Beyond the Lines: An Autobiography

by Kuldip Nayar

  The arrangement did not work for long because the spirit of sharing of power was lacking. Pant’s assurance to the hill districts remained only on paper. Particularly annoying to them was the imposition of Assamese, which in one form or another was spoken in the entire region but by now had come to be equated with Assamese chauvinism.

  The writing on the wall was that if the Assam government did not mend its ways, the state would split. Chaliha rode the crest of populism generated by his stand that the Assamese language could not be bartered for territory. The state subsequently paid the price when it was split and when illegal migration from the then East Pakistan reduced the Assamese-speaking population in Assam to a minority.

  It was not Chaliha who had initiated the issue of illegal migration but his senior in the Congress, Fakhruddin Ali Ahmad, who rose to be India’s president. In fact, the entire party was guilty. Its simplistic solution was to win elections in Assam by allowing would-be settlers from across the border into the state thus creating a vote bank.

  Pant knew that large numbers of people were coming from across the border. After all, his party had connived at the migration since Independence, but he wished to ascertain its exact extent. He sent Asok Mitra, then the census commissioner, to ascertain numbers. Mitra conducted a mini-census in some of the border districts of Assam and West Bengal and found the infiltrators numbering 2,50,000 in Assam and 1,16,000 in West Bengal.

  Pant decided to expel them as quietly as they had come. Some were expelled but protests from Pakistan that Muslims were being ejected from Assam and West Bengal brought the issue out into the open. Several Muslim leaders from Assam were perturbed. The fact that some Indian Muslims had been thrown out also contributed to a stoppage of the process of reconciliation between India and Pakistan. Nehru too remarked: ‘To take rash action is no help and may even make the situation worse.’

  Those were the days when the Naga hill district was still a part of Assam, although more or less at the behest of underground Nagas. Jayaprakash Narayan and the Rev. Michael Scott, a British missionary, tried to help Chaliha find a solution. The demand for independence by the Nagas, however, stalled a settlement.

  Indeed, the government was sensitive about the Nagas, and Nehru had outlined a policy to integrate them with India. The idea of the British, the Coupland plan, to join the Naga hills with the upper part of Burma and make it into a crown colony had made no headway. There was no doubt that the British did not administer the area and that it was not integrated with the rest of India during their rule. New Delhi’s policy was, however, to convert the area into a state within the country, but at the same time Nehru wanted the Nagas to follow their own culture and introduced a permit for permission to enter their territory.

  Till the mid-1950s the Naga hills were administered by the Ministry of External Affairs under Nehru but were transferred to the home ministry when Pant came to head it. He would say that the problem in Nagaland was one created by missionaries and instructed the home ministry not to extend the tenure of visas to foreign ones. Many of them were expelled notwithstanding a spate of protests from foreign churches.

  Pant did not, however, alter Nehru’s policy of keeping the Nagas separate, keen that they preserve their culture and their way of life and thereby retain their identity. He was, however, opposed to their being isolated from Indian culture.

  The demand of the Nagas for independence was repeatedly rejected by New Delhi. A.Z. Phizo, their leader, took to arms and the Indian forces met the challenge they posed until a ceasefire was declared. A white flag near Kohima flew for many years. I found during my visits there that the flag gave the Nagas a sense of equality as though New Delhi had accepted their demand for independence. This impression came in the way when New Delhi held serious talks with the Nagas to reach a settlement.

  New Delhi did not forgive the Nagas for having walked out of the meeting which the prime minister of Burma, U Nu, and Nehru jointly addressed in 1953. Pant took advantage of Nehru’s umbrage and changed the policy of treating the Nagas as ‘an anthropological specimen’, an idea propagated by Verrier Elwin, a British missionary and anthropologist, who was Nehru’s adviser on tribal matters. Pant kept Elwin out of the picture while he strengthened his ministry’s grip over the Naga territory.

  The Nagas and the Kashmiris are similar in one respect, as people seeking to secede from India. There is, however, one difference between the two. The Kashmiris raised the demand for independence after the ruler merged his state with the Union of India. The Nagas have maintained all along that they were never a part of India.

  The Kashmiris have realized the futility of violence and have adopted non-violence as their means to achieve their goal. The Nagas have not, but have continued the ceasefire under the delusion that both India and they are equal and speak to New Delhi on joint defence and the type of links that exist between two sovereign countries. The reality is however different. Nagaland is as much under New Delhi as any other state in India. New Delhi, having constituted Nagaland state, sits pretty because whatever the level of protest, the Nagas willingly participate in state and parliamentary elections with a polling percentage of around 70 per cent each time.

  Whenever in Kohima I have found the intellectuals busy adumbrating the thesis that the Nagas are not Indians. This may perhaps be true, but New Delhi has treated them just like the people in the rest of India and has been continually strengthening its military presence there. Undoubtedly, many atrocities have been committed by the security forces but there is little protest in India except by a few groups of human rights activists. Public opinion does not get as agitated as it does in the case of other states barring Kashmir because the feeling is that the Nagas are trying to break up the country.

  Phizo escaped to London to continue his struggle for independence and was aided by some missionaries but no country in the world, and at least not the UK, joined issue with New Delhi on Nagaland, in particular when Nehru was the prime minister.

  I wondered whether New Delhi’s policy on the Nagaland issue had been realistic. Nehru kept the area separate and isolated in order to preserve the culture of the people living there. The result was that it was cut off from the mainstream, telling upon their emotional integration with India. The economic development of the area also suffered in consequence, and the youth in particular have felt alienated and many among them have taken to the gun in desperation.

  Phizo died in 1990 in London when I was India’s high commissioner to the UK. The high commission sent his body to Kohima and defrayed travel expenses to enable members of his family to travel to Nagaland. A few weeks after Phizo’s death, Khoday-Yanthan, Phizo’s old comrade-in-arms who had been living in the UK since the days of insurgency in Nagaland, met me. He said he wanted to advise his old friends to abandon violence and seek a solution within the framework of the Indian constitution. According to him Phizo had changed his approach and had wanted to settle the Nagaland question within India.

  Khoday-Yanthan complained that his visa application had been rejected by the embassy. I called the officer in charge to find out what our position was in relation to this. He had written ‘Naga’ in the nationality column. I told the officer that Nagas were Indians and asked him to issue a visa to Khoday. I was confident that he would be a moderating influence on the extremists. I informed New Delhi about his visit which unfortunately took place when the V.P. Singh government was facing a no-confidence motion in parliament.

  I wished I had met Phizo, I was told that he had died long before this had been publicly disclosed. My journalist friend Harish Chandola (married to Phizo’s niece) who was then in London, tried in vain to obtain his death certificate to ascertain when exactly Phizo died. I also asked high commission officials to obtain this information but was unable to do so.

  It was eight years after the ceasefire in Nagaland that I met T. Muivah, a top Naga leader in New Delhi. His colleague, Issac Chesi Swu, had left him a few months earlier. The two and New Delhi’s emissary
had held several rounds of talks when I met Muivah. What amazed me was the cursory manner in which the central government or, for that matter the successive governments in New Delhi, had gone about the whole thing, year after year, without tackling the fundamental problem of independence, which was germane to the discussion.

  The first and foremost demand by the Nagas, said Muivah, was the integration of ‘their people’ who lived outside Nagaland. What this meant was that parts of Assam, Manipur, and Arunachal Pradesh inhabited by the Nagas would be cut off from those states and merged with Nagaland. ‘We do not want our people to live under the Assamese, Manipuris, or others,’ said Muivah. ‘Our places were forcibly occupied. We want them back to protect and pursue our own culture, our own way of living, and our own traditions. How can the Nagas be ruled by foreigners?’ There may have been something in what he said, but on the other hand how could the states be asked to surrender the areas inhabited by the Nagas which were integral limbs of states like Manipur and Assam.

  I must confess my inability to convince Muivah that the Indian constitution did not allow for alteration of the boundaries of any state without its consent. The constitution would need to be amended entailing a two-thirds majority in either House of parliament. No political party or leader would have the courage to even raise the issue, much less convince a state to part with its territory. Muivah told me that on advice from New Delhi, they had approached Assam, Manipur, and Arunachal but found them hostile to the very idea. That was not in the least surprising. Some boundary disputes, from the days of the states’ reorganization in 1955 were still pending because no state wanted to give up territory that the States Reorganization Act had allotted to them.

  The Nagas’ proposal for integration, however, brings to the fore a larger question: How insecure do ethnic groups feel in places where they are in a minority? People of different climes are spread throughout India but still we have seen Tamils having suffered in Karnataka over the water dispute. Kannadigas in Tamil Nadu, and the Bengalis in Assam have faced occasional outbursts of anger from the local people due to rising parochial feelings in India despite the fact that the constitution recognizes only common citizenship for the entire Indian population, with equal rights and opportunities to all Indians throughout the union.

  I gave Muivah the example of my own state, Punjab. It was divided and redivided. Some parts of Punjab constituted Himachal Pradesh and some Haryana. The Punjabis living in the two states, I argued, could not say that they must be grouped together with Punjab. People belonged to wherever place they lived in.

  Muivah also raised the old point that the Nagas were not Indians and had never been part of British or post-British India. This might be true, but the Hydari agreement (27 June 1947), which the Nagas had accepted, stated that they would be free to rule and choose the pattern of administration of their choice within the framework of the Constitution of India. They went back on the undertaking when the constituent assembly incorporated the conditions of the agreement in the Sixth Schedule to safeguard Naga demands. The Nagas could of course say that they did not accept the Sixth Schedule.

  Muivah did not contradict me when I told him that Phizo favoured a solution within the framework of the Indian constitution. He however said that the Nagas would be willing to accept India’s currency, a role in defence, and dual citizenship. This may be a good beginning but it is important for the Nagas to realize that it is not possible for New Delhi to expand Nagaland at the expense of Assam, Manipur, and Arunachal Pradesh.

  Pant was relieved that the stirs relating to the reorganization of states more or less subsided except in Punjab. The Sikhs were particularly agitated. Nehru was so perturbed that he wrote a letter to the chief ministers of states with a copy to Pant, that if people went ahead and did not accept a decision unless it was in consonance with their predilections, then that would be tantamount to a negation of democracy.

  Pant would at times feel depressed about the fallout of the formation of linguistic states. The SRC had sought to assuage the fears of linguistic minorities by providing safeguards, such as the right to instruction in their mother tongue and the use of the minority language for official purposes in the area where they constituted 30 per cent of the population. That the state governors could be entrusted with the task of protecting the minority interests was fine as an idea but difficult to implement and time evidenced that it was mere wishful thinking. Pant’s frequent warning to the ministry that the reorganization of states might create more problems than it would solve proved to be true.

  A Linguistic Minorities Commission was constituted to safeguard minority interests but it remained on paper because those who wielded power in the states ran the administration in a way that consolidated their own interests and their own vote bank. While the linguistic commission reported directly to parliament, in its annual reports it regularly expressed its helplessness against the ‘tyranny’ of linguistic majorities. Even minor officials snubbed the commission by refusing to meet the chairman. Many chairmen have complained to me that their recommendations received no attention from the government and were just filed by the home ministry.

  Anyone could read the writing on the wall that linguistic states would in due course become islands of chauvinism and eventually the sons-of-the soil theory would supervene and linguistic minorities would feel insecure. Anticipating that ‘outsiders’ would feel handicapped in not being conversant with the local languages, the home ministry ruled that the state language could be learnt after getting a government job. This was not adhered to because the states insisted on proficiency in the regional language as one of the qualifications for employment.

  The SRC had feared that the provisions of common citizenship of the entire Indian people with equal rights and opportunities throughout the union would get diluted after the territorial redistribution. This proved to be only too true. The solution, which the SRC suggested, such as the creation of an Indian Service of Engineers, an Indian Forest Service, and an Indian Medical and Health Service was sought to be implemented. Only the Indian Forest Service came into being.

  Pant also drew a blank on his proposal to have a ‘central pool’ of officers who would occupy important positions in Delhi and not return to the states in order to maintain continuity in the central administration. The states did not favour the scheme because they saw in it an attempt to retain the best talent or those who could pull strings in New Delhi. Even before its creation, the ‘central pool’ came to be known as the ‘cesspool’ and dropped.

  Top officers working at the Centre were disappointed because most of them had managed to find themselves a place in the pool. Pant clung to the idea for a long time but Nehru’s lukewarm response ensured its demise.

  Pant depended upon the bureaucracy a great deal but Nehru had a poor opinion of it. Both had different viewpoints on administration. Nehru, as he said, had no patience ‘for the jungle of rules and regulations’ and openly criticized the red tape. Pant believed that rules and regulations were the contours that obliged a government to take well-conceived action and inculcated a salutary discipline which, if harsh, needed to be followed.

  Pant in fact wrote a long note on administrative reforms, justifying the checks and balances. This was in response to a letter he received from Nehru, who had been influenced by Paul H. Appleby, an eminent expert on public administration. Assessing India’s bureaucracy at Nehru’s behest, Appleby had pointed out in a report that there were ‘too many forms of class, rank, and prerogative consciousness’. He had found the government procedures ‘cumbersome, wasteful, and dilatory’. After examining the Appleby report Nehru wrote to Pant: ‘We have worked too much in the rut and carried on old traditions which have little significance today. If we are to work for a welfare state, the whole of our administrative service has to function somewhat differently and, indeed, has to think differently…’

  Nehru’s letter was curt in tone and irritated Pant. Nehru had written that he would like the reorganization of t
he administrative structure ‘soon’. Pant passed on the note to Home Secretary K.K. Jha, who just filed it despite the word ‘soon’. His remark was that the starry-eyed Panditji had utopian ideas.

  Jha had a poor opinion of politicians who, he said, learnt elements of administration from bureaucrats and then behaved as if they knew everything. He gave me the example of his trainee, Lal Bahadur Shastri.

  Sensing that corruption had come to taint the bureaucracy, Pant one day called a closed-door meeting of all secretaries to the government. Top officials turned up in their buttoned-up jackets. He praised them for their good work but regretted that their integrity had come into question. ‘We cannot sit idle and see this happening,’ he said.

  His strong words sent a shock wave throughout the room and there was dead silence. One senior ICS officer, H.K. Patel, who later became a union minister, stood up and told Pant that no official would resort to anything illegal unless there was pressure from above. Some officers might be lacking in integrity, he said, but what about ministers? The rot began at the top. I could see Pant seething with anger but he remained silent. When three more officers got up and spoke in the same vein, Pant wound up the meeting with soothing words such as cooperation between ministers and bureaucrats. He said the two were like two wheels of a carriage; both had to carry the load equally. With these words the meeting ended. No one subsequently spoke about the meeting or corruption and the press had no inkling of the discussion.

  Jha was unhappy about the class of officers working in government. His criticism dwelt on one particular issue: there was too much élitism in the civil service. I realized how true his remarks were when I once visited the IAS training school at Metcalfe House in Delhi. Joint secretary of the home ministry, Senapati Bapat, who headed the school, told me that they purposely wanted the service to be élitist. The probationers were the best in the country and they should not mix with the ordinary lest they be in any way influenced by the latter, he argued.