One containment, of course, was the famous one, the blockage of Communism or any form of social revolution throughout the developing world. The second was to be internal to each country, irrespective of any real or potential revolutionary threat. Public participation was to be contained until the people and their institutions were ready for it, otherwise the new polities would be submerged under a flood of unrealistic, unattainable popular demands. So, first the people must be tutored, taught patience, taught to vote, taught to postpone the satisfaction of their needs for the sake of future generations.
Academics, along with the new leaders of the postcolonial countries, the "donor" nations and the new world banking institutions in effect hoped for what I call the three 'Ds': deference from the people to the new leaders of the new states, the new nations, and the new institutions, on the one hand, and deferment of any hopes for themselves for the sake of the bright future that was to come for future generations through development.
Despite such worries about the readiness for democracy, India, in 1951, adopted universal adult suffrage that enfranchised more voters at one stroke than the entire populations of the other two great democracies, Great Britain and the United States. At the same time, the Indian government wasted no time in dealing with organised Communist forces that used violence in the early years after Independence, which were soon smashed, while the other main Communist organisations were tamed and became domesticated to representative government. But, from time to time, persisting up to the present, there have been pockets of Left revolutionary resistance and rebellion in various part of India, all of which are labelled in Indian parlance as 'Naxalite', denoting a category of persons whom the police and other armed state forces are entitled to kill on sight. But such radically violent forces have never been in a strong enough position anywhere in India to recruit large numbers of the deprived population or threaten the strength and stability of the Indian state. Moreover, there has been a long-term process of what I have called "caste succession" over the past six decades, involving the successive incorporation of backward and lower caste groups into electoral politics.
But do the vast mass of peoples living in India called, in the political parlance of the country, scheduled and backward castes, tribes, and classes continue to defer to the elite, aristocratic, and otherwise upper dominant castes in the country? With regard to deference, the vast majority of the poorest among the lower and lower backward castes remain deferential to their imagined "betters", or feign deference to them, but political practitioners have arisen from these classes who bargain with the upper caste leaders for power, place, and pelf on terms of equality, and they do so with increasing effectiveness.
But what about the material basis of life of these classes, their dignity and respect, their ability to live the life, in Walter Bagehot's phrase, "that becomes a man" or woman? The answer to this question may be summarised under the terms, marginal gain and a somewhat altered set of 'Ds', namely, continued deprivation, deferment and displacement. The marginal gains are tabulated in the declining incidence of poverty and the increasing literacy rates, both of which, however, are contested and are far behind most of the rest of the world.