India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy

by Ramachandra Guha

  The furtherback we go in time, the less of a problem this is. Historians of the eighteenth century seek to interpret and understand that time, and so, following them, do their readers. A biographer of Jefferson or Napoleon can count on more trusting readers – they do not presume to know the things those men did, or wish they should have done them differently. Here, the reader is usually happy to be led and guided by the expert. But the biographer of John F. Kennedy or Charles de Gaulle is not so fortunate. Some, perhaps many, potential readers already know the ‘truth’ about these men, and are less willing to hear alternative versions of it, even if they are backed up by copious footnotes.

  Contemporary historians thus face a challenge from their readers which their more backward-looking colleagues avoid. But there is also a second, and perhaps less commonly acknowledged, challenge. This is that the historian too is a citizen. The scholar who chooses to write on the Vietnam War already has strong views on the topic. The scholar who writes on the American Civil War would have less strong views, and one who writes on the Revolutionary War weaker views still. For the historian as well as the citizen, the closer one gets to the present, the more judgement alone tends to become.

  In writing this book I have tried to keep Maitland’s maxim always in front of me. I have been driven by curiosity rather than certainty, by the wish to understand rather than the desire to pass judgement. I have sought to privilege primary sources over retrospective readings, thus to interpret an event of, say, 1957 in terms of what was known in 1957 rather than in 2007. This book is, in the first instance, simply an attempt to tell the modern history of one-sixth of humankind. It is an account, as well as analysis, of the major characters, controversies, themes and processes in independent India. However, the manner of the story’s telling has been driven by two fundamental ambitions: to pay proper respect to the social and political diversity of India, and to unravel the puzzle that has for so long confronted scholar and citizen, foreigner as well as native – namely, why is there an India at all?

  PART ONE

  * * *

  PICKING UP THE PIECES

  1

  * * *

  FREEDOM AND PARRICIDE

  The disappearance of the British Raj in India is at present, and must for along time be, simply inconceivable. That it should be replaced by a native Government or Governments is the wildest of wild dreams . . . As soon as the last British soldier sailed from Bombay or Karachi, India would become the battlefield of antagonistic racial and religious forces . . . [and] the peaceful and progressive civilisation, which Great Britain has slowly but surely brought into India, would shrivel up in a night.

  J. E. WELLDON, former Bishop of Calcutta, 1915

  I have no doubt that if British governments had been prepared to grant in 1900 what they refused in 1900 but granted in 1920; or to grant in 1920 what they refused in 1920 but granted in 1940; or to grant in 1940 what they refused in 1940 but granted in 1947 – then nine-tenths of the misery, hatred, and violence, the imprisonings and terrorism, the murders, flogging, shootings, assassinations, even the racial massacres would have been avoided; the transference of power might well have been accomplished peacefully, even possibly without Partition.

  LEONARD WOOLF, 1967

  I

  FREEDOM CAME TO INDIA on 15 August 1947, but patriotic Indians had celebrated their first ‘Independence Day’ seventeen years before. In the first week of January 1930 the Indian National Congress passed a resolution fixing the last Sunday of the month for countrywide demonstrations in support of purna swaraj, or complete independence. This, it was felt, would both stoke nationalist aspirations and force the British seriously to consider giving up power. In an essay in his journal Young India, Mahatma Gandhi set out how the day should be observed. ‘It would be good’, said the leader, ‘if the declaration [of independence] is made by whole villages, whole cities even . . . It would be well if all the meetings were held at the identical minute in all the places.’

  Gandhi suggested that the time of the meeting be advertised in the traditional way, by drum-beats. The celebrations would begin with the hoisting of the national flag. The rest of the day would be spent ‘in doing some constructive work, whether it is spinning, or service of “untouchables”, or reunion of Hindus and Mussalmans, or prohibition work, or even all these together, which is not impossible’. Participants would take a pledge affirming that it was ‘the inalienable right of the Indian people, as of any other people, to have freedom and to enjoy the fruits of their toil’, and that ‘if any government deprives a people of these rights and oppresses them, the people have a further right to alter it or abolish it’.1

  The resolution to mark the last Sunday of January 1930 as Independence Day was passed in the city of Lahore, where the Congress was holding its annual session. It was here that Jawaharlal Nehru was chosen President of the Congress, in confirmation of his rapidly rising status within the Indian national movement. Born in 1889, twenty years after Gandhi, Nehru was a product of Harrow and Cambridge who had become a close protégé of the Mahatma. He was intelligent and articulate, knowledgeable about foreign affairs, and with a particular appeal to the young.

  In his autobiography Nehru recalled how ‘Independence Day came, January 26th, 1930, and it revealed to us, as in a flash, the earnest and enthusiastic mood of the country. There was something vastly impressive about the great gatherings everywhere, peacefully and solemnly taking the pledge of independence without any speeches or exhortation.’2 In a press statement that he issued the day after, Nehru ‘respectfully congratulate[d] the nation on the success of the solemn and orderly demonstrations’. Towns and villages had ‘vied with each other in showing their enthusiastic adherence to independence’. Mammoth gatherings were held in Calcutta and Bombay, but the meetings in smaller towns were well attended too.3

  Every year after 1930, Congress-minded Indians celebrated 26 January as Independence Day. However, when the British finally left the subcontinent, they chose to hand over power on 15 August 1947. This date was selected by the Viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, as it was the second anniversary of the Japanese surrender to the Allied Forces in the Second World War. He, and the politicians waiting to take office, were unwilling to delay until the date some others would have preferred – 26 January 1948.

  So freedom finally came on a day that resonated with imperial pride rather than nationalist sentiment. In New Delhi, capital of the Raj and of free India, the formal events began shortly before midnight. Apparently, astrologers had decreed that 15 August was an inauspicious day. Thus it was decided to begin the celebrations on the 14th, with a special session of the Constituent Assembly, the body of representative Indians working towards a new constitution.

  The function was held in the high-domed hall of the erstwhile Legislative Council of the Raj. The room was brilliantly lit and decorated with flags. Some of these flags had been placed inside picture frames that until the previous week had contained portraits of British viceroys. Proceedings began at 11 p.m. with the singing of the patriotic hymn ‘Vande Matram’ and a two-minute silence in memory of those ‘who had died in the struggle for freedom in India and elsewhere’. The ceremonies ended with the presentation of the national flag on behalf of the women of India.

  Between the hymn and the flag presentation came the speeches. There were three main speakers that night. One, Chaudhry Khaliquz-zaman, was chosen to represent the Muslims of India; he duly proclaimed the loyalty of the minority to the newly freed land. A second, the philosopher Dr Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, was chosen for his powers of oratory and his work in reconciling East and West: appropriately, he praised the ‘political sagacity and courage’ of the British who had elected to leave India while the Dutch stayed on in Indonesia and the French would not leave Indo-China.4

  The star turn, however, was that of the first prime minister of free India, Jawaharlal Nehru. His speech was rich in emotion and rhetoric, and has been widely quoted since. ‘At the stroke of the midnight hour
, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom,’ said Nehru.5 This was ‘a moment which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance’.

  This was spoken inside the columned Council House. In the streets outside, as an American journalist reported,

  bedlam had broken loose. Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs were happily celebrating together . . . It was Times Square on New Year’s Eve. More than anyone else, the crowd wanted Nehru. Even before he was due to appear, surging thousands had broken through police lines and flowed right to the doors of the Assembly building. Finally, the heavy doors were closed to prevent a probably souvenir-hunting tide from sweeping through the Chamber. Nehru, whose face reflected his happiness, escaped by a different exit and after a while the rest of us went out.

  No event of any importance in India is complete without a goof-up. In this case, it was relatively minor. When, after the midnight session at the Constituent Assembly, Jawaharlal Nehru went to submit his list of cabinet ministers to the governor general, he handed over an empty envelope. However, by the time of the swearing-in ceremony the missing piece of paper was found. Apart from Prime Minister Nehru, it listed thirteen other ministers. These included the nationalist stalwarts Vallabhbhai Patel and Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, as well as four Congress politicians of the younger generation.

  More notable perhaps were the names of those who were not from the Congress. These included two representatives of the world of commerce and one representative of the Sikhs. Three others were lifelong adversaries of the Congress. These were R. K. Shanmukham Chetty, a Madras businessman who possessed one of the best financial minds in India; B. R. Ambedkar, a brilliant legal scholar and an ‘Untouchable’ by caste; and Shyama Prasad Mookerjee, a leading Bengal politician who belonged (at this time) to the Hindu Mahasabha. All three had collaborated with the rulers while the Congress men served time in British jails. But now Nehru and his colleagues wisely put aside these differences. Gandhi had reminded them that ‘freedom comes to India, not to the Congress’, urging the formation of a Cabinet that included the ablest men regardless of party affiliation.6

  The first Cabinet of free India was ecumenical in ways other than the political. Its members came from as many as five religious denominations (with a couple of atheists thrown in for good measure), and from all parts of India. There was a woman, Rajkumari Amrit Kaur, as well as two Untouchables.

  On 15 August the first item on the agenda was the swearing-in of the Governor General, Lord Mountbatten, who until the previous night had been the last viceroy. The day’s programme read:

  8.30 a.m.

  Swearing in of governor general and ministers at Government House

  9.40 a.m.

  Procession of ministers to Constituent Assembly

  9.50 a.m.

  State drive to Constituent Assembly

  9.55 a.m.

  Royal salute to governor general

  10.30 a.m.

  Hoisting of national flag at Constituent Assembly

  10.35 a.m.

  State drive to Government House

  6.00 p.m.

  Flag ceremony at India Gate

  7.00 p.m.

  Illuminations

  7.45 p.m.

  Fireworks display

  8.45 p.m.

  Official dinner at Government House

  10.15 p.m.

  Reception at Government House

  It appeared that the Indians loved pomp and ceremony as much as the departing rulers. Across Delhi, and in other parts of India, both state and citizen joyously celebrated the coming of Independence. Three hundred flag-hoisting functions were reported from the capital alone. In the country’s commercial hub, Bombay, the city’s mayor hosted a banquet at the luxurious Taj Mahal hotel. At a temple in the Hindu holy town of Banaras, the national flag was unfurled by, significantly, a Muslim. In the north-eastern hill town of Shillong, the governor presided over a function where the flag was hoisted by four young persons – two Hindu and Muslim boy/girl pairings – for ‘symbolically it is appropriate for young India to hoist the flag of the newIndia that is being born’.

  When the first, so to say fantastical, Independence Day was observed on 26 January 1930 the crowds were ‘solemn and orderly’ (as Nehru observed). But, in 1947, when the real day of Independence came, the feelings on display were rather more elemental. To quote a foreign observer, everywhere, ‘in city after city, lusty crowds have burst the bottled-up frustrations of many years in an emotional mass jag. Mob sprees have rolled from mill districts to gold coasts and back again . . . [T]he happy, infectious celebrations blossomed in forgetfulness of the decades of sullen resentment against all that was symbolized by a sahib’s sun-topi.’

  The happenings in India’s most populous city, Calcutta, were characteristic of the mood. For the past few years the city had been in the grip of a cloth shortage, whose signs now miraculously disappeared in a ‘rash of flags that has broken out on houses and buildings . . ., on cars and bicycles and in the hands of babes and sucklings’. Meanwhile, in Government House, a new Indian governor was being sworn in. Not best pleased with the sight was the private secretary of the departing British governor. He complained that ‘the general motley character of the gathering from the clothing point of view detracted greatly from its dignity’. There were no dinner jackets and ties on view: only loincloths and white Gandhi caps. With ‘the throne room full of unauthorized persons’, the ceremony was ‘a foretaste of what was to come’ after the British had left India. Its nadir was reached when the outgoing governor of Bengal, Sir Frederick Burrows, had a white Gandhi cap placed on his head as he made to leave the room.

  II

  In Delhi there was ‘prolonged applause’ when the president of the Constituent Assembly began the meeting by invoking the Father of the Nation – Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. Outside, the crowds shouted ‘Mahatma Gandhi ki jai’. Yet Gandhi was not present at the festivities in the capital. He was in Calcutta, but did not attend any function or hoist a flag there either. The Gandhi caps were on display at Government House with neither his knowledge nor permission. On the evening of the 14th he was visited by the chief minister of West Bengal, who asked him what form the celebrations should take the next day. ‘People are dying of hunger all round,’ answered Gandhi. ‘Do you wish to hold a celebration in the midst of this devastation?’7

  Gandhi’s mood was bleak indeed. When are porter from the leading nationalist paper, the Hindustan Times, requested a message on the occasion of Independence, he replied that ‘he had run dry’. The British Broadcasting Corporation asked his secretary to help them record a message from the one man the world thought really represented India. Gandhi told them to talk to Jawaharlal Nehru instead. The BBC were not persuaded: they sent the emissary back, adding, as inducement, the fact that this message would be translated into many languages and broadcast around the globe. Gandhi was unmoved, saying: ‘Ask them to forget I know English.’

  Gandhi marked 15 August 1947 with a twenty-four-hour fast. The freedom he had struggled so long for had come at an unacceptable price. Independence had also meant Partition. The last twelve months had seen almost continuous rioting between Hindus and Muslims. The violence had begun on 16 August 1946 in Calcutta and spread to the Bengal countryside. From there it moved on to Bihar, then on to the United Provinces and finally to the province of Punjab, where the scale of the violence and the extent of the killing exceeded even the horrors that had preceded it.

  The violence of August–September 1946 was, in the first instance, instigated by the Muslim League, the party which fuelled the movement for a separate state of Pakistan. The League was led by Mohammad Ali Jinnah, an austere, aloof man, and yet a brilliant political tactician. Like Nehru and Gandhi, he was a lawyer trained in England. Like them, he had once been a member of the Indian National Congress, but he had left the party because he felt that it was led by and for Hindus. D
espite its nationalist protestations, argued Jinnah, the Congress did not really represent the interests of India’s largest minority, the Muslims.

  By starting a riot in Calcutta in August 1946, Jinnah and the League hoped to polarize the two communities further, and thus force the British to divide India when they finally quit. In this endeavour they richly succeeded. The Hindus retaliated savagely in Bihar, their actions supported by local Congress leaders. The British had already said that they would not transfer power to any government ‘whose authority is directly denied by large and powerful elements in the Indian national life’.8 The blood shed of 1946–7 seemed to suggest that the Muslims were just such an element, who would not live easily or readily under a Congress government dominated by Hindus. Now ‘each communal outbreak was cited as a further endorsement of the two-nation theory, and of the inevitability of the partition of the country’.9

  Gandhi was not a silent witness to the violence. When the first reports came in from rural Bengal, he set everything else aside and made for the spot. This 77-year-old man walked in difficult terrain through slush and stone, consoling the Hindus who had much the worse of the riots. In a tour of seven weeks he walked 116 miles, mostly barefoot, addressing almost a hundred village meetings. Later he visited Bihar, where the Muslims were the main sufferers. Then he went to Delhi, where refugees from the Punjab had begun to pour in, Hindus and Sikhs who had lost all in the carnage. They were filled with feelings of revenge, which Gandhi sought to contain, for he was fearful that it would lead to retributory violence against those Muslims who had chosen to stay behind in India.