India After Gandhi Revised and Updated Edition

by Ramachandra Guha

  Among the tribes of north-east India the Nagas were perhaps the most autonomous. Their territory lay on the Indo-Burmese border – indeed, there were almost as many Nagas in Burma as in India. Some Nagas had contact with Hindu villages in Assam, to whom they sold rice in exchange for salt. Yet the Nagas had been totally outside the fold of the Congress-led national movement. There had been no satyagraha here, no civil disobedience – in fact, not one Gandhian leader in a white cap had ever visited these hills. Some tribes had fiercely fought the British, but over time the two sides had come to view each other with mutual respect. For their part, the British affected a certain paternalism, wishing to ‘protect’ their wards from the corrosive corruptions of the modern world.

  The Naga question really dates to 1946, the year the fate of British India was being decided in those high centres of imperial power, New Delhi and Simla. As elections were held across India, as the Cabinet Mission came and went, as the viceroy went into conclave with leaders of the Congress and the Muslim League, in their own obscure corner of the subcontinent some Nagas began to worry about their future. In January 1946 a group who were ‘educated Christians and spoke expressive English’ formed the Naga National Council, or NNC. This had the classic trappings of a nationalist movement in embryo: led by middle-class intellectuals, their ideas were promoted in a journal of their own, called The Naga Nation, 250 copies of which were mimeographed and distributed through the Naga country.1

  The NNC stood for the unity of all Nagas, and for their ‘self-determination’, a term which, here as elsewhere, was open to multiple and sometimes mutually contradictory meanings. The Angami Nagas, with their honourable martial tradition and record of fighting all outsiders (the British included), thought it should mean a fully independent state: ‘a government of the Nagas, for the Nagas, by the Nagas’. On the other hand, the Aos, who were more moderate, thought they could live with dignity within India, so long as their land and customs were protected and they had the autonomy to frame and enforce their own laws.

  The early meetings of the NNC witnessed a vigorous debate between these two factions which spilled over into the pages of the Naga Nation. A young Angami wrote that ‘the Nagas are a nation because we feel ourselves to be a nation. But, if we are a Nation, why do we not elect our own sovereignty? We want to be free. We want to live our own lives . . . We do not want other people to live with us.’ An Ao doctor answered that the Nagas lacked the finances, the personnel and the infrastructure to become a nation. ‘At present’, he wrote, ‘it seems to me, the idea of independence is too far off for us Nagas. How can we run an independent Government now?’

  Meanwhile the moderate wing had begun negotiations with the Congress leadership. In July 1946 the NNC general secretary, T. Sakhrie, wrote to Jawaharlal Nehru, and in reply received an assurance that the Nagas would have full autonomy, but within the Indian Union. They could have their own judicial system, said Nehru, to save them from being ‘swamped by people from other parts of the country who might go there to exploit them to their own advantage’. Sakhrie now declared that the Nagas would continue their connection with India, ‘but as a distinctive community . . . We must also develop according to our own genius and taste. We shall enjoy home rule in our country but on broader issues be connected with India.’2

  The radicals, however, still stood out for complete independence. In this they were helped by some British officials, who were loath to have these tribes come under Hindu influence. One officer recommended that the tribal areas of the north-east be constituted as a ‘Crown colony’, ruled directly from London, and not linked in any way to the soon-to-be independent nation of India.3 Others advised their wards that they should strike out for independence, as the state of India would soon break up anyway. As the Superintendent of the Lushai hills wrote in March 1947,

  My advice to the Lushais, since the very beginning of Lushai politics at the end of the War, has been until very recently not to trouble themselves yet about the problem of their future relationship to the rest of India: nobody can possibly foretell what India will be like even two years from now, or even whether there will be an India in the unitary political sense. I would not encourage my small daughter to commit herself to vows of lifelong spinsterhood; but I would regard it as an even worse crime to betroth her in infancy to a boy who was himself still undeveloped.4

  In June 1947 a delegation of the NNC met the governor of Assam, Sir Akbar Hydari, to discuss the terms by which the Nagas could join India. The two sides agreed that tribal land would not be alienated to outsiders, that Naga religious practices would not be affected and that the NNC would have a say in the staffing of government offices. Next, an NNC delegation went to Delhi, where they met Nehru, who once more told them that they could have autonomy but not independence. They also called on Mahatma Gandhi, in a meeting of which many versions have circulated down the years. In one version, Gandhi told the Nagas that they could declare their independence if they wished; that no one could compel them to join India; and that if New Delhi sent in the army, Gandhi himself would come to the Naga hills to resist it. He apparently said, ‘I will ask them to shoot me first before one Naga is shot.’5 The version printed in the Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi is less dramatic; here, Gandhi is reported as saying, ‘Personally, I believe you all belong to me, to India. But if you say you don’t, no one can force you.’ The Mahatma also advised his visitors that a better proof of independence was economic self-reliance; they should grow their own food and spin their own cloth. ‘Learn all the handicrafts’, said the Mahatma, ‘that’s the way to peaceful independence. If you use rifles and guns and tanks, it is a foolish thing.’6

  The most vocal spokesmen for independence were the Angamis from Khonomah, a village which, back in 1879–80, had fought the British army to a standstill and whose residents were ‘known and feared’ across the Naga hills.7 A faction styling itself the Peoples’ Independence League was putting up posters calling for complete independence, in terms borrowed (with acknowledgement) from American freedom fighters: ‘It is my living sentiment, and by the blessing of God it shall be my dying sentiment – Independence now and Independence forever’ (John Adams); ‘This nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom’ (Abraham Lincoln); ‘Give me liberty, or give me death!’ (Patrick Henry).8

  Meanwhile, the British Raj departed from New Delhi and the new Indian state began to consolidate itself. The secretary to the governor of Assam told the Nagas that they were too few to successfully rebel against a nation of 300 million. Writing in the Naga Nation he related the story of the dog with a bone in his mouth who looked into the water to see a dog with a bigger bone staring back at him; he chased after the mirage, dropping and losing what he had. Concluded the official: ‘Why lose the bone of “autonomy” to try to get the bone of “independence” which it is not possible to get.’

  The parable did not go down well with the educated Nagas. ‘Bones, bones,’ remarked one angry NNC member. ‘Does he think that we are dogs?’ However, the same warning was issued in more palatable form by Charles Pawsey, the departing deputy commissioner and an official whom the Nagas both loved and admired. Also writing in the Naga Nation, Pawsey underlined that autonomy within the Indian Union was the more prudent course to follow. For, ‘Independence will mean: tribal warfare, no hospitals, no schools, no salt, no trade with the plains and general unhappiness.’9

  II

  As the Naga intelligentsia was struggling to define its ‘independence’, the Constituent Assembly of India was meeting in New Delhi. Among the topics for discussion was the place of tribals in a free and democratic India. On 30 July 1947 Jaipal Singh informed the Assembly of ‘some very unhappy developments’ which were brewing in the Naga hills. Jaipal had been receiving ‘a telegram per day’, the ‘latest telegram becoming more confounded than the previous one. Each one seems to go one step further into the wilderness.’ As he saw it, the Nagas had been ‘misguided’ into the belief that their status was akin
to that of the princes, and that like them they could reclaim their sovereignty once the British left. When the Naga delegation had come to Delhi to meet Nehru and Gandhi, they had also met Jaipal, who apprised them of the ‘blunt fact’ that ‘the Naga Hills have always been part of India. Therefore, there is no question of secession.’10

  Jaipal Singh was, of course, a tribal himself, one of several million such whose homes lay in the hilly and forest belt that ran right across the heart of peninsular India. Known as ‘adivasis’ (original inhabitants), the central Indian tribals were somewhat different from those that dwelt in the north-east. Like them, they were chiefly subsistence agriculturists who depended heavily on the forests for sustenance. Like them, they had no caste system and were organized in clans; like them, they manifested far less gender inequality than in supposedly more ‘advanced’ parts of the country. However, unlike the Nagas and their neighbours, the tribes of central India had long-standing relations with Hindu peasant society. They exchanged goods and services, sometimes worshipped the same Gods and had historically been part of the same kingdoms.

  These relations had not been uncontentious. With British rule, the areas inhabited by tribes had been opened up to commercialization and colonization. The forests they lived in suddenly acquired a market value; so did the rivers that ran through them and the minerals that lay beneath them. Some parts remained untouched, but elsewhere the tribals were deprived of access to forests, dispossessed of their lands and placed in debt to moneylenders. The ‘outsider’ was increasingly seen as one who was seeking to usurp the resources of the adivasis. In the Chotanagpur plateau, for example, the non-tribal was known as diku, a term that evoked fear as well as resentment.11

  The Constituent Assembly recognized this vulnerability, and spent days debating what to do about it. Ultimately, it decided to designate some 400 communities as ‘scheduled tribes’. These constituted about 7 per cent of the population, and had seats reserved for them in the legislature as well as in government departments. Schedule V of the constitution pertained to the tribes that lived in central India; it allowed for the creation of tribal advisory councils and for curbs on moneylending and on the sale of tribal land to outsiders. Schedule VI pertained to the tribes of the north-east; it gestured further in the direction of local autonomy, constituting district and regional councils, protecting local rights in land, forests and waterways and instructing state governments to share mining revenues with the local council, a concession not granted anywhere else in India.

  Jaipal Singh thought that these provisions would have real teeth only if the tribals could come to forge a separate state within the Union. He called this putative state Jharkhand; in his vision it would incorporate his own Chotanagpur plateau, then in Bihar, along with contiguous tribal areas located in the provinces of Bengal and Orissa. The proposed state would cover an area of some 48,000 square miles and have a population of 12 million people.12 The idea caught the imagination of the youth of Chotanagpur. Thus, in May 1947, the Adivasi Sabha of Jamshedpur wrote to Nehru, Gandhi and the Constituent Assembly urging the creation of a Jharkhand state out of Bihar. ‘We want Jharkhand Province to preserve and develop Adivasi Culture and Language’, said their memorandum, ‘to make our customary law supreme, to make our lands inalienable, and above all to save ourselves from continuous exploitation.’13

  In February 1948 Jaipal Singh delivered the presidential address to the All-India Adivasi Mahasabha, an organization that he had led since its inception a decade previously. He spoke here of how, after Independence, ‘Bihari imperialism’ had replaced ‘British imperialism’ as the greatest problem for the adivasi. He identified the land question as the most crucial, and urged the speedy creation of a Jharkhand state. Notably, he simultaneously underlined his commitment to the Indian Union by speaking with feeling about the ‘tragic assassination of Gandhiji’, and by raising a slogan that combined local pride with a wider Indian patriotism: ‘Jai Jharkhand! Jai Adivasi! Jai Hind!’14

  The Adivasi Mahasabha was now renamed the Jharkhand Party, and after several years of steady campaigning fought under that name in the first general election of 1952. With its symbol of a fighting cock, the party met with success beyond its own imaginings, winning three seats to Parliament and thirty-three to the state’s Assembly. These victories all came in the tribal regions of Bihar, where it comprehensively trounced the ruling Congress Party. At the polls at any rate, the case for Jharkhand had been proved.

  III

  Jaipal Singh and his Jharkhand Party offered one prospective path for the tribals: autonomy within the Indian Union, safeguarded by laws protecting their land and customs and by the creation of a province in regions where the tribals were in a majority. The Naga radicals offered another: an independent, sovereign state carved out of India and quite distinct from it. Among the Nagas this view was upheld most insistently by the Angamis and, among them, by a certain resident of Khonomah village, yet another of those remarkable makers of Indian history who is still to find his biographer.

  The man in question was Angami Zapu Phizo, with whose name the Naga cause was to be identified for close to half a century. Born in 1913, Phizo was fair and slightly built, his face horribly twisted following a childhood paralytic attack. Educated by the Baptists, and a poet of sorts – among his compositions was a ‘Naga National Anthem’ – he sold insurance for a living before migrating to Burma. He was working on the docks in Rangoon when the Japanese invaded. Phizo joined the Japanese on their march to India, apparently in return for the promise of Naga independence should they succeed in winning their war against the British.15

  After the end of the war, Phizo returned to India and joined the Naga National Council. He quickly made his mark with his impassioned appeals for sovereignty, these often couched in a Christian idiom. He was part of the NNC delegation that met Mahatma Gandhi in New Delhi in July 1947. Three years later he was elected president of the NNC and committed the Nagas to ‘full Independence’. He quelled the doubters and nay-sayers, who wanted an accommodation with India. Many young Nagas were willing to go all the way with Phizo. Travelling in the area in December 1950, the Quaker Horace Alexander met two NNC members whose ‘minds are obsessed with the word “independence”, and I do not believe that any amount of argument or appeals to the [Indian] constitution, still less any threat, will shake them out of it’.16

  Phizo was a man of great energy and motivational powers. Through 1951 he and his men toured the Naga hills obtaining thumbprints and signatures to a document affirming their support for an independent Naga state. Later it was claimed that the bundle of impressions weighed eighty pounds, and that it was a comprehensive plebiscite which revealed that ‘99.99 per cent had voted in favour of the Naga independence’.17 These figures call to mind similar exercises in totalitarian states, where, for example, 99.99 per cent of the Russian people are said to have endorsed Stalin as Supreme Leader. Still, there is no doubt that Phizo himself wanted independence, and so did numerous of his followers.

  By now India itself had been independent for four years. The British officers had been replaced by Indian ones, but otherwise the new state had not had much impact on the Naga hills. Busy with healing the wounds of Partition, settling refugees, integrating princely states and drafting a constitution, the political elite in New Delhi had not given these tribes much thought. However, in the last week of 1951 the prime minister was in the Assam town of Tezpur, campaigning for his party in the general election. Phizo came down with three compatriots to meet him. When the NNC president said the Nagas wanted independence, Nehru called it an ‘absurd’ demand which attempted ‘to reverse the wheels of history’. He told them that ‘the Nagas were as free as any Indian’, and under the constitution they had ‘a very large degree of autonomy in managing their own affairs’. He invited Phizo and his men to ‘submit proposals for the extension of cultural, administrative and financial autonomy in their land’. Their suggestions would be considered sympathetically, and if necessary
the constitution could also be changed. But independence for the Nagas was out of the question.18

  The NNC’s response was to boycott the general election. After the elected Congress government was in place, Phizo sought another meeting with the prime minister in New Delhi. In the second week of February 1952 he and two other NNC leaders met Nehru in Delhi. The prime minister once more told them that, while independence was not an option, the Nagas could be granted greater autonomy. But Phizo remained adamant. At a press conference he said, ‘we will continue our struggle for independence, and one day we shall meet [Nehru] again for a friendly settlement’ (as representatives of a separate nation). The free state he had in mind would bring together 200,000 Nagas in India, another 200,000 in what he called ‘no-man’s land’, and 400,000 who were presently citizens of Burma.19

  Afterwards the Jharkhand leader Jaipal Singh hosted a lunch for Phizo and his group. A journalist present found the NNC president to be a ‘short, slim man with [a] Mongolian look, with spectacles that hide the fires of dedicated eyes’. He also heard Jaipal say that, while he sympathized with the Naga cause, he ‘abhorred any further fragmentation of India in the form of a new Pakistan’. He advised Phizo not to ask for a separate sovereign state, but to fight for a tribal province in the north-east, a counterpart to the Jharkhand he himself was struggling for. His guest answered that ‘Nagas are Mongoloid and thus they have no racial affinity with the people of India’. Phizo said he hoped to unite the Nagas on this side with the Nagas on the Burmese side to form a country of their own. But, as the journalist on the spot observed, ‘according to the official view in Delhi, such a State cannot be viable, and as those haunting hills form a strategic frontier between nations, it would be dangerous to let the Nagas loose’.20

  IV