India after Independence: Consolidation, Reorganisation and Change, 1947–1991

The Constituent Assembly adopted the Constitution on 26 November 1949, and it came into force on 26 January 1950 — the date chosen because the Congress had observed 26 January as Independence Day since 1930. India became a republic, Rajendra Prasad became its first President, and the Election Commission was set up on 25 January 1950, with Sukumar Sen as the first Chief Election Commissioner. India also chose to remain in the Commonwealth as a republic, under the London Declaration of April 1949, which accepted the Crown only as a symbol of the association.

The first general election was held in phases from October 1951 to February 1952 — the largest exercise of its kind the world had seen. About 17.3 crore people were registered, the voting age was 21, and most voters could not read, so each candidate had a separate ballot box marked with a party symbol. The Congress won 364 of the 489 Lok Sabha seats with about 45 per cent of the vote; the Communist Party of India, with 16 seats, was the largest opposition party. Among the new parties were the Bharatiya Jana Sangh (1951), founded by Syama Prasad Mookerjee, and later the Swatantra Party (1959) of C. Rajagopalachari, which opposed the drift towards state control.

Political scientists such as Rajni Kothari called the first two decades the "Congress system": one dominant party that contained many factions and interests within itself, while opposition parties acted as pressure groups at its margins. Its first breach came in Kerala in 1957, where the CPI under E. M. S. Namboodiripad formed the first elected communist government; it was dismissed under Article 356 in 1959 after an agitation against its education and land policies. After Nehru’s death (27 May 1964), Lal Bahadur Shastri became Prime Minister; after Shastri’s death at Tashkent in January 1966, Indira Gandhi. The 1967 election cut the Congress majority sharply and brought non-Congress coalition governments to power in several states. In 1969 the party split — into the Congress (O) and Indira Gandhi’s Congress (R) — after the contest for the presidency in which V. V. Giri defeated the official candidate. That year 14 major banks were nationalised (July 1969), and in 1971 Indira Gandhi won a large majority on the slogan "Garibi Hatao".

The Congress had organised its own provincial committees on linguistic lines since 1920, but after partition the leadership feared that redrawing the map by language would encourage further division. The Dhar Commission (1948) advised against linguistic provinces, and the JVP Committee (1949) — Jawaharlal Nehru, Vallabhbhai Patel and Pattabhi Sitaramayya — counselled postponement. The demand for a Telugu state forced the issue: Potti Sriramulu began a fast on 19 October 1952 and died on 15 December 1952 after 58 days. In the riots that followed, the government conceded, and Andhra State was formed on 1 October 1953 from the Telugu-speaking districts of Madras.

The States Reorganisation Commission, appointed in December 1953 under Fazl Ali with K. M. Panikkar and H. N. Kunzru as members, reported in September 1955. It accepted language as an important basis for states but rejected "one language, one state" as the sole principle, weighing also unity and security, financial viability and administrative convenience. The States Reorganisation Act, 1956, together with the Seventh Amendment, took effect on 1 November 1956: it created 14 states and 6 Union Territories and abolished the Part A, B, C and D classification of the original Constitution. Kerala was formed from Travancore–Cochin and Malabar, Andhra Pradesh by joining the Telangana region of Hyderabad to Andhra State, and Mysore was enlarged; Bombay was left as a bilingual state.

Two renamings are often asked: Madras State became Tamil Nadu (1969) and Mysore became Karnataka (1973). Language also tested the Union through the question of an official language. The Constitution made Hindi in Devanagari the official language of the Union, with English to continue for fifteen years. As 1965 approached, the Official Languages Act, 1963 provided that English may continue; in 1965 a strong anti-Hindi agitation broke out in Madras State, and the Act was amended in 1967 to guarantee the use of English alongside Hindi for as long as non-Hindi states wished.

Planning had wide support before independence: the Congress’s National Planning Committee (1938), the industrialists’ Bombay Plan (1944), the Gandhian Plan of S. N. Agarwal and M. N. Roy’s People’s Plan. The Planning Commission was set up by a Cabinet resolution on 15 March 1950, with the Prime Minister as chairman, and the National Development Council (1952) brought in the chief ministers. The Industrial Policy Resolution of 1948 marked out a mixed economy; the Avadi session of the Congress (1955) adopted the goal of a "socialistic pattern of society"; and the Industrial Policy Resolution of 1956 divided industry into three schedules — 17 industries reserved for the state (Schedule A), 12 in which the state would progressively take the lead (Schedule B), and the rest left to private enterprise. The Community Development Programme began on 2 October 1952, and the Balwantrai Mehta Committee (1957) recommended three-tier Panchayati Raj, first adopted in Rajasthan in 1959.

Land reform was a state subject, so its results varied widely from state to state. It had four parts. Abolition of intermediaries — the zamindari, jagirdari and similar tenures — was the most complete, carried out in most states by the mid-1950s with compensation to the former owners. Tenancy reform aimed to give tenants security, fair rents and ownership rights, but many tenants were evicted in anticipation or recast as "personal cultivation". Ceilings on landholdings were the weakest part: high limits, many exemptions and benami (fictitious-name) transfers left relatively little surplus land to redistribute. Consolidation of holdings worked best in Punjab, Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh. Courts struck down early laws under the right to property, so the First Amendment (1951) added Articles 31A and 31B and the Ninth Schedule to protect land reform laws from challenge on the ground of Fundamental Rights.

• Bhoodan ("land gift"): begun by Vinoba Bhave on 18 April 1951 at Pochampalli in Telangana, when a landowner offered land to landless villagers; it grew into Gramdan, the gift of whole villages. Much of the land pledged was never distributed or was of poor quality.
• Cooperative farming: the Congress’s Nagpur resolution (1959) in favour of joint cooperative farming alarmed conservatives and was one reason for the founding of the Swatantra Party.
• Later state efforts that are cited as relatively successful include Kerala’s tenancy reforms and West Bengal’s Operation Barga (1978), which recorded the names of sharecroppers.

Non-alignment, shaped by Nehru, meant keeping out of the two Cold War military blocs and judging each issue on its merits — it was not neutrality, and India took clear positions, for instance against colonialism and on the Suez crisis of 1956. Its early landmarks were the Asian Relations Conference (New Delhi, 1947), India’s role as chair of the Neutral Nations Repatriation Commission after the Korean War (1953), and the Panchsheel — the five principles set out in the preamble of the India–China Agreement on Trade and Intercourse with the Tibet Region, signed on 29 April 1954. The Afro-Asian Conference at Bandung, Indonesia (April 1955) brought together 29 newly independent states, and the first summit of the Non-Aligned Movement met at Belgrade in September 1961, its founders usually named as Nehru, Tito (Yugoslavia), Nasser (Egypt), Sukarno (Indonesia) and Nkrumah (Ghana). New Delhi hosted the seventh NAM summit in 1983.

1. Mutual respect for each other’s territorial integrity and sovereignty
2. Mutual non-aggression
3. Mutual non-interference in each other’s internal affairs
4. Equality and mutual benefit
5. Peaceful coexistence

The Simla Agreement, signed by Indira Gandhi and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, committed both countries to settle their differences by peaceful means through bilateral negotiations, to withdraw troops to their side of the international border, and to respect the Line of Control resulting from the ceasefire of 17 December 1971 in Jammu and Kashmir. Other landmarks of the period: the Indus Waters Treaty (1960), brokered by the World Bank, which gave the eastern rivers (Ravi, Beas, Sutlej) to India and the western rivers (Indus, Jhelum, Chenab) mainly to Pakistan; and India’s first nuclear test at Pokhran on 18 May 1974, described by the government as a peaceful nuclear explosion.

In the mid-1960s two failed monsoons and dependence on American wheat under PL-480 made food the most urgent problem in the country — the backdrop to Shastri’s slogan "Jai Jawan, Jai Kisan". The response, led by the Food and Agriculture Minister C. Subramaniam with scientists such as M. S. Swaminathan, was a package: high-yielding varieties of wheat developed from Norman Borlaug’s Mexican strains, with assured irrigation, chemical fertiliser and pesticides, credit, and support prices. The High-Yielding Varieties Programme began in 1966; the Food Corporation of India and the Agricultural Prices Commission had been set up in 1965 to procure grain and fix prices. The term "Green Revolution" was coined in 1968 by William Gaud of USAID. A parallel White Revolution — Operation Flood, launched in 1970 by the National Dairy Development Board under Verghese Kurien — built a national milk grid on the cooperative model.

• Gains: wheat output roughly doubled within a few years of 1966, imports fell, and India built buffer stocks; rice gains came later and more slowly.
• Limits: the gains were concentrated in irrigated Punjab, Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh, widening regional inequality; larger farmers who could afford the inputs gained more; and heavy use of water and chemicals later brought falling water tables and soil degradation.

After the triumph of 1971 came economic strain: the burden of refugees and war, failed rains, and the oil price shock of 1973 pushed inflation above 20 per cent. In 1974 the Nav Nirman student agitation in Gujarat forced the state government out, a nationwide railway strike led by George Fernandes was put down, and Jayaprakash Narayan (JP) led a student movement that he called for "Total Revolution". On 12 June 1975 the Allahabad High Court (Justice Jagmohanlal Sinha), on an election petition by Raj Narain, set aside Indira Gandhi’s election to the Lok Sabha for electoral malpractice. The Supreme Court granted a conditional stay. On the night of 25 June 1975, President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed proclaimed a national emergency under Article 352 on the ground of "internal disturbance".

• During the Emergency (1975–77): opposition leaders were detained under MISA; the press was censored; in ADM Jabalpur v. Shivkant Shukla (1976) the Supreme Court held by a majority that detentions could not be challenged in court during the emergency, with Justice H. R. Khanna dissenting; a Twenty-Point Programme was announced; and a forced sterilisation drive and slum demolitions, associated with Sanjay Gandhi, caused deep resentment.
• The 42nd Amendment (1976) added "socialist", "secular" and "integrity" to the Preamble, inserted the Fundamental Duties (Part IVA, Article 51A), extended the term of the Lok Sabha and the assemblies to six years, and curtailed judicial review.
• The 1977 election: called in January 1977 and held in March, it was won by the Janata Party — a merger of the Congress (O), the Jana Sangh, the Bharatiya Lok Dal and the Socialists — with its allies. The Congress lost heavily in the north, and Indira Gandhi lost her own seat. The Emergency was revoked on 21 March 1977, and Morarji Desai became the first non-Congress Prime Minister (24 March 1977). The Shah Commission inquired into the Emergency’s excesses.
• The Janata interlude: internal divisions brought the government down in July 1979; Charan Singh became Prime Minister but resigned without facing Parliament, and Indira Gandhi returned to power in the January 1980 election.

In Punjab, the Akali Dal’s Anandpur Sahib Resolution (1973) demanded greater autonomy for the states and raised Sikh religious and economic grievances; supporters read it as a call for genuine federalism, opponents as a step towards separatism. By the early 1980s a militant movement had grown, and armed militants led by Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale occupied the Golden Temple complex in Amritsar. The army’s Operation Blue Star (June 1984) cleared it, with heavy loss of life and damage to the Akal Takht. On 31 October 1984 Indira Gandhi was assassinated by two of her Sikh bodyguards, and in the days that followed thousands of Sikhs were killed in anti-Sikh violence, above all in Delhi. Rajiv Gandhi became Prime Minister and won over 400 seats in the December 1984 election.

• Nagaland: the Naga National Council under A. Z. Phizo demanded independence from 1947; armed insurgency followed in the mid-1950s. Statehood (1963) did not end it. Under the Shillong Accord (11 November 1975) a section of the underground accepted the Constitution; those who rejected it formed the National Socialist Council of Nagaland (1980).
• Other settlements of the decade: an accord with the Tripura National Volunteers (1988), and an agreement with the Gorkha National Liberation Front that created the Darjeeling Gorkha Hill Council (1988).
• Rajiv Gandhi’s other landmarks: the 52nd Amendment (1985), the anti-defection law (Tenth Schedule); the 61st Amendment (1988), lowering the voting age to 18; and the Indo-Sri Lanka Accord (July 1987), under which an Indian Peace Keeping Force served in Sri Lanka until 1990.

The First Backward Classes Commission under Kaka Kalelkar (1953) reported in 1955, but its recommendations were not acted upon. The Janata government appointed the Second Backward Classes Commission on 1 January 1979 under B. P. Mandal; its report (December 1980) identified 3,743 castes as socially and educationally backward, estimated the Other Backward Classes at about 52 per cent of the population, and recommended 27 per cent reservation for them in central government jobs and public educational institutions — keeping total reservation under 50 per cent. The report lay unimplemented for a decade, until the National Front government of V. P. Singh announced on 7 August 1990 that 27 per cent of central government posts would be reserved for OBCs. Supporters saw it as overdue social justice for communities long excluded from public life; opponents objected to caste rather than income as the criterion and feared for merit, and there were violent protests in north India, including several self-immolation attempts by students. In Indra Sawhney v. Union of India (16 November 1992) the Supreme Court upheld the 27 per cent quota but excluded the "creamy layer", held that reservations should not normally exceed 50 per cent, and struck down a separate 10 per cent quota on economic criteria announced in 1991.

The election of 1989 ended single-party majorities for a generation. The National Front government, supported from outside by the BJP and the Left, fell in November 1990 after the BJP withdrew support following the arrest of L. K. Advani during his Rath Yatra for a Ram temple at Ayodhya; Chandra Shekhar governed for a few months with Congress support. Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated at Sriperumbudur on 21 May 1991 during the election campaign, and P. V. Narasimha Rao became Prime Minister in June 1991. He inherited a balance-of-payments crisis — foreign exchange reserves enough for only a few weeks of imports, and gold pledged abroad to raise loans. With Manmohan Singh as Finance Minister, his government devalued the rupee and, in July 1991, began the liberalisation that ended most industrial licensing — the story taken up in the chapter on the basics of the Indian economy.