Map Thread XX
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Crosspost from MOTF 239: A House Divided:
India at Boiling Point: The Events Leading to the Indian Civil War
In 2040, India looked set to be the next global superpower. Many of its biggest rivals had succumbed to civil war: America in 2025, Russia in 2026, China in the early 2030s. However, there were troubles brewing in the subcontinent that would lead to India falling into the same fate.
Taliban Insurgencies in Pakistan
Having taken control of Afghanistan in 2024, the Taliban then set its sights on on the fellow Pashtuns of Pakistan. The former Federally Administered Tribal Areas (or FATA), now split between the Pashto-majority states of Pakhtunkhwa and Khorasan, provided manpower for the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (also known as the Pakistani Taliban), and the Taliban government provided guns and money. The Pakistani Taliban aimed to overthrow the Pakistani government, and as of June 2040, control several districts in the border areas, and conduct occasional terrorist attacks in major cities.
Disputes over Kashmir
Ever since Partition in 1947, Kashmir had always been a sour point between India and Pakistan. Both countries claimed all of the region, but each only controlled part: Pakistan controlled Gilgit, Baltistan, and Azad Kashmir (1 on map), while India controlled Jammu, Kashmir, and Ladakh (5). In addition, both claimed the uninhabited Siachen Glacier (3), but neither controlled it. India also claimed the Shaksgam Valley (2) and Aksai Chin (4, 6) from Uyghuristan and Tibet. Religion played a major part in the dispute: whilst all of Pakistani Kashmir was overwhelmingly Muslim, Indian Kashmir was more religiously divided. Kashmir proper was mostly Muslim, Jammu was more Hindu, and Ladakh was Buddhist. Given the religious disparities between Kashmir and the (mostly Hindu) rest of India, Kashmir has frequently tried to secede; however, this has backfired, resulting in crackdowns on religion and Kashmiri culture. In 2020, the state of Jammu and Kashmir (then including Ladakh) was dissolved and replaced by the two union territories of Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh. Since then, Jammu has been intensely Hinduized, and in 2038 granted statehood. Many Muslims in Jammu and Kashmir were still bitter and would like to become independent or join Pakistan.
Workers' Strikes
India is a major source of cheap labor to the West, as large companies can take advantage of low wages to produce goods cheaply. However, not all workers were content with living in poverty. Across India, there have been many strikes and peaceful protests by workers calling for higher pay and better living conditions. In Jan 1 2040, workers in a factory in Moradabad, Paschim Pradesh, refused to work, demanding increased pay; their demands were accepted. This was followed by more strikes and protests around India, many unsuccessful. Many Indian workers awaited the day the Revolution will come; fortunately for them, that day came soon.
Bengali and Maldives Refugee Crises
Climate change, the invisible terror created by man and ignored for long, hit in the worst places. Bangladesh, being unfortunate enough to sit on the delta and floodplains of two major rivers, the Ganges and Brahmaputra, was one of the worst affected. Flooding has always been a frequent fact of life in Bangladesh, but the unpredictable side effects of global warming made floods more frequent, more severe and less predictable. In the Sundarbans, slowly rising sea levels have claimed some coastal settlements. With more and more people's houses being destroyed or rendered uninhabitable, many became displaced and had to flee elsewhere. Many settled in northern Bengal, the Brahmaputra Valley and Barak Valley to the east, and the Ganges Valley to the west. However, some states, such as Jharkhand and Assam, had become annoyed with the influx of Bengali refugees and wanted to enact anti-immigration laws to keep them out. Fortunately for the refugees, the Indian constitution prevented such laws. In response, those states considered secession from India to form their own country.
A similar situation occurred with the Maldives, which had many of its islands sink under the waves. In 2039, the remaining population of the archipelago voted overwhelmingly to be annexed into India. Many fled to India (primarily Kerala and Tamil Nadu) or Sri Lanka, and have formed sizable Dhivehi communities there.
India at Boiling Point: The Events Leading to the Indian Civil War
In 2040, India looked set to be the next global superpower. Many of its biggest rivals had succumbed to civil war: America in 2025, Russia in 2026, China in the early 2030s. However, there were troubles brewing in the subcontinent that would lead to India falling into the same fate.
Taliban Insurgencies in Pakistan
Having taken control of Afghanistan in 2024, the Taliban then set its sights on on the fellow Pashtuns of Pakistan. The former Federally Administered Tribal Areas (or FATA), now split between the Pashto-majority states of Pakhtunkhwa and Khorasan, provided manpower for the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (also known as the Pakistani Taliban), and the Taliban government provided guns and money. The Pakistani Taliban aimed to overthrow the Pakistani government, and as of June 2040, control several districts in the border areas, and conduct occasional terrorist attacks in major cities.
Disputes over Kashmir
Ever since Partition in 1947, Kashmir had always been a sour point between India and Pakistan. Both countries claimed all of the region, but each only controlled part: Pakistan controlled Gilgit, Baltistan, and Azad Kashmir (1 on map), while India controlled Jammu, Kashmir, and Ladakh (5). In addition, both claimed the uninhabited Siachen Glacier (3), but neither controlled it. India also claimed the Shaksgam Valley (2) and Aksai Chin (4, 6) from Uyghuristan and Tibet. Religion played a major part in the dispute: whilst all of Pakistani Kashmir was overwhelmingly Muslim, Indian Kashmir was more religiously divided. Kashmir proper was mostly Muslim, Jammu was more Hindu, and Ladakh was Buddhist. Given the religious disparities between Kashmir and the (mostly Hindu) rest of India, Kashmir has frequently tried to secede; however, this has backfired, resulting in crackdowns on religion and Kashmiri culture. In 2020, the state of Jammu and Kashmir (then including Ladakh) was dissolved and replaced by the two union territories of Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh. Since then, Jammu has been intensely Hinduized, and in 2038 granted statehood. Many Muslims in Jammu and Kashmir were still bitter and would like to become independent or join Pakistan.
Workers' Strikes
India is a major source of cheap labor to the West, as large companies can take advantage of low wages to produce goods cheaply. However, not all workers were content with living in poverty. Across India, there have been many strikes and peaceful protests by workers calling for higher pay and better living conditions. In Jan 1 2040, workers in a factory in Moradabad, Paschim Pradesh, refused to work, demanding increased pay; their demands were accepted. This was followed by more strikes and protests around India, many unsuccessful. Many Indian workers awaited the day the Revolution will come; fortunately for them, that day came soon.
Bengali and Maldives Refugee Crises
Climate change, the invisible terror created by man and ignored for long, hit in the worst places. Bangladesh, being unfortunate enough to sit on the delta and floodplains of two major rivers, the Ganges and Brahmaputra, was one of the worst affected. Flooding has always been a frequent fact of life in Bangladesh, but the unpredictable side effects of global warming made floods more frequent, more severe and less predictable. In the Sundarbans, slowly rising sea levels have claimed some coastal settlements. With more and more people's houses being destroyed or rendered uninhabitable, many became displaced and had to flee elsewhere. Many settled in northern Bengal, the Brahmaputra Valley and Barak Valley to the east, and the Ganges Valley to the west. However, some states, such as Jharkhand and Assam, had become annoyed with the influx of Bengali refugees and wanted to enact anti-immigration laws to keep them out. Fortunately for the refugees, the Indian constitution prevented such laws. In response, those states considered secession from India to form their own country.
A similar situation occurred with the Maldives, which had many of its islands sink under the waves. In 2039, the remaining population of the archipelago voted overwhelmingly to be annexed into India. Many fled to India (primarily Kerala and Tamil Nadu) or Sri Lanka, and have formed sizable Dhivehi communities there.
It's a democratic federation with checks and balances between its member republics. I'd call it a liberal polyarchy if it weren't for the fact that many industries are fully syndicalized and municipalities have a great deal of communal power encoded in the constitution of the union.
In 1980 it's led by Chairman of the Federal Assembly Wolfgang Schmidt.
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Wow. If the four great continental powers have all collapsed into civil war, then who would be left on top after India? Maybe the EU if it's still around, Japan, Indonesia, or even one of the more populous African countries? What does America, China and Korea look like by 2040? Has Taiwan emerged unscathed?
Not my map, but it’s good enough that I feel that it deserves more attention (also check out their DeviantArt account and give them love):
Definitely my favorite one of these I’ve seen - the scenarios are well drawn and interesting!
Don't know if you came up with this or not, but I think this "X countries" format is a big improvement on the previous one.
@TickTock The Witch's Dead That's a beautiful map! I would love to have lived in such a country. 
I'm assuming they would have banned slavery relatively early on?
I'm assuming they would have banned slavery relatively early on?
I don’t know but I’d like to think so too.@TickTock The Witch's Dead That's a beautiful map! I would love to have lived in such a country.
I'm assuming they would have banned slavery relatively early on?
My pleasure!
The next wish will be fulfilled in 2041
Thank you! I wasn't sure about this case, I thought that people would just get confused about the colors.
Of course you can use them without any problem.
- The United States of Europe (formed out of the EU in 2037), which stretches from the Atlantic to the Caspian and has territories on all seven continents.
- East Africa.
- Nigeria, which has its own SoI in West and Central Africa.
America: Its prestige ended with a bang in the Second American Civil War of 2025. Nowadays it is one of the integral members of the North American Union. Many companies fled to Canada, Cascadia, California, New England or Texas (the latter four all seceded during the war) during the war and stayed there. Population (2050): around 200M.
China: Hit hard by demographic collapse and harder by the civil war of the 2030s. Nowadays, a fairly liberal democracy. Lost Xinjiang, Greater Tibet, parts of Inner Mongolia, Yunnan, Guangxi, Canton, and Hainan to secessionists. Population (2050): around 700M.
Korea: Unified during China's civil war as North Korea had no reason to exist. Population (2050: around 90M.
Yes.
Unless the rest of the world is very different from OTL, seems likely. (Looking at the divisions, now I'm wondering why the Spaniards in the late colonial period bundled Bolivia together with Argentina in the Viceroyalty of La Plata. Keeping it united with Peru would seem to make more sense geographically and culturally.)
Excellent stuff.
r/historymemes in the year 2060 is going to have a field day...
All of which are, I assume, at this point really worried about disintegrating into internecine warfare?
Definitely an innovative story but I fell behind reading it. Thanks for the map. It helps me catch up.
The viceroyalty was created as a way to better control the flow of precious metals from the Andes by sending them donwstream from the mountains to the Paraná and then embark to the Peninsula while also avoiding Caribbean piracy and having to sail around Patagonia (although the Spanish founded a chain of Patagonian settlements in the late 1700's as restock supplies for that route). Hence, Bolivia was included for the source of the mineral wealth to share a political entity with the port that would transport them, simplifying the bureaucracy.
Crossposting from the MotF thread
The USPR has always had, among the various socialist states, a particularly diverse set of ideological variations, coexisting more-or-less peacefully in the country, working together under the guise of the Delhi-centric Politburo to establish a socialist economy from the feudal mess that India once was. Among the most prominent are the native Gandhian and Jinnahist variations of socialism, the mostly-principled and always-loyal opposition from the Leftists and Rightists (less different than you might imagine), the various proponents of a more federal system, popular among the more tribal regions and among more distinctive cultures in the country who are depreciatively known as "nationalists", although no genuine separatist is allowed anywhere near power nowadays, and, for some forsaken reason, even a few Trotskyist nuclei around some major cities and railways, who are mostly inoffensive anyway.
The Centralists, the Moscow-aligned and faithfully Stalinist line in Delhi, have allowed these oppositions to exist, unlike their own Moscow patrons, knowing full well they are weak enough not to present a genuine threat yet regionally strong enough to be too much of a bother to dislodge. This peace under the Centralists has existed for more than a decade now, but it seems that, after the latest reshuffling of Panchayat delegates, a change might be coming to Red India.
The problems started brewing due to a split in the Communist Party, that is, the breaking of one faction into two (both continuing to be members of the Communist Party, the only legal political party in the country), one that, interestingly enough, didn't even spring from Indian affairs, but rather, as a by-product of the increasingly hostile relation between Khrushchev's USSR, the traditional beacon for all world socialist movements, India's included, and Mao's PRC who, unlike its Soviet counterpart, rejected the denouncement of Stalin's legacy and the attempts at normalizing relations with the West, and criticized Khrushchev for revisionism and for collaborating with Western imperialism. This bitter split would, inevitably, reach the ranks of the Communist Party of India, as it found itself divided between the stalwart Centralists, defenders of the Moscow line at all times, and the newly-fledged Maoists, who turned to Mao Zedong as the new face of socialism in the Third World.
It went beyond that small political matter, of course. The split had deeper roots, based on differences of opinion between country and city (with many farmers, criticizing what they saw as Delhi focusing all efforts on cities, rather than in the agriculture regions of the country, siding with the Maoists who put greater emphasis on the revolutionary spirit of the Indian peasantry), opinions on the need for militancy (with the Maoists attracting many young Indians who were extremely energetic and warlike in the outlook towards society and the world) and even resentments towards the Centralist policy of making Hindi the language for running business in the government, while other languages struggled to be understood. Even without the Sino-Soviet split, the possibilities for internal struggle, between regions, between generations, between different political outlooks, would inevitably caught up with the Centralists and their ever-narrower popular appeal, as bureaucrats focused on responsible industrialization. India's first generation coming of age after the Revolution was growing up, and they were about to change everything.
The 1964 elections to the All-India Panchayat only confirmed what was already unavoidable: the Centralist faction, for the first time, did not hold the majority of districts, showing that plenty of regions around the country were displeased with their rule. Now, if this were a strict parliamentary democracy, that wouldn't be a problem in itself: the Centralists held a good plurality of the votes and could certainly work with other currents, further from the Maoists than from themselves even, to continue governing. But of course, autocracy can sometimes be more fickle, depending on the strength of your social basis to continue operating fine. And the Maoists happened to have a great deal of popularity among the youth and the youth happened to man the armies. Adding to that their support among the farmers of the country, and they had a power greater than their number of seats in the Panchayat. And, considering their love for militancy and action, it was quite clear that they would not restrain themselves to the bonds of legality and party unity for what they genuinely saw as a need to save the socialist world from a tide of revisionism stemming from Khrushchev all the way to their countries.
India was about to fall to one of the world's largest civil wars, after the Russian and Chinese ones. But this time, it wouldn't be a civil war between the forces of socialism and those of autocracy, or those of liberalism, but rather, a civil war between the forces of socialism and themselves.
_____________________________________________
So basically I wanted a intra-communist civil war. You know, since the left has that whole thing about splitting up and fighting itself more than others). And since India does happen to have, shall we say, a healthy tradition of political fragmentation to the left, I thought it would be an ideal candidate for this. And since I had already had an idea for a United Raj - turned red, I decided to apply it here (the idea is that the various islands were just kept by the British or British-aligned forces and are sort of Taiwans, although I didn't really figure that into the election results)
This was a fun map to work, if a bit of a workload. I know some of the borders are silly, but what's a good map without some quirky borders, eh?
Anyway, I hope you all enjoy this map, as always comments and questions are welcomed
India on the verge of a red-on-red civil war
The USPR has always had, among the various socialist states, a particularly diverse set of ideological variations, coexisting more-or-less peacefully in the country, working together under the guise of the Delhi-centric Politburo to establish a socialist economy from the feudal mess that India once was. Among the most prominent are the native Gandhian and Jinnahist variations of socialism, the mostly-principled and always-loyal opposition from the Leftists and Rightists (less different than you might imagine), the various proponents of a more federal system, popular among the more tribal regions and among more distinctive cultures in the country who are depreciatively known as "nationalists", although no genuine separatist is allowed anywhere near power nowadays, and, for some forsaken reason, even a few Trotskyist nuclei around some major cities and railways, who are mostly inoffensive anyway.
The Centralists, the Moscow-aligned and faithfully Stalinist line in Delhi, have allowed these oppositions to exist, unlike their own Moscow patrons, knowing full well they are weak enough not to present a genuine threat yet regionally strong enough to be too much of a bother to dislodge. This peace under the Centralists has existed for more than a decade now, but it seems that, after the latest reshuffling of Panchayat delegates, a change might be coming to Red India.
The problems started brewing due to a split in the Communist Party, that is, the breaking of one faction into two (both continuing to be members of the Communist Party, the only legal political party in the country), one that, interestingly enough, didn't even spring from Indian affairs, but rather, as a by-product of the increasingly hostile relation between Khrushchev's USSR, the traditional beacon for all world socialist movements, India's included, and Mao's PRC who, unlike its Soviet counterpart, rejected the denouncement of Stalin's legacy and the attempts at normalizing relations with the West, and criticized Khrushchev for revisionism and for collaborating with Western imperialism. This bitter split would, inevitably, reach the ranks of the Communist Party of India, as it found itself divided between the stalwart Centralists, defenders of the Moscow line at all times, and the newly-fledged Maoists, who turned to Mao Zedong as the new face of socialism in the Third World.
It went beyond that small political matter, of course. The split had deeper roots, based on differences of opinion between country and city (with many farmers, criticizing what they saw as Delhi focusing all efforts on cities, rather than in the agriculture regions of the country, siding with the Maoists who put greater emphasis on the revolutionary spirit of the Indian peasantry), opinions on the need for militancy (with the Maoists attracting many young Indians who were extremely energetic and warlike in the outlook towards society and the world) and even resentments towards the Centralist policy of making Hindi the language for running business in the government, while other languages struggled to be understood. Even without the Sino-Soviet split, the possibilities for internal struggle, between regions, between generations, between different political outlooks, would inevitably caught up with the Centralists and their ever-narrower popular appeal, as bureaucrats focused on responsible industrialization. India's first generation coming of age after the Revolution was growing up, and they were about to change everything.
The 1964 elections to the All-India Panchayat only confirmed what was already unavoidable: the Centralist faction, for the first time, did not hold the majority of districts, showing that plenty of regions around the country were displeased with their rule. Now, if this were a strict parliamentary democracy, that wouldn't be a problem in itself: the Centralists held a good plurality of the votes and could certainly work with other currents, further from the Maoists than from themselves even, to continue governing. But of course, autocracy can sometimes be more fickle, depending on the strength of your social basis to continue operating fine. And the Maoists happened to have a great deal of popularity among the youth and the youth happened to man the armies. Adding to that their support among the farmers of the country, and they had a power greater than their number of seats in the Panchayat. And, considering their love for militancy and action, it was quite clear that they would not restrain themselves to the bonds of legality and party unity for what they genuinely saw as a need to save the socialist world from a tide of revisionism stemming from Khrushchev all the way to their countries.
India was about to fall to one of the world's largest civil wars, after the Russian and Chinese ones. But this time, it wouldn't be a civil war between the forces of socialism and those of autocracy, or those of liberalism, but rather, a civil war between the forces of socialism and themselves.
_____________________________________________
So basically I wanted a intra-communist civil war. You know, since the left has that whole thing about splitting up and fighting itself more than others). And since India does happen to have, shall we say, a healthy tradition of political fragmentation to the left, I thought it would be an ideal candidate for this. And since I had already had an idea for a United Raj - turned red, I decided to apply it here (the idea is that the various islands were just kept by the British or British-aligned forces and are sort of Taiwans, although I didn't really figure that into the election results)
This was a fun map to work, if a bit of a workload. I know some of the borders are silly, but what's a good map without some quirky borders, eh?
Anyway, I hope you all enjoy this map, as always comments and questions are welcomed
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