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The purpose of this chapter, however, is to address the question of how India in the twenty-first century came to be this India. History matters, of course, and there is a great deal of contemporary scholarship that refers to so-called ‘historical path dependency’. Events, or actions, or decisions taken at one moment have repercussions that influence the next. Among economists, for example, as we discuss in the next chapter, there is a body of opinion that the pattern of economic development in all countries is subject to circular and cumulative causation. This means that no country or significant region has had a course of development that is exactly the same as that of another. As Marx once said, in a statement that has been so often quoted that it seems to be a truism, though it is actually profound: ‘Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please’. ‘They do not make it’, he goes on to say, ‘under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past’ (Marx 1852). Though, as a great contemporary historian, C. A. Bayly – certainly not a ‘Marxist’ – once wrote, Marx developed the closest that we have to ‘a theory of history’ (in the author’s autobiographical note in Bayly 1998), Marx is quite clear that there are no ‘iron laws’. This is because human agency matters, and people can ‘make their own history’ (‘change the course of history’, in a conventional phrase) – or, in other words, shift the trajectory of historical path dependency. But then the structures in the context of which they act – ‘circumstances transmitted from the past’ – greatly influence the possibilities of change at any particular moment. The way that some economic historians perceive historical change is in terms of multiple equilibria. There are historical ‘moments’ of movement from one equilibrium state to another (Nunn 2009: 75ff). The course of human history is perhaps not so different from the history of life itself, as this was described by Stephen Jay Gould, the evolutionary theorist, as ‘a series of stable states punctuated at rare intervals by major events that occur with great rapidity and help to establish the next stable era’ (quoted by Castells 1996: 29).

‘Circumstances transmitted from the past’ include, importantly, what are described as institutions, by which is meant the rules, norms and conventions on which social order, or, putting it somewhat differently, the structure of economies and societies depends. They lead to the establishment of an equilibrium that is maintained over a substantial period of time. The institutional arrangements of a society reflect the interests of those who have power, and they are reproduced over time. But, over time too, economic developments in particular, by shifting the balance of power in society, may change these institutions. It has been argued, for example, that the rise of the triangular trade in the Atlantic between Europe, Africa and the Americas, led to the empowerment of a merchant class against the ruling royal houses in north-western Europe, and that this brought about changes in institutional arrangements that have had profound historical consequences (Acemoglu et al. 2005). But it is not only institutions that matter for long-run patterns of historical change. Culture has an influence, too, and so do knowledge and technology (Nunn 2009).

All these factors enter into the explanation of the ‘great divergence’. Institutions certainly played a part, even if we may wish to reject a certain triumphalism about the importance of supposedly ‘good’ institutions emanating from north-western Europe (Acemoglu et al. 2005; and commentary by Bayly 2008). The significance of cultural values was emphasized by the great sociologist Max Weber, seminally in his work on the role played by the ‘protestant ethic’ in the development of capitalism. Latterly, the historian David Landes has argued similarly, ‘If we learn anything from the history of economic development, it is that culture makes all the difference’ – though he also argues that ‘culture does not stand alone … monocausal explanations will not work’ (1998: 516–17). Another scholar, Joel Mokyr, focuses on the importance of knowledge and technology, and the significance of the ferment of public debate and innovation in north-west Europe in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (Mokyr 2016). But there certainly were, also, significant benefits that accrued to the European powers from colonial exploitation. As Kenneth Pomerantz has argued, ‘the fruits of overseas coercion … help explain the difference between European development and what we see in certain other parts of Eurasia (primarily China and Japan)’ (2000: 4, emphasis in the original).

The idea of the ‘great divergence’ is about a very important point of punctuation, or ‘moment’ of historical change. It was inherently associated with colonialism, and colonial rule certainly ‘punctuated’ the history of many parts of the world (Nunn 2009). This is true, no doubt, of India. The first moment of historical change that we will consider, therefore, in our discussion of how twenty-first-century India has come to be, is the period of colonial rule, and its impact on India. The second moment is that of the establishment of the post-colonial state, which meant the introduction, as a result of the deliberate decisions of the political elite, of a partially new set of institutions (only ‘partially new’ because they mostly bear marks of colonial rule). The deliberations of the Constituent Assembly that drew up the Constitution of India mark what was, in a sense, the invention of a new India, as a federal, democratic, socialist and secular republic. The Preamble to the Constitution describes India in these terms, as ‘democratic’, ‘socialist’ and ‘secular’ (though it is important to note that the words ‘socialist’ and ‘secular’ were only added later, following an amendment passed in 1976), and a fairly large part of the main body of the Constitution is concerned with establishing the particular forms of Indian federalism (though the federal principle was established in the last act passed under colonial rule, in 1935, about the Government of India). The Indian state under the leadership of prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru sought to implement the design of the Constitution, with greater success in some areas than in others. But over time India has been subject to a process of reinvention, as Corbridge and Harriss (2000) described it. This, a third ‘moment’ in the making of twenty-first-century India, reached a point of culmination with the election of Narendra Modi as prime minister in 2014. Modi’s party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which won a large majority, is the party-political wing of a ‘family’ of organizations centred on the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, which has long been dedicated to making India a ‘Hindu rashtra’, or Hindu state. It is committed, therefore, to redesigning India, and as we will explain in this book, it has gone a long way towards achieving this goal. Indeed, with the crushing victory of the BJP, led again by Narendra Modi, in the national elections of 2019, it appears to many that the goal has been achieved (see tables 1.3–1.5). The Editorial of The Hindu newspaper on 24 May 2019 argued, for example, ‘The definitive nature of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s victory in the 17th general election marks an unmistakable inflection point in the journey of the Republic … The outcome must be understood as an electoral endorsement of Hindutva, or Hindu nationalism’. Whereas the mainstream of Indian political life and culture was committed to liberal values, it has now been taken over by majoritarian Hindu nationalism. Liberal democracy is in retreat.