The answer India gave was: a sovereign democratic republic, built by Indians for every Indian, and written down so that no future government could quietly take it back. The chapter ends on this question because it is the bridge to what comes next — the Constitution and the working of Indian democracy.
The immediate tasks were brutal. On 15 August 1947 the new government faced, all at once:
- Partition’s human wreckage — millions on the move, massacres, abductions, and refugee trains like the one in Fig. 2.36 with people riding on the roof.
- A country that was not yet one country — over 560 princely states with the option to join India or Pakistan or, in theory, stay independent. Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel integrated them “using a mix of persuasion and firmness”, with military action only as a last resort, which is why he is called the Iron Man of India.
- Institutions inherited from the rulers — an army “still largely structured under British command with Indian officers gradually stepping into leadership”, a civil service and a police built to control Indians rather than serve them.
The choices that answered the question. India decided to be a republic, with an Indian head of state rather than a foreign monarch; a democracy with universal adult franchise from the very first election, at a moment when most of the population could not read; a federal union that could hold many languages and regions together; and a state that would not belong to any one religion — a direct response to what Partition had just cost. It also promised, in the Preamble, justice, liberty, equality and fraternity, and it wrote in the abolition of untouchability, the concern Gandhi and Ambedkar had fought each other over in the 1930s.