As H.V. Kamath watched ‘the bent, retreating figure’, a cluster of memories came to his mind. Was this the same man who, while Kamath was studying at the Presidency College in Madras, he had seen ‘sprightly, slim and erect’, speaking at the Congress session of 1927 in that city? The same man who, when he visited him in Allahabad ten years later, had ‘jumped two steps at a time, with me emulating him, as I followed him upstairs from his office room on the ground floor to his study and library above?’ The same man who, when they were both members of the Constituent Assembly of India, during one session ‘impulsively ran from his front seat and literally dragged a recalcitrant member from the podium rebuking him audibly yeh Jhansi ki public meeting nahin hai’? [This is not a public meeting in Jhansi.] The same man on whom the nationalist poetess, Sarojini Naidu, had ‘affectionately conferred the sobriquet “Jack-in-the-box”—a compliment to his restless agility of body and mind’?
Kamath was clear that it was the war with China that was responsible for this deterioration and degradation. As he wrote, ‘India’s defeat, nay, military debacle in that one-month war not only shattered [Nehru] physically and weakened him mentally but, what was more galling to him, eroded his prestige in Asia and the world, dealt a crippling blow to his visions of leadership of the newly emancipated nations, and cast a shadow on his place in history.’
It was, the affectionate yet critical observer insisted, a debacle that could have been avoided, had Nehru not ‘stubbornly turned a deaf ear to all friendly warnings’, offered, for example, by his own deputy prime minister, Vallabhbhai Patel, who, as far back as 1950, had alerted him to ‘China’s intentions and objectives in invading Tibet, and its dangerous implications for India’s future security’, and more recently by his old comrades Jayaprakash Narayan and Acharya Kripalani, who had ‘cautioned against appeasement and adulation of China’. Kamath himself, after a tour of the India–Tibet border in the summer of 1959, had said publicly that ‘Nehru will have to adopt a firmer attitude towards China and her colonisation in Tibet must be exposed and condemned, just as he had criticised European imperialism in the past’. Alas, recalled Kamath twenty years later, Nehru ‘pooh-pooh[ed] all criticisms of his China policy but even dubbed the critics as war mongers who were spreading fear and panic in the country’. Thus it was that in 1962, as a consequence of Jawaharlal Nehru’s ‘supine policy’, ‘our Jawans, ill-clad, ill-shod, ill-equipped were sent like sheep to their slaughter’.*
Chapter Nine
The Beauty of Compromise
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The fundamental principle that governs—or ought to govern—human affairs, if we wish to avoid misunderstandings, conflicts, or pointless utopias, is negotiation.
—Umberto Eco
I
Over the past few decades, the nation states of South Asia have been home to some of the most bitter conflicts of the modern world. Women have opposed the domination of men; subaltern classes have resisted the hegemony of the elite; regions on the periphery have protested exploitation by the centre. To class and gender and geography have been added the fault lines of language, caste, religion and ethnicity.
No region of the world—not even the fabled Balkans—has had a greater variety of conflicts within it. South Asians are an expressive people, who have expressed their myriad resentments in a diversity of ways—through electing legislators of their choosing; through court petitions and other legal mechanisms at their command; through marches, gheraos, dharnas, hunger strikes and other forms of non-violent protest; through the burning of government buildings; and through outright armed rebellion.
The record of our nation states in dealing with these conflicts is decidedly mixed. Some conflicts, which once threatened to tear a nation apart, have, in the end, been resolved. Other conflicts have persisted for decades, with the animosities between the contending parties deepening further with every passing year.
From this vast repertoire of experience within South Asia, this essay will foreground some of the more intractable of these conflicts. I will analyse, among others, the Kashmir dispute and the Naga insurgency in India, and the rebellion of the Tamils in Sri Lanka. I will argue that these conflicts persisted for so long because of the inflexibility and, dare I say, dogmatism of the contending parties. The question I pose here is this: Could a middle path of accommodation and reconciliation, adopted by either party to a conflict or both, have helped in reducing or mitigating the suffering and the violence?
II
In search of an answer to this question, let me first turn to some forgotten episodes in the career of a man who might be considered a paradigmatic South Asian, Jayaprakash Narayan (JP). Narayan was an Indian patriot, but he retained close links with the republican struggle in Nepal as well as the socialist movement in Sri Lanka. He worked actively for conciliation between India and Pakistan. And he was an early supporter of the rights of the Tibetan people.
Within India, JP is celebrated for his role in two major movements: the Quit India struggle of 1942, and the ‘Indira Hatao’ movement of 1974–75. During Quit India, JP achieved countrywide renown for his daring escape from Hazaribagh jail, after which he spent more than a year underground, eluding the colonial police. The movement of 1974–75 was, of course, led and directed by him. Starting in his native Bihar, it soon became an all-India struggle against the corrupt and tyrannical regime of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.
Both those struggles saw Jayaprakash Narayan in, as it were, an uncompromising mode. In 1942, he was a charismatic young leftist, who sought to throw out the British and help rebuild India on socialist lines. In 1974–75 he was a charismatic old radical, who sought to throw out Indira Gandhi and bring about a ‘Total Revolution’ in India.
Thirty years after his death, JP is still remembered for his part in the upheavals of 1942 and 1974–75. What is now forgotten is his equally interesting and, in my view, even more noble work in the decade of the 1960s, when he tried heroically—if, in the end, unavailingly—to resolve the two civil conflicts that have plagued the Indian nation state since its inception. These conflicts were at either end of the Indian Himalaya—namely, Kashmir and Nagaland.
Among the politicians and social workers of mainland India, Narayan spoke out longest and loudest against the illegalities of the Union government in Kashmir. He was a close friend of the popular Kashmiri leader Sheikh Abdullah, who was jailed by the Indian government in 1953. JP called repeatedly for the release of Sheikh Abdullah, and when the Sheikh was finally set free in April 1964, encouraged the idea of sending him over to Pakistan as an emissary for peace. That idea, originally, was that of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. However, it was opposed across the political spectrum, by the Jana Sangh on the right as well as by the Communists on the left. Even the majority of Nehru’s own Congress party thought that the Sheikh should have remained in confinement.
Bucking the jingoist trend, two men of conspicuous independence supported Jawaharlal Nehru’s initiative despite being, on other matters, fierce critics of the prime minister’s policies. One was C. Rajagopalachari; the other, Jayaprakash Narayan. When some Cabinet ministers threatened to put the Sheikh back in jail, JP wrote that ‘it is remarkable how the freedom fighters of yesterday begin so easily to imitate the language of the imperialists’.
Nehru died in May 1964; the peace initiative died with him. The next year Sheikh Abdullah was placed under arrest once more. In June 1966, Narayan wrote an extraordinary letter to Prime Minister Indira Gandhi asking that the Sheikh be freed in time for the next elections, due at the beginning of 1967. 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.’ 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’, continued JP, ‘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.’
This letter got a brief, non-committal reply in return. It took another eight years for Mrs Gandhi to allow the Sheikh to re-enter politics. When Abdullah was made chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir in February 1975, Narayan welcomed the move (despite being, by now, a bitter opponent of the prime minister). But the concession itself was perhaps eight years too late. For, by then the Sheikh had become reconciled to subservience to New Delhi; and in time was to place the interests of his own family above the interests of the Kashmiri people as a whole. What might have been the fate of Kashmir and the Kashmiris had Mrs Gandhi listened to JP in June 1966, released Sheikh Abdullah, allowed him to contest a free and fair election that he would certainly have won, and then allowed him to run the administration in the best interests of the people themselves?
III
Let me now move away from India, and JP, to a civil conflict in another South Asian nation. In 1967, the rulers in New Delhi were too nervous to allow Sheikh Abdullah to contest a provincial election in Kashmir. Three years later, the rulers in Islamabad permitted a radical Bengali politician to contest a national election. To their great surprise, and shock, his party won a majority. What were they to do now?
Before answering that question, let us briefly rehearse the history of the nation of Pakistan. Created in 1947, it had two wings, these separated by several hundred miles of Indian territory. On his first visit to Dhaka, the governor-general of Pakistan, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, told his Bengali audience that they would have to take to Urdu sooner rather than later. ‘Let me make it very clear to you,’ said Jinnah, ‘that the State Language of Pakistan is going to be Urdu and no other language. Anyone who tries to mislead you is really the enemy of Pakistan. Without one State language, no nation can remain tied up solidly together and function.’ (emphasis mine)
In 1952, bloody riots broke out in Dhaka after the police fired on a demonstration of students demanding equal status for the Bengali language. (Ever since, the Bengalis have observed the day of the firing—21st February, or Ekushey February—as ‘mother language day’.) In 1954, Bangla was recognized as one of the state languages of Pakistan, but the feelings of being discriminated against persisted. The eastern part of the nation provided jute, coal and other valuable commodities, yet government revenues were mostly spent in and on the west. The West Pakistanis, and the Punjabis in particular, dominated the army and the civil services. Bengalis were under-represented in the upper echelons of the diplomatic corps and the judiciary. This being South Asia, there were even complaints of talented East Pakistanis being left out of the national cricket team.
Between 1958 and 1970 Pakistan was under military rule. Towards the end of 1970 General Yahya Khan called for elections. Apparently, the general hoped that the ambitious West Pakistani politician Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto would become prime minister, and allow him to continue as President. But these calculations went awry. The Awami League, led by Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, won 167 out of the 169 seats in the more populous eastern part of the country. The Awami leader had skilfully played on Bengali sentiments of being excluded and discriminated against over the years.
After the elections, Mujib’s party had a majority in the new Parliament. Its platform included a federal constitution, in which each wing would manage its social, political and economic affairs, with only defence and foreign relations in the hands of the Centre. (A key feature was that each wing would get to spend the foreign exchange it earned—previously, the gleanings from jute exports had been in the discretionary control of the generals in the west.) The proposals to reform the Constitution were deemed unacceptable by the generals as well as the politicians of West Pakistan. In any case, the self-proclaimed martial Punjabi could not abide the thought of conceding power to the allegedly effete Bengali. Another reason for spurning Mujib was the large presence of Hindus in the professional classes of East Pakistan. As one general put it, if the Awami League came to power, ‘the constitution adopted by them will have Hindu iron hand in it’.
Rather than honour the democratic mandate and invite Mujib to take office, Yahya Khan postponed the convening of the National Assembly. (In this he was encouraged and abetted by Bhutto.) The response was a general strike in all of East Pakistan. Now, the Pakistani Army decided to settle the matter by force of arms. But with the Indians choosing to ally with the Bengali dissidents, the task was made much harder than they had anticipated. Eight months of episodic fighting culminated in a full-fledged war in December 1971, which led to the defeat and dismemberment of the nation of Pakistan. But would this still have been a single nation if Yahya and Bhutto had permitted Mujib to take over as prime minister?
In asking this question, I do not mean to turn the clock back, to suggest that the creation of Bangladesh was a mistake. I mean only to highlight how the techniques of suppression, so often used by a state to settle a political conflict, may seek only to intensify and deepen it. The ruling elite of Pakistan was both obdurate and deaf; obdurate in hanging on to its privileges, deaf to the justice of the demands of those who asked merely for their rights as citizens. In this respect, the break-up of Pakistan holds lessons for the other nations of South Asia—not least Bangladesh itself—which seek, not always successfully, to deal judiciously with social and political divisions within their boundaries.
As it happens, the language problem is one issue the Republic of India has successfully resolved. Back in the 1920s, Mahatma Gandhi and the Congress party had promised that when India became independent each major linguistic group would have its own province. However, after 1947 the Congress leaders went back on their promise. India had just been divided on the basis of religion—would not conceding the linguistic demand lead to a further Balkanization? Then, in 1952, a protest fast by a former Congressman named Potti Sriramulu forced New Delhi to agree to the creation of a Telugu-speaking state of Andhra. Other linguistic groups now intensified their claims for states of their own. A States Reorganization Commission was constituted, which in 1956 recommended that the map of India be redrawn to accommodate these demands.
Now, five and a half decades later, it is possible to deem the creation of linguistic states as a success. Once the fear of one’s language being suppressed has been removed or allayed, the different linguistic groups have been content to live as part of the larger nation called India. There have been periodic manifestations of chauvinism, as in calls for preferential employment for speakers of the local language, but these protests have not in any way threatened the unity of the country.
In 1956, the year the states of India were reorganized on the basis of language, the Parliament of Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) introduced an Act recognizing Sinhala as the sole official language of the country. This made Sinhala the medium of instruction in all state schools and colleges, in public examinations, and in the courts. The new Act was opposed by the Tamil-speaking minority who lived in the north of the island. ‘When you deny me my language,’ said one Tamil MP, ‘you deny me everything.’ ‘You are hoping for a divided Ceylon,’ warned another, adding: ‘Do not fear, I assure you [that you] will have a divided Ceylon.’ An Opposition member, himself Sinhala-speaking, predicted that if the government did not change its mind and insisted on the Act being passed, ‘two torn little bleeding states might yet arise out of one little state’.
The protests were disregarded. The insecurity of the Tamils was intensified by riots against them in the capital city, Colombo, in 1958. Then, in 1972, Sinhala was confirmed as the official language of the state, and Buddhism added on as the official religion (most Tamils were Hindus or Christians). Now, the Tamil youths became disenchanted by the incremental, parliamentary methods of their elders. In the decade of the 1970s several para
military groups were formed, these known by their abbreviations or acronyms, to wit, EROS, PLOTE, ERPLF and, not least, LTTE.
Some Tamils still kept their faith in compromise. However, two events in the early 1980s decidedly put paid to hopes of a peaceful, democratic reconciliation of the linguistic question. The first was the burning, by the Sri Lankan Army, of the great Tamil library in Jaffna in 1981; the second, the anti-Tamil pogrom in Colombo in 1983, this directed by Sinhala politicians. Now the Tamils increasingly took to armed struggle to meet their ends. And so unfolded a quarter-century of civil war that cost tens of thousands of lives and deeply undermined the economic and social development of Sri Lanka.
IV
Having illustrated my thesis with examples from Pakistan and Sri Lanka, let me now return to my own country, and to the compatriot with whom I began my essay. In the decade of the 1960s, Jayaprakash Narayan was concerned not just with an honourable solution in Kashmir, but with the restoration of peace in Nagaland, likewise a most troubled part of the Indian Union. In 1946, a Naga National Council (NNC) had been formed; this was undecided as to whether to join the soon-to-be free India. Then, in the early 1950s, one faction decided to make a compact with New Delhi. The other faction, led by A.Z. Phizo, held out for an independent Naga state. This was not acceptable to India; as a consequence, an armed conflict broke out in the Naga hills, with the Indian Army on one side, and Phizo’s guerrillas on the other. The main casualties in this conflict were the villagers caught in between.
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