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

by Ramachandra Guha

  Both sides now sought amore permanent solution to the problem. Pakistan asked for the matter to be referred to international arbitration, which India at first refused. The World Bank stepped in to play the role of peacemaker. Knowing the recalcitrance of both sides, the Bank offered a surgical solution – the waters of three rivers would go to Pakistan, the waters of the other three rivers to India. This proposal was tabled in February 1954; it took another six years for the two sides to finally sign it.81

  With the Indus, as with Kashmir or any other topic under the subcontinental sun, agreement was made more difficult by domestic politics. An Indian or Pakistani head of government who promoted dialogue was inevitably accused of selling out to the other side. An early example of this was the trade war of 1949–51, prompted by the devaluation of the Indian rupee. Pakistan stopped the shipment of jute in protest; India retaliated by refusing to supplycoal.82 The conflict was resolved only when, in February 1951, Nehru agreed to recognize the par value of the Pakistani rupee. His decision was welcomed by chambers of commerce, but bitterly opposed by politicians of all stripes. The general consensus in New Delhi was that ‘India has been completely defeated’. One Congress member reported that the feeling in the party office was that ‘such a humiliation could not have been possible if Sardar Patel were alive’. A refugee leader remarked, ‘The real question to be considered now is to find out the next issue on which Jawaharlal will surrender to Pakistan – Kashmir, or more probably Evacuee Property’. A spokesman of the Hindu Mahasabha said, ‘In order to become a world leader, Nehru can go to the extent of surrendering the whole of India to Pakistan.’ And an RSS organizer claimed, ‘This shows what is to come next. More appeasement and surrenders if the masses do not check Nehru.83

  On the Pakistani side, any concession to India was likewise seen by opposition politicians as appeasement of the enemy. At the popular level, however, the feelings about the other side were distinctly mixed. Nationalist ideology drove them apart; but mass culture brought them back together again. It was not just that they ate the same food and lived in the same kinds of homes. They also had the same sense of fun. Indian filmstars were widely admired in Pakistan; and Pakistani cricketers given arousing reception when they played in India.

  This ambivalence is captured in an exchange printed by the Karachi newspaper Dawn in 1955. A lady who had recently visited her relatives in India wrote of her experiences while travelling by train from Amritsar to Ambala. When they heard she was from Pakistan, she was set upon by passengers who were refugees from Sindh and West Punjab. Apparently, ‘some of the non-refugee Hindu passengers remonstrated, but the refugee Hindus and Sikhs brushed aside their remonstrance, saying that the non-refugees could not realise the suffering of the refugees from Pakistan’. This account of Indian animosity provoked several letters recounting the warmt hand hospitality on offer on the other side of the border. A man advised any future traveller to India to ‘indulge in Amroods and Pans [guavas and betel-leaf] which are at their best these days instead of indulging in such talks as tend to injure the growing Indo-Pak accord’. A woman correspondent complained that such ‘mis-statements created bitterness and precluded ‘amity between India and Pakistan’. This last ideal was then endorsed by the original letter-writer, with this telling caveat: ‘I wish, however, that as a Pakistani, which I suppose she is, she had the delicacy of stating “Pakistan and India” instead of “India and Pakistan”.’84

  VII

  Indian foreign policy was opposed to the continuance of colonial rule anywhere. This, naturally, meant reclaiming the pieces of the motherland that were still under the control of foreigners. When the British left in 1947, the Portuguese stayed on in Goa and their other possessions in India while the French remained in control of three slivers of land in the south – most importantly the port of Pondicherry – as well as the eastern enclave of Chandernagore.

  In June 1949 the population of Chandernagore voted by an over-whelming majority to merge withIndia. The electionhad witnessed a resounding display of patriotism, with posters representing a mother in Indian dress reaching out to reclaim a child clad in Western apparel. A year later the territory was transferred. But the French hung on to their slices of south India. In the spring of 1954 the situation became ‘increasingly tense’; there was a vigorous pro-merger movement afoot in Pondicherry, and daily demonstrations in front of the French consulate in Madras. On 1 November the French finally handed over their territories, which the Indians celebrated with a spectacular display of fireworks. The following January’s annual Republic Day parade for the first time featured a float from Pondicherry, with young girls singing French songs.85

  In welcoming back these fragments, Jawaharlal Nehru praised the governments of both countries for their ‘tolerance, good sense and wisdom’, thus solving the problem of French India ‘with grace and goodwill’.86 These remarks were intended above all for the Portuguese, who, however, were not listening. They were determined to hang on to Goa for as long as they could. As the transfer of Pondicherry was being finalized, the Portuguese dictator Antonio de Oliveira Salazar spoke on national radio of their Indian colonies as belonging to ‘the Portuguese Nation by injunction of History and force of Law’. ‘Goa constitutes a Portuguese community in India’, he insisted: ‘Goa represents alight of the West in lands of the Orient. It had to be retained, so that it might ‘continue to be the memorial of Portuguese discoveries and a small hearth of the spirit of the West in the East’.87

  A Goa Congress Committee had been in operation since well before Independence; its activists included resident Goans as well as exiles in Bombay. They argued that the conditions in Goa were far worse than in British India; racial prejudice was rife and human rights wholly absent. In 1946 the left-wing Congress politician Rammanohar Lohia visited the territory and exhorted the people to rise against the rulers. A wave of strikes and protests followed; these were crushed by the authorities. On 15 August 1947 the Indian tricolour was hoisted here and there, but the protesters were quickly taken away by the police.88

  Apart from Goa, the Portuguese also held several smaller territories up the Konkan coast. One was Daman, which had a garrison of 1,500 African soldiers from Portuguese East Africa. This abutted the Indian province of Bombay, which after Independence had imposed prohibition. There was now a flourishing trade in the smuggling of liquor. On Sunday evenings the frontier between Daman and Bombay was ‘strewn with pilgrims to Bacchus, wending their way back to the land where they belong, back to Bharat, land of scarcity and austerity.89

  Alcoholics apart, most politically conscious Indians were outraged by the Portuguese attitude over their colonies. Nehru at first moved slowly, hoping that the matter would be resolved by dialogue. But his hand was being forced by radicals of the Socialist Party, who began a series of satyagrahas to compel Goa to join the union. In July 1954 a group of activists from Bombay seized the tiny enclave of Dadra. The next month the somewhat bigger enclave of Nagar-Haveli also fell without a fight. Then 1,000 volunteers attempted to cross over to Daman on Independence Day. They were stopped by the Indian police, whereupon they wired the prime minister for support. Nehru wired back saying that such a showdown would not ‘help our cause’.90

  The socialists were only temporarily deterred. A year later a group led by N. G. Goray entered Goa shouting slogans. They walked several miles into the territory before being attacked by the police. Several protesters were badly injured. The satyagrahis were put in Fort Aguada prison, where they spent twenty months before being released. During these protests in 1954 and 1955, the Portuguese arrested more than 2,000 people.91

  VIII

  For Jawaharlal Nehru, foreign policy was a means of making India’s presence felt in the world. After Independence he personally supervised the creation of the Indian Foreign Service (IFS), transferring to its cadre able officers of the ICS and making fresh selections from the young. A job in the IFS had a nearly unique combination ofidealism and glamour; it also offered the
chance of personal contact with the prime minister. One IFS officer recalled how, early in 1948, Nehru called him to his room and showed him a map of the world. The prime minister’s eyes ranged over the globe, and his fingers pointed to places north, south, east and west. ‘We will have forty embassies!’ he exclaimed. ‘We will have forty missions!’92

  Five years later, when India did have forty missions, Nehru wrote them all a letter of self-congratulation. The ‘prestige of India has greatly increased since Independence, he said, for ‘we have always avoided playing a flashy role in international affairs . . . Gradually, an appreciation has grown in other countries of our own sincerity of purpose even though there has been disagreement. He asked all those representing India abroad – ‘from the Head of the Mission to the humblest employee’ – to ‘feel and work as ahappy family,cooperating with each other . . .

  We are all partners in a great adventure, and are all partners and comrades in the same undertaking.’93

  Although presented and carried out as a collective enterprise, this particular adventure had ‘made by the prime minister’ stamped all over it. In 1950, one of his most intelligent and least sycophantic cabinet ministers spoke of how Nehru was becoming ‘the biggest man in the world, overtopping the USA men, the UK men and every otherman’. Through its leader, a country ‘without material, men or money –the three means of power – was ‘now fast coming to be recognized as the biggest moral power in the civilized world . . . her word listened to with respect in the councils of the great’.94 Even opposition politicians appreciated what Nehru had done for India’s international standing. Non-alignment seemed to them to be acreative application of Gandhian principles in world affairs. Confidence in its viability was strengthened when India was called upon to play an important mediatory role in the conflicts and civil wars of the time.

  Intelligent foreigners also praised Nehru’s non-alignment. When that now great publishing firm, Feltrinelli of Milan, began operationsin 1955, one of the first two books it published was Nehru’s autobiography, which it celebrated both for its ‘consistent and coherent anti-fascism’ and as an authentic voice of ‘the countries that were emerging from colonial domination . . . to take their place forcefully in the global political system’.95 And from her post in the Swedish embassy in New Delhi, Alva Myrdal wrote to her husband Gunnar of how Nehru was ‘naturally playing an authoritative, not to say world-historical role without the slightest tendency to Caesarism. Isn’t it true that he is perhaps the only person we have seen reach a high and powerful position without taking on new self-importance?’96

  Such was Nehru’s standing among the people of the front-line states in the Cold War, those who stood between the United States and the Soviet Union. In 1955 non-alignment still had a glow and moral halo about it. The next year was the Hungary fiasco, and the beginning of the Western disillusionment with Nehru. It took longer for him to lose the enchanted support of his countrymen.

  9

  * * *

  REDRAWING THE MAP

  Some want to revive the tradition of Shivaji and to hoist the Bhagwa Jhanda in Samyukta Maharashtra; others wish to extend the economic empire of the Bombay and Ahmedabad millionaires all over Maha-Gujarat.Provincial prejudices, rivalries and jealousies are being revived on all sides and everyone seems anxious to separate from, rather than unite with, the others. The Assamese want this bit of land cut off from Bengal, the Bengalis want a slice of Bihar, the Telugus are discontented in Orissa, the Tamilian minority wants to cut itself off from Travancore . . .

  K. A. ABBAS, left-wing writer, January 1951

  I

  THE LEADING INDIAN NATIONALISTS had long been sensible of the power of the mother tongue to rouse and move. This was a land of many languages, each with its distinct script, grammar, vocabulary and literary traditions. Rather than deny this diversity, the Congress sought to give space to it. As early as 1917 the party had committed itself to the creation of linguistic provinces in a free India. A separate Andhra circle was formed in that year, a separate Sindh circle the following year. After the Nagpur Congress of 1920, the principle was extended and formalized with the creation of provincial Congress committees (PCCs) by linguistic zones: the Karnataka Pradesh PCC, the Orissa PCC, the Maharashtra PCC, etc. Notably these did not follow, and were often at odds with, the administrative divisions of British India.

  The linguistic reorganization of the Congress was encouraged and supported by Mahatma Gandhi. When Independence finally came Gandhi thought that the states of the new nation should be defined on the basis of language. Shortly afterwards, on 10 October 1947, he wrote to a colleague: ‘I do believe that we should hurry up with the reorganization of linguistic provinces’ . . . There may be an illusion for the time being that different languages stand for different cultures, but there is also the possibility[that with the creation] of linguistic provinces it may disappear. I shall write something [about it] if I get the time’ . . . I am not unaware that a class of people have been saying that linguistic provinces are wrong. In my opinion, this class delights in creating obstacles.1

  Jawaharlal Nehru was also appreciative of the linguistic diversity of India. In an essay of 1937, he wrote that ‘a living language is a throbbing, vital thing, ever changing, ever growing and mirroring the people who speak and write it’. And ‘our great provincial languages are no dialects or vernaculars, as the ignorant sometimes call them. They are ancient languages with a rich inheritance, each spoken by many millions of people, each tied up inextricably with the life and culture and ideas of the masses as well as the upper classes. It is axiomatic that the masses can only grow educationally and culturally through the medium of their own language.’2

  That was Nehru’s view in 1937, but by 1947 he was having other thoughts. The country had just been divided on the basis of religion: would not dividing it further on the basis of language merely encourage the break-up of the Union? Why not keep intact the existing administrative units, such as Madras, which had within it communities of Tamil, Mala-yalam, Telugu, Kannada, Urdu and Konkani speakers, and Bombay, whose peoples spoke Marathi, Gujarati, Urdu, Sindhi, Gondi and other tongues? Would not such multilingual and multicultural states provide an exemplary training in harmonious living? In any case, should not the new nation unite on the secular ideals of peace, stability and economic development, rather than revive primordial identities of caste and language?

  Nehru gave voice to these reservations in a speech to the Constituent Assembly three months after Independence. While the Congress had once promised linguistic provinces, he said, the country now faced ‘a very critical situation resulting from partition’. Now ‘disruptionist tendencies had come to the fore’; to check them, one had to underline ‘the security and stability of India . . . The first essential therefore is for India as a whole to be strong and firmly established, confident in her capacity to meet all possible dangers and face and meet all problems. If India lives, all parts of India also live and prosper. If India is enfeebled, all her component elements grow weak.’3

  The creation of linguistic provinces, then, had to be deferred until such time as India was strong and sure of herself. Nehru seems to have persuaded even Gandhi of this, for in November 1947 the Mahatma was writing that ‘the reluctance to enforce linguistic redistribution is perhaps justifiable in the present depressing atmosphere. The exclusive spirit is ever uppermost. No one thinks of the whole of India.’ Gandhi now thought that the reorganization of provinces should be postponed until a calmer time, when communal strife had died out and been replaced by ‘a healthy atmosphere, promoting concord in the place of discord, peace in the place of strife, progress in the place of retrogression and life in the place of death.’4

  As ever, Gandhi extolled the need to take ‘one step at a time’. But the principle itself he would not surrender. In a prayer meeting held on 25 January 1948 Gandhi returned to the subject of linguistic states. ‘The Congress had decided some twenty years ago’, he recalled, ‘that there shoul
d be as many provinces in the country as there are major languages.’ Now it was in power, and in a position to execute that promise. Gandhi thought that if new provinces were formed on the basis of language, and if

  they are all placed under the authority of Delhi there is no harm at all. But it will be very bad if they all want to be free and refuse to accept central authority. It should not be that Bombay then will have nothing to do with Maharashtra and Maharashtra with Karnataka and Karnataka with Andhra. Let all live as brothers. Moreover if linguistic provinces are formed it will also give a fillip to the regional languages. It would be absurd to make Hindusthani the medium of instruction in all the regions and it is still more absurd to use English for this purpose.5

  Within a week Gandhi was dead. And the men in power had other, and more urgent, matters to attend to. Millions of refugees from East and West Pakistan had to be found homes and gainful employment. An undeclared war was taking place in Kashmir. A new constitution had to be decided upon. Elections had to be scheduled, economic policies framed and executed. For now, and perhaps indefinitely, the creation of new provinces had to wait.