Posted on 09/11/2012 2:43:38 AM PDT by coldphoenix
"The people of India deeply love you," Prime Minister Manmohan Singh famously told then US President George Bush in 2008. Apparently, the love affair extends to his successor Barack Obama too. Wait, strike that. India loves America, period.
A new Pew research poll has revealed that a solid 58% majority in urban India is favorably disposed toward the United States, seeing America in a more favorable light than they view other major world powers, including India's long time supporter Russia (48%) or the EU (38%).
The numbers are so good for the US President that he might want to move to India, where his predecessor also had high ratings at a time he was deeply unpopular across rest of the world.
The poll does not go into why American Presidents are so popular in India but the results broadly segue into the perception that US and India have by and large overcome the Cold War baggage in the last two decades. Huge number of Indian emigrants who have bumped up Indian population in the US from less than a million in 1990 to more than 3 million in 2010, consequently creating a large pro-American sentiment in urban India, could also be a factor.
Just how much Indians are besotted with the US is even starker when compared to their view of India's immediate large neighbors. Indians feel closer to the distant United States than to neighboring China.
The poll showed that Indians in cities are also generally supportive of the exercise of US power, both hard and soft. They broadly favor (73%) American-led efforts to fight terrorism and a plurality (48%) backs US drone strikes targeting extremists in countries such as Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia.
(Excerpt) Read more at timesofindia.indiatimes.com ...
If India loves zer0bama’s America....then whether they know it or not, they do not love America
My instructor in one of my history courses in college always said we made a mistake throwing our lot in with Pakistan instead of India during the early Cold War. We saw India as almost certainly going Red due to the large population (kinda like we count California or New York as throwaways in elections) and threw in with Pakistan.
So that is why they are all here. Great.
Business do what they need to do to survive and it's an apocalyptic environment for business these days.
May also have had something to do with India choosing to side with USSR. No enemies on the Left, you know, and India was a proud socialist state.
Also, India was a recent colony, and therefore sympathized more with the “anti-colonial” USSR than the British-allied USA.
India is a terribly frustrating place for their educated professionals.
That someone with an advanced engineering degree, at the head of his class, from a top university in India, wants to come to the US and work in a convenience store, is downright tragic. If he and his peers were just *allowed* by the Indian bureaucracy to work and innovate, they would likely quickly surpass China as the world’s largest economy.
The amount of “idle talent” in India is just nonsensical, a tremendous waste. They are probably the only country in the world that could eventually move into our shoes as “the world’s policeman”, and do a reasonably good job of it.
I understand the whole Cold-War calculus with Pakistan including the Soviet Union, but after 9/11, we should have just given up completely on Pakistan and told India - “Do what you want.”
Pakistan should now be viewed as an enemy. The goal should be to break it up into its ethnic and tribal pieces.
well, they love the ideals that make up America.
You mean the ideals that once made up America.
The idea in 1947 was that this poor country could not survive and would balkanize.
in contrast pakistan was seen as a sure bet since it was more or less homogenous (Moslem dominated and 45% Punjabi)
Also Pakistan marketed the idea that its people were the "martial races of india" while india had weak vegetarian hindu soldiers who would not be able to stand up to the USSR or china
in spite of this, ties with Eisenhower and Nehru were good and close.
The relationship deteriorated after Nehru (who for all his gullibility seemed to honestly want to be friends to all) and especially when his daughter, Indira Gandhi came to power.
They reached their Nadir in 1971 when Nixon sent a US nuclear fleet to intimidate India who was helping the Bangladeshi's get their independence from Pakistan
India was a socialist state, Sherman, but they didn't side with the USSR until after '68. Before that, they were wishy-washy, pontificating ('Gandhian values') and they were stomped by realpolitik (The Chinese had no such illusions of peace)
Not possible while:
That would be good -- Pakistan is divided into 4 areas and with 7 different regional groups.
The Punjabis are dominant and have their own province of Punjab. The Sindhis dominate Sindh, the Baluchis Baluchistan and the Pasthuns/pathans dominate the North-west frontier province.
The Pathans are really the same people as in Afghanistan, artificially separated by the British-era Durrand line.
the Baluchis are an Irani people and separated from their Balochi brethern in Iran's Sistan-e-Balochistan province
Besides these there are the Brahuis, a people in Baluchistan whose language is related to Tamil from southern India. But these associate themselves with Balochis mainly
The big non-local group are the Muhajirs who are folks from the Ganges river who came to pakistan after partition and live in Sindh mainly. they have no "land" of their own
The 7th "group" is actually a variety of different groups of people around the NWFP who don't seem Indic or Iranic but the third subbranch of the indo-irani branch of Aryan languages -- the Dardic languages.
Generally agree, especially about India not being a nation in the traditional sense. It’s a “continent” considerably more diverse than Europe.
Differ rather strongly about Pakistan being more homogenous (at independence) that India. Pakistan wasn’t eve geographically contiguous! Well over half its population lived in East Pakistan. I strongly suspect your 45% Punjabi number is for West Pakistan only.
I guess my biggest objection is the original claim that US “chose” to align with Pakistan and could have equally chosen to align with India. The Indians get to decide who they align with, you know. It’s not just our choice.
A Cold War was raging, and Pakistan was, or portrayed itself to be, or we perceived it to be, strongly anti-Communist. While India was at best “non-aligned” or at worst pro-Sovie. It’s hard for me to see why we should have aligned ourselves with the friends of our enemies.
Things look different now, but that’s the way they were in the 60s and 70s.
The notion behind these assumptions seems to me to be similar to the whole argument back in the 50s over “who lost China.” The implicit assumption behind that whole mess was that we were in control and deficiencies in our policies caused China to fall to the commies. As if the nearly 1B Chinese of the time were merely inanimate objects that we could move about at will.
The other guy gets a vote. While we may be able to influence them, we can’t control them nor should we want to.
I do believe that the US chose pakistan as a stronger ally. In the 50s and 60s India did not want to be allied with anyone -- it was too idealistic (at least Nehru was). That changed after the 1963 war with China.
But by then US ties with Pakistan deepened and this was irrevocably set in the Nixon years.
It’s hard for me to see why we should have aligned ourselves with the friends of our enemies. -- yes in the 1970s and 80s and possibly the late 1960s, but India was considered a friend (a woolly-headed friend, but a friend nonetheless) in the 50s under Eisenhower and under Kennedy
Kai-shing :) KMT
Population density has a stronger correlation to leftism than population total. One possibility for that is people living in closer quarters experience more envy and therefore are drawn into the politics of envy. India is socialist to the extent they can afford it. The Calcutta region is communist. Our growing military alliance with India is strategic vs. China rather than India being anti-communist, which they are not.
India was forced to side with the Russians out of necessity when the US barred Britain from selling India aviation-related weaponry. This was when the Russians seized the opportunity and gave Nehru a tour of their MiG factories, with aid and assistance to build jet fighters in India. The US simultaneously began ramping up ties with Pakistan, believing a religiously-”unified” Pakistan had better chances of making it through.
This was also the turning point when Indian weaponry, until now dominated by British wares, began to shift to Russian ones.
Also, don’t forget that India is fiercely independent when it comes to managing its strategic areas of interest - not a single sq. km of Indian territory was ever leased to the Soviets as any form of a military base. On the other hand, India did allow America to build listening posts along the Himalayas to watch Chinese nuclear tests. That image of “peaceful” India has also allowed the country to intervene in foreign territories militarily and establish its writ there.
India has a tradition of playing larger powers against each other to defend its own interests. When the US sent the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise to the Bay of Bengal during the 1971 Indo-Pakistan war, to intimidate India and show support to America’s ally, Pakistan, India engaged the Russians to get them to trail the Enterprise with their naval forces, including a nuclear submarine (the Soviet 10th Operative Battle Group). The US (and Britain, reluctantly siding with the US) was forced to watch as India ripped ita ally Pakistan into two separate countries.
If you ask me, depending on how well India continues to get its act together, it could swig from being a reliable ally of the West to a formidable foe in its own right. We are brain-dead stupid to continue Sidon with Pakistan, when instead, by now that entire country should have received a kill dose of nuclear radiation for its role in 9-11.
Swig = swing
Sidon = siding
That's a pretty bizarre way to put it, IMO.
The (West) Pakis were engaged in a genuinely genocidal campaign (upwards of 1M dead) to crush Bengalis with legitimate grievances. India eventually intervened, if only to stop the massive flow of refugees it couldn't adequately support.
Indian intervention in the Pakistani civil war was one of the most justified military actions of the 20th century.
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