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India’s population grew from 361 million in 1951 to over 1.4 billion in 2023. A nationalist movement emerged in India, the first in the non-European British Empire and an influence on other nationalist movements. In south India, the Vijayanagara Empire created a long-lasting composite Hindu culture. The resulting Delhi Sultanate drew northern India into the cosmopolitan networks of medieval Islam. In the early centuries of the 2nd millennium Muslim armies from Central Asia intermittently overran India’s northern plains. In the 1st millennium, Islam, Christianity, Judaism, and Zoroastrianism became established on India’s southern and western coasts.

With an average annual GDP growth rate of 5.8% over the past two decades, and reaching 6.1% during 2011–2012, India is one of the world’s fastest-growing economies. In 2008, a civilian bet365 India nuclear agreement was signed between India and the United States. India maintains a “no first use” nuclear policy and is developing a nuclear triad capability as a part of its “Minimum Credible Deterrence” doctrine.

In the Indian Ocean, India is near Sri Lanka and the Maldives; its Andaman and Nicobar Islands share a maritime border with Myanmar, Thailand, and Indonesia.

Government

India’s subsequent collision with Eurasia set off a mass exchange of species. Many Indian species have descended from those of Gondwana, the southern supercontinent from which India separated more than 100 million years ago. India has two natural zones of thorn forest, one in the Deccan Plateau, immediately east of the Western Ghats, and the other in the western part of the Indo-Gangetic plain, now turned into rich agricultural land by irrigation, its features no longer visible. India’s most dense forests, such as the tropical moist forest of the Andaman Islands, the Western Ghats, and Northeast India, occupy approximately 3% of its land area. India is a megadiverse country, a term employed for 17 countries that display high biological diversity and contain many species exclusively indigenous, or endemic, to them.

Because of some of India’s deserts, the entire country gets rain for four months of the year. The Himalayas block cold Central Asian winds from blowing into the Indian subcontinent. There are many mountains in the northern part of India. The Andaman and Nicobar Islands, a union territory of India, is near Thailand, Indonesia and Myanmar. It is the main part of the Indian subcontinent.

United Front coalition governments followed, which relied on external political support, H. In 1996, the BJP briefly formed a government after winning the general election. V. Narasimha Rao, formed a minority government which served a full five-year term. After the elections, Congress emerged as the largest single party; a new Congress leader, P. In 1991, soon after the first round of polling in the general election, Congress leader Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated by a member of a Sri Lankan Tamil separatist organisation who was seeking to avenge Indian intervention in the Sri Lankan civil war. She was succeeded as prime minister by Rajiv Gandhi, who led Congress to a comfortable victory in the elections at the end of the year.

• Since its independence in 1947, India fought four wars with Pakistan and a war with China.
• Native speakers of Hindi represented about 41% of the Indian population in the 2001 Indian census.
• Critically endangered species include the gharial, a crocodilian; the great Indian bustard; and the Indian white-rumped vulture, which has become nearly extinct by having ingested the carrion of diclofenac-treated cattle.
• The twin hills of Khandagiri and Udaigiri are famous for their rock-cut caves, constructed by Jain monks during the 1st and 2nd century BC.
• All the states (and the territories of Delhi and Puducherry) elect their local government themselves.
• In 2008, India’s share of world trade was 1.7%; in 2021, India was the world’s ninth-largest importer and the sixteenth-largest exporter.

Indian nationalist leader Mahatma Gandhi with Viceroy of India Lord Mountbatten and his wife in 1947 India has the second largest number of internet users in the world, after China. Bharatiya Janata Party leader Narendra Modi was elected for a third term as India’s prime minister in June 2024. As a rising economic powerhouse and nuclear-armed state, India has emerged as an important regional power.

India accounts for the bulk of the Indian subcontinent, lying atop the Indian tectonic plate, and a part of the Indo-Australian Plate. The rush of technology and the commercialisation of agriculture in the second half of the 19th century was marked by economic setbacks, and many small farmers became dependent on the whims of faraway markets. After the rebellion was suppressed in 1858, the East India Company was disbanded, and the British government began to directly administer India. Fed by diverse resentments and perceptions, including invasive British-style social reforms, harsh land taxes, and summary treatment of some wealthy landowners and princes, the rebellion rocked many regions of northern and central India and shook the foundations of Company rule. By this time, with its economic power severely curtailed by the British parliament and having effectively been made an arm of British administration, the East India Company began more consciously to enter non-economic arenas, including education, social reform, and culture. By the early 18th century, with the lines between commercial and political dominance being increasingly blurred, several European trading companies, including the English East India Company, had established coastal outposts.

Early modern India

The most significant import of cooking techniques into India during the last millennium occurred during the Mughal Empire, spreading into northern India from regions to its northwest, along with dishes such as pilaf. Increasingly, in urban northern India, the sari is no longer the apparel of everyday wear, though they remain popular on formal occasions. Towards the end of the 20th century, innovations in British South Asian music and dance, such as Post-Bhangra, fed back into dance in India.

Female infanticide in India, and lately female foeticide, have created lop-sided gender ratios; the number of missing women in the country quadrupled from 15 million to 63 million during the period 1964–2014, faster than the population growth during the same period. Averaging an economic growth rate of 7.5% for several years before 2007, India has more than doubled its hourly wage rates during the first decade of the 21st century. Until 1991, all Indian governments followed protectionist policies that were influenced by socialist economics. According to the International Monetary Fund, the Indian economy in 2024 was nominally worth $3.94 trillion; it is the fifth-largest economy by market exchange rates and, at around $15.0 trillion, the third-largest by purchasing power parity (PPP). The executive of the Indian government consists of the president, the vice-president, and the Union Council of Ministers—with the cabinet being its executive committee—headed by the prime minister. After the 1998 Indian general election, Atal Bihari Vajpayee of the BJP became prime minister; his government was short-lived due to the lack of a continued mandate.

The constitution also recognises 21 other languages – either because many people speak them, or because they are very important for Indian culture. The Indo-Aryan languages replaced the Dravidian languages in the northern and western regions of India. It has the Indian Ocean to the west, the Arabian Sea in the southwest, the Bay of Bengal in the southeast, and the Himalayas up north. India’s landmass, which forms the northwestern portion of the Indian-Australian Plate, began to drift slowly northward toward the much larger Eurasian Plate several hundred million years ago (after the former broke away from the ancient southern-hemispheric supercontinent known as Gondwana, or Gondwanaland). The land of India—together with Bangladesh and most of Pakistan—forms a well-defined subcontinent, set off from the rest of Asia by the imposing northern mountain rampart of the Himalayas and by adjoining mountain ranges to the west and east.

The island country of Sri Lanka is situated some 40 miles (65 km) off the southeast coast of India across the Palk Strait and Gulf of Mannar. Its government is a constitutional republic that represents a highly diverse population consisting of thousands of ethnic groups and hundreds of languages. The island country of Sri Lanka is situated some 40 miles (65 km) off the southeast coast of India. India also has the largest population of people adhering to both Zoroastrianism (Parsis and Iranis) and the Bahá’í Faith.