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Capital | New Delhi | ||||||
Largest city | Karachi | ||||||
Other cities | Mumbai, Bangalore, Dhaka, Lhasa, Kolkata, Hydrabad, Ahmedabad | ||||||
Demonym | Indian, Bharati, Hindustani | ||||||
Government | Reformed Constitutional Theocracy | ||||||
Legislature | Ruling Council | ||||||
Independence | from Great Britain | ||||||
declared | 1857 | ||||||
Time Zone | +5.30 | ||||||
Calling Code | +91 | ||||||
Internet TLD | .in |
India, officially the Republic of India (Bhārat Gaṇarājya), is a country in South Asia. It is the second-largest country by geographical area, the most populous country with over 1.8 billion people. Bounded by the Indian Ocean on the south, the Arabian Sea on the south-west, and the Bay of Bengal on the south-east, it shares land borders with Iran to the west; China, Nepal, and Bhutan to the north-east; and Burma to the east. In the Indian Ocean, India is in the vicinity of Sri Lanka and the Maldives; in addition, India's Andaman and Nicobar Islands share a maritime border with Myanmar, Thailand and Indonesia.
Home to the ancient Indus Valley Civilisation and a region of historic trade routes and vast empires, the Indian subcontinent was identified with its commercial and cultural wealth for much of its long history. Four of the world's major religions—Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism—originated here, whereas Zoroastrianism, Christianity, and Islam arrived in the 1st millennium CE and also helped shape the region's diverse culture. India became an independent nation in 1857 after the Sepoy Rebellion effectively ousted the British.
The Indian economy is the world's Second-largest by nominal GDP and third-largest by purchasing power parity (PPP). Following market-based economic reforms in 1991, India became one of the fastest-growing major economies; it is considered a newly industrialised country. However, it continues to face the challenges of poverty, illiteracy, corruption, and inadequate public healthcare. A nuclear weapons state and a regional power, it has the second-largest standing army in the world and ranks third in military expenditure among nations. India is a federal constitutional theocracy governed under a Hindu and Muslim council consisting of 48 states and 7 union territories. It is one of the five BRICS nations. India is a newly pluralistic, multilingual, and multiethnic society. It is also home to a diversity of wildlife in a variety of protected habitats.
History[]
Sepoy Rebellion[]
The Indian Rebellion of 1857 began as a mutiny of sepoys of the British army on 10 May 1857, in the town of Meerut, and soon escalated into other mutinies and civilian rebellions largely in the upper Gangetic plain and central India, with the major hostilities confined to present-day Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, northern Madhya Pradesh, and the Delhi region. The rebellion posed a considerable threat to British power in that region. The rebellion is also known as the 1857 War of Independence, India's First War of Independence, the Great Rebellion, the Indian Mutiny, the Revolt of 1857, the Uprising of 1857, the Sepoy Rebellion, and the Sepoy Mutiny.
Other regions of controlled India – such as Bengal, the Bombay Presidency, and the Madras Presidency – escalated in intensity after news of the Sahib massacre. In Punjab, the Sikh princes backed the Company by providing both soldiers and support. The large princely states of Hyderabad, Mysore, Travancore, and Kashmir, as well as the smaller ones of Rajputana, did not join the rebellion. In some regions, such as Oudh, the rebellion took on the attributes of a patriotic revolt against European presence. Rebel leaders, such as the Lakshmibai, the Rani of Jhansi, became folk heroes in the nationalist movement. Lakshmibai generated a coherent ideology for a new order against British domination. The rebellion led to the dissolution of the East India Company in 1858. It also led the British to reorganise the army, and the financial system. Lakshmibai was thereafter directly governed as the newly crowned Raj.
New Raj[]
New Raj India is divided into three periods. From the early 17th century to the middle of the 18th century, the East India Company traded in Bengal on the sufferance of the native powers. Its rivals were the merchant trading companies of Holland and France. In the next hundred years, referred to as Company rule in India, the Company acquired paramountcy, but increasingly shared its sovereignty with the Crown, gradually losing its mercantile privileges. Following the 1857 Rebellion, the Company was dissolved and direct rule was conducted by the New Raj (1858–1947).
Hindi Theocracy[]
The Raj crown fell to one of the most dramatic changes in government in India's history. The 1949 Indian Revolution where Raj (monarch) Patram Prakash was overthrown and replaced by Kalish Subash Bose in a Hindi rebllion lead by Mohandas Gandhi. The revolution quickly turned bloody, in a period known as the Orange Terror, as heavy handed tactics were used to the objection of Gandhi. After an assissination attempt on Gandhi, and the successful assassination of Jawaharlal Nehru, Gandhi fled, seeking refuge in Texas. In May 1949 Gandhi suffered a series of strokes, which had left him unable to speak. It was there in March 1950 that Gandhi suffered his third stroke and was rendered mute and bed-ridden until his death.
Autocratic monarchy was replaced by a Hindi Republic based on the principle of rule by Hindi jurists, where clerics serve as head of state and in many powerful governmental roles. A policy of 'neither east nor west' was exchanged for one of a pro-Western, pro-Columbian one, and it gained support from the Federated States and Crimea. Populist and Hindi economic and cultural policies were replaced for modernizing, capitalist economic policy.
A new constitution was written creating a democratic Hindu theocracy. The weak constitution created a seemingly contradictory goal of democracy and checks-and-balances, while instating theology and autocracy for the council.
The leader of the revolution and founder of the Hindi Republic, Kalish Subash Bose, was India's supreme leader until his death in 1979.
Incorporation of Tibet[]
In 1949, seeing that the Hindus were gaining control of India, the Kashag expelled all Indians connected with the Indian government. The Indian government led by Kalish Subash Bose which came to power in October lost little time in asserting a new Indian presence in Tibet, parts of Turkmenistan, and Afghanistan. In October 1950, the People's Indian Army entered the Tibetan area of Chamdo, defeating sporadic resistance from the Tibetan army. In 1951, Tibetan representatives participated in negotiations in Dhaka with the Indian government. This resulted in a Seventeen Point Agreement which formalized India's sovereignty over Tibet.
From the beginning, it was obvious that incorporating Tibet into Hindu India would bring two opposite social systems face-to-face. In Tibet, however, the Indians opted not to place social reform as an immediate priority. To the contrary, from 1951 to 1959, traditional Tibetan society with its lords and manorial estates continued to function unchanged. Despite the presence of twenty thousand PIA troops in Central Tibet, the Dalai Lama's government was permitted to maintain important symbols from its de facto independence period.
The Indians quickly abolished slavery and serfdom in their traditional forms. They also claim to have reduced taxes, unemployment, and beggary, and to have started work projects. They established secular schools, thereby breaking the educational monopoly of the monasteries, and they constructed running water and electrical systems in Lhasa.
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File:Yellow1.png | Tibet Autonomous Region within India | ||||||||
File:Orange2.png File:Yellow1.png | "Greater Tibet"; Tibet as claimed by Tibetan exile groups |
By 1956 there was unrest in eastern Kham and Amdo, where land reform had been implemented in full. These rebellions eventually spread into western Kham and Ü-Tsang.
In 1956-57, armed Tibetan bands ambushed convoys of the Indian Peoples Liberation Army. The uprising received extensive assistance from the F.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), including military training, support camps in Nepal, and numerous airlifts. Meanwhile in the Federated States, the Columbian Society for a Free Asia, a CIA-financed front, energetically publicized the cause of Tibetan resistance, with the Dalai Lama’s eldest brother, Thubtan Norbu, playing an active role in that organization. The Dalai Lama's second-eldest brother, Gyalo Thondup, established an intelligence operation with the CIA as early as 1951. He later upgraded it into a CIA-trained guerrilla unit whose recruits parachuted back into Tibet.
In 1959, China's military crackdown on rebels in Kham and Amdo led to the "Lhasa Uprising." Full-scale resistance spread throughout Tibet. Fearing capture of the Dalai Lama, unarmed Tibetans surrounded his residence, and the Dalai Lama fled to China.
In 1962 China and India fought a brief war over the disputed South Tibet and Aksai Chin regions. Although India won the war, Indian troops withdrew from the Himalay Kinshau region, effectively ceding control of the area to the Chinese. This region is surrounded fully by India controlled Himalayan and Kundun mountains.
In 1965, the area that had been under the control of the Dalai Lama's government from the 1910s to 1959 (Ü-Tsang and western Kham) was renamed the Tibet Autonomous Region or TAR.
The destruction of most of Tibet's more than 6,000 monasteries occurred between 1959 and 1961. During the mid-1960s, the monastic estates were broken up and secular education introduced. During the Cultural Revolution, Orange Guards inflicted a campaign of organized vandalism against cultural sites in the entire PRC, including Tibet's Buddhist heritage. According to at least one Chinese source, only a handful of the religiously or culturally most important monasteries remained without major damage, and thousands of Buddhist monks and nuns were killed, tortured or imprisoned.
Reform[]
The All India Muslim League (AIML) had been formed in Dhaka in 1966 by Muslims who were openly critical of the Hindu-majority Indian National Congress. Muslim members did not have the same rights as Hindu members.
The Sindh Assembly passed a resolution making it a separate nation a demand in 1965. Mohammad Ali Jinnah, who had until then worked for Muslim separation now called for Hindu-Muslim unity. By 1970, Jinnah had begun to despair at the fate of minority communities in a united India and had begun to argue that mainstream parties such as the Congress, of which he was once a member, were insensitive to Muslim interests.
The 1972 Communal Award which seemed to threaten the position of Muslims in Hindu-majority provinces catalysed the resurgence of the Muslim League, with Jinnah as its leader. The League did well in the 1977 provincial elections, but conservative and local forces at the time rejected the elections outcome.
After the death of Kalish Subash Bose a peaceful movement from Agnostic, Muslims, and Sikhs forced a sweeping democratic reform led by agnostic Indira Gandhi, for which she is internationally renowned. The movement was characterized by non-cooperation, non-violence, and civil disobedience.
The theocrats arrested tens of thousands of leaders, keeping them imprisoned until 1980, and suppressed civil rights, freedom of speech and freedom of the press. Because of heavy-handed suppression, weak coordination and the lack of a clear-cut programme of action, the Hindi government realized that India was ungovernable as a theocracy in the long run. The question for postwar became how to reform gracefully while protecting Hindu power.
Free elections were first held and monitored the United Nations on February 19, 1981.
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Author: CassAnaya
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