India After Gandhi

by Ramachandra Guha

  IV

  It is instructive to reflect on the international situation in the months leading up to India’s first general election. Elsewhere in Asia the French were fighting the Viet-Minh and UN troops were thwarting a North Korean offensive. In South Africa the Afrikaner National Party had disenfranchised the Cape Coloureds, the last non-white group to have the vote. America had just tested its first hydrogen bomb; Maclean and Burgess had just defected to Russia. The year had witnessed three political assassinations: of the king of Jordan, of the prime minister of Iran and of the prime minister of Pakistan, Liaqat Ali Khan, shot dead on 16 October 1951, nine days before the first votes were cast in India.

  Most interestingly, the polls in India were to coincide with a general election in the United Kingdom. The old warhorse Winston Churchill was seeking to bring his Conservatives back into power. In the UK the election was basically a two-party affair. In India, however, there was a dazzling diversity of parties and leaders. In power was Jawaharlal Nehru’s Indian National Congress, the chief legatee and beneficiary of the freedom movement. Opposing it were a variety of new parties formed by some greatly gifted individuals.

  Prominent among parties of the left were J. B. Kripalani’s KMPP and the Socialist Party, whose leading lights included the young hero of the Quit India rebellion of 1942, Jayaprakash Narayan. These parties accused the Congress of betraying its commitment to the poor. They claimed to stand for the ideals of the old ‘Gandhian’ Congress, which had placed the interests of workers and peasants before those of landlords and capitalists.24 A different kind of critique was offered by the Jana Sangh, which sought to consolidate India’s largest religious grouping, the Hindus, into one solid voting bloc. The party’s aims were well expressed in the symbolism of its inaugural meeting, held in New Delhi on 21 September 1951. The session began with a recitation from the Vedas and a singing of the patriotic hymn ‘Vande Matram’. On the rostrum, the party’s founder, Shyama Prasad Mukherjee, sat along with other leaders, behind them a

  white background [with] pictures of Shivaji, Lord Krishna persuading the remorse-striken Arjunato take up arms to fight the evil forces of the Kauravas on the battle-field of Kurukshetra,Rana Pratap Singh and of an earthen deepak [lamp], in saffron. From the Pandal was hung banners inscribed with ‘Sangh Shakth Kali Yuge’, adictum taken from [the] Mahabharata, professing to tell the people who attended the convention that in the age of Kali there was force only in [Jana] Sangh.25

  The imagery was striking: taken from the Hindu epics but also invoking those Hindu warriors who had later fought the Muslim invader. But who, one wonders, represented the evil enemy, the Kauravas? Was it Pakistan, the Muslims, Jawaharlal Nehru or the Congress Party? All figuredas hate objects in the speeches of the Sangh’s leaders. The party stood for the reunification of the motherland through the absorption (or perhaps conquest) of Pakistan. It suspected the Indian Muslims as a problem minority, which had ‘not yet learnt to own this land and its culture and treat them as their first love’. The Congress Party was accused of ‘appeasing’ these uncertainly patriotic Muslims.26

  S. P. Mukherjee had once been a member of the Union Cabinet. So had B. R. Ambedkar, the great Untouchable lawyer who, as the Union’s law minister, helped draft the Indian Constitution. Ambedkar had resigned from office to revive the Scheduled Caste Federation in time for the election. In his speeches he sharply attacked the Congress government for doing little to uplift the lower castes. Freedom had meant no change for these peoples: it was ‘the same old tyranny, the same old oppression, the same old discrimination. . .’ After freedom was won, said Ambedkar, the Congress had degenerated into a dharamsala or rest-home, without any unity of purpose or principles, and ‘open to all, fools and knaves, friends and foes, communalists and secularists, reformers and orthodox and capitalists and anti-capitalists’ 27

  Still further to the left was the Communist Party of India. As we have seen, in 1948 many activists of the CPI had gone underground to lead a peasant insurrection that they hoped would fructify into a countrywide revolutionary upsurge on the Chinese model. But the police and in some places the army had cracked down hard. So the communists came overground in time to fight the election. The Telengana struggle, said the party’s general secretary, had been withdrawn ‘unconditionally’. A temporary amnesty was granted and the militants put away their arms and went seeking votes. This abrupt change of roles produced dilemmas no text by Marx or Lenin could help resolve. Thus a woman communist standing for a seat in Bengal was not sure whether to wear crumpled saris, which would certify her identity with the poor, or wash and iron them, to better appeal to the middle-class audience. And a parliamentary candidate in Telengana (where the peasant revolt had been at its most intense) recalled his confusion at being offered a drink by a senior official: he said ‘yes’, and gulped down the offering, only to be hit by a ‘reeling sensation’ in his head as it turned out to be whisky rather than fruit juice.28

  The election campaign of 1951–2 was conducted through large public meetings, door-to-door canvassing, and the use of visual media. ‘At the height of election fever’, wrote a British observer, ‘posters and emblems were profuse everywhere – on walls, at street corners, even decorating the statues in New Delhi and defying the dignity of a former generation of Viceroys’. A novel method of advertising was on display in Calcutta, where stray cows had ‘Vote Congress’ written on their backs in Bengali. 29

  Speeches and posters were used by all parties, but only the communists had access to the airwaves. Not those transmitted by All-India Radio, which had banned party propaganda, but of Moscow Radio, which relayed its programmes via stations in Tashkent. Indian listeners could, if they wished, hear how the non-communist parties in the election were ‘corrupt stooges of Anglo-American imperialists and oppressors of the workers’.30 For the literate, a Madras weekly had helpfully translated an article from Pravda which called the ruling Congress ‘a government of landowners and monopolists, a government of national betrayers, truncheons and bullets’, and announced that the alternative for the ‘long-suffering, worn-out Indian people was the Communist Party, around which ‘all progressive forces of the country, everyone who cherishes the vital interests of his fatherland, are grouping’.31

  Adding to the list (and interest, and excitement) were regional parties based on affiliations of ethnicity and religion. These included the Dravida Kazhagam in Madras, which stood for Tamil pride against northIndian domination; the Akalis in Punjab, who were the main party of the Sikhs; and the Jharkhand Party in Bihar, which wanted a separate state for tribal people. There were also numerous splinter groupings of the left, as well as two Hindu parties more orthodox than the Jana Sangh: the Hindu Mahasabha and the Ram Rajya Parishad.

  The leaders of these parties all had years of political service behind them. Some had gone to jail in the nationalist cause; others in the communist cause. Men like S. P. Mookerjee and Jayaprakash Narayan were superb orators, with the ability to enchant a crowd and make it fall in line behind them. On the eve of the election the political scientist Richard Park wrote that ‘the leading Indian parties and party workers are surpassed by those of no other country in electioneering skill, dramatic presentation of issues, political oratory, or mastery of political psychology’.32

  Some might celebrate this diversity as proof of the robustness of the democratic process. Others were not so sure. Thus a cartoon strip in Shankar’s Weekly lampooned the hypocrisy of the vote-gathering exercise. It showed a fat man in a black coat canvassing among different groups of voters. He told an emaciated farmer that ‘land for peasants is my aim’. He assured a well-dressed young man that ‘landlords’ rights will be protected’. At one place he said that he was ‘all for nationalization’; at another he insisted that he would ‘encourage private enterprise’. He told a lady in a sari that he stood for the Hindu Code Bill (a reform aimed principally at enhancing the rights of women), but said to a Brahmin with a pigtail that he would ‘safeguard our Ancie
nt Culture’.33

  V

  These varied parties all had one target: the ruling Congress. Its leader, Jawaharlal Nehru, had just survived a challenge to his leadership of the party. With the death of Vallabhbhai Patel he was also the dominant presence within the government. But he faced problems aplenty. These included angry refugees from East and West Pakistan, not yet settled in their new homes. The Andhras in the south and the Sikhs in the north were getting restive. The Kashmir question was, in the eyes of the world, still unresolved. And Independence had not as yet made any dent in the problems of poverty and inequality: a state of affairs for which, naturally, the ruling party was likely to be held responsible.

  One way of telling the story of the election campaign is through newspaper headlines. These makeinteresting reading,notleast because the issuesthey flag have remained at the forefront of Indian elections ever since. ‘MINISTERS FACE STIFF OPPOSITION’ read a headline from Uttar Pradesh. ‘CASTE RIVALRIES WEAKEN BIHAR CONGRESS’, read another. From the north-eastern region came this telling line: ‘AUTONOMY DEMAND IN MANIPUR’. From Gauhati came this one: ‘CONGRESS PROSPECTS IN ASSAM: IMPORTANCEOF MUSLIM AND TRIBAL VOTE’. Gwalior offered ‘DISCONTENT AMONG CONGRESSMEN: LIST OF NOMINEES CREATES WIDER SPLIT’. A Calcutta headline ran: ‘W. BENGAL CONGRESS CHIEF BOOED AT MEETING’ (the hecklers being refugees from East Pakistan). ‘NO HOPES OF FREE AND FAIR ELECTION’, started a story datelined Lucknow: this being the verdict of J. B. Kripalani, who claimed that state officials would rig the polls in favour of the ruling party. And the city of Bombay offered, at three different moments in the campaign, these more-or-less timeless headlines: ‘CONGRESS BANKS ON MUSLIM SUPPORT’; ‘CONGRESS APATHY TOWARDS SCHEDULED CASTES: CHARGES REITERATED BY DR AMBEDKAR’; and ‘FOURTEEN HURT IN CITY ELECTION CLASH’. But there was also the occasional headline that was of its time butemphatically not of ours -notably the one in the Searchlight of Patna which claimed: ‘PEACEFUL VOTING HOPED [FOR] IN BIHAR’.

  Faced with wide-ranging opposition from outside, and with some dissidence within his own party, Jawaharlal Nehru took to the road – and on occasion the plane and the train as well. From 1 October he commenced a tour which a breathless party functionary later described as comparable to the ‘imperial campaigns of Samudragupta, Asoka and Akbar’ as well as to the ‘travel[s] of Fahien andHieun Tsang’. In the space of nine weeks Nehru covered the country from end to end. He travelled 25,000 miles in all: 18,000 by air, 5,200 by car, 1,600 by train, and even 90 by boat.34

  Nehru kicked off his party’s campaign with a speech in the Punjab town of Ludhiana on Sunday 30 September. The choice of venue was significant: as was the thrust of his talk, which declared ‘an all-out war against communalism’. He ‘condemned the communal bodies which in the name of Hindu and Sikh culture were spreading the virus of communalism as the Muslim League once did’. These ‘sinister communal elements would if they came to power ‘bring ruin and death to the country’. He asked his audience of half a million to instead ‘keep the windows of our mind open and let in fresh breeze from all corners of the world’.

  The sentiment was Gandhi-like, and indeed Nehru’s next major speech was delivered in Delhi on the afternoon of 2 October, the Mahatma’s birthday. To a mammoth crowd he spoke in Hindustani about the government’s determination to abolish both untouchability and landlordism. Once more he identified communalists as the chief enemies, who ‘will be shown no quarter’, and ‘overpowered with all our strength’. His 95-minute speech was punctuated by loud cheers, not least when he made this ringing declaration: ‘If any person raises his hand to strike down another on the ground of religion, I shall fight him till the last breath of my life, both at the head of the Government and from outside.’

  Wherever he went Nehru spoke out strongly against communalism. In S. P. Mookerjee’s native Bengal he dismissed the Jana Sangh as the ‘illegitimate child of the RSS and the Hindu Mahasabha’. To be sure, he touched on other themes as well. In Bihar he deplored the ‘monster of casteism’. In Bombay he reminded his audience that a vote for Congress was also a vote for its foreign policy of principled neutralism. In Bharatpur and Bilaspur he deplored the impatience of his left-wing critics, whose ends he shared but not their means: as he put it, ‘we can build the edifice of Socialism brick by brick only’. In Ambala he asked the women to cast off their purdahs and ‘come forward to build the country’. In many places he expressed his admiration for the best among his opposition: for men such as Ambedkar, Kripalani, and Jayaprakash Narayan, who had once been his colleagues in the party or in government. ‘We want a number of [such] men with ability and integrity’, he said. ‘They are welcome. But all of them are pulling in different directions and doing nothing in the end’. He was particularly sorry to find himself in opposition to the Socialist Party, which, he said, ‘contains some of my old intimate friends whom I admire and respect’. These sentiments were not shared by his daughter, Indira Gandhi, who in her own speeches alleged that the socialists were funded by American dollars.35

  In the course of his campaign Nehru ‘travelled more than he slept and talked more than he travelled’. He addressed 300 mass meetings and myriad way side ones. He spoke to about 20 million people directly, while an equal number merely had his darshan, eagerly flanking the roads to see him as his car whizzed past. Those who heard and saw Nehru included miners, peasants, pastoralists, factory workers and agricultural labourers. Women of all classes turned out in numbers for his meetings. Sometimes there was a sprinkling of hostiles among the crowd. In parts of northern India Jana Sangh supporters shouted out at Nehru’s rallies that he was not tobe trusted because he ate beef. Coming across a group of communists waving the hammer and sickle, Nehru asked them to ‘go and live in the country whose flag you are carrying’. ‘Why don t you go to New York and live with the Wall Street imperialists?’ they shot back.36

  But for the most part the people who came to hear Nehru were sympathetic, and often adulatory. This summation by a Congress booklet exaggerates, but not by very much:

  [At] almost every place, city, town, village or wayside halt, people hadwaited overnight to welcome the nation’s leader. Schools and shops closed: milkmaids and cowherds had taken a holiday; the kisan and his helpmate took a temporary respite from their dawn-to-dusk programme of hard work in field and home. In Nehru’s name, stocks of soda and lemonadesold out; even water became scarce . . . Special trains were run from out-of-the-way places to carry people to Nehru’s meetings, enthusiasts travelling not only on foot-boards but also on top of carriages. Scores of people fainted in milling crowds.37

  The independent press provided many instances of the popular mood. When Nehru spoke in Bombay, a procession, mainly of Muslims, marched to Chowpatty to the accompaniment of pipes and cymbals. It was headed by a pair of bullocks and a plough (the Congress symbol). Everywhere, crowds started collecting from early morning for talks scheduled for the afternoon; almost everywhere, barricades were broken in ‘the enthusiasm to catch a glimpse of Mr Nehru’. After he finished his speech in Delhi, Nehru was met as he came off the dais by a famous wrestler, Massu Pahalwan, who offered him a gold chain and remarked, ‘This is only a token. I am prepared to give my life for you and the country. The media was much taken with a Telugu-speaking woman who went to listen to Nehru speak in the railway town of Kharagpur. As the prime minister lectured on she was consumed by labour pains. Immediately, a group of fellow Andhras made a ring around her: the baby was safely delivered, no doubt while the mid wives had an ear cocked to hear what their hero was saying.

  The extraordinary popular appeal of the Indian prime minister is best captured in the testimony of the confirmed Nehru-baiter D. F. Karaka, editor of the popular Bombay weekly, the Current. He was in the vast crowd at Chowpatty beach, one of 200,000 people gathered there, many standing in the sea. Karaka noted – no doubt to his regret — ‘the instant affinity between the speaker and his audience’. This is how the editor reported Nehru’s speech:

  He had
come to Bombay after along time, he told them. Many years.

  He paused and looked at them with that wistful look he specialises in. In that pause, ominous for his political opponents, a thousand votes must have swung in his favour.

  Yes, he felt a personal attachment to the city.

  Pause.

  Two thousand votes. It was like coming home. Pause.

  Five thousand votes.

  In Bombay he had passed some of the happiest moments in his life. Yes, the happiest.

  Five thousand votes . . .

  He remembered those great moments so vividly. And some of the saddest moments too – the sad, hard days of the [freedom] struggle.

  Ten thousand votes for the Congress.

  Pause. ‘By looking at the people who have struggled together with me in the fight for freedom, I derive freedomand strength,’ he said.

  The affinity was complete.

  Twenty thousand votes!

  Pause.

  A deep, sorrowful, soulful look in the fading twilight hour; with the air pregnant with emotion . . . He told the gathering that he had taken upon himself the role of a mendicant beggar. Amidst cheers, he said: ‘If at all I am abeggar, I am begging for your love, your affection and your enlightened co-operation in solving the problems which face the country’.