AT the cusp of 75 years of India as a republic, I feel elated that our country remains a successful nation-state that commands a conspicuous presence in the community of nations. This, when the obituary of an impossibly diverse India was etched right at its birth by several international political science ‘experts’.
That the same was not unreasonable can be gathered from the fate of scores of newly independent nations of Asia and Europe which were much smaller in size, much less diverse and hence much more amenable to success as a nation-state, yet they failed.
The Constitution of India remains one of the very few among the constitutions of the newly independent Afro-Asian countries to survive this long, the other being the Japanese Constitution. We stand here as a stable democracy, an economic powerhouse, a military power in our own right and an emerging world power to reckon with. The journey has been long, arduous and eventful with great achievements and abject failures, as is the journey of any nation.
The sheer complexity of forging a stable national edifice requires the convergence of several factors such as geographical contiguity and accessibility, cultural homogeneity, economic unity and administrative commonality along with a team of leaders who possess robust expertise and honest intent, conditions that are not easily actualised.
