After he left the Cabinet, Ambedkar immersed himself in literature on or about the Buddha. He became a member of the Mahabodhi Society and travelled through the Buddhist countries of south-east Asia. At a public meeting in Bombay in May 1956, Ambedkar announced that he would convert to Buddhism before the end of the year. His mammoth study The Buddha and his Dhamma was already in the press. Ambedkar considered holding the conversion ceremony in Bombay – where the publicity would be immense – or in the ancient Buddhist site of Sarnath. In the event he chose Nagpur, a city in the centre of India where he had a large and devoted following. Many joined him in embracing Buddhism, in a colourful and well-attended ceremony that took place on 15 October 1956. Six weeks later Ambedkar died suddenly. He was cremated in Bombay, with an icon of the Buddha placed under his head. A million people participated in the funeral procession.46
Shortly before he died Ambedkar had decided to float a new party, the Republican Party of India. This formally came into being in 1957. Its leaders and cadre were, like Ambedkar himself, from the Mahar caste. It was also mostly Mahars who had followed their leader into Buddhism. Ambedkar was a figure of reverence among the Mahars of the Nagpur area. In his lifetime they celebrated his birthday with gusto, taking out processions holding his photograph aloft. When he came to town to speak, the factory workers would crowd in to hear him; even the ‘women went to these parades as to a wedding’. Under his inspiration the Mahars formed troupes that performed plays parodying Hindu ritual and the behaviour of the upper castes. They also sang songs in his honour: ‘From the moment that the glance of Bhim [rao Ambedkar] fell upon the poor’, began one song, ‘From that day our strengthgrew...’.47
But it was not merely in Mahar strongholds that Ambedkar was respected. All across northern India he was admired for his scholarship – he had doctoral degrees from Columbia and London universities – and for his political achievements – notably his drafting of the Constitution of India. For members of the Scheduled Castes who had a glimmer of learning themselves, for those who had been to high school or travelled outside their home village, Ambedkar was both exemplar and icon, the man who had breached the upper-caste citadel and encouraged his fellows to do likewise.
Ambedkar’s slogan for his followers was: ‘Educate, Agitate, Organize’. He setup a People’s Education Society that ran schools and at least two good colleges. Scheduled Caste members who went to these or others schools came inevitably to regard Ambedkar as their mentor. Among the Scheduled Caste intelligentsia, books or pamphlets by Ambedkar became required reading, lovingly passed on from hand to hand.48 Thus the son of a dock worker, sent by government scholarship to the Siddharth College in Bombay, began contributing to magazines and participating in debates – where ‘the topic of all these writings and speeches was always Babasaheb [Ambedkar] and his Dalit movement’.49
The presence of B. R. Ambedkar underlines a quite profound difference between the Scheduled Castes and the other minority with whom I have here compared them. For the Muslims had no seats reserved for them in the Secretariat or in Parliament. Nor, in independent India, did they have a leader of Ambedkar’s stature to inspire and move them – while he was alive or long after he was gone.
X
In March 1949 a group of Scheduled Caste members from the villages around Delhi walked to Mahatma Gandhi’s memorial in the city. They had been thrown out of their homes by Jat landowners angered that these previously bonded servants had the cheek to take part in local elections and graze their cattle on the village commons. There, in the very heart of the capital, these outcasts began a hunger strike. By sitting on a memorial to the Father of the Nation, and by using the methods of protest forged by him, they attracted wide attention, including solicitous visits by prominent Gandhians and Cabinet ministers.50
Turn next to a case from urban India, to a newly elected Scheduled Caste MP who applied for membership of the Bar Association in his home town, Sitapur. His application was kept pending for four months, after which he was told that he could join but not use the washroom, and be served only by a Muslim servant. The MP brought the matter to the attention of the prime minister, who intervened to have him admitted without any preconditions.51
Elsewhere, the Scheduled Castes who asserted themselves were not so fortunate. The sociologist N. D. Kamble collated hundreds of examples of ‘atrocities’ perpetrated on Scheduled Castes in independent India. Here are a few choice if that is the word – instances taken from Kamble’s research:
April 1951: A labour camp in Matunga, Bombay. A group of factory workers stages a play on Ambedkar’s birthday. Upper-caste young men break up the performance, assault the actors, and damage the stage.
June 1951: A village in Himachal Pradesh.
A conference of Scheduled Castes is attacked by Rajput landlords. The SCs are beaten up with sticks, their leaders tied up with ropes and confined to a cattle pound.
July 1951: A rural school in the Jalgaon district of Bombay State. A Brahmin teacher abuses Ambedkar for introducing the Hindu Code Bill in Parliament. A SC boy protests, whereupon he is beaten and removed from the school.
June 1952: A village in the Madurai district of Madras State. ASC youth asks for tea in a glass at a local shop. Tradition entitles him only to a disposable coconut shell. When he persists, he is kicked and hit on the head by caste Hindus.
June 1957: A village in the Parbani district of Madhya Bharat. Newly converted Buddhists refuse to flay carcasses of dead cattle. They are boycotted by the Hindu landlords, denied other work, and threatened with physical reprisals.
May 1959: A village in the Ahmednagar district of Bombay State. A Buddhist marriage party is not allowed to enter the hamlet through the village gates. When they persist, caste Hindus attack them with stones and swords.
October 1960: A village in the Aurangabad District of Maharashtra. Caste Hindus enter the Scheduled Caste hamlet and break a statue of the Buddha into tiny pieces.52
What these cases and the many more like them – reveal is a system that was in quite profound turmoil. All across India the winds of democratic politics had made the Scheduled Castes more willing to demand their rights. Aided by reservation in schools, offices, factories, and legislatures, inspired by the example of their great leader B. R. Ambedkar and encouraged by the constitutional provisions in favour of social equality, many among them were inclined to abandon the old road of deference in favour of the more rocky path of defiance. This in turn provoked a sometimes nasty reaction from those who persisted in thinking of themselves as social superiors.
XI
In the winter of 1925/6, the writer Aldous Huxley went on along trip through British India. He attended the Kanpur session of the Indian National Congress and heard declamatory speeches asking for freedom. Huxley had some sympathy with these aspirations, yet worried that they represented only the upper-caste Hindu interest. As he wrote in the book of his travels,
That the lower-caste masses would suffer, at the beginning, in any case, from are turn to Indian autonomy seems almost indubitable. Where the superiority of the upper castes to the lower is a matter of religious dogma, you can hardly expect the governing few to be particularly careful about the rights of the many. It is even something of a heresy [for them] to have rights.53
Two decades later India became independent, and the constitution bestowed rights of equality on all citizens, regardless of caste, creed, age or gender. The lower castes were in fact granted special rights, special access to schools and jobs, in compensation for the discrimination they had suffered down the centuries. But, as a Scheduled Caste member of the Constituent Assembly pointed out, state law was one thing, social practice quite another. For the prejudices of caste had been opposed by reformers down the centuries, from Gautama Buddha to Mahatma Gandhi, yet they had all ‘found it very difficult to get rid of this ghost of untouchability’. Laws had been enacted removing strictures against Untouchables, with regard to temple entry for example. ‘What is the effect of these laws
?’ asked the member, before supplying this answer: ‘Not an inch of untouchability has been removed by these laws . . . If at all the ghost of untouchability or the stigma of untouchability from India should go the minds of these crores and crores of Hindu folks should be changed and unless their hearts are changed, I do not hope, Sir, that untouchability will be removed. It is now up to the Hindu society not to observe untouchability in any shape or form.’54
There was pessimism about the position of Untouchables in free India, and pessimism also about the future of that other large and insecure minority, the Muslims. Travelling through India and Pakistan in 1951, the Aga Khan – the influential leader of the Ismaili sect – found ‘a horrible fear’ among Muslims on both sides of the border, but in India especially. He wrote to Jawaharlal Nehru of ‘the fear amongst Muslims which I myself share to a great extent’ – this being that ‘five or ten years hence there may be a [Hindu] Mahasabha government who openly make the union of what is now Pakistan – both East and West – with Bharat [India] the main purpose of foreign policy and high politics’. The Muslim leader thought that a Hindu chauvinist party, once in power, would use atomic blasts to divert the rivers flowing through Kashmir into Pakistan, thus bringing that state to its knees. He drew a parallel with the situation in the Arab world, where – so he claimed – Sudan was preparing to stop the flow of the Nile into Egypt. In the Aga Khan’s view, Hindu India was to Muslim Pakistan as Christian Sudan was to Muslim Egypt. As he putit, ‘I have felt that this atmosphere of doom [which] prevails amongst Muslims on account of this very water question . . . is a replica of the similar fear in Egypt’.55
This letter is notable for at least three reasons. First, as an early illustration of the now widespread fear that Muslims were being persecuted worldwide. Second, for its easy equation of the interests of Indian Muslims with the welfare of Pakistan. Finally, and perhaps most tellingly, for its prediction that the Republic of India would become a Hindu state within ten years.
The Aga Khan and Aldous Huxley were both right and wrong in their skepticism – right with regard to the continuing social prejudice, wrong with regard to the intentions of the top political leadership. For the ‘governing few’ were in fact very careful of the rights of the many. Writing in 1959 – a decade and more after Independence – an Indian editor who was bitterly opposed to Nehru was constrained to recognize his two greatest achievements – the creation of a secular state and the granting of equal rights to Untouchables. Recalling the ‘reactionary forces which came into play after partition’, the editor remarked that ‘had Nehru shown the slightest weakness, these forces would have turned this country into a Hindu state in which the minorities. . . could not have lived with any measure of safety or security . It was also to Nehru’s ‘everlasting credit that he insisted that Untouchables be granted full rights, such that ‘in public life and in all government action, the equality of man would be scrupulously maintained in the secular state of India’.56
To be sure, there remained a slippage between public policy and popular practice. The laws promoting secularism and social equality were on the statute books, but most Muslims, and most Scheduled Castes, remained poor and marginalized. The threat of violence was never far away. Still, given the bloody birth of the nation, and the continuing provocation from Pakistan, it was no small matter that the Indian government refused to merge faith with state. And given the resilience of social institutions in general, and the ancient and sanctified history of this one in particular, it was remarkable that the caste system changed as much as it did. The progress made in abolishing untouchability or in assuring equal rights to all citizens was uneven, and – by the standards of understandably impatient reformers – very slow. Yet more progress had probably been made in the first seventeen years of Indian independence than in the previous seventeen hundred.
PART FOUR
* * *
THE RISE OF POPULISM
18
* * *
WAR AND SUCCESSION
There is no question of Nehru’s attempting to create a dynasty of his own; it would be inconsistent with his character and career.
FRANK MORAES, political columnist, 1960
I
JAWAHARLAL NEHRU DIED ON the morning of 27 May 1964. The news was conveyed to the world by the 2 p.m. bulletin of All-India Radio. Two hours later the home minister, Gulzarilal Nanda, was sworn in as acting prime minister. Almost immediately the search commenced for a more permanent successor.
The central figure in the choice of a new prime minister was the Congress president, K. Kamaraj. Born in 1903, in a low-caste family in the Tamil country, Kamaraj dropped out of school to join the national movement. He spent close to eight years in jail, this spread out over two decades and six prison sentences. His status among the people was consolidated by his lifestyle – he lived austerely, and never married. He climbed steadily up the party hierarchy, and served as president of the Tamil Nadu Congress as well as chief minister of Madras before heading the party at the national level.1
Kamaraj was a thick-set man with a white moustache – according to one journalist, he looked ‘like a cross between Sonny Liston and the Walrus’. Like the boxer (but unlike the Lewis Carroll character) he was a man of few words. The press joked that his answer to all questions put by them was one word in Tamil: ‘Parkalam’ (We shall see). His reticence served him well, never better than after Nehru’s death, when he had to listen to what his party men had to say. From 28 May Kamaraj began consulting his chief ministers and party bosses (the ‘Syndicate’, as they were called) on the best person to succeed Nehru. An early name to consider was Morarji Desai, the outstanding administrator from Gujarat who had made it clear that he wanted the job.
In four days Kamaraj met a dozen chief ministers and as many as 200 members of Parliament. From his conversations it became clear that Desai would be a controversial choice: his style was too abrasive. The person most MPs seemed to prefer was Lal Bahadur Shastri, also a fine administrator, but one who was more accessible, and from the Hindi heartland besides. It helped that Nehru had come increasingly to rely on Shastri in his last days. These factors all weighed heavily with Kamaraj, who was concerned that the succession should signal a certain continuity.
Desai was persuaded to withdraw his candidature. On 31 May the Congress Working Committee approved the choice of Lal Bahadur Shastri. The next day the appointment was ratified by the Congress Parliamentary Party and the day following, Shastri was sworn in as prime minister. Very soon the new incumbent was asserting his authority. Desai was dropped from the Cabinet because he insisted on the number two position. There was a clamour to include Nehru s daughter, Indira Gandhi; Shastri complied, yet gave her the insignificant Information and Broadcasting portfolio. Mrs Gandhi, in turn, forestalled any move by Shastri to move into Teen Murti House (where Nehru had lived as prime minister) by proposing that it be made into a memorial to her father.2
Announcing Shastri’ s elevation to the press, Kamaraj had said that the undisputed rule of a great man would now be replaced by a form of collective leadership. Shastri had other ideas. An early innovation was the creation of a separate Prime Minister’s Secretariat, where a band of carefully chosen officials would prepare papers on matters of policy. This was to fill in the gaps in the prime minister’s learning – gaps larger by far than was the case with Nehru – but also to provide him with an independent, non-partisan source of advice, freeing him of excessive dependence on the Cabinet.3
Not long before Nehru’s death, the United Kingdom had its own ‘succession’ drama, with the Conservatives deeply split on the choice of Harold Macmillan’s successor. The left-wing Guardian newspaper gleefully remarked that the ‘new Prime Minister of India, in spite of all forebodings, has been named with more dispatch, and much more dignity, than was the new Prime Minister of Britain’.4 The paper’s New Delhi correspondent met Nehru’s successor, whom he found ‘rock-sure of himself’ , a ‘very strong man indeed’ who spoke in sh
ort and sharp sentences – ‘no words wasted’.5
Old colonial hands were less optimistic. Nehru’s death, wrote one ICS man to another, had made India’s future fraught with uncertainty. For ‘I can’t imagine S[h]astri has the stature to hold things together, and all the trouble-makers from Kashmir to Comorin will work to fish in troubled waters, to say nothing of China and Pakistan. Cyprus on a big scale? What revolting times we live in!’6
II
With his death, Nehru’s Kashmir initiative also died. However, on the other side of the country, moves were afoot to resolve the dispute between the Naga rebels and the government of India. Pained by a decade of bloodshed, the Baptist Church of Nagaland had constituted a ‘peace mission’ of individuals trusted both by the underground movement and the government of India. The three members agreed upon were the chief minister of Assam B. P. Chaliha, the widely respected Sarvodaya leader Jayaprakash Narayan and the Anglican priest Michael Scott, who had helped secure refuge in London for the Naga leader A. Z. Phizo.
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