Our Friends the Indians

It seems that the Congress party India has now won quite a few seats and seems pretty pro-American.

The election held over four weeks in April and May has produced a result very much to our advantage. The Congress party has been returned to power with a larger share of the vote than indicated by pre-election and exit polls, and will no longer need Communists and left-wingers for majorities in the Lok Sabha. The BJP attacked Congress for being too close to the United States; voters evidently decided that this was not a minus but a plus.

You have to hand it to a country that has a four week election and still has a democracy in place. We say it is too much trouble to take an hour off of work once very few years to vote. But it seems that there is now a major chance for us to cement good relations with India going forward. It is startling how similar both of our countries are:

It became obvious that we had much in common. Both countries have a large and capable military, both have nuclear weapons, both have electoral democracies and English common law traditions, and both are prime targets of Islamist extremists. After Sept. 11, when Pakistan’s Gen. Pervez Musharraf made a U-turn and promised to help the United States in Afghanistan, he did so in the awareness that the U.S. had a friend on the other side of his border.

Hell, both of our countries even freed themselves from the same colonial master i.e. Great Britain. Americans are more and more accepting of Indian culture from the success of movies like Slumdog Millionaire. You could even see some Bollywood creeping into the US by way of something like High School Musical. Also women like Padma Lakshmi are the kind of export that no American man will complain about. Now if we can just accept Indian hot curry we will really be closer to an Indian/American transcendence.