The spread of agriculture, especially with modern irrigation, has been one of the most significant transformations of the landscape, producing the food and fibre that sustains millions. But it is the fate of this mass that comprises a seventh of all humanity that is cause for both celebration and concern. A large, inclusive polity can only be sustained, if not created, through something more than brute force. If India has held together as an entity across the latter half of the 20th century, the vibrancy and flexibility of its democracy has played no small a part. The formation of linguistic states, the greatest ever peaceful reordering of political boundaries within a country was accomplished fairly smoothly.
Endurance is achievement in itself.
India has survived even as the former Soviet Union has crumbled and Pakistan shrunk to half its former size. But much depends on the ability of today's leadership to continue with the blend of flexibility and firmness that defused the stir for linguistic states or the armed movement for an independent Mizoram. This vast experiment in a peaceful mingling of cultures that allows survival for all but primacy for no single voice requires statesmanlike qualities. These are often wanting in the world of realpolitik. Exclusionist notions of a part or whole of India constitute the greatest single problem to be surmounted in the second half century of the republic.