The Indian Renaissance: 1965 to 1981

Between 1965 and 1981, India's GDP per capita expanded at an annual average rate of some eight percent; at the end of third period, nation-wide GDP per capita was 3.4 times higher than at the period's beginning, thanks to substantial foreign investment, the mobilization of Indian domestic capital in sarvodaya financial cooperatives, the principles of the Bombay Plan, and the expanding demands of Indian consumers. Superficially, then, India was a spectacular success, with an economy not far from attaining Second World levels of development. These manifold successes convinced many naïve Indian and foreign observers that India provided a foolproof model for the modernization of a Third World country. And yet, the rapid economic growth that impressed so many was regionally imbalanced -- the most successful state, semi-industrialized Maharashtra in the west, saw state income per capita grow sixfold, while in the backward eastern states of Bihar and Orissa state income per capita expanded only by half. This simple regional economic imbalance -- the prosperity of the western and southern states, and the penury of the northern and eastern states -- would be reflected across modern India.

During this period, the social and economic reforms which began soon after independence bore spectacular fruit. By 1980, India's national literacy rate rose to 73%, with near-universal literacy in the western and southern states. This sharp improvement in basic education was also matched by a steady expansion of higher education. Health statistics also improved sharply -- the average lifespan of Indian women in 1981 was 60 years, for Indian men 59 years -- while fertility rates declined sharply nation-wide. The most spectacular declines were in the southern and western states, which by and large attained near-replacement or even (for Kerala) below-replacement fertility rates; fertility rates elsewhere in India remained high, and fed a steady low of emigrants from rural areas to India's great cities. Delhi, Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Chennai (the former Madras) and above all else Mumbai (the former Bombay) expanded into vast urban conurbations, combining vast slums with growing prosperous manufacturing and middle-class residential districts. Gross population growth rates remained high, from a low of 1.7% per annum in Kerala to more than 3.0% in Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh, but the general trend was towards a slower population growth, and, through migration from the Hindi heartland of north India to industrialized areas elsewhere, a more balanced population. As middle classes began to form, Indian culture began to evolve into a media-guided popular culture, marked by the nation-wide use of English and Hindi (and the strength of Dravidian languages in the south), the rapid diffusion of television and radio broadcasting, the more limited spread of Euronet access, and a flourishing print media. Bollywood -- India's film industry, based in Mumbai -- became globally success thanks to the popularity of Indian film musicals.

Even better, these salutary developments were accompanied by the maintenance of a thriving democratic political system. The national government did not dissolve or lose its power to determine national policies to state governments as many expected, but remained strong even as state governments consolidated the powers available to them. The division of powers in Indian politics remained stable, and the political enfranchisement of the vast Indian electorate proceeded even more rapidly than its socioeconomic enfranchisement. India's stability might well have been caused by its vast stable bureaucracy, and by the ability of the myriad ethnolinguistic, caste, and religious groups to offset each other. Whatever its causes, though, India's political stability was an immense aid.

Despite this prosperity and this general stability, India did have domestic problems. Perhaps the most significant were the communal disputes, between Hindus and the various non-Hindu minorities. Independence had precipitated the formation of the Hindutva movement, supported by religious traditionalists and members of the upper castes who felt threatened by the secularization and modernization of Indian society and hoped to establish India as an officially Hindu society. Members of the lower Hindu castes--particularly the Sudras and Harijan--felt threatened by this challenge to their upward mobility; in those Indian states where the Hindutva movement was strongest, like Bihar, tensions between Hindutva supporters and lower castes regularly exploded into violence. (Bihar even developed a sizable Maoist insurgency aimed against the state government.)

Another religious minority troubled by the Hindutva movement were the prosperous Sikhs of the Punjab. In 1967, two decades of Sikh agitation for a separate state within the Indian union culminated in the partition of the state of Punjab between Hindu-majority Haryana and Sikh-majority Punjab. The Sikhs were a prosperous people: Punjab's modern agriculture and well-trained industrial workforce made it one of India's wealthiest units; Sikhs living in India outside Punjab were habitually middle-class and educated; a growing Sikh diaspora living outside South Asia as part of the Indian diaspora equally prospered. Yet, many Sikhs felt threatened by the Hindutva movement, as well as by the perennial turmoil of the Muslim near-majority in Punjab's capital city of Lahore.

Indian Muslims was the single largest--and, because of India's disputes with Pakistan, the most vulnerable--minority, constituting only a tenth of the total Indian population but (by 1981) numbering more than one hundred million people. Indian Muslims were ethnically quite diverse. There were four major Muslim subpopulations in India:

• Most of the south Indian states were home to relatively small (5-10% of the total population) Muslim populations very well integrated into wider society on equal terms. Kerala's Muslim community, at one-fifth of the total Keralan population, was proportionally larger but just as well integrated as its counterparts in Tamilnad and Karnataka.
• Muslims in the states of Gujarat and Maharashtra formed one-tenth of the population of those two states, but were disproportionally concentrated in major cities. Communal tensions with the Hindu majorities of both states existed, but the exceptional pluralism and prosperity of both states minimized these tensions.
• The Muslims of the state of Kashmir were, at least in potential, a nation. 95% of the population of Kashmir state professed Islam as of 1981, after all, and the Kashmiri language and culture was quite distinct from India's other cultures and languages. Many Kashmiris would have preferred Kashmir to become an independent state, not a constituent unit of the Indian union. India's federal government was determined to retain Kashmir, though, in order to prove India's secularism.
• Muslims in the states of north India formed a considerably larger proportion of state populations (~15%) than anywhere in India apart from Kashmir and Kerala. Perhaps because of these large numbers, and the strong religious belief of north Indian Muslims, these Muslims were regularly persecuted by pro-Hindutva mobs and state governments. Federal government interventions were regularly of no avail.

Although Muslims living in India outside of the reactionary north Indian "cow-belt" states were generally treated as equals of their non-Muslim neighbours, there was always a vague attitude of suspicion directed by many non-Muslim Indians towards their compatriots. To some extent, it came from a nationalist reading of the Muslim invasions and states of previous centuries as responsible for tyranny and the desecration of utopian Hindu societies, but it was also aggravated by India's enduring problems with Pakistan.

Most of the other successor states to the Indian Raj--Bengal, Nepal, Sikkim, Bhutan, Tibet--were content to recognize a vague Indian suzerainty over their affairs in exchange for Indian military protection against China. (China's 1962 invasion of northeastern Bengal terrified even nationalist Bengalis into signing an alliance with India the next year.) Relations with Burma, though strained, were basically cordial. Even the hostility of Srilanka to its own Indian-associated Tamil minority did not prevent extensive non-military cooperation between New Delhi and Colombo. Pakistan, though, was quite hostile to the thought of Indian military hegemony in southern Asia, and to India's continued presence in.

Following India's successful nuclear bomb test in April of 1971 the Pakistani army launched a ground invasion of northwestern India with the intent of dismantling and/or capturing Indian nuclear installations before further Indian nuclear weapons could be developed. The Pakistani offense failed, owing to Indian technological superiority, and within two weeks of the outbreak of the Third Indo-Pakistani War India mounted a counteroffensive. As the Indian navy mounted a blockade of Pakistani shipping on the Arabian Sea and the Indian air force established its superiority in Pakistani airspace, the Indian army mounted a tank counteroffensive into the Pakistani Punjab. By the time that military dictator General Ali Bhutto requested a ceasefire in June of 1971, India had captured almost all of Pakistan to the east of the Indus river. India withdrew from Pakistan in exchange for a Pakistani renunciation of all territorial claims upon India, leaving a weakened and humiliated Pakistan to fight a year-long civil war.

By the early 1980's, India had emerged. India's wealth and foreign trade, its relatively high level of social development, and its skillful foreign policy promised to place India in an elite group of Great Powers. The deterioration of intra-East Asian relations did encourage a new focus on foreign policy by the Nehru government. The Indian government closely coordinated its foreign policy with those of the other League member-states, but Indian foreign-policy makers also cultivated relationships with Indian diasporic communities, on maintaining Indian hegemony in South Asia (through weakening Pakistan and maintaining its alliances with its smaller eastern neighbours), and on an alliance with Thailand aimed at supporting that fortunate country against claims by its revisionist neighbours. Indian foreign policy, then, was essentially constructive and defensive, aimed at limiting an Asian war.

The Indian government and the Indian people hoped that India, as the first democratic and enlightened Third World country to emerge as a Great Power, would set a positive example for the wider Third World. By the beginning of the 21st century, Indians of all castes, religions, and ethnolinguistic groups confidently expected their remarkable homeland to be far better off than ever before.