I have Indian heritage, and I heard this take growing up, and I'll concede that India is on the peaceful side of the international median. That said, the folks in Sri Lanka [1][2] and Bangladesh [3] would aggressively disagree. (Book recommendation: The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida [4]. Also, anything by Assamese authors.)
And this thesis really only applies to modern India. Pre-EIC India was a subcontinent of warring states. And even for the "modern India" designation, we have to ignore the violence of political integration [5][6].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_intervention_in_the_Sri...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaffna_hospital_massacre
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bangladesh_Liberation_War
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Seven_Moons_of_Maali_Almei...
Sri Lanka is more complicated, but India was never directly involved in the conflict. Except for the peace keeping forces it sent, and those too targeted the Indian Tamils, which was the reason they assassinated Rajeev Gandhi.
Well yes, we turned them into a suzerainty. The Iranians didn't like it when America did it through the Shah. The Bangladeshis don't like it when Indians think they should be a supplicant sovereign. (Sheikh Hassina was to New Delhi what the Shah was to D.C.)
Like, America rescued Japan from a ruinous autocracy. It would still be mean and violent to demand their gratitude for us nuking them.
> India could have easily took over Bangladesh
And it would have had another Kashmir. In practice, buffer state was the only correct play. (Arguably, it's what China should have done with Tibet.)
> India was never directly involved in the conflict. Except for the peace keeping forces
Yeah. The entire American occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan was done with "peacekeeping" forces. The peacekeepers in both cases committed documented atrocities.
The huge part you are missing is, India did the atrocities against it's own people. LTTE were Tamils of Indian origin. My original comment said India has never been an aggressor to it's neighbors.
Everyone always says this. Taiwanese are ethnically Chinese. Ukrainians aren't real. And India wasn't subjugated by the British, it was part of the British Empire and thus a domestic concern.
> LTTE were Tamils of Indian origin. My original comment said India has never been an aggressor to it's neighbors
If you redefine neighbors to being inside India, and then excuse atrocities inside India, sure. By that definition, nobody has ever been an aggresor to its neighbors.
1987–1990: India deployed ~70,000 troops to Sri Lanka and engaged in combat during the civil war.
1987-1990: Indian peace keeping troops only targeted Indian Tamils, which was the primary reason they assassinated Rajeev Gandhi.
https://www.cfr.org/global-conflict-tracker/conflict/conflic...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/India%E2%80%93Pakistan_wars_an...
That's always been the nature of partition.
So the Mughals defeated and assimilated the Sultanate of Delhi ruled by the Afghan Lodi dynasty. Then they defeated and assimilated the Rajput Kingdom of Mewar ... who were Hindu ... ah, I've got it, you must mean Hindus. So excluding Shah Jahan and the Taj Mahal from being Indian I guess. I'll figure this out eventually.
Right then: Rana Sanga (the Rajput Maharana of Mewar) invaded and captured lots of territory belonging to the Malwa Sultanate, the Gujurat Sultanate, and the Lodi dynasty (again). So there you go. You can't say that those places were India at the time, and you can't say he was from the wrong culture, checkmate.
It's like saying that the English never invaded anywhere before 927. Of course they didn't, because the first English king was crowned in 927, and before that the English were the West Saxons, South Saxons, East Angles, Middle Angles, South Angles, Men of Kent, two flavors of Northumbrians and a few stray Welsh, and they were all busy invading one another.
China doesn't belong on this list. Nehru's government was aggressively pro China. China returned the favour by invading Tibet and then attacking India [1].
If Mao hadn't done that, we'd probably be living in a Sino-Indian world order today. (India and China have surprisingly few fundamental geopolitical overlaps, the Himalayas neatly partitioning their spheres.)
Hmm, so in eastern Kashmir, in fact. Versus Tibet!
Your turn.
I see you had shifted the goal posts from being aggressor to "disproportionate response". My original comment said India has never been the aggressor and thanks for finally agreeing to that. I will not comment on the response being disproportionate or not, because that is just an attempt to derail the original conversation.