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Problems of Power. It was in most respects an appalling heritage. When independence finally came, and Nehru took the reins of power, it scarcely seemed as if he had even the raw material for a nation. The people with whom he had to work were among the world's poorest and most backward. Even today 325 million Indians (85% of the population) are illiterate, and their per capita income is only $57 a year (v. $49 in China, $143 in Japan). Some 68 million—the equivalent of the total U.S. labor force—are unemployed. In summer in 120° heat, millions of city workers go without water because they cannot afford to buy it at one-fifth of a cent a glass. In Calcutta (pop. 2,568,000) it is still cheaper to hire a man or a boy to pull a cart than to hire a bullock, and thousands of people sleep on the streets every night.
There were also immense problems of diversity and disunity. Indians speak some 200 dialects, including 14 distinct major languages. India's teeming masses are bedeviled by almost every form of intolerance known to man. The mutual religious antipathy between Hindus (303 million), Moslems (35.4 million) and Sikhs (6.2 million) is always close to the boiling point. The nation's 50 million untouchables suffer from caste discrimination, resting, in the words of an Indian government official, on "prejudices deeper than the one against Negroes in the U.S." The 26 million ebony-colored Tamils claim that fair-skinned northerners (like Nehru) persecute them because of their color.
Armageddon Postponed. In the first year of India's life, it seemed as though religious hatred by itself would tear the nation apart. Hindus, Sikhs and Moslems battled all over India in an orgy of violence which claimed up to half a million lives. Somehow, through the public shock of Gandhi's assassination and by the determined use of power, the slaughter was finally checked. Nehru could at last turn his attention to other problems. He and his government forced through laws forbidding social and religious discrimination against untouchables. They incorporated into free India 552 princely states which the British had allowed to fester in medi eval autonomy. They held free elections—the world's largest—and by a mixture of force and political guile staved off Communist Party bids to win control of provincial governments.
As a solution to the nation's economic problems, Nehru advanced what he vaguely called "a socialist pattern of society."