Rajenda
What can be the point here.
I see from Wiki that the Maurya India is close to
today's India
This was followed by Invasions by Greeks, Sakas etc
when it again got disintegrated.
>>>That is because they historians and thought
leaders.
This is a good topic one can debate long.
I think they have their points.
Barua
----- Original Message -----
From: "Rajib Das" <rajibdas at yahoo.com>
To: "A Mailing list for people interested in Assam
from around the world"
<assam at assamnet.org>; <umesh.sh05 at
post.harvard.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, September 26, 2007 8:34 AM
Subject: Re: [Assam] Book review : India After Gandhi-
Bengal democracy
I fail to understand why SOME historians (and thought
leaders) continue to insist that India is a country
that was never meant to be.
The exact political boundaries are new (as in 60 years
old) - but there is enough political thought through
the course of history - before the Brits came in or
even before the Islamic invasion of India - to warrant
the idea of India.
--- Rajen & Ajanta Barua <barua25 at hotmail.com>
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 <barua25 at hotmail.com>
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 at 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
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