How do we measure the age of nations? The idea of India as a civilisation, as a distinct presence, is at least four millennia old. But as an independent nation-state, it is only 62 years old. No previous emperor ruled over the extent of territory that Pratibha Patil presides over. There was also no democracy and no notion of individual human rights before 1947. The empowered Indian is 62 years old.

Of course, Indians often behave like teenagers—cocky and unsure at the same time. The latest flurry over a Chinese ‘strategist’ about how China should assist breakaway movements in India amused me very much. If it were a term paper written by a student of mine, I would fail it for laziness. Ideas expressed therein have been well-worn for at least 50 years. In 1960, an American journalist, Selig Harrison, wrote India: The Most Dangerous Decade. He argued that as you look at India, state by state, there were caste rivalries and these would shape the future of Indian politics. For us, Indians in the first flush of Independence brought up with a simple seamless story of united India, this was a shock. How dare a foreigner tell us that we were not a single nation free of such petty divisions! But of course, what he was telling us then is daily political wisdom now with the mandalisation of politics.

Panditji was unhappy about the demands for linguistic states as he feared balkanisation. But India absorbed that change easily. There was an explicit warning of the South of India seceding, of course in a friendly way—not like the Partition, as Annadurai told the Lok Sabha in 1962. The India-China war put a stop to that. Neville Maxwell, a British journalist, warned that the 1967 elections were the last ones and military dictatorship would follow. The Emergency came eight years later, but did not last long.

... contd.