by Kuldip Nayar
His reaction at the dismissal of Durga Das from the editorship of the Hindustan Times was somewhat similar. Both had known each other from the days when Pant was the UP chief minister and Durga Das a special correspondent at Lucknow. Birla appointed S. Mulgaonkar as editor. Pant did not intervene despite Durga Das’s pleas. I suspected that Mulgaonkar’s friendship with Krishan Chand, Pant’s only son, endearingly called Raja, could have been a factor because no journalist was closer to Pant than Durga Das. However, when I asked Pant he simply said that Mulgaonkar was a better editor.
As regards his own publicity, Pant naively believed that it depended upon the resourcefulness of his information officer. Once when I congratulated him for his speech at Amritsar, he merely said: ‘I have done my duty, you do yours.’ I used to badger the Press Trust of India (PTI), a news agency, to disseminate as complete a version of his speech as possible. Pant was always overwhelmed by the coverage he received in the south. This was because reporters there were conversant with shorthand and would reproduce virtually all that he said.
One of Pant’s drawbacks was that he was seldom on time, although he kept his watch half an hour ahead. Once when he wanted to leave for a cabinet meeting, his driver was nowhere to be found. He asked me to drop him at Parliament House where the cabinet meetings were held. My small car could not muster the speed he sought, so he remarked: ‘Does your car have no engine and why are you so nervous?’ Indeed I was nervous and he should have known why.
I believe that Dr Rajendra Prasad, India’s first president, showed his displeasure at Pant’s late arrival by asking him to come again the following day at the same time. Some allowance should, however, be made given Pant’s disability: he had been beaten mercilessly by the police during the demonstration against the visit of the Simon Commission to India and as a result could not walk properly and his hands would shake all the time; so much so that he had parliament’s permission to remain seated when addressing it.
Soon I realized that Pant wanted me to be at his house after my work at the PIB. This would mean working till late into the night. I must admit that I had no family life those days and hardly spent any time with my two sons. One of them said on a Sunday when I was at home: Why don’t you marry Pant?
Pant was still the chief minister at Lucknow when he told Nehru that he had his doubts about Sheikh Abdullah. Indeed, the relation between Nehru and Abdullah had begun falling apart after the signature of the ‘Delhi Agreement’ in July 1952. The Delhi Agreement had several clauses. One was that hereditary rule would be abolished; two, the constitutional head of state would be called Sadar-i-Riyasat and elected by the state assembly from among the state’s citizens; three, citizenship rights would not be conferred on non-state subjects; and fourth a separate flag for the state would fly alongside the national flag.
The assurance to the centre was what the Jammu & Kashmir Constituent Assembly elected in 1951 had stated: ‘The State of Jammu and Kashmir is and shall be an integral part of the Union of India. This section cannot be legally amended as per provisions of the constitution.’
Sheikh Abdullah’s warning that the Centre’s role should not extend beyond the three subjects agreed upon, i.e. defence, foreign affairs, and communications, led to his clash with Delhi. Nehru sent Union Minister for Food and Agriculture Rafi Ahmed Kidwai to Srinagar to find out what Abdullah was up to. Kidwai returned unhappy, not only because Abdullah had treated him shabbily but also because he found him defiant. Sheikh Abdullah told him that India could arrest him but not silence him.
After some days Nehru sent Maulana Azad to talk to Sheikh Abdullah. He insulted him too, well aware that Nehru held Azad in high esteem. At a meeting with Azad, Sheikh Abdullah said that he regretted his decision to support Kashmir’s accession to India.
Nehru was perturbed but did not know what to do because of his friendship with Sheikh Abdullah. Nehru entrusted the matter to the cabinet where Sheikh Abdullah had no supporter. The cabinet was all for removing him from Kashmir which it apprehended could rise in revolt if Abdullah was allowed to get his way. The home ministry alleged that Sheikh Abdullah was in touch with Pakistan.
This charge was not correct as Sheikh Abdullah later discussed the developments of those days with me. He said that New Delhi was trying to exceed the terms of accession and wanted a say in the domestic affairs of the state. He did not blame Nehru but ‘others’ who carried ‘tales’ to him. Sheikh Abdullah argued that he told both the union ministers who met him that he did not want his state to be ‘slave of India’. Nehru came round to accept Azad’s advice that it would be better to remove Sheikh Abdullah from the Valley than to face the resultant complications.
Sheikh Abdullah was arrested on 9 August 1953. This was the day when Gandhi had launched the Quit India Movement against the British in 1942. Sheikh Abdullah was flown to Coimbatore from where he was taken to cooler Kodaikanal in the south.
After dealing with Sheikh Abdullah, Delhi took up the task of redrawing the map of the Indian states on a linguistic basis. Nehru had brought Pant especially to Delhi to pilot in parliament a bill on the recommendations, of the States Reorganization Commission. Long before Independence the Congress had given an assurance to the country that it would undertake this. Left to themselves Nehru and Pant would have wriggled out of this commitment, realizing the error of opening up a Pandora’s Box of claims and counter-claims for separate states at a time when the country was facing innumerable problems. The Congress could not, however, retract from the repeated assurances it had given. At the last minute Nehru, Pant, and Pattabhi Sitaramayya, the then Congress president, decided to defer the question for ten years to allow the atmosphere to cool down, but it was too late.
In fact it was Nehru who stoked the fires of linguistic claims by making a number of statements in favour of redrawing India’s map. I recall that what rushed the decision was the fast unto death by a political worker, Potti Sriramulu, who wanted the grouping of Telugu-speaking areas, hitherto part of Madras state, to be formed into a separate state. New Delhi dilly-dallied but his death created panic. The government announced a State Reorganization Commission (SRC) with Fazl Ali as the chairman and K.M. Panikkar and H.N. Kunzru as members, even though Andhra Pradesh had been constituted a short time earlier.
The commission’s constitution silenced agitators from different parts of the country making varied demands. However, the report (1955) reignited agitations and revived claims for separate states. Those who did not get what they sought raised the standard of revolt. The impression that gained ground was that the greater the pressure, the greater the likelihood of it being accepted. The situation got aggravated when Nehru said that the recommendations were not ‘sacrosanct’. Pant was unhappy about the remark, not because he wanted the commission’s recommendations to be implemented in full but because it compounded the confusion.
Pant wanted to go down in history like Patel, who had integrated some 560 princely states into India. A daily meeting of home ministry officials would take place at Pant’s residence to discuss the report. No other report received as much attention as did the SRC. The cabinet discussed it fourteen times, apart from long discussions in the parliamentary select committee and the two Houses of parliament.
Even so, the SRC report was like an unwanted child which troubled the government. Pant was really unhappy over Panikkar’s dissenting note, advocating trifurcation of UP, Pant’s home state. There was indeed no love lost between the two. Pant distrusted Panikkar for his communist leanings and was never reconciled to his appointment as India’s ambassador to China. The home minister believed that Panikkar had purposely kept Nehru in the dark about the Chinese building a road through Indian territory to link Sinkiang with Tibet.
Panikkar’s dissenting note was thrown out without discussion, with Pant calling it ‘mischievous’. Hari Sharma, the SRC secretary, recalled how both Fazl Ali and Kunzru had tried to prevail upon Panikkar not to press his proposal. Panikkar’s argument was however that the fede
ral concept of the Indian constitution would be imperilled if UP remained as large as it was. Once he remarked: ‘I do not want UP to rule the country all the time.’
Over 25 years later the then home minister, Choudhary Charan Singh, also from UP, supported Panikkar’s proposal to trifurcate UP. He was, however, at loggerheads with most of his colleagues in the cabinet, including Prime Minister Morarji Desai. Another 25 years later, the then Home Minister L.K. Advani succeeded in bifurcating the state, grouping together the hilly parts into Uttarakhand as a separate unit. In 2011 Chief Minister Mayawati proposed to split UP into four states. It was an election stunt but it went down well with the people of UP keen to have an administration in greater proximity.
Pant was very upset over the Akalis’ threat to begin an agitation to revive their demand for a Punjabi suba, which the commission had rejected on grounds that such a state would lead to greater communal disharmony.
Indeed, the report plunged the nation into linguistic warfare. Pant blamed Nehru who admitted that the death of Potti Sriramulu had exerted such a weight on his mind that he had appointed the commission. Even so, the Congress never expected the issue to boil over to such a degree as to appear as if the country was falling apart at the seams. India had not faced a crisis on this scale since Partition. However, India continued to have supporters such as Yehudi Menuhin, famous American violinist, who wrote to Nehru:
[W]hen I myself think of India, I think of a quality specially Indian which in my imagination holds something of the innocence of the fable and symbolic Garden of Eden. To me India means the villages, the noble bearing of their people, the aesthetic harmony of their life: I think of Gandhi, of Buddha, of the temples, of gentleness combined with power of patience matched by persistence, of innocence allied to wisdom, of the luxuriance of life from the oxen and the monkeys to the flame trees and the mangoes; I think of innate dignity and tolerance of the Hindu and his tradition. The capacity of experiencing the full depth and breadth of life’s pleasures and pains without losing a nobler resignation, of knowing intimately the exalted satisfaction of creation while remaining deeply humble, are characteristics peculiar to these villages.
Nehru and Pant met to discuss how to stall demands for separation and agreed upon a strategy to initiate anti-linguistic movements. Pant telephoned the two Congress stalwarts, West Bengal Chief Minister B.C. Roy and Bihar Chief Minister A.N. Sinha (Anugraha Babu), to propose the merger of West Bengal with Bihar, integrating the Bengali-speaking area with a Hindi-speaking state to become a larger unit called Purva Pradesh. A formal letter Sinha wrote to Roy, who agreed to the proposal, was released to the press. I was told to propagate the idea that people in the two states were agog with excitement over a bilingual rather than a unilingual state.
Nehru, as expected, hailed the proposal as ‘the great lead’. ‘We have had enough folly in this country during recent weeks and it was time that we turned our face away from it.’ The idea of a ‘joint family’ of Bengalis and Biharis caught the imagination of many people. They backed Roy’s argument that language was not as important as food or clothing, but when the entire opposition in West Bengal walked out from an assembly session, the proposal was dropped.
But the juggernaut of state reorganization had picked up too great a momentum to be halted. The horse had bolted from the stable by the time the leadership thought of shutting the gates. In linguistic states, people saw separate entities for themselves. Pant was opposed to the formation of small states, an idea which the Gandhian leader Jayaprakash Narayan had floated to implement the idea of direct democracy. Still, Pant accepted Fazl Ali’s note suggesting that the union territory of Himachal Pradesh be converted into a fully-fledged state. Its merger with Punjab, Pant thought, would be ‘locally unpopular’.
One recommendation which received the most attention and ignited prolonged agitations concerned Maharashtra. Pant did not favour the creation of Vidarbha but agreed with the commission that the Marathi-speaking region and the Gujarati-speaking areas in Bombay state be kept together, joining together a maritime community with a mercantile class; the vibrant with the wily.
Nehru toyed with the idea of separating the Marathi-speaking areas from the Gujarati-speaking areas and constituting Bombay city, India’s largest financial centre, as a separate entity directly under the Centre, as was the case with Delhi. He was chided for being influenced by money bags, and retaliated by saying: ‘We are children of revolution not of money bags.’
I wish Bombay had become a union territory. This would have stalled the parochial agitation by Bal Thackeray, and his parivar, the Shiv Sena, to oust non-Marathis from Maharashtra. The harm that the Shiv Sena has inflicted on our secular ethos is immeasurable. It is responsible for initiating violence in the name of preserving a language and culture in a pluralistic society.
After speaking to Nehru, Pant put before the cabinet a proposal to divide Maharashtra into three states, namely Maharashtra, Gujarat, and Bombay City. C.D. Deshmukh, the then finance minister hailing from Maharashtra, agreed to the proposal at the cabinet meeting but when Nehru announced that Bombay city would be under central administration, Deshmukh resigned from the government.
While explaining the reason for his resignation in parliament, Deshmukh also attacked Nehru for having such ministers whose sons were linked to the corporate sector. When challenged, he named one. In a letter to Nehru, Deshmukh mentioned K.C. Pant, Govind Ballabh Pant’s son. When I learnt this, I went straight to Pant’s house where he was closeted with the ministry’s top officials. When he saw me at the door he asked them to leave. After hearing that Deshmukh had named Raja, his son, Pant said he wished he were dead. ‘In the evening of my life,’ he said, ‘I did not want to see this day.’
The press did not publish Deshmukh’s allegation. I wondered why. Was it because Raja occupied a room at the home minister’s residence from where, after returning from Germany he ran a consultancy? Nehru requested Chief Justice S.R. Das, the Supreme Court judge, father-in-law of Ashok Sen, law minister, to hold an inquiry. K.C. Pant was exonerated to his father’s relief but I was shocked when Ashok’s wife said that she had to remonstrate with her father to get Raja absolved. I had gone to call on them at their house in London when I was Indian high commissioner in 1990.
The decision to place Bombay city under the Centre reignited the struggle for a greater Maharashtra under the leadership of the Samyukta Maharashtra Samiti, a new version of the Samyukta Maharashtra Parishad (SMP). It announced that it would fight for a state of Maharashtra comprising all contiguous Marathi speaking areas.
However, the bulk of the population in western Maharashtra got disgusted with the vacillations of local Congress leaders and turned to S.M. Joshi and S.A. Dange, the two non-Congress leaders, who organized Satyagraha. The Samyukta Maharashtra Samiti achieved its goal on 1 May 1960 when the bilingual state of Bombay was divided into the Marathi-speaking state of Maharashtra and the Gujarati-speaking state of Gujarat.
The SRC found the argument advanced for the creation of Telangana weightier than that in favour of Vishal Andhra. That the latter would cut deep into the pockets of Telangana was convincing. Equally so was the commission’s feeling that it would be better administratively to set up Telangana. ‘Hyderabad State’ was the name suggested when the new state of Andhra was enmeshed with the problem of integration of services.
The commission’s recommendation was that it would be better ‘for the present’ to constitute Hyderabad state with a provision for its unification with Andhra after the general elections scheduled for 1961. The condition for unification was that a two-third majority of the legislature of the residuary Hyderabad state should express itself in favour of it.
Politically, Telangana did not find favour with either Nehru or Pant. Deliberations over the formation of Telangana in the ministry were animated. The majority was in favour of a separate state of Telangana, as the SRC had recommended. Even so, Pant had the self-immolation of Potti Sriramulu at the back of hi
s mind and Nehru too concurred with Pant’s suggestion that the question should not be reopened lest the other parts of Andhra Pradesh should go up in arms again.
A Major fallout of the states’ reorganization was the disappointment of territories comprising Assam. Six of them wanted to go it alone with the status of union territory. Were one to go by history, one would infer that Assam and the North-east hill districts were intended by nature to be the meeting place of many tribes and races, with migration to the state from sundry areas. Till 1931, the linguistic tabulation showed that Assamese was not the language spoken by the majority in the state.
Indeed, a former Assam governor during the Raj compared the Brahmaputra valley with a broad central corridor or hall, from which small rooms corresponding to the hill districts opened out on both sides with no connecting door between them. Even today, Guwahati provides access between India and six hill states. The ambitions of several hill state leaders were probably a clear warning. Still, Raj Bhawan in Shillong has embossed these words on the entrance: ‘Your uncle is not greater than my country.’
Pant’s predicament was how to keep the state of Assam united while giving the hill districts a sense of being their own masters. He camped at Raj Bhawan in Shillong for nearly a week. Nehru had told him not to entertain the claim for a hill state because its creation would lead to a separation between Assam and its tribal people. The key to the problem was Rev. Michael Nicholas, a widely respected man. Chief Minister Bimala Prasad Chaliha had annoyed him but Nicholas was respectful to Pant. My job was to issue a daily press release recording Pant’s meetings.
No doubt, there was a deadlock between Chaliha and the hill leaders. One of Pant’s strong qualities was his ability not to throw up his hands in despair. He had a great deal of patience and I often thought that he won because he would tire others out. He evolved the idea of autonomy within Assam: the Scottish pattern of government, as he called it. Hill districts were offered a council, an assembly of sorts, enjoying control over subjects such as health and roads.
