India Since Independence

Prologue

In the first couple of decades after independence, the political discourse in India was guided, by and large, by the legacy of the freedom movement. The reorganisation of states in 1956, for instance, marked the culmination of a political principle that the Indian National Congress had internalised. Congress provincial committees were constituted on linguistic principles rather than on the basis of the administrative divisions evolved by the colonial rulers. A separate committee of the Congress was set up for the Andhra circle to function within the Madras Provincial Congress Committee in 1918 and, over the years, more Congress committees were formed on linguistic basis across the nation.

Similarly, the dynamics of the freedom struggle ...