In the 60 years since India won its independence, it has confounded dire predictions made for its future. Winston Churchill once famously described the country as a mere “geographical expression”, a land that was “no more a united nation than the Equator”.

He warned that “to abandon India to the rule of the Brahmins would be an act of cruel and wicked negligence”. If the British left, he predicted, India would “fall back quite rapidly through the centuries into the barbarism and privations of the Middle Ages”, a fear that the massacre of an estimated 1m refugees during the partition of the subcontinent in 1947 seemed at first to confirm.