00:00:00.880Good afternoon and welcome to another episode of RealPolitik. I am your host, Firas Mordad,
00:00:07.460and today we are going to be talking about India and why God built a wall around it in the form of the Himalayas.
00:00:15.560No, we will actually explain some of the geography of the country, its relationship with Pakistan and China,
00:00:23.620its issues with the West, and how it is facing a pretty difficult geopolitical situation,
00:00:31.620which it's trying to address with all kinds of alliances.
00:00:37.620The best place to start is with a map.
00:00:40.840And when you want to think about the historic definition of India,
00:00:44.960it sort of begins in Afghanistan or in the borders of Pakistan and Afghanistan,
00:00:51.980because this is the indus river the place where indian civilization actually emerged
00:00:58.140and now it mostly sits in pakistan even though it originates in the mountains in
00:01:03.380in cashmere in the himalayas and what you've had historically is this mountain barrier with with
00:01:13.520china that separated the two nations and the two civilizations um you have the barrier with
00:01:22.160the mountain barrier with myanmar even though myanmar is kind of indian kind of not
00:01:29.760you have the monsoon uh season which basically moves winds um from an east-west direction to a
00:01:39.440west east direction depending on which part of the year you're in and that is what allowed
00:01:44.960india to trade with arabia and with east africa and with the south towards indonesia
00:01:52.720and that meant that the influence of indian culture was quite extensive
00:01:57.920to the extent that you find hindu temples in in cambodia in thailand uh in uh burma myanmar
00:02:05.600some traces of it in in malaysia a hindu population in singapore etc so when you're
00:02:13.520thinking about the geopolitics of this region you're thinking about a pretty huge part of the
00:02:19.100world which is south asia with a massive population that is walled off from china with the himalayas
00:02:26.860and kind of walled off uh from the middle east with the mountains in afghanistan and pakistan
00:02:33.340But the fundamental problem facing India is that its actual historic heartland, the Indus River Valley, is now conquered and dominated by Pakistan and by Islam.
00:02:49.260And when you think about India, you have to think about the conflict with Islam, because even in the days of the Rashidun Caliphate, that is the Islamic rule that immediately followed the death of the false prophet of Islam, Muhammad, in that 40-50 year period, the first Islamic incursions into India began.0.76
00:03:10.340And they began out of Persia. They began sort of in this area here along the coast with some incursions into India. And then the invasions expanded with access points via Peshawar and Quetta, which in modern times ended up becoming strongholds of the Afghan Taliban within Pakistan.
00:03:38.080So over many centuries, the Muslims expanded further into India, and that was partly reversed with the partition of India and the creation of Pakistan, but this forms an integral part of the Hindu DNA, because for a pretty long period, the majority of northern India was in fact governed by Muslims.
00:04:03.340And when you look at the geography of the place, you have the Indus-Ganges river systems, which are represented in this relatively greenish plain here, extending all the way from Karachi in Pakistan to basically Bangladesh, Dhaka in Bangladesh.
00:04:27.640and that all used to be India but was taken away from India in partition. If you remember during
00:04:36.800the partition of India, Pakistan was established but this part, Bangladesh, was actually East
00:04:42.260Pakistan. The Muslim areas were supposed to be one country and then Bangladesh and Pakistan had
00:04:48.920their own war in the 70s which led to the separation of Bangladesh from Pakistan.
00:04:53.560But what this meant is some of the most important agricultural regions and some of the most important historic regions of India ended up being stripped away from it.
00:05:06.600and the indian memory is very much one that sort of relies on the mughal empire which was one of
00:05:14.760the gunpowder empires which dominated the majority of northern india and which allowed um in some
00:05:23.500cases hindu rulers to govern within their administration but in many other cases very
00:05:31.400heavily kept the Hindu population down. And the Hindus were allowed to maintain their very0.97
00:05:37.820complicated case system, which has sort of four major cases, the religious case, the ruling0.98
00:05:44.900military case, the merchant case, and the worker case, and then the no case, the untouchables
00:05:51.060underneath that. This mess is what India inherited after the dissolution of the British Raj0.99
00:06:01.180after India got its independence from Britain.0.55
00:06:05.280Before that, the British didn't actually conquer India.
00:06:29.080You've got the plains around the Indus River, the Ganges River, and the Brahmaputra River,
00:06:36.780which terminates in Bangladesh and which passes through, in part,
00:06:42.820these seven states on the far east of India, which we will discuss because they're important.
00:06:49.200You've got the southern plateau, which is the most Hindu part of India, shall we say.
00:06:54.640and you've got a bunch of islands which we won't be diving into too much and you've got sri lanka
00:07:01.940so when you think of indian geopolitics it's really how it relates to china
00:07:09.220and how it relates to pakistan and the muslim threat these are the two defining issues when
00:07:16.760you think about india and continuing with the issue of islam this is a religious map of the
00:07:23.400Indian subcontinent, you see that Pakistan here is in the darkest green. You see that Kashmir,0.96
00:07:29.460which is contested, is sort of majority Muslim. And then you see that along the plains that
00:07:35.580connect to the other Muslim enclave of Bangladesh, you have these large areas that are 10 to 20%1.00
00:07:43.140Muslim, which form a major threat for Indian security because the Indians can't be assured0.95
00:07:50.040that the Muslims will be loyal to a nationalist Hindu state0.99
00:07:53.720rather than being loyal to their religious kin.
00:07:57.560Because the view of Islam on Hinduism is quite a negative one.
00:08:02.740You could read some of that in the Baladhi's book,
00:08:07.700and he describes the Indians in somewhat unflattering terms.
00:08:13.560But the view is that these are polytheists
00:08:15.780and that they have very strange, unexplained customs,
00:08:20.720that they don't really have much of a fair legal system,
00:08:27.660that they burn their widows when the husband dies,
00:08:32.220that they have different laws to Muslims when it comes to inheritances, etc., etc.
00:08:36.820He goes on about the issues with Indians for quite some time.
00:08:40.360But the core issues for India is that the territory which formed the bedrock of its civilization has already been conquered and taken away from it.
00:08:53.900It's already been taken by Pakistan because the name India derives from the Indus River, and the Indus River is already conquered by the Pakistanis and now forms part of Pakistan.
00:09:05.160And the defining issue is that. And to make things worse for the Indians, China and Pakistan are pretty close allies, and they are both working pretty hard on constraining India and on tying it down, and on making sure that the Indians don't have that many options and are slowly being surrounded, as I'll discuss in a moment.0.51
00:09:29.500so china's aim here is to make china's view of india is that india is mainly an american proxy
00:09:42.000and that india is going to align with the united states against china
00:09:48.600and therefore what the chinese do need to do is to slowly surround india and to gradually cut it off0.55
00:09:56.800So the Chinese are building a major dam on the Chinese portion of the Brahmaputra River, which is going to be much larger than China's massive Three Gorges Dam, which is the largest dam in the world.0.74
00:10:14.580And if you think about this, if you're going to build this kind of logistics in this kind of mountainous area, the camps that you will need for workers, the roads that you are going to need, the airports that are going to be required, all of that is almost inseparable from a military buildup.
00:10:38.040because with all things military, the logistics come before the military.0.81
00:10:43.380And the Chinese, by deciding that they're going to build a dam of that magnitude
00:10:47.860in such a forbidding terrain on the border with India,0.52
00:10:53.020are signaling that they are expanding their military presence
00:10:56.660in the north of India, or just north of India, close to Bangladesh,
00:11:02.880close to an area that is i mean these states the seven sister states that are on the border of
00:11:09.920bangladesh these are not majority hindu these are a very diverse part of india with a big christian
00:11:16.980grouping a big muslim grouping and a big tribal grouping that doesn't actually follow hinduism
00:11:23.120and you can sort of see that the chinese are looking and asking themselves0.56
00:11:28.780can we carve up this part of india and separate it from the rest of the country0.68
00:11:35.240so that we can weaken the indians further and make sure that they aren't a threat0.99
00:11:40.220and the two countries had a brief war in 1962 um in this area of of kashmir here1.00
00:11:49.100and the chinese just completely won that conflict
00:11:52.960so briefly the threat for india is that it is stuck between pakistan and china
00:12:04.180and it's facing an incredibly difficult situation as a result
00:12:08.280one analysis here points out to what the chinese themselves are saying about this uh dam that
00:12:17.680they're building. And essentially, this is a bit of a water bomb. Because if the Chinese build a
00:12:25.860dam on the Yarlong Tsangpo River, the world's highest altitude river, the world's highest0.98
00:12:35.080altitude dam, the biggest dam in the world, they would be building, in effect, a water bomb.1.00
00:12:40.500If they decide to fill up the dam, it's a problem for the Indians because they and Bangladesh will
00:12:47.080get less water. But if they decide to open the dam, they just flood everything in the way.0.99
00:12:52.460And they completely crush India with a massive humanitarian disaster. And the Chinese themselves1.00
00:12:59.200are warning that this is a massive project that is extremely dangerous, that can cause
00:13:06.060big changes in the geography because of building up a water reserve of that size.0.98
00:13:17.080And the Chinese are working hard on just slowly surrounding India.0.75
00:13:22.440As you know, I'm sure, there is a pretty large civil war that is going on in Myanmar.
00:13:29.920And previously, the Chinese weren't that interested.
00:13:33.840But slowly, they've been expanding their support for Burma or Myanmar, whatever you want to call it,0.80
00:13:40.520and allowing it to conquer the territory on the border with India
00:13:43.940and building deeper military cooperation so that Myanmar becomes a full open outpost for the
00:13:50.460Chinese. And they are already building massive railroads in Myanmar. They are already massive
00:13:58.500investors in the country. They're huge investors in both Thailand and Cambodia and Vietnam
00:14:05.320and obviously Laos. And what the Chinese are trying to do is to develop enough infrastructure
00:14:12.080and enough transport capability to basically deny India and its navy the use of the Bay of Bengal.0.81
00:14:20.820That's the idea that is animating China.0.56
00:14:24.180And so they are backing Burma and the government in Burma0.88
00:14:30.100in order to slowly crush Indian influence in that country.0.84
00:14:34.900And over time, this is going to allow them to just gain influence at the expense of India.0.80
00:14:44.500They're also doing the same with Sri Lanka.
00:14:49.980China is the biggest or second biggest investors at Sri Lanka.
00:14:55.420Sri Lanka is a Buddhist country that is deeply tied to India,
00:15:00.920obviously by geography and much else.1.00
00:15:06.260The Sri Lankans have been messing around1.00