Eastern Tennessee (where slave ownership was rare as well) made a similar attempt to break away from its seceding state.  See link.  Unlike West Virginia it was occupied by the confederates and was unsuccessful.  While the region did not get a star on the flag, it was rewarded by the inclusion of native son (and War Democrat) Andrew Johnson on the 1864 Republican presidential ticket as Lincoln’s running mate.  It was a fateful decision whose repercussions on race relations in this country are perhaps still being felt.

More evidence on why the revisionism diminishing the role of slavery as a cause of the Civil War is bunk.

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The emergence of coinage greatly facilitated the growth of international trade in the Mediterranean world and along the trade routes to China and India.  The city states seem to have understood the importance of weight standards early on (with the Lydians even managing to keep the gold and silver content of their electrum coins constant).  And the states that resisted the urge to debase their coinage and/or had the largest imperial reach saw their coinage spread across the world and become almost ubiquitous like the Athenian Owl Tetradrachms, the Mauryan Karshapana, the Roman Denarius etc and sometimes spawned local imitations.  See here, here, here and here.

A lot of history in a small blob of metal.

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However, these coins are replete with irony as a few years before minting them Brutus himself would have considered them an act of impiety.  For a long time in the Greco-Roman world it was considered an act of impiety to use the image of a living person on a coin.  Philip II of Macedon and his son Alexander created a loophole to get around this.  Philip’s tetradrachms display the image of Zeus and Alexander’s that of Hercules.  However, the gods on the coin just happen to look like the king.  After Alexander’s death, Ptolemy I of Egypt was the first to brazenly use his own image on his coins without resorting to the divine loophole.  With the horse out of the barn, the other Hellenistic states followed.

But the ban remained in place for Roman coinage for another 250 years until it was breached by Julius Caesar (probably one of the items added to his myriad alleged offenses that led to the assassination).  And yet Brutus, that stern defender of the values of the Roman Republic, issued coins with his own image on them.  The likely reason for this apostasy is the fact that after Caesar’s death his successors discovered the propaganda value of using their own images on the coins used to pay their soldiers.  Once again after horse got out of the barn everybody else followed.  And Brutus decided to use his apostasy to glorify the assassination of Caesar, the act primarily associated with his name two millennia later.

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Geographic proximity would appear to argue for Argentinian control of the Falklands.  But since the islands were uninhabited when Europeans landed, the sovereignty claims are fairly complex.  It does not help Argentina’s case that the islanders themselves vocally want to be a part of the United Kingdom.  With no native populations displaced by the colonization there are few moral arguments against respecting their wishes.

This is very similar to the periodic spats between the UK and Spain over Gibraltar.  Ever since the British conquest was ratified by the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, Spain has tried repeatedly to get it back (including a 4 year siege during the American Revolution).  With two referendums (the last in 2002) having overwhelmingly voted for British sovereignty Spain has periodically responded with petulant economic blockades and harassing border restrictions.  Unlike the Falklands the capture of Gibraltar was accompanied by the departure of the native Spanish inhabitants.  Whether that has any moral bearing on the dispute 300 years later depends on your point of view.

Ironically Spain is engaged in a similar dispute with Morocco over Spanish enclaves on the North African coast.  Spain rejects any equivalency because these were Spanish possessions before the current state of Morocco existed.  See link.  Morocco obviously disagrees.

The age of decolonization has reduced the number of far flung outposts (e.g. Hong Kong, Macau and the Panama Canal Zone), but the remaining ones can still cause tempers to fray, even if war is unlikely in many such disputes.

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Its hard to blame them.  History has not been kind to the 13th president of the United States.  As one of the mediocrities between James Polk and Lincoln, he is remembered for his failures rather than any successes.  Fillmore had some successes resolving some prickly foreign policy disputes amicably.  But domestically his desperate desire to appease the South gradually built up the tensions that exploded into the civil war.

It is an irony of history that the one Southerner (and the last President to own slaves while in office) to hold the Presidency in the 19th century, Zachary Taylor, had the gumption to stand up to the South promising to lead the army personally to hang traitors.  In contrast, his three vacillating Northern successors spent their tenure appeasing the South.  Fillmore has attracted the most opprobrium for the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act that forced Federal marshals in free states to arrest fugitive slaves (somehow revisionist Southerners arguing that the Civil War was about federalism and not slavery forget this basic assault on federalism they perpetrated (albeit based on the US Constitution) to protect slavery).

As a Vice President who was unexpectedly elevated to the Presidency, Fillmore also displays the flaw in the American political process in how Vice Presidential candidates are selected (in recent years John Edwards and Sarah Palin provide examples of people chosen by the arbitrary whims of the candidate and who mercifully were not elected).  He was selected to geographically balance out the ticket, for his obscurity that would not generate too much hostility and to deny some New York party bosses a space on the ticket.

As an ultimate indignity, Fillmore is probably remembered most for a hoax, that he was the first President to install a bath tub in the White House.  The hoax was used without correction in the Kia ad below a couple of years back, which cost some ad execs their job.  See link.

Admirers of this much maligned and obscure President can try joining one of the local Millard Fillmore Societies that pops up as a lark every so often.  See link.  Meanwhile, Millard Fillmore has received the honor of two launches of his dollar coin.  A precedent has been set for the battle over Grover Cleveland, born in Caldwell, New Jersey but whose career was largely in Buffalo, best remembered for being the only President with non-consecutive terms and the last man before Al Gore to win the popular vote but lose the electoral college.

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And yet not much is known about the boy/man himself.  He ruled during the period when the Egyptian New Kingdom under the XVIIIth dynasty was at the peak of its opulent splendor but facing religious turmoil.  He succeeded the enigmatic Akhenaten (formerly Amenhotep IV) who drew the wrath of the priestly class by transferring royal patronage from Amun to the sun god Aten (which has also drawn a lot of attention for alleged monotheism).  The relationship between the two Pharaohs (an there relationship to the even more obscure Smenkhkare who was co-regent and perhaps the brief successor of Akhenaten was not known.

Tutankhamun was assumed to be Akhenaten’s son, but his mother was not known.  Most historians doubted that his mother was the famous Nefertiti and speculated that it was a minor wife of Akhenaten called Kiya.  The damnatio memoriae that appears to have been inflicted on Akhenaten in the religious reaction following his death (when Tuthankhaten morphed into Tutankhamun) may be to blame for this.

But now DNA technology has lifted the veil.  King Tut was likely not murdered by his vizier and successor Ay, but was instead a frail product of inbreeding who suffered from a bone disorder and likely died from an infection from a broken leg aggravated by malaria.  See link.   Also see here and here.  Akhenaten has been identified as his father and Amenhotep III and his chief queen Tiye as his grandparents.  His only grandparents.

Tutankhamun’s mother was Akhenaten’s full sister.  There are no records indicating that Nefertiti was related to Akhenaten which likely rules her out.  So far the identity of the mother is not known.  This also makes Tut’s wife Ankhesenamun known to be a daughter of Akhenaten and Nefertiti his half-sister.

Royal inbreeding was very common in Egyptian history.  The royal family being considered divine a “pure” bloodline was expected to be passed down.  This occurred elsewhere (including for example with the Incas) and the Egyptians appear to have passed it along to their Persian and Greek conquerers.  While sibling marriage faded away after the rise of the Roman Empire, royal families until this century were plagued by the effects of inbreeding.

The DNA testing has also confirmed that Akhenaten was not androgynous in appearance from some medical condition as the artwork of his reign appears to suggests.  The unusual renderings of the Pharaoh and his family appear to have been made for artistic and religious reasons.

Deciphering a 3300 year old mystery was made possible by the Egyptian habit of mummifying the dead.  There seems to be a pattern of solving ancient Egyptian mysteries of late.  See previous blog post.  Maybe the trifecta of finding the tomb of Alexander the Great is round the corner.

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An example to the contrary would be the coastal strip of Israel-Palestine-Lebanon.  In recent years some opponents of a Palestinan state have used the absence of any Muslim state since the Arab conquest of the region to argue that the Palestinans were not a national entity.  That ignores the unfortunate reality that Christians and Jews have struggled to establish viable independent states in the same region.  Sandwiched between Egypt and Syria (and occassional erruptions from Babylon-Mesepotamia), each with significantly greater resources of manpower and wealth, independent states in the region have historically had to rely on weakness of its neighbors or significant assistance from abroad.  A survey of the four independent states to rule the region shows why.

The biblical kingdom of David and Solomon flourished at a time when Pharaonic  Egypt was in deep decline and the Hittite Empire on the other flank had long since dissolved.  The weakness became evident shortly after Solomon’s death when a revived Egypt under Sheshonk I would humble Solomon’s successors.  The twin Kingdoms of Judea and Israel would survive, but would have to pay tribute to the Egyptians, Assyrians and Babylonians until their destruction.

The second independent Jewish state of the Hasmoneans emerged as the Hellenistic successor states of Ptolemaic Egypt and Seleucid Syria were in decline.  Even then, the Hasmoneans would not obtain independence until the Seleucid state dissolved into civil war after the death of Antiochus VII.  Independence would be extinguished by the Romans a century later.

The third independent states in the region were the Crusader states of Outremer formed after the First Crusade conquered Jerusalem.  The First Crusade was aided my the tumult in Islamic Syria following the Seljuk invasion and the weakened state of Fatimid Egypt.  Outremer was extremely reliant on continued immigration from Western Europe, particularly landless younger sons of the nobility to provide a manpower for its army.  Once Syria started to consolidate under Zengi and Egypt and Syria were united under Saladin, Outremer was doomed.  Understanding this inherent defect, many of the crusades following the Third Crusade were targeted at Egypt (which had a large native Christian population).

Which brings up the current states of Israel and Lebanon.  Israel has benefited from superior organization in its early years, heavy immigration of European Jewry and immense amounts of American military aid.  This has helped it overcome its exposed strategic situation.  In contrast Lebanon has been for most of its history a Syrian satellite.

Poland never faced similar issues of viability.  Its wounds were self inflicted.  For example Poland disappeared as a single entity for about 200 years when Boleslaw III Wrymouth chose to divide the country among his four sons after his death in 1138 (a succession policy similar to the one that contributed to the fragmentation of the German principalities next door).  Yet the concept of a Polish nation and the title “Duke/King of Poland” would survive until the reconstitution of the Polish state 200 years later.  After its union with Lithuania, during the reign of Casimir IV Poland-Lithuania stretched from the Baltic to the Black Sea.  Hardly the mark of an inherently doomed state.

If Poland had an exposed geographical frontier, so did every other European state except England. The example of Prussia next door shows why geographic location need not define the destiny of a state.  The rise of Brandenburg-Prussia was far from a sure thing.  While Poland was aggressively intervening in Russian affairs in the early 17th century, the Electors of Brandenburg were cutting a sorry figure on the European stage.  Under the hapless George William (1619-1640) Brandenburg was a battleground for the combatants of the Thirty Years War and lacking an army was subject to repeated extortion.  This changed under his son and successor Frederick William I, also known as the Great Elector.  Frederick William created a standing army, the foundation of the future Prussian military machine.  He and his successors opportunistically used the army to expand Prussian territory so that by the early 18th Century Prussia was a legitimate player in European affairs.  And even then under Frederick the Great, Prussia overreached.  It took a death in St. Petersburg for Prussia to survive.  See previous blog article.  As a new player on the international power scene, Prussia drew the hostility of France, Austria, Russia, Sweden and Poland and yet survived.  It can hardly be argued that Prussia had a particularly favorable geographic location.  Good leadership, good timing and a generous dose of good luck did the trick.

Poland lacked all three.  Central control in Poland started to decline, just as its neighbors were reorganizing.  The symptoms of broken government were evident during the years of The Deluge (1656-1660) when tiny Sweden with its extremely efficient army briefly occupied Poland.  However, the rot in Polish government responded with the liberium veto.   The culture that gave rise to the liberium veto prevented any meaningful national army just as Russia and Prussia were building theirs.  While Prussia, Russia and Austria (under Maria Theresa) received competent and sometimes enlightened leadership, the Polish crown became the subject of international haggling at each election and the Sejm with the liberium veto was unworkable.  The liberium veto was the symptom of a broken government that failed to adapt to emerging challenges from abroad and was caught up in its parochial interests.

America is still far from the constitutional anarchy of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.  However, far too many intelligent people in this country extol the virtues of gridlock in Washington.  This country has too many serious problems and needs to adapt to many emerging challenges.  The path of the ostrich is a recipe for disaster.

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A lot of the credit must go to India’s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru.  Ever since the dismantling of the license raj and the beginning of free market reforms in India in 1991, it has become fashionable to criticize Nehru.  However, unlike many of the early leaders of the newly independent countries of Asia and Africa, Nehru was at heart a believer of democracy and its institutions.  He did not attempt to turn his ruling party into a gaggle of sycophants, create a cult of personality or attempt to create a political dynasty by aggressively promoting his daughter Indira.  The ultimate respect for constitutional norms survived Indira Gandhi’s failure on all these three points (and even the Emergency was imposed based on a constitutional provision).  And even with this failure, Indira Gandhi like her father did take steps that created a national identity.

As Kashmiri Brahmins who grew up in the North Indian heartland, Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi projected an Indian identity.  Buttressed by the boost to their reputation by their history in the independence struggle they belonged to India in a manner that few leaders other than Mahatma Gandhi could.  While this did have the deleterious effect of choking the growth of an alternative set of leaders, it delayed the rise of regional satraps  until a core Indian national identity was nurtured.  India has suffered secessionist movements along the periphery, but with the rise of coalition politics reliant on regional support some of this tension has eased.  This has eased the concerns (more often raised in Western media about the fragmentation of India).

Finally credit must be given to the professionalism of the Indian armed forces and their willingness to obey civilian authority.  In most newly independent countries, Nehru’s neglect of the army in the 1950s followed by the debacle at the hands of the Chinese in the 1962 war would have sparked a coup.  It did not happen.  Western media raised similar fears of a coup in the aftermath of Indira Gandhi’s assassination, a thought not seriously considered domestically within India.  Today such an eventuality seems unthinkable.

And so India’s democratic republic continues to move on into is projected rise as a new world power.  There are issues of concern.  The division of revenues (as noted in the article linked above) is and will continue to be a source of tension between haves and have nots within India.  India has punted the issue of reapportioning parliamentary seats till 2026.  When reapportionment does happen, it will cause tension as the more prosperous states (which have done a better job implementing family planning policies) lose parliamentary seats (and as a result political power) to poorer states.  Indian democracy, like many young democracies, is often rooted in support of personalities as opposed to policies and political dynasties dot the landscape.  This phenomenon is not unknown in the United States, but the next step to the maturation of Indian democracy has to be the strengthening of parties based on political ideologies rather than vehicles for personalities.

So far India’s politicians have generally shown a sense of flexibility in working towards a common national purpose.  As long as that continues, the passage time will buttress the sense of Indian national identity and the Republic of India will continue to thrive.  So here are birthday wishes to the longest written constitution in the world.

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To some extent it is understandable.  Self-criticism is too hard to take and certain groups can often go too overboard on the critiques of America without acknowledging the good.  But too often the American media goes to the other extreme by embracing the Pollyannaish version of American exceptionalism (like the ridiculous George W. Bush assertion “they hate us for our freedoms“) in which all American foreign policy actions are undertaken for noble reasons.  As many Latin Americans would tell you, that has unfortunately not always been the case.

A column by Juan Cole brought this issue up for me recently.  The column deals with the continuing human catastrophe in Gaza.  Israel’s apologists in the United States often attribute any criticism of Israel to an undercurrent of anti-semitism and are only too willing to grant it unquestioned support.  However, it is stories like the one linked above that have undercut the sympathy Israel attracts (including among some progressives in the United States) in many parts of the world.

Israel is no longer the plucky underdog of the Six Days War or the Yom Kippur War threatened by seemingly overwhelming odds.  While the threat to Israel is real, the armies of its Arab neighbors have atrophied since the fall of the Soviet Union.  Meanwhile the Israeli army built up with a steady diet of American aid is the 800 lb gorilla in the Middle East.  Add to that the (not publicly acknowledged, but understood) second strike nuclear capability delivered to Israel by the United States and Israel has the ability to pulverize any of its neighbors (as Lebanon and the Gaza strip found out in the last two years).

However, with great power comes great responsibility.  American media coverage generally fails  to acknowledge this change in status for Israel or the extremely disproportionate number of Palestinian casualties in the last decade.  American media has also not really delved into the details of the collective punishment inflicted on Gaza in the past year.  When the destruction is covered, it is generally framed solely in the context of a response to terrorist attacks with little discussion of whether a hammer is being used to swat a fly.  As a result, the United States remains one of the few countries where public opinion and elected officials generally uncritically support Israel.

In contrast, the rest of the world’s media has covered this issue extensively.  So now a furious and sometimes bewildered Israel finds much of world opinion treating it as a bully for actions it feels are justified self-defense.  Israel is also painfully learning the lesson the United States learned in Vietnam.  Civilian suffering transmitted to the living rooms makes for awful public relations for a democracy, unless of course the media chooses not to cover it.  It is unfair, but countries are generally held to higher standards than terrorist groups.

A critique I have had for the Cheneyian vision of the world is that it often seeks to lower American actions to the standards of the thugs they oppose while encouraging charges of hypocrisy by maintaining the high minded rhetoric that plays so well domestically.  Israel does have a point that it should not have to take too many pious bromides from human rights “paragons” Syria, Saudi Arabia, Iran, etc. who are only too willing to use the Palestinians as props while doing nothing to ameliorate their lot.  However, the question does arise whether Israel really wants to lump itself on the issue of human rights with these countries?

Juan Cole’s column also brought about a sense of deja vu.  The stories about Gaza sound distressingly similar to the stories about the sufferings of Iraqi civilians during the sanctions in the 1990s.  These stories were circulated by human rights groups, dismissed by the Clinton and Bush administrations as solely Saddam Hussein’s fault and were largely ignored by the media.  While nobody should discount Saddam’s brutality, hiding behind indifference of a tyrant to the suffering of his people is an odd way to absolve yourself of any responsibility.  And ultimately all that suffering made not a whit of difference to toppling his regime.  As the Iranian people are finding out and as the Chinese found in 1989, public outrage by itself cannot topple men with the guns who have no qualms about shedding blood.  It is also very easy, as in the case of Iraq, for governments used to manipulating public opinion to transfer the blame to the people implementing the sanctions.

The result is a propaganda coup for the regime (another example would be Castro’s dictatorship in Cuba that blames the yanquis for the failures of its socialist revolution) and a recruiting boon for fanatics like Al Qaeda who tap into the resentment caused by the suffering that is transmitted into living rooms across the Middle East.

However, as little of this is transmitted to American living rooms the perspective of the American public is shaped very differently than the rest of the world.

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Eastern Europe was not immune to such trends.  Seven years after the Magna Carta, the Hungarian nobility forced their extravagant King Andrew II to issue the Golden Bull granting the nobility greater powers.

A series of dynastic shifts in the three premier East European monarchies of Bohemia (Přemyslid to Luxembourg to Jagiellon) , Hungary (Árpád to Angevin to Luxembourg) and Poland (Piast to Angevin to Jagiellon) caused a steady shift of royal power to the nobility (and as the list shows the three countries imported each others princes very often).  Each new foreign dynasty brought with it new privileges to keep the nobility happy.

However in the 16th century this pattern breaks.  Bohemia and Hungary fell to the Hapsburgs (who also married themselves into the crowns of of Spain,. (briefly Portugal and England), Naples, Milan, Sicily and the Netherlands).  After the Thirty Years War the ramshackle Hapsburg monarchy pulled back many of the privileges granted to the nobility.  Poland went in a different direction.  Faced with the impending death of the last male Jagiellon the magnates of Poland-Lithuania instituted an elective monarchy.

While the crown remained in the hands of female line descendants of the Jagiellons until 1660, the elective principle and the haggling by prospective monarchs for support took full control.    It was around this time that the legislative innovation that crippled Polish government for the next century was introduced – the Liberium Veto.

This measure allowed a single member of the Polish Sejm (parliament) to end the session and nullify all legislation by shouting Nie pozwalam! (I do not allow!).  Somehow this pernicious measure was allowed to continue.  Egged on with bribes from neighboring Prussia and Russia who were only too happy to see a weakened crumbling Poland and delusional deputies who considered this privilege as the hallmark of liberty, attempts at reform were thwarted for a century.  It wasn’t until 1764 that someone utilized a technicality to bypass this measure.  But by then it was too late.  In three successive partitions (1772, 1793, and 1795), Poland was wiped off the European map.

Obviously the filibuster does not even come close to the liberium veto.  But when a minority uses it of pretty much every single piece of legislation (including for example overwhelmingly popular bills like the military budget), it is hard to always appreciate the difference.  Not surprisingly calls to abolish it are rising.

In some ways the Democrats conversion on the filibuster (and boy did they love it when George W. Bush was President) mirrors their conversion on the advisability of the Independent Counsel Act.  When independent counsels targeted Republican Administrations all was fine.  It took one out of control independent counsel who acted like a heat seeking missile aimed at Bill Clinton’s rear end for the Democrats to switch sides on the issue.

The Republicans do risk overplaying their hand on this issue (they used more than 100 of them last year).  There is no constitutional right to a filibuster and the repeated use on every single item (which will likely increase with Scott Brown’s election) will increase the Democrats incentive to explore procedural technicalities like reconciliation to force a bill to a vote or even the nuclear option previously considered by the Bush Administration (which will be really hard for the Republicans to oppose since they drafted it).

The realization that they will one day return to the minority likely makes some Democrats squeamish on the issue.  But the legislative process in the Senate is currently broken on many issues (and don’t even get me started on the issue of anonymous Senatorial holds which have made the appointment of the President’s cabinet a travesty).  More appropriate protections for the minority (like giving them the ability to delay but not eternally block legislation) can be considered.  Otherwise ridiculous headlines like “Scott Brown Wins Mass. Race, Giving GOP 41-59 Majority in the Senate” will continue to proliferate around our broken legislative process.

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• His unusual length of tenure,
• The land reforms initiated in Bengal that broke the feudal hold on society,
• His secular outlook that saw few religious riots on his watch,
• And finally the historic moment in 1996 when he bowed to the command of his party’s politburo and turned down the prime minster’s job.

The more critical articles also refer to the industrial stagnation, if not regression, that occurred on his watch.

Basu in many ways is an overrated figure.  His importance is inflated by the collapse of all opposition parties in West Bengal, aided by the general unwillingness of the Congress party to challenge the reds on their home turf and the communists ruthless utilization of the instruments of state to quash dissent.  This is in stark contrast to the other communist bastion in Kerala, where Communist and Congress led coalitions alternate power with mind numbing regularity.

However, the untrammeled power Basu and his communist colleagues had locally, ultimately showcased the ideological bankruptcy and incompetence of the communist movement in India.

Land reform in Bengal was long overdue, and that early accomplishment marks the high water mark of communist rule in West Bengal.  Unlike Kerala, the other social indicators remain average.  The Bengali peasant is still poverty stricken, businesses have fled the state and Kolkata’s status as the cultural capital of India has long since been taken over by Mumbai.  The violent collapse of the communist party’s attempt to entice the Tata Motor Company to build a plant at Nandigram, symbolizes why businesses are not keen to enter Bengal.

The impact Basu would have had in the rejected prime ministership (he later cryptically referred to the rejection as a historic blunder) is also overrated.  Basu would have headed a ramshackle coalition united by the pursuit of power and a loathing of the Hindu nationalist Bharaitya Janata Party (subsequent events would show that many of the constituents of the coalitions valued power over their loathing of the BJP).  The coalition was supported from the outside by the just deposed Congress party which was smarting from its electoral humiliation and itching for the opportunity to force a new election.  It is hard to see how Basu’s tenure as prime minister would have been markedly different or longer than what actually transpired.  The BJP would have still made the necessary electoral adjustments and Basu’s mismanagement of West Bengal’s economy hardly supports the theory that any good governance on his part would have prevented the BJP’s ultimate rise to power.

The humbling of Bengal’s communists in India’s parliamentary elections last year has given rise to hope that their  33 year old grip on power may come to a close in the next state elections.  However, with the successor likely to be the mercurial populist Mamata Banerjee, it is hard to see West Bengal’s lot improving anytime soon.

Meanwhile, one of the last of India’s “gentlemanly” politicians of a bygone era has passed on, fortunate that he will not see the collapse of the creaky edifice he nurtured in West Bengal for so many years.

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None of this has prevented (even reputed) coin dealers from attaching the relatively obscure Indo-Scythian King who ruled a loosely held kingdom across Northwestern India and Afghanistan (that crumbled shortly after his death) to the Nativity.  Given the tendency for price inflation of items connected to the Bible this has likely elevated the asking price for and interest in the coins of Azes II which are largely minted in the style of the Indo-Greeks.

Silver coin of King Azes II (r.c. 35-12 BCE). Obv: King with coat of mail, on horse, holding a sceptre, with Greek royal headband. Greek legend ΒΑΣΙΛΕΩΣ ΒΑΣΙΛΕΩΝ ΜΕΓΑΛΟΥ ΑΖΟΥ "The Great King of Kings Azes". Rev: Athena with shield and lance, making a hand gesture identical to the Buddhist vitarka mudra. Kharoshti legend MAHARAJASA RAJADIRAJASA MAHATASA AYASA "The Great King of Kings Azes". Buddhist triratna symbol in the left field.

Even if the three magi who visited Bethlehem were actually Kings, that one of them would be a central Asian nomad who abandoned his kingdom to travel across the hostile Parthian Empire to a small hamlet in an obscure corner of the world strains credulity.

The historicity of other parts of the Nativity, particularly the Massacre of the Innocents has also been questioned.  The massacre (like the story of the Three Kings) appears in only the Gospel of Matthew.  It also bears striking similarities to the story of the birth of Moses (not to mention stories of numerous deities and heroes in the ancient world like Romulus and Remus, Krishna, Jason,  Cyrus the great, etc. whose lives were miraculously spared in infancy).  It is also entirely absent in the historical record of King Herod.  Herod’s bloody reign and life that saw him kill his father-in-law, brother-in-law, favorite wife, sons and Jewish zealots who displeased him are cheerfully counted in the records.  A massacre that would have immediately reminded his subjects of the story of Moses is glaringly absent in the records and is not believed to have been a historical event today.

The history of the Indo-Greek and Indo-Scythian kingdoms has been put together largely based on their coinage.  The house of Azes I continued this, with a nod to their origins by showing the king riding a horse.  The coinage offers a fascinating insight into the now disappeared culture of the region now known as Afghanistan.  As such they are worthy of standing on their own merit rather than through spurious connections to a region the kings likely never heard of.

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This was not the case in India.  The mish mash of the provinces of British India and the princely states that acceded to the India at independence made the reorganization of states essential.  Even though the trauma of partition ensured that the power of states would be curbed (more on that later), in the 1950s the fateful decision was made to reorganize the states on linguistic grounds rather than administrative efficiency.  Larger states have always brought with them a concern that the political influential areas would reap state largess while the less fortunate areas would be ignored.  As a result, demands for breaking up some of the larger states have simmered in the background since the reorganization of the states.

A decade ago the agitators for smaller states found some hope.  Uttarkhand and Jharkhand were carved out of the two most populous states in India.  Chattisgarh was carved out of the geographically largest state in India.  This brought the demand for Telangana to the forefront.  A Telugu speaking region merged into Andhra Pradesh, Telangana previously was part of the former princely state of Hyderabad.  While some of the princely states like Mysore, Baroda and Gwalior were relatively well administered, Hyderabad was not.  The region remained a resource poor economic and educational backwater.  Apart from the capital Hyderabad, a large portion of the province has felt ignored in favor of the more prosperous coastal regions of the state.  The argument was that a Telangana state would create with a more responsive local government which will boost regional development.

Unfortunately the  backing for the position is mixed.The North Indian states of Haryana and Punjab are often touted as examples of how a smaller state can benefit development.  The recent creation of Uttarkhand and Chattisgarh supply added support.  However, both Haryana and Punjab (and Western Uttar Pradesh) were the prime beneficiaries of the Green Revolution which brought prosperity to the local agricultural economies.  The various North Eastern states carved out of the once far larger state of Assam (Arunachal Pradesh, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland etc.) which did not get similar economic support and have limited local resources remain economic backwaters.  Also as the example of Jharkhand shows, a smaller state is not immune from a dysfunctional and corrupt political structure.  While in theory smaller states can imprve government responsiveness, they are not an administrative panacea.  Which brings us to the next issue and the heart of this article’s title.

The federal structure in India contains a potentially fatal flaw.

The flaw I refer to is not unknown and has been subject to some recent (and flawed) attempts to fix it. The issue was discussed in the Sarkaria Commission report in the 1980s.  Unfortunately, the commission essentially started with an excessive faith in the wisdom of the drafters of the Indian constitution and brushed aside this flaw.  The idealization of the wisdom of a nation’s founders is is hardly unique to India and is often visible in the United States.  Unfortunately it can create blinders in evaluating their decisions.

The flaw I allude to arises in Article 246 of the Indian Constitution which enumerates powers belonging to the national and government, state governments and concurrent powers in the Seventh Schedule to the constitution.  For items in the concurrent list, primacy is given to acts by the national government (a change after the partition of India).  Items 82-92 of List I of the Seventh Schedule grant the national government the exclusive right to levy among others, income taxes (on non-agricultural income), corporation taxes, property taxes and even taxes on the sale of newspapers and on advertisements posted therein (talk about micro-managing).  Items 45-63 provide the states with the exclusive right to tax a more limited source of revenue including agricultural income (which for political reasons no state has done), tariffs for the entry of goods into an area for consumption, tolls, taxes on non-newspaper advertising and intra-state sales taxes.

In micro-managing the powers of the national and state governments the drafters of the Indian constitution seemed to have overlooked the possibility of two different government entities taxing the same source of revenue or assets.  Worse, by permitting states to levy internal tariffs they perpetuated the economic policies of the British Raj that destroyed India’s domestic manufacturing.  While the United States abandoned tariffs between the states at its inception and the European Union understood the wisdom of abolishing them among its members, India still retains a tax structure designed to cripple manufacturing and the free flow of goods.

The flawed attempt to neatly divide out powers of the national and state governments resulted in the revenue sources made available to the state being insufficient to pay their expenses.  As a result the national government has to redistribute a portion of its takings to the states.  This creates two further problems.

First, states are now spending funds they do not have to raise. In a country full of irresponsible politicians it is an in invitation to populist profligacy.  So states start making dumb decisions like providing free electricity to farmers and other populist sops that they cannot afford.  As a result, even the most prosperous states generally teeter on the edge of insolvency.

Second, this opens up the Pandora’s box of just how revenue should be split among the states.  Should it go by population (where some of the most populous states contribute the least to the national kitty and which further encourages their irresponsibility).  Or, should it go to the states that actually generated the revenue (which causes heartburn in the poorer states).  All of which results in a delicate balancing act of which the attempt to create a national VAT system is the latest iteration.

As long as the Indian constitution encourages its states to suck off the national teat, its federal structure remains inherently flawed.  There is nothing wrong with some national assistance to states to remedy some inequities.  But the current set up is designed to encourage inefficiency and bad government.  As some states prosper faster than others and see the fruits of their labors distributed to others, it is bound to raise tensions within India’s federal structure.  At some point the states need to be cut loose and made to bear the costs of their fiscal irresponsibility.  With the increasing mobility of labor across India it may be the only way to force laggards like Bihar out of their corrupt fedual  backwaters.

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As far as nostalgic dreams go the Turks sure have a lot to daydream about.  For the descendants of a steppe tribe whose conquest of Anatolia was almost accidental they blazed their way across the global stage.  The battle of Manzikert was a Turkish victory because of a comedy of errors and treachery and even then with the Byzantine army almost intact did not have to be one of the major turning points in history.  But the Byzantines lapsed into one of their ill timed episodic civil wars and in the ensuing decade most of Anatolia was lost for ever.  Numerous opportunities to reverse the flow were wasted in the coming century.  With the Byzantine Empire reduced to a hollow shell after the disastrous Fourth Crusade, the stage was set for the Ottomans.  The Ottoman rise was meteoric.  From a minor tribe in northwestern Anatolia in the early 1300s they had conquered the Balkans and most of Anatolia in 100 years.  After a brief setback at the hands of Timur, the next 120 years saw the conquest of Constantinople, Syria, Egypt and Hungary, the humiliation of the new Safavid Persian Empire and the first siege of Vienna.

The long decline that lasted the next 350 years (interspersed with occasional flickers of strength) commenced with the death of Suleiman the Magnificent.  Gradually many of the European and North African conquests were lost.  The Empire survived largely because, like Austria-Hungary, nobody could agree who would fill the vacuum.  The coup de grace was delivered by World War I.  Outrage at the humiliations imposed by the Treaty of Sevres gave rise to the nationalist movement under Ataturk and the elimination of the dynasty.

It is dangerous to romanticize Ottoman rule too much.  The Ottomans generally tolerated all faiths and sometimes provided better governance than the states that preceded them.  But as the Bulgarians and Armenians found out, they could also brutally suppress any insurrection.  Many of the prominent generals and viziers who effectively ruled the state were not even Turkish.  Albanian, Greek and other Balkan converts to Islam rose close to the top of the Ottoman hierarchy.  But ultimately it was an alien regime that eliminated national states in the Balkans and beyond.  Advancement did require an abandonment of culture and religion.  It is not surprising that various ethnic minorities repeatedly chose to rebel, and as the Empire weakened they were successful.

Ataturk, like Peter the Great, forced Turkey into the modern age by breaking down the old feudal systems of the Ottoman Empire.  The forced population exchanges after the Greco-Turkish War, which essentially ratified painful ethnic cleansing and whose impacts are felt today, brought an ethnic and religious homogeneity (with due respect to the Kurds in the east) that did not exist before.  The resulting Turkish state is a stronger national unit as a result.

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]]> http://rashtrakut.com/blog/2009/12/04/turks-and-ottomania/feed/ 0 http://rashtrakut.com/blog/2009/12/04/a-simmering-insurgency-in-indias-northeast-may-be-sputtering-out/ http://rashtrakut.com/blog/2009/12/04/a-simmering-insurgency-in-indias-northeast-may-be-sputtering-out/#comments Sat, 05 Dec 2009 00:48:44 +0000 Rashtrakut http://rashtrakut.com/blog/?p=820 Indian authorities (with silent Bangladeshi cooperation) appear to have arrested the head of the United Liberation Front of Asom.  ULFA now appears a spent force and hopefully the mistakes of the past that gave rise to the insurgency will not be repeated.  While the Indian constitution explicitly protects minority religions, cultures and languages and the Indian government has generally not actively discriminated against minorities, India has been plagued by repeated insurgencies and secessionist movements along its periphery.  This was often created by excessive centralization in the aftermath of partition and particularly in the Indira Gandhi years.  The central government also repeatedly dismissed opposition governments in sensitive states like Punjab and Jammu & Kashmir.  While this was also carried out in different parts of the country, needless to say states with large minority populations took umbrage.

The insurgency in Assam was different in that unlike Kashmir, Punjab or Nagaland the state is largely Hindu.  Assam, like Kashmir, has historically very much been a part of the Indian cultural mileu but due to geographical location was somewhat isolated on the periphery.  The name of the state itself comes from the Ahoms who conquered the ancient Indian region of Kamarupa.  While the Ahoms would defeat Mughal invasion attempts their civil war plagued kingdom was eventually conquered by Burma.  A few years later the British annexed Assam after the First Anglo-Burmese War.

Assam like Punjab saw its territory drastically reduced after independence when Mizoram, Nagaland, Meghalaya and Arunachal Pradesh were carved out of the state.  Even now certain tribal gorups like the Bodos have agitated for their own states.  If this was a bruise to the Assamese ego, the Indian government made it worse.  Even though Assam contains most of India’s land based oil reserves the refineries (and the resulting jobs) were relocated to electorally more promising states.  From the 1970s illegal immigration from Bangladesh threatened the religious and demographic make up of Assam, a problem aggravated by unscrupulous politicians enrolling these politicians on the electoral rolls.  By the 1980s Assam was the site of a simmering insurgency.

Countries don’t often get a chance to fix repeated mistakes.  However, the decline of the Indian National Congress and the emergence of coalition politics at the national level in India has helped ease some of the regional unrest.  Article 356 of the Indian constitution that was repeatedly misused in the past has rarely been used in the last 15 years.  This has allowed Indian state governments to rise and fall on their own merits without New Delhi being used as a scape goat.  The decline of ULFA is an opportunity to finish the transition from the bullet to the ballot to resolve Assam’s problems.

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This is a fascinating coin on so many levels.  First, it is a rare numismatic representation of Ram and it is ironic that it appears on the coinage of a Muslim ruler. To the extent Hindu coinage represented deities, the goddess Lakshmi (the goddess of wealth) was the most popular choice (See here, here, here and here for examples).  Krishna, Vishnu, Shiva and their consorts make their appearance on Vijayanagar coinage.  But Ram is a rare subject for Indian numismatics (after a quick search I found this coin for Akbar’s Vijayanagar contemporary Tirumala II but have not seen many more) and is more likely to show up on temple tokens.

Then there is the irony that Ram would be the subject matter of this coin.  Akbar’s grandfather Babur allegedly destroyed the temple built on the site of Ram’s birthplace.  A movement to correct this historical wrong has simmered for about 150 years until it burst on to the Indian political landscape in the 1980s.  The after effects are still felt today.

Finally there is the unusual presence of images on Muslim coins.  Since the religion eschews depictions of the human form, Islamic coinage has often relied on calligraphy and geometric forms (See here and here) to enhance the coinage.  Images appeared in transitional coinage like the Arab-Sassanian or the Arab-Byzantine variety or by Muhammad Bin Sam after his conquest of Delhi where he continued the gold coinage with Lakshmi for a while.  There were a few coins on horseback like the Seljuks or Iltumish (See coins 216 and 217 on page 14) of the Delhi Sultanate or the series by Seljuk Sultan Kaykhusraw II honoring his wife.

Akbar’s son and successor Jahangir would commission an equally fascinating (and as a result now widely forged) series of Zodiac coins.  But the open adoption of another deity in a non-transitional coin is unique in Islamic numismatics (indeed the incorporation of Jesus Christ on Byzantine coinage by Justinian II caused the caliph Abd al-Malik to commence the tradition of Islamic coinage largely bearing scripts).

A truly fascinating (and given the estimate, expensive) example how far Akbar’s theological discussions and disputations took him.

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The next rumination in this series focuses on what I term as an accidental empire – Mughal Empire.  For the descendants of a bunch of Central Asian marauders, the Mughals have been indelibly entwined with the image of India.  From the Taj Mahal, to the Mughlai cuisine that is the staple of Indian restaurants across the world, to the loan word Mogul that has been incorporated into the English language the cultural influence of the Mughals survives to this day.

Yet the Mughals were in many ways an accident.  The survival of their Empires territorial integrity for so long is in marked contrast to their Timurid cousins.  The prevalence of polygamy and concubinage caused recurrent succession problems across most Islamic dynasties.  The Ottomans would solve this by a mass slaughter of the siblings of the new monarch (Mehmed III would notoriously commence his reign by executing 19 of his siblings).  After this blood letting almost brought the dynasty to an end following the death of Murad IV (his only surviving heir was his insane brother Ibrahim), the Ottomans would formalize the policy started by their father Ahmed I.  Henceforth princes would be locked in the Kafes (literally the Cage), a section of the harem where they were under surveillance and often with concubines too old to get pregnant, and the succession to the throne rotated through seniority.  While this stopped the blood letting, it eventually resulted in the succession of emasculated, unprepared and often psychologically disturbed men who oversaw the Ottoman Empire’s long decline.

The Timurids did things differently.  Traditionally each prince received an appanage to rule.  The obvious result was a fragmentation of authority and near constant fratricidal strife following the death of the founder of the house Timur-e-lang (Tamerlane).  Weakened by civil war, the fragmented Timurid states would be mopped up by the emerging Safavid Empire of Persia in the west and the Shaybanid Uzbeks from the east.  This pressure from both ends ultimately forced the founder of the Mughal dynasty Zahir ud din Muhammad Babur to abandon his dream of restoring Timur’s empire from Samarkand and head east where the disorder in the Delhi Sultanate under the incompetent Ibrahim Lodi opened up new venues of action.  Accidental opportunity #1

Yet even after conquering the Gangetic plain and “establishing” the Mughal Empire, Babur remained a Timurid to his core.  On his death he divided his state among his 4 sons, weakening the position of his eldest son and heir who ruled in Delhi, Humayun.  Within 10 years the Mughals had been driven out of India by one of the most remarkable men in history to rise from obscurity to an imperial diadem, the Afghan adventurer Sher Shah Suri.  This should have marked an abrupt end to the Mughal interlude, but for the Mughals unexpectedly getting a second chance when the Suri domains collapsed in civil war following the death of Sher Shah’s son Islam Shah.  Profiting from this opportunity the relatively unimpressive Humayun would retake Delhi.  Accidental opportunity #2.

Now comes an event that is not as well known, largely because it did not impede Mughal success in the traditional Timurid fashion.  Humayun, like his father also split his kingdom by giving Kabul to his younger son Mirza Muhammad Hakim.  This incompetent prince is a footnote to history and overshadowed by his brother Akbar the true founder of the Mughal Empire.  After causing no end of trouble to his brother by his incompetence, he did the Mughal dynasty a favor by dying without a son.  This allowed Akbar to annex Kabul into his expanding realm and not worry about his brother being used as a proxy by ambitious nobles, particularly since Akbar failed to father a surviving son until the fourteenth year of his reign.  Accidental opportunity #3.

Akbar’s oldest son Salim appears to have been the intended heir in a very non-Timurid fashion.  However, this was never put to the test since conveniently for the Mughals Akbar’s other sons Murad and Danyal predeceased him.  By the time Akbar died in 1605, a division of the empire in traditional Timurid fashion was probably unthinkable.  The absence of mature heirs to the throne (Danyal appears to have produced sons) reduced the likelihood of an exhausting war of succession.  Another historical accident that worked to the Mughal dynasty’s favor was that it was the younger sons who predeceased Akbar.  This avoided the temptation of a young grandson from an older son with a more “legitimate” claim than the only surviving son of the Emperor.  I raise this as an historical accident, because such a succession was not unknown and it had a history of failing badly.  Timur’s designated heir and grandson survived only two years.  In the Delhi Sultanate, both Ghiyas ud din Balban and Firuz Shah Tughlaq failed to assure the succession of a grandson who was the son of a predeceased older son.  Yet the succession of Salim was not without its drama.  Akbar and a group of nobles were still miffed at Salim’s rebellion against his father and there was an attempt to put his oldest son Khusarau on the throne.  But the legitimate heir would not be denied and Salim ascended the throne as Jahangir.  Accidental opportunity #4

The incident would have a tragic sequel.  With his ego puffed up Khusrau revolted against his father, was defeated, was blinded and would die mysteriously in the custody of his younger brother Khurram.  With his oldest son abruptly eliminated from the succession, most of Jahangir’s reign was consumed by underlying tensions over the succession.  The sons of the disgraced Khusrau do not seem to have factored into serious discussion, a decision probably encouraged by their youth.  The next son Parwiz predeceased Jahangir.  That left the third and most competent son Khurram (Shah Jahan) and the effete Shahryar who was championed by Jahangir’s favorite wife Nur Jahan.  The most competent heir does not always survive palace intrigue and after his unsuccessful rebellion against his father Shah Jahan could have easily suffered the fate of the unfortunate Khusrau (or worse the fate of the son and intended heir of the Ottoman Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent who was executed in favor of a more incompetent heir).  But Jahangir was not as bloodthirsty and was probably aware of the extremely limited choices of competent heirs among the  indolent Mughal princes (starting with Babur and with the notable exception of Akbar most Mughal prices struggled with opium and alcohol addictions).  This probably stayed his hand.   Accidental opportunity #5.

Another factor in Shah Jahan’s favor was the close presence of his father in law (and Nur Jahan’s brother) to the corridors of power.  When Jahangir died he promptly neutralized Nur Jahan, arrested Shahryar and put Khusrau’s son Dawar Baksh on the throne as a place holder until Shah Jahan arrived.  On his arrival, Shah Jahan made a decisive break from Timurid tradition and embraced Ottoman practice by ordering a whole sale slaughter of Shahryar, Dawar and all his remaining cousins and nephews.  The Mughal Empire would remain indivisible and would not be torn apart by civil war until the end of Shah Jahan’s reign.  Accidental opportunity #6

It was this series of historical accidents that enabled the Mughal Empire to survive longer than any of its historical predecessors and create the cultural and artistic heritage that shaped India into the British Age.  But it did not have to happen.  Any one of the accidental opportunities outlined above could easily have torn the Empire apart much faster.  Between the 1540s when Humayun eliminated his brothers until the end of the reign of Shah Jahan in 1658, the Mughal Empire did not face full scale civil war.  The rebellions of Salim and Shah Jahan against their father’s were localized and a testament to the strength of the state Akbar built.  All of this was ultimately aided by a series of fortuitous deaths that eliminated mature contenders to the throne.  This would end with the reign of Shah Jahan.  Unlike his predecessors he had four healthy sons.  Dara Shukoh was the designated heir, but the other three sons had been posted to the far corners of the Empire – Shuja in Bengal, Aurangzeb in the Deccan and Murad in Gujarat.  A rumor of Shah Jahan’s imminent death sparked rebellion and civil war that saw Dara and Murad executed and Shuja exiled to an ultimately violent end in Arakan.  With the precedent of a bloody succession initiated by Shah Jahan now firmly established, the next four successions would occur as the result of civil wars.  At the end of these the imperial pretenders would be puppets in the hands of ambitious noblemen and surviving princes would in the Ottoman model be locked in the harem.

The series of fortuitous accidents that allowed the glory years of the Mughal Empire were over.  Racked by civil war, unable to control Maratha raids from the south, weakened by Persian and Afghan raids from the northwest, and with the Emperors reduced to ciphers the Mughal Empire entered terminal decline.

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