Peter Parker: They won history's biggest gamble (India)
The epilogue to Ramachandra Guha's huge but absorbing "history of the world's largest democracy" is entitled "Why India Survives". When India gained independence 60 years ago many people predicted catastrophe. How could a single nation emerge from a subcontinent that - even after Partition - was fragmented by religious, cultural and linguistic differences?
Nehru declared in his broadcast on August 15, 1947: "A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance." It was not a matter of a single moment and, as the early part of Guha's book makes clear, the transition was complicated and long drawn out.
Even after Partition had been reluctantly conceded, it took a lot of wrangling, conciliation and compromise before what remained of the country could be organised and governed. India and Pakistan may have come into existence at the stroke of midnight, while the world slept, but several princely states refused to decide by the deadline which country they wanted to belong to and tried for their own independence, while the French didn't give up their territories until November 1949 and the Portuguese hung on in Goa until forcibly evicted in December 1961.
Unlike most new democracies in the West, India immediately introduced universal adult suffrage, which meant that, five years after independence, 176 million people were eligible to vote in the republic's first general election.
The election was something of a logistical triumph since provision had to be made that many voters in this vast country of more than a million square miles lived in very remote and inaccessible districts and 85 per cent of them were illiterate. Described by one sceptical newspaper editor as "the biggest gamble in history", the election went surprisingly smoothly, the ruling Congress Party winning by a comfortable majority....
Read entire article at Telegraph (UK)
Nehru declared in his broadcast on August 15, 1947: "A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance." It was not a matter of a single moment and, as the early part of Guha's book makes clear, the transition was complicated and long drawn out.
Even after Partition had been reluctantly conceded, it took a lot of wrangling, conciliation and compromise before what remained of the country could be organised and governed. India and Pakistan may have come into existence at the stroke of midnight, while the world slept, but several princely states refused to decide by the deadline which country they wanted to belong to and tried for their own independence, while the French didn't give up their territories until November 1949 and the Portuguese hung on in Goa until forcibly evicted in December 1961.
Unlike most new democracies in the West, India immediately introduced universal adult suffrage, which meant that, five years after independence, 176 million people were eligible to vote in the republic's first general election.
The election was something of a logistical triumph since provision had to be made that many voters in this vast country of more than a million square miles lived in very remote and inaccessible districts and 85 per cent of them were illiterate. Described by one sceptical newspaper editor as "the biggest gamble in history", the election went surprisingly smoothly, the ruling Congress Party winning by a comfortable majority....