NCERT Extracts - India After Independence
Category : UPSC
How were States to be Formed?
- Back in the 1920s, the Indian National Congress had promised that once the country won independence, each major linguistic group would have its own province.
- However, after independence the Congress did not take any steps to honour this promise.
- For India had been divided on the basis of religion.
- Both Prime Minister Nehru and Deputy Prime Minister Vallabhbhai Patel were against the creation of linguistic states.
- In October, 1952, a veteran Gandhian named Potti Sriramulu went on a hunger fast demanding the formation of Andhra state to protect the interests of Telugu speakers.
- On 15 December, 1952, fifty-eight days into his fast, Potti Sriramulu
- Thus, on 1 October, 1953, the new state of Andhra Pradesh came into being. After the creation of Andhra, other linguistic communities also demanded their own separate states.
- A States Reorganisation Commission was set up, which submitted its report in 1956, recommending the redrawing of district and provincial boundaries to form compact provinces of Assamese, Bengali, Oriya, Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada and Telugu speakers respectively.
- A little later, in 1960, the bilingual state of Bombay was divided into separate states for Marathi and Gujarati speakers.
- In 1966, the state of Punjab was also divided into Punjab and Haryana, the former for the Punjabi speakers (who were also mostly Sikhs), the latter for the rest (who spoke not Punjabi but versions of Haryanvi or Hindi).
Planning for Development
- In 1950, the government set up a Planning Commission to help design and execute suitable policies for economic development.
- There was a broad agreement on what was called a "mixed economy" model.
- Here, both the State and the private sector would play important and complementary roles in increasing production and generating jobs.
- In 1956, the Second Five Year Plan was formulated.
The search for an independent foreign policy
- India gained freedom soon after the devastations of the Second World War. At that time a new international body - the United Nations - formed in 1945 was in its infancy.
- The 1950s and 1960s saw the emergence 'of the Cold War, that is, power rivalries and ideological conflicts between the USA and the USSR, with both countries creating military alliances.
- Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, who was also the foreign minister of newly independent India, developed free India's foreign policy in this context.
- Non-alignment formed the bedrock of this foreign policy.
- But this policy of staying away from alliances was not a matter of remaining "isolated" or "neutral".
- The former means remaining aloof from world affairs whereas non-aligned countries such as India played an active role in mediating between the American and Soviet alliances.
- Krishna Menon led the Indian delegation to the UN between 1952 and 1962 and argued for a policy of non-alignment.
- Leaders of Asian and African countries met at Bandung, Indonesia in 1955.
- Over 29 newly independent states participated in this famous conference to discuss how Afro-Asian nations could continue to oppose colonialism and Western domination.
- By the 1970, a large number of countries had joined the non-aligned movement.
