Poll: India without Afghanistan is the same like China without Manchuria

Afghanistan could have been India's 'Manchuria'

  • Yes

    Votes: 22 20.4%
  • No

    Votes: 32 29.6%
  • Different situation

    Votes: 47 43.5%
  • I don't know

    Votes: 7 6.5%

  • Total voters
    108
To elaborate this matter:
- The Qing Forces started their conquest of China in the late 16th century and finished after a century of war. Their home region was Manchuria and due to the conquest, Manchuria was wel integrated in China by the 19th century.

- Afghanistan was the base of Muslim-Turkic/Iranian Invaders of India since the 12th century. If the Mughals, for example, held Afghanistan, and kept India united, it would be integrated by the Muslim Indian Rulers. The process of assimilating Afghanistan is an option...

Is my statement (partly) true or (partly) false?
 
Well, issue is that Manchuria has very fertile lands, is sparsely populated, and lacks much rough terrain, which made it easy and desirable to settle in Manchuria, despite the ban on Han settlement in Manchuria during the Qing dynasty. Open plains made it hard to defend against horsemen but gunpowder changed that rather rapidly. Once the steppe nomads that had historically ravaged Han settlement in Manchuria were either integrated or pacified by the Qing, there wasn't much that could prevent Han settlement in Manchuria.

Land Quality
rhA51Jp.jpg

Terrain
world-physical-map.jpg

By contrast, Afghanistan's land is not very fertile and the terrain is rather rough, which makes it harder to pacify and control effectively. People aren't going to want to move there without incentives, unlike with Manchuria where people were flooding in naturally, so it wouldn't be the same.
 
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While Afghanistan probably doesn’t directly correlate as India’s Manchuria, I’d argue that the Afghans could qualify as reasonable analogies to the Manchus. The homeland of the Pashtun people was in the Suleiman mountains in Pakistan and as they had been locked out of power in the east by Mughal imperium they began to migrate westwards. It’s almost as if the Manchus saw that China was ruled by a strong Mongol dynasty and then a Manchu warlord set up a state in Siberia. However, had an indian state maintained control over modern Afghanistan from the Mughals to the modern day, it would undoubtedly be well integrated culturally into India and I’d imagine Pashtu would decline in use as compared to Urdu. Then again Afghan identity was solidified in the Mughal empire in a very diasporic sense in that they were conscious of the threat of assimilation and the first Pashtu dictionary itself states the reason the author is writing it is because he feels too many Afghans are forgetting the language and barely know any of their tribal history.
 
I don't think so, what bound Manchuria to China proper was the assimilation of the Machus and the migration of Chinese into Manchuria. Aside from the fact there probably aren't many people intent on moving to arid mountainous Afghanistan, the Mughals weren't the biggest on assimilation, not only is there the big question who what they'd assimilate to (as India wasn't as homogenous as China-proper) but there's also the fact that they made Persian the language of prestige and administration where as the Manchus adopted Mandarin for those roles.
 

Albert.Nik

Banned
Well, issue is that Manchuria has very fertile lands, is sparsely populated, and lacks much rough terrain, which made it easy and desirable to settle in Manchuria, despite the ban on Han settlement in Manchuria during the Qing dynasty. Open plains made it hard to defend against horsemen but gunpowder changed that rather rapidly. Once the steppe nomads that had historically ravaged Han settlement in Manchuria were either integrated or pacified by the Qing, there wasn't much that could prevent Han settlement in Manchuria.

Land Quality
rhA51Jp.jpg

Terrain
world-physical-map.jpg

By contrast, Afghanistan's land is not very fertile and the terrain is rather rough, which makes it harder to pacify and control effectively. People aren't going to want to move there without incentives, unlike with Manchuria where people were flooding in naturally, so it wouldn't be the same.
Fertile land isn't a criterion for everything in the Modern era. How fertile is Tibet? And how fretile is Aksai Chin that was occupied by China which was formerly,Indian held? The answer is these though bad terrains provide Strategic routes. Tibet helps to connect to Pakistan,Iran and Europe on a land trade route and Aksai Chin connects Xinjiang and Tibet to where no other connectivity is possible in this heavily mountainous regions. Afghanistan could help an undivided India immensely to connect a land route to Iran,Turkey and Europe and is a gateway to Central Asia,China and Russia via land. That is a precious resource for India.
 
Fertile land isn't a criterion for everything in the Modern era. How fertile is Tibet? And how fretile is Aksai Chin that was occupied by China which was formerly,Indian held? The answer is these though bad terrains provide Strategic routes. Tibet helps to connect to Pakistan,Iran and Europe on a land trade route and Aksai Chin connects Xinjiang and Tibet to where no other connectivity is possible in this heavily mountainous regions. Afghanistan could help an undivided India immensely to connect a land route to Iran,Turkey and Europe and is a gateway to Central Asia,China and Russia via land. That is a precious resource for India.
The above is absolutely true. It is also tangential to the OP and not what I was discussing in the slightest.

The OP concerns, unless I am mistaken (in which case @Koprulu Mustafa Pasha, please correct me), the possibility of Afghanistan acting as an Indian analogue to Manchuria in that the locals of that region manage to conquer a vast swath of territory directly adjacent to their homeland and, over time, are assimilated into the populace that they had conquered to the point that, at a certain point, their homeland becomes an integral part of the conquered peoples' nation and their own people lose a distinct identity and become another subset of the natives of the land their ancestors conquered.

I posited that it would not be an apt comparison and unlikely to happen bar major changes in geography, politics, etc. as Afghanistan lacks the qualities that helped attract Han settlement during the Qing dynasty, which was part of the process that led to the loss of a separate Manchu identity and culture and the integration of Manchuria into China proper. There is little that would push tens of millions of Indians to settle Afghanistan the way the Han flooded into Manchuria during the Chuang Guandong, which led to the current clear Han majority in Manchuria in the present day. Afghanistan lacks the fertile farmlands that would attract poor, landless peasants, the safety created by gunpowder and Qing diplomacy+force that enabled the settlement of the region (mountains making it much harder to root out dissenting locals and Afghanistan has historically been difficult to unify, at least in part due to its rough terrain), and the ease of actually settling the area (Afghanistan's landscape is difficult to traverse, which limits both the number of potential settlers and the range of lands that they can easily reach) of Manchuria.

Nowhere did I mention that India would not have any incentive to conquer or retain the region, simply that it would not easily become yet another Indian province the way Gujarat or Rajastan are and its people would not simply slip into the passage of time and go extinct by their own success.

Tibet is neither fertile nor does it have a Han majority. As of 2011, a bit over 90% of Tibet's 3 million people are Tibetan and under 10% are Han Chinese. Tibet is of great strategic importance to China, yes, but that does not incur mass migration and massive demographic shifts, nor does it lead to the locals assimilating into Chinese culture. Xinjiang would be a better counterpoint but the Uyghur are resisting assimilation and the Han are not an overwhelming majority as they are in the Dongbei, nor did the Uyghur conquer China and thus create their own circumstance, which does not fulfil the OP.

As for Aksai Chin, I can't easily find demographic information on that region but it doesn't fulfil the 'conquered the region it got colonised by' condition anyways.

I did not say these regions were not valuable to the nations they border/are in; rather, I said they wouldn't attract much settlement because they weren't attractive for settlement because of poor land fertility and rough terrain, which has rather proven true when compared with Manchuria, which saw a flood of poor Han farmers when settlement was allowed, and that settlement was a key component in the dissolution of the Manchu identity and homeland into the greater Han Chinese identity and homeland.
 
I don’t have the figures but the Manchu population was quite small. They were a highly militarized society were nearly all able bodied men and their whole families lived together in a regiment system. When they conquered China the Manchus went south to settle garrison towns in such numbers that Manchuria was depopulated. The Manchu emperors later had to repopulate Manchuria with Han settlers to counter Russian expansion. That is not going to happen in Afghanistan.
 
I don’t have the figures but the Manchu population was quite small. They were a highly militarized society were nearly all able bodied men and their whole families lived together in a regiment system. When they conquered China the Manchus went south to settle garrison towns in such numbers that Manchuria was depopulated. The Manchu emperors later had to repopulate Manchuria with Han settlers to counter Russian expansion. That is not going to happen in Afghanistan.

You raise an interesting question- could a large number of Indian garrison towns in otl Afghanistan lead to an indian plurality and then majority? The area is of course vital to the security of the indo gangetic plain as whenever India did not control this area it opened the subcontinent up to northern invasion. Perhaps if garrison towns are situated by Aurangzeb at the Khyber pass and every militarily viable pass in the region you roughly get an indian majority?
 

Albert.Nik

Banned
The above is absolutely true. It is also tangential to the OP and not what I was discussing in the slightest.

The OP concerns, unless I am mistaken (in which case @Koprulu Mustafa Pasha, please correct me), the possibility of Afghanistan acting as an Indian analogue to Manchuria in that the locals of that region manage to conquer a vast swath of territory directly adjacent to their homeland and, over time, are assimilated into the populace that they had conquered to the point that, at a certain point, their homeland becomes an integral part of the conquered peoples' nation and their own people lose a distinct identity and become another subset of the natives of the land their ancestors conquered.

I posited that it would not be an apt comparison and unlikely to happen bar major changes in geography, politics, etc. as Afghanistan lacks the qualities that helped attract Han settlement during the Qing dynasty, which was part of the process that led to the loss of a separate Manchu identity and culture and the integration of Manchuria into China proper. There is little that would push tens of millions of Indians to settle Afghanistan the way the Han flooded into Manchuria during the Chuang Guandong, which led to the current clear Han majority in Manchuria in the present day. Afghanistan lacks the fertile farmlands that would attract poor, landless peasants, the safety created by gunpowder and Qing diplomacy+force that enabled the settlement of the region (mountains making it much harder to root out dissenting locals and Afghanistan has historically been difficult to unify, at least in part due to its rough terrain), and the ease of actually settling the area (Afghanistan's landscape is difficult to traverse, which limits both the number of potential settlers and the range of lands that they can easily reach) of Manchuria.

Nowhere did I mention that India would not have any incentive to conquer or retain the region, simply that it would not easily become yet another Indian province the way Gujarat or Rajastan are and its people would not simply slip into the passage of time and go extinct by their own success.

Tibet is neither fertile nor does it have a Han majority. As of 2011, a bit over 90% of Tibet's 3 million people are Tibetan and under 10% are Han Chinese. Tibet is of great strategic importance to China, yes, but that does not incur mass migration and massive demographic shifts, nor does it lead to the locals assimilating into Chinese culture. Xinjiang would be a better counterpoint but the Uyghur are resisting assimilation and the Han are not an overwhelming majority as they are in the Dongbei, nor did the Uyghur conquer China and thus create their own circumstance, which does not fulfil the OP.

As for Aksai Chin, I can't easily find demographic information on that region but it doesn't fulfil the 'conquered the region it got colonised by' condition anyways.

I did not say these regions were not valuable to the nations they border/are in; rather, I said they wouldn't attract much settlement because they weren't attractive for settlement because of poor land fertility and rough terrain, which has rather proven true when compared with Manchuria, which saw a flood of poor Han farmers when settlement was allowed, and that settlement was a key component in the dissolution of the Manchu identity and homeland into the greater Han Chinese identity and homeland.
Tibetians are the dominant demography in Tibet. Coming to Aksai Chin,this isn't an inhabitable land and there is less to none population here except some isolated Monastery communities and Chinese forces/employees.

Coming back to Afghanistan,I think Afghans are more influenced by Indian subcontinent more or less. There could be modern era Indian settlements built for economic reasons and that could be like trade,business,tourism,resource economy,etc. Pashtuns assimilating I'm not sure. Their population could rise due to the benefits in this scenario initially before finally becoming an integral part of India. We can't say about the resistance though. But a former part of the Pashtuns land is today a part of Pakistan as KPK without much problem so Id except a similar situation here.
 
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