AFCAT II 2017 Solved Paper

The most important reason for this state of affairs is that India was the only country in the world to truly recognise the achievements of the Soviet Union-rather than merely focus on the debilitating faults that Communism brought to its people. The people of India realised that the achievement of one hundred percent literacy in a country much, much larger than its own and with similarly complicated ethnic and religious groupings, the rapid industrialization of a nation that was a primarily agrarian society when the Bolshevik revolution took place in 1917, the attendant revolutionary steps in science and technology, the accessibility of health care (primeval according to Western standards, perhaps,but not according to Indian ones) to the general population, and despite prohibition of the government of the time the vast outpourings in literature, music, art, etc. are momentous and remarkable feats in any country.In contrast, all that the West focused on were the massive human rights violations by the Soviet State on its people, the deliberate uprooting and mass migrations of ethnic peoples from one part of the country to another in the name of industrialization, the end of religion. In short, all the tools of information were employed to condemn the ideology of Communism, so much at variance with capitalist thinking. The difference with the Indian perception, I think here is, that while the Indians reacted as negatively to what the Soviet governments did to its people in the name of good governance (witness the imprisonment of Boris Pasternak and the formation of an international committee to put pressure for his release with Jawaharlal Nehru at its head), they took the pain notto condemn the people of that broad country in black and white terms; they understood that mingled in the shades of grey were grains of uniqueness (The Russians have never failed that characteristic in themselves; they have twice experimented with completely different ideologies, Communism and Capitalism both in the space of a century).