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Filuwaúrdjan
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« on: April 26, 2009, 01:18:21 PM »

Legacy of the Raj

Mihar Bose, 21st April in The Staggers


At one point during the recent general election campaign in India, the leader of the BJP opposition, L K Advani, accused the prime minister, Manmohan Singh, of being “weak”. Singh and his colleagues reacted with fury. This was an abusive term, they said, that insulted both the office of the prime minister and the country itself. Not to be outdone, Advani reacted by claiming he was “hurt” by the attacks on his record, and for good measure then failed to attend an all-party dinner in honour of the departing speaker of the Indian parliament.

Such exchanges suggest that levels of debate in the Indian political class are not particularly elevated. But to be fair to the participants, they have not been helped by the historical inheritance the new state received at its birth. It may be hard to credit now, as 700 million voters go to the polls in the world’s biggest elections, but back in the 1940s the wise men of the British Raj predicted that while Pakistan would prosper, India would soon be Balkanised. Pakistan, it was thought, would become a vibrant Muslim state, a bulwark against Soviet communism. India’s predominantly Hindu population, however, was presumed to be a source of weakness and instability.

Nobody expressed this view more forcefully than Lieutenant-General Sir Francis Tucker who, as General Officer Commanding of the British Indian Eastern Command, had been in charge of large parts of the country. His memoirs, While Memory Serves, published in 1950, the year India became a republic, reflected the view of many of the departing British.

Hindu India was entering its most difficult phase of its whole existence. Its religion, which is to a great extent superstition and formalism, is breaking down. If the precedents of history mean anything . . . then we may well expect, in the material world of today, that a material philosophy such as Communism will fill the void left by the Hindu religion.

Tucker was hardly alone among Raj officials. By then, it was almost an orthodoxy to believe that Hinduism was, if not an evil force, at least spent and worthless. Islam, on the other hand, was a religion the west could understand and with whose political leaders it could do business.

Rudyard Kipling, the great chronicler of the Raj, had long made clear his fondness for Muslims and his distrust of Hindus. He was appalled by the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, the two great Hindu classics, and repulsed by the jumble of the faith’s beliefs. In contrast, Kipling claimed that he had never met an Englishman who hated Islam and its people, for “where there are Muslims there is a comprehensive civilisation”.

The British had seized power in the subcontinent mainly from Muslim rulers, and the crushing of the 1857 revolt, after which the last Mughal emperor was removed, put paid to any chance of Muslim revival. By the beginning of the 20th century, however, the Muslims had become the allies of the Raj as it struggled to quell the agitation for freedom led by the Indian National Congress. The Raj encouraged the formation of the Muslim League and determinedly portrayed the INC as a Hindu party, despite its constant promotion of its secular credentials and advertisement of its Muslim leaders. (True, the party was mostly made up of Hindus; but as India was overwhelmingly Hindu, this was hardly surprising. The Raj just could not believe that a party made up largely of Hindus could be truly secular.)

Such was the hatred for the Hindus, particularly Brahmins, that the Raj could not be shaken from this fixation – even when the Congress Party had political victories in diehard Muslim provinces, the most remarkable of which was in the North-West Frontier Province. Today, parts of the province (which voted to join Pakistan in 1947) are adopting sharia law, but in the 1930s a secular Muslim movement had grown up there, led by Ghaffar Khan and his brother Khan Sahib. They joined the Congress Party and won successive election victories from 1937 onwards, defeating established Muslim parties.

But the Raj pictured these secular Muslims as dupes of the wily Hindus. The only consolation for Sir Olaf Caroe, considered to be the supreme Raj expert on the local Pashtuns, was that they would soon come to their senses, “It is hard to see how the Pathan [Pashtun] tradition could reconcile itself for long to Hindu leadership, by so many regarded as smooth-faced, pharisaical and double-dealing . . . How then could he [the Pathan] have associated himself with a party under Indian, even Brahmin, inspiration . . .”

What would the west not give now for such secular Muslims to return to power in this playground of the Taliban and al-Qaeda – even if under the spell of “pharisaical Brahmins”?

Such caricatures of Hindus were not uncommon (featuring, for instance, in Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop), but it was when this view was espoused by major politicians such as Winston Churchill that it became truly dangerous. When Churchill argued vehemently against Indian independence in the 1930s, his fire was directed mainly at the Hindus (in contrast, he praised Muslims, whose valour and virility he admired). As the Second World War neared its close, the British prime minister was so consumed by hatred of the Hindus that he told his private secretary John Colville that he wanted extraordinary destruction visited upon them. Colville’s The Fringes of Power records the extreme nature of his master’s feelings in February 1945, just ­after his return from Yalta:

"The PM said the Hindus were a foul race “protected by their mere pullulation from the doom that is due” and he wished Bert [Bomber] Harris could send some of his surplus bombers to destroy them."

Clement Attlee, who came to power within months, did not share Churchill’s Hindu-phobia. There were also historic ties between Labour and Congress. Yet his government nevertheless agreed that a separate Pakistan was vital to Britain’s global interests. By early 1947, British policymakers realised they had to withdraw from the subcontinent, but still wanted a military presence there: to protect Britain’s position in the century-long Great Game with Russia, and to protect the sea routes to Arabian oil wells. Partition, the foreign secretary Ernest Bevin told the Labour party conference that year, “would help to consolidate Britain in the Middle East”.

British strategy was also shaped by Pakistan’s wish to remain in the Commonwealth, while India wanted out. By the end of the war, what little love there had been between the Raj and Congress had long evaporated, as most of the party’s leaders spent much of the war inside British jails. They had refused to co-operate with the war effort unless their masters promised freedom when peace came. Regarding this as blackmail during the empire’s “darkest hour”, the British made mass arrests and banned the party. In such circumstances, it was understandable that the pleas of both Churchill and Attlee that the king-emperor should remain as head of state were ignored.

British hopes for the country that emerged were not high. Just before he left India in 1943, the Viceroy of India, Lord Linlithgow, forecast that it would take Indians at least 50 years to learn how to practise parliamentary democracy. Even then, he felt it would require much tutoring from the British and other Europeans, whom he thought could be tempted to the subcontinent by the arrival of air-conditioning. (Once they didn’t have to worry about the heat, he reasoned, some six million Britons could be persuaded to settle in India to take on the task.)

That democracy took root so quickly and successfully owes much to Jawaharlal Nehru, the first and longest-serving prime minister of India, who was in office from 1947-64. So well did the system embed itself that when his daughter Indira imposed emergency rule in the 1970s – the closest India has come to a dictatorship – it was ended not by tanks rolling down the streets of Delhi, but through the ballot box. That election showed, as have many since then, that ordinary Indians, many of them poor and illiterate, value their vote (perhaps even more than the rich, who feel money can buy them influence). They queue for hours in the baking heat to cast their ballots.

Before the Second World War, the Raj’s relationship with India was like a father promising to allow his stepson to come into his inheritance at some unspecified date in the distant future. It never quite believed that there could ever be a time that this brown person would be capable of managing the estate.

This general election campaign may have exposed just how fractured the political classes are today, with numerous caste, religious and communal groups competing and doing deals with each other. The Congress-led United Progressive Alliance may have completed its five-year term of office, but many of its allies, including cabinet ministers, are opposing Congress at local level. Some of them make no secret that they aspire to the prime ministership, and all of them are aware that, as the Times of India put it: “Opportunistic post-poll equations will be more important than the pre-poll pitch of the parties.”

Yet the patchwork quilt that is made up of British India and the hundreds of princely states united and survived, and still manages to do so despite all the challenges that could have led to that Balkanisation predicted by old Raj hands. The likes of Tucker, Churchill and Kipling were proved wrong: constructing the new nation of India was not, after all, beyond the Indians.

http://www.newstatesman.com/asia/2009/04/india-british-raj-pakistan
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Gustaf
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« Reply #1 on: May 03, 2009, 06:52:58 PM »

To play a little bit of Devil's Advocate I'd point out 3 things:

1. It took quite a while for India to have a change of power.
2. Pakistan WAS more loyal to the West during the Cold War.
3. India didn't pursue sensible economic policies until fairly recently.

The rest doesn't really come as much of a surprise. Racism is much more recent phenomenon than we'd like to think.
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Sbane
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« Reply #2 on: May 03, 2009, 09:30:44 PM »
« Edited: May 03, 2009, 09:32:48 PM by sbane »

To play a little bit of Devil's Advocate I'd point out 3 things:

1. It took quite a while for India to have a change of power.
2. Pakistan WAS more loyal to the West during the Cold War.
3. India didn't pursue sensible economic policies until fairly recently.

The rest doesn't really come as much of a surprise. Racism is much more recent phenomenon than we'd like to think.

Could you expand on your first point? Was the transfer of power in India more tumultuous than in Pakistan? And wasn't all the chaos a result of Britain agreeing to partition?

You are absolutely right about your third point. But you should consider the way the Indian polity back then viewed capitalism. They conflated capitalism with colonialism and didn't want to be too close to the US as they felt they only wanted to replace Britain as the overlords of India. And then there were all the arcane rules that shackled businesses in chains. Yet it is interesting that Pakistan hasn't grown any more rapidly than India even while being the friends of the capitalist west.

Also if the British hated the Brahmins so much, why didn't they actually try to curtail their power and try to enpower the lower classes by educating them and such? The British tried to implement education for the masses but they were only able to raise the literacy rate from about 5% in the late nineteenth century to 12% in 1947. Today India's literacy rate is 66% and among those under 24 its 82%. Of course the reality is that the British didn't care how the lower castes were doing, rather they just used their crusade against the Brahmins to gain moral high ground for their own immoral actions. They didn't do anything to stop the Zamindari system, rather they extended it into tribal territory and thus destroyed the autonomy they enjoyed through antiquity and even under the Mughals.

And what do you mean that racism is a recent phenomenon? Do you think the British weren't racist towards Indians and Hindus in particular, including even the lower castes.
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minionofmidas
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« Reply #3 on: May 05, 2009, 01:09:42 PM »

That would be India's bureaucracy and lack of democratic structures at the bottom where it matters.

And the fact that India is a single country at all.

(will read article now)
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« Reply #4 on: May 05, 2009, 05:16:35 PM »

To play a little bit of Devil's Advocate I'd point out 3 things:

1. It took quite a while for India to have a change of power.
2. Pakistan WAS more loyal to the West during the Cold War.
3. India didn't pursue sensible economic policies until fairly recently.

The rest doesn't really come as much of a surprise. Racism is much more recent phenomenon than we'd like to think.

Could you expand on your first point? Was the transfer of power in India more tumultuous than in Pakistan? And wasn't all the chaos a result of Britain agreeing to partition?

You are absolutely right about your third point. But you should consider the way the Indian polity back then viewed capitalism. They conflated capitalism with colonialism and didn't want to be too close to the US as they felt they only wanted to replace Britain as the overlords of India. And then there were all the arcane rules that shackled businesses in chains. Yet it is interesting that Pakistan hasn't grown any more rapidly than India even while being the friends of the capitalist west.

Also if the British hated the Brahmins so much, why didn't they actually try to curtail their power and try to enpower the lower classes by educating them and such? The British tried to implement education for the masses but they were only able to raise the literacy rate from about 5% in the late nineteenth century to 12% in 1947. Today India's literacy rate is 66% and among those under 24 its 82%. Of course the reality is that the British didn't care how the lower castes were doing, rather they just used their crusade against the Brahmins to gain moral high ground for their own immoral actions. They didn't do anything to stop the Zamindari system, rather they extended it into tribal territory and thus destroyed the autonomy they enjoyed through antiquity and even under the Mughals.

And what do you mean that racism is a recent phenomenon? Do you think the British weren't racist towards Indians and Hindus in particular, including even the lower castes.

My first point was simply that India has been dominated by a party (or one might say a dynasty) for most of the post-war era. That isn't really different from Sweden, as far as party goes, of course. Still, the article sounds as if India is a model democracy. To me, a model democracy wouldn't have three generations of the same family holding the premiership and the same party being in power for too long.

Being friends of the west of course isn't the same as pursuing western policies. I'm obviously not making the ridiculous claim that Pakistan is in any way better than India.

I'm not sure whether the paragraph about brahmins has anything to do with me. Regardless, I'm not contesting it.

My third point was probably a bit badly worded. What I meant is that racism is a recent phenomenon in contrast to being a thing of the past, not that it emerged recently. I realized that in typing it but couldn't be bothered to change it then. Smiley
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minionofmidas
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« Reply #5 on: May 06, 2009, 10:27:16 AM »

I feel the urge to quote at length from the introduction to the first British Census of India, from 1871.

"Nationality, Language and Caste

Although nearly the whole of the inhabitants of British India can be classed under one or other of the two prevailing religions [the chapter on Religion is just above], it will be found that, when arranged according to nationality or language, they present a very much greater variety. The population of the single province of Bengal contains many races and tribes. Bengal proper, and some of the adjacent districts, are inhabited by the Bengali, living amid a network of rivers and morasses, nourished on a watery rice diet, looking weak and puny, but able to bear much exposure, timid and slothful, but sharp-witted, industrious, and fond of sedentary employment; the Bengali-speaking people number some 37 millions. Allied to these, both in language and descent, even more timid, conservative, bigoted, and priest-ridden, are the Ooryas, or people of Orissa, numbering four millions. The Assamese, of whom there are less than two millions, speak a language very similar to Bengali, but have a large mixture of Indo-Chinese blood; they are proud and indolent, and addicted to the use of opium. The Hindustanis of Behar are hardier and more manly, have a less enervating climate, and use a more substantial diet; their language is Hindee, and, they number(in Bengal) some 20 millions. Besides these, there are the Sonthals, koles, Gonds, and other aboriginal tribes in Chota Nagpoor, the wild mountain races in Julpigoree, the inhabitants of the Garo, Cossya, Jyntea, and Naga Hills, and those in Tipperah and the Chittagong Hill tracts. (...)

Great pains have been taken by the writers of the several reports in the classifi- cation of the population according to caste. The result, however, is not satisfactory, owing partly to the intrinsic difficulties of the subject, and partly to the absence of a uniform plan of classification, each writer adopting that which seemed to him best suited for the purpose. It has, indeed, been found possible to put together a few particulars which are mentioned in 'nearly all the reports; but these give little idea of the mass of detailed information which has been collected under this heading.

The title of Hindoo, in the category of nationality and caste, includes many persons of Hindoo origin, who are no longer Hindoos by religion, such as Native Christians, or who have branched off from its stricter use, such as Buddhists [the vast majority of the Buddhists enumerated in this census are Burmese, so wtf?]and Jains, or whose actual religion is unknown, such as the aboriginal tribes. In this wider view of the Hindoo people, we find 149 mil- lions so designated, of whom about 10 1/8 millions are Brahmins, and 5 5/8 millions Kshatriyas and Rajpoots [Obviously the British did not consider Jat, Yadav, or any other numerically large, locally dominant peasant caste with at least a shred of military tradition to be Kshatriyas, as the custom is now. Otherwise the figures would probably be closer ten times that. Actually, wording elsewhere in the report implies that this is simply the no. of Rajputs, presumably including Thakurs.]; 105½ millions belong to other castes; of nearly 790,000 the caste is unspecified; 8¾ millions are out-castes, or re- cognize no caste (as the Bud- dhists) ; not quite 600,000 are Christians.
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minionofmidas
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« Reply #6 on: May 06, 2009, 10:31:04 AM »

And, if correct, an interesting piece of etymology:
"The fishing and hunting castes, named Sembadaven, include 972,000 persons in the Madras Presidency, but, notwithstanding the long line of sea coast, they are most numerous in the inland districts of Bellary and Kurnool; it is a subdivision of this class, the Boees, which is so largely employed in domestic service, that the name, corrupted into the English "boy," has become the usual term for a servant in the Madras Presidency."
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« Reply #7 on: May 06, 2009, 07:41:59 PM »

To play a little bit of Devil's Advocate I'd point out 3 things:

1. It took quite a while for India to have a change of power.
2. Pakistan WAS more loyal to the West during the Cold War.
3. India didn't pursue sensible economic policies until fairly recently.

The rest doesn't really come as much of a surprise. Racism is much more recent phenomenon than we'd like to think.

Could you expand on your first point? Was the transfer of power in India more tumultuous than in Pakistan? And wasn't all the chaos a result of Britain agreeing to partition?

You are absolutely right about your third point. But you should consider the way the Indian polity back then viewed capitalism. They conflated capitalism with colonialism and didn't want to be too close to the US as they felt they only wanted to replace Britain as the overlords of India. And then there were all the arcane rules that shackled businesses in chains. Yet it is interesting that Pakistan hasn't grown any more rapidly than India even while being the friends of the capitalist west.

Also if the British hated the Brahmins so much, why didn't they actually try to curtail their power and try to enpower the lower classes by educating them and such? The British tried to implement education for the masses but they were only able to raise the literacy rate from about 5% in the late nineteenth century to 12% in 1947. Today India's literacy rate is 66% and among those under 24 its 82%. Of course the reality is that the British didn't care how the lower castes were doing, rather they just used their crusade against the Brahmins to gain moral high ground for their own immoral actions. They didn't do anything to stop the Zamindari system, rather they extended it into tribal territory and thus destroyed the autonomy they enjoyed through antiquity and even under the Mughals.

And what do you mean that racism is a recent phenomenon? Do you think the British weren't racist towards Indians and Hindus in particular, including even the lower castes.

My first point was simply that India has been dominated by a party (or one might say a dynasty) for most of the post-war era. That isn't really different from Sweden, as far as party goes, of course. Still, the article sounds as if India is a model democracy. To me, a model democracy wouldn't have three generations of the same family holding the premiership and the same party being in power for too long.

Being friends of the west of course isn't the same as pursuing western policies. I'm obviously not making the ridiculous claim that Pakistan is in any way better than India.

I'm not sure whether the paragraph about brahmins has anything to do with me. Regardless, I'm not contesting it.

My third point was probably a bit badly worded. What I meant is that racism is a recent phenomenon in contrast to being a thing of the past, not that it emerged recently. I realized that in typing it but couldn't be bothered to change it then. Smiley

Yeah I thought you might have been talking about the one party rule that existed for a long time in India. It is very much possible, even probable, that it is one of the reasons development took so long. Of course India has always had multiple parties, but none had the national reach of the Congress and could never dream about forming the government. That was changed by the "emergency" declared by Indira. It made a lot of people realize a check against the Congress is required and it also served to unify the opposition somewhat.

Also the rant about Brahmins was a response to the article itself, not you. Should have made that clearer.
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Sbane
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« Reply #8 on: May 06, 2009, 08:09:02 PM »
« Edited: May 06, 2009, 08:35:08 PM by sbane »

I feel the urge to quote at length from the introduction to the first British Census of India, from 1871.

"Nationality, Language and Caste

Although nearly the whole of the inhabitants of British India can be classed under one or other of the two prevailing religions [the chapter on Religion is just above], it will be found that, when arranged according to nationality or language, they present a very much greater variety. The population of the single province of Bengal contains many races and tribes. Bengal proper, and some of the adjacent districts, are inhabited by the Bengali, living amid a network of rivers and morasses, nourished on a watery rice diet, looking weak and puny, but able to bear much exposure, timid and slothful, but sharp-witted, industrious, and fond of sedentary employment; the Bengali-speaking people number some 37 millions. Allied to these, both in language and descent, even more timid, conservative, bigoted, and priest-ridden, are the Ooryas, or people of Orissa, numbering four millions. The Assamese, of whom there are less than two millions, speak a language very similar to Bengali, but have a large mixture of Indo-Chinese blood; they are proud and indolent, and addicted to the use of opium. The Hindustanis of Behar are hardier and more manly, have a less enervating climate, and use a more substantial diet; their language is Hindee, and, they number(in Bengal) some 20 millions. Besides these, there are the Sonthals, koles, Gonds, and other aboriginal tribes in Chota Nagpoor, the wild mountain races in Julpigoree, the inhabitants of the Garo, Cossya, Jyntea, and Naga Hills, and those in Tipperah and the Chittagong Hill tracts. (...)

Great pains have been taken by the writers of the several reports in the classifi- cation of the population according to caste. The result, however, is not satisfactory, owing partly to the intrinsic difficulties of the subject, and partly to the absence of a uniform plan of classification, each writer adopting that which seemed to him best suited for the purpose. It has, indeed, been found possible to put together a few particulars which are mentioned in 'nearly all the reports; but these give little idea of the mass of detailed information which has been collected under this heading.

The title of Hindoo, in the category of nationality and caste, includes many persons of Hindoo origin, who are no longer Hindoos by religion, such as Native Christians, or who have branched off from its stricter use, such as Buddhists [the vast majority of the Buddhists enumerated in this census are Burmese, so wtf?]and Jains, or whose actual religion is unknown, such as the aboriginal tribes. In this wider view of the Hindoo people, we find 149 mil- lions so designated, of whom about 10 1/8 millions are Brahmins, and 5 5/8 millions Kshatriyas and Rajpoots [Obviously the British did not consider Jat, Yadav, or any other numerically large, locally dominant peasant caste with at least a shred of military tradition to be Kshatriyas, as the custom is now. Otherwise the figures would probably be closer ten times that. Actually, wording elsewhere in the report implies that this is simply the no. of Rajputs, presumably including Thakurs.]; 105½ millions belong to other castes; of nearly 790,000 the caste is unspecified; 8¾ millions are out-castes, or re- cognize no caste (as the Bud- dhists) ; not quite 600,000 are Christians.


Actually there is evidence that a lot of traditions that are unequivocally "Hindu" today are actually adopted from these tribes. The worship of gods like Shiva, Durga, Kali, perhaps even Vishnu and Rama, probably came from the tribal population. The Ramayana was actually written by a tribal. In addition some languages of India have been influenced heavily by tribal languages, the most prominent example being Bengali and its similarities to the Santal language. And considering that religious traditions in India change from region to region, including aboriginal religions as "Hindu" makes a lot of sense.

Also many tribes have a heirarchy within them similar to the caste system, bringing up the question as to where the caste system originated. There might be several different sources but I do think an indigenous system of class certainly existed in India before the arrival of the Aryans. IIRC the Namboothiris(Brahmins) of Kerala follow traditions that are much different from the Brahmins of the north. There is also no evidence of Brahmins moving to Kerala, like there is with Bengali Brahmins. Are they just "converts" of upper class tribals? Who knows. I will also note that the Namboothiris were one of the strictest practitioners of untouchability and all that junk.
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k-onmmunist
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« Reply #9 on: August 11, 2009, 03:41:33 PM »

I wouldn't speak too soon. Without Pakistan to hate, I doubt the Indian Union will last long.
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« Reply #10 on: August 12, 2009, 12:51:00 AM »

I wouldn't speak too soon. Without Pakistan to hate, I doubt the Indian Union will last long.

So Pakistan doesn't exist anymore? Did I miss something?
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k-onmmunist
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« Reply #11 on: August 12, 2009, 04:54:37 PM »

I wouldn't speak too soon. Without Pakistan to hate, I doubt the Indian Union will last long.

Go away.
[/quote]

Haha. You lose.
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Filuwaúrdjan
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« Reply #12 on: August 13, 2009, 11:48:14 AM »

Ahem...

Board for high-quality discussions of complex issues
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k-onmmunist
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« Reply #13 on: August 13, 2009, 03:14:59 PM »

Ahem...

Board for high-quality discussions of complex issues

Tell him that, I was making a valid point. The people of the different Indian cultures are about as separate as those of Europe.
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« Reply #14 on: August 13, 2009, 04:12:33 PM »

Sorry, Al. Embarrassed

Ahem...

Board for high-quality discussions of complex issues

Tell him that, I was making a valid point. The people of the different Indian cultures are about as separate as those of Europe.

Anyway, India exists in and of itself, not as opposition to anything else. Every group in India stands for India of some sort, be it an inclusive India or an exclusive India. Much of this is to the credit of the monarchy, but there are other factors of all. The most important is the plain fact that to a venal Malayala, there are more opportunities in united India than there would be in independent Kerala.
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« Reply #15 on: November 16, 2009, 10:28:17 AM »

>My first point was simply that India has been dominated by a party (or one might say a >dynasty) for most of the post-war era. That isn't really different from Sweden, as far as party >goes, of course. Still, the article sounds as if India is a model democracy. To me, a model >democracy wouldn't have three generations of the same family holding the premiership and >the same party being in power for too long.

India's parliment is the host of about 400 different political parties.  The fact that
the Congress Party has been in power for so longb since Independence is the
result of a number of factors.  First, with that many political parties, no majority
party will get into power without constructing a massive, broad-based coalition,
as is the case in most Parlimentary systems.  The IC has been the most successful
at building such coalitions, in a manner similar to the Liberal Democratic Party
in Japan, which only lost recently.  Second, the Indian populous, an overstated but
nonetheless vast majority of which are Hindu, was inclined to dance with the
one that brung 'em for many decades because it was effectively, in their eyes,
an IC coalition that brought them independence.  Thirdly, I would argue that
the resurgence of the IC party under Manmohan Singh has been overall quite
good for India, especially in view of the fact that the ten year reign of the BJP
was characterized by increased communal hostilities all over the country that
the BJP's allies often actively instigated, as well as the pursuit of the nuclear
arms race with Pakistan.  India does seem, on the whole, to be a rather
vibrant democratic state.
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