mullah Ali or Caliph Ali as he styled himself. I don't give a shit. I called him "burrhead."
Okay, yes, that's a racist comment. Caliph Ali would make Martin Luther King racist.
Somehow Kuwazi Jones, aka half a dozen names ending in Mullah Ali, former drug dealer, armed robber and rapist, had become the darling of the media and what was left of the tofu-eater set. He had "established order" in Detroit and was "working for the poor and oppressed peoples of color of the degenerate and oppressing" United States by bringing a "new order" of "equality and enlightenment."
He was, I'll admit, photogenic and charismatic. He was very good on camera. He was well-spoken and could deliver a good line. He knew all the liberal mantras to spout.
But somehow the refugees that made it out of Detroit with tales of horror never got as much air-time.
And Warrick had treated him like fucking God. He could do no wrong. Getting food shipments to the "established government" in Detroit had been a high priority. Whenever the Army tried to balk, somebody got canned.
Since Caliph Ali was very good about not shooting at the troops, as long as they dropped off the shipments at the edge of his territory, the Army geeked. They didn't like it, but they geeked.
Problem being, we also saw the intelligence coming out of Detroit. We knew that life in the "Caliphate" was, well, life in a Caliphate. Which meant hell for values of hell. Worse than most Caliphates, really, because Mullah Ali was one fucked up psychopath.
Right-wing radio had long had Detroit as one of its underlying themes of how fucked up Warrick was. Carson knew about the conditions, he thought, from that. When he saw the real conditions in intel reports, he was said to have nearly thrown up.
The problem being, well, the story that everyone had gotten for going on two years was that Detroit was a "model of modern good governance in a multicultural environment."
Just rolling into Detroit and hanging every fucking hardcore would have thrown everyone for a loop. Sure, he had overthrown established order and governance. But for most people in 2021, that wasn't good enough. Here was an African-American spokesperson who had "saved the people of Detroit."
The other cities that were "city-states" all had similar "image issues." To cover for Warrick, the news media had had to avoid finding anything wrong with dictators holding American cities. Since they'd practiced for years finding nothing wrong with Fidel Castro, they were very good at it. They'd made people look as if they enjoyed the chains. Hell, there were people who wanted to go to Detroit. It sounded like paradise.