A History of India Volume 3: From the Nehru Era to the Neoliberal Age (1947-2014)

Comprehensive and in-depth exploration of one of the oldest civilisations in the world, revealing the dynamic changes of its society, the links to the rest of the world and the underlying forces that led to India’s significant role on today’s global stage.

This is the third of a three-volume history of India, characterized by three main arguments: (a) Indian history has been crucially conditioned by the connections linking the Indian subcontinent to the remainder of the world; (b) Indian society was never static, but always crisscrossed by powerful currents of change; (c) colonialism caused both the crystallization of a ’traditional’ society - which, in that shape, had never really existed before - and, at the same time, the rise of modernity.

This volume examines the political, economic and social evolution of India from independence to the 2014 general election. It argues that the period is subdivided into two main phases; the Longer Nehruvian Era, which extended well after Nehru’s death in 1964, and the Neoliberal Age. The book shows that the Longer Nehruvian Era was articulated in two stages. In the first, which ended with Nehru’s death, the features which characterized India until the late 1980s and early 1990s came into being. The main ones were a secular democracy, a dominant-party system, and an economy where the state played a crucially important economic role. The second stage of the longer Nehruvian era was characterized by the decline of these characterizing features, which, however, were still in place at the end of the 1980s. The years 1989-1991 - here examined in depth - saw the tumultuous transition to a new historical phase. This new phase, the Neoliberal Age, was characterized by the eclipse of the dominant party system and the implementation of neoliberal economic policies. The neoliberal policies sped up development but, in spite of some governmental efforts to protect the lower social strata, widened social and economic disparities.
The Neoliberal Age was also characterized by the rise of Hindutva. Already in power in the years 1999-2004, it made a comeback in the 2014 general election, whose detailed analysis concludes this volume.