India’s Five Turning Points

India in 1947 was not expected by many to survive as an independent nation. The departing British thought it would fragment along ethnic, linguistic and regional lines. The more benign Americans believed democracy in an impoverished country would be hard to sustain. 

Over seven decades after independence from the British Empire which drained India’s wealth while enriching Britain’s, India hasn’t just survived. It has thrived. 

Despite poverty – though diminishing – and despite inequality – though reducing – India has defied the world’s predictions.

In the arc from the Middle East to Southeast Asia, India’s robust democracy stands out. Since Independence though, India has experienced at least five major turning points that have helped it negotiate road blocks along the way and brought it to the brink of becoming the world’s third largest economy. Had India stumbled at these five forks on the road, the journey would have been more fraught. 

*First Turning Point: Through the 1950s, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru based his foreign policy on nurturing friendly relations with China. Despite China’s forcible annexation of Tibet in 1950-51 that created for the first time in history a border between the two Himalayan nations, Nehru continued to appease China.

In an act of extraordinary generosity, Nehru lobbied to give China a permanent veto-carrying seat in the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), waiving any right India might have had. 

The India-China entente cordiale ended in 1959 when Nehru – rightly – gave the Dalai Lama sanctuary in Dharamsala. Beijing (then known as Peking) was furious. It regarded, and still does, the Dalai Lama as a dangerous separatist, fuelling the “free Tibet” movement.

After the 1962 war, India-China relations slipped into ennui for decades. China was distracted by Mao Zedong’s cultural revolution through the 1960s that took an estimated 30 million Chinese lives. India too was pre-occupied following Nehru’s death in 1964 and years of drought, wars with Pakistan and a sputtering economy. 

In sum, India’s first turning point was taking the wrong fork in the road with respect to its China policy. Sixty years later China remains India’s most significant security challenge. 

*Second Turing Point: The dynastic ascension of Indira Gandhi after her father’s death was another misstep. In 1959, when Indira was just 41 years old, Nehru appointed her Congress president. From then dynastic politics in India was set in stone. 

Nehru’s successor as prime minister, Lal Bahadur Shastri, gave rise to the hope that merit would count in Indian politics. But following Shastri’s untimely death during peace talks with Pakistan’s president General Ayub Khan in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, Indira Gandhi’s ascension to the prime ministership in 1966 emboldened other political parties to build their own family dynasties.

*Third Turning Point: As India struggled to come to terms with its raucous 28-year-old democracy, Mrs Gandhi in 1975 changed the course of Indian politics by declaring the draconian Emergency. More than one lakh Opposition leaders, activists and journalists were jailed without charge or trial. The Constitution was suspended and the Supreme Court subverted. The right of habeas corpus was denied. 

But from the disaster sprang a new political ethos. The Emergency was revoked in 1977. Though it took a decade to nurse democracy back to good health, the assassinations of Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi within the span of just over six years created both a vacuum and an opportunity to regroup.

*Fourth Turning Point: After three wrong turns, the Narasimha Rao-Manmohan Singh reforms of 1991-96 set India on the right path. Liberalisation was followed by Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s reformist government that deepened the Rao-Singh reforms. After decades of average annual GDP growth rates of three per cent, India in the 2000s began to record consistent annual growth rates of eight per cent. 

*Fifth Turning Point: The election of Narendra Modi in 2014 would herald a decisive change in India’s political and economic trajectory. Dynasty was devalued, corruption contained and merit promoted.

Modi’s first term was spent on fixing the broken bits of the economic engine he inherited in 2014. His second term could have been hobbled by the Covid pandemic and wars in Ukraine and Gaza. The fact that India’s economy has grown over seven per cent consecutively over the last three years points to the success of third-generation reforms now in place: infrastructure, digitalisation, last-mile electrification and corruption-free delivery of benefits to India’s most vulnerable citizens.

Looking ahead

Of these five turning points, three took India on the wrong path and two in the right direction.

Whoever forms the next government in May 2024 will face several challenges. One, to sustain the momentum of economic growth which in the October-December 2023 quarter rose to 8.4 per cent. Two, craft a foreign policy for an era where India stands at the threshold of being the world’s third largest economy. Three, ensure that innovation serves as an enabler across demographics as, for example, UPI has done.

John Chambers, former CEO of Cisco and currently Chairman of the US-India Strategic Partnership Forum, declared recently in an interview with The Indian Express: “You have got things going for you. Millions of engineers are educated per year. You have an entrepreneurship attitude. The future is going to be about startups and small businesses getting bigger. So you better lead in innovation and startups.

“What Prime Minister Modi has done is outline the vision and strategy. If the policies he’s putting in place stay strong for the next decade, then you’ve locked yourself into being the No.1 economy. You will, at that time, probably be 30 per cent greater than the US, and you’ll probably be 90 per cent greater than China. Whether that happens in 40 years or 70 years is purely a function of math.”