Four lakh middle class families had suffered the loss of Rs. 98000 crore due to their greed to make fast profits through their investments in scripts in suddenly rising stock index. They did not know anything of companies and ventures whose stocks they had bought. They had used their life savings, their spare properties to raise the needed capital. The losses made them to keep away from unknown field or walking on the slippery ground.

A year before the tricolor got unfurled, the Congress leadership was already evaluating the various models for economic development. On Gandhi’s call three socialists GG Parikh, Dr. VM Tarkunde and SM Bannerji prepared People’s Plan to emphasize the priority to development of women, girls education and child care as priority sectors and industrialists headed by JRD Tata gave Bombay plan but Nehru ignored both and adopted his solution to give emphatic place to use available money for development of metal and machine. He was probably in hurry to take Indian economy to be a giant one through similar pattern of development that he had witnessed in a visit to Soviet Russia in 1928. In eight years, the communist regime had built giant projects ignoring its agricultural dominance of economic base. Without turning India to be a communist regime, he sought to build giant steel, cement projects as well as the irrigation facilities.

He did not eliminate the existing private sector units but placed restrictions of mandatory permits of future expansions of the existing units or new ventures. In adopting his model of development had perhaps assumed that his bureaucratic structure would remain untouched by lures of corruption. In ten years period, corruption seeped into entire system as the middle class persons inside or outside the government structure behaved in similar pattern. In his 15 years planned development era, corruption grew more rapidly than the economic growth.

His daughter Indira Gandhi, suspicious of the rightist elements around her inside and outside of her party, allowed seeping of corruption in the electoral process and the entire system of governance to be contaminated. It worsened further as she converted her political system to be dependent on her pleasure and displeasure to grant political appointments or eliminate appointees. Through imposition of her rule over the constitutional norms in June 1975, she allowed the system to be misused by the coterie around her younger son. She lost her gamble in the election in 1977 through which she sought to put the system back on the democratic rails. Her defeat in the north and east parts was mainly due to abuse of the super powers thought six states where the extra powers were put to use to improve the government functioning gave her three fourths of seats in the same election.

The personal ambitions of her replacing regime ensured her dramatic return to power in twenty seven months. Her defeat had chastised her but had also drained her of courage to improve on her earlier misdeeds. Serious challenges in regions, growing communalism in Assam, separatists’ violence in Punjab and secessionists in Kashmir had left her without much leeway to amend her earlier political mistakes in improving India’s economy. Her son Rajiv Gandhi wasted the foreign exchange by allowing free imports of luxury goods for comforts of the upper middle class. His term of five years also drained the influence of the party in several social groups. The other groups consolidated their strength by overlooking their intra-caste conflicts for two thousand year. They gained power in few states but fragmented the national fabric as their separating away from the main party with the national base imposed the coalition politics for a quarter of century.

The Narsimha Rao government was the first Congress party led government without the member of the Gandhi family on the board. But the precarious and critical finances to meet the payments for imports or meet the foreign debt installation payments cause by frittered away foreign exchange reserves in five years of the last Congress government force the Rao government to allow entry of private sector participation in some of the restricted sectors of economy, 45 years after Independence.

For four decades after India adopted the strategy of the planned development, the private sector was not allowed a role in the economic development. The Communist regimes in the Soviet bloc or China had eliminated the private sector from existence. The communism collapsed in the soviet bloc and China had encouraged return of private enterprises by providing freedom under the government protection to exploit the cheap labour a decade earlier. The wafting winds of the global economy had after decades of denials to allow free space had forced India to open her wings to allow the private sector participation.

The growth rate improved but improvement did not last long. The politics underwent changes. Dr. Man Mohan Singh had claimed in his 1992 budget speech as the finance minister in the Rao government that India was wide awake. He was wrong in his assessment was proved in 12 years after he took over as the nominee prime minister of the Congress party chief. For her India was serfdom of her family and seat of the top position remaining preserved for her son was her only consideration and concern. In 2014 the electorate delivered a message that Indians are democratic humans and no slaves of anyone family. They had lived for seven centuries in the alien rules without being slaves. They can be living under the rule o misguided religious zealots for a decade but not in the rule by a misguided family.