| Volume 7, Number 1, January 2010 |
India’s 2009 General Elections
and Beyond
by N. Jayaram 嘉亚拉穆 |
India’s Peaceful Rise in World Politics
—Present Reality and Future Prospect
by 时殷弘、宋德星
Shi Yinhong & Song Dexing |
WHILE the People’s Republic of China celebrated 60 years of existence in 2009, neighbouring India, with an equally huge population, began its 62nd year as an independent country. Unremarkable though that is as a milestone, what distinguished the year for India was that the 15th parliamentary elections since the country became a republic in 1952 passed off almost peacefully, barring stray violent attacks by Maoist militia in a few parts of the vast country.
More importantly, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, who is generally perceived as one of the most honest politicians in India, not only completed a full five-year term but won reelection at the head of a stable coalition of parties, with the Congress party managing to garner enough seats to be able to negotiate from a position of slightly greater strength vis-à-vis smaller parties than it could five years earlier.
The Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which stresses the Hindutva or “Hinduness” of Indian society—thereby downplaying Muslim...
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AS one of the world’s ancient civilizations and as a huge modern-day country, India by all accounts does not lack the ambitions of a great nation, and in fact has always shown a strong desire to be counted among the world’s great powers. From the time of pre-independence Congress Party leader Jawaharlal Nehru’s bold rhetoric about India becoming an “impressive and dramatic” nation, to the proclaiming of a “twenty-first century superpower” during the seven years of rule by the leadership of the Bharatiya Janata Party beginning in 1998, down to the present proclamation of “India’s Century” by today’s Indian National Congress Singh government, this has always been the case. India possesses the population, size, and natural resources of a leading nation, and judging from some of the key indicators of great nations, it is displaying a truly impressive level of competitive power. Not only that, India’s aspiration to seek the status of a great nation, along with its faith in strategic realism as its plan for governance...
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| Issue 7.1 |
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India’s Peaceful Rise
in World Politics
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