Part of the country series of articles.
TRAVEL ADVISORY: EXERCISE CAUTIONPARSTATE advises that East India has strict laws on drug carriage and use, and that the Commonwealth has no ability to interfere in legal proceedings. Normal travel precautions apply.
| East Indian Socialist Republic | |
|---|---|
| One-party socialist state | |
 |
|
| Capital | Port Blair |
| Languages | English, and many regional languages |
| Population | 540,000 |
The East Indian Socialist Republic (also East India) is an island country in the eastern Bay of Bengal, comprising more than 300 islands which form the boundary between the Bay and the Andaman Sea. Port Blair, on South Andaman, is the capital and largest city. It divides into the Andamans in the north and the nineteen Nicobars in the south, separated by the Ten Degree Channel, and most of the population lives in the Andamans despite the Nicobars holding most of the republic’s fresh water. Only about three dozen islands are permanently settled.
The climate is tropical, with heavy monsoon rainfall between May and September. Dense forest covers most of the islands and supports a largely undocumented indigenous flora, and the surrounding seas contain fish, turtles, sea snakes and saltwater crocodiles.
Arab traders reached the islands in the ninth century and Marco Polo in the thirteenth, on the route between the subcontinent and Southeast Asia. Denmark claimed them in the eighteenth century before selling the claim to the UK, which established colonies at Port Blair and Rangat, and after Indian independence they were incorporated as a union territory of India. The government’s handling of the July 1955 tsunamis provoked widespread unrest and hardened an existing nationalist sentiment, and a referendum in 1966 returned a majority for independence under a coalition led by the Nicobarese Socialist Party.
It has kept its distance from India ever since, and its closest ties are with Vekllei, with which it maintains close political, military and economic relations. It is also a member of the COMOC alongside the Maldives, Ceylon, Seychelles and Mauritius, and trades with island states across the Indian Ocean. Its healthcare and education have improved substantially across the more populated islands since independence, despite the difficulty of supplying three dozen scattered settlements.