The Bharat Parishad

The Bharat Parishad, usually just the Parishad, is the fourth bloc on Earth: about 1.8 billion people from India to the Gulf and the Tian Shan. It held the Himalaya through a cold war that has more than once come close to a hot one, filled the vacuum the heat left in the Gulf and Iran, and turned down the Settlement to become a great power in its own right. Indians call the whole bloc Bharat; its Arab, Iranian and Central Asian members notice.

The name

Bharat is India's own name for itself, and parishad means council. To Indians the name simply describes the bloc. To its other members it is a reminder of who holds the majority.

How it formed

1. The engineers come home (2050s–2110s). Many of the engineers behind America's Fab Wave systems came from wealthy, highly educated Indian families, who would go on to choose the strongest embryo edits for generations. As America divided, they came home in waves from the 2050s, and the first of them built a Fab Wave system of India's own in that decade. It was sealed in the Partition alongside America's and China's, and became India's Vault (see Recursive self-improvement).
2. The Parasol quarrel (2090–2130). India joins China in seeding the stratosphere, then blames the Chinese programme when the monsoon fails. Blame is unprovable, and the rivalry of the 2020s hardens into a cold war (see The Long Heat).
3. Holding the foothills (2100s–2180s). The wet-bulb century crowds India into its foothills, hill country and fortified, partly underground cities. It does not break. The charter cities and Basin Compacts that will form the Settlement quietly back it, fortunes from the cities that will become the Open Cities invest in it, and its arsenal and the Himalaya keep the Mandate out.
4. The Indus Line (2150s). Pakistan breaks apart under heat and debt. India takes the Indus plains, Punjab and Sindh with Karachi, and keeps Kashmir and Ladakh; the Mandate takes the north and west (see The Mandate). The line between them is the hottest frontier on Earth.
5. Filling the vacuum (2150s–2190s). As oil loses its value and heat empties the Gulf, Iraq and the Iranian lowlands, India's engineers and heat-proof cities keep the remaining people alive. Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan, the Gulf states, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan sign on one by one, and the Bharat Parishad is founded in the 2190s.
6. The refusal. The Settlement has offered membership more than once. The Parishad refused, meaning to become a great power in its own right, which it did. It keeps trade and other agreements with every bloc, but culturally it stays closest to the Settlement.

How it governs

• A parliament for all. A federal parliament is elected by universal vote; there is no exam. Its lower house keeps India's name, the Lok Sabha. India's population gives it a permanent majority, the standing grievance of the Iranian, Arab and Central Asian members.
• The Vault's casting vote. When the Lok Sabha (lower house or house of representatives) splits, the Parishad's Vault casts the deciding vote on whether a bill passes to the Rajya Sabha (senate). The ruling party or the opposition consults the Vault before tabling bills in the lower house. Two thirds of the questions put to the Vault are allocated to the ruling party, the rest to the opposition and minor parties. A bill tabled in the lower house by the opposition party and approved by the Vault can be vetoed or amended by the ruling party (usually in consultation with the Vault) before proceeding to the upper house and re-tabled by the ruling party. The Settlement calls this reckless.
• One Vault. Descended from India's own Fab Wave system, it was sealed in the Partition, and the Parishad's founders inherited India's place in the Sealing Treaty and the Shared Question. Its Vault engineers come from the same families that built it, edited for generations since. With only one Vault, its answers cannot be cross-checked at home; it pays other blocs to check them, which the Settlement says is no real check, and its main reason for calling the casting vote reckless.
• Renewal and children. Health care is free and equal for every citizen until the age of 100. After that, all care must be paid for, even body renewal, cheap as it is, and for those who cannot pay, the only free care is voluntary assisted death. Those who cannot pay are mostly the same people who cannot afford to leave Earth, and without brain renewal most brains fail by 150. The Parishad's clinics in its small enclave on the Moon sell renewals to anyone who can pay, the best and most expensive anywhere, and the sales help pay for everyone's care to 100. A court may bar a convict from buying renewal after 100 (see Justice under long lives). The limit holds because most of the old have families and will not take money from their grandchildren. The custom is deeply rooted, but there are dissenters who look to the Settlement's 300-year lives. Its culture favours shorter lives and more children than the Settlement's. To keep its share of the birth cap, births are set at replacement, generally two children per couple. Anyone may sell their quota, but only after a procedure that makes them infertile, which can be reversed only by buying a quota back or by emigrating off Earth, where the quota does not apply. Embryo edits are allowed with no equal-sum pool, which is why its Vault engineer families have stayed a hereditary elite. A rotation law caps time in office at thirty years (fifty in the Settlement), but nothing limits inherited property, so long-lived families keep their fortunes for centuries. The result is a fiercely competitive society, in which the young race to build enough wealth to pay for care after 100.

Raised parenthood

Raised persons may have offspring only if they agree to end their own lives at 150 or emigrate. This applies to children from new designs and to clones. An accepted move to a Parishad habitat off Earth fulfils the agreement when skills, the habitat’s needs and settlement quotas align. Leaving Parishad jurisdiction also fulfils it.

Raised maintenance follows the ordinary funding rules for care: free to 100 and paid for after that. The agreement at 150 is a separate condition of parenthood. Moving off Earth or surrendering birth rights removes that deadline but does not itself grant free lifelong maintenance.

A parent may remain beyond 150 by buying another person’s unused birth rights and permanently surrendering them. The rights cannot be used or resold. The practice is legal but frowned upon: supporters say a future place has been left unfilled, while critics say the wealthy buy longer lives from those who cannot afford to keep their right to children (see Parenthood in the Parishad, in One mind, one form).

Everyday network access

Level 1 protected access is free to everyone, covering basic communication, essential services and purchases, education and a public reference library. Level 1 also includes civic information and discussion, petitions, consultations and voting where eligible. Public terminals and loan interfaces serve people without working equipment. Level 2 adds wider public forums, hosted games and entertainment, and wider commerce for a fee. Free access does not make purchases free or change the age limit on free health care (see Two levels of access, in Everyday technology).

What keeps it standing

A bloc squeezed into its foothills has held off the Mandate for four centuries. It does so through:

• Settlement backing: money, and the inspectors who staff its fabs.
• Open City money: Open City entrepreneurs invest heavily in it.
• Skills: the engineering families that built its Vault, and the schools that train their children.
• The diaspora: Indians across East Africa and Settlement cities give it reach, money and influence.
• The Indian Ocean: its navy contests the sea lanes between the Gulf, Africa and the Mandate's route through Malacca.
• Heat know-how: the fortified and underground cities that kept India alive are what the Gulf and Iran needed most.
• Medicine: its renewal clinics, and the specialists who verify each brain renewal, are among the best anywhere: real leverage in a world that rations life.
• Fabs: licensed fabs, staffed by Settlement inspectors and sealed under the treaty, whose chips also supply the Open Cities.
• Its arsenal and the mountains: the oldest deterrents of all. Apart from the Indus Line, the Amu Darya plain north of Afghanistan and the Fergana Valley, its frontier with the Mandate runs along mountains, from Iran's northern ranges through the Pamirs and the Tian Shan to the Himalaya.

The cold war

• Water. The Brahmaputra, the Indus and the Sutlej rise in Mandate Tibet, and the Indus runs through Mandate Gilgit before it reaches the Parishad's plains. Every dam and diversion there is an act of war in all but name.
• The Indus Line. It divides old Pakistan, and both blocs' arsenals face each other across it. The Mandate's side is a long corridor from Gilgit to Gwadar, wedged between Parishad Afghanistan and the Indus plains and supplied only over the Karakoram.
• Sri Lanka. The Mandate's island fortress lies just across a narrow strait from the Parishad's southern coast.
• The Brahmaputra Crisis (2470s). In a drought year the Mandate held back the river behind its Tibetan dams. Both blocs put their arsenals on alert before the water was released. It is the standoff's closest call on Earth.

Beyond Earth

After the Halcyon Breach of 2418, the Parishad and the Open Cities formed a coalition on Mercury: two mirror arrays that share designs, on top of the chips the Parishad had sold the Open Cities since 2387 (see The Mirror Race). About a quarter of a billion of its people live off Earth, mostly in Belt habitats of its own. It has a seat in the Anchorage, but no colony ship yet. It recognised the Raised as persons in the 2390s, soon after the Mandate, when Freehold became a bloc, and it pays Freehold about 3% of its mirror array's power for the Raised crews who work its factories on Mercury. Its largest cluster, Vesta, which it calls Agni, buys its water and fuel from the Belt Republic, and the Vesta Crisis of the 2480s, when the Republic cut both off, is its closest call off Earth (see Vesta, in Reaching outward).

Its fault lines

• India's majority. Every quarrel about who runs the Parishad starts with the name.
• The hidden hand. Critics say the Parishad's laws are shaped by a machine nobody voted for.
• Too close, too proud. It is too close to the Settlement to be truly independent, and too proud to join it.