SectIon II - usad.org · prompted the eIc to fortify their factory at Surat drove ... were also...

25USAD Social Science Resource Guide • 2015-2016

The British in India, 1707–1857: “A Fatal Friendship”?100

SectIon II

The ShifT from Trade To rule, 1707–57BriTiSh 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 uncer-tain endeavor as the long-distance luxury trade. Queen elizabeth’s charter of 1600 gave the company monop-oly 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 op-portunistic 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 cen-turies, 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 permis-sion to build a factory (a depot to store goods before shipment) at Surat (in modern Gujarat) from the Mu-ghal 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 fund-ed soldiers, and its increasing demand for textiles gave weavers across India employment. However, for the Mu-ghal 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 Ma-dras 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 Mu-ghal 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 Shiva-ji’s earlier raids on Surat had shown. over these several decades, the Bengal textile trade grew briskly, provid-ing 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

47USAD Social Science Resource Guide • 2015-2016 • Revised Page

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 In-dia: it intensified British racism. The explosion of the British popular press in the mid-nineteenth century co-incided 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 Cap-tain 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 grue-some fashion, such as being blown from cannons, espe-cially 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 must-visit) 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 pho-tography at home in England. The PosT-MuTiny PoliTical FraMework

The Mutiny prompted major changes in the gover-nance of India. What had been the outgrowth of accu-mulated 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 en-vironment.

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 previ-ous section.

The Mutiny occasioned a vast reorganization of re-sources 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-

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.


and in 1939 Bose left India first for Germany then Sin-gapore. 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 dem-onstrated 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 sol-diers 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 Brit-ish 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 under-taken, 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 emphati-cally not a result of a shortage of food, but rather its mal-distribution. Food stores were centralized in urban ar-eas 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 ren-dered 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 colo-nial 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 In-dian 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 flour-ished. These movements, whether Hindu, Sikh, or Muslim, sought to knit together a community of believers on the basis of shared individual be-liefs. 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.

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.

62 USAD Social Science Resource Guide • 2015-2016 • Revised Page

significant wing that pushed the party away from secu-larism 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 Northwest-ern 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-

tional level, thereby giving Muslims more power over na-tional politics than sheer numbers would have warranted since two groups were Muslim-majority. Important pow-ers 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 In-dian 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 Ac-tion 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

Representatives at the Simla Conference in 1945. The Simla Conference failed because Jinnah and Nehru could not come to an agreement about its terms.


Contemporary India, 1991–2014

SeCtIon V

IntroductIonIn this section we shall examine the past three de-

cades 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 na-tional 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 char-acter 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 liberal-ization—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 sec-tion 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 themati-cally. A brief outline of the government and Prime Min-isterships of India since Independence will be helpful:

1947–64 Jawaharlal nehru, Indian national Congress

1964–66 Lal Bahadur Shastri, Indian national Congress

1966–77 Indira Gandhi, Indian national Con-gress

1977–79 Morarji Desai, Janata Party

1979–80 Chaudhury Charan Singh, Janata Party (Secular)

1980–84 Indira Gandhi, Indian national Con-gress (I)

1984 Assassination of Mrs. Gandhi

1984–89 Rajiv Gandhi, Indian national Con-gress

1989–90 V.P. Singh, Janata Dal (national Front)

1990–91 Chandra Shekhar, Samajwadi [Social-ist] Janata Party

1991–96 P.V. narasimha Rao, Indian national Congress (I)

1996–96 Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Bharatiya Janata Party, Janata Dal (United Front)

1996–97 H.D. Deve Gowda, Janata Dal (Secu-lar)

1997–98 I.K. Gujaral, Janata Dal (United Front)

1998–2004 Atul Bihari Vajpayee, Bharatiya Janata Party (national Democratic Alliance)

2004–14 Manmohan Singh, Indian national Congress (United Progressive Alliance)

2014– present

narendra Modi, Bharatiya Janata Party (national Democratic Alliance)

This only conveys the national dimensions of the In-dian 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, ex-perimentation, and debate, rather than a deficit. Though it is easier to follow the single strand of national develop-ment, 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 politi-cal 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


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 ad-opted a mixed economy that was primarily socialist in nature with space for much private enterprise. Nehru-vian socialism created a mixed economy aimed at en-suring 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 In-dian conditions, ideas, and experiences. Major problems faced by India include uneven development, corruption, and a lack of basic education and housing for many citi-zens. Discrimination against girls, women, and Dalits also continues despite the many ameliorative efforts the state takes. Nevertheless, India has maintained a near-perfect record of stable democratic rule. Its government

is relatively efficient and ensures basic services and hu-man rights. India has maintained its territorial integrity as a nation-state and played important regional and in-ternational 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 uni-versities 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 cri-tiques of colonial rule and knowledge, developed new, more dynamic and complex understandings of modern-ization around the world, and attempted to recover non-elite 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 po-litical theory), and the intriguing discipline of ethnohis-tory. 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 lega-cy? And, what are the best methods to ensure the future flourishing of India’s 1.2 billion citizens?


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 fail-ures 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 guaran-tees and civil liberties were suspended. How-ever, 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 national-ism. 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-cul-tivation into effect. Gandhi successfully built a mass base for Indian nationalism, relying on ac-cessible symbols with emotional resonance for many Indians, such as the spinning wheel and Hindu religious mythology. For example, Gan-dhi 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 Eng-land. 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 Min-ister 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 pow-er when his mother was assassinated in 1984. Rajiv began the process of liberalizing the In-dian economy. However, he also relied on re-ligious 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 Disobedi-ence movement. It overhauled the government of India. It ended the system of dyarchy enacted in 1919 in which provincial powers were di-vided 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 leg-islative 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 ef-fective in northern India, a wheat-growing re-gion considered the breadbasket of India. Key aspects of the Green Revolution included high-yield seeds, fertilizers, pesticides, and irrigation. While the Green Revolution did not substan-tially 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


and guarantee than an informal IOU. The hun-dis were such effective financial instruments that the British colonial government, rather than try-ing to abolish these alternative-banking institu-tions, instead simply adopted and formalized them. Such networks facilitated long-distance trade in the early modern period, and they con-tinue 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 anti-corruption movement in India. Hazare has en-gaged 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 Moun-tain range is the highest in the world, contain-ing most of the world’s highest peaks, includ-ing 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. Ad-ditionally, 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 reli-gion 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

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, Sanskri-tized Hindi, and other aspects of Hindu reli-gious identities to ally Indian national identity with Hinduism. The ideology of this movement is called Hindutva. Another important Hin-dutva organization is the Rashtriya Swayamse-vak 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 as-sassinated Gandhi in 1948, for which the or-ganization 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 con-tinent; this peninsula is bounded by the Hima-layas, the Karaokoram, and Hindu Kush moun-tain 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 Indepen-dence founded in 1885 in Bombay. The Con-gress remains an important political party in India today. It has maintained an official policy of commitment to secularism and democracy.


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 Gold-en Temple at Amritsar; Assassination of Mrs. Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards

1984–89 Prime Ministership of Rajiv Gandhi

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