Back to the future

As India completes 76 years of independence, there is much to celebrate for a country that inherited a grim colonial legacy of poverty and starvation in 1947. Judged in terms of life expectancy, adult literacy, and access to food and basic necessities, Indians today are better off than their compatriots at independence. The country is now the world’s fifth-largest economy, overtaking France and Italy, and could become the third-largest by 2027. It is among the world’s largest and fastest-growing markets for consumer goods, a global information technology (IT) services major, a space player of note, and wields considerable soft power. Contrary to the predictions of its imminent demise as late as the 1950s, the Indian republic has survived as, by