India-An Overview
Situated so it forms its own subcontinent, India is located between the smaller nations of Bangladesh
and Pakistan in South Asia. It is separated from the rest of Asia in the north by the towering
Himalaya Mountains. Because of its size, India has a number of climates. The north, where the
capital, New Delhi, is located, has a pleasant temperate climate, although in the summer
temperatures can get into the 100s. In the south, where devastating flooding often occurs, the
climate is characterized by tropical monsoons and hot, sticky weather in which the temperature is
usually between 75 F and 90 F.
Despite India's massive size and numerous natural resources, its
population threatens to outgrow both. With almost 1 billion people, experts say India may outstrip
China's population by 2030, which would make India the world's most populous nation. The
roughly 2% annual growth is occurring despite a vigorous campaign to introduce modern
birth-control techniques.
India has a huge variety of ethnic groups and languages. Indeed, there are
24 languages each spoken by more than 1 million people. Chief among these languages is Hindi,
which is spoken by roughly 30% of the people. Other major languages include English, which is the
common tongue for business and political communication, Bengali, Telagu, Urdu, Marathi,
Assamese, Kashmiri, Malayalam, Gujarati, Tamil, Oriya, Sindhi, Sanskrit, and Hindustani. Despite
their different ethnicities, which include Indo-Aryan (the majority), Dravidian, Mongoloid, and
others, about 83% of Indians share Hinduism as their common religion. However, there is a small
Muslim minority, mostly in the northern Jammu and Kashmir State, that is vocal and frequently
violent in its demands for a separate homeland. There are also tiny Christian, Sikh, Buddhist, and
Jains religious communities.
India's ancient culture has produced a vigorous, sprawling multiparty democracy in which family
dynasties, ethnic groups, and religion often play as important a role in politics as parties and their
leaders. Historically, India's political scene has been dominated by the Indian National Congress
(INC) party (later the INC Indira party), which has spawned some of the nation's best-known
leaders, including Jawaharlal Nehru; his daughter, Indira Gandhi; and her son, Rajiv Gandhi.
However, there are numerous and ever-changing opposition groups, attesting to the dynamic power
of India's political system. But one factor has caused the majority of strife in the country: religion.
Bitter differences between the huge Hindu majority and the nation's Muslims are responsible for tens
of thousands of deaths in the past decade and have resulted in fierce political divisions, giving rise to
such militant groups as the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which espouses Hindu supremacy. A civil
war has been raging in Muslim-majority Jammu and Kashmir State since 1948, when India and
Pakistan fought their first of two wars over the territory. In 1992-93 alone, 1,700 people died in
fighting over a Muslim mosque in the town of Ayodhya, which leaders of both religions had claimed
as a sacred site.
Despite its internal turmoil, India has a powerful, wide-based economy. The country is
world-renowned for its textile manufactures, which have become the root of a transformation from a
protected market to an increasingly free- market economy in recent decades. Indian leaders,
especially Finance Minister Man Mohan Singh, have engineered such dramatic reforms as lowering
trade barriers with other countries and offering strong incentives for foreign investment. However,
several factors have slowed down India's attempts to become a world economic power: almost
50% of its work force is illiterate; the country's roads, communications, and power sources are
poorly developed and maintained; and there is massive unemployment. Fully two-thirds of the work
force is employed in the agricultural sector. Nevertheless, India has used its bountiful natural
resources, which include natural gas, diamonds, petroleum, titanium ore, and coal (the world's
fourth-largest reserves), to build itself into a modern industrial state. India exports most of its goods
to Russia, while it buys most of its imports from the United States and Germany.
[Sources: Europa World Year Book; The Hutchinson Dictionary of World History; Political
Handbook of the World; The World Factbook; World Population Prospects; World Reference
Atlas]
