ABSTRACT
It was intended to be a peaceful severance from Britain that brought freedom from colonial rule to one-fifth of mankind. The massed bands of the Indian army and the Scottish Highlanders on parade side by side first played ‘God Save the King’ and then when the saffron, green and white flag of free India was raised, with Gandhi’s spinning-wheel at its centre, the bands together struck up the Indian national anthem. It was symbolic of the new relationship, Prime Minister Nehru asked Lord Mountbatten to stay as independent India’s first governor-general. But independence solved only one problem, the relationship with imperial Britain. Daunting tasks faced the new rulers; they had to maintain law and order when the cauldron of ethnic and religious animosities turned to murderous violence; they had to define and to secure the new national frontiers in the vacuum of power left by the British which had not been completely filled by the agreements reached at independence; and they had to find ways of raising the standard of living of the hundreds of millions surviving at subsistence level in rural India and in its teeming cities. All these things had to be tackled simultaneously. Ever since independence, the combination of poverty, the fervour of ethnic-religious minorities and the manipulation of politics by the wealthier elites has resulted in a cycle of violence that has continued for more than half a century. Gandhi’s vision of an India where all its inhabitants would be brothers was not to be realised.
