Rajen-da,
The dictatorship is too much of a term - it depends where you are in India -
those in metros definitely are having full democracy and as you go into
interiors where law and literacy are remote it becomes dictatorhip by the
elected.
See the video of Indira's India of 1984 - Sikh Holocaust
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MasMHq7oUs&NR=1
Umesh
Rajen & Ajanta Barua <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: Umesh:
India is best described as 'an elected dictatorship'.
Rajenda
----- Original Message -----
From: umesh sharma
To: A Mailing list for people interested in Assam from around the world
Sent: Tuesday, September 25, 2007 11:52 PM
Subject: Re: [Assam] Book review : India After Gandhi- Bengal democracy
Rajen-da
Good example of India-Shining rhetoric.
But just becos there is peace (despite armed militancy in 25% of India's
districts- NE, Kashmir, Bihar, Central India, LTTE South India etc etc) and
not many are dying of starvation and voting not by reading election manifestos
but by recognizing cartoons (election symbols) of political parties .
Even democratically elected communist govt (an anamoly) of West Bengal is
allegedly in power for past 25 years non-stop since a nexus prevents
anyone from voting against the "party" or else face ex-communication a-la
erstwhile Pope's rule in Europe in medieval times -as per a Bengali
researcher .
But ofcourse noone can deny that despite is shortcomings the India that is
Bharat is growing - despite spoofs like Hollywood's "Borat" movie (Bharat
??) from Kazakhstan (Rajasthan???)
Umesh
Rajen & Ajanta Barua <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: Following
may be added from another review about the book:
India is the country that was never expected to ever be a country. In
the late 19th century, Sir John Strachey, a senior British official,
grandly opined that the territory's diverse states simply could not
possess any sort of unity, physical, political, social or religious.
Strachey, clearly, was wrong: India today is a unified entity and a rising
global power. Even so, it continues to defy explanation. India's existence,
says Guha, an internationally known scholar (Environmentalism: A Global
History), has also been an anomaly for academic political science,
according to whose axioms cultural heterogeneity and poverty do not make a
nation, still less a democratic one. Yet India continues to exist. Guha's
aim in this startlingly ambitious political, cultural and social survey is
to explain why and how. He cheerfully concludes that India's continuing
existence results from its unique diversity and its refusal
to be pigeonholed into such conventional political models as
Anglo-American liberalism, French republicanism, atheistic communism or
Islamist theocracy. India is proudly sui generis, and with August 15,
2007, being the 60th anniversary of Indian independence, Guha's
magisterial history of India since that day comes not a moment too soon.
32 pages of b&w illus., 8 maps.
----- Original Message -----
From: Rajen & Ajanta Barua
To: assam@assamnet.org
Sent: Tuesday, September 25, 2007 10:42 PM
Subject: [Assam] Book review : India After Gandhi
Good review of a grand 900 page book on India
recently published:
India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy
by Ramachandra Guha
>From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
Reviewed by George Perkovich
A toast to India on its 60th birthday: No country has more
heroically pursued the promise of democracy. Against the odds of
staggering poverty, conflicting religious passions, linguistic
pluralism, regional separatism, caste injustice and natural resource
scarcity, Indians have lifted themselves largely by their own sandal
straps to become a stalwart democracy and emerging global power. India
has risen with epic drama -- a nonviolent struggle for independence
followed by mass mayhem and bloodletting, dynastic succession and
assassination, military victory and defeat, starvation succeeded by
green revolution, political leaders as saints, sinners and sexual
ascetics. And yet, the Indian story rarely has been told and is
practically unknown to Americans.
India After Gandhi masterfully fills the void. India needs a wise and
judicious narrator to convey its scale, diversity and chaos -- to describe
the whirlwind without getting lost in it. It needs a biographer neither
besotted by love nor enraged by disappointment. Ramachandra Guha, a
historian who has taught at Stanford and Yale and now lives in Bangalore,
has given democratic India the rich, well-paced history it deserves.
Much will be new to American readers. Large-scale conflicts in
India's northeast between tribal groups and the center have been as
enduring, and in some ways as important, as the more familiar violence
in Kashmir. The framing of India's constitution from 1946 through 1949
should induce awe, especially in light of Iraq's post-Saddam experience.
In the midst of Hindu-Muslim bloodshed, a flood of 8 million
refugees, starvation, and other profound conflicts, Indian representatives
worked out constitutional provisions to protect minorities, keep religion
out of state power, correct thousands of years of caste discrimination and
redistribute power and wealth accumulated by still-regnant princely
states. This was done with no external guidance or pressure. The drafting
committee was chaired by an "untouchable," B.R. Ambedkar -- analogies are
inexact, but imagine if James Madison at the Philadelphia Constitutional
Convention had been a freed slave.
Specialists will quicken over insights from the private papers of
Indira Gandhi's confidant, P.N. Haksar, who gave his papers to Guha. These
documents reveal, among other things, that it was the Soviet Union that
proposed the 1971 treaty of cooperation and friendship between the two
countries, and that suspicion of China motivated both nations more than
was appreciated at the time.
Miniature biographies of grassroots leaders and movements also
enliven Guha's storytelling. Jay Aprakash Narayan -- "JP" -- plays a
leading role. A onetime friend of Nehru who became the bête noir of his
daughter, Indira Gandhi, JP led a massive movement for radical
governmental reform in 1974-75, which moved Indira Gandhi to declare a
national emergency and suspend democracy.
Some themes go under-explored: For example, why has the Indian Army
abstained from interfering in politics, unlike the military in many other
developing countries? And why has India given short shrift to primary
education, even as it has developed technological institutes that rival
M.I.T?
Many chapters begin or end with India's future in doubt. "India is
almost infinitely depressing," Aldous Huxley wrote in 1961, "for there
seems to be no solution to its problems in any way that any of us [in the
West] regard as acceptable." He predicted that "when Nehru goes, the
government will become a military dictatorship." Guha records that "ever
since the country was formed there have also been many Indians who have
seen the survival of India as being on the line, some (the patriots)
speaking or writing in fear, others (the secessionists or revolutionaries)
with anticipation."
Yet, marvelously, India's survival as a democracy seems more assured
than ever. Less clear is the nature of its relationship with America.
Since 2005, the U.S. and Indian governments have moved toward nuclear
cooperation, reversing 30 years of U.S. policy against nuclear assistance
to countries that refuse to sign the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.
Washington clearly views India as a counterbalance to China's
strategic power. But Guha records an important historical parallel.
In 1962, China crossed disputed boundaries in the northwest and
northeast of India. A shocked Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru abandoned
nonalignment and pleaded for emergency U.S. military assistance.
Ambassador John Kenneth Galbraith wrote to President Kennedy: "The only
Asian country which really stands in [China's] way is India and pari passu
the only Western country that is assuming responsibility is the United
States. . . . We should expect to make use of India's political position,
geographical position, political power and manpower or anyhow ask."
Four decades later, another Harvard professor-cum-American ambassador
to India, Robert Blackwill, championed the proposed nuclear deal with
similar reasoning. As different as the presidents they served, Blackwill
and Galbraith were tempted by strategic abstraction and a desire to raise
"their" country -- India -- in American priorities. Yet supplying arms to
India in 1962 did not make India any more deferential to U.S. foreign
policy. Washington will delude itself again if it thinks that nuclear
India will be a pliant instrument in its geostrategy. As long as India is
a democracy, it will go its own way.
To comprehend India's achievement, imagine if Mexico became the 51st
of the United States, followed by Brazil, Argentina and the rest of
Central and South America. Add Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain to give
this union the Sunni-Shia mix of India. The population then represented in
Congress would still be smaller and less diverse linguistically,
religiously, culturally and economically than India's. If such a state
could democratically manage the interests and conflicts swirling within
it, and not threaten its neighbors, the world should ask little else from
it. If we were such a state, we would feel that our humane progress
contributes so much to global well-being that smaller, richer,
easier-to-manage states should not presume to tell us what to do.
Sixty years after Gandhi, India has earned greater appreciation than
we give it.
---------------------------------
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Umesh Sharma
Washington D.C.
1-202-215-4328 [Cell]
Ed.M. - International Education Policy
Harvard Graduate School of Education,
Harvard University,
Class of 2005
http://www.uknow.gse.harvard.edu/index.html (Edu info)
http://hbswk.hbs.edu/ (Management Info)
www.gse.harvard.edu/iep (where the above 2 are used )
http://jaipurschool.bihu.in/
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_______________________________________________
assam mailing list
assam@assamnet.org
http://assamnet.org/mailman/listinfo/assam_assamnet.org
Umesh Sharma
Washington D.C.
1-202-215-4328 [Cell]
Ed.M. - International Education Policy
Harvard Graduate School of Education,
Harvard University,
Class of 2005
http://www.uknow.gse.harvard.edu/index.html (Edu info)
http://hbswk.hbs.edu/ (Management Info)
www.gse.harvard.edu/iep (where the above 2 are used )
http://jaipurschool.bihu.in/
---------------------------------
For ideas on reducing your carbon footprint visit Yahoo! For Good this month._______________________________________________
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