India, July 6 -- Would India be better off than today if it had chosen the American camp at the time of its independence? This is one of the most animated counterfactuals often posed in India. Counterfactuals and those who pose them have the luxury of ignoring Marx's famous dictum. "Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past," he wrote. India, in the immediate aftermath of its independence was trying to do pretty much what Marx described. Historian Srinath Raghavan's tour de force of a book, The Most Dangerous Place: A History of the United States in South Asia, is a must read for th...