25See R. M. Lala, ‘Refugees’, the Current, 29 March 1950.
26SWJN2, vol. 4, pp. 115–17. (The original broadcast was in Hindi.)
27Aparna Basu, Mridula Sarabhai: Rebel with a Cause (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996), chapter 8.
28Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin, Borders and Boundaries: Women in India’s Partition (New Delhi: Kali for Women), pp. 91–3, 97–8. Cf. also Urvashi Butalia, The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India (New Delhi: Viking, 1998), chapter 4.
29See Chitra Bhanu, ‘Food Situation Getting Worse in Malabar’, Swatantra, 29 July 1947; ‘Famine Conditions in East Godavari’, Swatantra, 4 October 1947; P. V. C. Rao, ‘The Food Debacle’ and ‘Lesson of Gujerat Famine’, Swatantra, 7 August 1948 and 12 February 1949.
30Clare and Harris Wofford, India Afire (New York: The John Day Co., 1951), pp. 105–6, 113–15; ‘Communists in Hyderabad’, Swatantra, 28 May 1949.
31Ananth Rao Kanangi, ‘Communists in Andhra’, the Current, 3 May 1950.
32Quoted in John H. Kautsky, Moscow and the Communist Party of India (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1956), p. 49.
33G. S. Bhargava, ‘Balchandra Triambak Ranadive’, Swatantra, 22 April 1950.
34D. Jayakanthan, A Literary Man’s Political Experiences, trans. M. S. Venkataramani (New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1976), pp. 19–22.
35Gene D. Overstreet and Marshall Windmiller, Communism in India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959), chapter 13.
36Quoted in M. R. Masani, The Communist Party of India: A Short History (Bombay: Bhavan’s Book University, 1967), pp. 78–9.
37Pravda, 25 November 1949, quoted in Mahavir Singh, Soviet View of the Indian National Congress (New Delhi: Sanchar Publishing House, 1991), p. 22.
38Penderel Moon to his father, 5 February 1949, Moon Papers, Mss Eur F230/23, OIOC.
39Anon., ‘Rounding up of Communists in Hyderabad’, Swatantra, 4 June 1949; Wofford and Wofford, India Afire, pp. 118–19.
40Amit Kumar Gupta, The Agrarian Drama: The Leftists and the Rural Poor in India, 1934–51 (New Delhi: Manohar, 1996), pp. 464–5.
41SWJN2, vol. 4, pp. 52–3.
42See correspondence in G. M. Nandurkar, Sardar’s Letters – Mostly Unknown – Post-Centenary, vol. 2 (Ahmedabad: Sardar Patel Smarak Bhavan, 1981), pp. 20–2, and vol. 3 (1983), pp. 42–3.
43Baroo, ‘Enter the Sangh’, Swatantra, 10 September 1949. For a sympathetic contemporary portrait of the RSS, see Jagat S. Bright, Guruji Golwalkar and R.S.S. (Delhi: New India Publishing Co., 1951).
44Letter quoted in the Current, 19 October 1949.
45N. S. Muthana, ‘Golwalkar’s Climb on Congress Ladder’, the Current, 9 November 1949.
46News report in the Current, 16 November 1949.
47Dewan Chaman Lall, quoted in Tai Yong Tan and Gyanesh Kudesia, The Aftermath of Partition in South Asia (London: Routledge, 2000).
48R. G. Casey, An Australian in India (London: Hollis and Carter, 1947), p. 114.
49Albert Mayer, Pilot Project, India: The Story of Rural Development at Etawah, Uttar Pradesh (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1958), p. 13.
6. IDEAS OF INDIA
1Hindustan Times, 10 and 11 December 1946.
2In the description of the independent Anglo-Indian member, Frank Anthony. Constituent Assembly Debates: Official Report (reprint New Delhi: Lok Sabha Secretariat, 1988), hereafter cited as CAD, vol. 8, p. 329.
3K. Santhanam, quoted in Granville Austin, The Indian Constitution: Cornerstone of a Nation (1966; reprint New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 13. The varied ideologies and political trends represented in the Assembly are discussed in S. K. Chaube, Constituent Assembly of India: Springboard of Revolution, 2nd edn (New Delhi: Manohar, 2000), esp. chapters 8 to 10.
4Winston Churchill quoted in CAD, vol. 2, pp. 267, 271.
5See ‘Summary of representations received in office regarding “Rights of Minorities”’, in File 37, C. Rajagopalachari Papers, Fifth Instalment, NMML.
6Austin, The Indian Constitution, p. 71.
7CAD, vol. 1, pp. 59–61. That Nehru would mention the Soviet Revolution alongside the other two may be considered by some characteristic of his broadmindedness, by others as characteristic merely of his lack of discrimination.
8See CAD, vol. 4, pp. 737–62.
9Cf. Austin, The Indian Constitution, pp. 314–15.
10The words are those of Ambedkar. See CAD, vol. 9, p. 974. The contributions of Munshi, Aiyar and Rau to the making of the Indian Constitution were immense. They prepared dozens of notes and minutes on specific subjects, the more important of which are reproduced in B. Shiva Rao, ed., The Framing of India’s Constitution: Select Documents, 4 vols (New Delhi: Indian Institute of Public Administration, 1968). On K. M. Munshi’s role, see also N. H. Bhagwati, ‘An Architect of the Constitution’, in Munshi at Seventy-Five (Bombay: Dr K. M. Munshi’s 76th Birthday Celebration Committee, 1962).
11In the preface to the 1999 edition of his book, Austin amends this slightly, speaking of unity, social revolution and democracy as ‘the three strands of a seamless web’. Austin’s work is indispensable, but see also the long critique by Upendra Baxi, ‘“The Little Done, the Vast Undone” – Some Reflections on Reading Granville Austin’s The Indian Constitution’, Journal of the Indian Law Institute, vol. 9, 1967, pp. 323–430.
12CAD, vol. 7, p. 39.
13Ibid., vol. 7, pp. 219, 285, 350, 387 etc.
14Ibid., vol. 7, p. 305.
15For a good discussion of how this choice was made, see E. Sridharan, ‘The Origins of the Electoral System’, in Zoya Hasan, E. Sridharan and R. Sudarshan, eds, India’s Living Constitution (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2002). See also ‘Report by the Constitutional Adviser on his Visit to U.S.A., Canada, Ireland and England’, in Shiva Rao, Select Documents, vol. 3, pp. 217–26.
16Nehru, quoted in Austin, The Indian Constitution, p. 121.
17The phrase is Granville Austin’s. See The Indian Constitution, p. 50.
18An excellent discussion of the framing of the fundamental rights section is contained in B. Shiva Rao, ed., The Framing of India’s Constitution: A Study (New Delhi: Indian Institute of Public Administration, 1968), chapter 7.
19Austin, The Indian Constitution, p. 56.
20CAD, vol. 4, p. 769.
21CAD, vol. 11, pp. 711–13.
22CAD, vol. 7, p. 360.
23CAD, vol. 11, p. 616.
24Intervention by Shibban Lal Saxena, CAD, vol. 11, pp. 705–6.
25Ibid., p. 212.
26Interventions by Loknath Misra and K. Hanumanthaiya, CAD, vol. 11, pp. 799, 617.
27CAD, vol. 5, pp. 54–5.
28Intervention by Balkrishna Sharma, CAD, vol. 5, pp. 74–6.
29Speech of 17 December 1946, CAD, vol. 1, p. 102.
30CAD, vol. 4, p. 546.
31Ibid., vol. 4, p. 859.
32CAD, vol. 5, pp. 211–13.
33Ibid., vol. 5, p. 271.
34CAD, vol. 7, p. 306; CAD, vol. 8, p. 300.
35Intervention by Naziruddin Ahmad, CAD, vol. 8, pp. 296–7.
36CAD, vol. 1, p. 138.
37CAD, vol. 4, p. 668.
38CAD, vol. 7, p. 356.
39CAD, vol. 5, pp. 202–3; vol. 11, pp. 608–9.
40CAD, vol. 9, p. 667–9.
41Intervention by Brajeshwar Prasad, CAD, vol. 10, p. 239.
42CAD, vol. 8, pp. 344–5.
43CAD, vol. 5, p. 210.
44Regrettably, there is no biography of Jaipal Singh. See, however, P. G. Ganguly, ‘Separatism in the Indian Polity: A Case Study’, in M. C. Pradhan et al., eds, Anthropology and Archaeology: Essays in Commemoration of Verrier Elwin (Bombay: Oxford University Press, 1969).
45CAD, vol. 1, pp. 143–4.
46CAD, vol. 7, pp. 559–60.
47Intervention by Brajeshwar Prasad, CAD, vol. 9, p. 281.
48CAD, vol. 1, pp. 26–7.
49Hindustan Times, 11 December 1946.
5
0CAD, vol. 8, p. 745.
51CAD, vol. 7, pp. 20–31.
52See Suniti Kumar Chatterji, Languages and the Linguistic Problem, Oxford Pamphlet on Indian Affairs, no. 11 (Bombay: Oxford University Press, 1943); Alok Rai, Hindi Nationalism (Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 2000).
53Nehru, ‘The Question of Language’, in his The Unity of India: Collected Writings, 1937–1940 (London: Lindsay Drummond, 1941), pp. 241–61.
54Letter to Krishnachandra, 12 May 1945, in CWMG, vol. 80, p. 117.
55See letters in CWMG, vol. 80, pp. 181, 317–18; vol. 81, pp. 33–4, 332.
56Austin, The Indian Constitution, p. 267.
57Cf. interventions by B. Pocker Sahib Bahadur and Jaipal Singh, CAD, vol. 4, pp. 553, 554.
58CAD, vol. 7, p. 235.
59Article 343 of the Constitution of India.
60This section is based on Ambedkar’s last speech to the Constituent Assembly – CAD, vol. 11, pp. 972–81.
61John W. Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1999), p. 347. The making of the Japanese constitution is discussed in chapters 12 and 13.
62Courtney Whitney, quoted ibid., p. 373.
63Austin, The Indian Constitution, pp. 308, 309–10, 328.
7. THE BIGGEST GAMBLE IN HISTORY
1‘Vignhneswara’ (V. Raghunathan), Sotto Voce: A Social and Political Commentary, vol. 1: The Coming of Freedom (Madras: B. G. Paul and Co., 1951), p. 203.
2Quoted in the Current, 18 July 1951.
3‘Disintegration of the Congress’, the Current, 9 May 1951.
4See S. H. Desai, ‘Sardar Patel’, the Current, 14 August 1948; A. S. Iyengar, All Through the Gandhian Era: Reminiscences (Bombay: Hind Kitabs Ltd, 1950), pp. 289–95 (section titled ‘Nehru and Patel’); V. Shankar, My Reminiscences of Sardar Patel, vol. 2 (New Delhi: Macmillan, 1975), pp. 20–3.
5Prasad had a greater following than Rajaji because he was a Hindi speaker from north India (like the majority of Congress politicians at the time) and because, unlike Rajaji, he had actively participated in the Quit India movement of 1942. See Rajmohan Gandhi, The Rajaji Story, 1937–1972 (Bombay: Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, 1984), pp. 190–4.
6The Statesman, 26 January 1950. Left-wing critics complained of the pageantry, saying it was a colonial hangover. They were reminded that ‘pomp and pageantry were Indian before they became British, and the British used them because they understood the Indian mentality’. See ‘Shridharani in Delhi’, Swatantra, 8 January 1950.
7The verdicts, respectively, of Michael Brecher, Nehru: A Political Biography (London: Oxford University Press, 1959), p. 43; K. A. Abbas, ‘Rajarshi Tandon – the New President’, Swatantra, 9 September 1950; the Current, 13 September 1950.
8Nehru to Rajagopalachari, letters of 26 and 27 August 1950, File 189, C. Rajagopalachari Papers, Fifth Instalment, NMML.
9Nehru, ‘Statement to the Press’, 13 September 1950, copy in File 24, C. Rajagopalachari Papers, Fifth Instalment, NMML. I have failed to locate this statement in any volume of Nehru’s selected works.
10Letter of 28 March 1950, in SPC, vol. 10, p. 19.
11Rajmohan Gandhi, Patel: A Life (Ahmedabad: Navjivan Press, 1991), pp. 526–7.
12S. Gopal, Jawaharlal Nehru: A Biography, vol. 2: 1947–1956 (London: Cape, 1979), p. 309.
13Gandhi, Patel, p. 530.
14‘Vallabhbhai Patel’, in S. Gopal and Uma Iyengar, eds, The Essential Writings of Jawaharlal Nehru, vol. 1 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 633.
15Gopal, Nehru, vol. 2, p. 155.
16See K. Mukherjee, ‘The Resurrection of Somnath’, Indian Review, July 1951.
17Nehru to Rajendra Prasad, 2 March 1951, copy in Subject File 46, C. Rajagopalachari Papers, Fourth Instalment, NMML.
18Speech in Hindi at Somnath, 11 May 1951, in Valmiki Choudhary, ed., Dr Rajendra Prasad: Correspondence and Select Documents, vol. 14 (New Delhi: Allied Publishers, 1991). I am grateful to Professor Bhagwan Josh of Jawaharlal Nehru University for this reference. This and other translations from the Hindi in this book are mine.
19Editorial in Swatantra, 8 September 1951.
20Gopal, Nehru, vol. 2, p. 155.
21Richard L. Park, ‘India’s General Election’, Far Eastern Survey, 9 January 1952.
22This description of the mechanics of the election is based on Sukumar Sen, Report on the First General Elections in India, 1951–52 (New Delhi: Election Commission, 1955); supplemented by Park, ‘India’s General Election’; and Irene Tinker and Mil Walker, ‘The First General Elections in India and Indonesia’, Far Eastern Survey, July 1956.
23The Times of India (Bombay – hereafter TOI), 5 November 1951.
24See, for example, Asoka Mehta, The Political Mind of India (Bombay: Socialist Party, 1952).
25News report in the Searchlight (Patna), 22 November 1951.
26See Craig Baxter, The Jana Sangh: A Biography of an Indian Political Party (Bombay: Oxford University Press, 1971), pp. 87–8 etc.
27Reports in Hindustan Times (Delhi – hereafter HT); 12 October 1951; TOI, 9 November 1951; Mehta, The Political Mind, p. 61.
28TOI, 9 November 1951; Manikuntala Sen, In Search of Freedom: An Unfinished Journey (Calcutta: STREE, 2001), pp. 220–1; Ravi Narayan Reddy, Heroic Telengana: Reminiscences and Experiences (New Delhi: Communist Party of India), pp. 71–2.
29Lord Birdwood, A Continent Decides (London: Robert Hale, 1953), p. 103; TOI, 22 January 1952 (news report headline ‘Bovine Election Propaganda’).
30TOI, 1 January 1952.
31S. Borzenko, ‘Before the Elections in India’, originally published in Pravda, 25 October 1951, translated in Swatantra, 1 December 1951.
32Park, ‘India’s General Election’.
33Prakash, ‘Lalaji’, Shankar’s Weekly, 6 January 1952.
34This and the following paragraphs on Nehru’s all-India election tour are based on newspaper reports in TOI and HT, supplemented by Anon., The Pilgrimage and After: The Story of how the Congress Fought and Won the General Elections (New Delhi: All-India Congress Committee, 1952).
35See Ajit Bhattacharjea, J.P.: His Biography (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1975), pp. 254, 256. Mrs Gandhi based her allegations on the fact that one socialist leader, Ram Manohar Lohia, had recently returned from a speaking tour in the United States, while another, Jayaprakash Narayan, had once studied in that country.
36Frank Moraes, Jawaharlal Nehru: A Biography (New York: Macmillan, 1956), p. 413.
37Anon., The Pilgrimage and After, p. 23.
38D. F. Karaka, Nehru: The Lotus Eater from Kashmir (London: Derek Verschoyle, 1953), pp. 96–8.
39Nehru to Lady Mountbatten, 3 December 1951, quoted in Gopal, Nehru, vol. 2, p. 161.
40This account of voting and voter behaviour is largely based on contemporary newspaper accounts, especially in TOI and HT.
41HT, 26 October 1951.
42Irene Tinker Walker, ‘The General Election in Himachal Pradesh, India, 1951’, Parliamentary Affairs, vol. 6, no. 3, summer 1953.
43‘General Elections’, lead edit, Economic Weekly, 5 January 1952.
44Jean Lyon, Just Half a World Away: My Search for the New India (London: Hutchinson, 1955), pp. 125–30.
45Sen, Report on the First General Elections, p. 135.
46Personal communication from Professor Rajen Harshe of Hyderabad University, 21 May 2002.
47Park, ‘India’s General Election’.
48C. R. Srinivasan, ‘The Elections Are On’, Indian Review, January 1952, emphasis added.
49Clare Woodford and Harris Woodford, Jr., India Afire (New York: John Day, 1951), p. 25.
50Letter in Mss Eur F230/26, OIOC.
51Organiser, 7 January 1952, quoted in Margaret W. Fisher and Joan V. Bondurant, eds, The Indian Experience with Democratic Elections, Indian Press Digests, University of California, Berkeley, no. 3, December 1956, p. 60.
52The Tribune (Ambala), 22 December 1951, and the Hitavada, 30 December 1951, both quot
ed ibid., pp. 56–7, 58.
53This paragraph is based on press reports quoted ibid., pp. 61f; Nehru’s remarks are quoted in W. H. Morris-Jones, ‘The Indian Elections’, Economic Weekly, 28 June and 5 July 1952.
54Chester Bowles, Ambassador’s Report (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1954), chapter 11.
55Ahmed Emin Yalman, editor, Daily Vatan (Istanbul), writing in TOI, 21 February 1951.
56D. P. Mukerji, ‘First Fruits of General Elections’, Economic Weekly, 26 January 1952.
57Jawaharlal Nehru, An Autobiography: With Musings on Recent Events in India (1936; reprint London: The Bodley Head, 1949), p. 598 (quote taken from the postscript dated Badenweiler, 25 October 1935).
8. HOME AND THE WORLD
1Nirad C. Chaudhuri, ‘After Nehru, Who?’, Illustrated Weekly of India, 10 May 1953.
2Arthur Lall, The Emergence of Modern India (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), p. 128. Lall was a high-ranking member of the Indian Foreign Service and had worked closely with Nehru.
3The autobiography was Nehru’s second book-length work. The first, whose title (Glimpses of World History) is testimony to his global outlook, was written initially as a series of letters to his daughter from jail. His third major book was published in 1946; its title is revealing – it was called The Discovery of India, suggesting that perhaps this man was an internationalist well before he became a patriot, that he had discovered the world before he had discovered India.
4‘Peace and Empire’, in Jawaharlal Nehru, Peace and India (London: The India League, 1938).
5See Nehru to S. K. Datta, letters of 20 June 1939 and 24 December 1941, Datta Papers, Mss Eur F178/28, OIOC.
6See Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s Foreign Policy: Selected Speeches, September 1946–April 1961 (New Delhi: Publications Division, 1961), pp. 3, 24, 28–9, 31–2. It is important to remember here that Nehru wrote his speeches himself.
7Quoted in K. P. S. Menon, ‘India and the Soviet Union’, in B. R. Nanda, ed., Indian Foreign Policy: The Nehru Years (Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1976), p. 134.
8James Cameron, Point of Departure (London: Arthur Barker, 1967), p. 247.
9Asian Relations: Being a Report of the Proceedings and Documentation of the First Asian Relations Conference, New Delhi, March–April 1947 (New Delhi: Asian Relations Organization, 1948).
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