Post-independence Consolidation and Reorganisation

What the official syllabus says

UPSC Civil Services (Main) Examination, Paper II: General Studies I.

Post-independence consolidation and reorganization within the country.

Topics in detail

Partition and its aftermath

• Refugees, rehabilitation and resettlement in Punjab, Bengal and Delhi
• Communal violence and the division of assets, services and the army

Integration of the princely states

• Sardar Patel and V.P. Menon; the Instrument of Accession and the Standstill Agreement
• Junagadh, Hyderabad (Operation Polo, 1948) and Jammu and Kashmir
• Integration of the French settlements (Pondicherry) and the liberation of Goa, Daman and Diu (1961)
• Sikkim becomes a state of India (1975)

Constitution and democracy

• The Constituent Assembly; adoption (26 November 1949) and commencement (26 January 1950) of the Constitution
• The first general elections (1951–52) and the Election Commission
• The era of one-party dominance and the rise of opposition parties

Reorganisation of states

• The Dhar Commission and the JVP Committee on linguistic states
• Potti Sriramulu’s fast and the creation of Andhra State (1953)
• The States Reorganisation Commission (Fazl Ali, H.N. Kunzru, K.M. Panikkar) and the States Reorganisation Act, 1956
• Later states: Maharashtra and Gujarat (1960), Nagaland (1963), Haryana (1966), Himachal Pradesh (1971), Meghalaya, Manipur and Tripura (1972), Mizoram, Arunachal Pradesh and Goa (1987), Chhattisgarh, Uttarakhand and Jharkhand (2000), Telangana (2014)
• The Union Territories of Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh (2019)
• The language question: the Official Languages Act, 1963, the anti-Hindi agitations and the three-language formula

Building the economy

• The Planning Commission (1950) and the Five-Year Plans; the Mahalanobis strategy and the mixed economy
• Land reforms: abolition of intermediaries, tenancy reform, ceilings; the Bhoodan movement
• The Community Development Programme (1952) and Panchayati Raj after the Balwant Rai Mehta Committee
• The Green Revolution, the White Revolution (Operation Flood) and food security
• Nationalisation of banks (1969); the public sector
• The economic crisis of 1991 and the reforms that followed

Science, education and institutions

• IITs, the Atomic Energy Commission, ISRO (1969) and the CSIR laboratories
• Nuclear tests of 1974 and 1998
• Education policies: the Kothari Commission and the national policies on education

Foreign policy and wars

• Non-alignment, Panchsheel (1954), the Bandung Conference (1955) and the Non-Aligned Movement
• Wars with Pakistan (1947–48, 1965 and the Tashkent Declaration, 1971 and the creation of Bangladesh; the Simla Agreement, 1972) and with China (1962)

Challenges to unity and democracy

• Insurgencies and accords in the North-East (the Assam Accord, 1985; the Mizo Accord, 1986)
• The Punjab crisis of the 1980s
• The Naxalbari uprising (1967) and Left-wing extremism
• The Emergency (1975–77) and its lessons; the JP movement
• Social movements: Chipko, the Narmada Bachao Andolan, the farmers’ movements, the Dalit Panthers
• Coalition politics and the rise of regional parties

Overlaps

• Federalism and the Constitution itself belong to General Studies II; economic planning and reforms to General Studies III.
• These themes are also material for the Essay.