Born in 1996

India hosted the Cricket World Cup and the country went into a month-long festival of cricket. The semi-final defeat to Sri Lanka in Calcutta, where spectators rioted, was a national trauma. Raja Hindustani was the Bollywood hit.

Coalition politics had returned — no single party commanding a majority — and governments came and went with bewildering speed. But the liberalised economy was increasingly self-sustaining, growing regardless of which politicians sat in Delhi.