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The Nehruvian state sought to realize the aims of the Constitution. As we argue in chapter 2, its record in regard to economic development was not quite as poor as has often been suggested, and it succeeded in establishing institutions of liberal democracy – such as, notably, an independent judiciary; an autonomous Election Commission charged with the responsibility of ensuring free and fair elections; and the office of the Comptroller and Auditor General, charged with the audit of the receipts and expenditure of central and state governments – which have served India well. But in the mid-1960s the effort of planned economic development ran into major difficulties, to an important extent because the government was no longer able to raise revenues adequate for sustaining investment. At the same time, and at least partly in consequence, the authority of the Congress Party began to be challenged. Nehru died in May 1964, and was succeeded by Lal Bahadur Shastri, who also died, less than two years later. It was at this juncture that Nehru’s daughter Indira Gandhi became prime minister. A split in the Congress Party followed in 1969, and then in the early 1970s – a difficult time in many developing countries, and not just in India – Mrs Gandhi encountered increasing opposition from outside parliament. The more left-wing policies that she was trying to pursue largely failed to deliver. And it was in this context that she declared the Emergency that we referred to earlier.

Change then began to take place in the 1980s, when Mrs Gandhi returned to office after the brief period of the Janata government. First Mrs Gandhi, and then her successor, her son Rajiv, shifted the stance of the government in regard to the private sector. There was a pro-business ‘tilt’, and in the later 1980s there were tentative moves towards economic liberalization. The pace of economic growth picked up (see chapter 2). But in the same period the Bharatiya Janata Party began to win increasing support, including among business people, professionals, former civil servants and military officers, who had become increasingly frustrated by the Congress government. With the advantage of hindsight, it has seemed to observers of Indian politics that the failures of the Congress government created a kind of a vacuum into which the BJP stepped. From a position of having won only two seats in the 1984 general election, the party took 85 in 1989 and held the balance of power (see tables 1.3 and 1.4). Eventually, in late 1990, the BJP brought down the Janata Dal government led by V. P. Singh, that had taken office in 1989, over its decision to implement the recommendations of a long-shelved report, prepared by a commission headed by B. P. Mandal and that had been appointed by the earlier Janata government. These recommendations were for the considerable expansion of reservations for members of the Other Backward Classes (see chapter 11), and the decision to implement them brought very strong opposition from among members of the higher castes, many of whom were by now BJP supporters.

The early 1990s were momentous years that brought very significant change in India. This was the period of ‘Mandal and the Mandir’ – of heated controversy over the implementation of the Mandal Commission report, and over the demands of Hindu nationalists for the construction of a temple (the mandir) for Lord Ram on the site of the old mosque at Ayodhya. The latter was advanced in December 1992, when Hindu nationalist volunteers took the law into their own hands, and destroyed the Babri Masjid (though the construction of the temple in its place had still not taken place more than 25 years later). This action was recognized at the time as having shaken the foundations of India’s liberal democracy, and with the advantage of hindsight, it clearly was a major step on the way to the assertion of the Hindu nationalist vision of India as a majoritarian Hindu state. But the beginning of the 1990s also saw a historic change in India’s economic policy. A tipping point was reached in 1991 when, as we explain in chapter 2, a crisis over the availability of foreign exchange to pay for imports provided an opportunity for economic liberals in the Indian establishment to make a more decisive move towards neoliberalism. What were known as ‘the Economic Reforms’ began to be introduced in the first budget of Dr Manmohan Singh, the Finance Minister in a new minority Congress government, in the summer of 1991. We have described the shift in economic policy and the increasing support for Hindu nationalism as ‘elite revolts’, because both reflected the dissatisfaction of elites with the way India had for long been governed. But there were revolts from below as well, at this time, as the early 1990s saw the emergence of the new generation of ‘backward caste’ political leaders (from among the ‘OBCs’), notably in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. The political scientist Christophe Jaffrelot was to describe this as a ‘silent revolution’ (Jaffrelot 2003).

By the end of the twentieth century, therefore, India was being ‘reinvented’, as a definitely capitalist, ‘emerging economy’ (rather than a poor ‘developing country’ with an ostensibly socialist orientation), that was becoming much more integrated into the global economy (our arguments were elaborated by Corbridge and Harriss 2000). Hopes started to build up that India would benefit from its ‘demographic dividend’ – from the burgeoning numbers of young people entering the labour force (see chapter 13). The middle class was growing, and a new consumerism was becoming evident in Indian society (see chapter 10). The logic behind the description of ‘consumer-citizen’, used by at least one NGO in Chennai by this time, was apparent. How far rural people and India’s poor – and many of India’s women (see chapter 12) – were benefiting from higher rates of economic growth remained questionable, and the stresses of environmental degradation bore down on them in particular (see chapter 5). The BJP, the political party of the Hindu nationalist movement had effectively challenged the long-running hegemony of the Congress in Indian politics, and it was clearly winning support both from upper caste elites and among many poorer people (albeit more in the north and west than in other parts of the country). At the same time, regionally-based political leaders and parties from lower castes were exercising influence, and there was also abundant evidence of pervasive criminality in Indian politics (and certainly not only among those politicians who came from lower castes). India was no longer remotely ‘socialist’; secularism was under severe threat; and for all the strengths of electoral democracy in the country, how much real substance there was to Indian democracy was doubtful.

This is the starting point of the ‘new India’ that emerged in the early years of the twenty-first century. A new point of punctuation in India’s historical trajectory came with the election of Narendra Modi in 2014, and then the completion of the hegemony of the BJP and of Hindu nationalism were marked by the outcome of the national elections of 2019. This book, through the questions that we address in each chapter, aims to tell the story of these years.