70 years after independence, the India I know is losing its way

As the country celebrates 70 years of independence, it seems to be turning its back on the secular, tolerant society I remember growing up in Mumbai.


In 1960, 13 years after India won freedom, the American writer Selig Harrison published India: The Most Dangerous Decades. He feared “the collapse of the Indian state into regional components” ruled by communists. Predicting that India would never be able to match China, he wrote: “The west confronts the unmistakable fact of a dominant central authority in China, it is possible that in an unstable India no outsider will be able to say with assurance where political legitimacy resides.”