Paper short abstract:

The paper interrogates India's transition from a colonial economy to its struggle for self-dependent national development and eventually emergence into a semi-imperialist economic and political power in the 21st century.

Paper long abstract:

The anti-colonial struggles in India that succeeded in making India an independent nation created a prominent place for India in the global arena. That prominence was further strengthened during the early phase of India's post-colonial development path that focussed on national sovereignty, self-sufficiency in agricultural development, import substitution in industrial development and non-alignment in foreign policy. Indian nationalism as an ideology was a central connecting thread between various components of the internal and external economic policies and strategies. For a food dependent nation, critically dependent on food aid from USA, to have achieved the goal of food self-sufficiency by the early 1970s was a remarkable achievement for any developing economy and raised India's international profile among Third World economies. By early 1980s, significant but as yet slow changes in Indian economic policies signalled a change of direction. This change marked a qualitative leap with the 1991 neo-liberal economic reforms. India achieved very impressive rates of economic growth in the last decade of the twentieth century and in the last few years of this century. This impressive growth transformed India into a prominent place in a newly emerging bloc of BRICS nations which have the characteristics of semi-imperialist powers.

This paper will chart this transition and will elaborate the concept of semi-imperialism and its relevance for examining India's place in the current international arena. The paper will also examine the linkages between Indian nationalism and its current semi-imperialism phase.