At the stroke of the midnight hour, India awoke to freedom of a kind, as well as to a host of unresolved problems that had only been discussed theoretically before. In political and intellectual circles, there had for some time been a deeply felt need to anticipate the nature and content of the post-independence Indian state. With formal independence achieved, the need for a definite programme and direction for the new Indian state now became a matter of urgency; there was a need to order various contending ideas into manageable forms and to find at least an interim closure to the debates on the nature of the new India.

The debates, when recounted in terms of their particular arguments, have a spurious rationality and calmness about them: they took place against the very turbulent backdrop of the violence and population transfers of 1946-8, the problems of accession of states to the new Union (notably Kashmir and Hyderabad), armed conflict with Pakistan, and continuing economic and political pressures from the former colonial power. But the debates need to be recounted here in that spurious calmness; because that was the way they were invoked, as legitimising principles for the actual politics of the independent Indian state. We must therefore examine the roots of what came to be called the 'Nehruvian vision' or the 'Nehruvian model' in India, describing thereby what might be called the political culture of post-independence India.

We might profitably ask whether this political culture took shape in the crucial period of transition from the temporary Dominion of India

-139-