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The Indian prime minister called on his compatriots on Monday to get rid of “the least thing related to colonialism” to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the former British colony. India has grown economically and demographically by leaps and bounds, while the caste system and Hindu nationalism question the open model of the country’s future.
With our correspondent in New Delhi, Varoon Anand
In front of the historic Red Fort in Delhi, Prime Minister Narendra Modi pledged to transform India into a developed country in the next 25 years.
“Hundreds of years of colonialism have restricted our feelings, distorted our thoughts. When we see even the smallest thing related to colonialism, in us or around us, we should get rid of it,” Modi said in a 90-minute speech from the fortified setting. with portraits of independence heroes and guarded by mechanical elephants.
Modi urged the nation’s youth to make five promises: create a developed India, remove any signs of servility, pride in heritage, show unity and fulfill their duties.
The prime minister assured that India should crush the “termite” of corruption and nepotism and follow the mantra “India First” (India first), which recalls the American nationalist slogan.
Since gaining independence, India has built one of the world’s fastest growing economies, is home to some of the world’s richest people, and according to the United Nations, its population will soon overtake China as the world’s largest. world.
The number of inhabitants has grown exponentially, from 340 million at the time to 1,400 million today.
But despite the nation’s growing wealth, poverty remains a daily reality for millions of Indians and significant challenges remain for a diverse and growing nation of disparate regions, languages and religions.
Many, particularly the 200 million Muslim minority, fear for the founding ideals of India, which is ruled by Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), a strong supporter of Hindu hegemony.
India’s nearly $3 trillion economy is now the fifth largest in the world and one of the fastest growing. The World Bank has promoted India from low-income to middle-income status, a range denoting a gross national income per capita of between $1,036 and $12,535. Still, as recently as 2017, around 60% of India’s nearly 1.3 billion people lived on less than $3.10 a day.
Although India may end up being the world’s fastest growing major country in the coming years, it will still be far behind its double-digit growth target.
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