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Comment by senthil_rajasek | Hacker News Reader

What makes you think India is building an empire?

I believe that they are focussed on lifting their masses out of poverty.

I think his point was demonstrating that the EU and militaristic and colonial empire of the former UK have very limited similarities other than they both represent entities with international economic power to some degree. A ridiculous notion in the context of history and reality.

He goes on to ask "what's your point?" which leads me to believe he knows how ridiculous his comparison is but is just making it in bad faith.

"making it in bad faith. "

No, I wanted him to actually list some counterpoints, not just asking pointed questions without concrete points. You cannot answer a "Ha, have you heard of X?" question in any meaningful way.

I keep seeing people claim there is no bad faith approach being made on their end on HN and instead flipping the accusation on another person and claiming their post is indecipherable, even when opposing person's argument is quite clear if even a small effort is taken to gleam meaning from it.

I'm not going to pretend that person spoke in hieroglyphs, and if you are, then it's clear you are speaking from a place of bad faith. I've even spelled it out to you and you've refused to address the original person posing the question and instead brow beat on what you think you can get away with regarding nettiquette - the most uninteresting part of the conversation possible.

You're misunderstanding me. The EU is no more of an empire than all of those nations.

It's just a new regional power and some people hate that. The same kind of people who would've been against pretty much any country back when it was formed.

Just thinking their small city state was enough. Hell, they would've been against city states, against tribes unifying, just against any society beyond their own tribe/family.

Small minded fools who blame everything on someone else. Usually anti-vaccine and anti-science in general, suspicious of any smart person in the world who tries to save and help their worthless stupid lives.

Who does that for no apparent reason, right? Why is Bill Gates spending billions on fighting diseases? Is he insane? No, clearly he has an ulterior motive. Just dumb.

Are we saying a country with 1.4bn people, 22 official languages, 5 major religions, over 100 ethnic groups isn’t an empire? Before the Raj, most of it was the Mughal Empire (1500-1800). Before that, the Delhi Sultanate, pretty definitely an empire (1200-1500). The only thing missing is the nomenclature.

There was no "India" before the British colonizers. So lets start from there.

How do you define an empire? Your definition is quite odd to me.

India is structured like the USA, a collection of states, with central and regional powers. But they are very much internally focused, and rarely venture into global politics. They don’t intend to colonize any other states, nor make any attempts at militarizing anything outside their borders.

I would find it hard to ever compare India to a British-like empire…

Do you believe it was an empire under the Mughals? If so, what's changed?

For starters, India now has a representative democracy? Empire usually means a monarchy.

Also, for Indians, organizing into such a distributed state->central structure was the only way to survive after the British (an actual empire) had finished their colonial destruction. The Mughals violently acquired multiple regional monarchies, to be ruled by their monarchy.

> India now has a representative democracy

So did the Romans for 500 years

It really seems to me that you’re arguing in bad faith, by making facetious statements with very little substance. I suggest you read up a bit more about these countries and their systems before we continue further, I don’t see much to be gained from this thread. Cheers!

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