etcetera

Sudan & India

You may be wondering from the title what could be possible relationship between poor African country of Sudan & world's next superpower (?) India. What I am trying to relate is India's past and Sudan's present. I have in the past written relating events in India and some other countries, like Cricket & Football stadiums or Singapore & Mumbai. This 1 is on the similar lines.

Sudan is having referendum on whether south Sudan should split from the north and results show that that would indeed happen. Sudan is like many countries in Africa which are Country just because of European colonial powers. European imperialist powers, as they did other parts of the world, divided Africa on their own accord in the Scramble for Africa. They didn't care about ethnicities of people in countries n divided Africa on paper in conference (that's the reason many country boundaries in Africa are straight line or rivers). So this created chaos after these countries became independent, because as per some UN accord, boundaries were not changed after independence. So Muslim north Sudan was forced to stay with Christian south. Same is the case with many countries like Nigeria and this is the root cause of many civil wars in Africa in my opinion. Now secession of south Sudan could led to many such events and Africa could be realigned as per ethnicities, which always should have been the case.

I think this is similar to post-independence India. Many of the provinces were created by British for their administrative convenience and there were many Princely states as well. So people of similar ethnicity, or should I say language, were divided in different provinces/ princely states. Agitations in Andhra led to formation of first Indian state based on language (similar to 1st African state to separate south Sudan). After this within 10 years, states were formed based on people's origins, language, culture, etc. Would such wave of new African states will start post independence of south Sudan? Only time will tell!

posted by ninad @ 7:49 pm