Was it corruption that destroyed India from within in the past?

Mother India

Atanu Dey on India's Development ...

9 October 2009

Will Durant (1885 - 1981) was an American historian, writer and philosopher. His most famous work is the 11-volume “The Story of Civilization”, published between 1935 and 1975. In a 1931 work, “The Case for India“, he had this to say about India.

India was the motherland of our race, and Sanskrit the mother of Europe’s languages: she was the mother of our philosophy; mother, through the Arabs, of much of our mathematics; mother, through the Buddha, of the ideals embodied in Christianity; mother, through the village community, of self-government and democracy. Mother India is in many ways the mother of us all.
[Wikiquote]

It is hard to reconcile today’s India with the great civilization that India once was. Something must have gone wrong. Durant wrote, “A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within.”

Was it corruption that destroyed India from within in the past? And is it now in its final phase being totally destroyed by corruption?