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.

- MINHAZ MERCHANT

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 vetocarrying 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.