India

Indian Muslim devotees offer prayers at The Taj Mahal in Agra.

AFP / Getty

• Share

Human settlement in South Asia began about 9,000 years ago, when people started farming in the Indus valley along the modern-day India-Pakistan border. Since then, the story of what we now call India has been one of successive waves of arrivals and invaders, many of whom ended up assimilating into the existing society: Aryans from central Asia, who literally wrote the books from which Hindu religion and culture derives; Persians; Greeks; Muslims.

Among the later forces that shaped India was the great Mughal Empire, which was established in the early 16th century and eventually controlled most of modern-day India, Bangladesh, Pakistan and parts of Afghanistan. The Mughal emperors were Muslim, but they relied on Hindu advisors and dropped taxes that targeted non-Muslims. The Mughals were also responsible for many of India's greatest buildings and monuments, including the Taj Mahal.

It was in the 16th century, too, that traders from Portugal, Holland, France and England began arriving in India. As the Mughal Empire began to fade over the next century, European governments established outposts and colonies. The most successful of the trading firms was the British East India Company, which by the middle of the 19th century had supplanted the Mughals and controlled most of the subcontinent. But Indians chafed under the rule of London-based businessmen; an 1857 rebellion begun by local soldiers led to the British government taking over.

By the turn of the 20th century, the struggle for complete freedom was growing more intense. Led by the Indian National Congress and the charismatic Mahatma Gandhi, who preached non-violent protest, millions of Indians engaged in campaigns of civil disobedience. At first the English rulers resisted the demands for independence; but change became inevitable, and at midnight on Aug. 15, 1947, the nation of India was born.

The break with Britain was far from smooth. States where Muslims were the majority, in the northwest and northeast of the country, were carved off as the separate nation of Pakistan. (East Pakistan would later go to war to secure its own independence as Bangladesh). Partition, as the division of Hindu and Muslim British India was called, led to the migration of some 15 million people as Hindus and Muslims rushed to make sure they were on the right side of the new national boundaries. As many as 2 million people were killed in sectarian fighting during the great reordering.

India's relationship with Pakistan remains tense still. The two countries have regularly gone to war and continue to wrestle over the disputed territory of Kashmir. Both are now nuclear powers, making the possible consequences of any future disputes far deadlier. Ethnic and religious divisions within India have also led to numerous violent clashes and massacres, but the country, one of the most ethnically diverse on the planet, continues to hold together, in part because of its remarkably resilient political system.

India is the world's largest democracy. For much of its existence, parliament has been controlled by the Congress party, which has long been dominated by the Nehru-Gandhi family (no relation to the Mahatma). The clan has given India three prime ministers: Jawaharlal Nehru, who held power for India's first 17 years; his daughter Indira Gandhi, who ruled in the late 1960s and '70s and again in the early '80s and who was killed by her Sikh bodyguards in 1984; and her son, Rajiv Gandhi, who took over after the death of his mother and was himself assassinated in 1991. Rajiv Gandhi's widow Sonia, Italian by birth, led the Congress party to an unexpected return to power in 2004 but turned down the prime minister's post, installing instead the highly regarded technocrat Manmohan Singh. Rajiv and Sonia's son Rahul, now a member of parliament, is often talked about as a future leader.

For many decades, India's economy remained protected and over-regulated, condemning the country, it seemed, to a disastrously slow "Hindu rate of growth." But from the early 1990s successive governments have begun to dismantle the "license Raj," which handed control of key industries to a handful of companies and suffocated competition and progress. Liberalization is credited by many with kick-starting India's economy. New industries such as data processing and software engineering, centered in such southern Indian cities as Bangalore and Chennai, have attracted thousands of jobs from the U.S. and Europe. (Western workers whose jobs have been outsourced complain of being "Bangalored.") By late 2006 growth was more than 9% a year, a rate that had international investors looking at India in the same way they had China in the early 1990s.

Indians believe in a kind of demographic destiny: because India will pass China as the most populous country on earth sometime in the next couple decades, many are sure India will become a huge world power as well. To ensure continued success, however, India's government will have to find a way to spread the benefits of the current boom. Hundreds of millions of people remain mired in poverty; the child malnutrition rate is an incredible 45%, higher than in sub-Saharan African countries like Ethiopia; and pockets of rebellion, especially in India's vast rural areas, where two-thirds of the people still live, threaten long-term stability. If India gets it right, though, the 21st century could belong to the world's biggest democratic freemarket just as much as it does to a certain Communist behemoth to the north.

—By Simon Robinson