Burma loosened itself from India 80 years ago this year. Aden did likewise, to become a Crown Colony. Sind was separated from Bombay Presidency at the same time.

Bihar and Orissa became separate provinces.

A Federal Court, precursor to our Supreme Court, came to be founded in New Delhi.

All these were nation-forming, nation-defining moves.

The year 2015 marks eight decades of that Act of the British Parliament which continues, through its afterlife in the Constitution of India, to affect us, to influence us, in fact, to govern us.

And in its scheme of provincial autonomy, state assemblies as we now know them are elected by a popular vote, from among which ministers with thorough-going powers are appointed by titular governors.

By a new and palpable deepening of franchise, it increased the number of voters - with no gender or property or educational bars - from seven million to 35 million, who voted new governments into office.

Its provisions for a federation at the Centre did not come to fruit at the time but the principle of India's future republicanism was laid by it, with a bicameral Central legislature giving voice to the states and the codification of the nation's interests into the three lists we now see in the Constitution as lists - Union, state and concurrent.

The Government of India Act, 1935 became the future interim Constitution of both India and Pakistan. But it was by no means an unflawed document. Its reluctance to part with governors' powers was self-evident and its separation of electorates, religion-wise, was an abomination.

The Congress criticized the act, Nehru being its most vocal opponent. But the party did come into its play and contested the elections under it - with considerable success. It won in eight of the 11 provinces - the three exceptions being Bengal, Punjab, and Sindh.

The Congress took office. Rajagopalachari became the premier as chief ministers were then called, in Madras, G.B. Pant in Uttar Pradesh, Srikrishna Sinha in Bihar, N.B. Khare in Central Provinces, Biswanath Das in Orissa, Gopinath Bordoloi in Assam, B.G. Kher in Bombay, Dr Khan Sahib in North West Frontier Province.

This year, therefore, in a very real sense, is the 80th anniversary of an Act that led to the Congress forming ministries for the first time, and assuming representative office in almost all of India, and thereby getting apprenticed for the 'tryst' role that awaited it a decade thence.

The principal architect of the Act was the Conservative Lord Butler, 'RAB' as he was called after his initials, who ought to have become prime minister of Great Britain some years later but did not, as 'good guys generally stay second'. Winding up the debate in the House of Commons on the government of India bill, Butler said with prescience if also with some self-congratulation,"...we (have) stumbled on a future line of development in regard both to a Constitution for India and, possibly, a model Constitution for the world... which may also tie together the best in the East and the West." In his Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Lecture in 1967, 'RAB' Butler revealed that Nehru had told him in a conversation that the 1935 Act had "proved to be an organic link between the old and the new".

All this is history.

Nostalgia apart, does the 80th anniversary of the Government of India Act, 1935, hold any significance for India today?

The 1935 Act was the blueprint for the 'final print' of the Constitution of India in which bicameralism at the Centre and devolution of powers at the states remain pivotal. But the final print was to differ from the blueprint in two critical respects.

In his August 14/15 1947 speech, Nehru spoke of India "stepping from the old to the new".

The Constitution of India, as masterminded by B.R. Ambedkar, did away with the "old" in the 1935 Act's separate electorates on religious lines and brought in the "new" in terms of reserved constituencies envisaged in the Gandhi-Ambedkar Poona Pact.

Why is this critical?

Separate electorates were the pathway to division and to ultimate Partition.

Reserved constituencies were meant to be a pathway to protection and to ultimate cohesion.

Giving his Nehru Memorial Lecture in London in 1970, V.K. Krishna Menon recalled the "stepping from the old to the new" imagery used by Nehru and said, "The stepping has never been completed."

Today, 80 years after the 1935 Act, we need to reflect on where our steps have brought us.

Our constituencies are no longer separate but what of the electorates?

There is a word Gandhi, Nehru and Ambedkar did not use much or at all. Nor Menon either - 'polarized'.

Our electorates are not separate any longer but who can deny they are getting increasingly polarized? Separatism on religious lines has resurfaced in the 'us' and 'them' rhetoric of our electoral politics, in the vocabulary of our campaign speeches. Not frontally like in the 1935 Act but surreptitiously and that much more dangerously, through side-lanes and back doors. It is a fact, a disturbing one, that the last election, which brought the Bharatiya Janata Party to power at the Centre, also saw the smallest number of Muslim members of parliament to be elected to the 16th Lok Sabha. The House has only 23 Muslim MPs, the lowest figure since 1952. There are no Muslim MPs from UP, from Maharashtra. What does this indicate? First, that the 'victorious' party, the BJP, fielded almost no Muslim candidate. And the parties that did could not see them through because the vote had been polarized. This is ominous.

The wholly mistimed disclosure of the Census of India's latest tabulations on religious lines on the eve of the elections to Bihar is a pointer. Religious divergences have insinuated themselves into our political consciousness, through an unmistakable enunciation of a new, unwritten code of citizenship : Concord through Conformism, Compliance. Dissent is portrayed as indiscipline, and if that dissent talks of liberalism, of pluralism, of secularism, it is threatened with 'Go To Pakistan'. This code sees criticism as disruption and free expression as an extravagance, something a country 'on the move' can ill afford. Our constituencies are not separate but our electorates are voting separately.

And what of reserved seats for the scheduled castes and scheduled tribes, that salutary and high-minded methodology, that Gandhi and Ambedkar devised in 1932, in Poona to Tagore's celebration of their accord? They have done well, to use a Nehruism, 'in large measure'. I cannot do better than quote from the philosopher-statesman, K.R. Narayanan, who was, incidentally, returned to the Lok Sabha over three successive general elections from a reserved seat in Kerala. "If an illiterate person," he said in a G.V. Mavalankar Memorial Lecture in 1993, "becomes a member of Parliament, he might well prove to be a good member. But the problem comes when his illiteracy has been tampered with partial enlightenment by all kinds of forces." That 'tampering' is done most damagingly at the time of the selection of the 'reserved' candidates by cabals that comprise powerful persons from the higher castes and by powerful self-serving cabals from within the scheduled castes and tribes themselves. Thus has 'reservation' been distorted, its intent disturbed.

Un-separated but polarized, reserved but manipulated, our electorates and constituencies face a challenge. They ought not to let atavistic recoils into outmoded animosities, rivalries and 'othernesses' to deflect the nation's "stepping from the old into the new".

The 1935 Act needs to be remembered today and re-visited for what its afterlife has done, in the good and the bad, for it will be part of us, our daily hopes and our night-time fears as long as we remain a republic.