Essay on India vs China's conflict on LAC....(50 to 70 worlds)...
Answers
Explanation:
India and China are two of the oldest and still extant civilizations. For Europeans, they
were legendary seats of immense wealth and wisdom right up to the eighteenth century.
Somewhere between the mid-eighteenth century and early nineteenth centuries, both
these countries became, in the European eyes, bywords for stagnant, archaic, weak
nations. For China, this happened between the adulation of Voltaire and the cooler
judgment of Montesquieu; in India’s case, it was the contrast between Sir William
Jones’s desire to learn things Indian and James Mill’s dismissal of Indian history as
nothing but darkness.
Twentieth century brought nothing but a deepening of the perception of the two countries
as bywords for misery and the perceptions were not too far behind actual conditions of
the two countries. For one thing they were and remain the two most populous countries.
In 1820, they had a combined population in excess of half a billion and by 1900, 700
million. Within the twentieth century, their population had trebled. But they were also
two of the poorest countries, typically thought of as locations of famine, disease,
backwardness and superstition, of women with bound feet and men with long pony tails,
untouchables beyond the pale and myriads of gods with many heads and limbs.
In mid-twentieth century, particularly in the 1960’s, the fortunes of these two countries
seemed to have reached their nadir. They were independent republics supposedly
launched on their path of development, but both suffered devastating famines. China’s
famine was hidden, perhaps more from China’s own ruling classes than from its people
or the world, but it had followed swiftly upon the debacle of Great Leap Forward, a
memorable piece of policy making by fantasy. India’s double harvest failure in 1965 and
1966 brought India to its proverbial knees in terms of foreign policy and dependence on
US food aid. These two countries were “basket cases“ in the then fashionable terms of
international diplomac