India After Gandhi

I have started reading "India After Gandhi" by Ramchandra Guha, and am slowly getting addicted to it. The book documents the political history of India from 1947 to the present day. Though it will take more than a month to finish a 900 page volume, I hope to stick around till the end. Here are some excerpts.

...throughout the sixty years since India became independent, there has been speculation about how long it would stay united, or maintain the institutions and processes of democracy. With every death of a prime minister has been predicted the replacement of democracy by military rule; in every failure of the monsoon has been anticipated countrywide famine; in every new secessionist movement has been seen the disappearance of India as a single entity......The heart hoped that India would survive, but the head worried it wouldn't. The place was.....far too diverse to persist as a nation, and much too poor to endure as a democracy.....

....On my way to work, I had to pass through Rajpath, the road whose name and location signal the exercise of state power. For about a mile, Rajpath runs along flat land; on either side are specious grounds meant to accommodate the thousands of spectators who come for the annual republic day parade.......By the time I had moved to New Delhi the British had long departed. India was now a free and sovereign republic - but not, it seemed, an altogether happy one. Signs of discord were everywhere. Notably, on Rajpath, the grounds meant to be empty except on ceremonial days has become a village of tents, each with colorful placards hung outside it. One tent might be inhabited by peasants from the Uttarakhand Himalaya, seeking a separate province; a second by farmers from Maharashtra, fighting for a higher price for their produce; a third by the residents of the southern Konkan coast, urging that their language be given official recognition by inclusion in the Eighth Schedule of the constitution of India. The people within these tents and the causes they upheld were ever changing. The hill peasants might be replaced by industrial workers protesting retrenchment; the Maharashtra farmers by Tibetan refugees asking for Indian citizenship; the Konkani-speakers by Hindu monks demanding a ban on cow slaughter.....I wished I had the time to walk on Rajpath every day from January 1 to December 31, chronicling the appearance and disappearance of the tents and their residents. That would be the story of India as told from a single street, and in a single year.....However, this too, is a story, above all, of social conflicts; of how these arise, how they are expressed, and how they are sought to be resolved.......

The forces that divide India are many. This book pays due attention to them. But there are also forces that have kept India together, that have helped transcend or contain the cleavages of class and culture, that - so far at least - have nullified the many predictions that India would not stay united and not stay democratic. These moderating influences are far less visible; it is one aim of this book to make them more so....Suffice it to say that they have included individuals as well as institutions.