What does modern India refer to?
Answers
Answer:
India is a land of [poverty] and, in some ways, of plenty. It is a nation both powerful and weak, ancient and modern, climatically dramatic in its contrasts. The very term "India" implies a unity which exists more as a tentative political form than as a human and socio-cultural reality. ❤
Answer:
Five important features which will perhaps give us some aid in understanding modern India:
Its diversity
The depth of culture
A land of minorities
Its future depends on the interaction between two worlds:
In the cities and rural India, poverty, spirituality and modernity mix and coexist
Many people in the Western world think of India as an inert and distant [grouping] of people and poverty, a combination of the exotic and tragic. This misperception, popularized through years of media stereotyping, conceals reality.
In fact, India is a vibrant society with an increasingly vigorous internal dynamic and an increasing influence, directly and indirectly, in the world. Its significance lies not only in its size—some 930 million Indians are 15 percent of the planetary population—but also in the questions raised by the path India has chosen in domestic and foreign policy. This nation is the largest functioning democracy, with regular and freely contested elections. Thus, it is the test of whether democracy is a suitable system of govemment for large numbers of relatively poor people_in a world where democracy, as we understand it, is a much-endangered political species, especially in Third World countries.
Modern India is also a test of two middle-ground philosophies. As an early proponent of non-alignment in international politics, India has attempted to establish a [middle] position between Western and [communist] oriented states. Over the years, its leadership in carving out a Third World posture demonstrated that there is a viable route for nations who did not want to take sides in Cold War politics, an approach which many other nations in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East have followed and hope to sustain.
India's economic policies have also broken new ground. They were the first large-scale test of the modern mixed economy: central government planning with a combination of both private and public ownership of economic enterprises. It is perhaps still too early to evaluate the results. On the one hand, poverty remains [widespread] and unemployment is high. On the other, Indian agriculture has performed much better than either Soviet or Chinese agriculture. (India now feeds her population and has imported hardly any grain in the past four years.) Also, India now ranks as the ninth largest industrial economy in the world. A further significance of India today comes from the geopolitics of South Asia. Bordering the Indian Ocean into which the Persian Gulf flows, it is a key location in an era of oil logistics. Add the proximity of Russia, Afghanistan, Pakistan and China, and India's situation becomes critical to the tensions and interactions of current global politics. From this perspective alone, apart from the many human, cultural and other reasons, it behooves thoughtful people around the world to make efforts to understand this vast and vital nation.
It is possible to say almost anything about India and have it apply to some part of that subcontinent. India is a land of [poverty] and, in some ways, of plenty. It is a nation both powerful and weak, ancient and modern, climatically dramatic in its contrasts. The very term "India" implies a unity which exists more as a tentative political form than as a human and socio-cultural reality. From the intertwining of its complex history with contemporary society, one can distill five important features which will perhaps give us some aids in understanding modern India.