When India gained independence in August 1947, it inherited a deeply impoverished economy, a literacy rate of approximately 17%, and the legacy of nearly two centuries of systematic deindustrialisation — its vast agricultural and textile wealth redirected to serve the imperial economy of Britain. This colonial rule had reduced India’s share of global GDP from roughly 20–25% in the early eighteenth century to less than 4% by 1947.
The task facing its founders was not merely nation-building — it was structural transformation. Jawaharlal Nehru understood that a nation of India’s scale and diversity could not sustain itself on natural resources or cheap labour alone. Lasting prosperity would have to be built on indigenous intellectual capital. That conviction shaped some of the most consequential policy decisions of the first two decades of independence — decisions whose impact is still felt in boardrooms from San Francisco to Singapore.
His response rested on three pillars. The first was human capital — the IITs, established from 1951, and the IIMs, from 1961, built as centres of excellence from the outset, whose graduates were swept up by the IT revolution of the 1990s into roles that would reshape the global economy. From 17% literacy at independence to over 74% today, the results are visible across every major industry: Sundar Pichai at Google, Satya Nadella at Microsoft, Arvind Krishna at IBM, Shantanu Narayen at Adobe, Indra Nooyi formerly at PepsiCo, Ajay Banga at the World Bank, and Vinod Khosla as one of Silicon Valley’s most influential venture capitalists, among many others. No country of comparable income level has shaped the global knowledge economy so disproportionately.
The second pillar was state-led development — the Five-Year Plans that built industrial and scientific foundations in steel, energy, space, and pharmaceuticals that the market alone would never have created in a newly decolonised economy. Today, India is the “Pharmacy of the World,” a nuclear power, the first country to reach Mars on its maiden attempt, and the first to land a mission near the Moon’s south pole. It is also the fourth nation with anti-satellite capabilities and the world’s largest exporter of IT services.
The third pillar was strategic autonomy. Nehru co-founded the Non-Aligned Movement with four postcolonial giants — Nasser of Egypt, Tito of Yugoslavia, Sukarno of Indonesia, and Nkrumah of Ghana — convening their first summit in Belgrade in 1961. The movement gave India moral standing in the developing world and strategic flexibility at home: the earliest articulation of what is now called strategic autonomy.
That dignity, and the principled tradition it produced, makes what has followed under Prime Minister Narendra Modi more consequential — and troubling. A deepening strategic alliance with Israel marks a major departure from earlier policy. For decades, India’s pro-Palestinian position was substantive, not rhetorical. India was the first non-Arab country to recognise Palestine, maintaining that stance even in the face of Western pressure and grounding it in a genuine anti-colonial principle. Under Modi, however, that posture has shifted significantly. India has become one of Israel’s largest arms customers, purchasing drones, missiles, and air-defence systems. As one Indian leftist leader stated directly: “Modi’s embrace of Zionist Israel amidst its relentless assault on Palestine is a betrayal of India’s anti-colonial legacy.”
The moral stakes of this alliance became stark after October 2023. As a UN member and participant in international legal frameworks, India faces a diplomatic dilemma: the ICC issued arrest warrants in November 2024 for Prime Minister Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Gallant for alleged war crimes, yet India maintains a close relationship with their government.
Who benefits from this alliance, and at whose expense? The answer lies partly in a 2011 interview in which Benjamin Netanyahu outlined Israel’s core strategic doctrine with unusual clarity: “The greatest mission that we have is to prevent a militant Islamic regime from meeting up with nuclear weapons, or from nuclear weapons meeting up with a militant Islamic regime. The first is called Iran; the second is called Pakistan.”
In this strategic framework, Iran and Pakistan represent Israel’s principal perceived threats. India — with its unresolved conflict with nuclear-armed Pakistan, its ongoing border tensions, and its growing appetite for advanced military technology — has therefore become, in this interpretation, a strategically useful partner. The reverberations of this logic were visible in the military confrontations between India and Pakistan in May 2025, which brought both nuclear-armed nations to the brink of full-scale war and illustrated how fragile the regional security environment has become.
Israel’s strategic interest may lie in destabilising Pakistan, while India’s interest lies in its stability. These objectives are often directly opposed. A destabilised nuclear-armed Pakistan — where institutional crises allow non-state actors to fill power vacuums — poses a far greater long-term threat than a stable state with which dialogue remains possible.
Modi’s 2014 election campaign was built on several transformative promises: the repatriation of black money stashed abroad (often cited as approximately ₹15 lakh per citizen), the creation of 20 million jobs annually, substantial currency strengthening, and the elimination of extreme poverty within a defined timeframe. More than a decade later, these commitments have largely gone unfulfilled.
Two of Modi’s most frequently cited achievements — Aadhaar and UPI, the twin pillars of India’s digital financial revolution — were conceived and initially developed under the preceding UPA government of Manmohan Singh, with foundational institutions established between 2008 and 2009. Modi’s government deserves credit for scaling and deploying these systems nationwide, but their conceptual origins predate his administration.
The BJP under Modi has also demonstrated a sophisticated capacity to shift public discourse toward Hindu-Muslim tensions at moments when economic accountability or governance failures might otherwise dominate debate. Critics describe this as “polarisation politics,” evident across multiple election cycles. Issues such as unemployment, agricultural distress, education quality, and healthcare capacity are often displaced by controversies over mosque demolitions, inter-religious marriages, beef consumption bans, or citizenship legislation.
Conclusion
India’s post-independence trajectory stands as one of the most remarkable experiments in deliberate nation-building — a country that converted colonial-era poverty into global intellectual leadership through principled investment in education and strategic independence. Yet the Modi era represents a significant pivot. Campaign promises have largely remained unmet and a foreign policy once anchored in anti-colonial solidarity has drifted toward alliances whose strategic logic may serve interests misaligned with India’s own long-term security.
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