For the last several hundred years most nations have struggled with what Marxists call “state formation”. Indeed, it forms an entire branch of Marxist studies.
India, in most things, has had the opposite problem. It inherited a strong state in 1947 but, for well-known and well-understood reasons, struggled to form a cohesive nation.
The Congress saw this as a political challenge, not least because of Mohammad Ali Jinnah, who demanded a religion-based nation. India’s diversity also contributed to the Congress approach as did the initial skirmishes caused by the precipitate departure of the British.
By the end of the 1980s, barring Kashmir, the
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