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India After Gandhi Book Summary - India After Gandhi Book explained in key points

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India After Gandhi summary

Name: India After Gandhi
Rating: 4.5 (153 reviews)
Author: Ramachandra Guha

Ramachandra Guha

The History of the World’s Largest Democracy

4.5 (153 ratings)

47 mins

Brief summary

India After Gandhi by Ramachandra Guha offers a detailed account of India's political, social, and cultural life since independence, delving into its challenges and achievements as a democracy.

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International Economics Asian History

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India After Gandhi
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Key idea 1 of 16

What’s in it for me? Discover the riveting story of post-independence India.

After China, India is the second most-populous nation in the world. But India has something that China doesn’t – an unbroken record of democratic elections since its independence from British rule in 1947.

This is in itself a remarkable feat if you consider that the ethnic, religious and linguistic diversity of India is wider than that of all of Europe. And it is precisely this diversity that led to countless commentators both foreign and domestic doubting that India could exist as a single, secular republic.

India may have mitigated doubts on this front, but its diversity and geographic size have proven challenging in other respects. India was born of a British decision to partition its former Indian empire into Muslim- and Hindu-majority states – Pakistan and India. Violence and mass migration ensued, and the event has soured relations between the two nations ever since, as well as leading to numerous wars.

But in the face of incredible adversity, the Republic of India lives on. Within its borders, over one billion people speaking over 720 languages and dialects participate in democratic elections on a regular basis. And although its democracy has occasionally faced peril, the future looks bright for this up-and-coming south Asian nation.

In these blinks, you’ll learn

how India dealt with the largest refugee crisis in human history;
why India was briefly led by the only female dictator of the twentieth century; and
why the disputed region of Kashmir still pops up in the news from time to time.

India became independent from the British Empire on August 15, 1947.

Any history of modern India must begin with British rule. From the seventeenth century onwards, the British had been slowly increasing their presence in the region. By 1857, India was formally placed under the rule of the British government, under a system known as the British Raj.

The British ruled over nearly 300 million Indians who spoke hundreds of languages and practiced many different religions.

The prevailing opinion among the British elite was that India as a whole would never be fit for self-rule. How could a country with more ethnicities, languages and religions than all of Europe survive as a united, self-ruled republic?

This view was best-reflected in remarks made by British Indian civil servant John Strachey in 1888, who noted that Spain is more similar to Scotland than Bengal, in the east of India, is to the Punjab in the west.

But, the Indian National Congress, or INC, a political movement formed in 1885, disagreed. Their goal was to move people across India, regardless of language, race or religion, toward a single Indian sense of nationality. They believed that India could be a viable, independent state.

By the 1930s, with the local Indian independence movement accelerating, British opinions remained the same. Winston Churchill predicted that an independent India would quickly descend into endless civil war and ethnic violence.

It was only after the Second World War that the British position on India changed. The war crippled Britain economically. The fighting drained the British economy to such an extent that it was unable to maintain an expensive colonial empire. And so, finally, the INC’s demands for an independent India came to fruition.

On August 15, 1947, India was born in the form of a democratic republic consisting of 28 states, some of which were larger than France.

This achievement was remarkable in many respects. The INC’s mission to unite all of India involved the assent of over 500 autonomous, ancient regions known as the “princely states” to join together in a new democratic experiment. Only three abstained from joining the new India. Two of them, Junagadh and Hyderabad, were simply annexed by the new Indian government. However, the third, Jammu and Kashmir, became a more complicated issue, as we’ll explore later.

The unity of India was an exceptional success in political history. Indian political theorist Sunil Khilnani even proclaimed that the creation of the Republic of India was the third great experiment in democracy of the modern age – after the French and American revolutions.

The Partition of India led to widespread death, migration and the creation of India and Pakistan.

The new, INC-dominated Indian government reflected the remarkable nature of this new nation. Its new cabinet consisted of men and women from five different religions – Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, Sikhism and Christianity. They came from all parts of India.

The spiritual “Father of the Nation” was, of course, Mahatma Gandhi. All the speeches and parades conducted on Independence Day, celebrated in the capital of New Delhi, began with an invocation to him.

The partition of India was caused by three main factors.

It’s impossible to attribute blame for partition to one party or person, but actions instigated by the British, INC and Indian Muslim politicians resulted in the bloodiest period in modern Indian history.

The British were ultimately responsible for deciding to partition India, and had helped by setting Muslim and Hindu communities against each other. For example, in British-organized municipal elections during the last decades of the Raj, Muslims could only vote for other Muslims, and Hindus for Hindus.

India-Pakistan relations were immediately damaged by territorial disputes, particularly in Jammu and Kashmir.

Jammu and Kashmir was ruled by Hindu Prince Hari Singh. Pre-partition, it had a slight Muslim majority, but the post-partition refugee crisis caused the balance to tip toward a Hindu majority.

Still, the region’s mountainous, isolated populace seemed destined for relative peace after partition, and its prince wished it to remain a neutral, Switzerland-like state.

India’s formative years involved handling refugee crises and drafting a constitution.

Non-Muslim refugees were trickling into what would become India even before independence. But after August 15, 1947 a staggering wave of eight million refugees descended upon the new republic.

The partition of Punjab, for example, resulted in hundreds of thousands of non-Muslim west Punjabis settling on the Indian side of the border. Refugee camps were set up everywhere, with the largest at Kurukshetra, a plain north of Delhi, containing 300,000 refugees.

The early 1950s saw India’s first general election, as well as the country finding its place in the world.

British administrators in India had always argued that democracy couldn’t work in India. Post-independence commentators continued to predict the country would partition itself further and descend into chaos. But the general election that took place in 1952 proved otherwise.

Many problems stood in the way of a successful election, particularly the fact that 85 percent of the electorate couldn’t read or write. So an ingenious system was devised – ballots would signify parties by symbols such as elephants or huts instead of party names. Novel advertising methods were also used, such as the INC having “Vote Congress!” painted on the sides of stray cows.

India’s society and economy changed for the better throughout the 1950s.

With a successful election in the bag, Nehru now had the backing of the nation to set about implementing radical policies that changed the face of Indian society – and its economy.

In the country’s first Five-Year Plan for 1951-1956, agricultural reform was at the top of the agenda. After all, 60 percent of India’s GDP at independence was based on agriculture. Massive dams were constructed, and land reform bills were enacted to redistribute land more evenly among the peasantry.

India’s economic and diplomatic fortunes began to wane at the turn of the 1960s.

While the INC swept the 1957 national elections, regional opposition led to a number of changes in state governments, such as in the southern state of Kerala, where the Communist Party of India won.

The communists immediately went about implementing fast-paced radical reforms in land ownership and education. These caused massive opposition protests organized by landowners and religious groups whose power was directly threatened.

After Nehru’s death, his daughter Indira Gandhi proceeded to lead India through the uncertain 1960s.

Nehru died on May 27th, 1964, after seventeen years as prime minister. The search for a successor to lead the INC – and India – began right away. Eventually, Nehru’s daughter, Indira Gandhi, was chosen to continue where her father had left off.

Although politically inexperienced, she was a known figure to both India and the world. Additionally, it was hoped she could bring India together after the double tragedy of the loss against China and her father’s death.

India in the 1970s was marked by war and political upheaval.

In 1971, another election took place that defined India’s destiny – the Pakistani general election. In it, East Pakistani nationalists under the umbrella of the pro-Bengali Awami League won virtually all of the East Pakistani seats. This surprised the West Pakistani leadership so much that they decided to cancel the results of the election.

East Pakistan’s Bengali-speaking majority was furious, and in January began a nationwide general strike. They had felt discriminated against by their Urdu-speaking West Pakistani rulers for decades, and this was the final straw. A massacre of Bengali students by Pakistani soldiers on March 25th marked what became known as the Bangladesh Liberation War.

India briefly lurched toward authoritarianism in 1975.

In 1971, Mrs. Gandhi had been reelected to the lower house of the Indian parliament. Immediately after, however, a socialist politician who had contested her seat accused her of breaching spending limits during the election campaign. This ended up going to court, where the plaintiff hoped to nullify Mrs. Gandhi’s election as an MP.

On June 12, 1975, the Allahabad High Court ruled against her. This nullified her election, pending appeal to the Indian Supreme Court.

The new Janata administration was beset with infighting and didn’t last long.

One result of Mrs. Gandhi’s brief dictatorship was something that had never happened before in Indian post-independence politics: there arose a united political opposition against the INC. On January 19, 1977, a day after opposition party leaders were released from prison, they formed a new political force – the Janata Party.

And in the March 1977 election, the game was up for Mrs. Gandhi. Another first took place in India: the INC was voted out of office.

India in the 1980s saw religious tensions increasing, leading to fatal consequences.

The first tragedy to strike Mrs. Gandhi was the death of her son and anointed successor, Sanjay Gandhi, in an airplane accident in June 1980. This led to the entry of her son Rajiv into Indian politics for the first time.

Secondly, in the Sikh-dominated state of Punjab, Sikh separatists were demanding autonomy and increased federalism. But Gandhi was having none of it. Violence ensued, with a number of high-profile assassinations by Sikh extremists.

The 1980s saw increased economic liberalization and the end of INC domination.

Changes in religious identity weren’t the only thing happening in 1980s India. Rajiv Gandhi decided to reverse decades of state control over the economy in order to placate the rising middle classes, who numbered about 100 million by the mid-1980s.

Government controls, the INC now said, had been responsible for all the corruption and inefficiency of the past. So taxes were reduced across the board, and tariffs lifted. Middle-class income boomed, as did the real estate and manufacturing sectors, the latter growing at a record 8.9 percent annually in the second half of the 1980s.

The 1990s saw Hindu nationalists rise in power and win national elections.

Kashmiri kidnappings were not the only unexpected item on the new government’s plate. The Ayodhya controversy was picking up speed, with Hindu nationalists starting a huge march on the mosque on September 25, 1990 to demand its destruction and replacement with a temple.

Government security forces attempted to stop the march, arresting up to 150,000 participants. In response, the BJP Hindu nationalist party refused to continue supporting the government. This forced new elections to be called for 1991.

India saw rapid economic growth in the 2000s, as well as some advances in peacemaking.

While religious tensions were still running high in some parts of the country, India’s flashpoint region of Jammu and Kashmir was finally experiencing relative peace. For the first time in thirty years, local elections were held in 2003. Tourists even began flocking to the beautiful, mountainous region. Violent incidents were on the decline, from 3,505 recorded in 2002 to fewer than 2,000 in 2005.

Finally, for the first time since partition, India and Pakistan decided it was time to bring the Kashmiri dispute to an end. Two buses were authorized to cross a new “Peace Bridge” traversing the Line of Control between the two nations, carrying families that had been torn apart by the conflict.

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What is India After Gandhi about?

India after Gandhi (2007) chronicles the story of post-independence India. For centuries, the country was ruled by colonial overlords, but that changed in 1947. After a long struggle for independence, Indians gained self-rule. Since then, the journey hasn’t been easy, but India remains a persevering and determined democracy – and the largest the world has ever seen.

India After Gandhi Review

India After Gandhi (2007) chronicles the journey of India from colonial rule to becoming the world's largest democracy. Here's why this book is worth reading:

It provides a comprehensive account of the political and social developments in post-independence India, offering insights into its complex history.
By examining the challenges and achievements faced by the nation, the book offers a nuanced understanding of modern India's identity.
Through engaging storytelling and meticulous research, the author makes a complex subject accessible and ensures the book is far from boring.

Best quote from India After Gandhi

At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom. – Jawaharlal Nehru, Indias first prime minister

—Ramachandra Guha

Who should read India After Gandhi?

Students of history interested in the region of south Asia
Indians looking to learn more about their contemporary history
Political junkies looking to clue into a new region

About the Author

Ramachandra Guha is an Indian historian and writer. His works have been translated into twenty languages, and have won a number of prizes. As well as being a regular contributor to the Telegraph and Hindustan Times, he is the author of numerous titles, such as Gandhi Before India and Gandhi: The Years That Changed the World, 1914–1948.

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