If there’s one factor that India’s authorities likes to say it stands for, it’s “decolonization.” Delivering his annual speech for Independence Day earlier this week from the ramparts of Delhi’s historic Red Fort, Prime Minister Narendra Modi spoke of his time in energy as a liberation from a “thousand years” of slavery to exterior powers, and of how he was laying the inspiration for a thousand-year state that might “return” India to its previous golden age.

Ironically, given the Mughal antecedents of the fort from which he spoke, Modi’s phrasing lumped collectively the primary a long time of Indian independence, the couple of hundred years of the British Raj, and the for much longer interval that Islam has existed within the nation. It carried the unsubtle implication that India’s Muslims have been a part of its colonial baggage, no completely different from the legal guidelines and language the British left behind. It additionally implied that India’s governments earlier than Modi took energy in 2014 have been complicit in perpetuating international affect by the training system and types of governance. The present authorities, in different phrases, can be the primary within the nation’s historical past to actually throw off the shackles of colonization.