INTERLUDE – ENVISIONING
THE NEW INDIA
At the stroke of the midnight hour, India awoke to freedom of a kind, as
well as to a host of unresolved problems that had only been discussed
theoretically before. In political and intellectual circles, there had for some
time been a deeply felt need to anticipate the nature and content of the
post-independence Indian state. With formal independence achieved,
the need for a definite programme and direction for the new Indian state
now became a matter of urgency; there was a need to order various con-
tending ideas into manageable forms and to find at least an interim closure
to the debates on the nature of the new India.
The debates, when recounted in terms of their particular arguments,
have a spurious rationality and calmness about them: they took place
against the very turbulent backdrop of the violence and population
transfers of 1946–8, the problems of accession of states to the new Union
(notably Kashmir and Hyderabad), armed conflict with Pakistan, and
continuing economic and political pressures from the former colonial
power. But the debates need to be recounted here in that spurious
calmness; because that was the way they were invoked, as legitimising
principles for the actual politics of the independent Indian state. We must
therefore examine the roots of what came to be called the ‘Nehruvian
vision’ or the ‘Nehruvian model’ in India, describing thereby what might
be called the political culture of post-independence India.
We might profitably ask whether this political culture took shape in
the crucial period of transition from the temporary Dominion of India