The planners felt that for the country to develop, it was essential to develop industries so that more people can shift to towns to work in factories and in the service sector. Hence, from the Second Five Year Plan onwards, the emphasis shifted to industries. You would have read about these aspects of economic development of India in the earlier classes.

When India became independent, the Cold War had just begun and the world was being polarised into countries in the US or USSR camp. Jawaharlal Nehru followed a policy of not joining either camp and tried to maintain an equidistant and independent position in foreign policy. He also joined hands with several other countries that had become independent around the same time and wanted to follow a similar policy – Indonesia, Egypt, Yugoslavia and so on.

With Nehru’s death in 1964, critics raised doubts as to whether democracy itself would survive, or would it lose its democratic ethos like other countries?

The Congress however managed a successful transition by choosing Lal Bahadur Shastri as its leader in the government. Shastri was immediately put to test with a series of issues which challenged the fundamental values and goals of the Indian nation. These included the Anti-Hindi agitation led by the DMK in the South, which threatened the goals of unity and integrity, the shortage of food which came in the way of social and economic transformation, and a war with Pakistan in 1965. Indira Gandhi succeeded Shastri as Prime Minister after his untimely death in 1966.

When the Official Languages Act was passed in 1963, the DMK believed it was an attempt to foist Hindi on the rest of the country and they began a state-wide campaign