Abstract & Overview
The India story at 75 is an extraordinarily consequential and researchable one. The single biggest challenge for anyone analyzing Indian politics is that the subject seems like a “Project in Progress”, conveying a sense of a country perennially in a state of transformation. For the study of Indian politics is, in many ways, the study of India’s democracy, understood in the most comprehensive sense. The constitutional foundation and the institutional framework on which India’s politics rests, is to my mind also the bases of democratic politics in India. Indian democracy today remains the unwritten evolving subtext of any discussion on Indian politics. Our transformation from a “soft” state to a “hard” state should make us more confident, compassionate inclusive and humane- qualities that the world’s largest democracy can well afford to stand for and stand by, because these are the qualities that have sustained our democracy in 75 years. Keywords: India; Politics; Democracy; Institutions; Transformation