Indian History Quiz: India after Independence: 1947 to 1964

The Nizam of Hyderabad signed a Standstill Agreement in November 1947 and then delayed accession while the Razakar militia terrorised the countryside; the Indian government sent in troops from 13 to 18 September 1948 in an action called Operation Polo, after which Hyderabad acceded to India.

The States Department was created in July 1947 with Patel as the minister in charge and V. P. Menon as its secretary, and the pair persuaded the rulers to sign the Instrument of Accession, which is why Patel is remembered as the Iron Man of India and his birthday is…

He fasted for a separate Telugu-speaking state and died on 15 December 1952 on the fifty-eighth day of the fast; the protests that followed forced the government to announce Andhra State, which was created on 1 October 1953 as the first state formed on a linguistic basis, with Kurnool as…

The States Reorganisation Commission was appointed in December 1953 under Justice Fazl Ali, with the historian and diplomat K. M. Panikkar and the educationist H. N. Kunzru as its two members, and its report of 1955 accepted language as a basis for reorganisation while rejecting the formula of one language…

The Act came into force on 1 November 1956 and, along with the Seventh Amendment of the same year, ended the old classification of Part A, Part B, Part C and Part D states that the Constitution had set out in 1950, leaving fourteen states and six union territories.

The Bombay Reorganisation Act divided the bilingual state of Bombay into Maharashtra, with Bombay as its capital, and Gujarat, with Ahmedabad and later Gandhinagar as its capital, and the day is observed as Maharashtra Day and Gujarat Day.

The Second Five Year Plan, which ran from 1956 to 1961, was built on the two-sector model of Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis and gave the first place to heavy and basic industry; the public sector steel plants at Bhilai, Rourkela and Durgapur belong to this plan, and the Industrial Policy Resolution…

The Balwantrai Mehta Committee of 1957 recommended democratic decentralisation through a three-tier structure of the gram panchayat, the panchayat samiti and the zila parishad, and Nehru inaugurated the scheme at Nagaur on 2 October 1959, which makes Rajasthan the first state to adopt Panchayati Raj.

Indian forces entered Goa, Daman and Diu on 18 and 19 December 1961 in Operation Vijay, Portuguese rule of four and a half centuries ended, and Goa was administered as a union territory until it became the twenty-fifth state of India in 1987, with Konkani recognised as its official language.

The five principles of mutual respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity, non-aggression, non-interference in internal affairs, equality and mutual benefit, and peaceful coexistence were written into the preamble of the Agreement on Trade and Intercourse with the Tibet region of China, signed on 29 April 1954 and associated with Nehru…

Sukumar Sen, an officer of the Indian Civil Service, was the first Chief Election Commissioner and conducted the first general election, held from October 1951 to February 1952 for the Lok Sabha and the state assemblies together, with about one hundred seventy-three million electors, most of whom could not read…

Nehru died in office on 27 May 1964, Gulzarilal Nanda served as acting Prime Minister for the thirteen days that followed, and Lal Bahadur Shastri was sworn in on 9 June 1964; he led the country through the war of 1965, gave the slogan Jai Jawan Jai Kisan and died…