Legacies of British Rule in the Indian Political System

Two hundred years of colonial administration left independent India an inheritance it could neither refuse nor fully own. The question the syllabus poses is not whether India borrowed from British rule — it plainly did — but what exactly was inherited, what was deliberately rejected, and whether what survives is a set of useful institutions or a structure of power that outlived the power it was built to serve.

Why the question of legacy arises at all

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Every political system is built on the wreckage of the one before it, and India’s is unusual only in how recently and how visibly this happened. The Constituent Assembly did not write on a blank page. It inherited a century of administrative law, a functioning bureaucracy, a police force, a court system, a legislative practice, and a set of political habits formed in opposition to all of these.

“I am sure that the British will leave this country one day; however I am sure that before leaving, the British will leave so much dirt and filth that generations of Indians will not be able to clean it.” — Rabindranath Tagore

• The colonial state shaped Indian politics deliberately, to suit imperial needs, and the Indian response to that shaping was itself formative.
  • What emerged by 1947 was neither a British system nor a pre-colonial Indian one, but a third thing produced by the encounter — a colonial political order and a nationalist counter-order that had grown up inside it.
  • Bipan Chandra puts the point comparatively: unlike China, which passed through a communist revolution, India experienced a transfer of power, so no institutional rupture occurred and the inherited apparatus simply changed hands.
• The choice of parliamentary democracy was over-determined, not accidental.
  • With the princely states integrated and no rival centre of power left, the political class that took charge was the one the colonial education system had produced, and its instincts were liberal, legalist and constitutional.
  • India’s own republican past — the ganasanghas, and the Buddhist sanghas whose procedures Ambedkar cited as parliaments in miniature — supplied rhetorical legitimacy rather than institutional design.
• The word “legacy” carries an ambiguity worth naming at the outset.
  • It can mean an inheritance that was consciously adopted — the parliamentary system, the rule of law, the civil service examination.
  • It can equally mean a structural continuity nobody chose — the police architecture, the detention power, the outward-facing economy.
  • Most of what follows is of the second kind, which is why the legacy question is politically contested rather than merely historical.

Morris-Jones’s four categories of legacy

W. H. Morris-Jones offers the standard classification, and it remains the most useful frame because it separates what the state bequeathed from what the movement bequeathed.

• The “Government” strand runs deepest, because it altered what Indians expected politics to be.
  • Before the colonial state, most people’s contact with authority was intermittent and local; the Raj made government a daily presence through land revenue, registration, licensing and policing.
  • That government was nonetheless narrow, alien and thin — at village level effectively synonymous with the tax collector — so what was inherited was the apparatus of an extensive state without its legitimacy.
  • This psychological fact is legible in the Constitution’s design: emergency provisions and the qualifications attached to fundamental rights were written by men who assumed that the state’s authority would have to be asserted rather than assumed.
  • The framers’ answer was to build a state that was both more extensive and more legitimate, which is why the same document expands rights and retains extraordinary powers.
• The “Movement” strand explains a peculiarity of Indian democracy: the techniques that delegitimised the colonial state were carried, undiminished, into the democratic one.
• The “Mediating institutions” strand is what most decolonising states lacked, and it is the strongest evidence that the legacy was not purely a burden — parties, elections and a critical press existed in India before independence and did not have to be improvised after it.
• The “Problems and process” strand is the least discussed and arguably the most predictive: the specific conflicts India has spent seventy-five years managing are the specific conflicts colonial policy generated or sharpened.

The colonial state bequeathed India the machinery of governing without the consent that makes governing legitimate; the national movement supplied the consent, and the Constitution fused the two.

The statutory inheritance: a century of Acts

A chain of British statutes built the representative and administrative apparatus the Assembly took over. Read as a sequence they show one pattern: each conceded a form of participation while withholding the substance of power, and each concession became a fixture of the 1950 text.

Dyarchy and the origins of Indian federalism

• Dyarchy — introduced in the provinces by the 1919 Act — split provincial subjects into transferred subjects administered by ministers answerable to the legislature, and reserved subjects retained by the Governor.
  • Finance, police and land revenue stayed reserved, so Indian ministers held responsibility without resources, and the scheme was discredited within a decade.
  • Its constitutional importance is nonetheless real: it established the principle that subjects can be distributed between authorities, which is the germ of a federal division of powers.
• The 1935 Act converted that principle into a scheme, replacing dyarchy in the provinces with provincial autonomy and introducing it, briefly, at the centre.
  • The threefold list — Federal, Provincial and Concurrent — is the direct ancestor of the Union, State and Concurrent Lists of the Seventh Schedule.
  • India’s federation was described by K. C. Wheare as quasi-federal, and the unitary tilt is inherited: emergency powers under Articles 352, 356 and 360, and Article 249, which lets Parliament legislate on a State List subject on a Rajya Sabha resolution in the national interest.
• There is an irony here worth stating plainly. The Simon Commission of 1927 was boycotted and protested against across India for its all-white composition, and the 1935 Act was built on its recommendations. The statute India fought hardest against became the foundation of India’s own political system.

The Government of India Act 1935 as the structural skeleton

• The 1935 Act is the largest single source of the Constitution’s text, and the borrowing is structural rather than incidental.
  • The federal division of powers, the three lists, and the drafting conventions that give the document its length and statutory tone all come from it.
  • The office of Governor, the administrative relations between centre and units, and President’s Rule — which descends directly from Section 93 — are continuities.
  • The Federal Court, established in 1937, was the institutional ancestor of the Supreme Court; appeals to the Privy Council were abolished only in 1949.
• The 1935 federation never came into being. The princely states declined to accede in the numbers required and the war intervened, so only provincial autonomy commenced, in 1937.
  • The Assembly therefore inherited a federal blueprint drafted but never tested, which gave it unusual freedom to alter what it disliked.
  • The Congress ministries of 1937-39 were the real experiment, and running provinces under a Governor’s reserve powers is what convinced the Congress leadership those powers had to go.
• The “carbon copy” charge is half right, and separating the halves is the whole of the answer.
  • Retained: the administrative machinery, the lists, the emergency architecture, the Governor’s office, and much of the language.
  • Refused: an elected head of state in place of the Crown; justiciable fundamental rights; universal adult franchise; the abolition of separate electorates; and, decisively, removal of the Governor’s discretionary override of a ministry commanding the confidence of the House.
  • Ambedkar’s defence in the Assembly was that there is nothing to be ashamed of in borrowing, since the essentials of constitutional structure are broadly similar everywhere, and what distinguishes one constitution from another is its accommodation to particular conditions.
• Sir Ivor Jennings pressed the sharpest early version of the criticism — that the document was too long, too rigid and too lawyer-made. The judgment has aged poorly: the features he condemned are precisely those that have let the text absorb seventy-five years of strain.

The Westminster inheritance proper

Distinct from the statutes is what India took from British constitutional practice, most of which is unwritten in Britain and therefore had to be written down in India — an act of transcription that changed the thing transcribed.

• The rejections matter as much as the borrowings. India took the parliamentary executive and refused parliamentary sovereignty, and that single combination explains most of what followed.
  • Because Parliament is not sovereign, judicial review was possible; because judicial review was possible, Kesavananda Bharati (1973) and the basic structure doctrine were possible; neither is available in Britain.
  • The result is a system with a British executive, American judiciary, whose recurring institutional conflict is not a design flaw but the predictable consequence of the combination.
• The parliamentary model was chosen over the presidential one on an explicit argument. Ambedkar’s ground was responsibility over stability: a presidential executive is stable but assessed only periodically, while a parliamentary executive is assessed daily by the legislature and periodically by the electorate.
• A whole layer of practice came across untouched by statute: the office of Speaker, parliamentary privilege, the motion of no confidence, question hour, the committee system, and the convention of the Leader of the Opposition.
• Writing conventions down had unanticipated effects.
  • In Britain the Governor-General’s discretion was disciplined by convention; in India it had to be textualised.
  • The areas left unwritten — the Governor’s choice of Chief Minister, the President’s discretion in a hung Parliament, the timing of a floor test — are exactly where post-1950 constitutional crises have clustered.

Sources beyond Britain: the eclectic borrowing

The Constitution’s foreign sources go well past Britain, and the Assembly was candid about it. Granville Austin describes the method as the art of selection and modification, producing what has fairly been called a beautiful patchwork.

• The Article 21 choice is the most consequential single borrowing decision, and it was made deliberately against the American model.
  • B. N. Rau, the Constitutional Adviser, toured foreign jurisdictions and discussed the question with Justice Felix Frankfurter, who warned that due process placed an undemocratic burden on judges by inviting them to strike down legislation on substantive grounds.
  • The Assembly preferred the narrower Japanese formulation, and A. K. Gopalan (1950) duly read the rights of Part III as watertight compartments.
  • Maneka Gandhi (1978) reversed this by judicial route, requiring that any procedure be fair, just and reasonable — effectively restoring the substance of the formula the Assembly had rejected. The borrowing was undone by interpretation rather than by amendment.
• Pratap Bhanu Mehta reads the eclecticism positively: the Indian Constitution is a cosmopolitan constitution, drawn from multiple traditions and situated at the crosscurrents of global constitutional law, with Indian courts still reasoning from comparative material. Like Indian culture, it is syncretic and eclectic rather than derivative.
• The critical counter is that a document assembled from foreign parts had no organic relation to the society it governed — the objection K. Hanumanthaiya made when he complained that the Assembly had produced the music of an English band rather than of the veena or sitar.

The administrative legacy: the steel frame

• The colonial state governed through a small, elite, hierarchical service with the district as the unit of administration and the Collector as the state made visible.
  • The service was given vast powers precisely because it was thin on the ground and had to manage disobedience with few personnel.
  • Recruitment by open competitive examination, security of tenure, and a generalist rather than specialist ethos are colonial design features that survive intact.
• The Constitution did not merely keep this service; it entrenched it.
  • Article 312 provides for All India Services recruited and controlled centrally but serving the states — a design chosen deliberately because the framers did not trust the states with the machinery of administration in the aftermath of partition.
  • Articles 309 to 311 give civil servants constitutional protection of tenure, a security that has proved as much an obstacle to accountability as a guarantee of independence.
  • Sardar Patel defended the service in the Assembly in the strongest terms, warning the House that without it there would be no India at all — a judgment delivered with the integration of the princely states still in progress.
• The critique is that a service designed to hold down a colony was repurposed to develop a democracy without being redesigned for the new task.
  • The administration remains hierarchical, generalist and centrally controlled, and the district officer’s role has shifted only partially from regulation to development.
  • The Official Secrets Act 1923 survives, and with it what has been called the bureaucracy’s cloak of secrecy; the Right to Information Act 2005 is the first serious statutory breach of it, and the two sit in unresolved tension.
  • Reform bodies have been consistent and unheeded: the Administrative Reforms Commissions of 1966 and 2005, and more recently the case for lateral entry above joint secretary level, which the National Commission to Review the Working of the Constitution endorsed in 2002.
• The colonial theory of the service is what most needed changing and changed least.
  • The ICS officer was trained as a neutral instrument of an alien authority, accountable upward and to no one else.
  • The IAS officer serves an elected political executive whose legitimacy comes from an electorate — a different relationship altogether.
  • The inherited rules of tenure, transfer and confidentiality were never rewritten to reflect the change, which is why the relationship between minister and secretary remains contested.

The judicial and legal legacy

• The court structure is colonial in its entirety. The Supreme Court at Calcutta under the Regulating Act 1773, the High Courts under the Act of 1861, the district judiciary, the appellate hierarchy, and the Federal Court of 1937 together supplied the architecture that Part V, Chapter IV and Part VI, Chapter V simply continued.
• Codification was the great colonial legal project, and its products outlasted the empire by a century and a half.
  • Macaulay’s Law Commission of 1834 produced the draft that became the Indian Penal Code 1860; the Civil Procedure Code, the Evidence Act 1872 and the Contract Act 1872 followed.
  • India was thus a codified common-law jurisdiction — statutory in form, common-law in method — a hybrid that remains its distinctive legal character.
• The doctrine of precedent, the adversarial trial, and the writ jurisdiction all came across; Article 32 and Article 226 turn the English prerogative writs — habeas corpus, mandamus, prohibition, certiorari and quo warranto — into constitutional remedies available as of right.
• The rule of law is the most genuinely double-edged item in the whole inheritance.
  • Colonial legality was real but partial: it bound Indians reliably and Europeans erratically, as the Ilbert Bill agitation of 1883 demonstrated when European residents revolted at the prospect of trial by Indian judges.
  • Yet it gave the national movement its most effective weapon — the ability to hold the Raj to its own professed standards — and it is why Indian nationalism was constitutionalist in method long before it became mass-based.
• Personal law was left deliberately unreformed, on the promise made after 1857 not to interfere in religion. The Assembly inherited that settlement whole, could not undo it, and deferred it into Article 44 as a directive rather than a command.

The coercive legacy: police, detention and emergency

This is the sharpest edge of the inheritance, and the one where continuity is least defensible.

Policing

• The Police Act of 1861 was drafted in the aftermath of 1857 for a specific purpose: a force answerable to the executive rather than the community, built to suppress disorder rather than to prevent crime.
  • The Act remains, with amendments, the governing statute across much of India, so the basic architecture of Indian policing is a post-mutiny counter-insurgency design.
  • The Indian Police Act was passed by the same generation that passed the Indian Penal Code, and the pairing is instructive: a modern criminal law administered by a police force built for political control.
• The reform record is a study in institutional inertia.
  • The National Police Commission (1977-81) recommended separating investigation from law and order, fixed tenures, and a new Police Act; the Ribeiro (1998), Padmanabhaiah (2000) and Malimath (2003) committees repeated variants of the same prescriptions; the Model Police Act (2006) drafted under Soli Sorabjee offered a replacement statute.
  • In Prakash Singh v. Union of India (2006) the Supreme Court issued seven binding directives that together amount to a blueprint for de-politicising the force.
    • A State Security Commission to set policy, and a National Security Commission at the centre.
    • A fixed two-year tenure for the DGP and for SPs and SHOs, to break the transfer as an instrument of political control.
    • Separation of investigation from law and order, a Police Establishment Board for postings, and Police Complaints Authorities at state and district level.
  • Two decades on, compliance is partial, formal and frequently evasive — state legislation that reproduces the directives’ language while diluting their effect. Police is a State subject, which makes central enforcement constitutionally awkward and gives every state government an interest in the status quo.

Preventive detention

• India is the rare democracy that writes preventive detention into its constitution rather than treating it as an emergency exception.
  • The lineage runs from Bengal Regulation III of 1818 through the Rowlatt Act 1919 and the Defence of India Rules to Article 22.
  • The irony is exact. The Rowlatt Act, whose central feature was detention without trial, produced the agitation that led to Jallianwala Bagh and launched Gandhi’s first all-India movement — and the same power was retained by the men that movement brought to power.
  • Ambedkar defended Article 22 in the Assembly with visible discomfort; a veteran freedom fighter called preventive detention “the darkest blot” on the Indian Constitution
• The statutory chain since 1950 is unbroken: the Preventive Detention Act 1950, MISA (1971), the National Security Act 1980, TADA (1985), POTA (2002), and the UAPA as amended in 2019 to permit designation of individuals as terrorists.
• The judiciary’s position has hardened. In Pramod Singla v. Union of India (2023) the Supreme Court held that preventive detention laws are a colonial legacy with great potential for abuse, that such powers must be used only in the rarest of rare cases, and that every procedural lapse must benefit the detenu.
• The NCRWC proposed a ceiling in 2002, recommending that the maximum period of preventive detention be capped at six months — a recommendation that has never been acted on.

Emergency

• The emergency architecture of Articles 352, 356 and 360 descends jointly from Section 93 of the 1935 Act and from the Weimar Constitution, and its purpose in the colonial original was to preserve the Raj against Indian politics.
  • Article 356 has been invoked well over a hundred times; its disciplining came not from the Assembly’s intentions but from S. R. Bommai (1994), which made the proclamation justiciable and required a floor test rather than a Governor’s report.
  • The Sarkaria Commission (1988) and the NCRWC both recommended that Article 356 be retained but used only as a last resort, which has become the settled position.
• The 44th Amendment (1978), passed after the Emergency of 1975-77, narrowed Article 352 by replacing “internal disturbance” with “armed rebellion” and requiring written Cabinet advice — the clearest instance of a colonial legacy being consciously trimmed after it had been abused.

The army and the civil-military settlement

• The colonial army was built on a doctrine of political insulation — recruited on the martial races theory after 1857 from communities judged loyal, deliberately mixed in composition so that no single community dominated a unit, and kept rigorously out of politics.
  • Indianisation of the officer corps began slowly after the First World War, with Indian cadets at Sandhurst and then the Indian Military Academy at Dehradun in 1932, so that by 1947 India had a small but genuine Indian officer class.
  • The INA trials of 1945-46 briefly made the loyalty of Indian soldiers a mass political issue, and the Congress leadership drew from that episode a lasting conclusion about the danger of politicised armed forces.
• Independent India kept the insulation and strengthened it. The office of Commander-in-Chief was abolished as a Cabinet-rank position in 1955, the three service chiefs were placed under a civilian Ministry of Defence, and no serving officer sits in the Cabinet Committee on Security.
• This is the legacy with the clearest positive verdict.
  • India’s freedom from military intervention in politics is not a natural fact about Indian society.
  • It is the joint product of a colonial tradition of apolitical soldiering and a nationalist leadership determined to keep it — the single sharpest contrast with the trajectories of most of its neighbours.

Princely India and the lapse of paramountcy

• The Raj governed two Indias. British India was administered directly; the roughly 565 princely states covering about two-fifths of the territory were bound to the Crown by paramountcy rather than sovereignty, and left largely to their own internal government.
• The Indian Independence Act let paramountcy lapse rather than transferring it, so the states were technically free to accede to either dominion or to remain outside — a device that created the accession crises in Junagadh, Hyderabad and Jammu and Kashmir almost immediately.
  • Integration was achieved by the Instrument of Accession and the Standstill Agreement, negotiated by Patel and V. P. Menon, and later consolidated by the States Reorganisation Act 1956.
  • Article 370 originated as the accession terms of a single state, and its abrogation in 2019 closed the last constitutional trace of the paramountcy settlement.
• The princely order left one further residue. Privy purses and princely privileges were guaranteed at accession and written into the Constitution, and were abolished only by the 26th Amendment in 1971 after an earlier attempt was struck down — a reminder that decolonisation of the Indian polity was itself a staged and contested process.

The fiscal inheritance

• Fiscal centralisation is the least visible and most consequential piece of the legacy. Colonial finance divided revenue heads between centre and provinces without giving provinces buoyant sources of their own, through the Meston Award (1920) and the Niemeyer Award (1936).
• The Constitution reproduced the asymmetry: the most elastic taxes were assigned to the Union, and the states were given expenditure responsibilities far larger than their revenue powers — the structural reason a Finance Commission under Article 280 was needed at all.
• The consequence has been permanent negotiation rather than settled division, running from the first Finance Commission through the Sarkaria and Punchhi Commissions to the vertical devolution debates that followed the 101st Amendment and the introduction of GST in 2017.

The economic legacy

• Colonial policy left an economy structurally oriented outward: a supplier of raw materials and a market for finished goods, with the pattern persisting long after 1947.
  • In world-systems terms India remained, and to a degree remains, in the periphery or semi-periphery — a position measured by what a country exports rather than by how fast it grows.
  • The nationalist economic critique — Dadabhai Naoroji’s drain theory, R. C. Dutt on deindustrialisation — supplied the intellectual justification for the state-led, import-substituting, self-reliant strategy adopted after independence. The economics of the first four decades of the republic were written in the vocabulary of the anti-colonial argument.
• The land settlements were the deepest structural inheritance in the countryside.
  • The Permanent Settlement (1793) created an intermediary rentier class in the east; ryotwari in Madras and Bombay and mahalwari in the north produced different agrarian structures, and the regional variation in post-independence land reform success tracks these settlement zones.
  • Abolition of zamindari was the republic’s first great legislative project, and the resistance it met produced the First Amendment (1951) and the Ninth Schedule. The property question thus generated India’s first constitutional crisis within a year of the Constitution’s commencement.
  • Commercialisation of agriculture under colonial revenue demands — cash crops, indebtedness, the shift from subsistence — left an agrarian structure whose vulnerabilities the Green Revolution addressed only partially and unevenly.
• The physical infrastructure carried its purpose with it. Railways were laid to move raw materials to ports and troops to trouble, not to integrate an internal market, and the resulting port-and-hinterland geography is still legible in India’s development indicators.
• Regional imbalance is itself colonial in origin, and the presidency-versus-interior gap is among the most durable of all the legacies, because infrastructure decisions compound over a century.

The social legacy: enumeration, categorisation and communal division

• The colonial state governed by knowing its subjects, and the instruments of that knowing became political facts.
  • Bernard Cohn’s argument on the census and objectification is the standard reference: the decennial census, comprehensive from 1881, did not merely record religious and caste identities but hardened fluid categories into countable, comparable and therefore competitive ones.
  • Before enumeration there were large zones of ambiguity in religious and caste self-description; afterwards, communities could compare their numbers and claim representation proportionate to them.
  • Nicholas Dirks, in Castes of Mind, extends the point: caste as a single, all-India, hierarchically ordered system is substantially a colonial sociological construction imposed on far messier realities.
• Edward Said’sOrientalism supplies the wider frame — colonial knowledge as a form of power, producing the Orient as an object to be described, classified and ruled.
  • Partha Chatterjee’s refinement matters more for India: nationalist thought was a “different yet derivative discourse”, contesting colonial claims while accepting colonial categories, which is why Indian nationalism argued about the nation in terms the coloniser had set.
  • The colonial account of India — a land of irreconcilable difference held together only by British rule, in the histories of James Mill and Mountstuart Elphinstone — was the claim nationalism had to refute, and refuting it in the coloniser’s own terms shaped what Indian nationalism became.
• The institutionalisation of communal difference was the most damaging piece of this.
  • Separate electorates from 1909, extended in 1919 and 1935 and to the Depressed Classes by the Communal Award of 1932, converted religious identity into an electoral unit with a permanent institutional interest in remaining separate.
  • The Constituent Assembly abolished separate electorates — the sharpest single break with the colonial constitutional order — retaining reservation of seats only for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes.
  • The habit outlived the institution: communal appeal as an electoral technique long survived the electorates that made it mechanically rewarding, and the elite preference for continuity over change on this question is the least creditable part of the record.
• English education produced a class Macaulay intended and an outcome he did not.
  • The Minute of 1835 aimed at a class Indian in blood and colour but English in taste and intellect.
  • It supplied both the subordinate administration the Raj needed and the nationalist leadership that ended it.
  • Wood’s Despatch (1854) and the universities of 1857 built the system that produced almost every member of the Constituent Assembly — the strongest version of the charge that the document is liberal, legalist and socially unrooted.

Local government: the one legacy that was allowed to lapse

• Municipal and district institutions were a colonial creation — the Madras municipal corporation of 1687, Mayo’s Resolution of 1870 on financial decentralisation, and above all Lord Ripon’s Resolution of 1882, which introduced elected local boards and earned Ripon the title of the father of local self-government.
• The Royal Commission on Decentralisation (1907) and the 1919 Act, which made local self-government a transferred subject, extended the experiment further, so India entered independence with a longer continuous history of elected local bodies than of elected legislatures.
• The Assembly then declined to build on it. Village panchayats were placed in Article 40, in the non-justiciable Part IV, over Gandhian objections — and the constitutional status the colonial precedent might have supported arrived only with the 73rd and 74th Amendments in 1992, four decades later.
• This is the legacy that inverts the usual pattern. Where India retained colonial institutions of control, it discarded the colonial institution of participation — which suggests that what was inherited was selected according to the needs of the new state rather than absorbed passively.

The extra-constitutional legacy: the repertoire of protest

• The techniques invented to make a colony ungovernable were carried intact into the democracy: the bandh, the hartal, the dharna, the gherao, the satyagraha, the hunger strike and the fast unto death.
  • Post-independence instances run continuously: the anti-Hindi agitations of the 1960s, JP’s Total Revolution in 1974, the Assam movement, the Mandal agitation of 1990, India Against Corruption in 2011-12, the Jat, Patidar and Maratha reservation agitations, and the farm law protests of 2020-21, which ended in repeal.
  • Courts have repeatedly held the bandh — as distinct from a voluntary general strike — unconstitutional, beginning with the Kerala High Court in 1997 and affirmed by the Supreme Court, and it has continued regardless, which is itself the point.
• Ambedkar’s warning in the Assembly is the counter-argument, and it is the most important thing anyone said about this part of the inheritance.
  • Where constitutional methods are open, he argued, there can be no justification for unconstitutional ones; civil disobedience, non-cooperation and satyagraha were justified against a state that offered no lawful remedy, and are “nothing but the grammar of anarchy” once remedies exist.
• Rajni Kothari offers the positive reading of the same inheritance.
  • The length and continuity of both the national movement and of Indian civilisation contributed to the unity of the new India, giving it design, depth, flexibility and manoeuvrability.
  • Had the movement been short in duration or shallow in penetration, no such synthesis would have been available when independence came.

The national movement bequeathed India both its democratic capacity and its habit of settling political questions outside the institutions democracy provides.

Foreign policy and the territorial legacy

• India inherited British India’s frontiers, treaties and strategic assumptions along with its administration.
  • C. Raja Mohan argues that Nehru’s neighbourhood policy was substantially Curzon’s — a conception of India as the security manager of the subcontinent, with a ring of buffer states beyond a defended frontier.
  • The treaties with Bhutan (1949) and Nepal (1950) are, on this reading, superficial modifications of agreements the British made with the same kingdoms, which is precisely why neighbours read Indian regional policy as continuous with imperial practice and describe it as a colonial mindset.
• The borders are colonial artefacts, and they are the source of the region’s most persistent conflicts: the Radcliffe Line, the McMahon Line, the Durand Line, and the lapse of paramountcy, which left princely accession unresolved in Jammu and Kashmir, Hyderabad and Junagadh.
• The consequence is structural. South Asia is among the least economically integrated regions in the world, with intra-regional trade a small fraction of the total, and partition’s unresolved questions are the principal reason.
• Not everything here is a burden. Membership of the Commonwealth, the English language, the legal-diplomatic idiom and a professional, apolitical army subordinate to civilian authority are all colonial products, and the last of these is the single clearest reason India avoided the trajectory of most of its neighbours.

Theoretical frames for reading the legacy

The disagreement is rarely about the facts of continuity. It is about what explains it, and the competing explanations are worth stating as such.

• Bipan Chandra’s formulation remains the most economical: India did not start with a clean slate, and 1947 was a transfer of power rather than a revolution, so the real question is not why continuity occurred but why anyone expected otherwise.

Against the legacy thesis: what India did not inherit

The legacy argument can be pressed too far, and the strongest counter is that the most important features of the Indian Constitution have no colonial ancestor at all.

• Mridula Mukherjee rejects the proposition that modern, responsible, constitutional government in India was initiated solely by British rulers, and with it the idea that the 1950 Constitution is merely the culmination of a chain of British statutes beginning in 1861.
  • The Indian constitutional tradition ran in parallel: the Constitution of India Bill 1895, the Commonwealth of India Bill 1925, the Nehru Report 1928, the Karachi Resolution 1931 and the Sapru Committee Report 1945 were Indian attempts to draft an Indian constitutional order.
  • Granville Austin records that the fundamental rights section of the Nehru Report was a close precursor of Part III, with certain clauses reappearing materially unchanged in 1950.
• Four features have no colonial source whatever, and between them they define the document.
  • Universal adult franchise from the first election, without the phased extension every Western democracy required and without a literacy or property qualification.
  • Justiciable fundamental rights enforceable under Article 32, in a system whose colonial predecessor had no rights chapter at all.
  • The abolition of untouchability under Article 17, and caste-based affirmative action — a programme of social transformation the colonial state had no interest in attempting.
  • A republic with an elected head of state, ending both the Crown and the princely order in a single instrument.
• Purpose is the decisive discontinuity. The colonial state was designed not to be accountable to Indians; the Constitution is designed for nothing else. Retaining a filing system is not the same as retaining a purpose.

Decolonising the inheritance: the contemporary record

The legacy question is no longer only academic, because a deliberate programme of statutory decolonisation has been under way, and its results are genuinely mixed.

• The criminal law was replaced wholesale. The Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita and the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam, enacted in 2023 and in force from 1 July 2024, superseded the Indian Penal Code 1860, the Criminal Procedure Code and the Indian Evidence Act 1872.
  • What genuinely changed: statutory timelines for investigation and judgment, mandatory forensic examination for serious offences, provision for electronic and video-recorded evidence, zero FIR and e-FIR, and community service as a punishment.
  • What did not: large portions were reproduced almost verbatim; the marital rape exception survives; the language of “outraging modesty” was retained rather than replaced with the neutral vocabulary of sexual assault; the obscenity provisions are unchanged.
  • Sedition is the test case.Section 124A IPC is gone in name, but Section 152 BNS penalises acts endangering the sovereignty, unity and integrity of India, using terms such as “subversive activities” that are arguably wider than what they replaced.
    • Being a new provision, it also lacks the protective gloss that decades of case law had put on 124A, notably Kedar Nath Singh (1962).
  • The Supreme Court had kept 124A in abeyance from May 2022 in S. G. Vombatkere, while the Law Commission’s 279th Report (2023) recommended retaining sedition with enhanced punishment, arguing expressly that colonial origin is not by itself a ground for repeal — a proposition that frames the whole debate.
• The statute book has been pruned steadily.
  • The Repealing and Amending Act, 2025 removed 71 obsolete enactments dating from 1886 to 2023, and more than 1,500 outdated central laws have been cleared since 2014.
  • The Telecommunications Act 2023 replaced the Indian Telegraph Act of 1885 — though it carried forward the interception powers that were the older Act’s most criticised feature.
• The symbolic register has moved faster than the substantive one — renaming, the removal of imperial iconography, and the framing of a break with the colonial mindset as a national objective.
• The critical question is whether decolonising law means changing the language or changing the power relation.
  • A statute renamed in Sanskrit that confers the same discretion on the same official has changed its name and not its nature.
  • Conversely, the Right to Information Act 2005 did more to dismantle colonial administrative practice than any renaming, and did it without invoking decolonisation at all.

A law is colonial not because of the language it is written in but because of the relation it establishes between the official and the citizen.

Conclusion

The Indian political system is colonial in its machinery and anti-colonial in its purpose, and the tension between the two is not a defect awaiting resolution but the actual structure of the thing. What was inherited — the bureaucracy, the police, the emergency powers, the detention law, the statutory federalism — was built to govern a subject population. What was added — universal suffrage, justiciable rights, an elected head of state, the abolition of untouchability — was built to constitute a citizenry.

The institutions in themselves explain nothing about the outcome. India’s democracy has outlasted almost every prediction made for it in 1950, and not because it inherited good machinery: states with near-identical machinery across the region have not managed it.

The explanation lies in the movement half of the legacy rather than the government half — in a long, plural, argumentative national struggle that made constitutional method a habit before it was a rule. The unfinished part of the inheritance is precisely the part the framers retained and expected to fall into disuse. Seventy-five years on, it has not.