Subject: 
            AH Challenge: Inverted Countries; China and India
       Date: 
            13 Aug 2001 13:28:05 -0700
       From: 
            hartjos@iit.edu (Fleetlord Hart)
Organization: 
            http://groups.google.com/
 Newsgroups: 
            soc.history.what-if


With a POD after, say, 1750, have 21st century China as a developing
former British colony with a democratic form of government, and a
communist India (inc. Pakistan and Bangladesh) seen as future
superpower material by some. Both nations are still nuclear armed.
Bonus points if the world has an independent nuclear armed Sinkaing
(Pakistan) AND a rump democratic Indian state (Taiwan).

Good luck,
-Joe Hart

"A litle learning is a dangerous thing, drink deep or taste not the
Pierian spring. There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain, and
drinking largely sobers us again." - Alexander Pope

Subject: 
            Re: AH Challenge: Inverted Countries; China and India
       Date: 
            Wed, 15 Aug 2001 02:05:02 GMT
       From: 
            Byzantine <belisarius_ii@yahoo.com>
Organization: 
            Excite@Home - The Leader in Broadband http://home.com/faster
 Newsgroups: 
            soc.history.what-if
 References: 
            1


 Hmmm… this one’s tough.  But I’ll try….

POD: In 1757, the battle of Plassey goes a bit differently.  Maybe the
Nawab doesn’t impetuously squander his ammunition, or his generals don’t
stab him in the back, or the French are more co-operative, or something
else.  The net result is that Plassey is a draw.  The British East India
Company fails to get a foothold in Bengal and therefore can’t extract
massive land taxes to fund the expansion into India.  And since it’s a
draw, the French can’t either.

Over the next couple decades, India is a patchwork of relative chaos,
with French, British, Dutch and Portuguese vying for external control,
while the more progressive Indian kings with more extensive European
contact rapidly build modern defense industries based on cannon and
musket.  No one can get in, but each keeps the other out.  All the while
there is a continuous exchange of ideas.

In 1782, Britain is reeling from the exorbitant costs of fighting in the
American colonies;  in this timeline, there are the reduced profits of a
delayed industrial revolution (less capital from Indian land taxes) and
far less asymmetric trade with distant colonies.  Unwilling to
countenance propping up the BEIC in India, Britain turns its back on the
Company after its defeat at the hands of Tipu Sultan in Mysore.  They
settle, instead for taking Ceylon from the Dutch and running
plantations.  Over the years they also manage to get the southern Malay
peninsula and Java, providing a future British gateway to China.

The French Revolution in 1789 abruptly curtails French colonial
ambitions in India.  Tipu Sultan gathers a coalition of like-minded
co-belligerent rulers in south and east India, vowing to maintain
sovereignty against the remaining “foreign devils”.  To speed the
necessary industrialization, they agree to a currency union amongst
their separate states.  To facilitate communication, they agree to adopt
a “Modern Sanskrit” as a link/courtly language between the member
states, which together form the Confederate States of India (CSI).  The
rather limited federal government is also in charge of foreign policy,
war, the collection of customs revenue, and the maintenance of a
standing army.  Loosely paraphrasing the Mahabharata, the new
constitution states “Separately, we were like easily broken fingers;
together, we form a powerful fist.”

Meanwhile, British expansion continues eastward, by-passing India.
Though the Dutch are left to their devices in OTL Indonesia (minus Java)
the British sail up the coast into China.  There they meet the Qing
dynasty in a state of decline.  Using the process of divide and rule,
they manage to acquire hegemony over a good chunk of the Chinese
heartland by 1850.  The Japanese pull a weaker Meiji restoration a bit
early, and are able to beat off British and American incursions, but
can’t do much more at this time.

In South Asia, meanwhile, the last bits of the carcass of the Mughal
Empire have fallen to the CSI (1857), which has steadily adopted the
best of the European and Indian institutions.  An army staffed and run
by Indians organized along Prussian-lines, funded by a British-style
national bank, with Swiss-quality arms, steamrollers the rest of South
Asia, stretching to the borders of OTL Persia, Tibet, and Thailand, by
1914.  Industrialization, led by capitalists from Bengal and Madras,
proceeds rapidly.  The first trans-CSI railroad opens in 1870.  By 1914,
on the eve of the Great European War, India’s per capita wealth
(including newly incorporated regions) is only 25% that of Germany but
catching up fast.

Exultant with their heady success after the destruction of the Moghuls
in the 1850s, the CSI undertakes an ambitious national project, partly
inspired by the Japanese example – they will form a much closer union,
adopt a national religion and have a single language.  With the currency
union having led the way in economic integration, a common army, and the
link language of “Modern Sanskrit” as a precedent, the CSI government
adopts a militant, monotheistic Kshatriya-ized Hinduism, with elements
taken from Sufi Islam (think reformist Sikhs on steroids worshipping the
one true God, chanting His Sacred name ‘Om’).

The institution of state-run schools speeds this process so that by
1939, other languages and religions are fading fast.  State-run
persecution speeds this process.   Refugee orthodox Hindus who cannot
stomach the incredibly rapid de facto abolition of the caste system in a
rapidly urbanizing country, and fundamentalist Muslims who cry heresy at
the changing pattern of social interaction and the slow erosion of
institutions such as purdah, flee to other parts of the world, forming
an extensive diaspora.  Muslims choose Ottoman and British SW Asia,
where they distinguish themselves overseeing construction of the Qattara
Depression Scheme in 1910.  Hindus prefer East and South Africa, where
they grow to surpass whites in population and eventually dominate the
cut diamond trade and the commercial sector;  Ceylon is popular with
both groups.  During the abortive Boer rebellion, the heavily
outnumbered Afrikaners curse the ‘curry-eating’ ortho-Hindu British
troops.

In 1938, Hitler’s invasion of Poland sparks the Eurasian War.  With the
running sore of Ceylon, swayed by Hilterian arguments about ‘Aryan
brotherhood’, and admiring the example of Japan  (who have governed the
Philippines since the late 1890s), India joins the Axis, hoping for
quick territorial gains against Ceylon and the mountainous country of
Afghanistan and Tibet.  Though Ceylon is easily taken (thanks to the
spectacular work of the engineer-jawans who construct the Palk bridge in
record time using pre-fab construction techniques), Tibet and
Afghanistan prove much harder, especially with lots of American
lend-lease aid flowing through Soviet Manchuria on its way to Afghani
nationalists and Tibetan fighters.

India remains stuck in this position as first Germany falls in 1946 and
Japan in 1947.  However, India has been bled – and caught off guard in
what for India has been primarily an anti-guerilla war.  The destruction
of Osaka and Yokohama by nuclear fire strikes terror into the CSI
government.  Though it plays for time, the nuclear bombing of Madras by
a long-range British Vindicator bomber based in Oman forces the CSI
government to the negotiating table.  They agree to put Ceylon under
joint Allied control, and grudgingly agree to give up Tibet, which will
join with Sinkiang to form the “Central Asian Republic” (CAR).  Citing
“historical continuity” with Afghanistan, the spread of the new faith
over the previous decades (and backed up by the previous ethnic
cleansing of those who failed to submit to “Modern Hinduism”), the CSI
retains control of Afghanistan in a remarkable show of generosity by the
Americans, spurred on by the utopian post-war plans of General
Marshall.  However, confusion over the actual border between CAR and
China mars any residual good will.

Simultaneously, the Japanese withdraw from the Chinese possessions that
they had taken during the course of the war.  Japan is to be a
parliamentary democracy, as will be the various Chinese states, merged
into one ramshackle federal state, each with mutually unintelligible
dialects (thanks to the adoption of the Latin alphabet to write the
various Chinese languages [as in OTL Vietnam], to increase the ease of
learning them by British colonialists and administrators and to increase
literacy rates in badly underfunded colonial grammar schools).

Humiliation by the foreign devils, however, causes chaos in India.
Drawing upon the rantings of a semi-religious figure in OTL Nepal, the
CSI falls to a “People’s Revolution”.  The strength of the movement is
confirmed after a “Long March” from the Karen region of Burma province
to the capital in Delhi.  The old aristocracy is to be replaced by
“people’s cadres” who will run the country of 400 million people in a
fairer manner.  Women will be given the right to vote for the appointed
party official.  There will be free medical care for all.  There will be
no scraping and bowing before foreigners.  And the policy of ‘from each
according to his ability, to each according to his need’ will be
strictly followed.  While the Soviets rejoice at a ‘communist’ takeover,
the People’s Republic of India (PRI) foreign minister Anil Jamshedpur
retorts ‘Lenin was specific to his socio-cultural milieu .  If the
Soviets want to call this communism, this is communism with Indian
characteristics.’  Aided by the Soviet intelligence services, India
explodes its first nuclear bomb in 1955.  Miraculously, the relatively
underpopulated Central Asian Republic (though bolstered by hordes of
migrants from India, as a result of a “reciprocal friendship agreement”)
explode their first bomb in 1975, a mere year after China does the same.

After the first nuclear bomb a series of spectacular failed Indian
economic experiments follow, from the “greening of Baluchistan” to the
“Narmada Hydroelectric Project”.  Ceylon remains a sticking point,
though PRI succeeds in exporting it’s firebrand communism to CAR and,
with the aid of the Soviet Union, attempts (unsuccessfully) to re-export
communism to anarchic China.

China continues to muddle along, as insurgency along the border with
Soviet Manchuria proves difficult to stamp out.  The continuous threat
by guerilla raiders and infiltrators from CAR, and failed efforts at
Fabian socialism (inspired by the works of Thoreau and friends) fritters
away economic potential.  Though famines are a thing of the past in
democratic China, the economy grows at an anemic “Confucian rate of
growth” – barely ahead of population growth.

By 1980, the standard of living in India is no better than 25 years ago,
and worse by some measures, despite tremendous upheaval.  Moreover, the
PRI has fallen behind its geopolitical competitors.   A new generation
of communist leaders realizes that a second cycle of modernization is
needed.  Vowing that “it does not matter the shape of the mango flower,
as long as it bears fruit”, PRI Secretary-General Motilal Maurya
“rehabilitates” Indian capitalists festering in the prisons of the
Andaman islands and puts them to work on a short leash.

By 2001 India is rapidly catching up with the West.  Though still
heavily dependent upon oil from the CAR, royalist Persia, and the badly
tottering Soviet Union, India, with its 900 million strong population,
is projected to overtake the USA as the world’s largest economy by
2020.  China’s progress has been much slower.  However, the boom in
computer technology has allowed for the English-speaking Chinese to gain
a large slice of the global information technology industry, even as
India has a near choke-hold on light manufacturing.  The abolition of
the Chinese “License Kingdom” in 1991 (after near economic collapse
during an OPEC led effort to drive up the price of oil) temporarily
boosts growth to near-Indian levels.

With rising power, comes rising military aggressiveness, as Red Indian
belligerence to democratic and pluralistic Ceylon increases.  Seeking to
preserve vital shipping lanes, the USA engages in occasional tit-for-tat
symbolic gestures with India, sending in the 7th fleet for “exercises”
on occasion from its base in NW Australia.

Nuclear-armed CAR’s aggressiveness, supported increasingly by immigrant
Indians from the PRI and their descendents, continues to be a
flashpoint, with occasional artillery and small arms skirmishes on the
high altitude mountains on the southern China border.

A participant in a newsgroup in ATL SHWI posts a question: “What if we
inverted India and China….?”

Subject: 
            Re: AH Challenge: Inverted Countries; China and India
       Date: 
            15 Aug 2001 10:16:13 -0700
       From: 
            hartjos@iit.edu (Fleetlord Hart)
Organization: 
            http://groups.google.com/
 Newsgroups: 
            soc.history.what-if
 References: 
            1 , 2


Bravo!


-Joe Hart

"A litle learning is a dangerous thing, drink deep or taste not the
Pierian spring. There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain, and
drinking largely sobers us again." - Alexander Pope