Greatest Blunders in Indian history

On the morning of Janurary 26 (60th republic day) I happened to read an article about the achievements of China. The article mentioned that China has made huge progress in construction, engineering, power generation, airport development, railways, space technology etc. There are high speed trains between Shanghai and Beijing which runs at the speed of 300 kms per hour, whereas our trains struggle to maintain an average speed of 100 kmph. Looking at the advancements that China has made, I realized that it would take 30 more years for us to come up to that level.

It made me think about our achievements in the past 63 years. Well, there is nothing much to talk about in terms of achievement. Hence I thought it would be better to write about the greatest blunders committed, which might be the root cause of our current status.

1) Nehru as Prime Minister: This can be considered to be one of the greatest blunders. I am not sure what made Gandhi choose Nehru over Patel. The policies of Nehru are being criticized by their own party men today. He neither had the vision nor was he a shrewd politician. He messed up the Kashmir issue, did not handle the relationship with China properly, his policies on NAM was total crap etc. We were not clear whether to align with erstwhile USSR or US. The first few years after a country’s independence is very vital for its development. Nehru ensured that we would not develop for the next 100 years by making terrible mistakes.

2) War with Pakistan: Most of us feel proud that we won the wars against Pakistan. Though the result of the war was favorable to us we did not get any benefit out of that. Ideally we should have used the opportunity to make Pakistan dance to our tunes. Alas! We did not!! Where in the world you can find a country which won the war and agreed to give away a part of its territory to the enemy. Ideally Pakistan should have been thrown out of Kashmir and shown its way out. We should have made them agree to the fact that Kashmir is a part of India and they would not mess up with us henceforth. We did neither. Instead we gave a part of Kashmir to them and agreed on the Line of control as the border. Had we resolved the Kashmir issue in 1970’s we could have easily concentrated on our development instead of fighting terrorism.

It is an irony that every one of us wants India to develop rapidly; however our political system is so corrupt that it would take decades to even come up to the level of present day China. While China was able to host Olympics and prove to the world that they are a major economic force, India is struggling to complete the infrastructure projects before commencement of common wealth games. Though I am not a great fan of communist principles, I am sure china would not have achieved so much in this short span had it been a democracy.