To the saying ‘Behind every great man there is a woman’, Groucho Marx famously added, ‘And close behind her is his wife.’ Much is to be learnt by looking beyond what meets the eye. In trying to understand India's predicament we often look only for the proximate causes—corruption, squabbling politicians, rhetoric sans action. But fifty years of Independence is a good time to go behind these immediate factors to take stock of how we have come to be where we are.

India was born of an astonishing intellectual legacy. It had the good fortune of immense inputs from statesmanship and scholarly intelligence over its formation. This gave us our democratic tradition and commitment to higher education. But it also became the source of economic ambivalence. India's economic system emerged from an uneasy compromise between Mahatma Gandhi's objective of a village-based economy and Jawaharlal Nehru's faith in the welfare state and heavy industry. Nehru confided to his diary in 1933 his growing alienation from Gandhi's ideology: ‘I am afraid I am drifting further and further away from him mentally. His continual reference to God irritates me […]. What a tremendous contrast to the dialectics of Lenin & Co.’ By the time India became independent in 1947, Nehru was disillusioned by Lenin's method, but he still believed in planning and heavy industry.