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Random Thoughts If a single sentence were to summarize the history of India, it would be the above title. The Scythians, Huns, Greeks, Persians, Afghans, Turkomen, Mongols and Arabs have used the Boland, Khyber and other northwest passes to attack, plunder and colonize the Indian subcontinent and neither the border nor the regional Hindu kingdoms gave a single thought to guard or fortify the few bottlenecks singly or collectively even after repeatedly experienced disasters. Those who do not learn from history are condemned to re-live it. The repeated invasions of India, Russia (Napoleon & Hitler) and currently Iraq (Britain & US) prove this. Mohammed Ghazni raided Northern and Western India dozens of times for plunder, but no Hindu king set up any warning posts or defenses to impede the difficult logistics of his raiders over a thousand miles of India in an era when the only mode of transport was human or animal limbs. Eventually plunder gave way to conquest and colonization for nearly a millennium with active collusion by local traitors without remorse. The second route of subjugation later was maritime. The cruel and atrocious behavior of Vasco de Gama was not only ignored and not retaliated against, but led to craven cowardly collaboration by petty competing rulers. Eventually the Portuguese carved out local enclaves as did the French and British using Indian sepoys to fight their wars and subjugate their own people. The so-called mighty Indian Mughal Empire had to pay bribes to Portuguese pirates in the Arabian Sea to allow it to send ships for trading to Gulf ports and for Haj pilgrimage to Mecca. It took three to six months in those days for reinforcements from Europe to arrive to support the British, Dutch, French and Portuguese territories in the Indies. There was no internal cohesion, independent spirit or revulsion at subjugation leading to any mass movement of liberation. In the fifth century BC, the onslaught of the mighty Persian Empire encompassing present day Iran, parts of Iraq and Pakistan, Egypt and Turkey was stopped cold at the narrow pass of Thermopylae by a small group of Spartans with a little foresight and willingness to die. It set a pattern and allowed the fleets of the unified Greek City States to decisively defeat the Persian fleet at Salamis. In the fifteenth century the Spanish expelled the colonizing Moors after seven centuries. The Dutch escaped the Spanish yoke over a century later. The Greeks, Serbs and Bulgarians overthrew their Turkish colonial rulers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Americans despite being ethnically and linguistically identical left the British Empire as India was forcibly inducted in it. Some may excuse the Indian idiocy on the basis of historical artifacts of earlier times but the lack of foresight, egotistic trumpeting and subsequent long laments still continue post-independence in India. A foolish and naive Nehru egomaniacally strutting on the world stage ignored the national defense needs, laying the country open to the 1962 Chinese aggression and Indian debacle and had to throw himself at the mercy of American military help. His ignoring of basic needs like agriculture led to the humiliating indebtedness of India to America for the PL480 grain aid to prevent starvation. His daughter Indira Gandhi’s machinations to perpetuate dynastic rule led to her creation of the Khalistan and Kashmir insurgencies. Even today the shameful sycophantic intellectual cowardice leads to a puppet Manmohan Singh ruling on stage, while Sonia, an unqualified dynastic relic pulls the strings behind the curtain like the British political agents of the vintage days of the Raj. Only America the land of an equally ignorant and apathetic electorate has dynastic rule despite relatively open and fair elections, apart from India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, all in South Asia and with similarities in culture. Nothing is gained by the tirade of proclaiming the litany of past follies, if one keeps repeating the same mistakes. The catharsis of confession even when inclusive of remorse and repentance has little meaning when unaccompanied by reform. It is conceivable that there were legitimate reasons for India’s inability to join the nuclear club prior to the NPT of the late nineteen sixties. There was no advantage to the explosion of 1974. It was done by Indira Gandhi in her usual pique to shore up her falling popularity that ultimately led to her declaration of emergency and arrests of the opposition a little over a year later. Her plots led to Bhindranwale, the Khalistan insurgency, the Golden Temple attack and her assassination. Similar foolish delusions of grandeur without the premeditated malice of his mother led to the assassination of the heir Rajiv. |
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