India: The Fourth Great Power?

India: The Fourth Great Power?
by Dilip Mohite

In September 1954, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru told the Indian Parliament that “if you peep in the history, and nothing goes wrong, like wars and so on, then the fourth country (after US, USSR, and China) is India.” Arguably, Nehru’s statement was made in the context of his plans to attain rapid economic growth as well as industrial development for India through the soon-to-begin Five-Year Plans.

As India enters the 1990s, it appears poised to achieve the status that Nehru envisaged for it, not so much in the spirit he had visualized, but as a result of circumstances created by a series of events in the 1970s and the 1980s.
Post-independence Indian history can be divided into three major phases: the 1951 to 1962 phase of post-colonial economic reconstruction, the 1963 to 1975 phase of military buildup, and the 1976 to 1992 phase of economic growth through the gradual liberalization of the economy.

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http://www.acdis.uiuc.edu/Research/S&Ps/1993-Sp/S&P_VII-3/great_power.html