Modi’s words came as millions of people celebrated 75 years of Indian independence since midnight on August 15, 1947 that ended nearly 200 years of British colonial rule. At that time, India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru said that the country was on a path of rebirth and rebirth. “There comes a moment, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out of the old into the new,” said Nehru. “When an era ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds expression.” Seventy-five years later, the India of today is almost unrecognizable from that of Nehru’s time. Since gaining independence, India has built one of the world’s fastest-growing economies, is home to some of the world’s richest people, and according to the United Nations, its population will soon overtake China’s as the world’s largest. . But despite the nation’s growing wealth, poverty remains a daily reality for millions of Indians, and significant challenges remain for a diverse and growing nation of diverse regions, languages and religions.
Rise of economic power
After independence, India was in chaos. Reeling from a bloody partition that killed between 500,000 and 2 million people and uprooted an estimated 15 million more, it was synonymous with poverty. Average life expectancy in the years after the British left was just 37 for men and 36 for women, and only 12% of Indians were literate. The country’s GDP was $20 billion, according to scholars. Fast forward three quarters of a century and India’s nearly $3 trillion economy is now the fifth largest in the world and among the fastest growing. The World Bank has promoted India from low-income to middle-income status — a category denoting a per capita gross national income between $1,036 and $12,535. Literacy rates have risen to 74% for men and 65% for women, and the average life expectancy is now 70 years. And the Indian diaspora has spread far and wide, studying at international universities and holding senior roles at some of the world’s biggest tech companies, including Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Twitter boss , Parag Agrawal. Much of this transformation was driven by the “revolutionary reforms” of the 1990s, when then-prime minister PV Narasimha Rao and his finance minister Manmohan Singh opened the country to foreign investment after an acute debt crisis and soaring inflation forced a review of socialist Nehru’s model of protectionism and state intervention. The reforms have helped increase investment from US, Japanese and Southeastern companies in major cities including Mumbai, the financial capital, Chennai and Hyderabad. The result is that today, the southern city of Bengaluru — dubbed “India’s Silicon Valley” — is one of the region’s biggest technology hubs. At the same time, India has seen a proliferation of billionaires — now home to more than 100, up from just nine at the turn of the millennium. Among them are infrastructure tycoon Gautam Adani, whose net worth is more than $130 billion, according to Forbes, and Mukesh Ambani, founder of Reliance Industries, who is worth about $95 billion. But critics say the rise of such superwealth highlights how inequality remains even long after the end of colonial rule — with the country’s richest 10 percent controlling 80 percent of the country’s wealth in 2017, according to Oxfam. On the streets, this translates into a harsh reality, where slums line sidewalks beneath high-rise buildings and children dressed in ragged clothes routinely beg for money. But Rohan Venkat, an adviser to India’s Center for Policy Research think tank, says India’s broader economic gains as an independent nation show how it has confounded skeptics 75 years ago. “In a broad sense, the image of India (after independence) was that it was an extremely poor place,” Venkat said. “Certainly the image of India (in the West) is heavily overshadowed by Orientalist tropes — your snake charmers, small villages. Since then, India’s trajectory has been “excellent”, Venkat said. “To witness the largest transfer (of power) from a state-ruled elite to now becoming a full global franchise … we are looking at an incredible political and democratic experiment that is unique.”
The rise of a geopolitical giant
For years after independence, India’s international relations were defined by the policy of non-alignment, the Cold War-era stance favored by Nehru that avoided siding with either the United States or the Soviet Union. Nehru played a leading role in the movement, which he saw as a way for developing countries to reject colonialism and imperialism and avoid being drawn into a conflict in which they had little interest. This stance proved unpopular in Washington, preventing closer ties and marring Nehru’s debut trip to the US in October 1949 to meet President Harry S. Truman. During the 1960s the relationship became even more strained as India received economic and military aid from the Soviets, and this freeze largely remained until 2000, when President Bill Clinton’s visit to India led to a reconciliation. Today, while India remains technically nonaligned, Washington’s need to counterbalance China’s rise has led it to turn to New Delhi as a key partner in the increasingly active security grouping known as the Quad. The grouping, which also includes Japan and Australia, is widely seen as a way to counter China’s growing military and economic power and its increasingly aggressive territorial claims in the Asia-Pacific. India, meanwhile, has its own reasons for wanting to offset Chinese influence, not the least of which is its disputed border in the Himalayas, where more than 20 Indian soldiers were killed in a bloody battle with their Chinese counterparts in June 2020. In October, the US and India will hold a joint military exercise less than 100 kilometers (62 miles) from the disputed border. As Happymon Jacob, associate professor of diplomacy and disarmament at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, said: “India has been able to assert itself on the world stage because of the nature of international politics today and the political and diplomatic military capital put in place by previous governments ». Part of India’s growing geopolitical influence is due to its growing military spending, which New Delhi has increased to counter perceived threats from both China and its nuclear-armed neighbor Pakistan. Since their separation in 1947, relations between India and Pakistan have been in an almost constant state of turmoil, leading to several wars, with thousands of casualties and numerous skirmishes along the Line of Control in the disputed region of Kashmir. In 1947, India’s net defense spending was just 927 million rupees — about $12 million in today’s money. By 2021, its military spending was $76.6 billion, according to a report by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute – making it the world’s third-largest military spender, behind only China and the US.
Ambitions on the world stage
Apart from economics and geopolitics, India’s growing wealth is fueling its ambitions in areas as diverse as sports, culture and space. In 2017, the country broke a world record when it launched 104 satellites in one mission, while in 2019, Prime Minister Modi announced that India had shot down one of its satellites in a military show of force, making it one of only four countries Later the same year, the country attempted to land a spacecraft on the moon. Although the historic effort failed, it was widely seen as a statement of intent. Last year, the country spent nearly $2 billion on its space program, according to McKinsey, trailing the biggest spenders, the US and China, by some margin, but the India’s space ambitions are growing. In 2023, India is expected to launch its first manned space mission. The country is also using its growing wealth to boost its sporting prospects, spending $297.7 million in 2019 before the spread of Covid-19. The Indian Premier League — the country’s premier cricket tournament that began in 2007 — has become the second most valuable sports league in the world in terms of value per match, according to Jay Shah, secretary of the Board of Control for Cricket in India. , after selling the media rights for $6.2 billion in June. And Bollywood, India’s glamorous multibillion-dollar film industry, continues to attract fans around the world, catapulting local names to global superstars by attracting millions of followers on social media. Between them, actors Priyanka Chopra and Deepika Padukone have nearly 150 million followers on Instagram. “India is a powerful country. It is an aggressive player,” said Shruti Kapilla, a professor of Indian history and global political thought at the University of Cambridge. “In the last two decades, things have changed. Indian culture has become an important story.”
Challenges and future
But for all India’s successes, challenges remain as Modi tries to “break the vicious cycle of poverty”. Despite India’s large and growing GDP, it remains a “deeply poor” country by some measures and this, said Councilor Venkat, is a “huge concern”. As recently as 2017, about 60 percent of India’s nearly 1.3 billion people lived on less than $3.10 a day, according to the World Bank, and women still face widespread discrimination in the deeply parochial country. Violence against women and girls has made international headlines in a country where reports of rape often suffer due to a lack of legal recourse for alleged perpetrators through a legal system that…
