India After Gandhi Revised and Updated Edition

by Ramachandra Guha

  By now it was too late. On 15 December, fifty-eight days into his fast, Potti Sriramulu died. Now all hell broke loose. ‘The news of the passing away of Sriramulu engulfed entire Andhra in chaos.’ Government offices were attacked; trains were halted and defaced. The damage to state property ran into millions of rupees. Several protesters were killed in police firings.23 Nehru had once claimed that ‘facts, not fasts’ would decide the issue. Now, faced with the prospect of widespread and possibly uncontrollable protest, the prime minister gave in. Two days after Sriramulu’s death, he made a statement saying that a state of Andhra would come into being.

  Over the course of the next few months the Telugu districts of Madras province were identified for separation. The division of the province, wrote the chief minister, was ‘accompanied by a lot of bad language, bad behaviour and distrust and anger’.24 Suppressing his feelings, Rajagopalachari attended the inauguration of the new state of Andhra at Kurnool on 1 October 1953. Also in attendance, and as the chief guest no less, was that other erstwhile enemy of the Andhras, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru.

  IV

  The formation of Andhra Pradesh grated with the prime minister of the day. ‘You will observe’, wrote Jawaharlal Nehru grimly to a colleague, ‘that we have disturbed the hornet’s nest and I believe most of us are likely to be badly stung.’25

  As Nehru had feared, the creation of Andhra led to the intensification of similar demands by other linguistic groups. Somewhat against its will, the government of India appointed a States Reorganization Commission (SRC) to ‘make recommendations in regard to the broad principles which should govern the solution of this [linguistic] problem’. Through 1954 and 1955 members of the Commission travelled across India. They visited 104 towns and cities, interviewed more than 9,000 people and received as many as 152,250 written submissions.

  One of the longer and more interesting submissions was from the Bombay Citizens Committee. This was headed by a leading cotton magnate, Sir Purushottamdas Thakurdas, and had within its ranks other prominent industrialists such as J. R. D. Tata. On its masthead were many of the city’s most successful lawyers, scholars and doctors.

  The Bombay Citizens Committee had a one-point agenda – to keep the city out of the state of Maharashtra. To make the case they printed an impressive 200-page book replete with charts, maps and tables. The first chapter was historical, showing how the city was settled by successive waves of settlers from different linguistic communities. It claimed that there had been little Maharashtrian immigration before the end of the nineteenth century and that Marathi speakers comprised only 43 per cent of the city’s current population. The second chapter spoke of Bombay’s importance in the economic life of India. It was the premier centre of industry and finance, and of foreign trade. It was India’s window to the world: more planes flew in and out of it than all the other Indian cities combined. The third and fourth chapters were sociological, demonstrating the multilingual and multicultural character of the city. To quote a European observer, it was ‘perhaps the most motley assemblage in any quarter of this orb’; to quote another, it was ‘a true centre of the diverse varieties and types of mankind, far surpassing the mixed nationalities of Cairo and Constantinople’. The fifth chapter was geographical, an argument for Bombay’s physical isolation, with the sea and the mountains separating it from the Marathi-speaking heartland.

  The first settlers were Europeans; the chief merchants and capitalists Gujaratis and Parsis; the chief philanthropists Parsis. The city was built by non-Maharashtrians. Even among the working class, Marathi speakers were often outnumbered by north Indians and Christians. For the Bombay Citizens Committee, it was clear that ‘on the grounds of geography, history, language and population or the system of law, Bombay and North Konkan cannot be considered as a part of the Mahratta region as claimed by the protagonists of Samyukta Maharashtra’.26

  Behind the veneer of cosmopolitanism there was one language group that dominated the ‘save Bombay’ movement: the Gujaratis. If Bombay became the capital of a greater Maharashtra state, the politicians and ministers would be mostly Marathi speakers. The prospect was not entirely pleasing to the Gujarati-speaking bourgeoisie, whether Hindu or Parsi. It was they who staffed, financed, and basically ran the Bombay Citizens Committee.27

  Nehru himself was somewhat sympathetic towards the idea of keeping Bombay out of the control of a single language group. So was the Marathi-speaking M. S. Golwalkar, this a rare meeting of minds between the prime minister and the RSS supremo. Both thought that the creation of linguistic states would ‘lead to bitterness and give rise to fissiparous tendencies endangering the unity of the country’.28 In May 1954 Golwalkar spoke in Bombay at the invitation of the Anti-Provincial Conference, which saw linguistic demands as a manifestation of ‘the menace of provincialism and sectionalism’. ‘Multiplicity breeds strife’, thundered Golwalkar: ‘One nation and one culture are my principles.’ To see oneself as Tamil or Maharashtrian or Bengali was to ‘sap the vitality of the nation’. He wished them all to use the label ‘Hindu’, which is where he departed from Nehru, who of course wished them all to be ‘Indian’.29

  But just as some in the Congress Party did not see eye-to-eye with Nehru on this question, there were RSS cadres who departed from their leader. From as early as 1946 there was a Samyukta Maharashtra Parishad in operation. Within its ranks were Maharashtrians of all political persuasions, left and right, secular and communal, Brahmin, Maratha and Harijan. The Parishad sought a state that would unite Marathi speakers dispersed across many different political units. In their minds, however, there was no doubt that such a state could have only one capital: Bombay.

  The president of the Samyukta Maharashtra Parishad was the veteran Congress man Shankarrao Deo, while its secretary and chief theoretician was the celebrated Cambridge-educated economist D. R. Gadgil. In Gadgil’s opinion, while Bombay could still be the major port and economic centre of Maharashtra, there must be a ‘compulsory decentralization’ of the city’s industries. Another ideologue, G. V. Deshmukh, was more blunt. Unless Bombay city became part of their state, he said, Maharashtrians would have to remain content with ‘playing the part of secondary brokers to brokers, secondary agents to agents, assistant professors to professors, clerks to managers [and] hired labourers to shopkeepers’.30

  To answer the Citizens Committee of the Gujaratis, the Samyukta Maharashtra Parishad prepared an impressive 200-page document of its own. The first part mounted a theoretical defence of the principle of linguistic states. These, it argued, would deepen federalism by bringing together speakers of the same language in one consolidated, cohesive unit. Thus, ‘a linguistic province with its administration in the language of the common people, would make it possible for the people to feel and understand the working of democracy and the need to participate in it’.

  Coming specifically to their own state, the document claimed that ‘society all over the Marathi country is remarkably homogeneous’. There was the same configuration of castes, the same deities and saints, the same folklore and legends. That the Marathi speakers were presently spread out over three political units – Hyderabad, Bombay state, and the Central Provinces – was an accident of history that needed urgently to be undone.

  A new and unified state of Maharashtra had to be created, argued the Parishad, with Bombay as its capital. For the land on which this island city stood had long been inhabited by speakers of the Marathi language. While the sea lay to Bombay’s west, the territory to its north, south and east was dominated by Marathi speakers. The city itself was the main centre of the Marathi press, of publications in the Marathi language and of Marathi culture. Economically, Bombay depended heavily on its Marathi hinterland, from where it drew much of its labour and all its water and power. Its ways of communication all lay through Maharashtra. In sum, it was ‘unthinkable to form a State of Maharashtra which has not Bombay as its capital and it would render impossible the working of a State of Maharashtra, if any attempt
was made to separate the city of Bombay from it’. To the argument that the city did not have a Marathi-speaking majority, the Parishad answered that there were more people speaking this language than any other. In any case, it was in the nature of great port cities to be multilingual. In Burma’s capital, only 32 per cent of the population spoke the national language, but ‘nobody yet dared to suggest that Rangoon should be considered as non-Burmese territory’.31

  Bombay was surrounded by Marathi-speaking districts; it must be the capital of a new state of Maharashtra. So argued the Samyukta Maharashtra Parishad. But the Citizens Committee claimed that Bombay had been nurtured mostly by non-Maharashtrians, and must therefore be constituted as a separate city-state. Could the two sides ever agree? In June 1954 Shankarrao Deo visited Sir Purushottamdas Thakurdas to discuss a compromise. Deo said that there was no negotiation possible on their core demand – Bombay as capital of Maharashtra – but said that they could work together to retain ‘the same autonomous character of the metropolitan city, ensuring its cosmopolitan life; its trade, commerce and industry, etc.’. Sir Purushottamdas, for his part, was willing to give up the city-state idea in favour of a composite bilingual province of Marathi and Gujarati speakers.32

  The meeting was civil, but inconclusive. The matter of Bombay was referred to the States Reorganization Commission, the hottest of the many hot potatoes it became their misfortune to handle.

  V

  The members of the States Reorganization Commission were a jurist, S. Fazl Ali, a historian and civil servant, K. M. Pannikar, and a social worker, H. N. Kunzru. Notably, none had any formal ties, past or present, with the Congress. After eighteen months of intensive work, the trio submitted their report in October 1955. The report first carefully outlined the arguments for and against linguistic states. It urged a ‘balanced approach’ which recognized ‘linguistic homogeneity as an important factor conducive to administrative convenience and efficiency’ yet not ‘as an exclusive and binding principle, over-riding all other considerations’. Among these other considerations were, of course, the unity and security of India as a whole.33

  Next, in nineteen chapters, the report outlined their specific proposals for reorganization. With respect to the southern states, it seemed easy enough to redistribute areas according to the major language zones: Telugu, Kannada, Tamil and Malayalam. Districts and taluks (sub-districts) were reallocated with regard to which linguistic group was in a majority. Four compact states would replace the melange of territories deriving from the British period.

  With regard to north India, the SRC likewise sought to divide the huge Hindi-speaking belt into four states: Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan. In the east, the existing provinces would stay as they were, with minor adjustments. The Commission rejected the demand for tribal states to be carved out of Bihar and Assam.

  The SRC did not agree to the creation of a Sikh state. And it refused to allocate Madras city to Andhra. However, its most contentious recommendation was not to permit the creation of a united Maharashtra. As a sop, the Commission proposed a separate state of Vidarbha, comprising the Marathi-speaking districts of the interior. But Bombay state would stay as it was, a bilingual province of Gujarati and Marathi speakers. They respected the arguments of the Samyukta Maharashtra movement, said the Commission, but they could ‘not lightly brush aside the fears of the other communities’.

  VI

  The SRC’s recommendation that Bombay be the capital of a bilingual state was discussed in Parliament on 15 November 1955. The ambitious Bombay MP S. K. Patil thought the Commission should have gone further. He thought the government should create a city-state of Bombay; no doubt hoping that it might come to be managed by himself. The prospective city-state, he argued, had a ‘cosmopolitan population in every respect’; it had been ‘built upon the labour of everybody’. If left to govern itself, Bombay would ‘be a miniature India run on international standards . . . [A] melting pot which will evolve a glorious new civilisation . . . And it is an extraordinary coincidence that the population of the city should be exactly one per cent of the population of the whole country. This one per cent drawn from all parts of the country will set the pace for other states in the practice of secularism and mutual understanding.’

  Patil, like the SRC itself, asked the Maharashtrians to give up their claim on Bombay in the spirit of compromise. But it soon became clear that he did not speak for his fellow Maharashtrians. Speaking immediately after Patil in the Lok Sabha was the Congress MP from the city of Puné, N. V. Gadgil. Gadgil insisted that while he was in favour of compromise, ‘there is a limit. That limit is, nobody can compromise one’s self-respect, no woman can compromise her chastity and no country its freedom’. Everywhere the principle of language had been recognized, except in this one case. The report of the Commission had caused great pain throughout the Marathi-speaking world. The reports of protest meetings should make it clear ‘that anything short of Samyukta Maharashtra with the city of Bombay as capital will not be acceptable’. If these sentiments went unheeded, warned Gadgil, then the future of Bombay would be decided on the streets of Bombay.

  The SRC urged the Maharashtrians to accept the loss of Bombay in the name of national unity. Gadgil protested against this attempt at blackmail. The last 150 years, he said, had seen Maharashtrians contributing selflessly to the growth of national feeling. Marathi speakers founded the first Indian schools and universities, and helped found the Indian National Congress. The Mahrattas were ‘the pioneers of violent action’ against the British. Later, in the early twentieth century, when the Congress Party languished, ‘who was it that brought in new life? Who propounded the new tenets and new philosophy? It was Lokmanya Tilak. In the Home Rule movement he led and in the 1920 movement we were behind none and ahead of many provinces . . . I will merely quote the certificate given to us by no less a person than Mahatma Gandhi that Maharashtra is the beehive of [national] workers.’ Even now, in independent India, it was a Maharashtrian, Vinoba Bhave, who was ‘carrying the flag of Gandhian philosophy and spreading his message from place to place’.

  In the matter of Bombay, the Maharashtrians were being lectured on the need to ‘work for the unity and safety and good of the country’. But, said the Puné MP bitterly, all these years ‘we have done nothing else’. Gadgil’s was a moving peroration – and the last line was the best: ‘To ask us to serve the nation is to ask chandan [sandalwood] to be fragrant.’34

  The matter now shifted, as Gadgil had warned, from the chamber to the streets. These, as one Bombay weekly warned, were ‘literally seething with an unrest that may possibly erupt into something terrifyingly coercive, making ordered life impossible for some time to come’.35 The discontent was being stoked by politicians of both left and right. The prominent communist S. A. Dange had thrown his weight behind Samyukta Maharashtra; so had the leading low-caste politician B. R. Ambedkar. With them were the Jana Sangh, and the Socialist Party, who were perhaps the most active of all. Many dissident Congress Party members had also joined, making this a comprehensively representative coalition of angry and disillusioned Maharashtrians.

  This capacious inclusiveness was reflected in an amended name: the Samyukta Maharashtra Parishad had become the Samyukta Maharashtra Samiti.36 ‘Parishad’ is best translated as ‘organization’, thus implying the central role of office-bearers; ‘samiti’ as ‘society’, this connoting a more co-operative and participatory endeavour.

  Fearing trouble, in the early hours of 16 January the Bombay police swooped down on the leaders and activists of the newly constituted All-Party Action Committee for Samyukta Maharashtra. They made nearly 400 arrests in all. This prompted a call for a general strike on the 18th. That day shops and factories were closed, and buses and trains didn’t run. Processions were made through the streets, burning effigies of Nehru and of the Gujarati-speaking chief minister of Bombay state, Morarji Desai. When a European journalist stopped to take a photograph of Nehru’s portrait smashed and tr
ampled at the roadside, ‘tremendous cheers rose from the balconies and the roofs. “Take it, take it and show the world what we think of Nehru,” they shouted.’37

  Two days earlier, on the afternoon of the 16th, the first clashes between police and protesters had been reported. Mobs went on the rampage, looting shops and offices. For nearly a week the city was brought to a complete standstill and 15,000 policemen were called out to battle the rioters. When the smoke lifted, there were more than a dozen people dead, and property worth billions of rupees destroyed. It had been the worst riot in living memory.38

  Jawaharlal Nehru was deeply shaken by the events in Bombay. The linguistic question, he wrote to a colleague, ‘is more serious than even the situation created by the Partition and we have to give a positive lead’.39 Meeting in Amritsar in the third week of January, the All-India Congress Committee deplored the violence by which ‘Bombay and India were disgraced and dishonoured’. Under Nehru’s direction, the party urged its members to discourage forces of ‘disruption, separatism and provincialism’, and instead work for ‘the integration of all parts of this great country’. The Congress chief ministers of Bihar and West Bengal issued a joint statement proposing that their two states be merged into one. This union, they hoped, would quell ‘separatist tendencies’, aid economic progress and, above all, be ‘a significant example of that positive approach to the problem of Indian unity’ that the party bosses had called for.40