India has a misguided government that is crippled by bureaucracy and incompetent. The country would be in much better shape if it was still controlled by the British.
I'm sorry, but I feel like the comment from OP does have a place in this discussion, given the context of the article. I agree it could have been worded in better ways, but an argument that India's bureaucracy is corrupt is not a groundless insult nor completely irrelevant to the article here. I'm not sure how closely you follow Indian politics but I'd refer you to the last national election and the emergence of the Aam Admi Party, both driven in large part by popular frustration at pervasive bureaucratic corruption (eg how telecom spectrum was awarded by the previous administration). In fact, it'd be hard to argue that India's bureaucracy doesn't have a history of bribery to some degree, especially in cases when it comes to regulators and companies.
Again, I think OP could have done a better job phrasing his point, perhaps pointing out how regulation unfavorable to Apple actually might point to less tolerance of corruption at high levels. But I think simply censoring dicscussion of corruption as nationalistic grandstanding is heavy-handed. In other contexts, making comments about political lobbying in the US as corruption would not be considered nationalistic. I don't see why it should be here either.
Anyone who thinks "India was better off under British rule" needs to read about the Bengal Famine that killed 3 million people from Bengal [1] -- a direct result of Churchill's basic idea that Indian lives were worth less than others [2]. This is not to mention the numerous previous atrocities, such as the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre [3], in which a garden was blocked off and troops ordered to fire into a massed crowd until their ammunition was exhausted.
I am usually not one to dust off the history books, but in my opinion, people who perpetrate this "Things were great under the British" meme (including pmarca) need at least some amount of education, and perhaps a little more empathy. Indians were absolutely considered as an inferior, secondary class by the British, and the lack of a few Apple stores is a small price to pay for avoiding that.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943
[2] http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/soutikbiswas/2010/10...
Editing my comment to reflect my mistake. Thanks.
Edit: at least I think it is.
There are certainly many criticisms of or insults to our country that a lot of our countrymen would prefer to not see.
Hinduism was never even a cohesive entity before British rule, it was the orientalist scholars that classified it based on many similar belief systems. http://www.e-ir.info/2012/11/26/the-impact-of-european-colon...
That's not the same as saying that the people in what is now India didn't exist or share many of the same traditions and cultures, but it was not a cohesive unit, let alone a nation with a national identity.
"The country (varṣam) that lies north of the ocean and south of the snowy mountains is called Bhāratam; there dwell the descendants of Bharata."
It's a region with many shared traditions and at some times has had large swaths governed by warlords, kings, conquerors, but the concept of India as a nation just did not exist pre-colonialism. I don't see how that's denying anybody identity.
The (well cited and researched) paper I linked above mentions how old the Vedas are. However, they are holy books and mythology, not historical documents. A description of a region in a holy book is not as a identity or cohesiveness as a cultural or political entity.
I'm hardly a scholar of Indian history, I just did a bunch of reading during the two months I recently spent traveling the country from south to north. That was one of the articles that popped up when I was trying to find any decent information on the caste system and it's very well written and argued (and, like I said, the citations check out).
It seems to me though that the area was wildly diverse and hardly a unified entity before the Brits came along. I mean, what about Pakistan? That's not part of India. But that's only as of 75 or so years ago? Is that counted in these "national income" totals that the original parent poster was talking about? That was my original quibble with what the hell the guy meant by his statement and the historical existence of India as a nation. (A nation being a modern concept anyway, which was also at the heart of my quibble.)
Anyway, as to the analogy with Arthurian mythology, that's a good one. The area that King Arthur purportedly ruled was Britain, Ireland, Norway, and Gaul. Is that all Britain or . . . ? See the problem with that line of reasoning?
Some of your queries might be answered here http://sankrant.org/2003/10/why-india-is-a-nation/
The blog post you linked me to just reinforces my point about nationhood if you'd have been paying much attention to my posts instead of getting defensive about "Indian identity" or whatever.
You are confusing two different topics, we are not discussing the concept "Hindu", we are discussing whether there was an entity "India". The paper you linked says nothing about that. I have told you how the concept of India is very old using the citations in your cited paper. The blog post I linked proves my point so I don't know what you are talking about.
What do I have to be defensive about? Do you think I have identity crisis because some random person on the internet has some beliefs? lol