On November 25, 2025, at the Dhwajarohan ceremony of the completed Ram Temple in Ayodha, PM Modi, while addressing the public gathering in Ayodhya, returned to a theme he has made central to India's ongoing renaissance. "For decades," he told the gathering , "a section of people kept saying Indians cannot do this, Indians cannot achieve that. Today, India is shattering that slave mentality and marching ahead with the resolve of a self-confident nation." The phrase "slave mentality" was unmistakable. It was a direct indictment of the lingering ghost of Macaulayism - the belief, deliberately cultivated in 1835 and astonishingly preserved by a section of Indians long after the British departed, that we are inherently lesser, destined to imitate rather than originate, to follow rather than lead.A Legacy That Outlived the Empire
Thomas Babington Macaulay wanted a class of Indians who would be Indian only in skin colour and English in everything else. The tragedy is not that the British tried; the tragedy is that many who took the reins in 1947 continued to govern through the same prism of inadequacy. A decade after independence, Jawaharlal Nehru, speaking from the Red Fort on 15 August 1957, described his own countrymen in terms that could have been lifted straight from a colonial district officer's report: "We are lazy... we lack the spirit of hard work." The internalisation of self-deprecation was complete. For generations thereafter, policy reflected the same low expectation. Space programmes were dismissed as elitist indulgence. Nuclear capability was treated as too risky for Indian fingers. Private enterprise was smothered in red tape because Indian entrepreneurs were presumed incapable of honest global competition. Even sporting success was considered genetically out of reach. We were governed not just as a poor country, but as a permanently inferior one.
The Great Psychological Shift
A paradigm change was visible after 2014. Initiatives such as Make in India, Digital India, and now the clearly articulated vision of Viksit Bharat@2047 carried a new and revolutionary message from the highest office: "You are capable of the impossible." No caveats, no paternalistic caution, no inherited ceiling. The country's response has been nothing short of electric. Ten years ago, the aspiration of an Indian moon-landing on the lunar south pole was met with eye-rolling condescension in certain circles. Today, Chandrayaan-3 is a global benchmark, Gaganyaan hardware is undergoing tests, and private Indian rockets are preparing for liftoff. In semiconductors and artificial intelligence, a field we barely featured in, the world's leading companies are opening their most advanced design and research centres in Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Pune. Indian engineers who once left for Silicon Valley are returning to build foundation models in Indian languages that were declared impossible even half a decade ago. In renewable energy, the nation once ridiculed for perpetually missing climate targets is now installing solar and wind capacity faster than any other major economy, racing toward 500 gigawatts of non-fossil power well ahead of schedule. Indian solar companies rank among the top five globally by market capitalisation. On the sports field, the old joke about medals only in events that require no electricity has been buried forever. Neeraj Chopra's Olympic javelin gold, the record-breaking medal hauls at Asian and Commonwealth Games, the emergence of world-class shooters, wrestlers, boxers and badminton players from small towns and villages - all of it proves that the talent was always there; only the belief was missing. Indians did not suddenly become more intelligent or industrious after 2014. They were simply told, for the first time in seven decades, that they were good enough.
Why 2035 Must Mark the Final Exorcism
The formal target of a developed India is 2047, the centenary of freedom. But the psychological decolonisation must be completed at least twelve years earlier, by 2035, for two compelling reasons. First, the frontiers of human progress - artificial intelligence, quantum computing, biotechnology, fusion energy, space industrialisation - are accelerating exponentially. Nations that still carry even a trace of self-doubt will be digitally colonised in this century rather than militarily colonised in the last. Second, India's demographic dividend reaches its absolute peak around 2040. If the most talented generation in our history enters its prime still half-apologising for being Indian, the moment will slip away forever. Shedding the Macaulay mentality by 2035 is therefore not cultural nostalgia; it is cold, hard strategic necessity. It means textbooks that place Baudhayana before Pythagoras, Panini before Chomsky, and Sushruta before Hippocrates. It means bureaucrats, judges and editors who no longer treat a Western precedent as the default measure of excellence. It means a generation that can imagine an Indian future without first asking London or Washington for permission. When Prime Minister Modi spoke in Ayodhya on 25 November 2025, beneath the shadow of the newly unveiled Ram Mandir and beside the runway of a world-class airport built in record time, he was doing far more than inaugurating a temple. He was serving the final eviction notice to a mindset that has haunted this civilisation for almost two centuries.
Political freedom was won in 1947. Psychological freedom must be sealed irrevocably by 2035. Only then will the twenty-first century cease to be an extension of someone else's story, and become, unapologetically and irreversibly, the Indian century.
(The writer is an author and National Spokesperson of BJP)
Disclaimer: These are the personal opinions of the author
