In August 1947, Jawaharlal Nehru addressed the Indian Constituent Assembly on the eve of independence with a sentence that became one of the most celebrated in the rhetoric of decolonisation: “Long years ago we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge.” The phrase captured something genuinely extraordinary: after roughly two centuries of British colonial rule, the largest and most complex of the empire’s possessions was becoming a self-governing state. But it concealed as much as it revealed. The “we” of Nehru’s sentence was immediately contested. Independence came simultaneously with partition — the division of British India into the dominions of India and Pakistan along lines drawn in haste by a British lawyer who had never been to the subcontinent before — and the violence that accompanied partition remains one of the largest catastrophes of the twentieth century. The tryst with destiny was written in blood before it was written in ink.
India’s subsequent history is an argument conducted continuously over what the country is, who it belongs to, what its founding ideals actually committed it to, and whether those ideals have been honoured or betrayed. It is also a story of remarkable achievement: the survival of democratic governance in a country of extraordinary complexity, a successful nuclear programme, an economic transformation that produced one of the world’s largest and fastest-growing economies, and a middle class whose existence would have seemed implausible to the exhausted, newly independent government of 1947. And it is a story of persistent failure: the failure to address the structural inequalities of the caste system, the communal violence that has erupted periodically since 1947, the corruption that has retarded development, and, in more recent years, the rise of a Hindu nationalist politics that has challenged the secular pluralism on which the Indian republic was theoretically founded.
Partition: The Founding Trauma
The violence that accompanied the partition of British India in August and September 1947 was not a by-product of independence but its central event. The partition plan, drawn by Sir Cyril Radcliffe in roughly five weeks without adequate maps or demographic data, created two new states whose borders cut across the Punjab in the west and Bengal in the east — the two provinces where Muslim and Hindu populations were most thoroughly intermingled. The result was a forced migration of approximately 14 million people and a violence in which historians estimate between 200,000 and 2 million people died, a range so wide that it indicates the scale of the chaos rather than any imprecision in the counting. Trains arrived at their destinations packed with corpses. Villages were massacred and burned. Women were raped and killed on both sides of the new borders; many thousands were abducted and never returned to their families.
The founding trauma of partition shaped Indian and Pakistani politics in ways that have not yet been worked through. For India, it reinforced the determination of Nehru and the Congress leadership to build a secular state in which religious identity was not a basis for citizenship — a determination that was simultaneously a genuine political commitment and a response to the horror of what had just happened when religious identity was the basis for political organisation. For Pakistan, it created a founding narrative of Muslim separatism and a relationship to India defined by existential hostility. The Kashmir dispute — which had its origins in the partition settlement and produced three wars between India and Pakistan — remains unresolved, and has been the flashpoint for a nuclear stand-off between the two countries since both tested nuclear weapons in 1998.
Mahatma Gandhi, the moral architect of the independence movement, was assassinated on 30 January 1948 by Nathuram Godse, a Hindu nationalist who believed that Gandhi had been too accommodating of Muslim interests and was guilty of the partition of what nationalists regarded as the sacred motherland. The assassination was a warning of what Hindu nationalism contained. It was not heeded for long enough.
Nehru and the Nehruvian Settlement
Jawaharlal Nehru governed India from independence until his death in 1964 and set the parameters within which Indian politics operated for the following generation. The settlement he built had several interlocking components. Politically, it was a secular democratic republic — one in which all citizens were equal before the law regardless of religion, caste, or language, and in which competitive elections would determine governments. Economically, it was a mixed economy of the Fabian socialist model: state-led development, import substitution industrialisation, central planning through Five-Year Plans, and a large public sector. In foreign policy, it was non-alignment: the refusal to choose between the American and Soviet blocs, and the attempt to build a third force of newly decolonised nations.
The achievements of the Nehruvian model were substantial. India built the institutional infrastructure of a modern state: universities, hospitals, steel mills, dams, a functioning electoral system, a free press, an independent judiciary. The Indian Institutes of Technology, established in the 1950s, began producing an engineering class that would later transform both India and Silicon Valley. The elections worked: India held general elections in 1952, the first in which all adult citizens could vote — an electorate of approximately 176 million people, the large majority of them illiterate — and the exercise was conducted without the violence or mass fraud that outside observers had predicted.
The failures were equally substantial. The Nehruvian economy, insulated from international competition and dominated by state enterprises, produced what economists came to call the “Hindu rate of growth” — a slightly cruel term for the approximately 3.5 per cent annual GDP growth that India averaged in the first three decades after independence, which was not sufficient to reduce poverty significantly given the rate of population growth. The bureaucratic controls that regulated the economy — the “licence raj,” in which every significant economic decision required government approval — created spectacular opportunities for corruption and embedded rent-seeking at every level of the state.
The Emergency: Democracy’s Near-Death Experience
Indira Gandhi, who succeeded her father after the brief interlude of Lal Bahadur Shastri, governed India for most of the period from 1966 to 1984 and remains the most consequential and most contested figure in post-independence Indian politics. Her declaration of a state of emergency in June 1975 — in response to a court ruling that invalidated her 1971 election victory on grounds of electoral malpractice — was the most serious challenge that Indian democracy has faced.
The Emergency of 1975 to 1977 suspended civil liberties, imposed press censorship, empowered the police and intelligence services to arrest opponents without trial, and concentrated executive power in Indira Gandhi and her son Sanjay to a degree that had no precedent in Indian democratic politics. Thousands of political opponents were imprisoned. A programme of forced sterilisation, promoted by Sanjay Gandhi as a population control measure, was enforced with a brutality that fell disproportionately on the poor and on Muslims and left a lasting association between family planning and coercion that impeded population policy for decades. The programme sterilised approximately 8 million people in a single year.
What redeemed Indian democracy was the election of 1977, which Indira Gandhi called in the belief that the Emergency had been popular and that she would win. She lost dramatically. The Indian electorate, which had endured the Emergency in apparent acquiescence, delivered a verdict that removed her from power and installed the Janata Party — a coalition of opposition groups — as the first non-Congress government in India’s independent history. The election demonstrated that the electorate’s tolerance for authoritarianism had limits and that the machinery of democratic choice, once established, could survive the attempt to subvert it.
Economic Liberalisation and the New India
India’s economic transformation began in 1991 under circumstances of external compulsion. A balance-of-payments crisis so severe that the government had to airlift gold reserves to London as collateral for an IMF loan forced Narasimha Rao’s Congress government to abandon the licence raj and liberalise the economy. Manmohan Singh, appointed finance minister, dismantled the system of import quotas and industrial licensing that had insulated the Indian economy from competition since independence, reduced tariffs, invited foreign investment, and began the privatisation of state enterprises.
The effects were transformative. India’s GDP growth rate accelerated to average approximately 7 per cent annually through the 1990s and 2000s, with some years touching double digits. The information technology sector, which had been building quietly through the 1980s, exploded as the liberalised economy made it easier to acquire computers and software, international telecommunications links made remote working viable, and the Y2K crisis briefly made Indian programmers indispensable to every corporation on earth that needed to recode its legacy software. Bangalore became the world’s back-office, then its software development hub, then a centre of genuine technical innovation. The Indian diaspora in the United States — engineers and doctors who had been educated at the IITs and the medical colleges — began returning capital, networks, and knowledge.
The growth was real and it reduced poverty substantially: the proportion of the population living on less than $1.90 a day fell from approximately 45 per cent in 1993 to under 13 per cent by 2015. But it was also uneven in ways that created new social tensions. The regions and sectors that benefited most were those already connected to the global economy — the western cities, the IT sector, the educated middle class. The agricultural sector, which still employed the majority of the workforce, did not benefit proportionally: the liberalisation of agricultural markets, combined with the withdrawal of state price supports, produced a crisis of farm incomes that resulted in tens of thousands of farmer suicides in the late 1990s and 2000s — a phenomenon without clear precedent in Indian history.
Nuclear India and Regional Power
India tested nuclear weapons in May 1998 under Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s BJP government, two months after the BJP had come to power in a general election. The tests — which Pakistan matched within weeks — transformed South Asia into a declared nuclear-armed region and demonstrated that India was willing to absorb the international sanctions that the tests triggered in order to establish itself as a full nuclear power. The decision was driven by a combination of genuine security concerns about China and Pakistan and by the BJP’s Hindu nationalist ideology, which associated nuclear weapons with national pride and the restoration of India’s great-power status.
The Kargil conflict of 1999, in which Pakistani military forces occupied positions on the Indian side of the Line of Control in Kashmir and were expelled after a brief but intense military campaign, was the first armed conflict between two nuclear-armed states in history. The conflict was contained — neither side used nuclear weapons, and American pressure on Pakistan played a role in the Pakistani withdrawal — but it illustrated the risks inherent in a nuclear standoff between two states with an unresolved territorial dispute, mutual hostility, and domestic political pressures that incentivised escalation.
The Rise of Hindu Nationalism
The Bharatiya Janata Party’s rise to dominance in Indian politics represents the most significant ideological shift in the country’s post-independence history. The BJP is the political expression of Hindutva — the ideology of Hindu nationalism, developed in the 1920s by V.D. Savarkar and subsequently elaborated by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh — which defines India as essentially a Hindu civilisation in which Muslims, Christians, and other minorities are tolerated guests rather than equal citizens. This is the direct antithesis of the secular pluralism that Nehru and the Congress had placed at the foundation of the Indian republic.
The demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya in December 1992 — when a mob of Hindu nationalist activists tore down a sixteenth-century mosque on a site claimed as the birthplace of the god Ram, in an event the BJP’s leadership was subsequently found by a court to have aided and abetted — produced communal riots across India in which approximately 2,000 people died. The 2002 Gujarat riots, in which over 1,000 people were killed — the large majority of them Muslim — in violence that human rights organisations found to have been facilitated by the Gujarat state government under Chief Minister Narendra Modi, became the defining controversy of Modi’s career and the subject of litigation and investigation that continued for years.
Narendra Modi’s election as Prime Minister in 2014 and re-election in 2019, both with commanding majorities, represented the consolidation of the BJP’s dominance. His government’s record combined genuine economic ambitions — infrastructure investment, digital payments systems, a formal banking inclusion programme — with policies that critics identified as systematically disadvantaging Muslims and eroding the institutional checks that had sustained Indian democracy. The revocation of the special constitutional status of Kashmir in August 2019, accompanied by a communications blackout and mass detentions, demonstrated a willingness to use executive power in ways that bypassed constitutional norms. The Citizenship Amendment Act of 2019, which offered a fast track to citizenship for religious refugees from neighbouring countries for every religion except Islam, produced the largest protests India had seen in decades and raised the question of whether the principle of secular citizenship was being formally abandoned.
The institutions that Nehru had built — an independent Election Commission, an independent judiciary, a free press — had shown considerable resilience, but they were under pressures they had not previously faced. The Supreme Court’s handling of the Babri Masjid case — awarding the disputed site to Hindus while acknowledging that the demolition had been illegal — disappointed those who had looked to it as a check on majoritarian excess. The media landscape, once diverse and combative, had become more uniformly supportive of the government as ownership concentrated in the hands of business groups with interests in maintaining good relations with the ruling party.
The World’s Most Populous Country
India overtook China as the world’s most populous nation in 2023, reaching 1.4 billion people. The demographic dividend — a large working-age population relative to dependants — that this represents is a potential economic advantage of enormous magnitude, but only if the economy generates the jobs that this population requires. India needs to create approximately 10 million new jobs each year simply to absorb young people entering the labour market. Whether the Indian economy can generate those jobs at the scale required, and in the forms — manufacturing as well as services — that would reach the majority of the population, is the central question of India’s economic future.
India is simultaneously one of the world’s great success stories and one of its greatest ongoing challenges. Its democracy has survived partition, emergency, assassination, communal violence, economic crisis, and the rise of a majoritarian nationalism that challenges its founding principles. Its economy has lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty and produced a middle class and a technological sector of global significance. It has maintained a free press, an independent judiciary, and competitive elections across a subcontinent of extraordinary diversity — religious, linguistic, ethnic, and economic — for more than seventy years. It has also failed, repeatedly and systematically, the poorest of its citizens: the Dalit communities at the bottom of the caste hierarchy, the Adivasi tribal populations, the Muslim minority, the women in rural areas whose life expectancy and literacy rates still lag far behind the average.
The argument that is India continues. It is an argument about what it means to be Indian, about whether secularism or Hindutva represents the country’s authentic identity, about whether the economic model of the past three decades has served its population or merely its upper fraction, about what role India will play in a world whose centre of gravity is shifting to Asia. The answers will shape not only the lives of 1.4 billion people but the character of the century that is just beginning.
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