21st century India belongs to?

New Delhi: Recently in a poll done by Reputation Institute, to know how some countries perceived in terms of overall respect, trust, esteem admiration and good feelings, India performed much better than other countries and was as high as U.S, with 32 points. In other countries such as Switzerland, Germany, Italy, Japan and even UK, the perception gap is least.

The report states that 82 percent of Indians are basking in self-esteem, whereas it was 79 percent for China, 77 percent for the U.S. and 57 percent for Japan. This result reflects the work that was done by people like Jawaharlal Nehru, Mahatma Gandhi, B.R. Ambedkar, Rajendra Prasad and many more, who tore their hair to work out viable and acceptable institutions of self-government for India. Constitution-making for India didn't begin in 1947; its origins go back to the Montagu-Chelmsford reforms of 1919. Thereafter, it went through a bumpy and treacherous ride, the Simon Commission Report, the three Round Table conferences, the Cripps Mission and the Cabinet Mission, which left many convinced that independent India would be violently ungovernable. But these abstruse and fractious exercises actually helped clear up the clutter for the inheritors of the Raj.

Prior to 1947, there were four major concerns. First, would India be governed by an overriding Centre or be a loose federation, a United States of India? Second, how would religious minorities be given a stake in the new dispensation? Third, how would the internal differentiations within Hindus be tackled to prevent, as many feared, Brahmin domination? Finally, how would democracy square with mass poverty and illiteracy?

Yet, India's success with democracy wouldn't have happened without the presence of a middle class that had imbibed a measure of European Enlightenment and combined it with patriotic selflessness. It was the relative irrelevance of this class in Pakistan that gave feudal landlords and soldiers the upper hand in that country. India's thriving Republic is an Indian achievement but it's also an outcome of inheritance.

Courtesy: Swapan Dasupta and The Times Of Iindia

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