[c. 13,000 words] [End]

The Indian Subcontinent
and the United States:
A Partnership In Waiting

by L. Craig Schoonmaker, Chairman
Expansionist Party of the United States
Newark, New Jersey
April 29, 2001

[Some things have changed since this piece was written in early 2001, but not much. The economic relationship between India and the United States is more developed, and Americans have become aware of India as a major site of offshore outsourcing of some of the best non-managerial jobs our technological economy offers. That awareness has brought with it considerable resentment of Indian competition. It has not, however, produced any sense of camaraderie with Indians nor interest in the culture and potential contributions to Western civilization that India might afford. We were, if anything, more aware of India as a possible source of inputs to Western culture during the heyday of the Beatles, when Ravi Shankar influenced their music. (Shankar himself lived for a while in California. His daughter Anoushka graduated from high school in Encinitas, and the Ravi Shankar Foundation is headquartered there, tho it seems that Ravi himself resides in India. Internet sources aren't clear on where, exactly, he might live.) This page's base observations on the culture of "the Indias" hold, as do, alas, observations about the intercommunal violence that mars the Indias. If anything, the situation became worse when Pakistan successfully tested nuclear weapons and became a full-fledged member of the nuclear club.]

The Indian Subcontinent is a geographical and cultural area comprising the nations of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan, and, in its largest cultural sense, Afghanistan as well. The Indus Valley civilization that shaped the Subcontinent's cultural history is one of the very oldest in the world, and aspects of that civilization have affected every part of the Subcontinent, even tho political entities rarely unified more than a small fraction of its area. It is from "Indus" that both "India" and "Hindu" derive — even tho, today, almost the whole of the Indus Valley falls within Pakistan! Because the geographical boundaries of India's various empires and nations have varied so much from time to time, this presentation speaks to "historic India" in the largest, cultural sense.

Historic India is the birthplace of two major world religions, Hinduism and Buddhism, and a number of minor religions or offshoots of the major religions, like Sikhism and Jainism. Islam came with Mogul conquerors and remains the religion of 422 million people across the Subcontinent. Judaism arrived early, and a small Jewish community remains to this day. Christianity arrived very early in its history, with the Apostle St. Thomas. The tradition is that he arrived in Kerala, southern India, in 52 A.D., long before Christianity reached much of the West. This tradition has won significant scholarly support in recent years. Today there are some 23 million Christians in India, a seemingly respectable number but which, given the immensity of the overall population, is only 2.3 percent of the population. Because of persecutions and the feeling of being out of place, some of India's Christians are leaving India for the West.

Buddhism moved from India outward, and has essentially vanished from its homeland. All these other traditions remain, but most of all Hinduism, which infuses the life of the people and permeates the culture — for good and ill.

Historic India's multifaceted culture is shared among its several constituent countries, embracing foods, music, architecture, sculpture and other arts, fabrics, clothing, and other aspects of people's daily lives. This culture is only slightly known in the West, and the only aspects generally appreciated thus far in the United States are the wonderful cuisine and exotic music.

Decorative grass mat

India has the world's largest film industry, which turns out several films each business day (800 a year), mainly in Mumbai — the new name of what the bulk of the world still knows as "Bombay". The Indian film industry is thus known as "Bollywood", a meld of "Bombay" and "Hollywood". Will it be renamed "Mollywood" now that "Bombay" is "Mumbai"? Probably not. Curiously, the Bollywood Movie Awards 2001 ceremony, featuring stars of the Indian and American film industries, was held not in Bombay / Mumbai, not in Hollywood, but at the Time Nassau Coliseum outside New York City. The next day, ABC World News Sunday had a feature on the event, which remarked that "nearly all Indian movies, even action movies, are musicals". That introduced footage of American action-film star Steven Seagal singing during the ceremonies. ABC says that there are now 6 million South Asians living in the United States, and many of their Americanized children still watch Indian films and, according to one young woman interviewed, think they're "cool". They have a very limited reach among non-Indians in the U.S., however, because of language. If, however, Indian producers start creating English-language Indian musicals, who knows?

The Republic of India ("Bharat") is the largest remnant of former British India, which at one time administratively encompassed not just present-day India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh but also Burma ("Myanmar") and, for some purposes, Sri Lanka (formerly "Ceylon") as well. Together, the nations of South Asia cover almost 2 million square miles and encompass some 1.3 BILLION people, a billion of them in the Republic of India alone.

India is the second-largest English-speaking country on Earth, after only the United States and ahead of the United Kingdom by 20 million speakers. But India has little to do with the rest of the English-speaking world, in large part because the bulk of its population does not speak English or any other international language, but only languages indigenous to India that are spoken nowhere else. India, which is geographically in large part a peninsula, has made itself psychologically an island partly surrounded by land. That must end.

To the extent India cares to relate to any part of the English-speaking world in anything but sports, its aging, British-educated ruling class feels more comfortable with the class-conscious and elitist rulers of Britain than with the rock-and-roll egalitarians of American politics and culture, so have tried to ignore the vital democratic spirit bursting from the United States in favor of the staid, only semi-democratic model of the United Kingdom and its "mother of parliaments".

Britain, however, is a world-history has-been, with little left to give. Its ruling class's notions of right and wrong and instinctive recourse to divide-and-rule politics, have been repudiated by dozens of former colonies around the world, including India and the two smaller countries carved from India by British malice. It is time for India to renounce, in fact and act, the colonizing mischief of its former British overlords, and open itself to the democratizing and liberating influence of the United States.

The U.S.-India relationship is remarkable for its insignificance. The American public pays almost no attention to an enormous country, a billion people and growing, while the Indian ruling class pretends the United States does not exist — or at least should not exist. India's elite plays cricket! in a world that increasingly prefers basketball, baseball, and volleyball, all American games. Of course, different countries have their sports peculiarities. The U.S., for instance, despises professional soccer, a British game that almost all the rest of the world loves. (Canada shares the United States' uninterest in soccer, one of the many similarities between Canada and the United States.)

Emigration from India and the other former British colonies of the Indian subcontinent has for generations been directed primarily to Britain. But times are changing, and there are now many hundreds of thousands of Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, and Sri Lankans living in the United States. Their U.S.-born children are unconditionally American and are growing into adulthood feeling little or no connection to their ancestral lands.

U.S. influence in the Subcontinent may need to pass thru an Indian arch — Americans of Indian descent.

As much as Indians fear the loss of their children's Indian 'soul' (and their peers from other Subcontinent nations fear a comparable loss), the United States should be concerned that instantaneous, total assimilation of Subcontinent children costs the U.S. a host of potential ambassadors and salespeople not just of U.S. goods and services in international commerce but also of U.S. values. Surely it would be easier to recruit young adults fluent from infancy in Hindi, Urdu, Gujurati, Bengali, Sinhalese, etc., than to teach those exotic languages to Americans of Irish, Italian, German, Mexican, or African ancestry. It would as well be easier to sell our message and goods abroad if the salesperson looked like the people he's trying to persuade. Already, the United States is India's largest single trading partner, but that trade relationship could and should be broadened. Perhaps we can move in the direction of a common market or free trade area.

The relationship between India —and indeed all the nations of the Indian subcontinent —and the United States should be much stronger than in fact it is.

Any future relationship must be based on candor. India has felt free to rail against the West. Can it stand some railing-against itself? We'll see.

Indian glass jars. Is India's ego too fragile to take criticism?

India has tried at once to go it alone in the great world and to lead a "Non-Aligned Movement" to find a 'third path' to modernization, between the capitalist and democratic West on the one side and Communist world on the other. What exactly has the Non-Aligned Movement done for the masses in benighted India? Where has that third path led?

By now it should be obvious to everyone that India's past policies have been a monumental failure, that its hauteur in seeing itself as a great power —or even superpower —has done worse than nothing for the bulk of its people. India's space program, nuclear-weapons program, and other vanities have cost billions of dollars that should have gone to community development, education, healthcare, infrastructure, etc.

Worse, India's pretensions to superpower status thru the development of nuclear weapons has, as predicted, caused Pakistan to bring its nuclear program out of the laboratory and onto the testing range. Thus has India brought a region of 1.3 billion people to the edge of holocaust. Not one single advantage for the poor, who constitute the overwhelming preponderance of all South Asians, has arisen from the nuclear arms race in the Subcontinent. Quite the contrary, the nuclearization of South Asia has exacerbated tensions, DECREASED everyone's security, and endangered the entire planet with potentially devastating fallout if the fools in the region's governments should lose control of the passions they manipulate to keep themselves in power, and thus plunge all of historic India into nuclear armageddon.

UN diplomat and popular author Shashi Tharoor remarked in a PBS NewsHour interview with David Gergen on the 50th anniversary of Indian independence, "More than half the population live below a poverty line that’s been drawn just this side of a funeral pyre." Colorful language for a dismal reality:  any more reasonable definition of poverty would place the great preponderance of the population of India below the poverty line.

Plainly, present forms of organization and the policies currently being pursued by the leadership elites of the Subcontinent are not working for the people. Something must change, but impetus for change is not coming from within the Subcontinent. It must come from outside.

In part, it may come from Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, and Sri Lankans abroad, who have left the misery and violence of their region behind and seen how life can be. They have the education to succeed in the modern world and the intelligence to evaluate what needs to be done for their ancestral countries to succeed.

In part, it may come from organizations like the Expansionist Party of the United States, which try to reach the people of the Subcontinent directly, as thru the Internet, without a distortive interlocutor in the form of government or media "spin doctors" who twist things to suit their purposes.

Hereafter, rather than try to cover all the nations of the Subcontinent by naming them all, tediously, each time I make a point, I will say "India" when I mean all of historic India plus Sri Lanka, Nepal, and other adjoining areas profoundly influenced by Indian culture. In like fashion, I may speak of all these countries as "the Indias", for they all look to a shared history and culture that has often been politically fragménted but which nonetheless retains substantial unity above and beyond the politics of any era — what I might call "surpolitical" unity.

If you are Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Sri Lankan, Nepalese, Bhutanese, or Sikkimese (and not reconciled to the loss of Sikkim's independence), don't feel excluded from this discussion merely because I say "India" except when a point needs to address a different subdivision of historic India. I mean "India" in the widest and most inclusive sense, the India that Indo-Pak communities in New York City or nearby New Jersey live in, where appreciation of one's shared heritage crosses the political divide. People from all Subcontinent countries eat in each other's restaurants, shop in each other's stores, chat in each other's barber shops, and get along "beautifully", as one man put it in a TV interview — 99% of the time. Their camaraderie and surpolitical mutual assistance break down only when tensions from the Subcontinent cross the oceans on the wind of news of some violent clash in Kashmir, or nuclear test, or other provocation.

It is as true of nations as of individuals that before you can solve a problem, you must first admit that one exists. And India's aloof and snotty attitude toward the West is a very major problem indeed. A country in which a third of the population is at the edge of starvation and two-thirds suffer chronic undernourishment is a country that should be at once humble before more successful societies and frantic to find solutions to its appalling problems.

There is no urgency in India to solve its problems. Indeed, some Indian "intellectuals" pretend that its most-basic problem, overpopulation, is not a problem at all but gives India enormous human resources and ensures it a brilliant future! India must wake from such mad dreams and seek a better future for its people as its first and, for now, only priority. When the entire population is well-fed, well-housed, well-clothed, well-educated, and at peace, then India can dream lofty dreams.

Inadvertently(?) phallic public monument in present-day India. Click on it for the entire text of the horrifying news story below about castration of thousands of children in "modern" India. This was still on the Rediff server as of July 29, 2001.

How backward is India? Consider this excerpt from an article that ran on Rediff On The NeT, a daily online newsletter/magazine, on October 22, 1998, under the headline, "Eunuchs cry for justice":

"As per a survey done by the Sabha, there are . . . around 500,000 [eunuchs in India], . . . victims of forcible castration.

"[A] petition [to the government for relief and justice] . . . charges that young children [who are willingly given up by their parents] are brought to the cities by agents, from villages and towns all over the country, castrated, and then put in charge of a guru at one of the dhams, or hijra centres."

I will spare you here the horrifying details of exactly how these poor boys are mutilated. Suffice it to say that all their external genitalia are chopped off with a knife. A significant proportion of the victims of this "religious" ritual bleed to death and are buried in unmarked graves. The story continues:

"Startlingly, the petition estimates that 100,000 new eunuchs are created by forcible castration.

"At last count, there are an estimated 450 big, 1600 medium and 35,000 smaller dhams, where the young, castrated children are trained to dance and sing -- and clap in that peculiarly recognisable way -- and then put out on the streets to earn money begging at street corners and in marketplaces.

"Alleging that this empire is under the control of a few hijra gurus, the petition says that eunuchs who grow old and whose earning ability is thereby lessened are then dumped, left to die on the streets."

The governments of India and its various subdivisions have done nothing to stop this horrendous practice. That inaction constitutes condonation. The petition mentioned in the article above seeks economic assistance for abandoned eunuchs and criminal prosecution of the castrators. In what civilized country would there be a need for such a petition? Everywhere else, governments would step in of their own initiative.

For more on the eunuch story, see Letter No. 58 at our page "Letters from the Chairman" (http://members.aol.com/Schoonmakr/Chairman.html).

*

Castration of children is an age-old Indian tradition, part of the "glorious" culture that Indian traditionalists and their servants in various political parties wish to preserve, along with a vicious caste system, grostesquely unfair distribution of wealth, interreligious violence, and terrorism. Is any of that intrinsic to Indian civilization? Is any of that worth preserving?

Isn't this, the Taj Mahal, the kind of thing Indians should really be concerned about preserving? How can one country contain both a thing of such transcendental beauty as this love-inspired monument and something as ugly as governmental inaction in the face of forcible castration of hundreds of thousands of children?

XP presents now an open letter to a U.S.-based Indian newspaper about an opinion piece it carried that urged American NRI's [Non-Resident Indians, that is, Indians abroad] to teach their children Indian values. Tho drafted November 9, 1997, it could be written today with only the particular incidents differing, not the qualitative or even quantitative violence changing much.

Editor
India Tribune
3302 West Peterson Avenue
Chicago, IL 60659

To the Editor:

Some months ago one of your subscribers left a copy of your paper in the vestibule of our apartment building, apparently as a way to acquaint interested neighbors with India and the Indian community in America. An Opinion piece in that issue encourages parents to "Expose children to Indian heritage and values at home". Should Indian parents expose the real India to their children, or only the few good things about that horrible country?

A pavilion to peace in India — worthy aspiration, unrealistic expectation.

Let's consider the real India, summarized neatly in headlines in your own paper: "Bid to blow up J&K Civil Secretariat averted, car with explosive found" [For American and other non-Indian readers, let me clarify that "J&K" is Jammu and Kashmir, a state of India whose population is predominantly Moslem and would prefer to be part of Pakistan so is in a constant state of low-level war against the Indian government]; "2 dead, 12 hurt in car bomb blast"; "Police officer shot dead"; "6 cops among 8 hurt in group clash"; "2 dead, 15 hurt in explosion"; "Police open fire to quell mob"; "10 CRPF men gunned down by militants"; "176 houses set on fire"; "5 Samajwadi workers killed"; "Series of Bomb blast[s] in Srinigar" [Kashmir]; "Naxals kill 2 persons including a S.I."; "2 women killed in bomb blast"; "4 persons hanged to death" [not by a government]; "Ultras target killing innocent Kashmiris"; "Over 1200 families affected by Pak. firing."; "Top militant ['who allegedly beheaded 9 people'] killed in shootout". All these headlines appeared in one issue of your weekly newspaper.

That same issue speaks of violence in the Uttar Pradesh legislature (footage of which incident was broadcast worldwide); antidemocratic strains in India's vaunted, but sham, "democracy"; Federal takeover of Indian state governments; instability in such governments; growing popular resentment of restrictions on international trafficking in endangered animals; and Indian Government opposition to liberalization of trade worldwide. These are things to be proud of? I don't think so.

India is a hellhole — a violent, crushingly poor, class-fractured and viciously discriminatory society of tumultuous intergroup hatred, uncontrolled and devastating population growth, and a government so backward-looking, immovable, and arrogant that it can scarcely begin to solve the country's problems. India has no "social safety net" for the poor; if a Calcutta street youth without family gets sick and can't work for a month, he can literally die of starvation without anyone stepping in.

Victoria Memorial, Calcutta.

Even as all the world pities and scorns India, India itself pretends to majestic glory and demands international respect as tho it were a great power to be reckoned with. India is the France of Asia, except that France's glorious past did not end 250 years ago!

Let's be frank: the bulk of immigrants to the U.S., from whatever country, came here not just to achieve a better material existence but also to get out of the countries they came from. The great preponderance of their American-born children do not identify with the "old country", no matter what it might be, but see themselves, quite naturally, as Americans — unhyphenated Americans, not Indian-Americans, Mexican-Americans, or any other hyphenated restriction some people may want to place on them. Few such children will retain their ancestral tongue (if it's not English) nor even, if it be other than Christian, Jewish, or possibly Moslem, their ancestral religion, but will assimilate fully within at most two generations. If Indians in the United States don't want that to happen to their own children, they had better return to India pronto, because it will happen otherwise.

In the past two years I have worked with two U.S.-born Indians. The first is a young man of Indian ancestry. His grandfather was a Fulbright scholar who returned to India and fathered my colleague's own father there. Today, they're all here, three generations of Indians. Young Sandeep calls himself "Sandy", speaks unaccented American English pretty much all the time, and knows Hindi only at what he estimates to be a "third-grade level". He lives with a non-Indian, Christian woman, and if they should have children they will surely be raised to respect all their ancestries but to see themselves as individuals first and Americans second. Indians? — even third? I don't know about that.

My other co-worker is a young woman whose father was born in Sind before partition and moved with his family to Delhi after partition. There he met his future wife, a local woman. They didn't even speak the same language, and to this day communicate mainly in English, though the mother did learn some Sindhi. They moved to the United States and had a daughter who, like Sandeep, is a lawyer. The mother generally does not prepare Indian food at home, though she does sometimes serve Indian dinners we in the New York metropolitan area can buy, frozen, in the supermarket. The daughter married a young Jewish man who required as a condition of marriage that she convert to Judaism.  She did. How much will children of such a marriage identify with India? What connection will they maintain with that ancestral homeland? How likely is it that they will do anything at all to help India's modernization? (More than incidentally, when I commented to her, perhaps in connection with some news item, that India is a horrible country, she said aloud, "I agree with you.")

India needs much of what the United States has: a tradition of democracy and intergroup tolerance; religious neutrality in government and the popular culture; admiration for and ready acceptance of the new; inventiveness, creativity for new things out of old; and a deep respect for individuality. Indians in the United States should be doing everything in their power to modernize and, yes, Americanize India, to bring our countries closer and preserve only the good things from India, while gladly obliterating the bad. Indian food is great; the music and dance competitive with that of any region. Clothing, fabrics, art, architecture, design — all these things and more from Indian culture are welcome here. But not the intergroup violence, not the disgusting caste system, not the idiocy of Hinduism, a laughably absurd system of superstition scarcely higher than animism that in its extreme form induces people to wear face masks to prevent killing microbes but permits the same people to slaughter human beings by the thousands without a shred of shame.

Perhaps more than anything else, it is Hinduism that holds India back and causes the enormous suffering of the great majority of Indians. Hinduism is a hopelessly immodern and anti-modern hodgepodge of gods and demons, both of them equally horrible, which contemptibly mandates rigid class distinctions and discrimination, and allows people at the top of society to justify lethal social injustice as divinely ordered. If Hinduism cannot be modernized it must be abandoned and, eventually, eliminated as a force of consequence in the Indian mentality. If you and your family have not already done so, perhaps you should convert to a denomination of Christianity to your liking, then support missionary work in India on its behalf. Not surprisingly, Christians are more inclined to consider and help other Christians than they are even to think of, much less help, "heathens".

Instead of abandoning or modernizing Hinduism, however, major forces in India are working to make India more Hindu and more immodern. In advocating a strict adherence of society to Hindu values, the advocates of Hindutva [demands in India that that country throw off 'foreign' influences and restore the 'purity' of Indian, meaning Hindu, civilization] ask "Hindu values, what is wrong with them? After all, 85 per cent of Indians are Hindus." (That is Rediff's summary of the attitude of Hindu militants, October 28, 1998.) The question seems innocuous enough, until one realizes that the advocates of Hindutva mean all the values of traditional Hinduism, including casteism, and also mean that all elements of society should be required to follow the teachings of Hinduism.

The Taj Mahal is a work of Mogul — Moslem — art.
Would it have been created if the forces of Hindutva had been  in control of India at the time?

The champions of Hindutva are even advocating active governmental restrictions on other religions, especially Christianity! This, of course, is exactly the opposite of what India should be doing. Indians who want India to become a great and modern nation must fight Hindutva to a standstill, then reverse it and undo the harm it has already done.

India must cut many of its ties to the past, especially to class-ridden Britain, save within the context of a broader union of Britain and possibly some of its former colonies with the United States. See "Private Action for British-U.S. Union" (Britain.html) and "Whither Britain" (WhitherBritain.html). American-based Indians should switch to American spelling and pronunciations, and promote American English in India. (Your publication badly needs U.S.-born copy editors and proofreaders. At least ask your kids to check your stuff!)

By all means let each prosperous Indian family here adopt a school in India and encourage their kids to write to Indian penpals — but in English, the better to help kids in India learn the language that will liberate them. Donate a computer and a year's Internet service to a community center in India — or dozens or even thousands of computers and perpetual Internet service to as many schools and community centers across India as you can afford, individually or thru organizations. Then spend time enough yourself, or have your organizations send computer-savvy young Indo- and other Americans to the Subcontinent — not just to the Republic of India but to all of historic India — long enough to teach kids and adults alike to use those machines to free themselves.

During their stay, those young Americans will come to understand and appreciate the Subcontinent, and form relationships that might accomplish great things in future decades. The links they form could powerfully help all parts and strata of India to enter the modern era by bringing them firmly under the democratizing and personally liberating political and cultural influence of the United States.

Two views of the Palace of Winds, Jaipur.

Four other ways (among many) that U.S.-based Indians can advance the interests of India-trapped Indians are (1) to establish American-studies programs in Indian universities (each prosperous alumnus in his or her own former school, or each regional association at the colleges in their own former region), and provide ongoing guidance in the formulation of programs and production of materials; (2) to create India-studies programs in U.S. colleges, and Indian speakers' bureaus to send expert speakers on various aspects of Indian life, culture, and history to American classrooms at all levels; (3) to create scholarship programs (a) to bring promising Indian youths, of high school and college level, to the United States to study and learn by osmosis what it is to live in a social as well as political democracy, and (b) to send American youths (and not just youths of Indian ancestry) to study in India as would enable them thereafter to return to this country to teach Indian-studies courses, and advise corporations and governments on how best to reach Indian consumers and policymakers; and (4) to create major programs that promote the adoption of Indian orphans out of the nightmare they face in the place of their birth, instead to bring them to a loving home in the United States — be it the home of a family of Indian ancestry or not.

Agra Fort

You could even establish Devanagari-letter fraternities (like the present Greek-letter fraternities) on U.S. college campuses, at once to familiarize Americans with the writing of India's languages and to make India seem "cool" to American youth. Conversely, you could sponsor Roman-letter fraternities in India or, if Roman-letter combinations are too readily confused with existing corporate or governmental entities in the West (e.g., ABC, FBI, ITT, CIA), then chapters of a Greek-letter fraternity you may have belonged to in your U.S.-college days, starting with Phi Beta Kappa and the academic excellence and postgraduate networking it promotes.

Cut your own political bands to India. Become U.S. citizens and use your votes to make Americans more aware of India and the urgent need to shake that country out of its delusions and intergroup viciousness, whether the group be based on class, religion, money, or any other criterion.

Your first responsibility as Indians is not to some vague "culture" or "heritage" but to the more than 1 billion of the Subcontinent's 1.3 billion people of all the Indias now suffering grievously from a monstrously unjust social order. It is to them that any ancestral loyalty you feel must now attach.

Dare to think daring thoughts, if that's what it takes to turn around a disastrous situation for those hundreds of millions of individuals. Perhaps independence isn't good for India's people. Maybe India should join the United States, and all the states of India become States of the Union instead. Whatever it takes to help the people of India is what the Indian community in the United States must do — sooner rather than later.

Cordially,
L. Craig Schoonmaker

*

Next, we present an e-mailed letter I sent August 6, 1998 to the editor of Rediff on The NeT, concerning a statement by the Prime Minister of India at the time that perhaps India should consider adopting a presidential form of government in place of its present parliamentary form. Here are the main portions of the PM's remarks that I address afterward.

[Excerpts from Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee's lecture at the 13th Desraj Chowdhary Memorial (as published by Rediff On The NeT August 6, 1998)}

"I want to provoke a serious debate on this issue, believing as I do that the present system of parliamentary democracy has failed to deliver the goods and that the time has come to introduce deep-going systemic changes in our structures of governance. If the majority of our population is deprived of both power (in the real sense of democratic empowerment at all levels, especially for the poor and socially downtrodden) and fruits of socio-economic progress, is it not obvious that we need to take a re-look at our framework of governance?

Charminar arch in Hyderabad, one of southern India's high-tech cities.

* * *

"I often wonder whether the Westminster model has been defeated by the Indian reality. Is it time to think in terms of a second republic? In the past too, I have mentioned the need to change the system, not only of delivery of governance, but of the governance itself. When I see the ridiculous reduction of our parliamentary system to a level which allows a party with a tenth of the total number of seats to rule the country, or a party which is in imminent danger of losing its electoral symbol holding two key ministries of home and agriculture, I am left wondering whether those who framed the Constitution took this possibility into account. What, then, should we do?

"Let there be a serious nationwide debate on all the possible alternatives for systemic changes to cleanse our democratic governing system of its present mess. We should not shy away from discussing the merits of even the presidential system of government. If the presidential system of government is considered impractical or undesirable, then we should introduce radical and undelayed changes in the present parliamentary democracy system itself."

And now, my comments to Rediff:

"PRIME Minister Vajpayee is too timid, and apparently confused, in his recommendations for a re-evaluation of India's political structures. He timidly suggests that perhaps India should cast off the Westminster parliamentary model and adopt a presidential system, but quickly backs away from his own suggestion, as tho it is a hot potato he must toss off before it burns his hand. He then complains that Indian democracy is too fragménted, but proposes as a solution proportional representation, which is everywhere associated with even greater fragmentation — that is, even more tiny parties being represented in a legislature! Of course, in a presidential system, it doesn't matter how many parties there are in the legislature, because the legislature does not elect the executive.

U.S. President's Flag.

The solutions to India's democracy are plain. India is too diverse for the British model to work. Britain is relatively homogeneous. Its regional, ethnic, religious and, especially, linguistic divisions are trivial, even infinitesimal or nonexistent by comparison with India's. The model India should have adopted in the first place is the United States, a country based on diversity, in which real power is dispersed among states and among equal-but-separate branches of the federal government, with the legislature (Congress) ever a check to overreaching by the executive (President), and vice-versa.

Mysore, in India's south, the more progressive and prosperous region.

India must revitalize its regions by reconstituting its Union on the pattern of the United States' Union: real states (not subdivisions of a single, all-powerful federal authority), that have their own real areas of subject-matter jurisdiction and their own legitimacy that cannot be invaded by the federal government and cannot simply be put aside by federal intervention any time a power-hungry central government cares to act.

In this, as in so much else, India must abandon its past and reorient itself to the one great country that has the most to offer: the United States. It is an oddity of history that two such enormous and important countries have so little to do with each other, despite the intermediary of a shared language among the educated elite and, recently, substantial and growing trade promoted by a growing expatriate (NRI) community in the United States.

It's time to breach the walls that divide India from the mainstream West, and recognize that the United States has more than technology to help reshape India's future: it has political and social institutions that India needs too."

*

As regards strengthening the states of India, people in the U.S. and other federal countries may not appreciate how little a state means in India. Consider this: "Home ministry officials told Rediff On The Net the government can enact the legislation to carve out the controversy-ridden Uttaranchal and Vananchal states even if the state assemblies of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar reject the proposals, thanks to Article 3 of the Constitution." Plainly the states are only administrative subdivisions in India. In the U.S., no state can be created out of one or more states without the consent of the affected state(s). The fact that India's central government can and does heavy-handedly take over state governments and can even carve up states against the will of their people cannot be very reassuring to people who rely upon the protection and services of their state. It is precisely to remedy shortcomings like this that we advocate change of India's form of government in the direction of the U.S. model.

Alas, the presidential form of government is not well understood in India. One of Rediff's columnists wrote, on October 20, 1998, that the stability of a presidential system depends upon a single party controlling both the legislature and the presidency. He also suggested that the parliamentary form is a guard against dictatorship. I wrote this e-mail to Rediff in reply, under the subject line "Presidential system, not dictatorship":

MANI Shankar Aiyar misunderstands, or misrepresents, U.S. history when he suggests that U.S. political stability has rested upon the President of the United States and the majority of members of Congress being of the same party. Quite the contrary has been the rule for decades. President Nixon (Republican) faced impeachment by a Democratic-controlled Congress, so resigned. Ronald Reagan and George Bush (both Republicans) never had a Republican-dominated Congress but always had to work with a Democratic majority. Bill Clinton had a Democratic majority in Congress for only two years before the people voted in a Republican majority for the first time in decades to restore political balance.

Carved ivory comb, traditional craft.

Other countries that have presidential systems have also functioned as democracies; and many countries with ostensible parliamentary governments in form have been dictatorships in fact. France, which has a strong president, has now, and has had for large parts of recent history, a Prime Minister from the opposition. In France, that is called "cohabitation". Today, a president of the Right is balanced by a Prime Minister of the Left.

"Democracy is dependent not upon forms but upon mindsets and the people who enter government. No form of government will, without more, secure a country from either dictatorship or instability. The question India needs to ask, however, is 'What's wrong with stability?' If adopting a presidential system will enable India to turn its attentions from endless parliamentary infighting to instead solving its immense problems, then by all means adopt a presidential system."

*

A Rediff columnist wrote of growing religious intolerance toward Christianity (http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Crete/2339/index.html), which I sent email about on August 5, 1998, under the subject line "Hindu-Christian issues":

"ASHWIN Mahesh's (undated) column on potential Hindu-Christian conflicts in the next decade bodes ill for India's future if his observations and predictions are correct. For India to forbid proselytization by Christians would be an attack on religious freedom that would antagonize the entire civilized world. Is any such defensive nonsense necessary? Is Hinduism really in danger in India?

Not a church and steeple but the Kutb (or Qutb) Minar, "Tower of Victory" in Delhi,
a 232-foot-tall monument begun in the early 13th Century.

"Perhaps NRI's in Christian countries will see their children abandon Hinduism in ever larger numbers from generation to generation, but they must have understood that to be a possibility — not to say "risk" — when they emigrated. Perhaps such parents are actually glad that their children will be freed from the limitations and barbarousness of Hinduism, a religion that all the world apart from India regards as ridiculous, backward, childish, and violent, a preposterous mishmash of animism, vegetarianism, and abuse of the poor in the guise of divinely mandated separation of indivisible humanity into arbitrary castes. Devout Hindus will let cows, rats and monkeys eat crops, as may put the survival of large numbers of human beings in question, and even put gauze over their faces to keep from killing microbes — then turn around and chop their human neighbors to bits in sectarian violence.

"Make no mistake: Hinduism is a major element in India's perpetual backwardness. The social immobility of the caste system, intrinsic and necessary to Hinduism, will keep India out of the first rank of nations FOREVER if India insists on devout observance of Hinduism's insane requirements. Outsiders must hope that if Hindu militants take over India's state instruments of coercion, an anti-Hindu revolution will ensue in which the poor will destroy the oppressors who claim divine right to keep them at the edge of starvation.

The cross atop St. Francis of Assisi Church in Goa beckons to Hindus.

"A modern India must be a post-Hindu India, not a retrogressively devout-Hindu nation that pretends to see spirits in crickets and elephants. The best thing that could happen to India's masses would be for them ALL to renounce Hinduism and become active Christians or agnostics immersed in the Christian cultures of the West, tying themselves and their future into the forward-looking rationalism of the West, not the backward-looking and irrational Hindustan of old."

A different Rediff columnist on July 30, 1998 accused the U.S. Government of subverting Indian democracy. I sent this reply, under the heading "Paranoia re the U.S."

"ONE HOPES Rajeev Srinivasan was trying to write a humor column when he submitted his recent rant about U.S. racism and CIA overthrow of a state government within sovereign India, but his column is so witless and absurd that it offers no humor at all, certainly not to Americans interested in India.

"At its worst, the U.S. was less racist than India is today. American racists divide the human race into only two or three groups, many fewer than the castes of India, much less the groups that Indians may divide the rest of the world into. Further, the U.S. has evolved enormously in its racial attitudes in the past 40 years, to the point where it is among the most optimistically nonracist, even anti-racist, nations on Earth. The television program Asian America (http://www.asianamerica.com) on July 21, 1998 featured three Indo-Americans discussing franchising, with a focus on their own area of expertise, budget lodging (inexpensive hotels and motels belonging to popular chains). These gentlemen said that perhaps 15 years ago anti-Asian discrimination, albeit disguised, was a fact of life, but today, 55% of all budget lodgings in the U.S. are owned or managed by Asian-Americans, mostly of Indian origin, and in another several years that figure may approximate 75%. Further, whereas American bankers might once have demanded several interviews of Indian businessmen in their offices before approving a loan, today bankers may travel to Indo-American businessmen's homes to get their business. To pretend to see a 'danger' to Indians resident in the U.S. is nonsense — WISHFUL nonsense, perhaps, on the part of Indian-resident Indians who resent their successful peers who are 'making it' in the U.S., and growing gradually distant from and unconcerned with India.

"India will remain a backward embarrassment to the human race, and burden to the great mass of its people, until it stops looking elsewhere for the causes of its endless failures. It's not the CIA that has made India an unstable and unsuccessful democracy. It's India's own anti-democratic culture. It's not U.S. sanctions or criticisms that keep India from forging a modern, democratic, egalitarian, and prosperous state. Once again, the cause of those failures lies in India's own detestable culture.

"India needs to take a long, hard look at its ugly essence and realize that it will never be anything but a Third World hellhole until it purges its culture of elements many Indians seem to regard as sacrosanct. Its predominant religion, practiced essentially nowhere else — for good reason — is antihuman, backward, divisive, and hostile to the modern world. Its languages, spoken nowhere else, are not even universally comprehensible within India. Its alphabets or scripts, used nowhere else, are incomprehensible to the wider world, and at once dissuade outsiders from learning Indian languages and cause major problems for Indians seeking to learn outside languages. But perhaps the biggest single bar to Indian progress is the monumental chip on the shoulder India carries, this feeling that India SHOULD be a greater country than in fact it is, and thus somebody — pretty much ANYBODY — must be responsible for KEEPING IT from greatness. No, the fault is not in India's stars, but in itself, that it is an underling. And all the nuclear weapons in the world won't put food in every Indian's belly nor education in every Indian's head, nor provide India's hundreds of millions a prosperous, happy, and modern life.

"Far from endlessly criticizing the U.S. and trying to fault Americans for India's failures; far from pursuing grandiose and unrealistic notions of India's 'greatness' and resenting the U.S. for occupying a position more like what India wishes it had, India should frankly and humbly look into itself for what's holding it back, excíse that, and cozy up to the United States, which is, like it or not, the wellspring of modernity, prosperity, and democracy on this benighted planet."

*

The Problem of Hinduism. Some readers of this presentation may think I'm being too hard on Hinduism, the religion of 80% of Indians. They may think that criticizing Hinduism is religious intolerance. It is not. Religious tolerance is not respecting the doctrines of a religion you do not agree with but accepting the right of people AS INDIVIDUALS to practice whatever religion they wish, to believe anything they like in their heart, to speak openly of their beliefs and try to win willing converts, and to do all this without governmental interference. In a religiously pluralistic and tolerant society, government takes no side but permits all voices to be heard, whether they pray to a god or gods or condemn all religion as superstitious nonsense.

Hinduism is superstitious nonsense. But it's not harmless nonsense, because it has practical effects, disastrous effects, upon hundreds of millions of people.

Most Westerners have no idea what Hinduism is, nor, thus, why ending the influence of Hinduism is essential to progress in India. If you go to the Internet to try to find out what Hinduism is, you encounter gobbledygook you can't pin down — not just doubletalk but tripletalk and quadrupletalk.

Hinduism is polytheistic, right, with a panoply of gods? NO! God is one. God is everywhere, in everything. God is the self, in each of us. God is the one spirit that infuses all existence, not a personal, human-form man somewhere out in space but an all-embracing spirit down here on Earth, in us all. The many "gods" of Hinduism are mere aspects of the multiplicitous personality of the one universal spirit.

But Hindus generally do pray to different gods and goddesses, don't they? Well, you see, God presents himself (itself?) to different people according to their ability to understand. The enlightened will be able to see God in everything, as the universal spirit imbuing all existence. But the less enlightened need a more concrete vision to relate to, so yes, there are gods for them to connect with. These gods are not, however, separate from the one universal God, any more than the three aspects of the Christian Trinity (the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost/Spirit) are separate Gods. They are all part of what in Christianity is called "the godhead" and in Hinduism merely "God").

The Christian concept of the Trinity is reflected in Hinduism too, right? Well, yes, there is a triad of special gods in Hinduism: Brahma, the creator; Vishnu, the preserver; and Shiva (Siva), the destroyer who makes way for regeneration. But again, these are not the only gods, and they are not gods to themselves, only aspects of the universal, "immanent" god of all existence.

Got that? Good. Let's move on.

So far, Hinduism doesn't sound so bad, just a lot of harmless nonsense, God in trees and cows and cobras. Ah, but Hinduism doesn't stop there.

Now we get to the nitty-gritty of the destructiveness of Hinduism:  samsara, the endless cycle of birth, death, and rebirth, and the accumulation of karma over many lives. Hinduism asserts that each of us has many lives. Thus, the one we are in now doesn't much matter!

Moreover, our state of existence in this life is the consequence of our behavior in earlier lives. If we are born into a good life (now), it is only because we were good in our past lives, so have accumulated good karma (points, as it were) for which we are being rewarded now. If we were born into a bad life (this time), it is because we were bad in prior lives, so have accumulated bad karma (negative points) for which we are being punished now.

In Hinduism, no one is born innocent and new, our lives an "empty slate" (tabula rasa) upon which our own acts write our fate, but all of us are burdened by the deeds of our soul in prior lives. This is "original sin" carried to extremes, because it is uneven: it's not that all of us are equally sinful, but that some of us are born bad and deserve a bad life.

Thus there are no "innocent children" in Hinduism. There is no social injustice in keeping people down. The poor deserve to be poor; the starving deserve to starve; and it would be WRONG to interfere with divine justice. It gets worse.

Ramesh, a temple carved into rock.

After death, according to this view, each soul goes to a "higher plane" (whatever that's supposed to mean) and CHOOSES what one is to experience in the next life. If one has been prideful, and needs to learn humility, he/she chooses a life of poverty or incapacity so that their spirit can experience the pains of that kind of existence, in order to grow spiritually. Thus the poor are not to be pitied or helped, because each poor person CHOSE to be born poor! Nor should we trouble ourselves worrying about cripples, because each CHOSE to be crippled. It would be WRONG to interfere with the misery of the miserable, first, because divine justice is being meted out in this life for past lives' transgressions, and second, because only by experiencing the miseries they CHOSE to experience can their immortal soul move toward perfection. Wonderful belief system, isn't it? — if you're rich, or healthy and strong.

The rich are rich because they deserve to be rich. They haven't done a single thing (in this life) to justify being richly rewarded? Oh, that's okay, you see, because they are being rewarded for virtuous deeds in prior lives AND their spirit needs to experience luxury, idleness, and inactivity in order to contemplate their place in the universe. The poor and crippled are miserable because they DESERVE to be AND because they need to experience humbling circumstances and pain to realize the evils of their ways and grow spiritually. Oh, they are worthy of some charity from the rich. Giving to the poor, in the FORM of charity, is a good thing to do, and adds to one's 'karma account' in tallying one's place in the samsaric order. (In the same way, Christian believers in predestination assert that good deeds do not win one salvation but merely show that those already chosen for salvation deserve that reward.) In Hinduism, however, assistance to the poor properly takes the form of charity. The poor have no RIGHT to distributions of society's wealth! Everything they receive in the way of assistance SHOULD be in the form of charity, because charity humbles, and they need to learn humility. That's why they're poor to begin with!

This 'belief' system (can anybody really believe such evil crap?), which smiles upon social injustice and irresponsible callousness by the rich toward the poor, also immobilizes the disadvantaged by fixing their place in the universe and telling them that they are meant to be as they are and have no right to expect better from life. Two of the major findings of 20th Century psychology are (a) that people try to live up to expectations, negative as well as positive, and (b) that people internalize what other people think about them and permit that internalized view to influence or even control their own behavior.

In light of those understandings, put yourself in the place of a person of "low birth" whose early life is filled with hardship and whose mind is filled with internalized self-doubts. You have been told since birth that you are as you are because your deeds in a prior life and your choice of your present life while on the higher plane between lives assigned you your current place. You are being punished for misdeeds in a prior life (or lives). If you apply yourself and try to rise "above your station", you are guilty of the sin of pride. If you fail at any point along the way, you are being punished for that sin, and divine justice is merely ensuring that you get what you deserve. You fail because you are meant to fail, and there's nothing you can do about your fate. It is as if you are a karmic Sisyphus, consigned by the gods ever to try to rise only to be knocked down every time you approach your goal. All the forces of society are devoted to making you doubt yourself and keep your place, and any setback you experience proves to you that they're right, and you're wrong. You can't ever succeed because you're not meant to succeed, and the only purpose of this life is to grow spiritually. Humility is a virtue that will buy you a better life the NEXT time. Forget about this life and accept your fate. ONLY if you accept misery with grace will you be rewarded in the next life. To rebel against the will of god will get you punished with an even worse life the next time! Monstrous.

Moreover, social distinctions of wealth and privilege are reinforced by the caste system, in which the various classes are rigidly divided from one another and forbidden by tradition (if no longer by law) from intermarrying. "Upper" castes are regarded as "purer" than "lower" or "backward" castes, and there are some people who don't even count in the oldest caste system but are in a separate, abysmally low, set of castes, the "Untouchables". The term arises from the notion that there must be a physical separation between these people and those of higher castes, measured by the shadow a person throws: no Untouchable is to be within the shadow of anyone of higher caste.

Some historians believe that this was originally a public-health precaution in days when the world had no antibiotics and indeed few efficacious medicines of any kind. The theory is that India was originally populated by dark-skinned peoples, the Dravidians, who may be a mix of Caucasian and Negroid/Melanesian races or may simply have become dark-skinned over eons of exposure to the hot Indian sun. Neighboring light-skinned Caucasians from the temperate zone, perhaps Iran (the Aryans), migrated into India and there encountered the Dravidians and, with them, tropical diseases to which the Dravidians had some inborn immunity but the Aryans had none, so could be devastated by. In that there were no medicines to treat tropical diseases, it was important to avoid contracting such diseases by maintaining prophylactic distance between Aryans and Dravidians. Aryans certainly must never TOUCH Dravidians, lest diseases within the Dravidian's body move to the Aryan's body and thereupon infect others in the Aryan community. (The choice of a shadow to mark the closest safe distance may be a pre-scientific understanding that sunlight kills some pathogens that might survive in shade.)

Whether this be the actual origin of the treatment of Untouchables or a fanciful justification for millennia of discrimination I do not know. It sounds superficially logical, but even if there was once a public-health justification for Aryans' keeping their distance from Dravidians, it has disappeared in the modern era, thanks to advances in medicine. So Indian society should adjust to today's medicinal reality and realize that they are now free to touch anybody they want to touch, and live in peaceful, nondiscriminatory proximity to everyone. But the caste system, including harsh discrimination against Untouchables, remains in place because it is NOT just a public-health regulation but part of a religious system from which it cannot be readily separated.

This is why I say that Hinduism is monstrous and must be destroyed as a force in society: because it justifies the unjustifiable and victimizes the worst-off in society.

Pakistan. When India was under British colonial rule, activists for independence formed a united front to expel Britain from the Subcontinent. As the day drew near when Britain was actually to withdraw, the Moslem and Hindu factions of the independence movement decided they had irreconcilable differences so could not form a single, united India.

Sample of Urdu writing. Urdu, one of Pakistan's two official languages (with English), is basically Hindi written in Arabic script. Thus does Pakistan honor both its Indian and Moslem roots in what would otherwise seem a bizarre act: writing an Indo-European language in a Semitic alphabet.

The result of this disagreement was, in 1947, partition of India into unequal parts, the bulk going to Hindus but the majority-Moslem areas going to Pakistan, in two widely separated parts, West Pakistan (the larger) and East Pakistan (geographically smaller but more densely populated). Alas, the agreement to disagree and separate was not amicable. A civil war erupted that killed large numbers of people, as Moslems were expelled from Hindu-dominant areas and Hindus from Moslem-dominant areas. Some 12 million people migrated between the two new countries and at least 200,000 others were killed.

As if that weren't cause enough for bitterness, a Hindu prince controlled the northwestern region Kashmir, and chose to join India even tho 85% of the people of Kashmir were Moslem. That produced another round of fighting, and altho the United Nations ruled that a binding plebiscite should be held to determine which country Kashmir would go to, India has refused to hold that plebiscite. So militant Moslems have waged a guerrilla struggle ever since to take Kashmir out of India and into Pakistan, with, of course, atrocities on both sides. Why is giant, "democratic" India so insistent on holding on to little Kashmir against the will of its people? No one really knows.

After partition, Moslems found that the bulk of India's industry was in India, and the territory the Moslems held was relatively undeveloped to begin with and had been ravaged by war — a very inauspicious start to nationhood. Pakistan has been largely unsuccessful in making itself economically viable. Its unnatural division from its historic economic partners has been permanently debilitating, and Pakistan has been unable to replace those partners in a prosperous new community.

Worse, the cultural divisions between West Pakistan and East Pakistan proved as intractable as the religious differences that drove India and Pakistan apart. East Pakistan declared independence in 1971; West Pakistan attacked; 1 million people died and 10 million fled into India in the ensuing civil war. India intervened, winning East Pakistan its independence, as Bangladesh, in December of 1971.

Today, Pakistan is a violent, profoundly impoverished country prone to terrorism and military coups that achieve nothing for the fundamental wellbeing of the people. Machineguns blaze away in Karachi and other cities as members of disparate gangs and religious sects all try to kill each other off. And any reformer who escapes the guns and bombs to win public office risks being deposed by the military and executed. There is essentially no hope that Pakistan can reform from within. Absent external pressure and leadership of many kinds, Pakistan will remain a nightmare land.

Moreover, Pakistan and Afghanistan are deeply involved in the heroin trade. The brilliant 1989 British TV miniseries Traffik, recently rebroadcast in the U.S. on PBS, details the depth of corruption and evil into which Pakistanis have fallen in fitting themselves into the international drug traffic. Supposedly devout Moslems willingly, without moral hesitation, inflict harm upon people, thousands of miles distant, who have never done them any harm, rationalizing away their complicity in the death and destruction of others even as they personally follow Islam's own prohibition on a much more benign chemical, alcohol. Los Angeles Times TV critic Howard Rosenberg cites a scene in which the scriptwriter for the miniseries, Simon Moore, shows the thought process (if one could call them that) at work:

"'Nothing that grows from the ground is evil,' [says] a Pakistani who rationalizes the poppy fields. ‘There are only evil men.' In essence, that is the same self-serving ‘guns don't kill, people kill' argument put forth by the U.S. gun lobby."

Seemingly decent Pakistanis justify killing foreigners thru poison by pretending that the poppy is not to blame, for they have been smoking poppy since time immemorial without harm. They ignore the fact that the substance they have used is transformed by processors into a much more potent and deadly form that ruins and even takes tens of thousands of lives in the West. ‘Not my problem', seems their stance. We can make it their problem.

In Traffik, a British cabinet minister seeks to divert farmers from poppy production to other crops (particularly coffee), but is met by resistance that other crops are not as profitable. Honest work doesn't pay as well as crime? Even thinking such thoughts, much less allowing them to determine one's acts, is the very definition of evil. It's like a young man recently recruited by the Mafia into contract killing saying, "Sure, I could take a 9-to-5 job that would pay me $30,000 a year, but I can make 30 grand [the same amount] with one ‘hit' [murder]. Why on Earth would I work a whole year for what I can make in one day?"

Traffik is fiction, but the drug trade and the moral rationalizations it depicts are all too real.

How do we end Pakistani involvement in the drug trade? There is a timid course, a moderate course, and an extreme course.

The timid course, which stands essentially no chance of success, is that taken by the British government in Traffik: give monetary subsidies to farmers to shift to other crops, and urge them to do the right thing. Yeah, right.

The moderate course, which some will regard as revolutionary, is to offer Pakistanis full integration into the economy and culture of the United States, as several states of the Union, which would produce a huge inpouring of financial assistance of many kinds – not just price supports and other agricultural subsidies for legitimate crops, but also electrification, sanitation, education, healthcare, and other programs that would hugely improve the quality of life for everyone in the region – but would also entitle U.S. law-enforcement officials to oversee the destruction of the poppy crop and prosecution of drug producers at the very starting point of the international traffic in heroin.

The extreme course would be to warn Pakistanis that if they do not END their deep and evil involvement in the drug trade, the United States will declare war upon Pakistan and rain thermonuclear destruction upon the areas involved in heroin production: neutron bombs will explode over these farmers' heads, killing them, their families, and every living thing, including poppies, but leaving most structures intact for decent people to take over once the radiation has died down.

Which would Pakistanis – and Afghans – prefer?

Bangladesh. The breakaway Republic of Bangladesh is even less viable economically than was united Pakistan. Desperate to find ways to provide for its enormously dense population (129 million people living in an area smaller than Georgia), Bangladesh has tried nationalization of industry and closer relations with India, all for naught.

Low-lying, Bangladesh is regularly inundated by floods from both its rivers (the many branches of the deltas of the Ganges and Brahmaputra Rivers) and sea waters pushed inland by storms, especially during monsoonal downpours. At one point at the end of the 20th Century, 40 million Bangladeshis lived for weeks with flood waters three and more feet deep in their homes and fields, stranded on rooftops and islets of high ground.

Bangladesh is absolutely unsustainable as a country to itself. It needs to merge into a larger entity, evacuate a significant portion of its population elsewhere, and take measures to ensure that it never again becomes grotesquely overpopulated.

Sri Lanka. Long known as Ceylon, the island nation of Sri Lanka, off the southern tip of India, has suffered a vicious civil war since the 1980s. The World Almanac 2001 reports that

"More than 60,000 have died in the civil war, which continued through the 1990s; another 12,000, mostly young Tamils, have 'disappeared' after they were taken into custody by government security forces."

Given that the population of Sri Lanka is only 19.2 million, that equates with 1,054,000 people dying (878,000) or 'disappearing' (176,000) in the U.S. The German broadcaster Deutsche Welle said in July 2001 that not 60,000 but 80,000 Sri Lankans have died in that war to date. That would equate with about 1,171,000 Americans being known to have died. Add in 176,000 who'd have "disappeared", and you get the equivalent of 1,346,000 Americans dead or missing (and presumed dead), or nearly three times the toll of our own Civil War. The 80,000-dead statistic was given in a broadcast about a renewal of violence in an attack upon Columbo's airport. So the war is far from over.

Tho the Government of India has sent troops to impose 'peace' (tho peace is much more than the absence of actual military hostilities) at the request of the Government of Sri Lanka, the Tamil Tigers have not gone away, and the demands of the Tamils for their own country or autonomous region, or for an end to what they perceive as vicious discrimination against them by the Sinhalese majority, have gone unsatisfied. Sri Lanka is predominantly Buddhist, but suffers its own caste system and, with it, noxious discrimination against lower classes and the Tamil minority. The seeds of Sri Lanka's salvation do NOT lie in its own culture but must be imported.

Nepal. The small, Himalayan nation of Nepal on India's northern frontier is 90% Hindu, ruled by a Hindu king, and thus fully part of traditional Indian civilization. It is also intimately linked to India by race and trade. It is known for the world's hghest mountain, Mt. Everest, on the Nepal-China border, and for Lumbini, the birthplace of Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha.

Nepal is one of the poorest, most backward, and most illiterate countries on Earth. Part of its poverty is due to its scant resource base and terrain so difficult that developing transportation and other infrastructure is very difficult. But that does not explain why it has one physician for 13,777 people (as compared to one per 365 for the United States), nor why it has only 12 TV sets per 1,000 population, 30 radios per 1,000, nor any of the other appalling (Nepalling?) statistics that describe Nepalese backwardness. Nepal has been a mountain-ringed backwater for centuries, and its hidebound culture resists modernization. Progressives unable to proceed in the normal way in democratic states have been tempted to Communist, even Maoist insurrection. In early 2001, an argument within the Nepalese royal family resulted in the murder of the king, his queen, and several other members of the royal family, including the heir apparent — and presumed murderer. A brother of the dead king became regent, but rumors of military coup or Maoist attack fueled riots and instability for weeks after the 'incident'. In Nepal, as elsewhere in historic India, the seeds of the people's salvation are not to be found in their culture but must be imported.

Bhutan. Pretty much everything said about the basics of Nepal, above, can be said about Bhutan except that its king and the majority of the population are Buddhist (the rest being mainly Hindu) and Bhutan is, if anything, even more backward than Nepal. The number of TV sets, for instance, isn't even given in the World Almanac, which suggests that isolation from the outside world is even more complete in Bhutan than in Nepal.

A Bhutan-vacation website proclaims:

Bhutan is not involved with the Industrial Age, the World Wars, nor the Arms Race, and until recently not even cyberspace. In fact many of us didn't know you existed until we got your e-mail. Bhutan is the "Roof of the World" .

The Kingdom's own website tries to make a virtue out of Bhutan's backwardness:

Many eastern classics and books of wisdom have referred to the Himalayas as the abode of the gods and home to the immortals. These descriptions did not stem merely from the majesty and grandeur of the natural surroundings but perhaps alluded to a special environment where communion with the divine was possible through contemplation and meditation. And so since time immemorial, ascetics, scholars, philosophers and pilgrim have been drawn irresistibly to these remote and rugged mountains in their personal search for wisdom, inspiration, solitude and happiness.

If you are not an ascetic, scholar, philosopher or pilgrim, however, how are you to live in such a vacuum? Ordinary people would much prefer watching TV or surfing the Internet after a hard day's work to having to contemplate the universe for want of anything else to do!

Bhutan is under the thumb of India as regards foreign affairs and trade. It has essentially no internal movements for modernization, and India is content to keep Bhutan a quiet nook of the Indian world. Here, too, the only hope for Bhutan's deprived populace is reform and assistance from outside.

Afghanistan. The mountainous, arid nation Afghanistan is not really part of the Indian Subcontinent either geographically or culturally, but straddles the Indian and Moslem worlds. Ravaged and culturally influenced by innumerable invasions and migrations across its territory by invaders as diverse as nearby Persia, distant Greece, and nomadic Huns, Afghanistan is hard to pin down, and equally hard to govern.

This is what the monumental standing Buddha carved into a mountainside in Bamiyan, Afghanistan looked like before Taliban destroyed it. It was nearly 175 feet (53m) tall and had stood since the 6th Century.

The Mogul (Mongol) conqueror Babur brought northern India under his control from a base in Kabul, but Afghanistan's culture is only partly influenced by the Mogul Moslems (creators of the Taj Mahal). Archeological sites include ancient Greek cities and, until the lunatic Taliban government destroyed them this year, hundreds of Buddhist sculptures.

The reasoning behind this destruction is that Islam absolutely and unequivocally forbids the representation of the divine in human form; that this commandment comes from God Himself; and that there is no exception for the art of prior centuries or other religions.

Westerners shouldn't be too self-righteous at Afghan religious zealotry's destroying works of art and veneration. Early Christians, after achieving the takeover of the Roman Empire, destroyed uncounted numbers of pagan temples and statues, and "iconoclasts" in both the Byzantine Empire during the 8th and 9th Centuries and later, during the Prostestant Reformation of the 16th Century, destroyed similarly large numbers of religious artworks. Yes, that was hundreds of years ago, but it did happen, even in the West. Still, it is a pity that it is still happening in this day and age.

Surrounded by mountains and isolated from the world by an insular mentality and regressive religious fanatics, Afghanistan faces a grim future. It is also a key steppingstone in the international trade in heroin (see discussion at Pakistan, above). Can it achieve openness, democracy, and pluralistic tolerance? Not on its own, it can't. Perhaps — perhaps — it can be drawn into modernity thru interaction with its neighbors to the south and east, but regressive Iran lies to its west.

*

The Expansionist Party advocates that all the Indias embark immediately upon programs to modernize and, yes, AMERICANIZE. To separate religion from government. Embrace the new, while retaining a respect for the good things about the past. Accept change as inevitable and look forward to the next big thing.

We want India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan, and Afghanistan to take pride in the culture they are all, in greater or lesser measure, heir to. Afghans are blowing up their past! That is neither necessary nor wise. But nor is it necessary or wise to live in a museum.

All the Indias should stop being so defensive, so self-absorbed, so isolated from the outside world, instead to form links of every kind to the West, and especially to the United States. We advocate greatly increased trade and mutual cultural interaction. There should be massive migration of people from the Indias to the United States and from the United States to the Indias, in a constant and creative human convection, not one-sided immigration alone.

We'd like to see all the Indias put aside the insane passions of the past and recognize that they have much more to gain from healing old wounds and embarking upon a cooperative future than they could possibly gain by keeping the pains of the past ever in mind and constantly resented. There should definitely be a trading bloc for South Asia, and serious talks on federal reunion of historic India in a secular state that respects all communities.

If India cannot reunite federally to itself, then perhaps it can reunite federally within a hugely expanded United States, in which Bihar, Bengal, and Baluchistan become States of the United States and form amicable working relationships in Congress and in the totally free trading area guaranteed by the United States Constitution. That Constitution can also guarantee the individual rights of Hindus, Moslems, Sikhs, Jains, Christians, and other religious communities throughout historic India, and the power of the United States could enforce anti-discrimination laws that would make a reunited India viable.

Culturally, the Indias have much to offer the United States. But the U.S. has much to offer culturally as well.

The benefits to the Indias of deep and energetic U.S. involvement in development projects, creation of infrastructure, education, healthcare, and modernization in all its aspects should be obvious. The U.S. is a hugely rich country with masses of investment and technological knowhow capable of speeding up India's development by decades — at the least.

What may not be obvious to Americans contemplating the enormous cost of transforming India is that Americans have much to gain even economically from a revivified and modernized India. Tho the mass of Indians, Pakistanis, etc., are much too poor, at present, to buy any significant amount of U.S. consumer products, (a) there is still a huge absolute number of Indians of the upper and prosperous middle classes — on the order of 110 million — who can afford U.S. goods, (b) American corporations can establish manufacturing and marketing operations in the Indias to produce goods at low cost that the mass of Indians can afford, which could produce enormous profits for U.S. companies that in turn would produce sizable tax revenues to the U.S. Government and thus wider benefits to Americans generally, and (c) as the penetration of U.S. investment spawns material well-being and Indian incomes rise, even more millions of Indian consumers will be able to afford, and will be inclined to buy, U.S.-produced goods.

Bangalore, India's high-tech hope for change.

Moreover, tho India overall is backward, it does have some excellent institutions of higher education, and produces many more highly educated graduates than its economy can absorb. American high-tech corporations have found a treasure trove of computer programmers, web designers, and the like in, among other places, Bangalore, India's "Silicon Valley". The U.S., by contrast, is not producing enough graduates in a number of technical disciplines, and could sorely use the talents of India's best and brightest. Today, American high-tech companies are both opening branch offices in Bangalore and other Indian locations to take advantage of quality personnel at low cost, and bringing Indian recruits over to their U.S. operations. Alas, such efforts have led to protests from U.S. labor unions and other protectionists concerned that wage and working conditions will be adversely impacted by such programs. These are legitimate concerns, but transnational labor needs are not going away by legislative fiat and will not be satisfied by kneejerk protectionism. Rather, we must find ways to promote everyone's economic interest in cooperative development that does not impoverish the United States as it enriches Indians.

Militarily and strategically, a much closer relationship or union with India is decidedly in the U.S. national interest if you believe, as key figures in the Pentagon apparently do, that the government of Communist China is planning war against the United States within 20 years or so. Perhaps you hadn't heard about such Pentagon concerns. Consider this passage from a front-page article in The Wall Street Journal of July 11, 2001:

NEWPORT, R.I.--The U.S. is at war with China, and U.S. Navy commanders are using a new breed of ship called Streetfighter to sail perilously close to the Chinese coast.

There, the small, fast, inexpensive warships — designed to go into harm's way and, if necessary, be lost — hunt down Chinese subs and missile launchers hidden among fishing boats and cargo ships. Some Streetfighters are sunk by enemy fire, and casualties are high, but they help the U.S. win earlier than the military pros had projected.

The "war" was a computer simulation set around 2015, carried out in windowless rooms at the Naval War College here about a year ago. The Streetfighters existed only on paper.

"Risk Assessment: Plans for a Small Ship Pose Big Questions For the U.S. Navy", 7/11/01, p. 1, rightmost column

The population of the Republic of India alone is close to that of China and will likely be even closer in 20 years. The population of all of the Indian Subcontinent is greater than China's. Existence of a military alliance between modernized, U.S.-trained and -equipped militaries across the Subcontinent, which borders China for nearly 2,000 miles, would prove a powerful restraint on Chinese aggressiveness against us. No longer would China's Communist leaders be able to think of a distant and isolated U.S. incapable of projecting power across the broad Pacific. They would have to consider that they are stuck between a hugely powerful U.S. to the east and a hugely populous Indian Subcontinent on the west and south allied with the U.S. and host to U.S. military bases.

China's leaders know history. They remember that in the Opium War, little Britain defeated great China due to the assistance of military forces recruited and deployed from India. They learned from that bitter experience that they face devastating and humiliating defeat if a Western power and South Asia attack at once.

China must fear us if it is to avoid war against us. China's leaders must consider as very real the possibility that if it goes to war against the United States, the U.S. will counterattack from Japan, from Korea, from India, from the Philippines, from Russia — and so we must draw all these areas at least into alliance or, preferably, fully into our internal realm, as full, free, and ecstatic participants in our Union.

China's leaders must fear that an unsuccessful conclusion to a war against the United States would mean the end of historical China, the destruction of China's geographical unity and even its culture. No Chinese leader would willingly risk such a catastrophe.

China's Communist despots must fear that a triumphal United States would break China into several, even many, mutually antagonistic pieces — the fate of the Soviet Union must ever be uppermost in their minds. We could restore Tibet's independence; give Sinkiang (Xinjiang) independence; create Manchuria into a separate and powerful country; set up Hong Kong and Canton (Guangdong) as a commercial dynamo — even annex all of China as, first, colonies, then states, of the Union. We could force defeated Chinese to learn English . We could even ban the use of Mandarin to promote instead regional languages as would ensure the division of China forever, save as pieces of our Union. We couldn't do any of these things to a voluntary adherent to the Union, but we could assuredly do anything we wanted to a defeated enemy.

Plainly it is in our most fundamental interest to prevent a war with China by showing China's leaders that such an adventure would entail far too many risks of CATASTROPHE, for minimal gain. An alliance between the United States and South Asia, then, is very much to be desired. Americans who think a partnership with the Indias would be all well and good for them but of no value to us must rethink: how important is it to prevent World War III?

In time, an Indian Subcontinent at peace and making fast progress on economic development will experience a drop in birth rates, as has the prosperous West, and so not just stabilize its population but even reap the benefits of a declining population with increasing prosperity. Moreover, if the Indias make their ties to the West more intimate, they will be able to export part of their surplus population to places like Italy and Russia that are not even replacing their present population but are in danger of being gradually depopulated as old people die and there are no young peple to replace them — or pay into the local Social Security system, keep the economy rolling, etc.

That would in turn reduce the threat to many endangered species across the Subcontinent and contribute to planet Earth's revitalization and biological diversity. We mention this only briefly, but people of good will concerned about the environment must think seriously about the many threats to multitudinous, precious and irreplaceable species across the Indian Subcontinentm and about how habitat destruction could be minimized, even reduced and reversed ,if the Indias are helped to modernize in an ecologically-aware mindset. Forms of development, particularly urban sprawl, that have characterized the United States thru too much of recent history, could be corrected by appreciation of how small a 'footprint' human communities can crush into the environment by development that focuses on villages and a sense of community rather than the personally isolated and alienated pattern of too much of modern development in the present States. In short, India, which has for centuries seen people and animals coexist despite astonishing densities of human population, has something to teach US about ecologically-sound living patterns. And when we sprawl less and live together more, we may find that the human relationships we now devalue are much more important than we have appreciated.

Somnath Temple to Shiva, in coastal Gujurat.

Perhaps Americans will be too afraid of the Subcontinent's masses to risk full political integration of new Subcontinent states into the American Union, even knowing that it never happens that the 37 "new" states of the present 50 "gang up" on the original Thirteen but divide among themselves (and with the original Thirteen) on issues, not geography. The lesson should, then, be that we can expect new states created from the Indias to divide among themselves and form shifting alliances with their ideological soulmates in the present 50 states, not gang up to victimize the older 50 states.

Even if we cannot unite fully but can develop dynamic trade, military cooperation, cultural exchange, etc., the whole world has much to gain from a newly intimate working relationship between the Indias and the United States. We urge Indians abroad and Indians at home to end India's isolation and pursue mutually profitable and progressive relations with all the nations of the West, but especially with the one nation on the entire planet that has the most to offer all Indians: the United States.

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