Indian Freedom Movement In India

The Nehru era was a seminal one for the formation of the Indian nation. At independence a host of problems beset the Indian state. A traumatic partition and a communal holocaust had left the Indian state reeling. Together with this went the thorny problem of the Indian state. The achievement of India was not an easy one. We see throughout the post independence era how the idea of an Indian nation had to be fought for tenaciously. The Indian state constantly juggled the demands of separatism and cohesion. A precarious balance between these was maintained. Indeed the very discourse of a united India had to be fought for again and again. That the project of a united India survived is a testament to the achievement of the nation builders in the

One of these was that India was a united nation. That it would advance rapidly after gaining political independence. It was taken for granted that the British had played a ruinous and exploitative role in India. One of the basic planks of the ideology of the Indian freedom movement was that India was a united entity including the muslims. This ideology was best represented by the India National Congress. Though Gandhi played a dominating role in national affairs the freedom movement was not monolithic. A radical armed movement was always present, ebbing and flowing , but always present to some extent. Men like Bhagat Singh and Chandrashekhar Azad were famous representatives of this strain of the freedom movement. Particularly in Punjab and Bengal the armed movement was a vigorous one. Ambedkar was a leader of the untouchables who espoused a radical anti-Hindu point of view, alternative to the congress one. Then there was the vigorous Hindu right led by men like Savarkar and Hardekar. This movement was

These numbered as many as 572. These princely states were present in a patchwork all over India and the largest like Kashmir and Hyderabad were as large as European countries. At independence these states had the option of acceding to either India or Pakistan. Pakistan tried it’s best to induce as many states as possible to jo0in Pakistan. Under the able and tenacious leadership of Sardar Patel one by one, through adroit political moves, threats and inducements , the Indian states were incorporated into India. The most serious problems arose in relation to Kashmir and Hyderabad. Kashmir had been under dteady pressure from Pakistan. In 1948 Pashtun tribesmen were incited by Pakistan to invade Kashmir. Thereupon the Hindu Maharaja acceded to India and with the help of Indian armed forces the Pashtun invaders were driven out. But the Pakistani forces were not driven out of Kashmir completely, they still controlled a sizeable portion of the northern part of the state. At this juncture the matter was referred to the United Nations where it steadily developed into a diplomatic deadlock. The fact that the western powers did not support India led many to suspect that the western powers were playing power politics in the region, particularly with reference to the cold war. In Hyderabad the king held out, not acceding to either dominion and hoping to maintain some degree of independence. Within the state a fanatical Islamic