In the Winter Session of Parliament in February 2022, Prime Minister Narendra Modi posed a question, ‘What if there was no Congress in India?’ This question reflected the sentiments expressed by Mahatma Gandhi in 1948 in what was perhaps the last letter written by him. He wrote three days before his assassination that the Congress in its current form had ‘outlived its use’ and should be disbanded.
What would Bharat of today be like had Mahatma Gandhi’s call for disbandment of the Congress been heeded? The book revisits some of the key events that shaped India’s political history over the last 80 years—Partition, Kashmir, governance, scams, democracy and its interruptions, economic policy, intellectual colonization and foreign policy.
India’s modern-day history has been told to suit a particular political narrative. But it’s imperative that history be retold with fairness and accuracy in order to learn from the mistakes of the past. The current generation demands and deserves solutions to historical wrongs. Indians need to be presented with raw, unbiased, unfiltered, historically accurate information so that they can use their own judgement and walk the path towards the new India.
This is the first-ever rethink of how different India would have been, if not for the Congress party being at the helm for the most part of the last 80 years. More importantly, the book is also a roadmap to the India of tomorrow.