 Okay. Yeah. I wanted to start out by just thanking the Vermont Institute of Community and International involvement for having this discussion, especially, I mean, this may not be the most relevant discussion regarding what's going on in the world right now as far as our personal lives. But regardless, I think it's great that, you know, Sandy and Robin have worked together to put this together. Otherwise, I assumed about a week ago when I talked to Sandy that this was pretty much a no-go. And then she said that, you know, Robin had been working on and had successfully done a session last week or about two weeks ago, I think. And I was thrilled that we're continuing to engage with one another on local issues, you know, as local as things like, you know, Burlington telecom to something as exotic and different as cashmere in India. And we talked about Haiti a few weeks ago. So this is just great. And I'm glad that given the COVID-19 virus, we're still trying to form a sense of community and have this discussion. So what I'd like to do is just get a show of hands. How familiar are folks with general aspects of Indian history? Zero. Okay, no, there's no right answer here. The reason I'm bringing this up was because I want to tailor the conversation a certain way. A lot of times, even when I've been party to conversations about parts of the world that I don't know, I kind of get thrown off if there are a lot of names that are thrown at me, historical names that, you know, that I may not know. And I'm going to try to keep those names to a minimum. I'm just going to read out a quick list of some of those names. And if, if a fair number of people have not heard of these people, then I want to, you know, possibly I'll take it in a different direction. And again, this isn't to make people feel bad. I want to make people, you know, participate. So, I mean, I'm going to go with the list of names. Mahatma Gandhi, probably most people know that name. Yes. Nehru, he was the first Prime Minister of India. Jinnah was the first Prime Minister of Pakistan, if folks don't know him. Okay, that's okay. And Bhutto, there were two, there was a man who was the Prime Minister and President of Pakistan in the early 1970s. And then his daughter in the 1980s, Benazir Bhutto became the first woman to lead in an Islamic nation and she was actually voted in. So I'm going to be using that name. The other name is Indira Gandhi. No, no relation to Mahatma Gandhi. She was actually Nehru's daughter. She just happened to marry another guy named Gandhi, but no relation to the Mahatma Gandhi. And then the two other names I'll mention Modi. Modi is the current Prime Minister of India. And then finally, Lord Mountbatten. Lord Mountbatten was the viceroy, the last viceroy of India. Viceroy was sort of like a governor general. And he, he took part and oversaw the division and partition of India right after the Second World War. So I'm going to keep it to those names. I'm not going to go beyond that, because I think a lot of times in people, what happens is, you know, you get lost in the names and then you start losing. And you start losing interest in the, in the overall discussion. Does that sound okay? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. All right. Can I ask you a question? Yeah, go ahead. The most I think unfamiliar name to me is Jinnah. Okay. And I did read, I did happen to read something about him. But going back to the partition, was he the first Prime Minister of Pakistan? Yes, he was. He was involved. The movement to acquire independence from Great Britain from the subcontinent of India consisted of some of the more notable people like Gandhi. He's probably the most well known and then Nehru. And there was a department within this independent movement, independence movement. And it was the, it was called the Muslim League. Right. Okay. So the Muslim, the chairman of the Muslim League, there were a lot of notable great men and women in that league. But Jinnah was probably the most well known. And that's why he, you know, he was eventually chosen as the first and elected as the first Prime Minister of Pakistan. Okay. So that's just a little blurb about Jinnah. Yeah, as far as he was, you know, so he's considered the father of Pakistan. And he really was, because he was instrumental, instrumental in create and helping push for the creation of that country. And that was in 1947. That was 47. Correct. Two years after the Second World War and same year that Israel declared its independence. From again from Great Britain. India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Yes, from Great Britain and Burma and Burma that was one area. Jinnah sent me an email a little while ago saying that if I pull up a picture that you guys should be able to see it and the only pictures I'm going to use today are maps. I would have done a better audio visual presentation if we were meeting in person. I'm not really technical technically savvy and I didn't want today to be the day that I experimented with that. So I'm going to try to pull up this map. If it doesn't, if you can't see it, then I'm going to take Robin's advice Robin Lloyd told me, you know, just hold up the map, and we'll let you know if we can see it. So I'm going to just as an experiment try to pull up this map and see if and let me know if you guys can see the map. So cut just one thing I received an email about 1520 minutes ago with a bunch of maps. Oh okay. Great great those are the maps I'm going to be working with and I don't know if folks have the capability of looking at their email right now. I don't want to. I mean we don't really dare. Okay, can you see this image right now that I have on the screen. All right, so forget about that. Okay, give it give it one more moment more. Sure. Um, Kurt you if you click on chat, and then file, you may be able to post it that way. Let's just have him hold it up. I don't want to lose this and nervous about it. Okay, all right. So, let's see how this looks. Okay, this is a. Yeah, that's okay. Yeah. Okay, yep. Okay. Okay, so all right so that's that's the way we'll do it. We'll try to keep it simple. We'll hold it up again. Okay. No, I mean when it's relevant. Yeah. Okay. So, the reason I'm doing this is Sandy Baird and I had a conversation a few months ago and, you know, in the midst of the conversation, you know, Sandy said that boy it's really difficult for Cuba. A lot of times and Russia and I forget the third country, Venezuela, Venezuela, possibly getting a fair shake in the press. And I kind of jokingly said, well, a lot of times, yeah, I see that with respect to India, too. And Sandy said, really, and I said, yeah, I said based on the knowledge I have, it doesn't quite comport with a lot of the coverage that I'll see. Honestly, ever since I was a little kid. So that's so then invited me and said, you know what, why don't you do a little talk about India at some point, because a lot of times people, you know, people know that the country exists, and people will look, you know, see some basic articles in the press, you know, covering it, you know, the good, the bad and the ugly. But a lot of times people won't know a whole lot. And if we, you know, Sandy and I worked on Cuba together, if we judged Cuba based on what we read in the press, we wouldn't really have a very favorable image about that country at all. So that was, you know, one of the reasons I thought I would do this and I wanted to start out by talking about, well, why is that the case why is a lot of press coverage with respect to India, often negative in some cases, it's, it's, it's warranted, but then in other cases, a lot of times it's never made sense to me. So I'm going to give you a couple of reasons. These are my theories. And one of the theories is, and this is common to Cuba, also, is that after independence, India was not open to any foreign corporations coming in and doing business with it. The Cubans throughout the corporations, the foreign corporations, namely the American corporations, India never invited them in. And that was a cardinal sin, I think, on India's part, as far as international politics were concerned, because the country closed itself off. In the United States, dignitaries and politicians were very disappointed with India, because you had a massive population at that point at the time of independence, the country of India itself had a population in excess of 400 million people. Pakistan had a population over 100 150 million people, but Pakistan opened their country up, they didn't have some of the same. I'll call it a complex that the Indian leadership had with respect to foreign corporations coming in business. Robin? Yeah. Okay. So, namely, Robin, the reason the reason the Indian leadership had was because of their experience with the British. And when I say the British, I'm not talking about the British people. I'm talking about a corporation that was that was called the British East India Corporation. The British East India Corporation was probably one of the most wealthy and successful, depending on how one judges success, corporations in the history of the world, really. It was a corporation in the most modern sense in that it sold stock to shareholders. A fairly large portion of the British Parliament in the 16 and 1700s held stock in that corporation because the corporation, their balance sheets were extremely, extremely positive, and it was a great way to make money. So even if, even if parliamentarians in Britain disagreed with some of the excesses and some of the, some of the actions that the corporation took, their shared dividends were substantial, substantial and they paid handsomely. And that was that what happened was the when the when the when the British East India Company charted itself, Queen Elizabeth the first was still the reigning Queen of Great Britain. The corporation was charted in the year 1600. And it was, it was selling stock, and it was, it was, it was considered a means for the shareholders to acquire a great deal of wealth. Now, what was different about that corporation compared to some of the biggest corporations that we have in our country now, at least in the United States as we know them, such as such as Walmart such as Apple such as Google and Amazon, is that when the British East India Corporation or the company secured its charter, the charter had a provision that allowed it to raise its own private security force. That's, that's really important in the conversation that we're going to have today. The security force became one of the best trained armies in the world. Over time, and gradually it was able to take over a lot of the developing world and specifically in this case, most of India in the process in in slow increments. So, I want to start out. So that was, that's one of the cardinal sins. The, the fact that that India was really gun shy, allowing foreign corporations from coming in because of the experience that it had Robin with the East India Company, the British East India Company. So it was, it did damage the country because the country didn't have a lot of resources and manufacturing at the time of independence. But at the same point, there was a great deal of animosity, insecurity on the part of the Indian leadership to invite other companies to come in and to help in the development of the country. The second, the second cardinal sin that India committed was it created a strong relationship. It's foreign policy was at the time, considered progressive, however, unattractive and bothersome and inconvenient for the United States at the time. Now remember, this is right after the Second World War. The USSR and India were, you know, basically engaged in a chess match of trying to acquire countries on their side. India tended to, despite the fact that it created itself as a democracy and a liberal one at that, it had more, had more things in common with the Soviet Union. And it allied itself with the Soviet Union on many issues, not in its form of government and economic system, but with respect to a lot of the clauses the Soviet Union had. So India was close with the PLO. India was close with Cuba. Hold on. So can I, I, everybody know the PLO is Palestine, the Palestine. Yeah, so the Palestinian Liberation Organization, you know, most of us probably know it, you know, it was headed by Yasser Arafat, at least in my lifetime. And so India had developed these strong bonds with countries that often had progressive, and in the Palestinian case, this organization, not a country, but these organizations slash countries, entities that had a strong anti-colonialist bend. And, but at the same time were very in, you know, the, the, their actions were very inconvenient for, for the United States, and therefore led to a alliance with, with the Soviet Union. And that was something that was not something that the United States was very keen on. So, yes. You mentioned that they were also aligned with Cuba. Yes. Well, Cuba was until 1960. So, correct. So I'm, I'm talking when I say the alliance, this was post post Cuban revolution. Okay. Could I jump in also and ask about the non aligned movement? Yes. Maybe you're going to get to it so. Yeah. So, no, I'm glad you brought it up. I had it in my notes, but I'm glad you brought it up Robin. The first Prime Minister of India, Nero, what he did in the early 1950s is he formed an organization called the non aligned movement in the world. Again, that was a major thorn on the side of the United States. The United States didn't believe in non alignment at the time. The, the first Secretary of State in the late 1940s that visited India was, I believe it was John Foster Dulles, and he told Nero point blank, Listen, guys, you need to choose. You know, it's, it's either us or them. This, you know, this neutrality nonsense isn't going to get you very far. Nero stuck to his guns. Now, whether they were really not aligned. I mean, they, they were aligned with, for the most part, there was a friendship treaty that they executed with the, with the Soviet Union. You know, the next Prime Minister of India Indira Gandhi was very close to Fidel Castro. And India also had a lot of, a lot of relationships with other countries that the United States was wasn't too crazy about including the including the PLO. Yeah, very Indira Gandhi, the first female Prime Minister asked the only female Prime Minister in India's history was, and just to give you a timeframe, we're talking late 1960s, right until she was killed in the in 1984. Very good friends with Fidel, very good friends with Yasser Arafat of the PLO. And that changes later that relationship with the the PLO as well as with Israel in the last 1015 years. I'll get to that later. So, one of the things I wanted to do was, I wanted to hold up a map of this is. A map of India about 20 about 2500 years ago. As far as the reason I'm showing this is it. Prime ministers later such as Modi will often harken back to this golden age, when, you know, a lot of times there's blame placed on the Muslim minorities in that country, as to, you know, what India once was and what it became. After Islamic rule. So I'm just going to hold this up just to give you a sense of the area of control that ancient India had in the world. So, if you can't see this, let me know. Yeah, we can see it if you hold it up a little yeah, right, right. So this is what this is the area that we know as, you know, the Indian subcontinent. Now, it includes Afghanistan, modern Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Southeast Asia, Burma, and Indonesia. Wow. So, I mean, if one travels to many of these countries, even in the Southeast Asia and as far east as Bali in Indonesia, you'll see a great deal of ruins. And, and even, you know, things like cultural effects cuisine that you know that was essentially Indian and the language was Indian. The religions of those areas were primarily the two biggest Indian religions which were Hinduism and Buddhism at the time. And that area shrank in the 13th century. What happened in the 13th century. The Mughal Empire took over India the Mughal Empire, and I'm not going to go too far into history, I don't want to bore people, but the, but it's important with respect to the modern context, just to know a little bit about it. The Mughals were a an Islamic civilization. They came from Central Asia, and they invaded the what we know now as the subcontinent of India. They, they took it over and the area of India of Indian, you know, influence shrank substantially I'm going to hold up a map of what was known as the Mughal Empire from the 13th through the 17th centuries. This is it. Wow. So it's still a fair amount of geography, but it's not this. Okay, so, correct. Can I ask so that was the, these people were were Islamic, correct. That's correct. All right, so they did they take Indonesia. Now, their, their initial interest was to acquire the wealth that existed at the time in India. Okay. And I'll go a little bit into that once I talk a little bit more about the East India Company. And it was primarily in the area of gold, spices, cotton, cloth, and, and diamonds. How about tea? Not, not, not yet. No, tea was primarily a Chinese thing that made its way into India, but it's Chinese get credit for the tea. Okay. You know, the Indians, I guess they just drink it now. So, the, the, the moguls ran the country, you know, so the country country, I shouldn't. So when I say country, I should, I should refer to it as a region, it wasn't a country with borders as we know nation states, you know, that's largely a European advent to some extent, you know, so you had regions like Asia, you had India, you had, you know, other China, not with, not with rigid borders. Right. But the, but the moguls ran the country, ran the region fairly effectively for several hundred years. They let the local population that was not that well, they brought Islam into India, but the portion of the population that did not want to convert into Islam. They pretty much left them alone to their own devices. They didn't really make many cultural changes to, you know, to, to destroy Hindu or Buddhist civilization. Islamic law was indeed put into place. And that was very different from the, from, from Hindu law or Buddhist law, which was probably a lot more laissez-faire on a lot of issues, whether we talk about issues such as homosexuality, women's rights at the time, not necessarily modern India but at the time, as well as, you know, sexual mores and habits of the people, women at the time were not fully covered. The, that was an anathema to the, the Islamic rulers of the time, and they changed the requirements of dress to slightly, you know, cover up more. And a lot of those types of, you know, cultural things were, were changed, but for the most part, they really didn't interfere with people's lives and their ability to, you know, interact with one another. And, and Muslims and Hindus got along fairly well and, and from a, from a standpoint of business, personal relations, even intermarriage, fairly common thing. So we're going to, so that, that, that Islamic civilization was pretty firmly entrenched in India for about 350 years. There were changes, you know, the, the area of influence decreased significantly, but things were kind of going okay, what changed? I mentioned previously that the East India Company came in, in 1600, and by, and they were interested in the spice trade. That was mostly what they were interested in. And the other thing that they had a great deal of interest in was cloth, textiles. So for about 150 years, they were essentially conducting business on very good terms with, with the Mughal Empire. What changed there? In, in the 1750s, something that we know in our country as the French and Indian war. Right, right. Right. Not the, not, not the Indians in India, the other Indians. Right. But the French Indian war, and what Europeans call the seven year war, took place throughout the world between, largely between France and England. Now, how did, how did this affect India? Well, the French were also jockeying for position in certain portions of India. The province of India called Bengal was an area that was of great interest to the French. I'm just going to hold up a map of modern India and just point to where Bengal is in the scheme of things. So that's India, it's on the Eastern. Take it a little further away from the, because, yeah. Can you see that guys? Yeah. Okay, so this area, which is modern day Bangladesh, and the city of Calcutta, which was considered the capital of Bengal at the time. It's in Eastern India. That was the area where the British and the French fought on the Indian, Indian subcontinent. Obviously they fought in as far away as North America and in the mainland of Europe. But as it pertain to India, they fought in that area of Bengal. Why Bengal? Bengal in the 1750s consists, their GDP as it related to the world was 12%. How much? 12% of the entire world GDP. Bengal is the poorest India, poorest area of India currently. If people know the city of Calcutta, wealth and rich richness is not something that comes to mind right away. But in the 1750s, it was considered one of the richest areas of the world. The GDP exceeded that of the entire entirety of Western Europe at the time. So the British prevailed in that war, the Seven Years War. Our own General Washington, that was his first military conflict here in North America. But if we go east, east-eastwards, the British contingent were able to kick the French out. And in the process, they took over. Now again, when I say the British, I'm talking about the East India Company. Right. Not the British, the nation of Great Britain, as it pertain to the conflict in India. It was the East India Company that fought the French army in the province of Bengal. And what was unfortunate for the Indians, the Bengalis, is they allied themselves with the French. So they lost, and they lost big. So what the East India Corporation did was not only did they kick the French out, they took over the province of Bengal from the local chieftain or king of the area. What did the East India Company find out when they took over Bengal? That Bengal was loaded. What was happening at the time was the English were competing with other Western European countries. The jockey position, because England at the time was one of the poorer countries of Great Britain, I mean of Europe, compared to France and most notably compared to Spain. Spain was taking out massive amounts of gold from the New World, namely the Incan, Mayan and Aztec empires, and shipping it back home into Spain. Great Britain, England did not have that luxury. But what they did find out, the East India Corporation, was that the kings in... Is that okay? Yeah. In the province of Bengal had one quarter of the world's gold that had ever been mined within its possession. They had exclusivity with respect to diamond mining. Up until that time, that part of the world in India was the only place where there were diamond mines. Not in Africa. Brazil discovered diamonds in the early 1800s. But up until the 1700s, the only place you can get diamonds was Eastern India. The remains and the Bengali population had taken advantage of mining diamonds and extracting them from the ground. Can I interrupt for a minute? Because I think Jared wants to ask a question. Sure. Yeah. Jared? No, no, I didn't have a question. I just thought, I just said Beth's question, I thought was a good one. So I don't have any additional questions, but we're trying to think it's good ones for you, Kurt. Just give me a few minutes. Yeah, okay. Actually, I'm sorry. Okay, so Beth, I just opened up the group chat. So I see you asked what contributed to India's GDP then, or rather Bengal. Well, I guess maybe I answered the question. It was the mining of gold. It was the mining of diamonds, emeralds. They had also produced a rudimentary form of steel, which they were exporting at the time. And then of course, spices with the Middle Eastern cloth. So at the time, the Mughal Empire fell to the East India Company. The Indian share of GDP with respect to the world was 26%. That's enormous. When the English left in 1947, the Indian share of GDP was 3%. So a pretty precipitous drop in a little less than 200 years. So what the East India Company initially did when they found out about the incredible stock of diamonds, gold, as well as some of the other things I mentioned that they didn't know about was they began to load up ships. And it was a couple of hundred ships pulled into the Bay of Bengal. They were completely loaded with gold and diamonds and sent back to England. The corporate officers of the East India Company became some of the richest men. They were all men at the time, so I'm using the term men. They became some of the richest men not only in Great Britain, but in all of Europe. They also bought parliamentary seats in the British Parliament at the time. And further it gave more and more deference to the East India Company. Even though a lot of the English population at the time read really nasty reports about what the company was doing overseas. Not just in India, but other places, but the money was just too good for the folks in Parliament and for some of the wealthier corporate officers at the time. The other thing that they did revolutionary for a corporation was they established a tax on the residents of the area that they took over. So the tax pertained to any individual that owned land at the time. That became a huge boon for the British economy. England was a fairly, you know, the population wise, pretty small place in the late 1700s. You're talking about 10 to 15 million. And then slowly as time went on and as the East India Company took more and more control over other areas of India with this really well paid army that they had put together. Some of which was local hired guns from India itself. They acquired a tax base that exceeded 200 million people as far as the area that was covered. And by the 1940s at that point, I'm sorry, by the 1800s when Great Britain came in to overtake the East India Company's control. Great Britain with Ireland had about a population of 28 million. So it was colonialization of the Indian subcontinent was an extremely extracurative venture that that really couldn't be given up at the time. So, you know, what did the British bring to the to the table in India. They brought the railroads. They were built in the late 1800s. However, can you can you guys still hear me? I just got a message that internet connections unstable. Okay. That's, that's why he says that too. Okay. Okay. All right. So they built the railroads. What a lot of times people don't know is the railroads were built. However, they were not the railroads were not built for free. The Indian population was taxed. And they were. And when they've done a comparison of how much they were taxed, the Indian population paid nine times what it cost to lay track in the United States. So for a distance in the United States, it cost about 2000 British pounds at the time in the 1800s to lay track. The Indian population paid 18,000 pounds for each mile that was laid of track in India. So India did acquire a railroad, but it wasn't for free. It was paid for in that railroad, but regardless is still used today by a vast portion of the population. So I'm going to go, I'm going to try to bring this a little closer to where you know the topic for this evening. And I'm going to go towards the end of British rule, because that is what, you know, in that's instrumental in in the discussion that we're going to have today. The British were very successful in running India by taking advantage of a divide and conquer policy, which was not exclusive to the British. Countries, the French, the Belgians, they all did this what they did was they divided and conquered what they often did was they gave an excessive amount of power and respect to minor one particular minority. And what that would do is that would piss off the majority of the people in the country. The French in Rwanda did it with the Hutus, pissing off the Tutsi majority. And in the case of India, the what the British did was towards closer to towards independence in 1947. They gave a fair amount of deference to the Muslim League. And what that did was that created, or I'm sorry, I shouldn't say create it exacerbated tensions between Hindus and Muslims in that country. And that was brought to a zenith at the time of independence when much of the Hindu independence movement leadership was was not placed in jail and they often dined at, you know, British country clubs, and were involved in the separation of India and what it would look like while the Gandhi's in the in the narrows of the world were put in prison for and they serve multiple year sentences. When they came out of prison. They found that there was a new ruling elite in India and a an elite that needed to be reckoned with and it was primarily Muslim. And even though these folks were friends, just 10 years before they became adversaries, but you know at the time of independence at the time of. So as 1947 rolls by and I'm getting to cashmere now as 1947 rolls by Lord Mountbatten and his wife, the Countess Edwina Mountbatten were the vice Roy's of India. And when I say India at that point I'm talking about the entire subcontinent, including Bangladesh Burma, and, and Pakistan of course. They were overseeing the partition of India into a Islamic State, which was going to be known as Pakistan, and in a Hindu majority but secular state, which was known, which was going to retain the name India, and continue with that name. So what happened. There were 562 principalities in this vast area called the, the subcontinent of India and I'm just going to hold up a map of what the British had at that point and what they were dividing and this is as of 1947 to give you a little bit of context. Yeah. Okay. Further away. Yeah. Okay, so I'm going to use a pen so here we're talking. This is Burma. And this is, if I've got that right. Yeah, and this is what we know today is Pakistan over here. So still, you know, pretty large area here. This area up here is the area that we know now as cashmere. No, that is cashmere too. But this part Burma was given its own nation in 1948. And this part of the subcontinent was given to a entity called West Pakistan. And this part was called East Pakistan, which we now know as Bangladesh. I'm going to use the word Bangladesh because that's the word we use now. But if we start talking about East and West Pakistan people are going to get confused and I don't, I don't want that. So, going back to fight to 1947. Each principality in India was given a choice who they wanted to join with. Did they want to become part of Pakistan, or do they want to be part of India. The local governors, in some cases they were kings. The Islamic term for some of those areas, for some of those types of people they were called Nawabs. They had to make a choice of who they were going to go to. So there was a lot of horse trading going on lobbying. Jinnah, the prime minister, the guy who became the prime minister of Pakistan, did his own jockeying in areas that were largely Muslim. And was trying to attract them to join Pakistan. Nehru was trying to do the same thing with areas that were primarily Hindu, but also areas that were Muslim because he wanted to create this secular democracy. That's what he had in mind. So, a lot of concessions were made to different areas. And the, the areas that Nehru was lobbying that had a large Muslim population, he assured the local Muslim population that they would be able to retain. I'm sorry, was there a question. No, Robin was doing something else. Okay, I'm sorry. Okay. So yeah, no, that's all right. So Nehru, when he was trying to appeal to Muslims on the subcontinent, what he would say was that we, you know, that Islamic rights would be assured that, you know, the security would be assured and that they had nothing to worry about. It worked sometimes and sometimes it didn't work. Some of those areas decided to join, join with Pakistan. So, 561 by the end of 1947, 561 of the 562 many states had decided it was a done deal. There was one that didn't couldn't decide they couldn't make up their mind. That one was Kashmir. Kashmir couldn't make up their mind. Were they going to join India or were they going to join Pakistan? Initially, what they communicated to Lord Mountbatten and his wife, Edwina Mountbatten was, I think we're going to stay independent. And the English had Lord Mountbatten had a good laugh at that. He said, you're going to be between China, India and Pakistan. Good luck maintaining your independence. You're a country of 12, you know, you're an area of 12 million people compared to 200 million in the south, 150 million and over close to a billion in the north. You better pick. So the reason there was this vexation on the part of Kashmir, because Kashmir was about 66% Muslim. However, the king of Kashmir was a Hindu. I don't know how that turned out that way, but that's just the way it turned out. That's the way it was. So he didn't want to move to Pakistan. He had convinced a fair portion of the Muslim population that was largely secular in Kashmir that we don't want to become part of an Islamic State. The positive assurance that Pakistan was able to give to Muslims on the subcontinent was this was going to be a theocracy. And Islamic law, Sharia law was going to be the law of the land. And for a lot of Muslims, that was a very attractive proposition that wasn't necessarily an attractive proposition for the Muslims of Kashmir, because they were very mixed. Nairu was a Kashmiri Hindu. Today, in terms of popular culture, if you know the author Salman Rushdie, he's a Kashmiri. They were very integrated within Indian society, yet they were Muslim by religion, a majority of them, two thirds of which were Muslim. So what happened? The prince, the king of Kashmir went back and forth, back and forth. How should I decide? How should I decide? He went to Mount Batten. He went to Jinnah. He went to Nairu, Jinnah, the Prime Minister of Pakistan. What should I do? In the middle of that, going back and forth, Pakistan became frustrated and they pushed tribes that were in the northwest frontier of Pakistan to invade Kashmir. They invaded all of Kashmir and Kashmir was absorbed into Pakistan initially, all of Kashmir. However, the king of Kashmir was upset about this. He appealed to India for assistance. India said, no way, we're not getting involved in a war yet, Freudian slip. We didn't want to get involved in a war. So next, what happened was the king of Kashmir appealed to Lord Mount Batten, the viceroy overseeing the separation. Now, backstory here, the spouse of Lord Mount Batten had a substantial amount of sway over policy over the partition. She was having an affair with Nairu. Nairu was kind of known as a serial philanderer right until the Kennedys knew it in the 1960s. They would always have an attractive woman sitting in the oval office when Nairu visited and Nairu couldn't even, for lack of a better description, keep his shit together if he was in that environment. And he was having this hot and passionate toward affair with Edwina Mount Batten, who was also a very vivacious woman who had her share of relationships with men. And theory is that she and Nairu had a conversation that later went to Lord Mount Batten and Lord Mount Batten got involved in the conflict of Kashmir by offering the following terms to the king of Kashmir. He asked the king of Kashmir, look, I can probably convince India to help you and fight a war if you agree to exceeding your country to India formally by agreement and therefore becoming part of India and an Indian state. The king of Kashmir was not just concerned about his population, he was concerned about his own wealth. If Kashmir really was absorbed into Pakistan, he would be history. Not necessarily killed, but he'd probably thrown out and all of his wealth would probably, you know, stay in Pakistan. He didn't want that. He wanted to retain his wealth and if that meant he was going to side with India personally, so be it. Lord Mount Batten, yeah. What was Lord Mount Batten's, where was he coming from? Was he looking after British interest? Was he trying to be an honest broker? Was he a humanitarian? Was he a Stephen capitalist? Yeah, now Lord Mount Batten, I mean by all estimates, and I think this goes from, you know, the Indian leadership at the time and the Pakistani leadership, he was considered a good guy. The British at that point, exhausted from the German bombardment of the Second World War, really wanted to get the hell out of there. The British people were not really interested at that point in retaining these massive colonies. There was a substantial amount of damage done to British infrastructure. Cities such as Coventry were devastated during the Second World War, during the Blitz, as well as the V-2 rockets that Hitler sent over. So that honestly had a huge impact on giving India its independence, you know, possibly more so than even, you know, Gandhi's civil disobedience tactics, you know, if I look at it objectively. But the British hired Lord Mount Batten to basically oversee this partition and really to get the hell out of there. The Muslim population liked the Muslim leadership, liked Lord Mount Batten. The Hindu leadership liked Lord Mount Batten. He was considered an honest broker, Barry, to answer your question. Okay. Thank you. Yeah, sure. So Lord Mount Batten oversaw the accession agreement that the King of Kashmir signed and basically gave over his quote unquote kingdom to India. As a result, as India agreed in exchange, India invaded Kashmir. They were able to kick Pakistan out of 50% of Kashmir. They were not able to successfully take a remaining one-third of Kashmir and another area of Kashmir that Pakistan and China both claimed was their area. India did not want to get into a war with China at that time. It took about 50% of Kashmir back and gave it to the King and the King kept his kingdom and his wealth as a result. That did not go very well. It didn't go, you know, well over with the Pakistani population though, that there was this, this Muslim majority province that was going to India. Because otherwise that, you know, that didn't happen elsewhere. Bangladesh, which was on the other side of the subcontinent, decided to side with Pakistan because that was a Muslim majority area also. So Pakistan was split into two, kind of like if you know, you know, the Palestinian situation where the, you know, if there was a Palestinian state, you know, there's Gaza in the West Bank. There's no connection between the two, no geographical connection. There's a separation, you know, and similarly Pakistan was split into two parts in the West and in the East. So when India was able to secure 50% of Kashmir and bring it back into the fold of, bring it back or bring it into the fold of India, the United Nations got involved with the conflict. The United Nations, what they decided, the Security Council decided that there had to be a plebiscite. This couldn't be something that, you know, local kings and chieftains decide. What they, the terms of the plebiscite would be that India would have to withdraw its troops from the 50% of Kashmir that it took back or took. But similarly, Pakistan would have to draw back the tribesmen and some of its troops from the one third that it continued to retain. And then there would also be a plebiscite in the area that Pakistan and China contested. India said, sure, we'll withdraw our troops right after you guys withdraw your troops. Yeah, Pakistan will do it on the same day as a matter of fact. Pakistan said, we're not withdrawing our troops that the conflict is over the 50% that you guys took Pakistan is already a Islamic country, and the area that we took it was had over a 90% of the Islamic population. So we're not going to do that. Furthermore, to add insult to injury for India, the United Nations appointed Admiral Nimitz of the United States to oversee the plebiscite. Earlier that year. Now so this is 1950, guys, you know, we're 1947 was the partition 1950 is when the UN came in. Earlier that year. That conversation that I alluded to earlier between John Foster dollars and narrow had taken place where narrow was asked to decide which way India was going to go where they're going to go with the Soviets, or they're going to go with the United States and narrow stated that he was not aligned. Pakistan didn't show the same vaccination Jenna said, we're with the United States. They signed an agreement and Truman at that point met with Jenna, and talked about the prospect of establishing a CIA base in Pakistan. Not against India, but to kind of keep tabs with was back a stand which at that point was firmly part of one of the Soviet states, not very far from the Pakistani border. They may even share a border. Yeah, they do. I'm going to hold up that map again of modern subcontinent of India up here. This area is Pakistan was back a stand is right here. So a great place for the United States to have a CIA base. So the CIA base, primarily to spy on the Soviet Union. Correct, correct. It didn't happen Jenna said no. So it didn't happen. But, but what Pakistan did allow what that India did not allow was American corporations to come in, and to help in the country. And, because of this friendship at this point, which was disclosed to the rest of the world. India narrow did not trust Admiral Nimitz to oversee the plebiscite in cashmere, aside from the fact that he did not withdraw the troops and Pakistan did not withdraw the troops. So essentially there was a standstill. Nothing happened. In the next cashmere big moment in cashmere 1962 Pakistan and China worked out an agreement and Pakistan and gave up its claims to that portion of cashmere that that it contested with China. Give it up to home to China to China. Yeah. Remember the China, India and Pakistan were all all had claims on portions of cashmere. So, when when China gave up it's I'm sorry when Pakistan gave up its claim on Eastern North Eastern cashmere to China now the only two players were India and Pakistan. Now, we're going to take a macro look at why, what why why is cashmere important why why does Pakistan even really, really care about pack about cashmere. The people there broke the territory is extremely difficult to maneuver and govern because of it's the honestly the altitude, you're talking about a good portion of that area being over 16,000 feet in altitude. It's very, very difficult to maneuver. No real farming, no agriculture. There are no gems, the gold and the diamonds that I talked about before did not come from cashmere. What was the interest drugs. No, no drugs, water, water. You got it. You got it Robin water. The Indus River, the Indus River which you know that one of the great civilizations of the world the Indus Valley of 5000 years ago. That civilization grew from the river valley in that area that was being fed by the Indus River that Indus River comes from cashmere that Indus River gives Pakistan. 30% of its agricultural irrigation ability. If the Indus River forever for any reason was ever blocked by India and diverted, there would be a famine in Pakistan, unlike any that we've ever seen in human history. 30% of Pakistan now you know you're talking about a population of 165 million people 30% of Pakistan rely on the agricultural produce that's that directly comes from that river. That is directly responsible from from the Indus River that would that would go away overnight and there would be a famine. Now, India and Pakistan signed a treaty in 1960, stating that India would never do that but a treat is a treaty, you know, if they if they broke the treaty, if, if they chose to divert that river. That would be a starvation in Pakistan that could not be alleviated by any other manner, really, you know no foreign aid could feed a population that large, you know, if if India were to divert or block that river. So that's why, that's why Pakistan, it, you know, it's, it's really part of its vital interest for survival that they have control of that river. The glacier that feeds that river in the Himalayas that is in Kashmir. So a critical critical component of that country survival that they're essentially trusting their most notorious adversary to exercise good faith and hope that they're going to make good on that treaty at all times. There was a brief war 1965 over Kashmir. Something really happened. And now we're going to get to the big one, the 1971 war, which involved the United States involved the Soviet Union involved many Middle Eastern countries. And if I ever wrote a book, the book, the name of the book would be the second human missile crisis that no one never that no one knows about. So let me give a little bit of background. Pack East in West Pakistan, Bangladesh had just suffered a horrific cyclone. Many of the folks I think would probably remember a the first World Benefit Concert that George Harrison through 1971 the concert Bangladesh. Yeah, Ringo Starr, Eric Clapton, a lot of a lot of, you know, some of the biggest musicians of the world. That was the first live aid, really, before there was a live aid that was thrown. There were estimates of 300,000 to 500,000 people that died as a result of that cyclone in Bangladesh. Remember Bangladesh at that point was still part of Pakistan. The other part of Pakistan West Pakistan did not really contribute enough humanitarian assistance towards that the cyclone ravaged area of Bangladesh at that point that that was the feeling of the people in Bangladesh. That the world took a bigger role in helping Bangladesh, then their brothers in the West, you know, their country. They just simply did not allocate enough resources. So what happened at the next election, it was actually the first general election in the history of Pakistan, because a lot of the rulers at that point after Jinnah, the first prime minister Pakistan, they were military dictatorships after military dictatorship in Pakistan. 1970 was the first first election 1971 was the first general election, in which all Pakistanis had a chance to vote. It was monitored by the Soviets by the United States and it was considered a very fair election. So what happened at that election something really strange. The party that ran Eastern Pakistan Bangladesh got a majority the votes. That did not go over well in Western Pakistan up until that time 1971 Western Pakistan basically called all the shots when it came to a trans pan Pakistan, you know, and pan Pakistan policy. Eastern Pakistan Bangladesh really had very little say in the future that country there were much poorer. They were much more density populated at that point. Honestly, they were much darker in appearance. And there was always this, you know, East Pakistan West Pakistan conflict where, you know, East Pakistan Bangladesh they were the black sheep of Pakistan. In some cases literally. So there was an election and the East Pakistan Bangladesh Party got a majority the votes in the National Assembly, the Western Pakistan parties were all fractured. They couldn't get along and as a result they couldn't secure majority. The Western Pakistan majority National Assembly refused to see the winners of the election. They said, Oh, no way we're not going to do that. You know, this was never going to be in the cards Western Pakistan was always going to rule the roost. So what happened, Eastern Pakistan upset about the response to the, to the cyclone humanitarian efforts, and now slapped in the face because their majority party was not seated in the parliament. In the first general election in the country's history. They declared independence. They said we're breaking away from Pakistan. We're going to form a country called Bangladesh. So in 1971 Bangladesh declared its independence. Western Pakistan now Pakistan was not going to take that lying down. They just lost 180 million people of their population overnight and a very strategic area. In the Bay of Bengal that kind of oversaw Eastern India and their antics. They were able to then what they decided to do was invade East Pakistan or Bangladesh and retake it. Now, when they intervened and tried to retake Bangladesh the newly created Bangladesh. It was a humanitarian nightmare. They do it they were so far away. They use their Air Force, they use. So this was the first, what later turned into the third war between India and Pakistan. It was the first war that involved an extensive use of the Air Force, the navies of both countries. As well as troops that Pakistan that Pakistan sent into China and then come down into into East Pakistan reason I'm looking ways on that map again. So West Pakistan here, Bangladesh here. West Pakistan took their navy around the Indian Ocean and sent it up there into Bengal. They flew over their portion of cashmere over China and conducted bombardment raids, and they also sent ground troops over China here and into Bangladesh. That's that's how they did it now estimates are that anywhere from 300,000 to 3 million Bangladesh's were killed by the Pakistani army at the time. The, in order to encourage excitement and people to volunteer into the Pakistani army. One fringed religious leaders in West Pakistan told young men that non Muslim women were considered war booty. Possibly one of the largest instances of mass rape used as a policy. Since the Second World War, there were estimates of 200 to 400,000 rapes against women and girls in in that area, and you're talking about a pretty small, small geographic region. The, you know that portion of Bangladesh which was carved out of the province of Bengal. What that turned into was a massive refugee problem for India, 8 to 10 million refugees flowed into India. Now India was pretty broke, a pretty poor country to begin with, and to absorb 8 to 10 million refugees was simply something that that country could not really sustain. So they began contemplating conducting a military operation to stop the flow of refugees from Bangladesh. Now, at the time that the systematic rapes were going on and the murders were going on. The United States had a consulate in East Pakistan Bangladesh, and the consular officer the consular general the ambassador essentially the American ambassador his last name is blood. He sent a telegram to Kissinger Nixon, saying that he doesn't take the term genocide lightly since he had fought in the Second World War himself he was a veteran in the European campaign, but he said what was taking place on the streets of Bangladesh was genocide, and that the United States had to intervene, or at the very least, haul off their allies in Pakistan from committing atrocities on the streets. They were okay with taking the country back, but the rapes and the killings that were taking place on the streets, it was unbearable for the for the US consulate to deal with. And at the time, here's to make matters interesting. Nixon and Kissinger ignored the telegram cable. And because Nixon in Kissinger, we're working with the Pakistani Prime Minister so this is where buttoe comes in the first buttoe. He was the Pakistani Prime Minister running things at the time. He was assisting Kissinger and opening up the side the the relationship with China with at the time P King Beijing later. So Pakistan was an instrumental instrumental part of American foreign policy at the time, because the United States saw the bigger issue as the Sino-Soviet split the split between the US and China. What was happening on the ground in Bangladesh was secondary. That wasn't a concern so if the Nixon administration was nervous that if they placed restrictions on Pakistan's actions, the Pakistan was going to walk from Kissinger walk from the table and not provide Kissinger with this, you know, the essentially this gold holy grail of developing a relationship with China. And Pakistan was on like I said early was on very good terms with China. They just seated over their control over a portion of cashmere to China. Can I ask you a question about China? Yeah, go ahead Grant. So did China allow the West Pakistanis to go through it to get to East Pakistan? Was that in your interest to have it all split up divided up? So China now, so China had in 1962, when Pakistan seated its contesting of Eastern cashmere to China, Pakistan and China signed a military cooperation agreement. So for an exchange for land, they were given, you know, it was essentially this military friendship that was developed. So that's why later when Pakistan called on a favor said, we need to go over essentially the land we need an easement over the land that we gave you a portion of to go and reclaim our territory. China was okay with that. Yeah, they had an agreement treaty in place. And, you know, they had secured a fairly non consequential economic area but consequential strategic area of Eastern cashmere that was essentially, you know, handed to them on a silver platter without having to go to war. Thank you. Yeah, yeah. So the, the overriding policy at the time for the United States was to secure a relationship with China and have it split from the USSR. Pakistan was going to facilitate that. And Uto had a great relationship with Chow and lie, as well as Mao Zedong. And he eventually he did facilitate the relationship but what it resulted in at the time was the allowance of a genocide, as the American ambassador called it to take place on the streets of Bangladesh. The refugee crisis. So going back into what we were talking about before the refugee crisis that took place in India at the time from Bangladesh 8 to 10 million refugees was unsustainable India contemplated that it was cheaper probably to take military action in Bangladesh to secure its sovereignty, then it was to absorb 10 million people into into the eastern part of India, which was also the poorest part of India too. So they had their own problems. While they were contemplating that Pakistan followed an Israeli policy of preemptory strikes that it just take taking place four years early in the 67 war, and decided to invade cash the Indian portion of cashmere. So the part that India administered, and they commenced bombing over on the eastern part of India in the city called Agra if you don't know Agra that's where the Taj Mahal is. Yeah. So they be it was the first Air Force operation that Pakistan conducted against India. So now India was into the war now at this point so there was essentially a formal declaration of war by both countries against one another. The, and this was in 1971. It again involves a massive tank battle Air Force Navy. And this is now this is the part where I call it the the Cuban Missile Crisis that most people don't know about. And it's it's the Cuban Missile Crisis in a bizarre world. So, the United States was engaged in a war in Vietnam at the point 1971 guys. So we the seventh fleet, our naval fleet was in the Gulf of Tonkin at the time, station there, when India reclaimed the portion of cashmere that it lost in the 1971 war, and started moving further into Pakistan to take the portion of cashmere. The Pakistani portion they weren't going to mess with China, but they were willing to take, take a bet and go into the Pakistani portion of cashmere, and they took it. Nixon ordered the, the seventh fleet out of the Gulf of Tonkin into the Indian Ocean and the Bay of Bengal. And that happened within a very short period of time to provide assistance to Pakistan at the time to give butto again who was going to be the facilitator of this opening with China. The necessary credible support that the United States was ready to go back to bat for it. So the seventh fleet came into the Bay of Bengal. What's interesting at this point was that the United States when they sent the, the, the seventh fleet and they also cabled to India or Gandhi who was the Prime Minister at the time that the, that the seventh fleet had nuclear weapons and prepared to use them. Or about this particular about this war, they would use nuclear weapons where in India in India. Yeah, to get India out of Pakistan. And you know with population densities as they are now only even more so, but even then, you're talking about an unavoidable, you know, catastrophe, absolutely, you know, of the use of tactical nuclear weapons anywhere in India. There are no places that far apart from, you know, a major civilian center. So, and I'm telling you this because this is going to be a little interesting about the instability the region later. So, this was cabled to Indira Gandhi, Indira Gandhi, the next step she took was, she reached out to Leonid Brezhnev in the Soviet Union, right, and said that the United States was bringing nuclear weapons into this conflict. So, Brezhnev ordered, he gave a very stiff warning to Nixon to not proceed with this, and he followed up his words by sending a nuclear submarine fleet into the Bay of Bengal to confront the United States, the USS Enterprise, which was the main aircraft carrier at the time that was taken out of the Gulf of Tonkin, as well as the submarines and the battle cruisers that were accompanying the USS Enterprise. The Soviets sent nuclear submarines as well as a couple of destroyers to essentially confront and engage with the US, the seventh fleet. What they did was they, they actually surrounded the USS Enterprise, and it got to the point where the missile shoots of the submarines, the submarine surface and they opened their missile shoots to the point where the captain the USS Enterprise was able to see that with binoculars. Hi. Does somebody have a question? No. No, I just said, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I was right. Yeah. Now, whether or not the, you know, this was an intense game of chicken, whether the, you know, whether we were actually going to use nuclear weapons in India is unknown, whether the Soviets would have fired on the USS Enterprise is unknown. But it was again, you know, the reason I call it the second missile Cuban missile, excuse me, the second Cuban missile crisis is it got that close. When the, when the Soviet submarine engaged with the USS Enterprise, a cable was sent to Nixon, Nixon called off the, they told, they were given orders to stand down. And within two days, Pakistan surrendered and allowed for the independence of East Pakistan, now Bangladesh. Right. Buto went, the Buto, the Prime Minister of Pakistan went and met Indira Gandhi in person and explained to her that taking over the rest of Kashmir was going to be an unsustainable endeavor on the part of India that it was going to result in a guerrilla war that India was not prepared to fight. And Buto was able to get his way. I think I hear a duck. That's my dog playing with his toy. I'm sorry. Okay. Yeah, just do so. Good. Yeah. So folks, yeah, anyone, if anyone wants to mute themselves, they can do that, and then unmute themselves when they have a question. So, so, Oh, I was just going to invite Sandy to turn on the lights because we're just looking at a black screen. Sorry. They're beautiful. Yeah, okay. So, Jared too, I guess. Where is he? I don't see Jared right now. Oh, he was there. Oh, I'm 10 feet away from my, from my tablet. Yeah, Barry Cade is. Oh, okay. You know what I look like. Hey Kurt, does anybody have, maybe we should ask for questions. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Sorry. Yeah. So at that point, so there was a peace treaty between India and Pakistan. India gave back the portion of Pakistan that it had taken from Pakistan. Because it bought Bhutto's argument that they did, they were not interested in fighting a guerrilla war on an area that honestly they weren't really that interested in. But they did retain the, they did go back to the 1947 borders of the 50% of Kashmir that they previously had exceeded to through that agreement with the King of Kashmir. China retained their portion that was untouched and never up to question. So questions here over this crazy. So let me just add one thing. The reason this was the Cuban missile crisis in a bizarre world, because the United States supported a military dictatorship. And the Russians, the Soviets supported a liberal democracy. So it was kind of bizarre in terms of who, you know, politics made strange bedfellows fellows there. So it wasn't a situation where the democratic country supported the other democratic country and the autocratic country supported the other autocratic country. It was kind of in reverse, which was kind of strange, but there were bigger foreign policy objectives that the superpowers had at the time. So yeah, questions about this conflict. I think Sally had one. Do you have a question, Sally? Yeah, go ahead, Sally. Oh, okay. Yeah. Gandhi was a popular prime minister. Why was she assassinated? How did that come about? There was a seek. It's it's we're fast forwarding to 1984, but and not much that not much to do with cashmere but just to answer the question, there was a seek rebellion in. I'm going to hold up a map. North Western India here. No, not in cashmere. No, not in cashmere. The province known as Punjab, which is split partly part of it after the separation between India and Pakistan, partly partly went to Pakistan and then Pakistan decided to call it something else. And part of it went into to India, a majority of which was part of India. The population of Punjab consists of a minority religion, the people are called Sikhs. You can differentiate them in the Indian population by the fact that the men, they wear, you know, prominent turbines and they keep their beards long. So the Sikhs wanted to form their own country in in in that area of the Punjab. Indira Gandhi had a Sikh bodyguard who was partial to the cause of Sikh independence in that time of the 1980s and he killed her. Bodyguard great. Yeah, well, I mean she had a lot of bodyguards and you know and she had a lot of other Sikh bodyguards which were, I'm sure, very competent and very loyal but you know wrong place at the wrong time and this guy was able to pull it off. But that that happened 1984. Yeah, God Robin. Yeah. So, Kurt this has been so interesting and part of history that I know nothing about or. Yeah. But what I wonder is if you could. I would like to hear more nuanced approach towards the non aligned movement. Because, could you imagine what, how the world would have gotten through those decades, if, if it was totally paralyzed in other words a non aligned movement was between the United with between capitalism and communism and and many of those countries were, were used as what you call it proxy war and so on and so forth that were totally devastating. But if they, you know, my thought is that especially in the United Nations that they performed a very important role to get issues to be discussed and to understand that a lot of the non aligned people were former cap for former colonial provinces of the big powers and they wanted their independence and they argued for it in the United Nations and all that was a movement towards more democracy globally. So, I mean, you know, narrow the first Prime Minister of India in the late 1940s into the 1950s was was a chairman chairperson of the of the non aligned movement, and India often took a leading role in the non aligned movement. The criticism I think internally in India with respect to Nehru's leadership in the non aligned movement was, I don't think resources were committed by by India and by Nehru specifically towards it. And a lot of times people kind of criticize Nehru for being a wanting to kind of wanting to become a cult of personality for himself, more than espousing and believing in the causes that he claimed that he believed in, especially after independence. And as a result, he didn't put his money where his mouth was when it came to the non aligned movement, which I think if significant resources could have been put and invested in non aligned movement, it would have probably garnered a lot more sway and support in much of the developing world that really you know they really weren't interested in this chess match between the Soviets and the United States and picking sides, you know between capitalism and communism. I mean the reality in most of these countries, including India and including Pakistan for that matter was, these were extremely extremely poor countries that in many cases that were trying to adopt capitalism. And you can see the results of 5060 years of capitalism in a lot of these countries. They're not really that much better off than they were at the time of their independence. You know some people profited but a vast majority of the populations of these countries I mean I can definitely say for India I don't want to speak for other countries have not benefited from the capitalist system. They just really haven't yeah I mean certain people have, but they were often the people that were kind of doing well even under the British at the time. Yeah, so the wealthy class made more money. The wealthy became wealthier. The people that had you know two or three possessions to their name, still have two to three possessions to their name. Except you know maybe one of those is a smartphone now, but, but so the non aligned movement, you know, was something that was a wonderful concept if more countries, you know, it specifically if India probably invested a little bit more of its weight in it. But what often happened was some of these countries decided to take sides, you know behind the scenes anyway I mean India for fact, definitely, you know lean towards the Soviet Union. I don't know. All right. So, yeah, good. I think it's like quarter of acre. I'm not certain how much longer we're going on. Okay, so let me let me try to I'll bring it to the to the president is me unless there's some other questions are there other questions other questions. Yeah, go ahead Ian. Yeah, Ian's got his hand up. Where's Ian. I don't know. He's got his hand up. Okay, now he's off. Yeah. So, you were talking about Mark mountain and how he was given that responsibility for the partition and 47. Yeah, and I understand that he was really on a, on a schedule, you know, Britain. Really impatient to get out of the subjugation of the British Empire, at least in India. So, that mountain made a very hasty drawing of lines across the map to determine to establish Pakistan and India was two separate countries. Well, the consequence of that rather arbitrary lining line on the ground was that there was a massive refugee. Yes. A crisis that that ensued, and that in turn triggered huge massacres, I think on, you know, on both sides and yeah, you know, that's maybe has historical context that explains why India and Pakistan has two separate countries that got off into a really bad, bad start. And the memory of that would probably have affected things for years afterwards. Absolutely. I mean, Ian brings up a very critical point critical point in the sense that people that were in leadership positions in both countries saw family, you know, family members uprooted and treated extremely harshly, you know, both sides, because there was a tremendous fear that people that were going to be on the Muslim side of people that were on the Muslim side, who happened to be Hindu, wanted to get the hell out of there and move to an area where they felt more comfortable and really vice versa. You know, where Muslims that were majority Hindu areas, you know, the horse, the horse trading and the jockeying that, you know, the leaders were doing was all fine and well, but a lot of the people really didn't believe that their security was was adequately and they were very scared that they were going to, you know, number one, not only lose their possessions but in which case to make cases they did, but also lose their lives. The that movement that migration, they, they, you know, historically it's often been referred to as the second Exodus, the first one being of course in the Old Testament, because it was a movement of a million people. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, it was a movement of 10 million people, which, during which the massacres that Ian referred to resulted in over a million deaths. Reprisals back and forth between Hindus and Muslims and I remember reading an interview with, I'm going to bring up another name that I said I wasn't going to but a name that's, I think most people will know. His name was President Musharraf, previous General Musharraf of Pakistan during the 9-11 timeframe. And when he was interviewed, he said one of his earliest memories, he was actually, even though he's a president of Pakistan, he was from the area known as Delhi, New Delhi. That's where his family was from. He was a Muslim that happened to live in New Delhi, right in the middle of India. And one of the most defining memories that he had as a child was when he and his family were uprooted and moved to what's now Pakistan and the violence that they saw, the fact that they left everything that they had, which wasn't much, but it was everything they had behind and were essentially spat on on their way out. And fortunately, for their sake, the only thing that happened was they were spat on because much worse things happened for many of these people that moved from, you know, one side to the other. And they, these memories lived in the collective, you know, in the collective conscience of the leaders specifically more so in the case of Pakistan, because many of those leaders lived their families were in the area known, you know, now as India. So to speak, and they were their families were uprooted and they didn't forget those horrible experiences that they faced. What, what do you think would have happened if Gandhi had not been assassinated in 40. What was it 45. He was assassinated in 48. Yeah, correct. So a year after independence. So he was. Yeah, I've forgotten that he witnessed the whole trauma. He saw the whole trauma. He was, you know, he was devastated. He was not in favor of partition. You know, his famous quote at the time. You know, was when when it was a done deal that the country was going to be separated. He was standing between narrow and Jenna. And he and he looked at the two of them and he said that, you know, he said, today my heart just split in two. And I'm, and I'm heartbroken. But once the once the split happened, you know, Gandhi was essentially relegated to really smaller social causes. At that point, the big work of his life, the, the, the independence of the Indian subcontinent had been done. So a lot of a lot of things that he got involved with were local Hindu Muslim riots. And he was very emphatic on the Hindu population of which he was a member of right to show a great deal of deference to the, you know, the Muslim, you know, population and he at the end of the day because of the deference that he showed, he was killed by one of his own people. He was killed by a Hindu fanatic that thought he was bent that Gandhi was, you know, bending over backwards for Muslims. And not looking after quote unquote his own people but you know for Gandhi, all the people were his own people. So fast forward. Is there another question? Yeah, I've got a question. Yeah. Or between Hindus and Muslims sounds like it wasn't really religion. It was us and them. Yeah. Right. I mean they didn't debate about the nature of. No, no, no, they weren't talking about, you know, they weren't talking about heaven or who was keeping the Sabbath and now now it was us versus them classic us versus them. Can I ask something. Yeah, go ahead. I've never understood among them. It seems that a lot of Muslims stayed however they didn't go. Yeah. Who would have stayed and those in their climate. Okay, so I mean, just a really, really quick. I'm just throw out some facts grant demographic so India population 1.339 billion probably about five years it's going to overtake China that has 1.386 billion. So of that 1.339 billion 200 million people are Muslim in India. India is the third largest Muslim country in the world, even though it's not a Muslim country. It comes after Indonesia and Pakistan, and the third largest Muslim country happens to be India with its minority population. So look, I mean, so grant Nehru, and to a lesser extent Gandhi Gandhi was kind of done once he found out that you know things were that the country was going to split, but they did a substantial lobbying campaign to Indian countries to claim that you know their security was assured that they didn't have to leave the country, and that their rights in India were secured, their religious rights would be respected and that they would not be harmed in the long term. Well, we're going to end our talk today with a little conversation just about that. But as a result, a fairly substantial 15 to 20% of the population of India itself, continue to remain Muslim they did not leave. But a fair portion did leave a fair portion did leave into the two extremes of the country, East and East Pakistan known as Bangladesh, and West Pakistan, which is today's Pakistan. I want to just jump back into that crazy war that I talked about where the United States and the Soviet Union took sides. After India was first confronted with the prospect of a nuclear attack by the United States. Two years later, India developed an atom bomb in 1974 India. Yeah, in 1974 India exploded a conduct in an above ground test in the death in its desert it's Western desert of an atomic bomb. So, most people, if they know a little bit about the region think that the nuclear, you know, the nuclear race was largely due to the actions of one another. India in its in its archives of Indira Gandhi, they state, India did not develop a nuclear weapon or acquire a nuclear weapon because of Pakistan. India acquired a nuclear weapon because of the threat posed by the United States. Wow. So a little fun fact for you trivia folks out there. So, relationship with China at that time. The relationship with China Barry and is and not good in 1962, the two clashed. They had a border war in which China, China was able to take a couple of very high altitude areas in the Himalayas for itself that they claimed what were its territory. The Chinese were very well prepared. The story goes that the Indians set troops at 18,000 feet wearing shorts and and and the equivalent of athletic shoes and a good portion of that. The military force froze to death when they fought the Chinese so extremely ill prepared when they had this border skirmish with China. So the relationship was not the reason I asked. Yeah. The reason I asked was my memory, which I something I hadn't thought of in probably 20 or 30 years was that India, as an American, my belief was that India developed a nuclear capability against China. Yeah, no, no, I mean in Indira Gandhi's archives and she was the Prime Minister that oversaw the explosion of that first nuclear device in 1974. The China had never threatened the use of nuclear weapons, even in those border skirmish skirmishes. I think China developed a nuclear weapon and 64 I'm not certain that border war took place at 62. So I guess they didn't have those weapons at the time. But the the development of the nuclearization of South Asia was due to the intervention of the seventh fleet. Not because of Pakistan will make sense. And what I'm wondering is, if my memory is correct that the media position, the US government position was that India developed nuclear weapons because of China. So they would say that instead of against us. Yeah, I mean, the, the information about the USS Enterprise in the seventh fleet, going into the Bay of Bengal to support Pakistan, that was largely classified and not declassified until relatively recently, and here in our country, especially the prospect of the use of nuclear weapons in that in that conflict. Anyway, I think, okay, any other questions. Okay, any any questions so anyway, so going from there. So Pakistan developed a nuclear weapon 20 years later. Both countries tested their weapons in 1998 resulting in sanctions from the United States under under President Clinton. A quick thing just to bring people up to speed. Pakistan was also extremely very instrumental in helping the United States in its proxy war in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union. Right, which most people say the amount of money that the Soviets spent in trying to control and take over Afghanistan probably bankrupted the Soviet Union in general. Right. And Pakistan was a staging force and the Pakistani intelligence was a platform from which the United States was able to arm the Mujahideen and and and essentially sabotage the Soviet Army, the Red Army, every place that they could, they could be in Afghanistan. When, when the Soviets pulled out the, the intelligence services of Pakistan had been overdeveloped through aid from the United States as well as aid, you know, from from Pakistan itself. They really had not a whole lot to do. They were looking for other projects and what they were doing was what they started supporting and and actually helping create different militant Islamic groups, one of which was the Taliban which you know today, the other, their prime aim was to go into into Indian administered cashmere and to basically just cause a ruckus there. They, they, it was a tit for tat situation where they made a secular Muslim population cashmere radicalized they they would go and they would, they would play they would put force on down bars shutting down restaurants shutting down movie houses and really Islamizing the, the area which previously was secular and also placing a great deal of restrictions on cashmere Muslim women in terms of what they could do. What that would, what that resulted in is India moving in heavy artillery and committing essentially crimes against the, the cashmere population through its military occupation in that area, which resulted for the first time in a 40 year period of a great deal of animosity expressed by the local cashmere population, the Indian cashmere population against the government of India because they were essentially using heavy handed tactics. The intention was to fight these militants, but they didn't do an effective job distinguishing who were good people, and, and not so good people and who were a threat, and the over militarization of cashmere resulted in the situation that we have today. 100,000 close to 100,000 people have died in cashmere, largely due to actions by the Indian military and by the Pakistani insurgent groups that have come in Pakistan through General Musharraf or President Musharraf in 2015 admitted the first time that it was largely responsible for supporting and creating and training these groups, along with the Taliban to destabilize that region and hoping that the cashmere population would rise up against India. Let me just move into the present right now to finish this up. I hate to only spend four minutes on it. It's up to you guys how long you want to talk about it but so there was an attack on an Indian military barracks last summer in the Indian part of cashmere. The Indian government took that as a, you know, to quote our friend Dick Cheney, no crisis should be, you know, should be ignored, you know, if there's a every crisis should be used to somebody's advantage. Right, right. So that was a famous Dick Cheney quote after 9-11. So the Indian press with, you know, the government feeding the Indian press made, you know, it wasn't a nice thing that 40 soldiers died, but they made it into practically, you know, a second 9-11 and got the country in a fury and said that something had to be done. This can't go on. And to some extent there was this undercurrent in the overall Indian population, even the Muslim Indian population that, you know, you can't have these terrorist attacks constantly taking place because over close to 100,000 people had died between 1989 and the present in these attacks. But Modi, now, you know, a new name in our conversation, Modi, the current prime minister of India, took this attack on the military barracks as a means to not only hit a target in Pakistan, but also to revoke something called Article 35A of the Indian Constitution. Article 35A of the Indian Constitution was an amendment passed in the 1950s, what it guaranteed to people in Kashmir is their autonomy. By autonomy, that meant that they had legislative control over their region, the region known as Indian Kashmir, which again as remember guys that was 50% of the entirety of Kashmir. And that is currently still controlled by India. Now it's essentially a state as of the last four or five months of India like any other state. But by revoking autonomy, what happened was Kashmiris had the exclusive right to vote for their own legislators. They had the right to apply Islamic law over their region should they decide to do so. And they also had the exclusive right to own real estate in Kashmir. Indians from other parts of India could not go in there and let's say start building hotels and open factories and vote. And for election in election. All of that can now happen. And essentially, Kashmir as of November of 2019 has been absorbed into India, just like cash, the Pakistani portion of cash mirror was absorbed into Pakistan, and then the Chinese portion has has been absorbed into China since 1962 in that case. So the likelihood of a dream that even writers like Salman Rushdie have expressed of having an independent Kashmir, an independent state of Kashmir, hearkening back to you know ancient times. As of 2019 that will probably never happen at this point, based on the latest actions of the Modi government. The Modi government has a fair amount of support in India. The India of you know the current India, as we know it. The political party that Modi belongs to. They are referred to as a Hindu nationalist party. In terms of its cradle its platform. However, the way they've actually been able to secure widespread support amongst honestly people in India that don't follow any religion or they could be Hindu in name only but you know they don't go to temples or believe in any of the doctrines of Hinduism or Buddhism or any of that you know for that matter is by using a secular general platform. And it's, and it's campaigning by what I think I think was a grant or Ian, or maybe I'm sorry, I think it was grant that asked the question. How come 200, you know, million people, how come 200 million Muslims stayed in India weren't they scared that they were going to get killed in 1947. India promise through narrow to Muslims was a British law that was passed in 1937, which guaranteed Muslims. The application of Muslim Islamic law Sharia law for all matters involving family, family law in estate planning, and the law of, you know, seeding property. So there, India has two concurrent bodies of law that govern it a secular law, which is not very different from our common law and the common law that they adopted from the British, with respect to, you know, if a man and a woman were to get divorced or if there was a contest regarding inheritance rights. And then there's an Islamic law that applies to Muslims. So a, a Muslim man in India can marry up to four women. In a, in a, in a, in a, in a quote unquote, you wanted that. Pardon me. Why would anybody want to do that. I'm not going to say anything. Barry that's that's your that's your personal point of view. A fair majority of the participants here are women so I'm definitely not saying anything. Okay, but a Muslim man can marry up to four women. A Muslim girl is only allowed 25% of inheritance rights according to the way Sharia law is applied. A Muslim man can secure a divorce by a verbal proclamation and only be required to provide a woman two months. Almoni and, and or child support, even if he had children with her. So this law has been in place since 1937 here. Nero guaranteed that this law would be unchanged as part of his horse trading to secure Muslims to stay in India. And that law continues to this day. A lot of Hindu Indians and secular Indians and Christians, Jews and Buddhists who do still live in the country really don't like the fact that that exists. Even of all religions are not crazy of the fact that that Islamic family law is applied and they have their own courts in India that apply to them while they see their Christian Jewish and Hindu sisters getting things like Almoni and child support until children are 18. Again, largely reflecting the laws that the United States and Great Britain have, you know, slightly more progressive countries on those issues as far as the courts are concerned. So there's an overwhelming belief and a lot of secular India that these laws need to end women's groups, feminist groups are against these laws and they, and again politics, you know, creates strange bedfellows. They will often be on the same team with groups of Christians with the groups of more radical Hindus on the basis of, you know, changing some of these laws. So they'll essentially form a coal, the most bizarre coalition. But on some of these rights, these groups, you know, the Hindu nationalist group is probably, you know, using this as a political maneuver. But there's other groups in the country like women who really believe that these laws are, you know, antiquated that they're just plain wrong. They're immoral and should no longer have a place in a quote unquote, trying to be modern society. Trying to be modern society of India. And as a result, Modi has been very successful in forming a broad coalition in India and support, because his message to the population is not that, you know, everyone's going to be praying to Krishna and Shiva at the end of the day. Everyone's going to have to become a vegetarian is his message to the population in his campaigns is we're going to have one secular law, like our friend now our friends, the Americans, the British, you know, the Germans the French, every progressive country in the west. And there's a, you know, there's a big drive in a lot of India, you know, to quickly try to westernize a lot of its other areas of society. So, you know, of course, with the exception of religion. He's a progressive, you could say. Yeah, but chances are Robin, you know, I look I don't know what's in the guy's heart, but I think he's, he's taking care of taking advantage of an issue that he knows has brought support. When I say brought support, look, even a lot of Muslim people in India, don't believe in those laws anymore they think they're antiquated and a lot of Muslim women don't, you know, but what he's doing is he's pitting different groups against one another. Modi, when I say he and taking advantage of that and his party, the BJP, which is, you know, a party that doctrines were based on a more fanatical form of Hinduism has been able to sell a very broad based secular message to much of the country. Even with respect to cashmere. What he said is not that this is a, you know, this is a matter of religion, or this is a matter of Indian control is his, his, his, his go to argument has in in India not overseas but in India has always been. Hey, if you're an Indian Christian, or an Indian Hindu and you happen to want to move to cashmere, because the great skiing there. Why should you not have the ability to vote for your legislators. Why should you not be able to own private property and, and, and start up a ski resort, or a, a, a cross country skiing facility. You know, why should that only go be reserved for a subset of the population. And that argument, you know, if you're an Indian and you have, you know, if you if you look at the American full faith and credit clause in our Constitution. What you should be able to do in Maine, you should be able to do in California. Why should there be a separate set of rights. So he makes a very cogent argument to the Indian population and uses a very secular argument. In terms of what he wants to do on his own, if he's able to accomplish all this, you know, you probably want to look at his, you know, the, the, the true party platform under which the party was formed under his party is political party. But as far as when Robin placed a question to me, you know, a couple of days ago and she said, you know, how did a country that had a that produced a Gandhi had produced a narrow, you know, have a person like Modi. Well, Modi is not appealing to a fanatical message that his party, you know, possibly believes in. He's, he's, he's really appealing to a secular message where it's convenient for him, politically expedient for him to secure a broad base. And if, if people are familiar with Indian politics at all, you don't have to be that familiar, but he won in a land, his party won in a landslide in the, in the most recent elections. Okay. Yeah, sorry, go ahead. That's that's what I have to say. There are any questions I know we went well over our time but really, really thank you very much. This is very, very enlightening for me. Nothing about India really. Yeah, thank you enough. I don't know if anyone else has any final comments, but we're going to. The other thing is, is I wanted to mention I think we should continue this forum at, you know, some time. I shouldn't let it go. In other words, understanding what you and Robin are both doing, you know, with Vicki, I think it's, especially given the current time, you know, I just drove into Burlington today for the first time in a couple of weeks and the streets are deserted. I think, you know, if we need to maintain some sense of political allegiance, some sense of participatory democracy and sense of community, maybe I guess. If this is the only way to do it. You know, we need to keep it going. So you're doing important work by continuing this on a local and I guess international level. Look at Robin, what is she up to turn into the Buddha. Anyway, it was fascinating. It was really good. Thank you so much. Sally was going to say something. Yeah. You were so saying goodbye and I just wanted to mention to people if you're watching, if you can watch PBS right now, there's a two shows on about Cuba. Oh wow. Thank you. So check it out. Anything but the COVID-19 virus. That's what that was another reason this is so important to remind you that there are other issues right now. Thank you. I'm going to end the taping, the recording and we'll see what happens.