num_pages: 191
description: Today the Indian state claims to embody the values of a stable political democracy a harmonious territorial unity and a steadfast religious impartiality. Even many of those critical of the inequalities of Indian society underwrite such claims. The Indian Ideology suggests that the roots of the current ills of the Republic go much deeper historically. They lie in the way the struggle for independence culminated in the transfer of power from British rule to Congress in a divided subcontinent not least in the roles played by Gandhi as the great architect of the movement and Nehru as his appointed successor in the catastrophe of Partition. Only an honest reckoning with that disaster Perry Anderson argues offers an understanding of what has gone wrong with the Republic since Independence. The Idea of India widely diffused not only in the official establishment but more broadly in mainstream intellectual life side-steps or suppresses many of these uncomfortable realities past and present. For its own reasons much of the left has yet to challenge the upshot: what has come to be the neo-Nehruvian consensus of the time. The Indian Ideology revisiting the events of over a century in the light of how millions of Indians fare in the Republic today suggests another way of looking at the country.
language: English
title: The Indian Ideology
publisher: Three Essays Collective