The West has never been too comfortable with India’s rise. Indeed, at independence, nobody expected India to survive as a democracy. “Power will go to the hands of rascals, rogues, freebooters”, the imperialist Prime Minister of Britain Winston Churchill is supposed to have remarked on the independence of India, adding “all Indian leaders will be of low calibre and men of straw.” Now after leaders like Boris Johnson and Liz Truss, it is perhaps their leaders who deserve to be called “people of low calibre”.

In his 1968 book “Population Bomb”, the Nobel laureate Paul Ehrlich, and before him in 1967, the Paddock brothers, William and Paul, had predicted that India would splinter into anarchy and chaos over famine and food riots. The Paddock brothers in fact argued that there was no point in giving food aid to India as it would be a sheer waste ~ Indians should rather be left to their own fate. After India’s third Parliamentary election, Aldous Huxley wrote, “When Nehru goes, the government will become a military dictatorship ~ as in so many of the newly independent states, for the army seems to be the only highly organised centre of power.” On the eve of the 1967 elections, the Times of London ran a series of articles titled “India’s disintegrating democracy”.

Its Delhi correspondent, Neville Maxwell, wrote that “the great experiment of developing India within a democratic framework has failed” and that Indians would soon vote in the “fourth ~ and surely last ~ general election.” India has not only survived all these dismal predictions, but has thrived and prospered. No one today calls us a third world country or the “Sick Man of Asia”. The West has grudgingly ceded space to India’s growing heft in international affairs as champion of the global south and its economic rise within a short period of a decade under the NDA rule, which has seen India overtaking its erstwhile colonial master. India is comfortably poised to become the third largest global economy before the end of this decade.

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While the West has taken note of India’s achievements in space and technology benefiting millions of poor, it never misses a chance to denigrate........

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