Challenges of Nation Building in India After 1947

Challenges Faced by India After Independence

What Nation Building Meant at Independence

At the hour of midnight on 14‑15 August 1947, India became independent, and Jawaharlal Nehru addressed a special session of the Constituent Assembly in the speech remembered as the tryst with destiny. Nearly everyone in the national movement agreed on two goals. The country would be run by a democratic government, and that government would work for the good of all, particularly the poor and the socially disadvantaged. Nation building is the name for the work of turning that promise into a stable political community with one territory, shared institutions and a common sense of belonging.

The conditions were harsh. Freedom came with the partition of the country, and 1947 was a year of unprecedented violence and displacement. The leaders still kept sight of the larger tasks, from the integration of the princely states and the hard cases of Junagadh, Hyderabad, Kashmir and Goa to the linguistic reorganisation of states.

Three Linked Tasks: Unity, Democracy and Development

The first and most immediate challenge was to shape a nation that was united and yet accommodated the diversity of its society. India was a land of continental size whose people spoke different languages and followed different cultures and religions. It was then widely believed that a country with such diversity could not remain together for long, and the partition of the country appeared to prove that fear. The urgent question was how the territory of India was to be integrated.

The second challenge was to establish democracy. The Constitution granted fundamental rights and extended the right to vote to every citizen, and India adopted representative democracy on the parliamentary pattern. A democratic constitution is necessary but not sufficient, so the task was to develop democratic practices in keeping with it. The third challenge was to ensure the development and well-being of the entire society. The Constitution laid down the principle of equality and special protection for socially disadvantaged groups, and the Directive Principles set out welfare goals, so the real task was to evolve effective policies for economic development and the eradication of poverty.

Many countries that won freedom from colonial rule decided that they could not afford democracy. Their leaders held that national unity came first and that democracy would only add differences and conflicts, so they moved to one-party rule, rule by a single leader or army rule. India's leaders took the harder path, and they did not see politics as the problem but as the way of solving problems. That choice is why unity, democracy and development have to be read together in this period and not as three separate stories.

Diversity and National Identity: Language, Religion, Region and Community

The unity that the new state sought had to accommodate this diversity of language, religion and culture, not erase it. Four elements of diversity shaped the choices of the first decade.

In relative weight, language was the most politically potent element in this decade, because it forced the largest redrawing of the map and produced the sharpest popular movements. Religion produced the deepest crisis, since Partition and the killing of Gandhi tested whether India could be secular at all, and it fixed secularism as a condition of unity. Regional and tribal identities were handled mainly through federal accommodation and constitutional safeguards, and community identity worked through the promise of equality and protection.

The Colonial Inheritance and the Administrative Machinery

The new state inherited an administrative machine but not a settled map. In 1946 the Central Cabinet decided to form the Indian Administrative Service on the model of the Indian Civil Service and the Indian Police Service on the model of the Imperial Police, and when the country was partitioned the Indian remnant of the Indian Civil Service became the Indian Administrative Service.

The internal state boundaries, in contrast, had been drawn in colonial times for administrative convenience or simply followed the territories that the British had annexed or the princes had ruled. The new government therefore had an experienced service to rely on, while the territory and the boundaries still had to be settled. The country it governed was also poor and largely illiterate.

Partition of 1947: Displacement, Violence and Rehabilitation

Why the Principle of Religious Majorities Created Four Problems

Partition was the division of British India into India and Pakistan. According to the two-nation theory advanced by the Muslim League, India consisted of two peoples, Hindus and Muslims, and the League demanded Pakistan as a separate country for the Muslims. The Congress opposed the theory and the demand, but the political developments of the 1940s, the competition between the Congress and the League, and the British role led to the decision to create Pakistan. The division followed the principle of religious majorities, which meant that areas where Muslims were in a majority would make up Pakistan and the rest would stay with India.

The principle looked simple and was not, because it raised four problems.

• There was no single belt of Muslim-majority areas, only two concentrations, one in the west and one in the east, which could not be joined. Pakistan was therefore made of West and East Pakistan, separated by a long stretch of Indian territory.
• Not every Muslim-majority area wanted to join Pakistan. Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, known as the Frontier Gandhi, led the North-West Frontier Province and opposed the two-nation theory, but his voice was ignored and the province was merged with Pakistan.
• Punjab and Bengal, two of the Muslim-majority provinces, contained very large areas in which non-Muslims were the majority, so both provinces were divided on the religious majority at district level or even lower. The decision could not be made by the midnight of 14‑15 August, and many people did not know on the day of independence whether they lived in India or in Pakistan.
• Minorities were left on both sides of the border, and this was the most intractable problem of all.

The boundaries of Punjab and Bengal were drawn by two boundary commissions that shared a joint chairman, Cyril Radcliffe. The commission for Punjab was instructed to demarcate the boundaries of the two parts of the province by ascertaining the contiguous majority areas of Muslims and non-Muslims. The line, called the Radcliffe Line, was published on 17 August 1947, two days after independence. Its Punjab section is today part of the India-Pakistan border and its Bengal section is the India-Bangladesh border.

Violence, Migration and the Division of Assets

As soon as it became clear that the country would be partitioned, violence started on an unprecedented scale against whichever community was smaller in a given area. No one had expected the scale of the problem and no one had a plan for handling it. The violence went out of control, and communities on both sides were often forced to leave their homes at a few hours' notice. Cities such as Lahore, Amritsar and Kolkata were divided into communal zones that members of the other community avoided.

Minorities fled and found shelter in refugee camps, often facing an unhelpful local administration and police. Many were attacked on the road, thousands of women were abducted, converted and forced into marriage, and in many cases women were killed by their own families to protect family honour. Survivors described Partition as a division of hearts.

NCERT says about 80 lakh people migrated across the new border and five to ten lakh were killed; other accounts give wider ranges, between 1.2 and 2 crore people displaced and between 2 lakh and 20 lakh dead, with about 10 lakh the figure most scholars accept.

Partition also divided the machinery of the state. Financial assets, liabilities, tables, chairs, typewriters, books and even the musical instruments of the police band were divided, and so were the government and railway employees. Gandhi was unhappy with what he saw as the Indian government's decision not to honour its financial commitments to Pakistan, and after his last fast in January 1948 the Government of India agreed to give Pakistan its dues.

Refugees and Rehabilitation: Punjab and Bengal Compared

The 1951 Census of India recorded that 2 per cent of the country's population were refugees, 1.3 per cent from West Pakistan and 0.7 per cent from East Pakistan. The two borders produced different patterns of migration.

The state response had several parts. Camps were later converted into permanent housing through building projects from 1948 onwards, and colonies such as Lajpat Nagar and Rajinder Nagar came up in Delhi, whose population rose from 9,17,939 in the 1941 Census to 17,44,072 in 1951. Sindhi Hindus settled mainly in Gujarat, Maharashtra and Rajasthan, and the Governor-General, C. Rajagopalachari, laid the foundation of a township for them in Maharashtra and named it Ulhasnagar. The Resettlement of Displaced Persons (Land Acquisition) Act, 1948, was passed to acquire land for resettling displaced persons, and the Union government had a Ministry of Rehabilitation, which Ajit Prasad Jain held under Nehru after the First Lok Sabha was constituted in 1952.

The two governments also negotiated on minorities. The Nehru-Liaquat Pact of 8 April 1950, signed in New Delhi by the Prime Ministers of India and Pakistan, allowed refugees to return to dispose of their property, provided for the return of abducted women and looted property, did not recognise forced conversions, confirmed minority rights and set up minority commissions in both countries.

Minorities, Secularism and the Death of Gandhi

Even after the large migration, Muslims were 10 to 12 per cent of the population of India in 1951. The question for the new state was how it would treat its Muslim citizens and its other religious minorities, namely Sikhs, Christians, Jains, Buddhists, Parsis and Jews, and whether a partition on religious lines made India a Hindu nation.

The leaders of the national movement did not believe so. They held that India must treat persons of all religions equally and must not give superior status to the followers of one faith, so that being religious or a believer would not be a test of citizenship. Nehru put the practical case in a letter to the Chief Ministers on 15 October 1947, writing that failure to give the large Muslim minority security and the rights of citizens would leave a "festering sore" that would poison the whole body politic.

Gandhi spent 15 August 1947 in riot-torn Kolkata, where his presence improved the situation for a time, and he fasted when the riots returned. In January 1948 he undertook his last fast in Delhi, which reduced communal tension and allowed Muslims of Delhi and the surrounding areas to return to their homes safely. Extremists in both communities blamed him for their condition, and on 30 January 1948 one of them, Nathuram Vinayak Godse, fired three bullets at him during his evening prayer in Delhi, killing him instantly. The shock of the assassination brought the carnage that Partition had set off to an end, and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh was banned on 4 February 1948.

Integration of the Princely States into the Indian Union

Lapse of Paramountcy and the Problem of 565 States

British India was divided into the British Indian provinces, which were directly under the British government, and the princely states, which were ruled by princes who enjoyed control over their internal affairs as long as they accepted British supremacy. That supremacy was called paramountcy. Just before independence the British announced that paramountcy would lapse when British rule ended, which left every state legally free of any overlord.

The princely states covered one-third of the land area of the British Indian Empire, and one out of four Indians lived under princely rule. When paramountcy lapsed, all the states, 565 of them, would become legally independent. The British took the view that each was free to join India or Pakistan or to remain independent, and that the decision lay with the ruler and not with the people. NCERT says 565 states; other accounts give 552 within the present boundaries of India, of which 549 joined India and three, Hyderabad, Junagadh and Kashmir, at first refused.

The problem began quickly. The ruler of Travancore announced that his state had decided on independence, and the Nizam of Hyderabad made a similar announcement the next day. The Nawab of Bhopal was averse to joining the Constituent Assembly. India now faced the real possibility of dividing further into a number of small countries, and the people of the princely states, most of which were governed in a non-democratic manner, had poor prospects of democracy.

Patel, Menon and the Instrument of Accession

The interim government took a firm stand against a division of India into small principalities. Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel was the Deputy Prime Minister and Home Minister in the crucial period after independence, and he negotiated with the rulers firmly but diplomatically. V. P. Menon served as Secretary to the Government of India in the Ministry of the States under Patel, and the two headed the States Department, which handled relations with the princely states. The task required skilful persuasion because of the sheer fragmentation of the map. There were 26 small states in what is now Odisha, and the Saurashtra region of Gujarat had 14 big states, 119 small states and numerous other administrations.

The government's approach rested on three considerations. The people of most of the states clearly wanted to become part of the Indian Union. The government was ready to be flexible in giving autonomy to some regions, to accommodate plurality. And after Partition had brought the contest over territory into focus, the integration and consolidation of the territorial boundaries of the nation had assumed supreme importance. Lord Mountbatten also pointed out that "geographic compulsions" meant that most states must choose India, taking the position that only states sharing a border with Pakistan could in practice choose to accede to it.

Two documents carried the diplomacy. The Instrument of Accession was signed by a ruler to join India or Pakistan, and it transferred control over three subjects, defence, external affairs and communications. The Standstill Agreement confirmed the continuation of the existing agreements and administrative practices, and it gave time for negotiation.

The States Department refused a Standstill Agreement to any state that had not signed the Instrument of Accession, which made the Standstill a bargaining tool as well as a stopgap. Between May 1947 and 15 August 1947 peaceful negotiation brought the vast majority of the states, among them almost all whose territories touched the new boundaries, into the Union.

Junagadh, Hyderabad, Kashmir and Manipur

Four cases proved harder than the rest. Junagadh, Hyderabad and Kashmir held out against accession, and Manipur, whose Maharaja acceded before independence, came into the Union only through a disputed merger.

Hyderabad is the clearest example of why the case could not be left alone. About 87 per cent of its 1.7 crore people were Hindu while its ruler was a Muslim, and the Telangana peasantry had risen against the Nizam's oppressive rule, with the Communists and the Hyderabad Congress in the forefront. The Nizam's paramilitary razakars targeted non-Muslims in particular.

Operation Polo ended the question in a few days, although the communal violence that accompanied it was severe. The official estimate of deaths was between 27,000 and 40,000, and scholarly estimates run to 2 lakh or more. After accession the Nizam became the Rajpramukh, the constitutional head of the new Part B state. Kashmir became a long dispute, from its contested accession to the later debate over Article 370.

Manipur shows the democratic side of integration. It became the first part of India to hold an election on the basis of universal adult franchise, in June 1948. In its Legislative Assembly the state Congress wanted merger with India while other parties opposed it, and the Government of India persuaded the Maharaja to sign the Merger Agreement on 21 September 1949. It took effect on 15 October, and many in Manipur still dispute the legality of the process.

Border states such as Jodhpur also tested the process. Jodhpur's ruler, Hanwant Singh, held talks with Jinnah, but Mountbatten pointed out that the accession of a predominantly Hindu state to Pakistan would violate the two-nation theory, and the atmosphere in the state itself was hostile to accession to Pakistan.

Merger and Democratisation of the Princely Unions

Accession was only the first step, because the Instruments of Accession covered only three subjects and left the states insulated from the policies of the Centre. After accession, the larger states and groups of small states were integrated in four further steps.

1. Merger: Rulers signed Covenants of Merger that combined adjacent states into a princely union, in which all rulers lost their ruling powers except one who became the Rajpramukh. Patel united 222 states of the Kathiawar peninsula into the union of Saurashtra in January 1948. Madhya Bharat emerged on 28 May 1948, the Patiala and East Punjab States Union on 15 July 1948, the United State of Rajasthan by 15 May 1949 and Travancore-Cochin in mid-1949. Many other small states were merged into provinces, so that 66 states in Gujarat and the Deccan were merged into Bombay with effect from 1948.
2. Democratisation: In December 1947 Menon suggested that rulers take practical steps towards popular government, and the States Department put this into effect.
3. Centralisation and constitutionalisation: In May 1948 the Rajpramukhs signed new instruments that gave the Government of India power to legislate on all matters. From 1950 the Constitution divided the units into Part A states, which were the former British provinces together with the princely states merged into them; Part B states, which were the princely unions along with Mysore and Hyderabad; and Part C states, which were the Chief Commissioners' provinces and other centrally administered areas.
4. Reorganisation: The States Reorganisation Act of 1956 and the Seventh Amendment removed the distinction between Part A and Part B states and replaced the Rajpramukhs by Governors, which finally ended the princely order.

The path was not smooth, and the administrative and social difficulties explain why the process took until 1956. The merged states had a history of rivalry. In the former Central India Agency the rivalry between two groups of states inside the princely union of Vindhya Pradesh became so bad that the Government of India persuaded the rulers to sign a Merger Agreement that cancelled the old Covenants and took the area under a Chief Commissioner.

Princely administrations differed widely in size, law and efficiency, so staff had to be absorbed, and the provincial administrations took over the staff of the princely states with guarantees of equal pay and treatment. Bhopal, whose ruler feared that it would lose its identity in a merger with the neighbouring Maratha states, became a Chief Commissioner's province, as did the sensitive border states of Kutch, Tripura and Manipur. The social difficulty was sharpest where the religion of the ruler differed from that of most of his people, as in Junagadh, Hyderabad and Kashmir, and Hyderabad also had a peasantry in revolt.

Privy Purses and the 26th Amendment

The princes received compensation for surrendering their states. Under the merger arrangements the Government of India paid each ruler an annual privy purse, protected his private property and guaranteed his personal privileges, dignities and titles, and it fixed the sums by factors such as the revenue of the state and its rank in the salute system. The sums were fixed, tax-free and charged on the Consolidated Fund of India under Article 291.

A motion to abolish them passed the Lok Sabha in 1970 but failed by one vote to reach the required two-thirds majority in the Rajya Sabha. On 6 September 1970 the President then issued an order withdrawing recognition from the rulers, and test cases filed by some of the rulers in the Supreme Court ended in their favour. The Constitution (Twenty-sixth Amendment) Act, 1971, then omitted Articles 291 and 362 with effect from 28 December 1971 and inserted Article 363A, under which the rulers cease to be recognised and the privy purse is abolished. The Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi, argued for the abolition on the ground of equal rights for all citizens and the need to reduce the revenue deficit.

French and Portuguese Enclaves: Completing the Territory

The end of the princely states raised the question of the colonial enclaves. Pondicherry, Karaikal, Yanam, Mahe and Chandernagore remained French colonies, and Daman, Diu, Dadra and Nagar Haveli and Goa remained Portuguese.

• Chandernagore: A plebiscite on 19 June 1949 voted 7,463 to 114 for integration with India. The territory was ceded de facto on 14 August 1949 and de jure on 2 May 1950.
• Pondicherry, Karaikal, Mahe and Yanam: Demonstrations in Yanam and Mahe brought pro-merger groups to power, and a referendum in Pondicherry and Karaikal in October 1954 favoured merger. De facto control passed to India on 1 November 1954, a treaty of cession was signed in 1956, and the French National Assembly ratified it in 1962. The 14th Amendment of 1962 then made the territory a Union Territory.
• Dadra and Nagar Haveli: An uprising in July 1954 threw off Portuguese rule, and the Tenth Amendment of 1961 made the territory a Union Territory.
• Goa, Daman and Diu: Portugal resisted a negotiated settlement. On 15 August 1955 five thousand non-violent demonstrators marched at the border and were fired on, and 22 were killed. The Indian Army entered Portuguese India on 18 December 1961 in Operation Vijay, and Portugal surrendered on 19 December. The action ended 451 years of Portuguese rule and closed the last European colony in the subcontinent, and the territory became a Union Territory by the Twelfth Amendment of 1962. Goa became a state in 1987 and Daman and Diu a separate Union Territory.

Krishna Menon had urged taking Goa by force after Nehru's hope for a negotiated end failed. The enclaves were governed differently from the princely states, but they finished the same task of fixing the territory of the republic.

Reorganisation of States: The Linguistic Principle and the 1956 Act

Why Linguistic States Were Postponed After 1947

Once Partition and the integration of the princely states were under way, the task became to draw the internal boundaries of the states so that linguistic and cultural plurality could be reflected without weakening the unity of the nation. The national movement had rejected the colonial boundaries as artificial and had promised the linguistic principle as the basis for forming states. After the Nagpur session of 1920 the Congress itself reorganised its provincial committees by linguistic zones.

After independence the leaders reconsidered. They feared that carving out states by language might lead to disruption and disintegration, and that it would draw attention away from the social and economic challenges. The fate of the princely states was undecided and the memory of Partition was fresh, so the central leadership decided to postpone the matter. Two bodies examined the question in turn.

• Dhar Commission: Set up on 17 June 1948 under S. K. Dhar, it reported on 10 December 1948 that forming provinces on exclusively or even mainly linguistic considerations was not in the larger interests of the nation, and it preferred administrative convenience.
• JVP Committee: Appointed by the Congress in December 1948, it consisted of Jawaharlal Nehru, Vallabhbhai Patel and Pattabhi Sitaramayya. Its report of 1 April 1949 said that the time was not suitable for new provinces but also that public sentiment was "insistent and overwhelming", so that democrats had to submit to it, subject to limits in the interest of India as a whole.

B. R. Ambedkar, in a memorandum of 14 October 1948 to the Dhar Commission, had supported linguistic provinces, specifically a Marathi-majority Maharashtra with Bombay as its capital. K. M. Munshi, a Gujarati leader, opposed linguistic reorganisation because a linguistic group's political ambition could be met only by excluding other groups.

Potti Sriramulu and the Creation of Andhra State

The decision of the national leadership was challenged by local leaders and by the people, and the protests began in the Telugu-speaking areas of the old Madras province. The Vishalandhra movement demanded that these areas be separated from Madras and formed into an Andhra province. The Central government's vacillation gave the movement momentum. Potti Sriramulu, a Gandhian and Congress leader, began an indefinite fast on 19 October 1952 and died on 15 December 1952, after 56 days.

His death caused great unrest and violent outbursts in Andhra. People took to the streets in large numbers, many were injured or killed in police firing, and several legislators resigned their seats in Madras. The Prime Minister announced a separate Andhra state in December 1952, and Andhra State was formed on 1 October 1953, with Kurnool as its capital and Tanguturi Prakasam Pantulu as its first Chief Minister. It was the first state in independent India to be formed for linguistic reasons, and Sriramulu's home district was renamed Sri Potti Sriramulu Nellore District on 4 June 2008.

The formation of Andhra spurred struggles for linguistic states elsewhere. Madras city had been a sticking point because the Telugu people wanted it as their capital. Telangana, the Telugu-speaking part of Hyderabad State, remained a separate question until 1956.

States Reorganisation Commission and the Act of 1956

The pressure forced the Government of India to appoint a three-member States Reorganisation Commission in December 1953. Its chairman was Justice Fazl Ali, and its other members were K. M. Panikkar and H. N. Kunzru. The Commission submitted its report in September 1955 and accepted that state boundaries should broadly reflect language, but it rejected the theory of "one language, one state". It said that it was neither possible nor desirable to reorganise states on the basis of the single test of either language or culture, and it named four factors to weigh.

• The preservation and strengthening of the unity and security of the country.
• Linguistic and cultural homogeneity.
• Financial, economic and administrative considerations.
• The planning and promotion of the welfare of the people in each state and of the nation as a whole.

The Commission recommended abolishing the four-fold classification of states and creating 16 states and 3 centrally administered territories. The Government accepted the proposals with some changes, and the States Reorganisation Act, 1956, with the Seventh Amendment, abolished the distinction between Part A and Part B states and abolished the Part C states. On 1 November 1956 this produced 14 states and 6 Union Territories. The Rajpramukhs gave way to Governors.

Some recommendations were not accepted. The Commission proposed a separate Vidarbha state, but the Government merged those Marathi-speaking areas into the bilingual Bombay State. The Commission also suggested keeping Telangana as a separate Hyderabad State for some years, with the option of unification with Andhra after the 1961 elections. After an agreement between Telangana and Andhra leaders on 20 February 1956, a unified Andhra Pradesh was established on 1 November 1956.

States Formed After 1956

The acceptance of the linguistic principle did not mean that every state became linguistic at once. Language did not remain the sole basis either, and in later years sub-regions asked for statehood on the ground of a regional culture or an imbalance in development.

The Punjab Reorganisation Act, 1966, was passed on 18 September 1966. It separated most of the territory that became Haryana, transferred hill areas to Himachal Pradesh, which was then a Union Territory, and made Chandigarh a Union Territory serving as the capital of both states.

Did Linguistic States Strengthen Indian Unity?

The leaders feared that linguistic states would foster separatism and create pressure on the young nation. Under popular pressure the leadership finally chose linguistic states, hoping that accepting regional and linguistic claims would reduce the threat of division. Reorganisation was also seen as more democratic. The record of the following decades supports the case for unity in four ways.

• Opened politics: The path to politics and power was now open to people other than the small English-speaking elite.
• Uniform basis: Linguistic reorganisation gave a more uniform basis for drawing state boundaries.
• No disintegration: It did not lead to the disintegration that many had feared, and it strengthened national unity.
• Plurality accepted: By accepting the principle of diversity, India showed that democracy meant recognising differences that could at times be oppositional.

The limits are equally clear. The pressure for reorganisation came from below, with fasts, riots and police firing in Andhra and a movement in Bombay in which 107 people died, while the leadership had postponed the matter in 1948 and 1949. Disputes remained, for example over Belagavi, over the status of Bombay city, over Vidarbha and over a Punjabi-speaking state, and the later states of 2000 and 2014 show that language was not the only basis.

The Language Question and the Official Language

The Munshi-Ayyangar Compromise of 1949

After three years of debate the Constituent Assembly reached a compromise at the end of 1949, the Munshi-Ayyangar formula, named after K. M. Munshi and Gopalaswamy Ayyangar. Part XVII of the Constitution followed it. It does not mention a "national language" and defines only the official language of the Union.

1. Article 343: The official language of the Union is Hindi in Devanagari script, and for fifteen years from the commencement of the Constitution English would continue to be used for all the official purposes for which it was used before. Parliament may by law provide for English after the fifteen years.
2. Article 344: The President was to constitute a Commission on the official language after five years and again after ten years.

The first Official Language Commission, under B. G. Kher, was appointed on 7 June 1955 and reported on 31 July 1956 with steps to replace English by Hindi eventually, and two members, one from Madras State and one from West Bengal, recorded dissenting notes.

The Official Languages Act, 1963, and the 1965 Anti-Hindi Agitation

As the end of the fifteen-year period approached, the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam led opposition to Hindi in Madras State. To allay the fears of non-Hindi speakers, Parliament passed the Official Languages Act in 1963, under Prime Minister Nehru. It allowed the use of English beyond 1965 and in effect made the Government of India bilingual. The apprehension remained that later governments might not honour the assurance. As 26 January 1965 approached the agitation grew. A clash between students and Congress workers in Madurai on 25 January became a riot that spread to other parts of the state, and in about two weeks around 70 people were killed by official estimates, though unofficial reports put the toll as high as 500.

On 11 February the Union ministers C. Subramaniam and O. V. Alagesan from Madras State offered their resignations over the language policy.

The agitation had a lasting effect on language policy. The Act was amended in 1967 to provide that English would not be ended until a resolution was passed by the legislature of every state that had not adopted Hindi as its official language and by each House of Parliament. A resolution of 18 January 1968 required the development of all the languages in the Eighth Schedule. The three-language formula of 1968 provided for Hindi, English and a modern Indian language, preferably a southern one, in Hindi-speaking states, and for Hindi, English and the regional language in non-Hindi-speaking states. Tamil Nadu never implemented it and kept a two-language policy of Tamil and English.

Tribal and North-Eastern Frontiers in the Union

Excluded Areas, the Sixth Schedule and Special Provisions

Integration also meant fitting tribal and frontier regions into the Union on terms they could accept. During British rule the frontier regions of Assam were designated "excluded areas" or "partially excluded areas", and the tribes governed themselves by traditional systems. The framers continued the pattern in the Sixth Schedule, which provides autonomy and self-governance to Scheduled Tribes in the hill regions of the North-East through autonomous district councils. The tribal areas elsewhere were covered by the Fifth Schedule with weaker autonomy. B. R. Ambedkar explained the difference by saying that the tribals of Assam had not adopted the modes and manners of the Hindus around them and that their laws of inheritance, marriage and custom were quite different.

The Naga Movement and the Creation of Nagaland

The Naga National Council was reorganised in 1946 at Sanis, in present-day Wokha district, with T. Aliba Imti Ao as president. Towards the end of 1949 the hardline leader Zapu Phizo took it over and turned it into a secessionist platform, and the protracted conflict with the Government of India followed. A 16-point agreement was reached in July 1960 between Nehru and the leaders of the Naga People's Convention, by which the Government recognised the formation of Nagaland as a full-fledged state. Nagaland was inaugurated as the 16th state of the Union on 1 December 1963.

The Constitution (Thirteenth Amendment) Act, 1962, inserted Article 371A. It provides that no Act of Parliament in respect of the religious or social practices of the Nagas, Naga customary law and procedure, the administration of civil and criminal justice involving decisions under Naga customary law, or ownership and transfer of land and its resources applies to Nagaland unless the Legislative Assembly of Nagaland decides so by a resolution.

Manipur, Tripura and Arunachal Pradesh After Integration

Manipur and Tripura first acceded to India in August 1947. The Tripura Merger Agreement was signed on 9 September 1949, which made Tripura a Part C state, and it became a Union Territory without a legislature in November 1956, with an elected ministry from July 1963. Manipur became a Part C state after its merger agreement took effect on 15 October 1949. Both became full states on 21 January 1972 under the North-Eastern Areas (Reorganisation) Act, 1971, along with Meghalaya, which had been created in 1969 as an autonomous state within Assam by the 22nd Amendment.

Arunachal Pradesh was the North-East Frontier Agency until 1972, and then a Union Territory with its present name. It became a state on 20 February 1987, together with Mizoram and Goa. Mizoram was given statehood after the Mizoram Peace Accord of 1986 between the Central government and the Mizo National Front ended a two-decade-old insurgency. Arunachal's capital, Itanagar, is named after the Ita Fort, and the state has two national parks, Namdapha and Mouling.

Building Democracy: The Constitution and the First General Election

From the Constitution to the Election Commission

The Constituent Assembly adopted the Constitution on 26 November 1949. It was signed on 24 January 1950 and came into effect on 26 January 1950. Until then the country was ruled by an interim government, and the task was now to install the first democratically elected government. The Constitution had laid down the rules, and the machine had to be put in place.

The Election Commission of India was set up in January 1950, with Sukumar Sen as the first Chief Election Commissioner. Article 324 vests the superintendence, direction and control of elections in the Election Commission, and Article 326 bases elections to the House of the People and the State Legislative Assemblies on adult suffrage.

The First General Election of 1951‑52

The first elections were expected in 1950 itself, but holding a free and fair election in a country of India's size proved difficult. The Election Commission had to draw the boundaries of constituencies and prepare electoral rolls of all eligible citizens, and both tasks took a long time. The first draft of the rolls did not record nearly 40 lakh women by their own names; they were listed only as "wife of" or "daughter of". The Commission refused to accept these listings and ordered a revision where possible and deletion where necessary.

The scale was unprecedented. There were 17 crore eligible voters, who were to elect about 3,200 members of the state assemblies and 489 members of the Lok Sabha. Only 15 per cent of the voters were literate, so the Commission needed a special method of voting, and it trained over 3 lakh officers and polling staff. A British member of the Indian Civil Service claimed that recording the votes of so many illiterate people would be an absurd farce. The elections were postponed twice and finally held from October 1951 to February 1952. They are called the 1952 election because most of the country voted in January 1952, and the campaigning, polling and counting took six months.

The election was competitive, with more than four candidates on average for each seat, and more than half the eligible voters turned out. The results were accepted as fair even by the losers. The Indian National Congress won 364 of the 489 seats with 45 per cent of the vote, and Jawaharlal Nehru became the first democratically elected Prime Minister. The first general election was also the first big test of democracy in a poor and illiterate country, and it showed the critics to be wrong.

Economic Development and Foreign Policy: Planning, Agriculture and Non-Alignment

The Planning Commission and the First Five Year Plan

Economic development was the third challenge. The Planning Commission was set up in March 1950 by a resolution of the Government of India and was not a body established by the Constitution. Its role was advisory, and its recommendations became effective only when the Union Cabinet approved them. The Prime Minister was its chairperson. The idea of planning had public support in the 1940s and 1950s, and a section of big industrialists had drafted a joint proposal for a planned economy in 1944, called the Bombay Plan. The Commission followed the Soviet example in choosing Five Year Plans, and the draft of the First Five Year Plan and then the Plan Document, released in December 1951, generated great excitement.

The First Five Year Plan (1951‑56) sought to take the economy out of the cycle of poverty. K. N. Raj, a young economist who helped draft it, argued that India should "hasten slowly" for the first two decades, since fast growth might endanger democracy. The plan addressed mainly the agrarian sector, because agriculture had been hit hardest by Partition, with investment in dams and irrigation and large allocations for projects such as the Bhakra Nangal Dam. It identified the pattern of land distribution as the main obstacle to agricultural growth and treated land reforms as the key to development.

The Second Plan, a Mixed Economy and the Food Question

The Second Five Year Plan, launched in 1956 and drafted by a team under P. C. Mahalanobis, stressed heavy industry. Before it was finalised, the Congress session at Avadi near Madras passed a resolution declaring a "socialist pattern of society" as the goal. The government imposed substantial tariffs on imports to protect domestic industry, and industries such as electricity, railways, steel, machinery and communication were developed in the public sector while private industry also grew.

The balance between industry and agriculture was difficult to strike. The Third Plan was not much different from the Second, and critics said the strategy showed an urban bias or wrongly put industry ahead of agriculture. The risk of food shortage loomed large, and effective policies for the eradication of poverty remained the real test of the development challenge.

Non-Alignment as a Shield for Independent Policy

Foreign policy served the same ends. Nehru, who was his own foreign minister from 1946 to 1964, set three objectives, preserving the hard-won sovereignty, protecting territorial integrity and promoting rapid economic development, and he pursued them through non-alignment. India kept away from the military alliances led by the United States and the Soviet Union, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation and the Warsaw Pact. The balance was not always perfect. In 1956 India led the world protest when Britain attacked Egypt over the Suez Canal, but it did not join the public condemnation when the Soviet Union invaded Hungary in the same year.

Significance: Why the First Decade Decided the Republic's Course

What the First Decade Settled and What Stayed Open

By 1956 the internal map was largely settled. The princely states and the French enclaves were in the Union, states were drawn on a mainly linguistic basis, a Constitution was in force, and a general election had shown that universal adult franchise could work; the Portuguese enclaves followed in 1961. These choices of the early years explain why India remained a democracy while many new states did not.

Sources

• NCERT: Class 12 Politics in India since Independence, Chapter 1
• NCERT: Class 12 Politics in India since Independence, Chapter 2
• NCERT: Class 12 Politics in India since Independence, Chapter 3
• NCERT: Class 12 Politics in India since Independence, Chapter 4
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