In any contest, war, or struggle of life, when a person or a side is judged as defeated or feeble, but in the end overcomes every obstacle to achieve a startling triumph, that party is called an "Underdog," and their inspiring tale is called an "Underdog Story." India's own story draws us in precisely like such an Underdog Story. For India's history stands as a blazing testament to triumph against every conceivable odd. In the early years after independence, India was never given a chance, was perpetually doubted, and its collapse was forecast again and again — yet every single time, India has proven its critics and detractors utterly, completely wrong.
When India won its freedom in 1947, the voices of the doubters were shrill indeed. They prophesied every manner of calamity, catastrophe, and crisis. The picture of a successful, sovereign, democratic India lay entirely beyond their imagination. But India's iron will proved far greater than their pessimism. Indians answered their critics not merely in words, but through deeds and outcomes.
Winston Churchill, one of history's most notorious racial supremacists, was a bitter opponent of Indian independence. In his view, India was no country at all. He declared that "India is no more a single country than the Equator" — a statement that stood as proof of his profound ignorance. Churchill believed that it was British rule alone that held order in India, and that chaos would reign the moment the British departed. Before independence, he had also said, "We are handing India over to men of straw, of whom no trace will remain within a few years" — referring with contempt to Jawaharlal Nehru. He was proven entirely wrong. Nehru remained India's Prime Minister for nearly seventeen years, and after him, one bold leader after another carried the nation forward. Today India possesses a firm, unmistakable national and political identity of its own. Meanwhile, in Britain itself, protestors have taken to vandalizing Churchill's statues — proof enough that it is his own "political personality" that now stands in jeopardy.
The disposition of the Western press was no different. They reported the news as though Britain, in granting India its freedom, was bestowing upon it some great favour.
"The Observer" wrote that the moral and material benefits British rule had conferred upon India were beyond comparison — implying, in effect, that Indians ought to be grateful for having been enslaved. "The New York Times" called it a triumph of British and Indian statesmanship alike — as if a man who had set fire to another's house were then to be credited for putting it out. The "Globe and Mail" wrote that the great service Britain had rendered India must never be forgotten. Presumably they counted the famines of Bengal and Odisha, the bloodshed of Partition, and the plunder of trillions of dollars among that "great service."
After independence, riots broke out over Partition, and thousands upon thousands perished. London's "Daily Telegraph" ran headline after headline through August and September declaring that the transfer of power had been carried out with such reckless haste that it had become a curse upon the Indians. The essence of their editorial line was this: "It was Britain's presence alone that maintained balance among Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs; now we have left them to fight amongst themselves."
In September 1947, as the Punjab riots reached their peak, "The Times" wrote in an editorial that under British administration's guidance there had been "a tragic collapse of law and order" in India. They stated plainly that the "unprecedented peace," the "Pax Britannica", which British power had maintained for over a century, had been destroyed by Indian leaders within mere weeks of taking power.
When Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel launched the military action "Operation Polo" against the Nizam of Hyderabad in 1948, the Western press subjected India to fierce criticism. The British magazine "The Economist" and several American newspapers branded the newly formed Indian government "imperialist" and "aggressive." They completely ignored the fact that the majority population of Hyderabad wished to join India, and that the atrocities of the Razakars were escalating by the day.
After Gandhi's assassination on 30 January 1948, many Western journalists reported that India was now hurtling towards civil war. They believed that Gandhi alone had held Hindus and Muslims together, and that without him the country would be torn to pieces.
Between 1947 and 1949, as India's Constitution was being drafted, Western political analysts expressed astonishment. Given a country steeped in poverty and illiteracy, the Western press branded the decision to grant every Indian citizen universal suffrage a "ridiculous experiment." In their view, the illiterate masses could never grasp the value of democracy.
From 1947 to 1950, the Western world did nothing but search for faults, waiting for the day the Indian government would collapse. But exactly the opposite happened: India succeeded in unifying its princely states and framing a robust, democratic constitution.
Yet these ruinous prophecies of India's fragmentation and nationwide violence continued to be issued by foreign voices and newspapers well into the 1960s. The American scholar Selig Harrison, in his book "The Most Dangerous Decades", warned that after Nehru, India would splinter into pieces — Balkanization — and that the army would seize power for itself.
After India's independence, Western political scientists were unprepared to accept that people speaking hundreds of languages and dialects could live together in peace within one nation. When Hindi was opposed in South India and demands arose for states organized along linguistic lines, the Western press predicted that India would now fracture into small nations along linguistic lines, just as Europe had. But India, by forming the States Reorganisation Commission, created linguistic states through an entirely peaceful process, and turned diversity itself into its strength. Eighty years after independence, India's integrity remains unbroken to this day. By defeating every attempt to divide it, we have proven that Indian democracy is steered not merely by politicians, but by the ordinary people of the nation.
Next came the fear of population and food crisis. In 1968, the environmentalist Paul Ehrlich wrote in his book "The Population Bomb" that the time to feed mankind had run out. He asserted with total confidence that in the 1970s, millions upon millions of Indians would die of starvation. But India proved him wrong once again. Through its own Green Revolution, India adopted new technologies, improved seeds, and irrigation systems. As a result, the country moved from food scarcity to self-sufficiency in grain production. Today India ranks among the top three or top five nations in the world in the production and export of numerous food grains.
In 1967, "The Times" journalist Neville Maxwell declared that the general election of 1967 was India's last election, and that democracy would be destroyed thereafter. Yet we completed our eighteenth general election in 2024 — the largest electoral exercise in human history. Furthermore, when Emergency was declared in 1975, the Western world assumed that Indian democracy had met its end. But in the 1977 election, the people exercised their franchise and changed the government themselves. Likewise, during the terrible economic crisis of the 1990s, it was said that India's economy would collapse entirely. In 1991, India's foreign exchange reserves were sufficient for only a few days' worth of imports. At that very time, the Soviet Union, India's greatest ally, also collapsed. Western economists then declared that India now stood isolated on the world stage and would become an economic Failed State. But India did not go down so easily. In the midst of this very crisis, India adopted policies of liberalization, privatization, and globalization, demonstrating its economic strength to the entire world — laying the foundation for today's five-trillion-dollar economy. In 1991, we opened our economy and astonished the entire world.
After the Western nations had themselves polluted most of the world through their own Industrial Revolution, they began, in the 2000s, to pressure India to follow suit in restraint. They argued that India must halt its industry and coal use, or else the planet would be destroyed. They assumed India could never adopt green energy. But India, by forming the International Solar Alliance and achieving success in solar power production ahead of its own targets, proved to them that India could show the world the way in environmental protection.
When Lehman Brothers collapsed in America in 2008, the economies of the entire Western world were shattered. It was predicted then that a developing country like India, dependent on exports to America and Europe, would see millions lose their jobs and face economic catastrophe. Yet astonishingly, India's traditional banking system and its citizens' domestic spending habits shielded it from this global crisis. While Western nations languished in recession, India grew at a rapid pace.
In 2014, when a government was formed under the leadership of Narendra Modi, the Western world — especially the leading media of America and Europe — issued many negative prophecies. Drawing upon Modi's past history and political image, they predicted that chaos would engulf India and that India would become internationally isolated.
Just before the 2014 general election, in April, Britain's renowned global magazine "The Economist" published an editorial titled "Can anyone stop Narendra Modi?" In it, they wrote openly that communal violence would rise in India should Modi come to power. They labelled him "divisive" and declared that they could not endorse him as Prime Minister, adding that "India deserves better."
America's leading newspaper, "The New York Times", repeatedly wrote in its editorial pages, both during the election and after Modi's victory, that his triumph posed the gravest threat to India's secularism. They predicted that India's pluralistic democracy would fall into crisis and that minority rights would be eroded.
In 2005, America had denied Modi a visa to enter the country, and the European Union had likewise shunned him. On this basis, Western media such as "The Washington Post" and "Time" magazine predicted that if Modi became Prime Minister, Western nations would refuse to work with him. They feared India would become internationally isolated and that Indo-American relations would be permanently damaged.
Before the 2014 election, Britain's "The Guardian" published an open letter from prominent Western intellectuals and artists, including Salman Rushdie and Anish Kapoor. They warned that Modi's rise to power would mark a step towards authoritarianism in India, bringing a dark future for the country's freedom of speech and democracy.
But what actually happened afterward?
Just as India has historically proven Western assessments wrong throughout its history, so it did once again after 2014. The very America that had denied Modi a visa now welcomed him with full honour through its presidents. Modi received the rare distinction of addressing the American Congress twice. Nations such as the UAE, Saudi Arabia, France, and Russia conferred upon him their highest civilian honours. The successful hosting of the G-20 summit, and India's rise from the "Fragile Five" to become the world's fifth-largest economy, stood as a resounding rebuttal to every negative Western assessment.
But this negative Western outlook was not confined to politics or history alone — it extended to modern science, technology, and disaster management as well, where the West consistently underestimated India.
When India began its space program, Western nations mocked it. Even in 2014, when India launched "Mangalyaan", America's celebrated "New York Times" published a cartoon in which wealthy Westerners sat within an "Elite Space Club," while an Indian farmer, leading a cow, knocked upon its door. Yet India reached Mars on its very first attempt, setting a world record. A few years later, in 2023, "Chandrayaan-3" successfully landed on the Moon's south pole — an achievement no developed nation on Earth had accomplished. Today, those same Western countries rely on ISRO to launch their own satellites into space.
Likewise, when the Indian government placed emphasis on digital payments, Western economists said that in a country with low literacy, poor internet access, and where most people lacked bank accounts, a digital economy was entirely impossible. Yet today, India's Unified Payments Interface — UPI — has astonished the entire world. From India's smallest villages to roadside tea vendors in its cities, everyone today scans a QR code to receive payment. Nearly 46% of all real-time digital transactions in the world today take place in India alone. Western banking systems, observing India's success, are now trying to implement the same system in their own countries.
In the 1990s, Western companies viewed India merely as a source of cheap labour and call centres. They believed Indians could only ever be obedient employees, never leaders in technology. But today the picture has changed completely. From Google (Sundar Pichai) to Microsoft (Satya Nadella) to IBM (Arvind Krishna), it is Indians who today occupy the very top positions of the world's largest technology companies.
So why has the West harboured — and why does it still harbour — such deep pessimism and even hostility toward India?
The first reason is racism. In the 1940s and '50s, Western leaders looked down upon Indians and believed them incapable of governing themselves. Even today, that same racism, in lesser or greater degree, drives some foreigners to hold India and Indians in contempt.
But the deepest root of the negative prophecies made against India and Indians at the time of independence was fear itself. The British and other Western nations had constructed a false narrative to justify colonialism. They claimed that the native peoples were "uncivilized" and unfit to govern themselves. To conceal their plunder, they claimed they had come to "civilize" the Indians. Their fear was this: that if India succeeded in building itself into a strong, modern nation, the false veil of colonialism would be torn away entirely. This is precisely why they feared India's success — for India's success meant a double defeat for the imperialists: first, they had already lost their "colony," and now they stood to lose the very "story" they had fabricated to justify taking it. Since these negative prophecies against India have persisted continuously for the eighty years since independence, they have, over time, hardened into an ill tradition within the Western world.
Yet no matter how much negative commentary and dire prophecy has been hurled at India and Indians, India has suffered no harm whatsoever. Today India does not merely endure — it stands tall as a formidable power upon the world stage. The nation that once depended on others for food today feeds the world. The nation whose democracy was prophesied never to survive today guides the entire world as the "Mother of Democracy."
However many times the Western world has forecast India's downfall, India has, every single time, proven it wrong — through its own deeds, its resolve, and its unity. This, indeed, is India's true story — the story of an Underdog who never accepts defeat. Today's prosperous, self-reliant, digital India stands as the sharpest and most fitting answer to every one of those negative prophecies.
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