New Delhi, Jan. 26 -- As I have written before, if India had been a start-up in August 1947, not even the most venturesome of venture capitalists would have invested in it. No new nation was born in more inhospitable circumstances. The Partition of the country had been awful enough, in the scale of its violence and the mass displacement of people from their homes. Two months after Independence, Pakistan sent raiders into Kashmir, sparking a full-fledged war. Then, in January 1948, the Father of the Nation was murdered by a Hindu fundamentalist. This attack from the religious right was compounded by an attack from the political left, when, a mere six weeks after the Mahatma died, the Communist Party of India, acting on the orders of their Russian masters, started an armed insurrection against the Indian State. All this occurred against the backdrop of food scarcities, shortages of foreign exchange, and the refusal of the large and strategically vital princely state of Hyderabad to join the Indian Union....