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also came to form a rigid and exclusive caste, often having a conservative and narrow social, economic and political outlook. When massive social change and economic development was sought after 1947, the rigidity and the outlook of the bureaucracy became a major obstacle.
    While the ICS was more or less free of corruption, it flourished at the lower levels of administration, especially in departments where there was scope for it, such as public works and irrigation, the Royal Army Supply Corps, and the police. During the Second World War, because of government regulation and controls, corruption and black marketing spread on a much wider scale in the administration as also did tax evasion, once rates of income tax and excise were revised to very high levels. There was also the rise of the parallel, black economy.
    The British left behind a strong but costly armed force which had acted as an important pillar of the British regime in India. The British had made every effort to keep the armed forces apart from the life and thinking of the rest of the population, especially the national movement. Nationalist newspapers, journals and other publications were prevented from reaching the soldiers’ and officers’ messes. The other side of the medal, of course, was the tradition of the army being ‘apolitical’ and therefore also being subordinated, as was the civil service, to the political authorities. This would be a blessing in the long run to independent India, in contrast to the newly-created Pakistan.
    Referring reproachfully to the legacy bequeathed by colonialism,Rabindranath Tagore wrote just three months before his death in 1941:
The wheels of fate will some day compel the English to give up their Indian Empire. But what kind of India will they leave behind, what stark misery? When the stream of their centuries’ administration runs dry at last, what a waste of mud and filth will they leave behind them.

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The National Movement and its Legacy
    An appreciation of the hundred-year-old freedom struggle is integral to an analysis of developments in post-1947 India. While India inherited its economic and administrative structures from the precolonial and colonial period, the values and ideals—the vision—and the well-defined and comprehensive ideology that were to inspire it in nation building were derived from the national movement. Representing the Indian people, it incorporated various political trends from the right to the left which were committed to its ideological goals; it excluded only the communalists and those loyal to the colonial rulers.
    These goals and values were, moreover, not confined to the intellectuals and the middle classes. During the era of mass politics, tens of thousands of the most humble cadres disseminated them among the common people in the urban as well as rural areas. Consequently, these ideals were to play a critical role in integrating and keeping together Indian society and polity in the last five decades. They served to link the national liberation movement with the efforts to develop India, in what Jawaharlal Nehru characterized as ‘a continuing revolution’. It is, in fact, these ideals by which people and parties are still evaluated and judged.
Character of the National Movement
    The freedom struggle was perhaps the greatest mass movement in world history. After 1919, it was built around the basic notion that the people had to and could play an active role in politics and in their own liberation, and it succeeded in politicizing, and drawing into political action a large part of the Indian people. Gandhiji, the leader who moved and mobilized millions into politics, all his life propagated the view that the people and not leaders created a mass movement, whether for the overthrow of the colonial regime or for social transformation. He added, though, that the success or failure of a movement depended a great deal on the quality of its leadership.
    Satyagraha, as a form of struggle,