India After Gandhi (67 page)

In the winter of 1925/6, the writer Aldous Huxley went on along trip through British India. He attended the Kanpur session of the Indian National Congress and heard declamatory speeches asking for freedom. Huxley had some sympathy with these aspirations, yet worried that they
represented only the upper-caste Hindu interest. As he wrote in the book of his travels,

That the lower-caste masses would suffer, at the beginning, in any case, from are turn to Indian autonomy seems almost indubitable. Where the superiority of the upper castes to the lower is a matter of religious dogma, you can hardly expect the governing few to be particularly careful about the rights of the many. It is even something of a heresy [for them] to have rights.
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Two decades later India became independent, and the constitution bestowed rights of equality on all citizens, regardless of caste, creed, age or gender. The lower castes were in fact granted special rights, special access to schools and jobs, in compensation for the discrimination they had suffered down the centuries. But, as a Scheduled Caste member of the Constituent Assembly pointed out, state law was one thing, social practice quite another. For the prejudices of caste had been opposed by reformers down the centuries, from Gautama Buddha to Mahatma Gandhi, yet they had all ‘found it very difficult to get rid of this ghost of untouchability’. Laws had been enacted removing strictures against Untouchables, with regard to temple entry for example. ‘What is the effect of these laws?’ asked the member, before supplying this answer: ‘Not an inch of untouchability has been removed by these laws . . . If at all the ghost of untouchability or the stigma of untouchability from India should go the minds of these crores and crores of Hindu folks should be changed and unless their hearts are changed, I do not hope, Sir, that untouchability will be removed. It is now up to the Hindu society not to observe untouchability in any shape or form.’
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There was pessimism about the position of Untouchables in free India, and pessimism also about the future of that other large and insecure minority, the Muslims. Travelling through India and Pakistan in 1951, the Aga Khan – the influential leader of the Ismaili sect – found ‘a horrible fear’ among Muslims on both sides of the border, but in India especially. He wrote to Jawaharlal Nehru of ‘the fear amongst Muslims which I myself share to a great extent’ – this being that ‘five or ten years hence there may be a [Hindu] Mahasabha government who openly make the union of what is now Pakistan – both East and West – with Bharat [India] the main purpose of foreign policy and high politics’. The Muslim leader thought that a Hindu chauvinist party, once in power, would use atomic blasts to divert the rivers flowing through Kashmir
into Pakistan, thus bringing that state to its knees. He drew a parallel with the situation in the Arab world, where – so he claimed – Sudan was preparing to stop the flow of the Nile into Egypt. In the Aga Khan’s view, Hindu India was to Muslim Pakistan as Christian Sudan was to Muslim Egypt. As he putit, ‘I have felt that this atmosphere of doom [which] prevails amongst Muslims on account of this very water question . . . is a replica of the similar fear in Egypt’.
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This letter is notable for at least three reasons. First, as an early illustration of the now widespread fear that Muslims were being persecuted worldwide. Second, for its easy equation of the interests of Indian Muslims with the welfare of Pakistan. Finally, and perhaps most tellingly, for its prediction that the Republic of India would become a Hindu state within ten years.

The Aga Khan and Aldous Huxley were both right and wrong in their skepticism – right with regard to the continuing social prejudice, wrong with regard to the intentions of the top political leadership. For the ‘governing few’ were in fact very careful of the rights of the many. Writing in 1959 – a decade and more after Independence – an Indian editor who was bitterly opposed to Nehru was constrained to recognize his two greatest achievements – the creation of a secular state and the granting of equal rights to Untouchables. Recalling the ‘reactionary forces which came into play after partition’, the editor remarked that ‘had Nehru shown the slightest weakness, these forces would have turned this country into a Hindu state in which the minorities. . . could not have lived with any measure of safety or security . It was also to Nehru’s ‘everlasting credit that he insisted that Untouchables be granted full rights, such that ‘in public life and in all government action, the equality of man would be scrupulously maintained in the secular state of India’.
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To be sure, there remained a slippage between public policy and popular practice. The laws promoting secularism and social equality were on the statute books, but most Muslims, and most Scheduled Castes, remained poor and marginalized. The threat of violence was never far away. Still, given the bloody birth of the nation, and the continuing provocation from Pakistan, it was no small matter that the Indian government refused to merge faith with state. And given the resilience of social institutions in general, and the ancient and sanctified history of this one in particular, it was remarkable that the caste system changed as much as it did. The progress made in abolishing untouchability or in assuring equal rights to all citizens was uneven, and – by the standards of understandably impatient reformers – very slow. Yet more progress had probably been made in the first seventeen years of Indian independence than in the previous seventeen hundred.

There is no question of Nehru’s attempting to create a dynasty of his own; it would be inconsistent with his character and career.

F
RANK
M
ORAES
, political columnist, 1960

J
AWAHARLAL
NEHRU
DIED
ON
the morning of 27 May 1964. The news was conveyed to the world by the 2 p.m. bulletin of All-India Radio. Two hours later the home minister, Gulzarilal Nanda, was sworn in as acting prime minister. Almost immediately the search commenced for a more permanent successor.

The central figure in the choice of a new prime minister was the Congress president, K. Kamaraj. Born in 1903, in a low-caste family in the Tamil country, Kamaraj dropped out of school to join the national movement. He spent close to eight years in jail, this spread out over two decades and six prison sentences. His status among the people was consolidated by his lifestyle – he lived austerely, and never married. He climbed steadily up the party hierarchy, and served as president of the Tamil Nadu Congress as well as chief minister of Madras before heading the party at the national level.
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Kamaraj was a thick-set man with a white moustache – according to one journalist, he looked ‘like a cross between Sonny Liston and the Walrus’. Like the boxer (but unlike the Lewis Carroll character) he was a man of few words. The press joked that his answer to all questions put by them was one word in Tamil: ‘
Parkalam
’ (We shall see). His reticence served him well, never better than after Nehru’s death, when he had to listen to what his party men had to say. From 28 May Kamaraj began consulting his chief ministers and party bosses (the ‘Syndicate’, as
they were called) on the best person to succeed Nehru. An early name to consider was Morarji Desai, the outstanding administrator from Gujarat who had made it clear that he wanted the job.

In four days Kamaraj met a dozen chief ministers and as many as 200 members of Parliament. From his conversations it became clear that Desai would be a controversial choice: his style was too abrasive. The person most MPs seemed to prefer was Lal Bahadur Shastri, also a fine administrator, but one who was more accessible, and from the Hindi heartland besides. It helped that Nehru had come increasingly to rely on Shastri in his last days. These factors all weighed heavily with Kamaraj, who was concerned that the succession should signal a certain continuity.

Desai was persuaded to withdraw his candidature. On 31 May the Congress Working Committee approved the choice of Lal Bahadur Shastri. The next day the appointment was ratified by the Congress Parliamentary Party and the day following, Shastri was sworn in as prime minister. Very soon the new incumbent was asserting his authority. Desai was dropped from the Cabinet because he insisted on the number two position. There was a clamour to include Nehru s daughter, Indira Gandhi; Shastri complied, yet gave her the insignificant Information and Broadcasting portfolio. Mrs Gandhi, in turn, forestalled any move by Shastri to move into Teen Murti House (where Nehru had lived as prime minister) by proposing that it be made into a memorial to her father.
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Announcing Shastri’ s elevation to the press, Kamaraj had said that the undisputed rule of a great man would now be replaced by a form of collective leadership. Shastri had other ideas. An early innovation was the creation of a separate Prime Minister’s Secretariat, where a band of carefully chosen officials would prepare papers on matters of policy. This was to fill in the gaps in the prime minister’s learning – gaps larger by far than was the case with Nehru – but also to provide him with an independent, non-partisan source of advice, freeing him of excessive dependence on the Cabinet.
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Not long before Nehru’s death, the United Kingdom had its own ‘succession’ drama, with the Conservatives deeply split on the choice of Harold Macmillan’s successor. The left-wing
Guardian
newspaper gleefully remarked that the ‘new Prime Minister of India, in spite of all forebodings, has been named with more dispatch, and much more dignity, than was the new Prime Minister of Britain’.
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The paper’s New
Delhi correspondent met Nehru’s successor, whom he found ‘rock-sure of himself’ , a ‘very strong man indeed’ who spoke in short and sharp sentences – ‘no words wasted’.
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Old colonial hands were less optimistic. Nehru’s death, wrote one ICS man to another, had made India’s future fraught with uncertainty. For ‘I can’t imagine S[h]astri has the stature to hold things together, and all the trouble-makers from Kashmir to Comorin will work to fish in troubled waters, to say nothing of China and Pakistan. Cyprus on a big scale? What revolting times we live in!’
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With his death, Nehru’s Kashmir initiative also died. However, on the other side of the country, moves were afoot to resolve the dispute between the Naga rebels and the government of India. Pained by a decade of bloodshed, the Baptist Church of Nagaland had constituted a ‘peace mission’ of individuals trusted both by the underground movement and the government of India. The three members agreed upon were the chief minister of Assam B. P. Chaliha, the widely respected Sarvodaya leader Jayaprakash Narayan and the Anglican priest Michael Scott, who had helped secure refuge in London for the Naga leader A. Z. Phizo.

Through the summer of 1964 this peace mission travelled through the territory, meeting members of the state government as well as of the ‘Federal Republic of Nagaland’. A ceasefire agreement was signed by both sides; it came into effect on 6 September, signalled by the pealing of church bells. Two weeks later the first round of talks began between the government of India and the rebels.
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From Kohima, Jayaprakash Narayan wrote to a friend that, although the situation was still unpredictable, ‘the strongest desire of almost every Naga at the present time seems to be for a lasting peace. The Naga people are dreading nothing more than the resumption of hostilities’. Then he added, less optimistically: ‘However, it has to be said that as far as the talks between the Government of India and the underground leaders are concerned, very little progress so far has been made.
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The records of the talks between the government and the rebels do reveal a fundamental incommensurability of positions. The NNC leader, Isak Swu, began by saying that ‘today we are here as two nations –
Nagas and Indians, side by side’. The foreign secretary, Y. D. Gundevia, answered that ‘we are not living as two nations side by side. History tells us that Nagaland was a part and parcel of India.’ Between these two opposed positions, B. P. Chaliha and Jayaprakash Narayan tried valiantly to locate common ground.Chaliha praised the Nagas as ‘a people of rare and high qualities’ , and hoped that ‘both parties will find a way to remove the gulf’ between them. Narayan argued that ‘compromise is possible because we think that both sides have part of the truth. If one were 100 per cent right, or 100 per cent wrong, there could be no question of compromise.’
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The demand for Naga independence presented a powerful challenge to the idea of India. Another somewhat different challenge was presented by the testing of a nuclear device by China in October 1964. Immediately there were calls for India to develop an atom bomb of its own. On 24 October the director of India’s Atomic Energy Commission, Dr Homi J. Bhabha, gave a talk on All-India Radio on the nuclear question. He spoke of the need for universal nuclear disarmament, yet hinted that, pending that eventuality, India might develop a nuclear deterrent of its own. There was no means of successfully stopping a nuclear thrust in mid-flight, said Dr Bhabha, adding: ‘The only defence against such an attack appears to be a capability and threat of retaliation.’ Further, ‘atomic weapons give a state possessing them in adequate numbers a deterrent power against attack from a much stronger state’. Later in his talk, Dr Bhabha examined the cost of constructing an atomic stockpile. By his calculations, fifty bombs would cost about Rs100 million, an expenditure that was ‘small compared with the military budgets of many countries’.
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