India After Gandhi Revised and Updated Edition

by Ramachandra Guha

  10See, for example, National Planning Committee: Report of the Sub-Committee on Power and Fuel (Bombay: Vora and Co., 1949).

  11Memorandum Outlining a Plan of Economic Development for India (Parts One and Two) (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1945), emphases added. The signatories to the Bombay Plan included G. D. Birla, Kasturbhai Lalbhai, Lala Shri Ram, J. R. D. Tata, and Purushottamdas Thakurdas.

  12The intellectual climate of the time, as it pertained to economic policy, is captured in Tirthankar Ray, ‘Economic History and Modern India: Redefining the Link’, Journal of Economic Perspectives, vol. 16, no. 3, 2002; Nariaki Nakatozo, ‘The Transfer of Economic Power in India: Indian Big Business, the British Raj and Development Planning, 1930–1948’, in Mushirul Hasan and Nariaki Nakatozo, eds, The Unfinished Agenda: Nation-Building in South Asia (Delhi: Manohar, 2001); Pranab Bardhan, ‘A Note on Nehru as Economic Planner’, in Milton Israel, ed., Nehru and the Twentieth Century (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991).

  13Speech in Lok Sabha on 15 December 1952, in Planning and Development: Speeches of Jawaharlal Nehru (1952–56) (New Delhi: Publications Division, n.d.), pp. 7–8. See also R. Ramadas, ‘Report on the Draft Five-Year Plan’, Swatantra, 1 December 1951.

  14See Times of India, 4 November 1954.

  15Cf. A. H. Hanson, The Process of Planning: A Study of India’s Five-Year Plans, 1950–1964 (London: Oxford University Press, 1966), pp. 111–20.

  16Sunil Khilnani, The Idea of India (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997), p. 83. Mahalanobis was an intimate of Rabindranath Tagore – it was said that he had a better knowledge of Tagore’s poems and plays than did the poet himself.

  17See, for details, Ashok Rudra, Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis: A Biography (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996).

  18This and the following two paragraphs draw upon Mahalanobis’s letters to Pitambar Pant, June–July 1954, Pitambar Pant Papers, NMML. See also Khilnani, Idea of India, pp. 83f.

  19Mahalanobis wrote that he was ‘in favour of seeking the help of both USA and USSR (and of the UK and other countries) in developing the industrial production of India’ (letter of 7 July 1954, in Pitambar Pant Papers, NMML). He was in this respect genuinely non-partisan. In the years to come his ISI played host to top economists from both sides of the Iron Curtain – to men such as Simon Kuznets, Oskar Lange, Charles Bettelheim, Jan Tinbergen and many, many others. For details see Rudra, Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis, chapter 14.

  20‘Recommendations for the Formulation of the Second Five-Year Plan’, and ‘The Approach of Operational Research to Planning in India’, both written in 1955, both reprinted in P. K. Bose and M. Mukherjee, eds, P. C. Mahalanobis: Papers on Planning (Calcutta: Statistical Publishing Society, 1985). Along with these narrative papers, Mahalanobis also framed two mathematical models of economic growth. These are discussed in T. N. Srinivasan, ‘Professor Mahalanobis and Economics’, printed as chapter 11 in Rudra, Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis.

  21Hanson, Process of Planning, pp. 128–30. See also K. N. Raj, ‘Model-Making and the Second Plan’, Economic Weekly, 26 January 1956.

  22Government of India, The Second Five-Year Plan (New Delhi: Planning Commission, 1956), p. 6.

  23P. C. Mahalanobis, ‘Draft Plan Frame for the Second Five-Year Plan’, Economic Weekly, special issue, 18 June 1955.

  24Hanson, Process of Planning, pp. 459–62.

  25Haldane to Mahalanobis, 16 May 1955, quoted in S. Gopal, Jawaharlal Nehru: A Biography, vol. 2: 1947–1956 (London: Cape), pp. 305–6.

  26Letter of 22 December 1952, in Jawaharlal Nehru, Letters to Chief Ministers, edited by G. Parthasarathi, 5 vols (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1985–9) hereafter cited as LCM, vol. 3, pp. 205–7.

  27Letter of 22 December 1952, LCM, vol. 3, p. 205; letter of 14 February 1956, LCM, vol. 4, p. 346.

  28Letter of 13 January 1955, LCM, vol. 4, p. 123.

  29‘Triangular Contest for Steel Plant’, Economic Weekly, 19 December 1953; Taya Zinkin, Challenges in India (New York: Walker and Co., 1966), chapter 7.

  30The friend was Joe Miller, the late and legendary librarian of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies.

  31See Subject File 5, K. P. S. Menon Papers, NMML.

  32Ved Mehta, Portrait of India (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970), pp. 285–97.

  33S. Bhoothalingam, ‘Rourkela Steel Plant’, Indian Review, April 1956.

  34For example Meghnad Saha, My Experiences in Soviet Russia (Calcutta: publisher unknown, 1945); K. L. Rao, Cusecs and Candidates: Memoirs of an Engineer (New Delhi: Metropolitan, 1978).

  35Daniel Klingensmith, ‘One Valley and a Thousand: America, India and the World in the Image of the Tennessee Valley Authority, 1945–1970’, unpublished PhD thesis, Department of History, University of Chicago, 1999, p. 228.

  36A. N. Khosla to C. Rajagopalachari, 30 August 1953, in Subject File 124, C. Rajagopalachari Papers, Fifth Instalment, NMML.

  37Henry C. Hart, New India’s Rivers (Bombay: Orient Longman, 1956), pp. 97–100.

  38‘India Marches on: Bhakra–Nangal Project’, MysIndia, 28 November 1954. Much smaller was the complementary Nangal project, a low concrete dam located eight miles downstream of the Bhakra.

  39Indian Journal of Power and River Valley Development, Bhakra–Nangal special issue, 1956.

  40This portrait of Slocum is based on J. D. Sahi, Odd Man Out: Exploits of a Crazy Idealist (New Delhi: Gitanjai Publishing House, 1991), pp. 55–69, 133; M. S. Randhawa, A History of Agriculture in India, vol. 4: 1947–1981 (New Delhi: Indian Council of Agricultural Research, 1986), pp. 92–3.

  41Hart, New India’s Rivers, p. 225; report in the Current, 14 July 1954.

  42Obaid Siddiqi, Science, Society, Government and Politics: Some Remarks on the Ideas of Jawaharlal Nehru, Zaheer Memorial Lecture, Indian Science Congress, Cochin, February 1990.

  43See Shiv Visvanathan, Organizing for Science: The Making of an Industrial Research Laboratory (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1985).

  44On Bhabha see Robert S. Anderson, ‘Building Scientific Institutions in India: Saha and Bhabha’, Occasional Paper, Centre for Developing-Area Studies, McGill University, 1975.

  45George Greenstein, ‘A Gentleman of the Old School: Homi Bhabha and the Development of Science in India’, American Scholar, vol. 61, no. 3, 1992, p. 417.

  46Hindustan Times, 3 October 1952. The Community Development programmes were inspired by, and to a great extent modelled upon, the work of Albert Mayer in eastern Uttar Pradesh in the late 1940s. See Alice Thorner, ‘Nehru, Albert Mayer, and Origins of Community Projects’, Economic and Political Weekly, 24 January 1981.

  47S. C. Dube, India’s Changing Villages (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1958), pp. 157–63, 192–216 etc.

  48T. S. Epstein, Economic Development and Social Change in South India (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1962), esp. pp. 27–47.

  49For details see B. H. Farmer, Agricultural Colonization in India Since Independence (London: Oxford University Press, 1974).

  50See, inter alia, R. P. Masani, The Five Gifts (London: Collins, 1957); Hallam Tennyson, Saint on the March: The Story of Vinoba (London: Victor Gollancz, 1961); Geoffrey Ostergaard and Melville Currell, The Gentle Anarchists: A Study of the Leaders of the Sarvodaya Movement for Non-violent Revolution in India (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971). There is a characteristically acid portrait of Bhave in V. S. Naipaul’s A Wounded Civilization (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977).

  51See Ronald J. Herring, Land to the Tiller: the Political Economy of Agrarian Reform in South Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983); ‘Slow Pace of Land Reforms’, Economic Weekly, 30 May 1953; S. K. Dey, Power to the People? A Chronicle of India 1947–67 (Bombay: Orient Longman, 1969), pp. 232f.

  52The climate of economic policy in the postwar world is usefully sketched in Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw, The Commanding Heights: The Battle for the World Economy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2002), chapters 2 and 3. />
  53Hanson, Process of Planning, p. 128.

  54See ‘A Note on Dissent on the Memorandum of the Panel of Economists’ (1955), reprinted in Mahesh P. Bhatt and S. B. Mehta, Planned Progress or Planned Chaos? Selected Prophetic Writings of Prof. B. R. Shenoy (Madras: EastWest Books, 1996), pp. 3–24.

  55‘A Memorandum to the Government of India, 1955’, in Friedman on India (New Delhi: Centre for Civil Society, 2000), pp. 27–43.

  56Note of 10 October 1955, reprinted in V. N. Balasubramanyam, Conversations with Indian Economists (London: Macmillan, 2001), pp. 198–201.

  57It is noteworthy that the essays of Shenoy, Krishnamurti and Friedman were printed for public distribution only in the 1990s – by which time, of course, the political and intellectual climate was far more congenial to their views.

  58‘Not a People’s Plan’, Economic Weekly, 18 June 1955.

  59I have written elsewhere, and at greater length, about these ‘Green Gandhians’; as in Ramachandra Guha, Environmentalism: A Global History (New York: Addison-Wesley-Longman, 2000), pp. 23–4, 67–8, and ‘Mahatma Gandhi and the Environmental Movement’, Parisar Annual Lecture, Puné, 1992.

  60Reports in the Current, 11 June 1952 and 8 June 1955.

  61For the consensus among economists see I. G. Patel, Glimpses of Indian Economic Policy: An Insider’s View (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002), esp. chapter 2.

  62Memorandum, p. 92.

  63‘A Correspondent’, ‘On Revisiting the Damodar Valley’, Economic Weekly, 28 February 1953.

  64Letter of 2 October 1952, LCM, vol. 3, pp. 114–15. Nehru was speaking here of the Tungabhadra dam, which he visited barely a month before coming to Bokaro.

  11. THE LAW AND THE PROPHETS

  1André Malraux, Antimemoirs, trans. Terence Kilmartin (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1968), p. 145. The conversation took place sometime in 1958.

  2CAD, vol. 8, pp. 543–6, 722–3 (emphasis added).

  3Ibid., pp. 551, 781.

  4For an analysis of the Rau Committee see Chitra Sinha, ‘Hindu Code Bill (1942–1956) and Feminist Consciousness in Bombay’, unpublished PhD thesis, Department of History, Mumbai University, 2003.

  5See for example, Bina Agarwal, ‘A Bill of Her Own?’, New Indian Express, 23 December 2004.

  6Ambedkar’s speeches on the bill are reproduced in Valerian Rodrigues, ed., The Essential Writings of B. R. Ambedkar (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 495–516.

  7Dhananjay Keer, Dr. Ambedkar: Life and Mission, 3rd edn (1971; reprint, Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1995), p. 417.

  8The correspondence between Prasad and Nehru has been reproduced in SPC, vol. 6, pp. 399–404.

  9SPC, vol. 9, pp. 109–11.

  10This account of the doings of the All-India Anti-Hindu-Code Bill Committee is based on the reports and documents in Subject File 106, D. P. Mishra Papers, Third and Fourth Instalments, NMML.

  11J. D. M. Derrett, Hindu Law Past and Present (Calcutta: A. Mukerjee and Co., 1957), pp. 69–70. For a sampling of the conservative legal opposition to the code, see K. S. Hajela, ‘The Draft Hindu Code, its Exposition, Comment and Criticism’, All-India Reporter (Journal), 1949, pp. 64–7. For a modernist view, see Lahar Singh Mehta, ‘Some Implications of the Hindu Code Bill, 1948’, All India Reporter (Journal), 1950, pp. 26–9.

  12The debates on the Hindu code in the provisional Parliament are reproduced in Vasant Moon, ed., Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar: Writings and Speeches, vol. 14 (Bombay: Government of Maharashtra, 1995).

  13See Files 422, 423, 424 and 430, Delhi Police Records, Ninth Instalment, NMML.

  14Rajendra Prasad to Nehru, 15 September 1951, copy in Subject File 189, C. Rajagopalachari Papers, Fifth Instalment, NMML.

  15Nehru to Rajendra Prasad, 15 September 1951; secret note to Cabinet by Nehru, dated 25 September 1951, both in Subject File 46, C. Rajagopalachari Papers, Fourth Instalment, NMML.

  16Derrett, Hindu Law, p. 71.

  17The text of Ambedkar’s resignation speech was reproduced in the Hindustan Times, 12 October 1951. Cf. also Vasant Moon, ed., Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar: Writings and Speeches, vol. 15 (Mumbai: Government of Maharashtra, 1997), pp. 825–8.

  18See File 127, Delhi Police Records, Sixth Instalment, NMML.

  19See Lok Sabha Debates, 26 April 1955.

  20The most significant of Nehru’s parliamentary interventions on the subject are collected in Jawaharlal Nehru’s Speeches, vol. 3: March 1953–August 1957 (New Delhi: Publications Division, n.d.), pp. 438–54 (section entitled ‘Changing Hindu Society’).

  21Nehru to K. N. Katju, 13 June 1954; to R. Venkataraman, 30 September 1954; SWJN2, vol. 26, pp. 173, 180.

  22See, for example, the speeches of K. C. Sharma, B. D. Shastri and Nand Lal Sharma, Lok Sabha Debates, 29 April, 2 May and 13 December 1955, respectively; speech of H. C. Mathur, Rajya Sabha Debates, 11 December 1954.

  23Rajya Sabha Debates, 9 December 1954.

  24Interventions of Seeta Parmanand and M. P. N. Sinha, Rajya Sabha Debates, 8 and 6 December 1954. To placate the orthodox, the law minister changed the title of the bill from the ‘Hindu Marriage and Divorce Bill’ to the ‘Hindu Marriage Bill’ – this to put the accent ‘not on the dissolution of marriage’ but on the ‘maintenance of marriage [which] is more important’ (Lok Sabha Debates, 26 April 1955). The change, needless to say, was purely cosmetic.

  25Lok Sabha Debates, 29 April 1955. Others opposed the clause out of not logic, but envy. As S. Mahanty sourly noted, ‘it makes a discrimination in favour of the Muslims who may marry four wives under the Shariat law and not incur any of the offences under this Act’ (Rajya Sabha Debates, 6 December 1954).

  26Lok Sabha Debates, 2 May 1955.

  27Lok Sabha Debates, 26 and 29 April 1955.

  28Intervention by Shri Khandekar, Lok Sabha Debates, 29 April 1955.

  29Ibid., Rajya Sabha Debates, 8 December 1954.

  30Intervention by M. Muhammad Ismail, Rajya Sabha Debates, 11 December 1954.

  31Lok Sabha Debates, 29 April 1955.

  32Intervention by Nand Lal Sharma, Lok Sabha Debates, 13 December 1955.

  33Lok Sabha Debates, 13 December 1955.

  34Intervention by S. S. More, Lok Sabha Debates, 2 May 1955.

  35Marc Galanter, Law and Society in Modern India, ed. by Rajeev Dhavan (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 29; J. D. M. Derrett, Religion, Law and the State in India (London: Faber and Faber, 1968), p. 326.

  36Cf. Rajya Sabha Debates, 11 December 1954, where Dr P. Subbarayan gave his ‘special meed of tribute to Dr. Ambedkar who is not here but who laboured hard to push through the Hindu Code before the last Parliament but circumstances did not permit of this measure going through’.

  37Lok Sabha Debates, 6 December 1956.

  38For a fine discussion of these questions see Lotika Sarkar, ‘Jawaharlal Nehru and the Hindu Code Bill’, in B. R. Nanda, ed., Indian Women: From Purdah to Modernity (New Delhi: Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, 1976).

  39Quoted in D. E. Smith, India as a Secular State (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), p. 290.

  40See Parliamentary Debates, 17 September 1951, excerpted in Eminent Parliamentarians Series, Monograph Series, Dr Syama Prasad Mookerjee (New Delhi: Lok Sabha Secretariat, 1990), pp. 82f.

  41On the workings of the new laws in the several decades they have been in operation, see J. D. M. Derrett, A Critique of Modern Hindu Law (Bombay: N. M. Tripathi, 1970); Satyajeet A. Desai, Mulla’s Principles of Hindu Law, 18th edn (New Delhi: Butterworths India, 2001). The caveat ‘somewhat’ is in deference to feminist arguments that while the new bills removed many of the disadvantages suffered by Hindu women, they did not bestow ‘radical equality’ on them. See Archana Parashar, Women and Family Law Reform in India (New Delhi: Sage, 1992), pp. 79–134.

  12. SECURING KASHMIR

  1Sisir Kumar Gupta, Kashmir: A Study in India–Pakistan Relations (Bombay: Asia Publishing House, 1966), p. 365.

  2See Michael Brecher, The Struggle for K
ashmir (New York: Oxford University Press, 1953), p. 111.

  3Lionel Fielden, ‘India Revisited: Indo-Pak Problems’, Indian Review, May 1950.

  4Note by Nehru on Kashmir, dated 9 January 1951, in Subject File 62, C. Rajagopalachari Papers, Fourth Instalment, NMML.

  5See Jawaharlal Nehru Correspondence, Vijayalakshmi Pandit Papers, NMML.

  6Cable to State Department by Henderson, quoted in Ajit Bhattacharjea, Kashmir: The Wounded Valley (New Delhi: UBS, 1994), pp. 196–7.

  7See Abdullah to Gopalaswami Ayyangar, 16 January 1951, and note on file by latter, both in Subject File 62, C. Rajagopalachari Papers, Fourth Instalment, NMML.

  8See ‘Leaderlessness of Jammu’, article of March 1950, reprinted in Balraj Puri, Jammu – A Clue to the Kashmir Tangle (Delhi: privately published, 1966), pp. 20–3.

  9Baburao Patel, Burning Words: A Critical History of Nine Years of Nehru’s Rule from 1947 to 1956 (Bombay: Sumati Publications, 1956), pp. 147–8.

  10The Sheikh’s speech is printed in extenso in Gupta, Kashmir, pp. 367–70.

  11Prem Nath Bazaz, The History of Struggle for Freedom in Kashmir, Cultural and Political: From the Earliest Times to the Present Day (New Delhi: Kashmir Publishing Co., 1954), pp. 569–71.

  12Ian Stephens, Horned Moon: An Account of a Journey through Pakistan, Kashmir, and Afghanistan (London: Chatto and Windus, 1953), pp. 212–13. From Stephens’ book we learn that he was in the Valley in April 1952 – exact dates are not given, so we cannot say whether he talked to the Sheikh before or after his notorious Ranbirsinghpura speech. That speech had also hinted that perhaps Kashmir’s place in India was ‘unnatural’. This might have been a mere coincidence in thinking. On the other hand, if Abdullah met Stephens before Ranbirsinghpura, his speech might very well have been influenced by one who cynically saw ‘an anti-Muslim substructure’ in ‘Pandit Nehru’s new secular Republic’ (Horned Moon, p. 267).

  13Gupta, Kashmir, pp. 371–2.

  14Speeches of 11 and 19 August 1952, copies in Subject File 4, Y. D. Gundevia Papers, NMML.