Introduction

Mohandas Gandhi leading the Salt March, 1930

Mao Zedong proclaims the People’s Republic of China, 1949

With the European discovery of the American continents starting about 1500 AD, the balance of international power shifted west. Europe and North America became the richest, most powerful, most consequential regions in the world. Modern science, capitalism, and industrialization were all born in the West, and they allowed the West to dominate the rest of the world, with the great European empires spanning the globe.

This was a new development. For most of human history, one would have looked to either the Middle East or Asia for the global centers of power and culture. When Vasco de Gama arrived in India, reconnecting Europe to the spice trade, he encountered a society vastly wealthier and more cosmopolitan than his own. Seventeenth-century China was wealthier than the British Empire – so wealthy that it hardly needed foreign trade, given its massive domestic market.

The situation changed over the next four hundred and fifty years. The British Empire conquered the Mughal, Maratha, and Sikh empires of the Indian subcontinent, as well as the remaining independent kingdoms of the region, and combined them all into what they termed India. While the Western nations could not conquer China – it was simply too big – the West did have a sufficiently-large technological advantage over the Chinese that they could extort and otherwise dominate and humiliate the Chinese.
The Asians have forgotten neither their glorious empires, nor the humiliations, of the past. There is a school of historical thought (Declinism) which affirms that the West has seen the apex of its power; that the world wars demoralized and impoverished the West, rendering their empires untenable and allowing the new rise of Asia, manifest primarily by postwar China and Japan. While obituaries for the West are premature, the explosive rise of Asian economies has presented a challenge to American hegemony, particularly since the end of the Cold War.

This chapter will investigate the postwar rise of the world’s two most populous nations, China and India. These two nations addressed their problems in radically different ways, setting them on very different paths to the future.

The Republic of China

In the 19th century, China was an empire ruled by the Qing Dynasty. The dynasty was notably conservative, refusing to modernize its economy; as a result, while the Western world gained strength from industrialization and capitalism, China was falling behind. While not even the mighty British Empire could conquer China, various nations could extort the Qing Empire. For example, the British fought two successful wars against China, known as the Opium Wars, to force China to allow them to sell opium in the empire. After the Second Opium War, Britain also forced China into leasing them the island of Hong Kong, a humiliation the Chinese would not forget. Other nations exploited China’s weakness as well.

The Edict of Abdication of the last emperor of the Qing Dynasty, Puyi. This document officially ended monarchy in China.

These “national humiliations,” as the Chinese called them, led to a repudiation of the dynasty and the Xinhai Rebellion in 1911. A successful revolt by military units against the dynasty established the Republic of China, China’s first democracy, with Sun Yat-sen  as the first President. Unfortunately, as with so many new democracies, the peace was short-lived. The new government was unable to prevent the country from fragmenting into factions and kingdoms led by local warlords. Furthermore, the ruling party (the Kuomintang, or KMT), split into left- and right-wing factions. General Chiang Kai-shek, a protégé of Sun Yat-sen, led the rightist faction to a bloody victory over the left in 1928, and assumed control of the national government.

Standing against the KMT were not only the warlords, but also the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The communists were led by a man of extraordinary charisma: Mao Zedong, the scion of a wealthy agricultural family from Shaoshan. Mao rose through the ranks of the CCP, leading protests and uprisings against the KMT government. In 1931, he even led the CCP to capture several mountainous regions of central China and declare them an independent communist state (the Soviet Chinese Republic). However, a civil war within the communist state allowed the KMT to conquer it; Mao then led the CCP on longest military retreat in history (the Long March) into Western China, where he once again rebuilt the People’s Army and prepared to try again.

In the meantime, the KMT had conquered most of the warlords, reuniting their territory with the nation. Unfortunately for Chiang, this did not lead to peace, as Japan invaded the Chinese province of Manchuria in 1931, as a prequel to its attempt at conquering all of China. Consequently, in 1935, Chiang and Mao agreed to fight together against the Japanese, but during the war (1931 to 1945), spent as much time fighting each other as fighting the Japanese.

Mao Zedong (left) and Chiang Kai-shek (right) celebrate their 1935 collaboration against the Japanese. Withing five years, they were at war again.

Besides the external threats he faced, Chiang also caused himself problems with his own policies. Although a democracy on paper, China, under Chiang and the KMT, became a one-party, authoritarian state. Chiang and his family were often accused of nepotism and graft. Political opponents were brutally repressed. This generated ill-will among the people, a factor which would become critical in 1946.
Despite their many advantages, the Japanese proved incapable of conquering China. The United States provided considerable military and economic aid to the KMT government, and the CCP also fought successfully against the Japanese. Japan was forced to surrender to the Americans in 1945, and their forces withdrew from China. The fragile peace between the KMT and the CCP was soon abandoned, thus beginning the Chinese Communist Revolution, the battle for control of China.

The CCP enjoyed several advantages over the KMT, not least of which was that the corruption of Chiang’s government destroyed its credibility with its own people, leading people to join the communists. Furthermore, the KMT military was a shambles, uncoordinated and unprofessional. When the communists closed in, Chiang Kai-shek fled to the island of Taiwan in 1948, in a well-prepared retreat, with the intention of one day returning to reconquer China. The CCP completed the conquest of China in October 1949, and Mao declared the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC).

Mao’s first act was to initiate a purge of all suspected enemies of the state, from wealthy landowners to former KMT operatives. Just as economists have targets for unemployment and the GNP, Mao had execution targets. He calculated that, in order to eliminate lingering anticommunists, the CCP would have to execute one-tenth of one percent of the entire population. This was done via public executions for the purpose of terrorizing the population. Just to be accused was usually enough to guarantee death in the explosive post-revolutionary environment. In the first four years of the PRC, the CCP executed between three and five million people, with another million and a half sent to labor camps, perhaps never to return.
Such harshness prevented many educated people in China from participating in government, for fear of offending the CCP or being accused of disloyalty. Therefore, in 1957, Mao launched the Hundred Flowers Campaign, which invited constructive criticism of government policies. Within a year, the volume of criticism angered Mao; he now felt threatened by anyone opposing his ideas. He, therefore, ordered the arrest and imprisonment of 300,000 people who had criticized his policies.

These anti-rightist campaigns effectively silenced criticism of Mao and the CCP, assuring that future errors would remain unaddressed. And Mao was about to make an error of colossal proportions.
Impatient of the slow development of the Chinese economy, Mao launched a massive program known as the Great Leap Forward. This was designed to make China the economic equivalent of the United States in just fifteen years. The plan was to mobilize the Chinese people to work day and night, so that their numbers might compensate for the low degree of technology they possessed. The program focused on two main sectors: steelmaking and agriculture.

In the steelmaking campaign, people collected recyclable iron and steel, built makeshift furnaces in their villages, and tried to provide the government with the quotas it set. But such ad-hoc methods could only produce useless, low-quality steel. Properly trained metallurgists in China knew this from the start, but no one dared speak out after the Hundred Flowers Campaign. The program was a short-lived failure.
Worse still, the effort to increase grain output led to disaster and famine, as had the earlier attempts at collectivization in North Korea. Party officials overstated the amount of grain the farms produced, so that they would not be punished for failure. But when the government collected the grain for redistribution, it took grain according to the inflated figures, and consequently left the peasants with nothing to eat. Rather than admit their lies and face execution, the officials simply let the peasants starve to death. The results are difficult to calculate; some estimates are that 20 to 50 million people either died of starvation or were executed for resisting the program. This makes the famine one of the worst, if not the worst, famine on record – and it was completely avoidable.

Finally, in 1962, the CCP accepted that the Great Leap Forward had been an error. Mao went into semi-retirement, and the President of China, Liu Shaoqi, moderated economic policies in order to repair the economy. This did not sit well with Mao, who saw opposition to his policies as anti-communism and, worse, a personal affront.

To regain control of the country from Liu, Mao, who was still the Chairman of the CCP, launched the Cultural Revolution in 1966. He claimed that bourgeois elements had taken control of the CCP and wanted to reinstitute capitalism in China; he wanted to launch a new revolution to remove them and restart his Maoist policies. To do so, he bypassed the usual instruments of state power and built up a cult of personality among the young, forcing everyone to carry a copy of The Sayings of Chairman Mao, better known as “The Little Red Book.” His followers organized into cadres of “Red Guards” who harassed, attacked, and killed anyone who they believed was against Mao, including prominent CCP officials who had fought alongside Mao since the beginning.

China’s international relations were tumultuous. The most important early relationship was obviously with the USSR, the communist state on China’s border. Although Mao admired the Soviet Union’s accomplishments, he and Stalin did not trust each other very well, disagreeing over Korean War policy as well as other issues. After Stalin’s death in 1953, relations deteriorated further, since Mao considered himself a more important communist leader than Khrushchev; there were even skirmishes on the Sino-Soviet border in 1969, and the Soviets encouraged the ethnic Uighurs of Western China to rebel against Mao. By 1956, the Sino-Soviet Split had hardened.

This spat between the communist giants did not go unnoticed. US President Richard Nixon decided to leverage the split by establishing relations with the PRC. The US had cut all relations with the PRC after their revolution and considered Chiang’s government in Taiwan as the sole legitimate government of China, as did the United Nations. Nixon’s hope was that, by driving a wedge between China and the USSR by forging closer ties with China, the US might be better able to get them both to retract their support for North Vietnam (see Chapter 7). He also perhaps hoped that it would frighten the USSR into agreeing to nuclear weapons reduction talks. Mao stood to gain from establishing relations with the US; he could improve his economy without aid from the USSR and establish himself as a major world power, not second-fiddle to the Soviets. Mao did not like being second to anyone.

As a result of these overtures, Richard Nixon became the first US President to visit China in 1972, where he met Mao Zedong. This led to the lifting of US trade sanctions against the PRC, something that would develop into one of the biggest trade relationships in history, with the US serving as the largest market for Chinese goods, despite all ideological differences. As a precondition for complete diplomatic relations, the US had to acknowledge the CCP, not the Taiwanese government, as the legitimate government of China, and did so in 1979. The UN had already recognized the PRC as the legitimate government of China in 1971, when the PRC threatened to leave the UN if it did not do so.

The Cultural Revolution did not really end until Mao died in 1976. He was replaced as CCP Chairman by his hand-picked successor, Hua Guofeng, who promised to continue Mao’s policies. After Mao’s disastrous programs, few in the CCP’s leadership wanted a new version of Mao in power. But Hua was opposed by a remarkable politician named Deng Xiaoping, who had once fought alongside Mao in the revolution. Deng had been imprisoned by the Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution for opposing Mao’s extremism. The CCP leadership now released him from jail and, remembering him as a moderate, sensible, and steadfast leader, supported him over Hua. In December 1978, Deng outmaneuvered Hua to become the supreme leader of the PRC. In a clear break with the past, Deng did not imprison Hua, but allowed him to continue in the CCP with a reduced role. This was the first indication that Mao’s brutality and extremism was a thing of the past.

Deng’s first move as leader was to halt the Cultural Revolution and reverse its devastating effects. He reopened the colleges and released political prisoners; he also launched a campaign to stop the rampant crime which was surging in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution. This stabilized the society and created the opportunity for change and growth.

Deng also differed from Mao in his economic policies. He planned for steady, moderate growth, instead of the sudden surges which Mao pushed. He allowed for decentralization of both agriculture and industry, allowing local leaders more autonomy; he sought a slow and steady industrial growth by focusing first on light industry.

Another of his major economic changes was the establishment of Special Economic Zones in coastal Southeastern China. These were cities, such as Shanghai and Dalian, in which Marxist control of the means of production was largely suspended. These zones had a great deal of economic freedom, allowing them to use capitalist, market-based policies which would both improve the economy and attract foreign investment. The policy was a great success, leading to a massive increase in industrial output for the export market – China is now the world’s largest export economy, contributing about ten percent of all global trade.

Deng also instituted his famous “Four Modernizations,” a program to modernize China’s industrial base, science and technology, military, and agriculture. The CCP invested tremendous wealth and expertise in these areas, successfully modernizing all four sectors. As a result of both the Four Modernizations and the new mixed economy (a combination of socialism and capitalism), China has vastly increased its GPD, as well as per-capita income, expanded literacy, and improved life expectancy. In 1979, the CCP also launched the controversial “One Child Policy,” which punished women who had more than one child with stiff financial penalties, or even forced sterilization. The intention was to improve the economy by preventing overpopulation, so that the nation’s wealth did not have to be split among too many citizens. The CCP claimed that, before the program was changed to a two-child policy in 2015, it prevented 400 million births. However, the program had unintended consequences. For example, the preference for boys (to carry on the family name) led to a high incidence of abortion or infanticide of baby girls. This has led to a large gender imbalance in China, with as many as 40% more men than women in some parts of China. Because of this, China ceased all stipulations for births in 2021.

Deng also initiated political reforms designed to prevent a concentration of power, such as decentralizing political power and strengthening the separation of powers in the government. These changes did provoke some controversy within the CCP; furthermore, the rapid economic changes stirred dissent, from hardline communists who believed the party was straying too far from Marx and Mao, to liberals who wanted to see even more change. Economic growth in China, alongside the still-centralized power of the CCP, led to an increase of corruption in the government, which Deng attempted to suppress.

Deng’s greatest challenge came in 1989, with the death of reform politician Hu Yaobang. Hundreds of thousands of protestors, mainly university students, turned out for his funeral in Tiananmen Square in Beijing. The gathering turned into a prodemocracy protest which spread to several cities. Faced with a growing revolutionary threat, Deng deployed the Liberation Army to disperse the protestors. Thousands were killed and many more arrested and imprisoned; the nascent prodemocracy movement was effectively silenced. Deng may have embraced aspects of capitalism, but democracy was to remain off-limits.

Deng Xiaoping retired from his post shortly thereafter in a peaceful transfer of power to Jiang Zemin. Although Mao was the leader who had established the PRC, his economic and political policies were unsustainable. It was Deng who modernized China and established it as a world power. After Tiananmen Square, though, his political decentralization reforms were halted, as the CCP re-tightened controls to retain power. But he succeeded in protecting his economic policies, which continue in China to this day.

Jiang Zemin continued Deng’s policy of a mixed economy, ending obsolescent state-run companies and replacing them with more capitalist models. This foray into capitalism also drove income inequality and corruption, both of which China struggles to address. Jiang also oversaw the return of Hong Kong to China in 1997. After the Second Opium War, the British had forced the Chinese monarchy to lease them the rights to the city, which sits on an island just off mainland China. Hong Kong became a British colony; although this occupation of Chinese territory infuriated the CCP, the arrangement was completely legal, and the CCP could not move the British off the island without giving the UK cause for war, or at least sanctions. In 1997, the lease expired, and the CCP refused to renegotiate it. The UK returned the island to China in a formal ceremony, ending this humiliating legacy for the PRC. Although the PRC promised to allow the continuance of democracy in Hong Kong, it has slowly dismantled democratic institutions on the island and suppressed the subsequent protests with force.

Xi Jinping became the president of China in 2013. While continuing Deng’s economic legacies, he has changed China’s political and foreign policy landscape. Xi pushed through a constitutional amendment removing term limits for presidents, probably to protect his own status; he has also been accused of building up a cult of personality, as Mao did, raising fears of similar results. His anti-corruption crackdowns have mainly targeted political rivals, and he has also attacked human rights activists and lawyers in China, imprisoning many. Of particular consequence is his violent suppression of the ethnic Uighur people of Western China in an attempt to remove the influence of Islam and cultural separatism still lingering there. This is probably the worst single human rights problem in the CCP.

Xi has also been much more aggressive in foreign relations than his predecessors. He has made territorial claims in the South China Sea, claiming and even occupying and fortifying islands claimed by several nations; he has also been more aggressive in his dealings with Taiwan, and became embroiled in a trade war with the United States in 2018. Between expanding Chinese economic investments around the world and growing more assertive in his foreign relations, Xi seems intent on expanding the PRC’s influence, at least regionally, if not globally.

The People’s Republic of China has made tremendous strides since its founding in 1949, vastly expanding its economy and developing into a modern nation. However, the speed of its growth, and its authoritarian model relative to democracies, has led to a number of seemingly intractable problems. In the relentless pursuit of economic growth, the CCP has done great damage to the environment; the air in Beijing is among the most polluted in the world, causing long-term health problems for residents. The autocratic nature of the government – one that does not have to answer to anyone outside it -- leads to corruption among bureaucrats, law enforcement, the judiciary, and corporate leadership. This corruption, coupled with human rights abuses such as suppression of free speech and a lack of workers’ rights, leads to protests which are usually brutally suppressed, particularly in prodemocracy Hong Kong and Buddhist Tibet. The population, now with a gender imbalance, still grows rapidly, challenging the CCP to grow the economy fast enough to provide a good per capita income to the growing population. These represent major problems for the CCP, and the party’s continued survival probably depends on its ability to overcome them. Whether or not the party is up to the challenge will determine the future of the People’s Republic of China.

India under the Raj

Like China, India was one of antiquity’s most successful cultures, producing art and architecture which outshone the West for thousands of years. During the Mughal Empire’s tenure of the Indian subcontinent, India controlled one-quarter of the world’s economy and produced a quarter of global manufacturing, surpassing even mighty China. It was the trade of India and China, after all, that the Europeans sought during the Age of Exploration.

In the 19th century, most of the Indian subcontinent was ruled by the Mughal, Maratha, and Sikh empires; however, the internal weaknesses and fighting among the various regions allowed for their domination by the British East India Company, a private entity which established factories and trading posts in India to export the goods to Europe. The company had the legal authority to wage war and capture territory, and raised a private army to carry out its campaigns in India. Through conquest and negotiation, the company gained either direct or indirect rule (through local proxy leaders) of nearly the entire subcontinent, thanks largely to the political disunity of the region, which allowed the company to carry out a divide-and-conquer strategy. The company then ruled India as a private, profit-making enterprise.

East India Company rule came to an end after a revolt by Indian soldiers in the company’s employ in 1857. Although the company suppressed the revolt and retained control of India, the British government realized that the company’s exploitive policies would only lead to more rebellions, and so seized control of India in 1858, dissolving the company. India (eventually including what is now Pakistan, Burma, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh) was now ruled by Great Britain in the form of a colonial government called the British Raj. Other European nations (France, the Netherlands, and Portugal) held a few trading posts in the region as well.

A map of the British Empire in India, 1909

The Raj quickly developed Indian industry and infrastructure, modernizing the physical form of the nation while trying to leave its cultural norms untouched; this was done to prevent another rebellion. However, by the mid-1880s, discontent flared. Indians complained of unfair taxes, unfair trade policies (such as British monopolies on the manufacture of certain goods), and the use of Indian troops in foreign wars which did not benefit the Indian people. All of these complaints were common among colonized peoples. The Indian National Congress, an indigenous organization of educated Indian elites, was created in 1885 to address the problems of the Raj. Anti-British movements followed, most commonly efforts to boycott British goods, but revolutionary violence was not unknown. Several famines, exacerbated by British incompetence, only fueled the anger.

World War I was a watershed moment in the Indian home rule (i.e., independence) movement. A million Indian troops fought with distinction alongside the British in the Middle East and even in Europe. This gave Indians a strong sense of pride, as they had meaningfully contributed to the outcome of the Great War and helped save the British Empire. How could they continue to view themselves as inferior to the British, fit only to be ruled?

The independence movements in India intensified between the world wars. One reason for this was the return to India of a man who would personify the swaraj, or “home rule,” movement: Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. Gandhi was the son of a local state minister and attended law school in London. In 1893, he traveled to South Africa, home to thousands of Indians living in British colonial areas. He went to represent an Indian merchant in court; but what he encountered there led him to stay for twenty-one years. Gandhi initially believed the British propaganda that all British subjects were equal under the law. Once in South Africa, he experienced the racism of the empire – being kicked off trains because he tried to sit in first-class as a person of color, and pushed off sidewalks by White police officers. This is how Gandhi learned the hypocrisy of the imperial project, and then dedicated his life to fighting it.

While in South Africa, Gandhi developed his unique tactic for fighting repression, known as satyagraha (“truth force”). This strategy of nonviolent resistance depended on shaming the authorities into changing their behavior by exposing their brutality to the world. Indian protesters would provoke the police, for example, by walking in areas reserved for Whites. When the police would attack them, the protestors would not respond with violence, but would accept the blows – while newspapermen recorded what happened and told the world. It was hoped that the moral disgust felt back in Europe would force the British to change their behavior. It was a success; Gandhi’s movement forced the government to change anti-Indian policies in Africa.

Gandhi returned to India in 1915 to help organize opposition to the increased taxes which the British had imposed on the Indian people, and spending time in jail as a result. While Gandhi organized nonviolent resistance, violent rebellion against the Raj was growing, manifesting as terrorist attacks. These led to a harsh government response in 1919: the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, in which British General Reginald Dyer ordered his troops to fire on Indian civilians, killing or wounding thousands. Gandhi had joined the Indian National Congress, and in 1924 assumed leadership of the organization. It is important to note that there were many other organizations and leaders struggling for independence, with different goals and methods. Some groups, such as the Hindustan Republican Association, embraced violence in the pursuit of independence; others, like the All-India Muslim League, espoused independence, but also wanted India partitioned into two countries, one Muslim and one Hindu.

In 1930, Gandhi led what was probably the greatest individual satyagraha campaign: the Salt March. Indians always resented the British monopoly on the production and distribution of salt in their country. Gandhi led a protest march of over 240 miles, spreading word of the protest as he went; at its conclusion, thousands of protesters gathered salt at the Indian Ocean in violation of the law. This was the start of a year-long campaign of civil disobedience and non-cooperation. The police retaliated with arrests and beatings of protesters, who did not respond with violence. These actions were reported around the world, and world opinion towards the British Raj was negative. As a result, the Raj invited Gandhi to negotiate new reforms in London during the Round Table Conferences. These conferences resulted in a greater degree of home rule in India, but not independence.

The independence movement continued into World War II. The British Raj, without consulting the Indian people, declared war against the Axis powers. In 1942, the INC announced the Quit India movement, demanding that the British leave India immediately. The British government was in no way ready to do so. Not only did the UK need manpower, resources, and money of India during the war, but the Japanese were pressing into Burma from the east, and the UK did not want to abandon India to them. To counteract Gandhi and his followers, the Raj arrested him and most of the Indian National Congress leadership, who spent the rest of the war in jail. India sent about two and a half million men to fight in the war on the Allied side.

Indian Independence

After the war, the British realized that the days of empire were over. The US and United Nations both opposed imperialism, and the UK lacked the money and will to continue occupying its colonies. And the UK needed US money to survive in the immediate postwar years, so defying the US was not in Great Britain’s interests.

Leaving India was not a simple matter. The main division in Indian culture to this day is religion. India is about 80% Hindu and 14% Muslim, with the remainder mainly Buddhists, Sikhs, Jains, and Christians. Although Indians tend to believe in religious tolerance, a hallmark of Indian culture is the overwhelming division along religious lines – Indians prefer to live in communities of their own religion and associate with, and marry, only members of their own faith. Religion, specifically Hinduism, also forms the basis of the caste system.

These divisions complicated things for the Raj. The Muslim League demanded that the Raj be partitioned into two states, one Hindu and the other Islamic, divided along lines between states by majority religion. Although Gandhi vehemently opposed dividing India, the British realized that forcing Indian Muslims into a union they didn’t want would lead to violence which would prevent, or at least delay, a British withdrawal. Therefore, the British agreed to partition India into two states: India (Hindu) and Pakistan (Muslim). The eastern state of Bengal, geographically far removed from Pakistan, was also part of the Muslim state and became known as East Pakistan. The British hastily drew a dividing line which, due to lack of knowledge and care, ran through religious communities, leaving many people on the wrong side of the line (an ironic repeat of the lines drawn at the Berlin Conference in the 1880s, which doomed Africa to tribal divisions). This led to a tremendous demographic upheaval, where ten million people were forced from their lands by members of the majority religion in the area. Inspired by religious bigots and extremists, violence broke out against religious minorities on both sides of the lines, and as many as two million people were murdered in savage attacks. Despite the disruption, India and Pakistan both attained independence in August 1947. The Indian constitution created a secular, democratic republic; Pakistan became an Islamic Republic. The INC became the Congress Party, standing candidates for office in the new democracy.

Gandhi accepted no position in the new Indian government, and, in any case, was busy trying to halt the sectarian violence. The Congress Party won the elections, and Jawaharlal Nehru, a longtime ally and friend of Gandhi, became the nation’s first prime minister. Gandhi was assassinated in January 1948 by a Hindu nationalist who viewed Gandhi as a traitor for trying to make peace with Muslims. He thereby joined a long list of peacemakers, such as Anwar Sadat and Yitzhak Rabin, who died for their commitment to peace. His legacy goes far beyond India; his method of satyagraha has been used in social movements by such leaders as Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela.

Jawaharlal Nehru, first Prime Minister of India

One of the first problems for the new Indian government was national consolidation. The government had to integrate the 565 princely states (areas of India which the British had not directly controlled, but only ruled indirectly) into a unified India, as well as address the remaining Portuguese and French enclaves on the subcontinent. Responsibility for the princely states fell to Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, the new Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Home and States Affairs. Patel, an old political ally of Gandhi in the INC, brought 552 of the princely states into the Indian fold, incorporated into existing provinces, with the rest going to Pakistan. Although there was violence in several princely states during the annexations, the worst spot was certainly Jammu and Kashmir. Local Muslims and Pakistani forces clashed with the Indian Army over possession of the state, leading to the First Indo-Pakistani War, which lasted until the end of 1948. In the end, the state was roughly divided between the two countries, but the conflict was far from settled.

Prime Minister Nehru and the Congress Party led the new democracy until 1964. Nehru was a social democrat – that it, he believed in socialist economics, with the government controlling most economic activity, coupled with multi-party elections, as is done in democracies. The advantage of this system over the Marxist-Leninist system of one-party politics is that the social democrats can be voted out of office, a feature which prevents authoritarianism and corruption. Nehru believed that socialist policies would better serve India, which suffered from great poverty and economic stratification. His party nationalized heavy industry to quickly develop the economy, and also vastly expanded education and infrastructure development.

The integration of the princely states into existing provinces created tensions, however, as they now incorporated different ethnic groups, with different policy preferences, into the same states. In 1956, the government enacted the States Reorganization Act, which redrew states’ boundaries along linguistic lines (language being a major marker of ethnic identity).

Internationally, India pursued a neutral path, proclaiming nonalignment in the Cold War. The nation’s first 20 years were not very peaceful as boundary disputes raged on. In 1960, India  finally annexed the last Western possession in India, the Portuguese colony of Goa, in a military operation after negotiations failed. The next year, China attacked after violent skirmishes along the Tibetan border; Chinese forces pushed the Indians back in the Sino-Indian War before unilaterally declaring a ceasefire. While the US refused to provide India with advanced weapons, the USSR was willing to do so, mainly as a way of containing Chinese aggression in Western Asia. This pushed India into closer relations with the USSR. And in 1965, India and Pakistan fought the Second Indo-Pakistani War, again over Kashmir, and again with no decisive outcome despite considerable casualties.

As is so often the case after independence, the party which led the resistance enjoyed an initial popularity; in the case of India, this was the Congress Party. But when party leadership passed to Indira Gandhi (Nehru’s daughter) in 1966, the party split into two factions. A group of Congress Party officials sought a more right-wing economic model in line with the capitalist democracies. These members formed a new party, called Congress (O), while Gandhi maintained leadership of the original party, now called Congress (R).

Gandhi’s Congress (R) party continued Nehru’s socialist policies, for example by nationalizing the banking system. The party also launched very successful initiatives to improve agriculture and dairy production in the country, protecting it from the famines of the past. Gandhi directed the Indian military to intervene in the Bangladesh War of Independence, when East Pakistan sought independence from the rest of the Muslim-majority country. India defeated Pakistani forces during the intervention (also sometimes called the Third Indo-Pakistani War), and the revolution succeeded, resulting in the formation of the independent country of Bangladesh. Gandhi also oversaw the annexation of the Kingdom of Sikkim into India in 1973.

But Gandhi had many political opponents. In 1974, a social movement against government corruption and overreach spread across the country, culminating in a high court finding Indira Gandhi guilty of violating election laws. This led to a nationwide strike and protests led by opposition parties. Gandhi’s government responded strongly, suspending civil rights and elections and arresting opposition leaders. This twenty-one-month suspension of democracy was known as the Indian Emergency. The opposition, however, formed a unity party known as the Janata Party which challenged the Congress (R) in the next election after the emergency. They defeated the incumbents, then launched an investigation into government corruption, even arresting and imprisoning Gandhi for a time.

Economic Change in India

The Janata Party conducted a study in 1979 (the Mandal Commission) to address the caste system in India. The stratification of society along religious lines was an ancient practice in India, and circumscribed many aspects of one’s life, such as occupation and marriage. The British Raj had used the caste system as a way of administering the colony, for example, by determining taxes (despite their emphasis on freedom, British society was quite stratified, and they may have felt rather at home with caste). The Mandal Commission eventually led to a system of reservation, or affirmative action, in which a certain number of slots for students in higher education, or for government positions, be reserved for people of lower castes, to improve social mobility. Naturally, this was very controversial, as those of higher castes considered it a form of reverse-discrimination.

As the Indian economy grew more capitalist and deregulated in the 1990s, the role of caste weakened; less government control of the economy led to more social mobility. Today, there is much less caste-based discrimination and abuse in India than there once was. Nevertheless, most Indians associate mainly with people of their own caste and do not marry outside it.

The Janata Party could not maintain their parliamentary coalition and were perceived as ineffective in addressing the nation’s problems; they were defeated by Gandhi in the next national election in 1980, who now led a splinter political party known as Congress (I).

Indira Gandhi would not remain prime minister for long. Sikh militants in the northern state of Punjab clashed with police in their campaign to create a separate Sikh homeland in India. In 1984, Gandhi was assassinated by Sikh members of her own bodyguard unit. The resulting anti-Sikh riots claimed 3000 lives.

Rajiv Gandhi, Indira’s oldest son, had been elected to parliament two years before. Now, Congress party officials chose him for prime minister in the wake of his mother’s death. Gandhi abandoned many of his mother’s policies; for example, he shifted away from socialist economics by deregulating business. He also forged closer links with the United States, which led to some American financial and technical support. He pushed to modernize the tech industries in India, the greatest example of which was the founding of the Indian space program.

He also faced several scandals and difficulties. A Union Carbide pesticide plant in Bhopal leaked poisonous chemicals into the community, killing thousands; several government officials were caught accepting bribes from a foreign military contractor; and thousands of Indian troops were killed in Sri Lanka while participating in peacekeeping operations. Unemployment remained very high. Gandhi himself suffered the same fate as his mother: he was also assassinated, this time by a Sri Lankan rebel group that Indian troops had been fighting.

Sectarian violence continued in India in the 1990s. Hindu and Muslim extremists continued to fight for control of Jammu and Kashmir, while the destruction of the Babri Masjid mosque by Hindu extremists led to thousands of deaths in riots. In 1999, India launched a military campaign in Kashmir to dislodge a terrorist network supported by Pakistani troops (the Kargil Conflict), even though the two nations had started a peace process only three months before.

Economic development in India, however, remained strong. The government continued to privatize national industries and deregulate business. These policies would, by the early 2000s, lead to an expanding GNP and per-capita income, although the wealth gap was quickly widening. Economic growth, coupled with the fact that India grew to one billion citizens at the turn of the century, has convinced many observers that India is on the path to become a superpower.

The 1990s also saw the rise of a new right-wing power in India: the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The BJP espouses Hindu Nationalism (the concept that only Hindus can truly be Indian). Major BJP parliamentary victories in 1996 and 2014 led to an increase in sectarian legislation, such as beef bans (Hindus are vegetarian) and to religious violence in the form of anti-Muslim mob lynchings. And violence is not contained to India alone; the strained relationship with Muslim Pakistan flares up from time to time as well, a particularly dangerous prospect given that both countries now possess nuclear weapons. The 2001 Attack on the Indian Parliament was a case in point; five Muslim terrorists (backed by Pakistan, according to the Indian government) attempted to storm the parliament but were killed by security forces. This led to India shelling Pakistani forces along the Kashmiri border. The BJP also shepherded the passage of the Citizenship Amendment Act, which prevents Muslims from certain countries  from becoming naturalized Indian citizens – the first time religion has played a role in citizenship in postcolonial India. The BJP’s Indian agriculture acts deregulated the agricultural sector. This spawned the Indian Farmer’s Protest, as already-strained farmers feared that the new policies would lead to decreased profits.

Modern India is a study in contradiction, where wealth and poverty, tradition and modernity, reside side-by-side, particularly along urban / rural lines. It is an extremely complex and ancient culture, encompassing a dizzying array of religions, languages, and ethnicities. It is remarkable that, in such a short time since independence, India has not only avoided fragmentation, but has made great economic and political strides. Its international situation has stabilized following the Indo-Pakistani wars, though tensions with both Pakistan and China still smolder. But India remains a bold experiment: it is the largest democracy in the world by population, despite the diversity of its people, as well as the most successful of all decolonized nations. India serves as a sort of bellwether for developing nations, where democracy can prove itself in the most challenging of environments.

Conclusion

The economic rise of both China and India is a major change in world affairs at the start of the 21st century. What is most interesting is not the similarities between them, but their differences -- both have developed into major international players using very different methods. While both nations have struggled with balancing capitalism and socialism in their mixed economies, China maintains an authoritarian, one-party government. India remains committed to democracy and pluralism, though the commitment is often tested by religious conflict. China is the wealthier state by far, but also introduced capitalist reforms twenty years before India, giving it a head start in that direction.

Perhaps more important is India’s international position. India is a large, developing democracy in a region where commitment to democracy is largely either shaky or nonexistent. India, as an anchor of democracy, may prove an important stabilizing force in Asia through the turmoil of the 21st century. The entire developing world is watching how these two Asian giants develop, and are sure to be influenced by what they see.