VeryQuokka

VeryQuokka t1_ja10q6w wrote

France and India are so often described as being close that even the Wikipedia entry for France-India relations has mentions of them as having a "special relationship". France worked with India to de-colonize its assets in modern-day India without the violence that was associated with the UK or Portugal, so it has a different path for a Western European country.

France is basically taking over some of Russia's role with India after the 2014 annexation of Crimea led to Russia accepting China's rapprochement. An example is France's recent support for India in the UN, which has historically been Russia's role.

Germany is close with China and has been balancing both Russia and China as geopolitical counterweights to the US (at least before it lost control with the recent invasion), so I imagine they haven't done much but I will let others contribute there.

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VeryQuokka t1_ja07zi4 wrote

Their relationships with Western democracies are at an all-time high right now. Also, they might be closer to and care more about democracies like Japan, Israel, and in Southeast Asia than us in North America or Europe. There's a significant overlap with their BFFs and at least America's BFFs.

I've been reading more about them after Reddit has become filled with extreme rants about them, and I have to disagree that the countries that might actually come to India's defense would be any sort of collective West. Just off the top of my head:

  • They fought the British Empire for their independence and beat them to practice democracy, and lost over 100 million lives in that process. We didn't help them.
  • They fought against a Portuguese dictatorship and beat them. We didn't help them.
  • They've fought 3 or 4 wars with Pakistan and beat them. We didn't help them.
  • They fought a war with China and lost. We didn't help them.

They've been recovering from a civilization-scale apocalypse following the departure of the British Empire, fought in multiple wars in such a short time against despotic regimes. Yet they're still around. We have to give them some credit instead of pretending that the West is some savior when they've been left on their own and deal with so much in the short history of their country.

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VeryQuokka t1_ja03qb7 wrote

It's easy to pull demographic polling data for demographic groups, and I see that the majority of Indians in American don't even identify with caste.

Unfortunately, most white people voted for Trump, a man who is explicitly racist and misogynist, among other things. It almost seems like those third world immigrants people might be better integrated into our society that doesn't like discrimination/classism than people who have roots here going back multiple generations.

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