Section II
The British in India, 1707–1857: “A Fatal Friendship”?100
The Shift from Trade to Rule,
1707–57
British Trade in India
The East India Company was a joint stock company
financed by English merchants. This arrangement spread
the start-up costs as well as the risk of such an uncertain endeavor as the long-distance luxury trade. Queen
Elizabeth’s charter of 1600 gave the Company monopoly privileges for any trade with India. This monopoly
would last until 1813. In the seventeenth century, the
EIC imported India’s textiles.101 The Dutch dominance
of the spice trade had prompted the English to turn to
the textile trade. In the early seventeenth century that
either Holland or England would dominate all the India
trade and its vast inland territory was not yet known;
rather England, Holland, Portugal, and France sent opportunistic traders to take their share of the great Indian
Ocean trade in luxury commodities. From then until the
mid-eighteenth century, English political and territorial
rule in India developed from a long series of small steps
and decisions. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, European political and territorial rule was by no
means a predetermined outcome, nor was it a motivation
for the Europeans, either in India or at home.
The English diplomat Thomas Roe obtained permission to build a factory (a depot to store goods before
shipment) at Surat (in modern Gujarat) from the Mughal Empire in 1613. For a period of about fifty years,
from 1617 till the 1660s, the EIC resided in India as
a guest of the Mughal emperor. Its trade volume funded soldiers, and its increasing demand for textiles gave
weavers across India employment. However, for the Mughal Empire, the EIC was not an important economic or
political force.
Over the course of the seventeenth century, the EIC
continued to trade in India. In 1640, it purchased Madras from an Indian ruler; six decades later, the city had
grown to around 100,000 people, drawn by the steadily
increasing demand for textiles in Europe and Southeast
Asia.102 Madras was an open port, from which Indian
ships as well as English could trade, which no doubt
contributed to the rapid growth of the city. The British
also obtained the city of Bombay from the Portuguese
in 1668, as part of Princess Catherine’s dowry when she
married King Charles. The same Maratha attacks that
prompted the EIC to fortify their factory at Surat drove
many merchants and craftspeople to Bombay.103 The city’s
seven sandbars provided a rather improbable base from
which would grow one of the world’s most populous and
dense cities, the cultural and financial capital of India.
In Bengal, the Mughals had expelled the Portuguese
from their position at Hugli, a port city lying north of
Calcutta on the Hugli River. The EIC and Dutch East
India Company were allowed to set up shop there from
1632, where the Dutch spice trade at first far outstripped
the EIC’s trade.104 By the end of the seventeenth century,
EIC officials resented what they perceived as Mughal
officials’ interference in their trade. In 1686, ten armed
ships came from England and attempted to blockade
the ports at Surat in modern Gujarat and Chittagong in
Bangladesh. The Mughal state responded by blockading
Bombay (now Mumbai), and the EIC had to concede
and pay a large indemnity to the Mughal emperor in
1690.105
By 1700, the EIC had reached a détente with the Mughal Empire: it was autonomous in Madras and at an
uneasy and expensive peace in Calcutta and Bombay.
Though the EIC could threaten the Mughal Empire, it
could be threatened by Mughals and Marathas alike, as
the 1686–90 war and the Maratha warrior-king Shivaji’s earlier raids on Surat had shown. Over these several
decades, the Bengal textile trade grew briskly, providing about half of the textiles the EIC exported in 1710.
The locus of power for the Company shifted from Surat,
whose hinterlands had supplied most of its textiles, to
Calcutta in Bengal.106
In 1717 the EIC obtained freedom from duties on its
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25
the Mutiny: Punjabis, Pathans, and Nepali Gurkhas. By
1875, a full half of Indian troops were Punjabi.218
The Mutiny also changed British thinking about India: it intensified British racism. The explosion of the
British popular press in the mid-nineteenth century coincided with the Rebellion, providing the means for an
imperial conflict to reach a mass audience. All national
papers featured coverage of the murders of Britons in the
Rebellion, especially the massacre at Kanpur, which for
decades would serve as a symbol of all that was wrong
with India. Much of this coverage was sensationalistic.
Before the Kanpur rebellion was covered in this fashion,
a significant strain of British public opinion considered
the Mutiny a deserved response to Company mis-rule
in India; after Kanpur, most public opinion shifted to a
view of Indian injustice against the British that created
a sense that revenge was appropriate. Thus, that Captain Neill allowed the massacre of a thousand Indians
at Allahabad exemplified legitimate revenge rather than
violent Company excess.
In this spirit, rebels were summarily executed in gruesome fashion, such as being blown from cannons, especially in the heartland of the revolt around Delhi. The
great walled city of Shahjahanabad, long the heart of the
Mughal Empire, was partially razed and fenced in by a
two thousand-meter firewall. The imposing fort (still a
major tourist attraction in Delhi, the Red Fort is a mustvisit) was taken over by the British to house their troops.
About half of the population of the city was removed as
punishment. Kanpur and Delhi emerged as destinations
for “Mutiny Tours” by English residents in India. These
were also popularized through the nascent form of photography at home in England.
Photographic portrait of Queen Victoria. Queen
Victoria’s Proclamation of 1858 guaranteed Indian
princes their titles and declared that the Queen
and her representatives would not
interfere with Indian beliefs and customs
and would promote
the social advancement of Indians.
The Mutiny prompted major changes in the governance of India. What had been the outgrowth of accumulated experience based on profit motives took on a far
more elaborate and controlling form marked by a new
administrative structure, intensification of economic
control, and new colonial anxieties about the Indian environment.
Parliament passed the Government of India Act of
1858. This transferred all authority previously vested in
the East India Company to the crown. Alongside the
Act came Queen Victoria’s Proclamation of 1858. The
Proclamation responded to many presumed causes of
the revolt. It guaranteed the approximately five hundred
Indian princes their title, reversing Dalhousie’s policies
that allowed the paramount power (the Company) to
take away crowns. Indeed, the British would go so far
as to “invent traditions” for the princely states in order
to reaffirm their pride of place within the royal family
of the British Empire. The Proclamation also declared
that the Queen and her representatives in India would
not interfere with Indian religious beliefs or religion;
they would respect the customs of India; and they would
promote the social advancement of Indians. This was a
response to the perception that the Rebellion was caused
by English meddling in Indian religion and society, as in
the reform efforts aimed at Hindu women, such as sati
abolition and widow remarriage, discussed in the previous section.
The Mutiny occasioned a vast reorganization of resources as well. Its cost to Britain had been £50 million.
After the Rebellion, India was made to pay these costs in
what became known as the “India debt.” To finance this,
the colonial government revamped the land tax system
and added, for the first time, an income tax on wealthier
urban groups. This revenue financed the Indian Army;
the Indian Army in turn shored up British possessions
around the world. In the 1870s, expensive wars were
fought in Afghanistan; Burma was fully annexed in the
mid-1880s; Egypt was taken in 1882; in the 1880s and
the 1890s the Sudan came under British control; and in
the Boxer Rebellion at the turn of the twentieth cen-
The Post-Mutiny Political Framework
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47
Subash Chandra Bose greets Heinrich Himmler
(right) head of the SS and the Gestapo, 1942. Bose
struck a deal with the Axis powers: he would
mobilize the Indians the Japanese had collected as
prisoners of war as a force to help
in the war effort and take back India
from the British.
and in 1939 Bose left India first for Germany then Singapore. There he struck a deal with the Axis powers: he
would mobilize the Indians the Japanese had collected
as prisoners of war as a force to help in the war effort
and take back India from the British. The approximately
30,000-strong army even included a women’s brigade
named after the Rani of Jhansi. Though it never made
much progress in its goal to take back Delhi, it demonstrated that in no way could the colonial government
rely on the loyalty or even the passivity of its subjects.
Bose died as he traveled in a Japanese plane in August
1945; the plane crashed, and the movement fizzled out.
However, after the war, when the colonial state in 1946
tried three of the leaders of the INA for sedition, it only
fanned the raging flames of nationalist discontent and
hastened its own demise.254
Indian Summer: The 1943–44 Famine in
Bengal
Eastern India was hard hit by the war; as refugees
streamed into Calcutta from Burma, Americans soldiers came to eastern India to help secure the front, at
Kohima, helping to break the siege at nearby Imphal in
1944. Allied Forces also pushed to retake the substantial
Japanese gains in Burma.
That the war was being fought for distant interests was
made all the more clear by the horrific famine brought
on by colonial policies in eastern India. In World War
I, India had borne its own war expenses. In World War
II, Indian politicians refused to do so, forcing the British government to bear the expenses of fighting. As is
well known, Britain suffered greatly during the war, and
there was no way it could bear the expenses it had undertaken, including those of the 2.5 million Indian soldiers
in its army. It was agreed that the Government of India
would cover the expenses, and Britain would repay the
debt after the war. By the end of the war, London owed
Delhi £1.3 billion. Delhi, in turn, had robbed Peter to
pay Paul, printing rupees in India that sparked a round
of massive inflation.
Combined with other wartime pressures on food
supplies and stores, this led to the death of at least 3.5
million people in eastern India. This was most emphatically not a result of a shortage of food, but rather its maldistribution. Food stores were centralized in urban areas and shipped on to the army, leading to a shortage of
food in the countryside; what was there was—because of
inflation—outside the reach of most peasants. Recently
historians have started to study this famine to understand
its long-term political impacts in eastern India.255 One
young historian even argues that subsequent religious
rioting and divisions in Bengal were in large measure
caused by the unbearable stresses put on Bengali society
by the famine.256 The dropping of the nuclear bomb rendered the Allied efforts on the eastern front moot. But
Britain would not be able to recover her former glory in
India. Independence loomed large on the horizon.
Section III Summary
o The Rebellion of 1857 prompted major changes in
colonial governance in India, including the shift
from Company to Crown rule.
o The Rebellion had many causes but represented a
new level of intensity in Indian resistance to colonial rule. Diverse groups participated. Though not
a full-fledged national movement, the Rebellion
posed an effective challenge to British rule.
o The colonial state strengthened its hold over Indian society and became increasingly racist. At the
same time, it worked to find ways to accommodate
different sectors of Indian society. It promised to
respect Indian religious norms.
o Over the second half of the nineteenth century, the
colonial state haltingly granted Indians the right
to represent themselves politically, at first in very
limited measure on municipal councils beginning
in 1882.
o Meanwhile, modernist religious movements flourished. These movements, whether Hindu, Sikh,
or Muslim, sought to knit together a community
of believers on the basis of shared individual beliefs. They used modern organizational methods to
achieve their ends.
o The Indian National Congress was founded as an
elite organization in 1885. It used Constitutional
means and saw itself as representing Indian public
opinion to the colonial state.
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Representatives at the Simla Conference in 1945. The Simla Conference failed because Jinnah and
Nehru could not come to an agreement about its terms.
significant wing that pushed the party away from secularism and toward a Hindu political idiom—yet another
reason for an Indian Muslim to more seriously consider
what the League had to offer.261
Since neither party gained a decisive defeat or victory,
all were forced back to the negotiating table. The 1946
Cabinet Mission developed a breakthrough plan that
would, it was hoped, be a workable compromise. The
provinces were divided into three groups (A, B, and C
groups). Group A included the Hindu majority-states.
Group B included the northwestern Muslim majority
states of Punjab, Sind, Baluchistan, and the Northwestern Frontier Provinces. Group C was the eastern state of
Bengal, another Muslim-majority province. India would
have a three-tiered government made up at the first level
of individual states; at the mid-level, these A, B, and C
groupings; and at the final level, a national government.
Each group of states would have an equal say at the na-
62
tional level, thereby giving Muslims more power over national politics than sheer numbers would have warranted
since two groups were Muslim-majority. Important powers such as taxation and law and order were concentrated
at the group level. Socialist Nehru could not stomach
this. He felt only a strong central power in India could
knit the nation together in sufficient strength to ward
off future foreign efforts at domination. Nehru believed
India required large public works projects like dams to
fuel the industrial development that would provide Indian self-sufficiency. This time it was the Congress that
stalled out the negotiations.262
Jinnah felt backed into a corner and sought to display
the strength of the Muslim League with the Direct Action Day in August 1946. Meant to be a mass protest
against Congress domination, it spun out of control and
resulted in religious violence against Hindus in Bengal,
which was then met with retaliatory violence against
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Section V
Contemporary India, 1991–2014
Introduction
In this section we shall examine the past three decades of India’s recent history. In the political sphere, the
long period of Congress dominance ended with the fall
of Rajiv’s Congress government in 1989. The Congress
never again attained the total dominance of state and national politics that it held under Nehru or Mrs. Gandhi.
It gave way to new political players, and many of these
parties got their start in the states. This has increased the
diversity and vibrancy of the Indian political landscape.
In the economic sphere, in the 1990s India’s economy
was liberalized, significantly reducing its socialist character and opening it to a much wider array of market
forces and goods. In the social sphere, perhaps the most
pronounced change has also been prompted by liberalization—the development of consumer lifestyles that
promote consumer cultures on a very wide scale. Indian
economic genius and vibrancy should not be attributed
to Western influence. In fact, we shall see in this section that the Indian experience has produced a paradigm
shift in the understanding of world history, economics,
development, and democracy.
This section will proceed chronologically and thematically. A brief outline of the government and Prime Ministerships of India since Independence will be helpful:
1947–64
1964–66
1966–77
1977–79
1979–80
1980–84
74
J awaharlal Nehru, Indian National
Congress
Lal Bahadur Shastri, Indian National
Congress
Indira Gandhi, Indian National Congress
Morarji Desai, Janata Party
haudhury Charan Singh, Janata Party
C
(Secular)
Indira Gandhi, Indian National Congress (I)
1984
1984–89
1989–90
1990–91
1991–96
1996–96
1996–97
1997–98
1998–2004 2004–14
2014–
present
Assassination of Mrs. Gandhi
ajiv Gandhi, Indian National ConR
gress
V.P. Singh, Janata Dal (National Front)
handra Shekhar, Samajwadi [SocialC
ist] Janata Party
P.V. Narasimha Rao, Indian National
Congress (I)
Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Bharatiya Janata
Party, Janata Dal (United Front)
H.D. Deve Gowda, Janata Dal (Secular)
I.K. Gujaral, Janata Dal (United Front)
Atul Bihari Vajpayee, Bharatiya Janata
Party (National Democratic Alliance)
Manmohan Singh, Indian National
Congress (United Progressive Alliance)
Narendra Modi, Bharatiya Janata Party
(National Democratic Alliance)
This only conveys the national dimensions of the Indian political scene and not events at the state level. The
diversity of the Indian political landscapes at all levels
should be seen as a resource of new political thinking, experimentation, and debate, rather than a deficit. Though
it is easier to follow the single strand of national development, politics at the state level in India are often more
indicative of the trajectories of political and economic
developments. The states are the breeding grounds for
new forms of politics.
Let us review a few basic facts about the Indian political system. First, it is a Parliamentary system in which
executive and legislative powers are combined in some
important regards. The head of the executive is the
Prime Minister. The Prime Minister is elected by the
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and Sikhs into India and of Muslims from it. The Indian
Constitution was a progressive document committed to
democracy, equality, liberty, and civil rights. India adopted a mixed economy that was primarily socialist in
nature with space for much private enterprise. Nehruvian socialism created a mixed economy aimed at ensuring Indian self-sufficiency. After Nehru’s death, his
daughter, Mrs. Gandhi, turned to populism in the face
of social unrest. She declared an Emergency from 1975–
77, the only black mark on India’s democratic record.
Though after the Emergency ended Mrs. Gandhi lost
power, she was soon thereafter returned to the Prime
Ministership in 1980.
Part V:
Contemporary India, 1991–2014
The past three decades have been a period of political
fragmentation in India. Colonial-era models have given
way to economic and political systems forged out of Indian conditions, ideas, and experiences. Major problems
faced by India include uneven development, corruption,
and a lack of basic education and housing for many citizens. Discrimination against girls, women, and Dalits
also continues despite the many ameliorative efforts the
state takes. Nevertheless, India has maintained a nearperfect record of stable democratic rule. Its government
is relatively efficient and ensures basic services and human rights. India has maintained its territorial integrity
as a nation-state and played important regional and international roles. Its greatest assets are its commitments
to democracy, freedom, and development.
As should be clear, future directions for considering
Indian history are manifold. Today in colleges and universities the most exciting debates about Indian history
center on some of the themes raised here. Over the past
two decades, scholars have established the validity of critiques of colonial rule and knowledge, developed new,
more dynamic and complex understandings of modernization around the world, and attempted to recover nonelite voices, especially from oppressed and marginalized
groups, such as women and Dalits. Such approaches
have produced a rich body of scholarship. Now, a new
generation of scholars is taking up these themes through
a variety of interdisciplinary methods including history,
anthropology, sociology, political science (especially political theory), and the intriguing discipline of ethnohistory. Some of the most pressing questions they seek to
answer are: What explains Indian successes and failures?
To what extent has India departed from its colonial legacy? And, what are the best methods to ensure the future
flourishing of India’s 1.2 billion citizens?
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89
Gandhi, Indira (1917–84) – Indira Gandhi was the
Prime Minister of India from 1966 to 1977 and
from 1980 to 1984. After Jawaharlal Nehru’s
death, Mrs. Gandhi was able to successfully take
up her father’s mantle and preserve Congress
control of Indian politics. Though very popular
and with widespread support, Mrs. Gandhi’s
Prime Ministerships were also marred by failures of integration of dissident and separatist
movements. The single greatest black mark on
Mrs. Gandhi’s record was the Emergency of
1975 to 1977 during which democratic guarantees and civil liberties were suspended. However, shortly after the end of the Emergency in
1977 Mrs. Gandhi was re-elected by the Indian
populace.
Gandhi, Mohandas K. (1868–1948) – Gandhi was
the most important leader of Indian nationalism. Gandhi was educated in England, began
his political and legal career in South Africa,
and, upon his return to India in 1915, put his
revolutionary philosophy of nonviolent self-cultivation into effect. Gandhi successfully built a
mass base for Indian nationalism, relying on accessible symbols with emotional resonance for
many Indians, such as the spinning wheel and
Hindu religious mythology. For example, Gandhi encouraged Indians to spin their own cloth,
khadi, rather than relying on manufactured
cloth that would only strengthen the colonial
economic relationship between India and England. Assassinated by a Hindu extremist just
after Indian independence in 1948, Gandhi’s
sophisticated and complex political philosophy
continues to animate many aspects of Indian life
as well as other political struggles around the
world.
Gandhi, Rajiv – Rajiv Gandhi was the Prime Minister of India from 1984 until 1989. Rajiv was
the son of Mrs. Gandhi and the grandson of
Jawaharlal Nehru. He took up the reins of power when his mother was assassinated in 1984.
Rajiv began the process of liberalizing the Indian economy. However, he also relied on religious rhetoric and symbolism to ensure his
party’s electoral success, as in the controversy
over Muslim women’s rights to divorce. Rajiv
was assassinated in 1991 as he campaigned for
the Congress. He was assassinated by a suicide
bombing carried out by a female member of the
Tamil Tiger separatist movement.
Ghats – The ghats are the hilly granite mountains
that divide the Deccan plateau from the south
Indian coastal regions to their east and west.
These ghats created natural divides that tended
to produce smaller, more fragmented polities
along India’s Coromandel and Malabar coasts,
such as the Zamorin of Calicut.
Government of India Act of 1935 – This act was a
response to the demands of the Civil Disobedience movement. It overhauled the government
of India. It ended the system of dyarchy enacted
in 1919 in which provincial powers were divided between Indian and British control. The
major concessions of the 1935 Act were that all
government departments at the provincial level
would be held by elected members of the legislative councils; franchise was expanded; and
India’s various provinces as well as the princes
would come together in a federal system.
Green Revolution – The Green Revolution was
a series of agrarian improvements designed to
improve Indian agricultural outputs. These were
attempted across India and were especially effective in northern India, a wheat-growing region considered the breadbasket of India. Key
aspects of the Green Revolution included highyield seeds, fertilizers, pesticides, and irrigation.
While the Green Revolution did not substantially benefit rice outputs, it did benefit wheat
growing, especially in India’s breadbasket in
Punjab, Haryana, and western Uttar Pradesh.
Guru Nanak (1469–1539) – Guru Nanak was the
first of ten living Sikh gurus. Grounded in the
tradition of religious reform and mysticism in
the Punjab, Guru Nanak devoted himself to
a formless god, emphasized congregation and
community, and composed a series of poems on
the virtues of his god that formed the kernel of
the Adi Granth, the original text that is the holy
scripture of Sikhism and is considered a living
Guru of the faith.
Hawala or hundi – These terms refer to the system
of money transfer through networks of credit
and trust. In informal language, we might even
call hundis “IOUs,” but they carry far more trust
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93
and guarantee than an informal IOU. The hundis were such effective financial instruments that
the British colonial government, rather than trying to abolish these alternative-banking institutions, instead simply adopted and formalized
them. Such networks facilitated long-distance
trade in the early modern period, and they continue to do so, for example, providing a means
for migrant laborers in the Middle East to send
remittances to family in South Asia. However,
today hawala is often used to transfer ill-gotten
money for nefarious purposes, since it is outside
the purview of state regulation.
Hazare, Anna – Hazare is the leader of an anticorruption movement in India. Hazare has engaged in peaceful protest, civil disobedience, and
high-profile fasts to pressure India’s government
to root out corruption. The Aam Admi Party
is a political party founded in 2012 that sprang
from Anna’s movement. The Aam Admi Party
has had some electoral success, winning control
of Delhi, the capital, as well as a few seats in
India’s Parliament in the 2014 elections.
Himalayan Mountains – The Himalayan Mountain range is the highest in the world, containing most of the world’s highest peaks, including Mt. Everest at 29,029 feet. Spread out over
India, Nepal, Bhutan, China, and Pakistan, the
Himalayas provide the altitude necessary for the
Indus, Ganges, and Brahmaputra river systems
to build into the mightiest in the world in the
north Indian plains. The Himalayas have also
been of great strategic and military importance
over the centuries, forming a natural boundary
between India and the Tibetan Plateau. Additionally, the Himalayas block the monsoon
rains from departing the subcontinent, thereby
ensuring that the rainfall necessary for India’s
agrarian success falls over the subcontinent.
Hinduism – Hinduism is India’s largest religion,
with Hindus constituting about 80.5 percent
of the Indian population. It is an ancient religion with many branches of sacred knowledge,
practice, and belief. It is polytheistic, and today
it is most often practiced via worship of these
deities in temples. Hinduism also has a base
of religious texts that facilitate the individual’s
exploration of religion and ethics, such as the
94
Vedas and the two great epics the Mahabharata
and the Ramayana. Hinduism is a flexible and
adaptive religion—local faith traditions blend
with the great pan-Indian Hindu traditions.
Hindu Mahasabha – This is an important Hindu
nationalist organization. Founded in 1915, the
Mahasabha promoted cow protection, Sanskritized Hindi, and other aspects of Hindu religious identities to ally Indian national identity
with Hinduism. The ideology of this movement
is called Hindutva. Another important Hindutva organization is the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), established in 1925 to train
militant Hindu volunteers who provide much
of the manpower for the Hindutva movement.
It was RSS member Nathuram Godse who assassinated Gandhi in 1948, for which the organization was banned for one year. The Sangh
Pariwar refers to the larger “family,” or pariwar,
of Hindu right organizations.
India – India is the largest South Asian country,
with a population of about 1.2 billion. It is the
worlds’ largest democracy. It is situated on a
peninsula that extends from the Eurasian continent; this peninsula is bounded by the Himalayas, the Karaokoram, and Hindu Kush mountain ranges to the north, and the Indian Ocean
to the south, east, and west. India obtained its
independence from Britain in 1947. Its capital is
New Delhi.
Indian National Army – The Indian National
Army was the army of Indian prisoners of wars
and other Indians in Southeast Asia founded by
Subash Chandra Bose (1897–1945) in 1942.
The Army sought to wrest India from British
control as the Japanese advanced toward it. The
Army included an important women’s brigade
called the Rani of Jhansi brigade. Though the
army was important symbolically, it did not
succeed militarily. Bose’s eschewal of Gandhian
nonviolence shows the diversity of the Indian
nationalist movement.
Indian National Congress (INC) – The INC was
the premier organization of Indian Independence founded in 1885 in Bombay. The Congress remains an important political party in
India today. It has maintained an official policy
of commitment to secularism and democracy.
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1940
Lahore Resolution of Muslim League
1942
Quit India movement led by Gandhi; Fall of Singapore in February 1942
1943
The Great Bengal famine
1943
Subash Chandra Bose (“Netaji”) founds Indian National Army in Singapore
1945
World War II ends in September
1946
Cabinet Mission proposes a three-tiered, grouped Independence settlement to
solve the problem of Hindu and Muslim representation in independent India
1947
Independence and Partition
1947–64
Prime Ministership of Jawaharlal Nehru
1947–9
First India-Pakistan War over Kashmir
1948
Assassination of Gandhi in New Delhi
January 26, 1950
Republic Day: India’s new Constitution takes effect
1955
Pakistan Constitution takes effect
1962
India-China War
1964–66
Prime Ministership of Lal Bahadur Shastri with an Indian National Congress
government
1965
India-Pakistan War
1966
Death of Lal Bahadur Shastri
1966–77
Prime Ministership of Indira Gandhi
1971
Independence of Bangladesh
1975–77
Emergency
1977–88
Dictatorship of Zia-ul-Haq in Pakistan
1977–1979
Janata Party coalition government
1980
Mrs. Gandhi re-elected to the Prime Ministership
1984
Crisis in Punjab and Mrs. Gandhi’s attack on separatists holed up at the Golden Temple at Amritsar; Assassination of Mrs. Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards
1984–89
Prime Ministership of Rajiv Gandhi
108
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