The authors delve carefully into Jawaharlal Nehru’s painstaking efforts at educating the masses through electoral campaigns and laying the foundations of an electoral system based on universal franchise through free and fair functioning of the Election Commission and later, the Parliament. Thereafter, we are taken into political history proper, beginning with the Nehru years. Having mentioned the major challenges to the nation therein, the authors proceed with the complex process of state formation, describing in delightful detail the debates and concerns of the Constituent Assembly, the role of the Congress in it, and the consolidation and reorganization of the Indian states. Though the book is a sequel, the authors’ coverage of the state of India on the eve of independence is too detailed to give any hint of this, though the continuity between pre and post independence India is carefully brought out. Unlike works preceding and succeeding it however, India Since Independence covers economic history and important socio-economic aspects (like caste, communalism and the role of women) as well. The sequel to India’s Struggle for Independence, it seeks to trace the history of India from the infant steps of the late 1940s to the onset of the new millennium. In this context, India Since Independence can be regarded as a welcome corrective. India's achievements, they insist, have been quite.Even though the period after independence is the most familiar of historical periods, there is a dearth of good academic writing on it. Unlike many other assessments, Chandra and his colleagues present an extremely optimistic account of Indian development and declare the prophets of doom to be wrong. In thirty-eight diverse chapters, the authors review the colonial legacy, the framing of the constitution, the quest for national consolidation, the performance of government and the economy, the changing nature of political parties, the growth of communal and caste politics, problems of centre-state relations and the foundations of Indian foreign policy. ISBN 9-0.īipan Chandra, Professor Emeritus of History at Jawaharlal Nehru University, and two of his colleagues have joined a growing number of Indian and foreign scholars in attempting to assess the impact of the first fifty years of Indian independence.

New Delhi: Viking, Penguin Books India (distributed in North America by Penguin Books, New York and Toronto). By Bipan Chandra, Mridula Mukherjee and Aditya Mukherjee.

India after independence bipan chandra