Give an account of the challenges faced by India immediately after Independence.

Partition, violence, and rehabilitation

• The Partition of British India created India and Pakistan and produced mass killing and one of the largest refugee movements of the twentieth century, especially in Punjab and Bengal.
• The Ministry of Rehabilitation and provincial governments had to house, feed, and employ millions while trains, camps, and evacuee property became administrative emergencies.
• Communal polarisation did not end on 15 August; Gandhi’s last fasts in Delhi and his assassination on 30 January 1948 showed how fragile public order remained.

Political and constitutional challenges

• About 562 princely states had to be integrated; Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel and V. P. Menon used the Instrument of Accession, privy purses, and, where needed, force — Junagadh, Hyderabad in Operation Polo (1948), and the Kashmir war of 1947–48 after the tribal invasion.
• The Constituent Assembly, with B. R. Ambedkar as chairman of the Drafting Committee, had to write a republican constitution while the country was still on a wartime-style economy.
• Linguistic claims, later addressed by the States Reorganisation Commission (1953–55) and the States Reorganisation Act, 1956, were already pressing in Telugu-speaking Andhra after Potti Sriramulu’s death in 1952.

Economic and strategic scarcity

• Foodgrain shortage, Partition’s cut of irrigated Punjab and jute-mill hinterlands, inflation, and a narrow industrial base forced controls, imports, and the later Planning Commission (1950).
• Literacy was low, land relations were unequal, and princely and zamindari orders had to be dismantled without collapsing rural credit.
• In the Cold War, India chose non-alignment under Jawaharlal Nehru, while Kashmir, refugee rehabilitation, and sterling balances limited room for manoeuvre.