India After Gandhi Revised and Updated Edition

by Ramachandra Guha

  On 1 September the Pakistan army launched a major offensive in Chhamb. An infantry division with two regiments of American Patton tanks crossed the border. Catching the Indians by surprise, they occupied thirty square miles within twenty-four hours. Their aim was to capture the bridge at Akhnoor, thus to sever links between Jammu and Kashmir and the state of Punjab. The defenders now called in their air force, with some thirty aircraft raining down bombs on the enemy. The Indian Vampires were answered by Pakistani Sabre jets.

  By the 5th the Indian position was getting desperate, with the Pakistanis pressing hard on Akhnoor. To relieve the pressure, New Delhi ordered the army to open a new front. On the morning of the 6th, several tank regiments, supported by infantry, crossed the international border that divided the Punjab. They were heading straight for Pakistan’s first city, Lahore. Pakistani troops and tanks were hastily redeployed from the Kashmir operation. Now commenced perhaps the most bitter tank battle seen anywhere since the end of the Second World War. The two sides fought each other inch for inch, sometimes in barren soil, at other times in the middle of sugar-cane fields. The Indians routed the Pakistanis around Asal Uttar but then, attempting to recapture Khem Karan, were badly mauled in turn. The Indian commander, a veteran of the Second World War, said that he had ‘never seen so many tanks destroyed, lying there in the battlefield like abandoned toys’.26

  Overhead, the aeroplanes screamed en route to attack the enemy’s bases. A large tonnage of bombs was dropped by both sides, but – as an Indian chronicler later wrote – ‘luckily or unluckily some of the bombs failed to explode – they were old and had been supplied to the contending parties mostly by the same source’.27

  As the battles raged, the Chinese weighed in with words in support of the Pakistanis. On 4 September Marshal Chen Yi, visiting Karachi, condemned ‘Indian imperialism for violating the Cease-Fire Line’, and endorsed ‘the just actions taken by the Government of Pakistan to repel India’s armed provocations’. Three days later Peking issued a statement claiming that India was ‘still entrenched’ over large sections of Chinese territory. The next day Chou En-lai stated that ‘India’s acts of aggression pose a threat to peace in this part of Asia’.28

  Back in New Delhi, a surge of patriotic sentiment had overcome the population. At the daily press briefing, newsmen would ask the government spokesman: ‘Has Lahore airport fallen?’ ‘Is the radio station under our control?’ Lahore never fell, although why this was so remained a matter of dispute. The Indians argued that capturing the city was never on the agenda – why get into a house-to-house operation with a hostile population? The Pakistanis claimed that the Indian chief of army staff had bragged that he would have his evening drink at the Lahore Gymkhana – but the brave defenders of the city never allowed him to.29

  The escalation of hostilities alarmed the superpowers, and on 6 September the United Nations Security Council met to discuss the matter. The UN secretary general, U Thant, flew to the subcontinent, and after meeting leaders in both capitals got them to agree to a ceasefire. The decision was made easier by the fact that in the Punjab the two sides had fought themselves to a stalemate. On 22 September hostilities were finally called off.

  The battles took place principally in two sectors in the north-west – Kashmir and the Punjab. There were some exchanges in Sindh, but the eastern border – dividing the two halves of Bengal – stayed quiet. As is common in such cases, both sides claimed victory, exaggerating the enemy’s losses and understating their own. In truth, the war must be declared a draw. As a reasonably independent authority had it, the Pakistanis lost 3,000 to 5,000 men, about 250 tanks and 50 aircraft, whereas the casualties on the Indian side were 4,000 to 6,000 men, about 300 tanks, and 50 aircraft. With their much larger population, and bigger army, the Indians were better able to absorb these losses.30

  For the Western public, the Reader’s Digest magazine provided this colourful summary of the war far away: ‘The blood of Pakistani and Indian soldiers stained the wheat-lands of the Punjab and the stony ridges of Kashmir; vultures hung over corpses on the Grand Trunk Road, the immortal highway of Kipling’s Kim; and refugees huddled against tilting bullock carts, hesitant to start the journey home.’31

  V

  Before the war Shastri and Ayub Khan had met once, at Karachi in October 1964, when the Indian leader stopped there on his way home from Cairo. There is a photograph of the two together, the army man dressed in a suit, towering over the little Gandhian in his dhoti. Ayub was deeply unimpressed by the Indian, telling an aide: ‘So this is the man who has succeeded Nehru!’32

  There is little question that the Pakistani leadership seriously underestimated the Indian will to fight. Operation Gibraltar was conceived in ‘the euphoric aftermath’ of the Kutch conflict, which had ‘shown the Indians in a poor light’.33 In the first week of June 1965 the Dawn newspaper carried an essay written pseudonymously by a high official, which analysed Indian troop deployment before recommending that Pakistani strategy should ‘obviously be to go for a knock-out in the Mohamed Ali Clay style’.34 An army directive confidently stated that ‘as a general rule Hindu morale would not stand more than a couple of hard blows delivered at the right time and place’.35

  There was, indeed, an unmistakably religious idiom to an operation initiated by Pakistani Muslims on behalf of their brethren in Kashmir. Memories of wars fought and won ten centuries ago were evoked. The radicals in Pakistan believed that the kafir would be vanquished by the combination of Islamic fervour and American arms.36 The hope was that after the Kashmiris had arisen, their brothers would cut off enemy communication, and ‘start the long expected tank promenade down the Grand Trunk Road to Delhi’, forcing a humiliating surrender.37 The song on the lips of the warriors was: ‘Hus ke liya hai Pakistan, ladh ke lenge Hindustan’ (We achieved Pakistan laughing, we will take India fighting).

  As it happened, the attack united the Indians. Many Kashmiris stood with the army against the invaders. A Muslim soldier from Kerala won India’s highest military honour, the Param Vir Chakra. Another Muslim, this time from Rajasthan and ironically named Ayub Khan, knocked out a couple of Pakistani tanks. All across India Muslim intellectuals and divines issued statements condemning Pakistan and expressing their desire to sacrifice their lives for the motherland.38

  Ayub and company were encouraged by the debacle against China in 1962. But that was in the wet and slippery Himalaya, whereas this was terrain the Indians knew much better. The army commanders in 1965 had won their first spurs fighting tank battles on flat land in the Second World War. Besides, in the years since the Chinese disaster they had been provided with more (and better) equipment. The new defence minister, Y. B. Chavan, had gone on an extensive shopping spree in 1964, visiting Western capitals and the Soviet bloc to buy the tanks, planes, rifles and submarines that his forces required.39

  This defence minister was more respected by his troops than his counterpart in 1962. Chavan was no Krishna Menon and, when it came to the conduct of war, Shastri was no Nehru either. He certainly preferred peace, writing to a friend after the Kutch conflict that in his view the problems between India and Pakistan should be settled amicably, step by step. He hoped that ‘our fights and disputes do not take a form that makes battle inevitable’.40 But when war came he was decisive, swift to take the advice of his commanders and order the strike across the Punjab border. (In a comparable situation, in 1962, Nehru had refused to call in the air force to relieve the pressure.) And when the conflict ended he was happy to be photographed – dhoti and all – atop a captured Patton tank, a gesture that would not have come easily to his predecessor.

  However, in one respect Shastri was indeed like Nehru – in his refusal to mix matters of state with matters of faith. Days after the ceasefire, with patriotic feelings riding high, he spoke at a public meeting at the Ram Lila grounds in Delhi. Here he took issue with a BBC report that claimed that ‘since India’s Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri is a Hindu, he is ready for war with P
akistan’. Shastri said that while he was a Hindu, ‘Mir Mushtaq who is presiding over this meeting is a Muslim. Mr Frank Anthony who has addressed you is a Christian. There are also Sikhs and Parsis here. The unique thing about our country is that we have Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Parsis and people of all other religions. We have temples and mosques, gurdwaras and churches. But we do not bring this all into politics . . . This is the difference between India and Pakistan. Whereas Pakistan proclaims herself to be an Islamic State and uses religion as a political factor, we Indians have the freedom to follow whatever religion we may choose [and] worship in any way we please. So far as politics is concerned, each of us is as much an Indian as the other.’41

  VI

  During the Pakistan war, the prime minister coined the slogan ‘Jai Jawan, Jai Kisan’ (Hail the Soldier, Hail the Farmer). To salute the ordinary jawan in a nation given birth by Gandhian pacifism was distinctive, but so was the invocation of the humble kisan, in a nation taught to admire blast furnaces and high hydroelectric dams.

  In fact, one of Shastri’s first acts as prime minister was to increase budget allocations to agriculture. He was deeply concerned about the shortfalls in food production in recent years. The rate of increase of food grain had just about kept pace with the growth of population. If the rains failed, panic set in, with merchants hoarding grain and the state desperate to move stocks from surplus to deficit areas. There had been a drought in 1964, and another in 1965. Seeking a long-term solution, Shastri appointed C. Subramaniam to head the Ministry of Food and Agriculture. Born in 1910 into a family of farmers, Subramaniam had degrees in science and the law, and practised as an advocate before joining the freedom struggle. He had been a member of the Constituent Assembly, and was a widely admired minister in Madras before he joined the Union Cabinet. Subramaniam was known to be intelligent and a go-getter, which is why Nehru had placed him in charge of the prestigious Ministry of Steel and Mines. To shift him from Steel to Agriculture signalled a major change indeed.42

  Subramaniam took to his new job with vigour. He focused on the reorganization of agricultural science, improving the pay and working conditions of scientists and protecting them from bureaucratic interference. The Indian Council for Agricultural Research, previously a somewhat somnolent body, acquired a new life and identity. Besides reviving the ICAR, Subramaniam also encouraged the states to set up agricultural universities, whose research focused on crops particular to that region. He began experimental farms, and set up a Seed Corporation of India to produce, in bulk, the quality seeds that would be needed for the proposed programmes of agricultural intensification.

  Two of Subramaniam’s key aides were, like him, from the Tamil country. One was the able secretary of agriculture, B. Sivaraman; the other was the scientist M. S. Swaminathan, who was directing the research teams adapting Mexican wheat to Indian conditions. It was around this crop that the new strategy revolved. Notably, while wheat is grown principally in the north of the country, these three architects of India’s agricultural policy were all from the (very deep) south.43

  Meanwhile, Subramaniam prevailed upon the United States to provide food aid till such time as the Indians were able to augment their own production. He met with and impressed the American president, Lyndon Johnson, and forged a close partnership with the US secretary of agriculture, Orville Freeman. In December 1965 Subramaniam and Freeman signed an agreement in Rome whereby India committed itself to a substantial increase in investment in agriculture, to a reform of the rural credit system, and to an expansion of fertilizer production and consumption. In return, the Americans provided a series of soft loans and agreed to keep wheat supplies going to tide over the shortages at the Indian end.44

  While Subramaniam was signing what was informally called ‘The Treaty of Rome’, his prime minister was preparing to go to Moscow to sign a treaty of his own. This was with his Pakistani counterpart, Ayub Khan. After the war had ended, the Soviets offered their help in working out a peace settlement. In the first week of January 1966 Shastri and Ayub met in Tashkent, with the Soviet prime minister Alexei Kosygin as the chief mediator. After a week of hard bargaining the two sides agreed to give up what they most prized – international arbitration of the Kashmir dispute for Pakistan, the retention of key posts captured during the war (such as the Haji Pir pass) for India. The ‘Tashkent Agreement’ mandated the withdrawal of forces to the positions they held before 5 August 1965, the orderly transfer of prisoners of war, the resumption of diplomatic relations and the disavowal of force to settle future disputes.45

  The agreement was signed on the afternoon of 10 January 1966. That night Shastri died in his sleep of a heart attack. On the 11th his body was flown to New Delhi on a Soviet aircraft. The next morning the body was placed on a gun carriage and taken in procession to the banks of the Jamuna, to be cremated not far from where Gandhi and Nehru had been. Life magazine made the event a cover story – as they had done with the death of Shastri’s predecessor twenty months before. There were vivid pictures of the million-strong crowd, come to honour a man ‘with whom many [Indians] felt a closer affinity than with Nehru’. What Shastri gave India, said Life, ‘was mainly a mood – a new steeliness and sense of national unity’. The Chinese war had brought the country to a state of near collapse, but this time, when war came, ‘everything worked – the trains ran, the army held fast, there was no communal rioting. The old moral pretentiousness, the disillusion and drift, the fear and dismay were gone.’46

  This was a handsome tribute, but more notable perhaps were the compliments paid by those predisposed by ties of kin to see Shastri as an interloper. In the first months of the new prime minister’s tenure, Mrs Indira Gandhi had complained that he was departing from her father’s legacy. Within a year she was constrained to admit that ‘Mr Shastri is, I think, feeling stronger now and surer of himself’.47 Then there was Vijayalakshmi Pandit, who was even more fanatically devoted to her brother’s memory. In July 1964 she thought that the morale of the government of India was at ‘an unbelievably low level’ – and ‘there is now no Jawaharlal Nehru to stand up and restore confidence in the minds of the people’. On Shastri’s death, however, she felt ‘very sad’, for ‘he had begun to grow and we all thought he would put India on the right road’.48 The condescension was characteristic, but when we consider who was writing this and when, this must be considered very high praise indeed.

  Lal Bahadur Shastri may perhaps be seen as being in relation to Jawaharlal Nehru as Harry Truman was to Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Nehru and FDR both came from upper-class backgrounds, enjoyed long periods in power, undertook fundamental changes in their society and nation and were greatly venerated for doing so. Shastri, like Truman, was a smalltown boy of modest background, whose lack of charisma concealed a firm will and independence of mind. As with Truman, his background had endowed him with a keen practical sense, this in contrast to the more consciously intellectual – not to say ideological – style of his predecessor. Where the comparison breaks down is with regard to length of service. Whereas Truman had a full seven years as president of the United States, Shastri died less than two years after being sworn in as prime minister of India.

  VII

  On Shastri’s death, Gulzarilal Nanda was once more sworn in as interim prime minister, and once more Kamaraj went in search of a permanent successor. Once more, Morarji Desai threw his hat in the ring. Once more, Kamaraj rejected him in favour of a more widely acceptable candidate.

  The person whom the Congress president had in mind to succeed Shastri was Mrs Indira Gandhi. She was young – having just turned forty-eight – attractive, known to world leaders, and the daughter of the best-loved of Indians. To soothe a nation hit by two quick losses, she seemed the most obvious choice. True, Mrs Gandhi had little administrative experience, but this time the Congress ‘Syndicate’ would ensure that hers would be a properly ‘collective’ leadership.

  The chief ministers consulted by Kamaraj quickly endorsed Mrs Ga
ndhi’s name. So far, so good – except that Morarji Desai decided he would contest for the leadership. So New Delhi now ‘became the cockpit of concerted canvassing, large-scale lobbying, and hectic horse-trading’. Mrs Gandhi and Morarji Desai met with major leaders, while their seconds stalked the rank and file.49

  In terms of experience as well as ability Desai should have been the favourite. Jawaharlal Nehru had once written of him that there ‘were very few people whom I respect so much for their rectitude, ability, efficiency and fairness as Morarji Desai’.50 It is doubtful whether he would have written about his own daughter in quite that fashion – certainly, he had no hope that Indira Gandhi would ever succeed him as prime minister. However, the words I have quoted are from a private letter; neither Desai nor his supporters were privy to it. Even if they had been, it is unlikely that it would have helped. With Kamaraj and the Syndicate so solidly backing Mrs Gandhi, and others in the Congress Party having their own reservations regarding Desai, Nehru’s daughter commanded majority support in the Congress Parliamentary Party. When that body voted to choose a prime minister on 19 January 1966, she won by 355 votes to 169. Kamaraj had ‘lined up the State satraps behind Mrs Gandhi’, wrote one Delhi journal somewhat cynically, because ‘the State leaders would accept only an innocuous person for Prime Minister at the Centre’.51

  VIII

  Mrs Gandhi was the second woman to be elected to lead a free nation (Sirimavo Bandaranaike of Ceylon having been the first); and the second member of her own family to become prime minister of India. Her first months in office were, if anything, as troubled as her father’s. Nothing much happened in February, but in March a major revolt broke out in the Mizo hills. A tribal district bordering East Pakistan, these jagged hills were home to a population of a mere 300,000 people. But, as in Nagaland, among them were some motivated young men determined to carve out a homeland of their own.