Marathi, Tamil, Gujarati and so on – some four-
teen major languages. Urdu is the language of the
largest minority, the Muslims: in its spoken form
it is Hindi, but it uses a different script. Because
it involved the Muslim minority it was therefore
especially important to Nehru to find an accept-
able solution. The sensitivity of the language issue
is that it can move beyond ethnic and cultural
identity to assertions of national independence.
Nehru wisely compromised, allowing many lan-
guages to coexist with English and Hindi and
postponing the introduction of Hindi as the
national language for fifteen years – whereupon it
was postponed again. Nehru’s readiness to envis-
age a multicultural India took the heat out of the
divisive language issue. But when language was
being used as part of an independence claim, as
in the extreme north-east of India, Nehru used
force to suppress such movements.
Nehru laid down the fundamental principle
that religion and politics should be separated and
that India was a secular state, all of whose citizens,
of whatever religion, enjoyed equal civil rights.
This necessarily represented a step away from the
spirituality that lay at the heart of Gandhi’s
mission. Muslims, who constitute about 11 per
cent of India’s population, had traditionally been
supporters of the Congress and continued to be
elected to the Assembly and to serve in India’s
governments. Nehru and his successors worked
hard to remove any discrimination against the
Muslims, but the improving Muslim–Hindi rela-
tionship was threatened in the second half of the
1980s by the rise of a group of Hindu funda-
mentalists. They began to stir up religious ani-
mosities by attempting to reclaim former Hindu
sites on which mosques now stood. So some
fanatical Hindi groups were acting against a tra-
dition renowned for its tolerance towards other
religions.
Nehru was the privileged son of a wealthy
family. He nevertheless regarded democratic,
humane socialism not only as the best means to
secure Indian economic development, but also as
the best weapon to break down the evil of India’s
discriminatory class and caste society. Before and
after independence, he linked socialism in India,
which he believed would free its peasant and
urban poor from dependence and indignity, to
liberating the oppressed in Asia and Africa from
the dependence imposed by Western imperialism.
He was optimistic that reason, law and democ-
racy would overcome tradition and prejudice. His
was a noble vision that diverged significantly from
reality both in his lifetime and after. But his
democracy of the poor did not deliver the results
he hoped for. The democratic structure became
distorted by the power and influence of family
connection and of caste, by the landowning
class and the wealthy elite. A huge conservative
bureaucracy clogs and frustrates fair and efficient
government. India did not make the progress
Nehru expected by adopting scientific socialism
and Western liberal values, but that does not
mean that the fundamental principles of his policy
were wrong. Indians, in developing their country,
did not suffer the harsh fate that befell millions
of Stalin’s subjects and Mao Zedong’s peasants.
India’s economic development from independ-
ence to the 1990s only just kept ahead of its pop-
ulation growth. In successive five-year plans
Nehru accepted the premise of the Soviet experi-
ence, that to come of age as an independent state
India would need to give priority to becoming a
modern industrial and military power, with its
own heavy industries. The public sector would
enter into contracts with the key industries, and
central planners would control the commanding
heights of the economy. As in Britain, commu-
nism and doctrinaire socialism were rejected in
favour of a mixed economy. Not until the 1980s
did the emphasis revert back to greater reliance on
the private sector. Despite the establishment of a
modern industrial core – steel, oil, chemicals,
power and transport – India’s economic develop-
ment mainly benefited a growing urban middle
class, which demanded all the consumer luxuries
of the West. That development left behind the
urban poor and the destitute, living in shacks and
on pavements in the cities – cities which, in this
respect, resembled the Third World urban sprawls,
with their contrasts between rich and poor.
The increase in agricultural production was
also disappointing compared with that attained by
other Asian countries, such as South Korea. The
‘green revolution’, which achieved a tripling of
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