India After Gandhi Revised and Updated Edition

by Ramachandra Guha

  10Quoted in Parsa Venkateshwar Rao, Jr., ‘The Misty Origins of NAM’, New Sunday Indian Express, 26 January 2003.

  11CWMG, vol. 87, pp. 190–3.

  12Quoted in ‘The Asian Conference, 1947’, in Diana Mansergh, ed., Independence Years: The Selected Indian and Commonwealth Papers of Nicholas Mansergh (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 81.

  13Nehru, Glimpses of World History (1934; revised edition London: Lindsay Drummond, 1949), p. 930.

  14Time, 17 October 1949.

  15P. P. Kumaramangalam to C. Rajagopalachari, 22 December 1947, in File 82, Fifth Instalment, C. Rajagopalachari Papers, NMML. Kumaramangalam went on to become chief of army staff, the highest-ranking military officer in India.

  16Harold Isaac, Images of Asia: American Views of China and India (1958; new edition New York, Harper and Row, 1972), esp. Part III.

  17Quoted in S. Gopal, Jawaharlal Nehru: A Biography, vol. 2: 1947–1956 (London: Cape, 1979), p. 59.

  18These speeches are reproduced in Jawaharlal Nehru, Visit to America (New York: John Day, 1950).

  19Quoted in J. J. Singh, ‘The Triumph of Nehru’, Indian Review, January 1950.

  20See Gopal, Nehru, vol. 2, p. 61.

  21Time, 14 November 1949.

  22Acheson, Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1970), pp. 334–6.

  23Cf. Vijayalakshmi Pandit’s comments on Dean Acheson in her The Scope of Happiness: A Personal Memoir (New Delhi: Orient Paperbacks, 1981), pp. 235–6.

  24Chester Bowles, Ambassador’s Report (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1954), chapter 9.

  25Saunders Redding, An American in India: A Personal Report on the Indian Dilemma and the Nature of her Conflicts (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1954), p. 47.

  26Quoted in The Hindu, 30 October 1953.

  27Walter Crocker, Nehru: A Contemporary’s Estimate (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), p. 114.

  28Keith Callard, Pakistan: A Political Study (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1957), p. 321.

  29Untitled note enclosed with letter from Winston Churchill to Lord Mountbatten, 21 November 1947, in Mss Eur F200/39, OIOC; Kissinger, quoted in Aslam Siddiqi, Pakistan Seeks Security (Lahore: Longmans, Green and Co., 1960), p. 109.

  30See Baldev Raj Nayar, Superpower Dominance and Military Aid: A Study of Military Aid to Pakistan (New Delhi: Manohar, 1991); anon., ‘US–Pak[istan] Pact: An American View’, Swatantra, 27 February 1954.

  31E. Stanley Jones, quoted in The Hindu, 25 December 1953. Jones was the author of a number of books on Indian themes, among them a sympathetic study of Mahatma Gandhi.

  32Taya Zinkin, ‘Indo-American Relations’, Economic Weekly annual, January 1956.

  33Letter of 21 May 1954, Birla Papers, NMML.

  34‘Interview with Hon. John Foster Dulles’, ibid.

  35Letter of 6 February 1956, ibid.

  36Dulles Press Conference in India (New Delhi: United States Information Service, 1956).

  37Cf. Denis Kux, India and the United States, 1941–1991: Estranged Democracies (Washington, DC: National Defence University Press, 1993).

  38Jawaharlal Nehru, Soviet Russia: Some Random Sketches and Impressions (Allahabad: Allahabad Law Journal Press, 1928).

  39S. Gopal, Jawaharlal Nehru: A Biography, vol. 1: 1889–1947 (London: Cape, 1975), p. 108.

  40Cf. David Caute, The Fellow Travellers (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987).

  41Robert H. Donaldson, Soviet Policy Towards India: Ideology and Strategy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974), pp. 109–12.

  42Cf. Mikhail Gorbachev, Memoirs (London: Doubleday, 1996), pp. 52–3: ‘Obviously, we [students] were still very far from understanding the principles of democracy. Yet, the simplified black-and-white picture of the world as presented by our propaganda was even then considered rather sceptically by the students. Jawaharlal Nehru’s visit to Moscow in June 1955 was an unexpected stimulus for me in this respect . . . This amazing man, his noble bearing, keen eyes and warm and disarming smile, made a deep impression on me.’

  43K. P. Menon, The Flying Troika (London: Oxford University Press, 1963), pp. 110–19.

  44Anon., ‘Soviet Leaders’ Visit and After’, Economic Weekly, 24 December 1955.

  45N. A. Bulganin and N. S. Khrushchev, Visit of Friendship to India, Burma and Afghanistan: Speeches and Official Documents, November–December 1955 (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1955).

  46A. D. Gorwala, ‘As Nehru Leaves for Moscow’, the Current, 1 June 1955.

  47As for example, C. Parameswaran, Nehru’s Foreign Policy X-Rayed (New Delhi: privately published, 1954).

  48See, for representative views, L. Natarajan, American Shadow over India (Bombay: People’s Publishing House, 1952); Romesh Thapar, India in Transition (Bombay: Current Book House, 1956). Louis Fischer, travelling through India in 1953–4, commented that the prevailing understanding of non-alignment ‘tended to close minds to criticisms of Russia while stimulating a less-than-friendly attitude towards the Western democracies’. Fischer, This is Our World (London: Cape, 1956), pp. 142–3.

  49‘The Bandung Conference’, in A. Appadurai, Essays in Politics and International Relations (Bombay: Asia Publishing House, 1969), pp. 79–113.

  50Lok Sabha Debates, vol. 4, 1955, cols 8962–74.

  51Gopal, Nehru, vol. 2, pp. 277–90.

  52‘Aggression in Egypt and Hungary’ (editorial), Swatantra, 10 November 1956.

  53See Nehru, India’s Foreign Policy, pp. 534f.

  54See Escott Reid, Envoy to Nehru (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1981), chapter 11.

  55‘L. N. S.’ ‘Double-Think’, Swatantra, 17 November 1956.

  56Gopal, Nehru, vol. 2, pp. 291–9.

  57Frank Moraes, India Today (New York: Macmillan, 1960), pp. 198–9.

  58See T. J. S. George, Krishna Menon: A Biography (London: Cape, 1964).

  59Vincent Sheean, Nehru: The Years of Power (London: Victor Gollancz, 1960), pp. 144–5.

  60See news report in the Current, 15 February 1956.

  61United Nations World, quoted in the Current, 21 April 1954.

  62Sisela Bok, Alva Myrdal: A Daughter’s Memoir (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1991), p. 252.

  63K. M. Pannikar, In Two Chinas: Memoirs of a Diplomat (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1955), pp. 80–2.

  64Nehru, India’s Foreign Policy, pp. 302–3.

  65Nehru to Vijayalakshmi Pandit, 1 November 1953, Vijayalakshmi Pandit Papers, NMML.

  66SPC, vol. 10, pp. 335–41. Cf. also Marc C. Feer, ‘Tibet in Sino-Indian Relations’, India Quarterly, vol. 9, no. 4, 1953.

  67D. K. Karaka, ‘Nehru’s Neutralism Brings Mao to our Frontier’, the Current, 29 November 1950.

  68SPC, vol. 10, pp. 342–7.

  69Vijayalakshmi Pandit to Jawaharlal Nehru, 16 May 1952, copy in File 123, C. Rajagopalachari Papers, Fifth Instalment, NMML.

  70John Rowland, A History of Sino-Indian Relations: Hostile Co-existence (Princeton: D. Van Nostrand, 1967), chapter 7.

  71Bajpai to Subimal Dutt, 18 October 1954, letter in possession of Dr Supriya Guha. It has been claimed that Patel’s famous letter to Nehru on Tibet was actually drafted by Bajpai (personal communication from his son, K. S. Bajpai).

  72Gopal, Nehru, vol. 2, pp. 227–30; Moraes, India Today, p. 191. Among the topics discussed by Nehru and Mao was the possibility of an atomic war between the superpowers. When the Indian said he dreaded the prospect, the Chinese leader answered that he welcomed it, because while Western imperialism would be destroyed the more populous socialist bloc would still have some men standing; these would then reproduce themselves, and in time ‘the whole world would become socialist’. See Stuart Schram, Mao Tse-tung (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967), p. 291 and n.

  73News report in the Times of India, 3 November 1954.

  74Notes in File 6, Subimal Dutt Papers, NMML; George N. Patterson, Tragic Destiny (London: Faber and Faber, 1959), pp. 160–3.


  75Letters to ‘R’ dated 8 December 1956, in File 46, C. Rajagopalachari Papers, Fourth Instalment, NMML.

  76Sir Charles Bell, quoted in Dorothy Woodman, Himalayan Frontiers: A Political Review of British, Chinese, Indian and Russian Rivalries (London: Barrie and Rockcliff, 1969) p. 179. Woodman’s book remains the best historical account of the origins of the border dispute between India and China. But see also Hsiao-Ting Lin, ‘Boundary, Sovereignty, and Imagination: Reconsidering the Frontier Disputes between British India and Republican China, 1914–47’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, vol. 32, no. 3, 2004.

  77On Elwin, the IFAS and their work in NEFA, see Ramachandra Guha, Savaging the Civilized: Verrier Elwin, His Tribals, and India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), chapter 11.

  78Woodman, Himalayan Frontiers, p. 66.

  79‘Indo-Pakistan Clash of Ideologies’, Times of India, 26 January 1952.

  80Gopal, Nehru, vol. 2, pp. 82–8; Gargi Chakravartty, Coming out of Partition: Refugee Women of Bengal (New Delhi: Bluejay Books, 2005), pp. 15–25.

  81I have simplified and summarized a complex story told in detail in A. A. Michel, The Indus Rivers: A Study of the Effects of Partition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967).

  82See J. B. Das Gupta, Indo-Pakistan Relations, 1947–1955 (Amsterdam: Djambatan, 1958), pp. 51–2.

  83‘Feelings in the Capital about the Trade Pact with Pakistan’, unsigned note dated 28 February 1951, in File 61, C. Rajagopalachari Papers, Fourth Instalment, NMML. A year before this, when Nehru signed his agreement with Liaqat Ali Khan, a critic complained that he ‘represents the beatific school which believes in self-flagellation in reconciliation [with] the enemy’. ‘Shridharani from New Delhi’, the Current, 12 April 1950.

  84Dawn, 19, 24, 25 and 28 January 1955.

  85N. V. Rajkumar, The Problem of French India (New Delhi: All-India Congress Committee, 1951); Governor of Madras to President of India, 16 April 1954, in File 215, C. Rajagopalachari Papers, Fifth Instalment, NMML; Dawn, 27 January 1955.

  86Times of India, 2 November 1955.

  87As quoted in Goa and the Indian Union (Lisbon: Secretariado Nacional Da Informação, 1954).

  88See Portuguese India: A Survey of Conditions After 400 Years of Foreign Colonial Rule (Bombay: Goa Congress Committee, 1939); Julião Menezes, Goa’s Freedom Struggle (Bombay: privately published, 1947).

  89R. M. Lala, ‘Report on Daman’, the Current, 22 November 1950.

  90Aloysius Soares, Down the Corridors of Time: Recollections and Reflexions, vol. 2: 1948–70 (Bombay: privately published, 1973), pp. 45ff.; the Current, 25 August 1954.

  91Homer A. Jack, Inside Goa (New Delhi: Information Service of India, 1955); P. D. Gaitonde, The Liberation of Goa: A Participant’s View of History (London: C. Hurst and Co., 1987).

  92Y. D. Gundevia, Outside the Archives (Hyderabad: Sangam Books, 1984), pp. 18–19.

  93Letter of 22 January 1953, in Nehru correspondence, Y. D. Gundevia Papers, NMML.

  94C. Rajagopalachari to Edwina Mountbatten, 5 September 1950, File 189, C. Rajagopalachari Papers, Fifth Instalment, NMML.

  95See Carlo Feltrinelli, Secret Service (London: Granta Books, 2002).

  96Bok, Alva Myrdal, p. 243.

  9. REDRAWING THE MAP

  1CWMG, vol. 89, pp. 312–13.

  2‘The Question of Language’ (1937), in Nehru, The Unity of India: Collected Writings, 1937–1940 (London: Lindsay Drummond, 1941), pp. 232–3.

  3Quoted in Robert D. King, Nehru and the Language Politics of India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 102.

  4CWMG, vol. 90, p. 86.

  5Ibid., p. 494.

  6See letter of 8 June 1948 to Tushar Kanti Ghosh, in Subject File 82, C. Rajagopalachari Papers, Fifth Instalment, NMML.

  7Report of the Linguistic Provinces Commission (New Delhi: Constituent Assembly of India, 1948), paras 146 and 147.

  8King, Nehru and Language Politics, pp. 107, 108.

  9See Baldev Raj Nayar, Minority Politics in the Punjab (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960), chapters 2 and 3.

  10Satindra Singh, ‘Master Tara Singh: A Born Rebel’, Thought, 9 December 1967.

  11Nayar, Minority Politics, p. 143.

  12Quoted ibid., p. 36.

  13The best account of the history of the Andhra movement, on which the preceding paragraphs largely draw, is K. V. Narayana Rao’s The Emergence of Andhra Pradesh (Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1973).

  14The Current, 2 January 1952. See also Selig Harrison, India: The Most Dangerous Decades (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960), pp. 234–5.

  15Congress Sandesh, quoted in Narayana Rao, Emergence of Andhra Pradesh, p. 241.

  16See Times of India, 24 February 1952.

  17See ‘Kowshika’, The Boundaries of Andhra Province (Pudukottai: Anbu Nilayam, 1947).

  18Narayana Rao, Emergence of Andhra Pradesh, p. 243.

  19History of Andhra Movement, vol. 2 (Hyderabad: Committee for History of Andhra Movement, 1985), p. 496.

  20Gandhi to T. Prakasam, 4 January 1947, in History of Andhra Movement, pp. 496–7; also CWMG, vol. 86, p. 242.

  21Interview with Professor Béteille, New Delhi, December 2001.

  22See Subject File 123, C. Rajagopalachari Papers, Fifth Instalment, NMML.

  23Cf. P. R. Rao, History of Modern Andhra (New Delhi: Sterling Publishers, 1984), p. 130.

  24Letter of 18 August 1953 to General Sir Roy Bucher, Subject File 124, C. Rajagopalachari Papers, Fifth Instalment, NMML.

  25S. Gopal, Jawaharlal Nehru: A Biography, vol. 2: 1947–1956 (London: Cape, 1979), p. 259.

  26Memorandum Submitted to the States Reorganization Commission (Bombay: Bombay Citizens Committee, 1954).

  27The activities of the Committee, including its strategies for fund-raising and public relations, can be followed through the massive material contained in File 383, Purushottamdas Thakurdas Papers, NMML.

  28M. S. Golwalkar, quoted in Times of India, 8 November 1951.

  29Times of India, 24 May 1954.

  30Gadgil and Deshmukh are both quoted in Robert W. Stein, The Process of Opposition in India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), p. 46.

  31Samyukta Maharashtra Parishad, ‘Memorandum to the States Reorganization Committee’, May 1954, copy in the library of the Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics, Puné. D. R. Gadgil was the chief draughtsman of this memorandum.

  32See report of meeting of 20 June 1954 in File 383, Purushottamdas Thakurdas Papers, NMML.

  33This section is based on Report of the States Reorganization Commission (Delhi: Manager of Publications, 1955).

  34See Lok Sabha Debates, vol. X, 1955.

  35The Current, 4 January 1956.

  36The change of name was affected towards the end of 1955.

  37Taya Zinkin, Reporting India (London: Chatto and Windus, 1962), p. 108.

  38The Current, 25 January 1956. See also V. M. Bhave, ‘Struggle for Maharashtra’, New Age, September 1956.

  39Letter of 23 January 1956, Subject File 68, C. D. Deshmukh Papers, NMML.

  40See papers in Subject File 67, C. D. Deshmukh Papers, NMML.

  41See letters and papers in Subject File 4, N. V. Gadgil Papers, NMML.

  42As reported in alarm to the Home Minister, G. B. Pant, by Sir Purushottamdas Thakurdas. See letter of 20 January 1956, in File 383, Purushottamdas Thakurdas Papers, NMML.

  43The Current, 15 and 29 February 1956.

  44Y. D. Phadke, Politics and Language (Bombay: Himalaya Publishing House, 1979), chapter 6.

  45See Baburao Patel, Burning Words: A Critical History of Nine Years of Nehru’s Rule from 1947 to 1956 (Bombay: Sumati Publications, 1956), pp. 106–8.

  46Ravi Kalia, Bhubaneshwar: From a Temple Town to a Capital City (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1994).

  47Janaki Nair, ‘“Past Perfect”: Architecture and Public Life in Bangalore’. I am grateful to Dr Nair for showing me a copy of this ms prior to its p
ublication in her history of Bangalore, The Promise of the Metropolis: Bangalore’s Twentieth Century (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005).

  48Times of India, 26 February 1952.

  49‘Andhra Answers Dulles’, Economic Weekly, 5 March 1955.

  10. THE CONQUEST OF NATURE

  1W. Burns, ed., Sons of the Soil: Studies of the Indian Cultivator, 2nd edn (Delhi: Manager of Publications, 1944), introduction.

  2Gyanendra Pandey, The Ascendancy of the Congress in Uttar Pradesh, 1926–34: A Study in Imperfect Mobilization (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1978); Peter Reeves, Landlords and Governments in Uttar Pradesh: A Study of their Relations until Zamindari Abolition (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1991).

  3Chitra Bhanu, ‘Food Situation Getting Worse in Malabar’, Swatantra, 29 July 1947.

  4See, for illuminating contemporary analyses, Z. A. Ahmad, The Agrarian Problem in India: A General Survey (Allahabad: All-India Congress Committee, 1936); S. Y. Krishnaswami, Rural Problems in Madras (Madras: Government of Madras, 1947). Valuable surveys of the economic history of colonial India include V. B. Singh, ed., Economic History of India: 1857–1956 (Bombay: Allied Publishers, 1965); Dharma Kumar, ed., The Cambridge Economic History of India, vol. 2: c. 1757–c. 1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); and Tirthankar Ray, The Indian Economy, 1857–1947 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006).

  5See, inter alia, Dwijendra Tripathi, ed., Business and Politics in India: A Historical Perspective (Delhi: Manohar, 1991); Medha M. Kudaisya, The Life and Times of G. D. Birla (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003).

  6J. K. Galbraith, ‘Rival Economic Theories in India’, Foreign Affairs, vol. 36, no. 4, 1958, p. 591.

  7See Meghnad Saha, ‘The Problem of Indian Rivers’ (1938) and ‘Technological Revolution in Industry – How the Russians Did It’ (1943), both in Santimay Chatterjee, ed., Collected Works of Meghnad Saha, vol. 2 (Bombay: Orient Longman, 1986).

  8Lajpat Rai, The Evolution of Japan and Other Papers (Calcutta: Modern Review, 1922).

  9K. T. Shah, ‘Principles of National Planning’, in Iqbal Singh and Raja Rao, eds, Whither India? (Baroda: Padmaja Publications, 1948). Shah was a Bombay economist who served as Secretary of the NPC. See also R. Chattopadhyay, ‘The Idea of Planning in India, 1930–1951’, unpublished PhD dissertation, Australian National University, Canberra, 1985.