India After Gandhi Revised and Updated Edition

by Ramachandra Guha

  15See Daniel Thorner, ‘The Kashmir Land Reforms: Some Personal Impressions’, Economic Weekly, 12 September 1953.

  16Cf. Richard L. Park, ‘India Argues with Kashmir’, Far Eastern Survey, 2 July 1952.

  17Eminent Parliamentarians Series, Monograph Series, Dr Syama Prasad Mookerjee (New Delhi: Lok Sabah Secretariat, 1990), pp. 18–19, 109–23.

  18Balraj Madhok, Portrait of a Martyr: Biography of Dr Shyama Prasad Mookerjee (Bombay: Jaico Publishing House, 1969), pp. 159–61.

  19Karan Singh, Autobiography (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 149–50.

  20The Current, 10 and 24 December 1952.

  21The letters exchanged between Mookerjee on the one side and Nehru and Abdullah on the other were later published by the Jana Sangh in Integrate Kashmir: Mookerjee–Nehru and Abdullah Correspondence (Lucknow: Bharat Press, 1953).

  22See Files 12, 127 and 164, Delhi Police Records, Eighth Instalment, NMML.

  23The Current (Bombay), 26 August 1953.

  24Quoted in S. Gopal, Jawaharlal Nehru: A Biography, vol. 2: 1947–1956 (London: Cape, 1979), p. 131, n. 65.

  25For a contemporary interpretation along these lines, see Sadiq Ali and Madhu Limaye, Report on Kashmir (New Delhi: Praja Socialist Party, 1953). This reports that the Sheikh ‘was often heard to remark in his private talks that if Jammu wanted to go out of Kashmir it was welcome to do so; in fact it would be good riddance. Its merger in India would serve just the purpose he had in view, namely an Independent Kashmir’ (p. 5).

  26Madhok, Portrait of a Martyr, pp. 147–65.

  27See correspondence between Mookerjee and Rajagopalachari in Subject File 124, C. Rajagopalachari Papers, Fifth Instalment, NMML.

  28Madhok, Portrait of a Martyr, pp. 240–2.

  29Letter of 2 July to Rajagopalachari, Subject File 123, Rajagopalachari Papers, Fifth Instalment, NMML.

  30The Current, 1 July 1953.

  31See File 164, Delhi Police Records, Eighth Instalment, NMML.

  32See reports and correspondence, File 166, Delhi Police Records, Ninth Instalment, NMML.

  33Gopal, Nehru, vol. 2, pp. 130–1, which also excerpts Nehru’s letters to Abdullah.

  34Nehru to Rajagopalachari, 31 July 1953, Subject File 123, C. Rajagopalachari Papers, Fifth Instalment, NMML.

  35See B. N. Mullik, My Years with Nehru: Kashmir (Bombay: Allied Publishers, 1971), chapter 3.

  36The Current, 26 August 1953. Three years later a copy of the Id speech that Abdullah was to have made surfaced. This did not call directly for independence, but reopened the question of accession to India and also, for the first time, asked that Pakistan be made a party to the dispute. See Mridula Sarabhai, ed., Sheikh– Sadiq Correspondence (August to October 1956) (New Delhi: privately published, 1956), appendix I: ‘Id Speech’.

  37Karan Singh, Autobiography, pp. 156–64.

  38See reports in File 73, Delhi Police Records, Sixth Instalment, NMML.

  39Gopal, Nehru, vol. 2, pp. 132–3; Mullik, My Years with Nehru: Kashmir, pp. 42–7.

  40P. N. Kaula and K. L. Dhar, Kashmir Speaks (Delhi: S. Chand and Co., 1950), pp. 189–90. An American journalist wrote of the Bakshi that he was a ‘realist [who] can run a party machine and keep its joints oiled’, adding that he seemed to be ‘constituted chiefly of iron or steel’ (Vincent Sheean, Nehru: The Years of Power (London: Victor Gollancz, 1960), pp. 109–10). This likewise brings Patel to mind; not least because he was known as the ‘Iron Man of India’.

  41The Hindu, 25 August and 14 and 29 September 1953.

  42The Current, 31 March, 25 August and 6 October 1954 and 12 October 1955.

  43The Current, 14 November 1955. Cf. also Sheikh Abdullah, Flames of the Chinar: An Autobiography, abridged and trans. Khushwant Singh (New Delhi: Penguin India, 1993), chapter 18.

  44See File 73, Delhi Police Records, Sixth Instalment, NMML.

  45General Roy Bucher to Rajagopalachari, 14 August 1953, in Subject File 124, Fifth Instalment, C. Rajagopalachari Papers, NMML.

  46Bhattacharjea, Kashmir, p. 205.

  47See Spratt’s unsigned column ‘The World This Week’, MysIndia, 13 July, 3 and 17 August, and 9 November 1952 respectively.

  13. TRIBAL TROUBLE

  1This account of the early years of the Naga National Council is based on Mildred Archer, ‘Journal of a Stay in the Naga Hills, 9 July to 4 December 1947’, Mss Eur F236/362, OIOC. Archer, the wife of the last deputy commissioner in the Naga Hills, W. G. Archer, had interviewed a wide cross-section of the NNC membership and subscribed to the NNC journal. In later years she became an authority on British art in India.

  2Charles Chasie, The Naga Imbroglio (Kohima: Standard Printers and Publishers, 1999), pp. 33–6.

  3The Crown colony scheme is discussed in a forthcoming book by Professor David Syiemlieh of the North-eastern Hill University, Shillong.

  4A. R. H. Macdonald to P. F. Adams (secretary to the governor of Assam), 23 March 1947, copy in Mss Eur F236/76, OIOC. The ‘Lushai hills’ are now more familiarly known as the Mizo hills.

  5See A. Z. Phizo, The Fate of the Naga People: An Appeal to the World (London: privately published, July 1960).

  6CWMG, vol. 88, pp. 373–4. The context makes it clear that Gandhi was against the Nagas using guns and tanks though, of course, he would have opposed the Indian army’s use of them too.

  7Cf. J. H. Hutton, The Angami Nagas (London: Macmillan, 1921), p. 11 and passim.

  8See entry for 30 August 1947 in Archer, ‘Journal’. The invocation of God, and the recourse to American heroes, were a consequence of the deep influence on the Nagas of the Baptist missionaries who had converted them.

  9Entries for 27 September and 23 August 1947, in Archer, ‘Journal’.

  10CAD, vol. 4, pp. 947–8.

  11Useful studies of the tribal predicament include G. S. Ghurye, The Scheduled Tribes (Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1959; first published under a different title in 1943); C. von Fürer Haimendorf, Tribes of India: The Struggle for Survival (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982); Verrier Elwin, The Tribal World of Verrier Elwin: An Autobiography (Bombay: Oxford University Press, 1964); and K. S. Singh, Tribal Society in India (New Delhi: Manohar, 1985). See also André Béteille, ‘The Concept of Tribe with Special Reference to India’, in his Society and Politics in India: Essays in a Comparative Perspective (London: Athlone Press, 1991).

  12See Agapit Tirkey, Jharkhand Movement: A Study of its Dynamics (New Delhi: Other Media Communications, 2002), chapter 2.

  13Memorandum dated 1 May 1947, in Subject File 37, C. Rajagopalachari Papers, Fifth Instalment, NMML.

  14Jaipal’s speech is reproduced on pp. 2–14 of Ram Dayal Munda and S. Bosu Mullick, eds, The Jharkhand Movement: Indigenous Peoples’ Struggle for Autonomy in India (Copenhagen: IWGIA, 2003).

  15This paragraph is based on an anonymous three-part report on the Naga situation in the Current, 4, 11 and 18 July 1956, and on Nirmal Nibedon, Nagaland: The Night of the Guerillas (New Delhi: Lancer, 1983), pp. 24–5.

  16Letter to Jairamdas Daulatram, governor of Assam, 11 December 1950, in Subject File 188, C. Rajagopalachari Papers, Fifth Instalment, NMML.

  17A. Lanunungsang Ao, From Phizo to Muivah: The Naga National Question in North-east India (New Delhi: Mittal Publications, 2002), pp. 48–9.

  18‘No Independence for Nagas: Plain Speaking by Mr Nehru’, Times of India, 1 January 1952.

  19‘Demand for Naga State: Delegation Meets Nehru’, Times of India, 12 February 1952.

  20Report by Krishnalal Shridharani in the Current, 19 March 1952.

  21‘The Tribal Folk’, in Jawaharlal Nehru’s Speeches, vol. 2 (New Delhi: Publications Division, 1954), pp. 576f.

  22Nehru to Rajagopalachari, 26 October 1952, in Subject File 107, C. Rajagopalachari Papers, Fifth Instalment, NMML.

  23The report on the NEFA tour is reprinted in LCM, vol. 4, pp. 147–65.

  24NNC letter of 24 October 1952, quoted in the Current, 15 April 1953.

 
; 25Ramachandra Guha, Savaging the Civilized: Verrier Elwin, His Tribals, and India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), p. 285.

  26Entry for 10 July 1947 in Archer, ‘Journal’.

  27Arthur Swinson, quoted in Nibedon, Nagaland, p. 26.

  28Asoso Yonuo, The Rising Nagas: A Historical and Political Study (Delhi: Vivek Publishing House, 1974), pp. 210–13.

  29This account of the Phizo–Sakhrie rift is based on Nibedon, Nagaland, pp. 57–68.

  30Ibid., pp. 80–2.

  31Lt. Gen. S. P. P. Thorat, From Reveille to Retreat (New Delhi: Allied Publishers, 1986), chapter 15, ‘The Nagas’. As the commanding officer of the Eastern Command, General Thorat was in charge of operations against the rebels.

  32See clippings in Mss Eur F158/239, OIOC.

  33Dr S. R. S. Laing to Charles Pawsey, letters of ? June 1956 and 13 August 1956, in Box I, Pawsey Papers, CSAS.

  34Lok Sabha Debates, 23 August 1956.

  35India News, 8 December 1956; Manchester Guardian, 18 December 1956; both in Mss Eur F158/239, OIOC.

  36Ignes Kujur, ‘Jharkhand Betrayed’, in Munda and Bosu Mullick, The Jharkhand Movement, pp. 16ff.

  37Lok Sabha Debates, 22 November 1954; the Current, 16 February 1955.

  38Letter of 9 March 1955, in T. T. Krishnamachari Papers, NMML.

  39Nehru to Bishnuram Medhi, 13 May 1956, reproduced as appendix VII in Udayon Misra, The Periphery Strikes Back: Challenges to the Nation-State in Assam and Nagaland (Shimla: Indian Institute of Advanced Study, 200), pp. 203–4.

  14. THE SOUTHERN CHALLENGE

  1Report on the Second General Elections in India, 1957 (New Delhi: Election Commission, 1958).

  2Feroze Gandhi was also from the Nehrus’ home town, Allahabad. A Parsi by faith, he at first spelt his surname ‘Ghandy’. However, after he joined the national movement as a young man, he changed the spelling to bring it in line with that of Mahatma Gandhi. That amended surname proved to be of incalculable significance to his wife; for most foreigners, and not a few Indians, assumed that she was in some way related to the Mahatma.

  3Cf. Katherine Frank, Indira: A Life of Indira Nehru Gandhi (London: HarperCollins, 2001), pp. 240–1.

  4Indira Gandhi to Brijkrishna Chandiwala, 11 November 1957, Chandiwala Papers, NMML.

  5Nehru to Vijayalakshmi Pandit, 12 March 1957, quoted in Nayantara Sahgal, Indira Gandhi: Her Road to Power (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1982), pp. 1–2.

  6The data in this and the subsequent paragraphs are chiefly derived from the excellent statistical supplement on Indian elections printed as an appendix to the Journal of the Indian School of Political Economy, vol. 15, nos 1 and 2, 2003.

  7For the rise of the DMK in the 1950s, see Marguerite Ross Barnett, The Politics of Cultural Nationalism in South India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976).

  8The social history of modern Kerala has been treated with authority and insight in several books by Robin Jeffrey. See specially his The Decline of Nair Dominance (1975; 2nd edn New Delhi: Manohar, 2003) and Politics, Women and Wellbeing: How Kerala Became a ‘Model’ (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992).

  9See Dilip M. Menon, Caste, Nationalism and Communism in South India: Malabar, 1900–1948 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

  10Nikita Khrushchev, quoted in Communist Double Talk at Palghat (Bombay: Democratic Research Service, 1956), p. 112.

  11‘Communist Manifesto for Stable Government, Prosperous Kerala’, quoted in Victor M. Fic, Kerala: Yenan of India (Bombay: Nachiketa Publications, 1970), pp. 68–9.

  12Sadly, like Abdullah, Phizo et al. EMS has yet to find a serious biographer.

  13E. M. S. Namboodiripad, Twenty-Eight Months in Kerala (New Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1959), esp. pp. 5–6, 22–3.

  14P. N. Sampath, ‘Red Government in Kerala’, Indian Review, July 1957.

  15The Current, 8 May 1957. Krishna Iyer was actually an independent member of the Kerala legislature, a fellow-traveller rather than a card-holding communist. He was later a judge of the Supreme Court.

  16Ronald J. Herring, Land to the Tiller: The Political Economy of Agrarian Reform in South Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), p. 163.

  17This paragraph draws upon material in ibid., chapter 6, and T. J. Nossiter, Communism in Kerala: A Study in Political Adaptation (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1982), pp. 149–57.

  18The Current, 24 April 1957.

  19‘Letter from Kerala: Bloodsuckers still Thrive’, Economic Weekly, 19 April 1958.

  20Ibid.

  21Kerala Mail, quoted in the Current, 28 August 1957.

  22George Mikes, East is East (London: André Deutsch, 1958), p. 153.

  23For a useful summary see S. C. Joseph, Kerala: The ‘Communist’ State (Madras: The Madras Premier Company, 1959), chapter 8.

  24See ‘Who Supported the Communists in Kerala? An Analysis of the 1957 Election Results’, Economic Weekly, 1 August 1959.

  25See ‘Kerala Letter: Co-existence in Peril’, Economic Weekly, special issue, July 1959. It is not clear whether these excerpts were originally in English or are translated here from the Malayalam.

  26Rajni Kothari, ‘Kerala: A Post-mortem’, Economic Weekly, 28 November 1959.

  27‘Kerala Letter: Congress Misalliance with the Congress Church’, Economic Weekly, annual issue, January 1958.

  28Nossiter, Communism in Kerala, p. 145.

  29‘Red Rule in Kerala’, statements by E. M. S. Namboodiripad and Panampilli Govinda Menon, Illustrated Weekly of India, 25 January 1959.

  30Kamla Chopra, ‘Indira Gandhi: A Profile’, Illustrated Weekly of India, 22 February 1959.

  31S. Gopal, Jawaharlal Nehru: A Biography, vol. 3: 1956–1964 (London: Cape, 1984), p. 66.

  32Profiles of Mannath in the Illustrated Weekly of India, 28 June 1959 and in the Current, 16 September 1959; Anon., The Agitation in Kerala (Trivandrum: Department of Public Relations, 1959), pp. 9–12.

  33W. H. Morris-Jones, ‘India’s Political Idioms’, in C. H. Philips, ed., Politics and Society in India (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1963).

  34A good description of the protests is contained in George Woodcock’s Kerala: A Portrait of the Malabar Coast (London: Faber and Faber, 1967), pp. 270ff.

  35See the letters from Nehru to the prominent Kerala Congress politician R. Sankar, quoted in Robin Jeffrey, ‘Jawaharlal Nehru and the Smoking Gun: Who Pulled the Trigger on Kerala’s Communist Government in 1959?’, Journal of Commonwealth and Comparative Politics, vol. 29, no. 1, 1991.

  36See Gopal, Nehru, vol. 3, p. 68.

  37Quoted in ‘Mrs Indira Gandhi’s Election’, undated, unsigned typescript in Pupul Jayakar Papers, held by Mrs Radhika Herzberger (emphasis added.) Cf. also The Statesman, 27 July 1959.

  38Kannikara Padmanabha Pillai, The Red Interlude in Kerala (Trivandrum: Kerala Pradesh Congress Committee, 1959), pp. 183ff.

  39Woodcock, Kerala, p. 272.

  40Nehru to Namboodiripad, 30 July 1959, quoted in Gopal, Nehru, vol. 3, pp. 71–2.

  41See K. P. Bhagat, The Kerala Mid-Term Election of 1960 (Bombay: Popular Book Depot, 1962).

  42Gopal, Nehru, vol. 3, p. 73.

  43See correspondence and papers in Subject File 34, C. Rajagopalachari Papers, Fifth Instalment, NMML.

  44The article is reproduced in C. Rajagopalachari, Satyam Eva Jayate (The Truth Alone Shall Triumph) (Madras: Bharathan Publications, 1961), vol. 1, pp. 149–53. Cf. also ‘Rajaji on Need for Strong Opposition’, Swarajya, 9 March 1957.

  45C. Rajagopalachari, ‘Some Thoughts on the Budget’, the Current, 17 August 1957.

  46See ‘Statement of Principles of the Swatantra Party’, reproduced in Economic Weekly, special issue, July 1959, p. 894.

  47C. Rajagopalachari, ‘The Case for the Swatantra Party’, Illustrated Weekly of India, 16 August 1959.

  48See H. L. Erdman, The Swatantra Party and Indian Conservatism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967).

  49Gopal, Nehru, vol
. 3, p. 120.

  50See Tarun Kumar Mukhopadhyaya, Feroze Gandhi: A Crusader in Parliament (New Delhi: Allied Publishers, 1992), pp. 109–23.

  51A useful summary of the main aspects of the controversy is contained in M. C. Chagla, Roses in December: An Autobiography (1973; revised edn Bombay: Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, 1994), pp. 203–11. Justice Chagla headed one of the commissions; Justice Vivian Bose the other. But cf. also A. D. Gorwala, The Lies of T. T. K. (Bombay: R. V. Pandit, 1959). Feroze Gandhi died in 1960, not long after his speeches about the Mundhra scandal in Parliament.

  52Quoted in Motilal C. Setalvad, My Life: Law and other Things (Bombay: N. M. Tripathi, 1970), p. 282.

  15. THE EXPERIENCE OF DEFEAT

  1George N. Patterson, Tragic Destiny (London: Faber and Faber, 1959), p. 187.

  2‘Record of Prime Minister’s Talk with Dalai Lama’ (24 April 1959), in File 9, Subimal Dutt Papers, NMML.

  3See Ramesh Sanghvi, India’s Northern Frontier and China (Bombay: Contemporary Publishers, 1962), pp. 1–2.

  4Notes, Memoranda and Letters Exchanged and Signed between the Governments of India and China, 1954–1959 (New Delhi: Ministry of External Affairs, 1959), pp. 46, 26–7. This was the first of nine similarly titled White Papers issued by the government of India between 1959 and 1962, subsequently referred to here as WP I, WP II etc. Unless otherwise stated, the rest of this section is based on the notes and correspondence in this first White Paper.

  5Stuart Schram, Mao Tse-tung (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967), p. 282.

  6George N. Patterson, Peking versus Delhi (London: Faber and Faber, 1963), pp. 162–3.

  7For JP’s views see The Tragedy of Tibet: Speeches and Statements of Jayaprakash Narayan (New Delhi: Afro-Asian Committee on Tibet, 1959); for the Jana Sangh position, see ‘India’s Stake in Tibet’s Freedom’, Organiser, 27 April 1959, reprinted in Pandit Deendayal Upadhyaya, Political Diary (Bombay: Jaico Publishing House, 1968), pp. 97–101.

  8See Subject File 16, Thimayya Papers, NMML.

  9He was the first, and remains the last, Indian military man to be the subject of a biography by a Western author: Humphrey Evans, Thimayya of India (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1960).