India After Gandhi (71 page)

At the same time as JP became disenchanted with the rebels, Michael Scott had lost the confidence of the Indian government. They accused him of seeking to ‘internationalize’ the Naga issue by approaching the United Nations. Scott had suggested that likely models for Nagaland were Bhutan and Sikkim – nominally independent countries each with its own flag, currency and ruler, but militarily subordinated to India. In May 1966 New Delhi asked Scott to leave the country, making it clear that he was not welcome to return.
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There was no question that Michael Scott was deeply committed to the Naga cause. Between 1962 and 1966 he must have visited India a dozen times on Phizo’s behalf. Sadly, he could not see that political independence for the Nagas was unacceptable to the Indian government. They were prepared to grant Phizo amnesty, safe passage into Nagaland, even the chief ministership of the state if he so desired. But the old rebel doggedly held out for more; and Scott supported him. Thus it was that another Englishman with long experience of India, the journalist Guy Wint, was constrained to comment that ‘the main obstacle to peace [in the Naga hills] lies in the fanaticism of such people as Michael Scott and David Astor; both of whom allow themselves to be used by Phizo.
Neither has any conception of what is at stake in accepting the Naga claim for complete secession.
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The breakdown of the peace talks was signalled by a wave of attacks on civilian targets. On 20 April a bomb went off in a train in upper Assam, killing fifty-five passengers. Three days later a similar explosion claimed a further forty lives. The Naga radicals were now making contact withPeking, whose help they sought in renewing their struggle.
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Tribes were restive on the borders, and in parts of the heartland as well. Food scarcity in the district of Bastar, in central India, had sparked a popular movement led by the deposed Maharaja, Pravi Chandra Bhanj Deo. Pravi Chandra and his followers claimed that prosperity would return only when he, the rightful heir, was returned to the throne. The Maharaja was traditionally regarded as quasi-divine, as the key intermediary between the people and their gods. A man whose eccentricity bordered on lunacy – the reason the government had replaced him with his brother –Pravi Chandra was nonetheless revered by his people. There were a series of protests asking for his restoration and then, on 25 March, a several-thousand-strong march on the old capital, Jagdalpur. A battle broke out between the tribals, using bows and arrows, and the police, using tear-gas and bullets. When the smoke cleared about forty people were dead, one policeman and the rest tribals. Among those killed was Pravi Chandra. This was, to quote the chief minister of Madhya Pradesh – writing to the home minister in New Delhi – a ‘tragic incident’ , ‘shocking and regrettable’.
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From these rebellions the new prime minister turned with relief to the creation of a separate state for the Sikhs. In the war against Pakistan, Sikh commanders as well as
jawans
had distinguished themselves in large numbers. So had the ordinary Punjabi. Farmers opened stalls on the roadside to feed troops with the choicest delicacies. Others offered their homes; yet others nursed the wounded. As the general in command remembered, ‘the whole province was electrified to a man. There were no reservations in offering help for the cause.
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Their bravery in the war impelled the government of India to concede a longstanding demand of the Sikhs. In March 1966 a committee of MPs recommended a threefold division of the existing state, with the hill districts going to Himachal Pradesh and the eastern, Hindu-majority areas coming to constitute a newstate of Haryana. What these deletions left behind was a Punjab that, finally, was both Punjabi-speaking as well as dominated by Sikhs.
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Also in March the prime minister left for her first foreign tour. She stopped at Paris and London, but her main destination was the United States, a country whose goodwill (and grain) was greatly desired by India, for it would be some time before the new agricultural strategy would take effect. C. Subramaniam had ploughed up the lawns of his bungalow in Delhi to plant a new high-yielding variety of wheat, one of a series of experiments to test these new seeds in local conditions. Meanwhile, American farmers had perforce to help put food in Indian mouths.
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‘New Indian Leader Comes Begging’, was how one Alabama paper headlined Mrs Gandhi’s visit. She made a more positive impression on the East Coast, handling the press well and impressing the public with the elegance of her dress and the dignityof her manner.Lyndon Johnson seems also to have quite warmed to her.
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But after her return LBJ chose to keep his supplicants on a tight leash. Whereas the Indians had asked for an annual commitment of food aid, the American president released ships month by month. The American ambassador in New Delhi privately described LBJ’s attitude as a ‘cruel performance. The Indians must conform; they must be made to fawn; their pride must be cracked.’ Despairing of the Indians ever getting their act together, at one stage Johnson suggested sending 1,000 extension workers to teach them how to farm. His ambassador found the thought ‘appalling’; not only would these Americans know nothing about agriculture in Asia, they would bring with them ‘950 wives, 2,500 children, 3,000 air-conditioners, 1,000 jeeps, 1,000 electric refrigerators (many of which won’t work), 800 or 900 dogs and 2,000 or 3,000 cats’.
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In both 1965 and 1966 India imported 15 million tonnes of American wheat under a public loan scheme known as PL-480, this going to feed 40 million mouths.A memorandum prepared in the US Department of Agriculture stated baldly that ‘India was destitute’. When the rains failed again in 1966 the prospect for India was ‘one more drought, one more year of acute dependence on PL-480 imports, one more year of exposure to the world as paupers .
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Sections of the Washington establishment thought the Indians hypocritical, asking for aid with one hand while attacking American foreign policy with the other. New Delhi s criticisms of the Vietnam War
rankled deeply. Lyndon Johnson was not pleased when the Indian president, S. Radhakrishnan, sent a message urging that ‘the United States unilaterally and without any commitments cease bombing North Vietnam’, adding that when that happened, ‘the rest of the world would, through the force of world opinion, bring about negotiations’.
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The purchase of arms and grain from abroad, along with the import of machinery and materials for industrial development, caused a dangerous dip in India’s foreign exchange reserves, which were down to $625 million in March 1966. To counter this, the government decided to devalue the rupee in June. Earlier pegged at Rs4.76 to the US dollar, the exchange rate now became Rs7.50.
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The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund had both recommended devaluation, though its magnitude exceeded even their expectations. However, in India the action was greeted by a storm of protest from the left. The communist MP Hiren Mukherjee claimed that devaluation had been forced on India ‘by the cloak and dagger aid givers of America’. A communist trade union called it ‘a shameful act of national betrayal’.

Large sections of Mrs Gandhi’s own party were opposed to devaluation. Kamaraj, for one, saw it as undermining the policy of national self-reliance. But the action was supported by the free-market Swatantra Party, whose main spokesman in Parliament, Minoo Masani, said that ‘if devaluation constituted a first step in a policy of economic realism in place of the doctrinaire policies pursued by the Congress government, it would have some desirable results in boosting the exports and promoting the inflow of foreign capital’.

Writing to a friend, the prime minister said that the devaluation was a ‘most difficult and painful decision’, taken only ‘when various other palliatives which had been tried for the last two years did not produce satisfactory results’
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The liberal Delhi journal
Thought
went further – this, it said, was ‘the hardest decision the Government of India has taken since this country became independent’. The weekly hoped that it would lead to a redirection of economic policy, towards producing goods for export and strengthening India’s trading position. Devaluation, said
Thought
, should ‘logically mean the end of giganticism in our efforts to develop the nation’s economy’.
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In the end, though, devaluation was not accompanied by a liberalization of the trade regime. Controls on the inflow of capital remained in place, and there was no push to increase exports. It appears that the criticisms from within and outside her party inhibited Mrs Gandhi from promoting more thorough going reform. The support from Swatantra would not have helped either – if anything, it would have tended to push Nehru’s daughter back towards the left.

Throughout 1966, one place that had been unusually quiet was the Valley of Kashmir. The war of 1965 had put secessionists on the back foot. The chief minister, G. M. Sadiq, was providing an efficient and clean administration, conspicuously so in comparison to Bakshi Ghulam Mohammed’s. The tourist trade was booming, as was the market for Kashmiri handicrafts.

In the late summer of 1966 Jayaprakash Narayan wrote Mrs Gandhi a remarkable letter seeking a permanent solution to a problem that had ‘plagued this country for 19 years’. ‘Kashmir has distorted India’s image for the world as nothing else has done’, said JP. Even now, while peace reigned on the surface, beneath there was ‘deep and widespread discontent among the people’. The only way to get rid of this was to release Sheikh Abdullah after promising ‘full internal autonomy, i.e., a return to the original terms of the accession’. A settlement with Abdullah, believed JP, ‘may give us the only chance we may have of solving the Kashmir problem’. For ‘the Sheikh is the only Kashmiri leader who could swing Muslim opinion in the valley towards his side’.

His talks with Chou En-lai led to Sheikh Abdullah being dubbed a ‘traitor’, but in JP’s view that act, though indiscreet, was certainly not treasonous. In any case, the Sheikh had come back to India to answer his detractors. JP’s associate Narayan Desai met the Kashmiri leader in Kodaikanal and found him amenable to the idea of full autonomy. In the aftermath of the recent war with Pakistan, Abdullah saw quite clearly that an independent Kashmir was out of the question. So Narayan now suggested that the government release Abdullah and permit him to
contest the upcoming 1967 general election, to assure the Kashmiris that ‘they would be rid of the overbearing Indian police and enjoy full freedom to order their lives as they liked’. If the Sheikh fought and won in the election, if ‘it could be shown that they [the Kashmiris] had taken that decision freely at an election run by their own genuine leaders . . ., Pakistan will have no ground left to interfere in their affairs’.

To ‘hold a general election in Kashmir with Sheikh Abdullah in prison’, remarked Narayan, ‘is like the British ordering an election in India while Jawaharlal Nehru was in prison. No fair-minded person would call it a fair election’. This was a point that should have counted with Mrs Gandhi, but in case it didn’t, JP offered this melancholy prediction:

If we miss the chance of using the next general election to win the consent of the [Kashmiri] people to their place within the Union, I cannot see what other device will be left to India to settle the problem. To think that we will eventually wear down the people and force them to accept at least passively the Union is to delude ourselves. That might conceivably have happened had Kashmir not been geographically located where it is. In its present location, and with seething discontent among the people, it would never be left in peace by Pakistan.
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The prime minister wrote a brief note back, thanking JP ‘for sharing your views on Kashmir and Sheikh Sahib’.
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But no action was taken on his letter, and Sheikh Abdullah remained in confinement. However, in October 1966 the prime minister visited the Kashmir Valley for the first time since assuming office. Speaking at the sports stadium in Srinagar, she spoke of her ‘special love’ for Kashmir and Kashmiris. A large crowd turned out to hear her; in fact, wherever Mrs Gandhi went in the Valley, the people milled along the roads to see her.
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For now, Kashmir appeared quiet and its people quiescent. But down south, in Andhra Pradesh, an agitation was gathering ground. The protest was led by students, who demanded that a Planning Commission proposal for a steel plant in Vishakapatnam (Vizag) be implemented forthwith. The plant had been sanctioned several years earlier, but the
fiscal crisis besetting the government had led to its being put on the shelf.

The decision to delay the Vizag steel plant caused an outcry in the Andhra country. For the young, a massive state-run factory still carried enchantment – and the hope of productive employment. Protesters blockaded roads, halted trains, and attacked shops and offices. The movement spread through the state – ‘The entire student community of Guntur seems to be on the streets’, said one report. The police were mobilized in several cities, while in Vizag itself the navy stood guard over key installations. A railway station was set ablaze in one place, a crowd fired upon by the police in another. Students damaged the lighthouse in Vizag and forced the radio station to go off the air. All trains running through the state were cancelled.
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