by John Keay
After three years of consultation and debate India’s new constitution, ‘probably the longest in the world’, was rolled out in 1949 and officially adopted on 26 January (henceforth ‘Republic Day’) 1950. Like most of the proposals and revisions still being endlessly entertained by the constitution-makers in Pakistan, it favoured a Westminster style of government with first-past-the-post elections, an upper and lower house (the latter directly elected), a council of ministers, an inner cabinet, an independent judiciary and so on. But these arrangements were cast within a federal framework, as in the USA, which acknowledged the independent authority of the constituent provinces. Now known in India as ‘states’, the erstwhile provinces were also to elect assemblies. Each state/province assembly would appoint a state government, to which were reserved local revenue-raising powers (sales and liquor taxes, for example), a share of central revenues and a range of responsibilities (‘states’ subjects’). They also had a say in the so-called ‘concurrent subjects’, responsibility for which was shared with the central government. But in laying down these rules the constitution borrowed from the Government of India Act of 1935, and most notably from that Act’s imperial – that is, authoritarian – safeguards. Thus there were various ways by which the central government could influence or overrule state governments, including their dismissal and temporary suspension through the imposition of ‘President’s Rule’ (when the governor of a state, an appointee of the central government, took over on behalf of the president as head of state).
In sum, a federal (or provincial) structure was retained, but it was one heavily weighted in favour of the centre. For progressives like Nehru and Patel this was essential. In the run-up to Independence nothing had alarmed them more than proposals that, in order to preserve the integrity of pre-Partition India, would have limited the role of the central government to such things as foreign affairs, defence and some umpiring responsibilities for communications and the currency. Indeed the risk of a weak centre being held to ransom by its semi-sovereign provinces/states had soon appeared worse than the dangers inherent in the two-nation theory; for in the long run it too would jeopardise the integrity of the nation and, more immediately, would frustrate all hopes of pushing through the radical reforms that Nehru believed essential. More than anything else it had been this consideration that had reconciled him to Partition. Better, in other words, to head a governable entity minus Pakistan than an ungovernable one that included Pakistan. Obligingly, Karachi’s excruciating contortions over its own constitution seemed to be proving Nehru’s point. The ground rules of the centre – state relationship in India still left ample room for disagreement; but so long as Nehru lived and so long as Congress enjoyed a handsome majority in most of the state capitals as well as in New Delhi, stresses could be largely contained within the party.
In the first two decades of independence the substance of the Indian constitution proved less divisive than the language in which it was written. This was English, a foreign tongue with imperialist connotations. National pride demanded the adoption, at least for official purposes, of an indigenous language; so did notions of transparency; and there was no shortage of contenders. The constitution recognised sixteen major languages and acknowledged several hundred others. But therein lay the problem: which to choose and on what basis? Nehru favoured Hindustani, an innocuous amalgam of Hindi, the language of north India’s Hindus, and Urdu, that of its Muslims. It was easily mastered, widely understood, confessionally neutral, though not much spoken. On the other hand Hindi-speakers, who outnumbered any other language group and included much of the Congress leadership, strongly urged the claims of their own tongue. Meanwhile speakers of the Dravidian languages in the south (Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam) objected to both Hindi and Hindustani as Sanskrit-based and so more alien to them than English, whose retention they therefore favoured.
At issue was more than just the medium of government business. The adoption of an official language would empower all those who spoke it while disadvantaging those who did not. Easier access to educational places, government posts and public sector jobs, plus a sense of privileged identity, awaited the chosen language group; hard study, perpetual disparagement and a marginalised heritage would be the lot of the unchosen. Careers were at stake, vast communities affected. Here was a subject worth fighting for, even dying for.
In a still constitutionless Pakistan the debate was just as fierce, though the battle was joined slightly sooner. There Jinnah favoured Urdu with its Mughal pedigree, its Islamic script and its familairity to the largely mohajir elite of his Muslim League. Famous poets had embellished its appeal and, although little used for conversational purposes outside rarefied circles in the main cities, it was widely understood. In this respect it too could be regarded as neutral, like Nehru’s Hindustani. But Panjabi-speakers soon sought common ground with Sindi-speakers and Pushtu-speaking Pathans in opposing it as an academic irrelevance, while in east Pakistan it was positively tainted as the medium of a well-born and resented minority. The east being East Bengal, the language almost universally spoken there – and the rich culture associated with it – was Bengali. And since Bengalis outnumbered all other Pakistanis, their language even more than Hindi in India had the majoritarian argument on its side.
This did not stop a 1948 declaration in favour of Urdu by Quaid-e-Azam Jinnah himself, so making any subsequent backtracking heretical. Protests and strikes resulted; Bengali sentiment was outraged. Only the delay in giving constitutional effect to the decision left some grounds for hope. But when in 1952 Kwaja Nazimuddin, the then prime minister and scion of the Muslim League who was himself a Bengali, confirmed in Dhaka (Dacca) that Urdu must indeed be the national language, all hell broke loose. East Bengal’s students called a general strike and were supported by various progressive groups, among them the Awami League, a populist party lately formed by the province’s ex-Muslim League leader, H. S. Suhrawardy. The authorities then panicked. The police were ordered to open fire, four students were killed, many injured, the army was called out and thousands of influential sympathisers were rounded up. It was a taste of things to come. The 1952 ‘Dhaka killings sealed the [Muslim] League’s fate in east Bengal’; in doing so, they also signalled the beginning of that land’s second freedom struggle and provided the future Bangladesh with its first martyrs.3
No less ominous were the language protests in India. The 1950 constitution had eventually fudged the issue: Hindi was to be the sole official language, but not for fifteen years (during which English might still be used), not without careful preparation and an official inquiry, and not without assurances that the individual states might use regional languages in transacting their own business. The hope was that in the fifteen-year interim tempers would cool and Hindi would win more friends, especially if it could demonstrate a capacity to express the complex legal, financial and scientific concepts on which a modern political economy depended. But six years later the official inquiry again reported in favour of Hindi; preparations for the switchover were stepped up. The anti-Hindi lobby in the south, now hitched to the rising star of a radical Dravidian party, the Dravida Munetra Kazagham (DMK), redoubled its protests. Meanwhile in the north, Hindi’s need for new words and intellectual respectability had sent scholars running for their Sanskrit lexicons. As a result the Hindi news on All India Radio became so Sanskritised as to be barely comprehensible. Listeners switched off and Nehru complained that he couldn’t understand the verbatim reports of his own speeches.
As the 1965 deadline approached, anxiety increased. Hints that English might be reprieved led Hindi activists in the northern cities to torch cars bearing English numberplates and vandalise premises bearing English signage. Madras responded with student demonstrators who marched to the chant of ‘Hindi never, English ever’; anything written in Hindi’s Devanagri script – books, billboards, letterheads – was destroyed; and in what could have been scripted as a tragic nod to their 1952 counterparts in Dhaka, four student
s sacrificed their lives by igniting themselves ‘at the altar of Tamil’.4 State-wide strikes crippled the government. Police attempts to regain control resulted in the deaths of over sixty people. The DMK, like the Awami League, had earlier hinted that if Hindi was imposed and Tamils thereby reduced to second-class citizens, their state might be forced to secede. In East Bengal such threats had cut no ice with the quarrelsome leaders of the Muslim League; but in India, with elections ever pending, they had been taken seriously both by the Congress government in Madras and by the leadership of the Congress government in Delhi.
The Congress party had always been divided on the language issue; once the Hindustani option had been dropped, Nehru himself had acted more as umpire than as player. With compromise now imperative, it fell to his daughter Indira as education minister to signal a change of policy, then later as prime minister to formulate it.
In 1967, with another Indo-Pak war over and elections out of the way, the path was clear for legislation. The bill that was eventually passed, while confirming the status of Hindi as India’s official language, gave the non-Hindi states a veto over the phasing out of English, thus effectively guaranteeing its place as ‘an associate official language’ indefinitely. For central government purposes ‘a virtual[ly] indefinite policy of bilingualism was adopted’.5 But it was actually a trilingual policy, for there was also something in it for languages other than Hindi and English. In the states, some of which had already been split up and renamed to meet the aspirations of local language groups, government business would still be conducted in the preferred regional language – Tamil, for instance, in the case of the now renamed and redefined Madras state of Tamil Nadu. Additionally this ‘three-language formula’ was to prevail throughout the educational system. Indian schoolchildren would henceforth be expected to acquire some proficiency in a regional language, plus Hindi, plus another that was almost invariably English. Thus was calm restored at the cost of a policy that bore rather heavily on young minds. Yet almost fortuitously it afforded them access to a language and literature whose international currency would in time prove even more professionally rewarding than Hindi.
TEETHING TROUBLES
In marked contrast to Karachi, where ineffectual ministries were being toppled like ninepins, the Delhi government of the 1950s enjoyed a comparatively free hand to press ahead with its reform programme. Unlike the Muslim League, the Congress party held together; regular election victories topped up its mandate; central authority as refracted through an already entrenched bureaucracy assumed the impervious swagger of the raj; and above all Jawaharlal Nehru as prime minister brought a vision to the direction of public affairs that inspired regard and cowed opposition. Sectarian parties like the Hindu nationalist Jan Sangh (the political wing of the RSS) made little headway against Nehru’s bracing insistence on an even-handed secularism. Ideology-based parties like the communists similarly failed to make a national impact while Nehru’s socialist convictions stole their thunder and his Moscow connections trumped their own.
Only by lowering its sights to focus on state issues and cultivate local grievances was the Communist Party of India (CPI) able to make an impact in West Bengal and, more immediately, Kerala. There in the 1957 elections the party won nearly half the seats in the state assembly and duly formed what was hailed as the world’s first democratically elected communist government. It lasted only a couple of years. Congress-backed opponents of its reforms cynically fomented chaos, the state police waded in and the government in Delhi, citing a breakdown of law and order, then jumped at the chance to dismiss the ministry and impose President’s Rule. Congress won the subsequent election but lost the next. Despite splits in their own ranks, the communists would remain a potent force in the state.
Ironically Kerala’s first communist government, far from subverting the democratic process and overturning the social order, had acted strictly within the constitution. Even the reforms responsible for its downfall were not exactly controversial; they had been mandated by Delhi itself. Free schooling for all, limitations on the size of landholdings, redistribution of surplus land to the landless, guarantees for the rights of tenant cultivators, rural development schemes, collectivisation – all were dear to Nehru’s heart and were being trumpeted as key elements in the central government’s programme of social justice. But, except in leftist pockets like Kerala, they were not necessarily being enforced. Education and agriculture being states’ subjects, the responsibility for implementing the reforms lay with state-level ministers who, because of bloc-voting, were at the electoral mercy of those landholding interests that had most to lose by the reforms. By pleading local circumstances to delay action, dilute the terms, overlook the intent or condone the evasion of such measures, they could effectively frustrate them. Thus the ‘land ceiling’ – a statutory limitation of so many cultivable hectares per individual holding – was unevenly applied and, where enforced, often became something of a joke: many proprietors simply parcelled out their estates among their children and dependants without in fact relinquishing a single field. Agricultural output did rise during the Nehru years, but nowhere near as fast as the population and little thanks to land redistribution. As a result, by 1956 India was heavily dependent on food imports from the USA. It would remain so for more than a decade. For a country three-quarters of whose citizens were engaged in agriculture, and for a government proudly proclaiming self-reliance through a policy of ‘import substitution’, it was a major embarrassment.
Admittedly, for Nehru and his generation import substitution more often referred to manufactured goods than to foodstuffs. With a nod to the swadeshi movement of the 1930s, it meant developing a domestic productive capacity that would eliminate the need for foreign imports, so reinforcing political independence with the steel mesh of economic self-sufficiency. Following the then admired Soviet model of development, the prerequisite for creating such a modern economy was taken to be the establishment of heavy industries, machine-tool foundries, mammoth infrastructural projects and top-class technical and scientific institutions. In what amounted to Nehru’s equivalent of Mao’s ‘Great Leap Forward’, state planners would set the targets and the state itself would be a major player; but in India private sector enterprise was not to be excluded or nationalised. Conglomerates like those of the Tata and Birla families, long-time supporters of Congress, would continue to operate throughout the economy and were expected to meet the demand for consumer goods. It was to be a genuinely mixed economy, albeit with a Kafkaesque system of licensing (the so-called ‘permit raj’) that would discourage the import of all but essential raw materials and ensure for the government an effective regulating role – plus a rich source of patronage.
Meanwhile the state assumed direct responsibility for the leviathans of the economy as epitomised by vast new steel plants and hydro-electric projects. Employment in the state sector expanded exponentially, as did the bureaucrats who directed it. Like Stalin’s Russia and Mao’s China, Nehru’s India was awash with inspirational feats of construction and sensational production forecasts – even as the hydro-dams themselves filled with silt and the steel plants proved woefully inefficient. In retrospect the period would come to be remembered as one of scarcity and drab austerity, ‘the wasted years’ even. Nehru’s influential Planning Commission and its five-year blueprints would be seen as having crippled the economy, stunted the nation’s entrepreneurial genius and barely dented the poverty statistics.
But at the time each ingot of home-produced steel glinted with promise and every kilowatt of home-generated power sparked a glimmer of hope. What with a Gandhian legacy comprised of homespuns and handicrafts and a colonial manufacturing base represented by cotton piecegoods, duff matches, gearless bicycles and a glut of brass elephants, there was much ground to make up. As in China, labour-intensive production in the state-run industries generated employment, while expanding the pool of expertise and acting as a form of wealth redistribution. In a heavily protected economy such th
ings mattered more than the quality or competitiveness of the finished product. Industrialisation made sense psychologically and politically, and when in time import substitution gave way to export creation, it would make sense economically. The engineers and BSc graduates who spilled from the new technical institutes would prove a richer resource than the waters that sloshed through the dam-builders’ clogged turbines.
It was not domestic policy that discredited the Nehru period and brought on a national crisis of confidence but foreign policy. This was a field in which the internationally minded Nehru was uniquely qualified and for which he assumed sole responsibility throughout his prime ministership. As in matters of religion, language or economic development, he favoured a position of superior neutrality between the confrontational orthodoxies of the day. Standing aloof from the Muslim versus Hindu, Hindi versus English, Marxist versus capitalist rivalries, he would similarly position India outside the East versus West global confrontation. Europe’s ‘iron curtain’ and Asia’s ‘bamboo curtain’ were not destined to be drawn together along the length of the Himalayas. An even-handed India would keep them open, be a conduit between the ‘free world’ and the communist bloc, and offer a peace-loving alternative to both.
