From Tryst to Tendulkar: The History of Independent India

by Balaji Viswanathan

  In the early 19th century, that would change. The Konbaung Dynasty of Burma was getting quite ambitious and captured the kingdoms of Assam and Manipur, making use of internal tensions in Assam. This got the Burmese kingdom a massive border with Bengal. In parallel, the East India Company had consolidated the rest of India and built its base around Bengal. The East India Company was both threatened by the Burmese expansion and also wanted to get many resources further east of Bengal to feed the growing industrial revolution in Britain.

  Another factor was the French. The French had built a strong relationship with Burma and Britain feared that the French would use the Burmese ports to undercut British India. The conflicting interests between East India Company and Burma, put them on a war course.

  The First Anglo-Burmese War was fought between 1824 and 1826, ending with a major defeat for the Burmese. At the village of Yandabo, the Company put punitive sanctions on Burma and took over Assam and Manipur. Eventually most of Assam and the other territories around it were integrated with the rest of India.

  As Britain found the plains of Assam suitable for tea plantations and started building estates, they found themselves in conflict with various hill peoples like the Nagas. To protect the commercial interests and to fight tribal practices such as "headhunting", Britain started showing its presence in the Naga and Mizo hills and eventually it became the present states of Nagaland and Mizoram.

  Later, British interests also brought Tripura and Sikkim as protectorates of British India that eventually became integrated with modern India.

  Present Issues

  After the partition of India in 1947, the northeast region lost connection with the port of Chittagong [in Bangladesh now] and became disconnected with the rest of the world, but for the narrow Siliguri corridor. This has affected their economic development and cultural integration into the rest of India.

  Also, the Tibeto-Burmese people of India's northeast often look alien to some of the other Indians causing discrimination when they move to other Indian cities for work. Thus, there have been many separatist movements motivated both by economic and cultural pains.

  Manipur

  This was formerly a princely state with one of the longest running monarchies in the world. The predominantly Hindu Vaishnavites of the states coexisted along with the Naga tribes of the hills. However, tensions started when the Nagas were converted to Christianity in the late 19th century. Both groups are in a state of perpetual war and the state's development often gets victimized through the heavy violence. A local terrorist group - UNLF - has been attempting to secede the state from India through a violent struggle.

  Nagaland

  Nagas belong to a fierce martial class that defeated the Japanese in the Second World War and prevented the entry of Japan into the subcontinent. The region was given statehood in 1963 and major truce with the central government was secured in 1975. Since then the situation is more manageable in the state.

  Assam

  This is the core of the northeast. One of the key issue for this region is the unchecked illegal migration from the porous borders with Bangladesh. Militants from the Bodo tribe - National Democratic Front of Bodoland (NDFB) and socialist extremist fighters United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA) - are a key threat to the state in the region.

  The situation in Mizoram, Meghalaya, and Arunachal Pradesh have been much more peaceful than the rest.

  Armed Forces Special Powers Act

  One of the most controversial acts by the Indian government was enacted on September 11, 1958. It was essentially a rehashing of a British act enacted in the wake of the Quit India Movement of 1942. It allowed armed forces very broad powers to tackle violence.

  It was enacted after an unofficial plebiscite in Nagaland in 1951 that claimed that 99% of the Nagas wanted to be a free nation. The government wanted a stronger response to the tribal disturbance and didn't want the legal red tape to tie their arms. While the government reasoned that its usage would be temporary, the act has stayed for decades.

  While it was temporarily used in Punjab (ended in early 1990s) and Kashmir (since 1990), it is in states like Manipur where the people have borne the full brunt of the act for a very long period. A local activist, Irom Sharmila Chanu, has been working hard to bring public attention to Manipur's plight.

  Forgotten Tribals

  There are over 120 million people in India who belong to various tribal communities spread around the country. A lot of these people live close to dense forests and hills, gradually pushed to a corner by the people of the plains. The term Adivasi [indigenous groups] is used to refer to these groups in recognition for their migration into India before most other Indians.

  These people are isolated from the rest of India due to a variety of reasons:

  They live in more geographically inaccessible regions - partly because they tend to be more hunter gatherers and partly because of staying safe from the more dominant empires of India.

  They are economically isolated as they are far from cities and very few government programs are designed to help their needs.

  They are culturally isolated as they speak languages that are distinct from the languages of the plains surrounding them. They also have distinct religious and other cultural practices, often incomprehensible to the rest of India.

  Some of the major tribal groups:

  Tribes of Andaman and Nicobar islands: The Andamans is a chain of islands in the Bay of Bengal that hosted a lot of native cultures. Some of these adivasi cultures are isolated from the rest of humanity for tens of thousands of years. To prevent them from contracting diseases and other afflictions that decimated the aborigines of Australia and native Americans, the Indian government has strict control of the movement of outsiders into these regions.

  Munda and Santal people: These adivasis primarily inhabit the Chota Nagpur plateau of eastern-central India. The region is densely forested and also rich in many minerals - coal, bauxite [aluminum], and iron ore. Naxalism is rampant in this region as the tribals feel isolated and exploited.

  Gond tribals: This is the largest tribal group in central India. They are spread in a region stretching from Uttar Pradesh to Telangana. Their plight is similar to that of the Munda and Santal groups and often caught between the Maoist/Naxalite separatism and India's security agencies.

  Tribes of the northeast: As mentioned in the previous section, India's northeast has a rich collection of native hill cultures who are fiercely protective of their ways of life. Separatism is often very strong among these tribals.

  Himalayan peoples: These are a range of tribes that inhabit the states of Jammu & Kashmir, Uttaranchal, and Himachal Pradesh. Unlike the other groups mentioned above, they are not as much discriminated by Indian society and thus there are very few issues of separatism or Maoism there.

  As Indian economy grows, the resource-rich regions of these people get the attention of the rest of India who want to build their mines, hydroelectric power plants, and roads in their lands. In some cases, local government officials and entrepreneurs have misused the gullibility of these people.

  The Dalits

  Unlike the tribals, the dalits are a group of suppressed people who primarily lived in the plains along with the rest of India. These are a group of 900 castes that are out of bounds of India's traditional Varna system - grouping people into four categories of profession. They were often given the worst of menial tasks - such as cleaning the toilet and doing anything that castes Hindus traditionally considered impure.

  Dalits often lived in isolated quarters of the same village that the caste Hindus inhabited, but were often prevented from accessing the good wells, ponds, temples, or even the main streets. Untouchability - the act of upper caste Hindus not even coming in physical proximity with these people - and various crimes, such as the rape of young dalit girls, were inflicted on these peoples.

  After centuries of reform movements by Mahatma Gandhi and others, part of the discrimination in the form of unt
ouchability had ended. Since independence, BR Ambedkar and a few other leaders in the community have taken a stronger activist movement to forcefully get their rights. Despite various actions by the government of India, interior rural regions are still rife with discrimination and tensions between the dalits and caste Hindus, especially in the lower rungs. However, in urban regions untouchability has been mostly put out, although some discrimination is still present when it comes to personal issues like marriage.

  Women

  In December 2012, a woman later nicknamed Nirbaya [fearless] was brutally gangraped in a private bus in Delhi. The incident shook the nation's consciousness and brought to light some of the key issues women face in India. In his address to the nation on August 15, 2014, Prime Minister Modi put this issue at the top of his priority.

  Although India's rape rate is much lower than most places in the world, many of the social stats show that India is among the worst places to be born a girl. The Prime Minister promises to fix the following issues.

  Increasing rapes in the national capital: Violence against women has been increasing and is one of the few crimes to increase per-capita over time. However, some argue that the increase in rape rates is actually an indicator that women are coming out much more to report the issue and we are just seeing the tip of the iceberg.

  Murdering the female infant: In many states of India, some parents abort their child once they realize it is female [sex determination scans are illegal, but the law is often violated]. If the baby escapes abortion and gets born, some parents kill through deliberate murder or a lack of care. This has manifested in an alarmingly low sex ratio - for every ten men in India, there are only nine women.

  Dowry: This is an ancient custom of property division where daughters get the movable properties of the family (gold, jewelry, cash) and sons get the immovable properties (land, home). However, it has mushroomed into a brutal institution that is leading to the deaths of tens of thousands of Indian brides from torture. Despite the government's efforts to outlaw the practice, both in rural and urban India, the law execution is often poor in this.

  Participation in the workforce: India has among the lowest female participation in the workforce. Female literacy is way lower than males’ and families in rural India predominantly take their daughters out of high school to get them married. For a major economy, India has too few women in office, factories, etc. This has hampered India's growth. In Gender Gap index, India ranks at 105 (even Sri Lanka comes at 39). In human development index India ranks at 134.

  * * *

  Chapter 9: The First Female Dictator

  The President has proclaimed a state of emergency. This is nothing to panic about.

  -- Indira Gandhi on All India Radio (July 2, 1975)

  She [Indira] listened to them [my views] even when I was five years old.

  -- Sanjay Gandhi

  Politicians, like underwear, should be changed often, and for the same reasons.

  -- A popular American saying

  The Indian middle class has always had a strange fantasy for dictatorship. Controversial dictators like Hitler, Putin, and Mao have strong fans among different factions of urban India. Many sections of the middle class feel that India might have been better under a strong leader.

  This sentiment is echoed by this poem by the Vice Chairman of the Delhi Development Authority, who lamented his inability to clean up the capital city, plagued by bureaucratic red tape. He dreamt of the creators of great cities like Paris and Washington D.C. and is sad that he cannot emulate them.

  No Haussmann reborn

  No Lutyens with a chance

  Nor Corbusier with Nehru’s arms

  I am a little fellow

  An orphan of these streets

  -- Jagmohan (Vice Chairman of the Delhi Development Authority)

  In 1975, the Indian middle class would finally get a chance to see what a dictatorship was like. India elected the world's second ever female Prime Minister and made her into the first female dictator. Indian democracy faced its world test as Prime Minister Indira Gandhi imposed emergency, taking the country towards a path of dictatorship.

  The 1970s were the saddest time for many democracies all over the world. Amidst high inflation, unemployment, and the Middle East crisis, democracies across the world grappled with plenty of existential crises. In the US, Nixon and Agnew were threatening the foundation of US democracy by outright rigging and corruption. Both the President and Vice President were forced to exit in a period of a couple of years.

  Journalists all over the world penned the obvious end of Indian democracy - a complete anomaly. Among the largest nations by population, the USA was the only other democracy and it was an anomaly in itself. And among the poorest nations, none was a democracy. India was both poor and huge. It had no business being a democracy, its detractors derisively wrote.

  Mahatma Gandhi brought India's freedom movement to the fore with his Satyagraha in Champaran in the eastern state of Bihar. Another Gandhian, Jayaprakash Narayan, would attempt the same from the same state. Will India survive as a democracy and escape the marauding chaos that was enveloping it?

  * * *

  Rise of Indira Gandhi

  For the first 20 years of free India, the Congress party ruled without much competition. Nehru and Shastri had a lot of popularity and were generally accepted as incorruptible men by all parties. However, the death of Shastri brought a lot of power struggles.

  India no longer had a consensus candidate as the stalwarts of the freedom movement were long gone or retired from politics. Nehru's long reign (17 years at the top) was partly to blame. This is in sharp contrast to George Washington's principled stand to give up his presidency after eight years at the top. Washington's decision allowed other freedom leaders such as Jefferson, Adams, Madison, and Monroe to have a part in shaping the nation's destiny. Nehru's reluctance to give up the throne meant that there was no viable alternative left. Power went back to his family, like in the case of monarchies.

  Nehru groomed his only daughter, Indira, well and she acted as India's official hostess in the absence of her mother (who passed away in 1936). However, Indira lacked the worldly experience of Nehru and did not give the impression that she understood the world very well when she took office for the first time.

  Decay of 1967

  In 1966, there was the first sign of power struggle. Morarji Desai, a noted freedom fighter, was in line to become the third Prime Minister of India after the unexpected death of Lal Bahadur Shastri in Tashkent. However, powerful Congress bosses (called the "Syndicate") under the leadership of the Tamil leader, Kamaraj, wanted a pliable leader, and they chose the greenhorn daughter of Nehru. India became the second democracy in the world to elect a woman Prime Minister.

  By the early 1960s, Congress had started losing support in several states, starting with Tamil Nadu and Kerala. In the 1967 election, Indira Gandhi got a slender majority (winning 283 of the 520 seats). However, the opposition was too divided to push their challenge much further. This resulted in a period of anarchy, where Indira didn't have a sufficient majority to command and the opposition didn't have a sufficient power to push reforms through the Parliament.

  The period of 1966 was also the worst for the Indian economy due to a failed monsoon in the aftermath of two major wars. The rupee was substantially devalued and there was stringent restrictions on imports. Inflation soared and there were famines.

  The combination of anarchy and the poor economy meant that there was room for the separatists to grow. Since the war of 1962, China had quietly started fomenting trouble in India. Within weeks of the 1967 elections, India's communist revolutionaries started their violent struggle from the village of Naxalbari in West Bengal as mentioned in the previous chapter.

  There were 700 incidents of communal violence between 1966 and 1968. Then there was the issue of state reorganization that was still causing trouble all over the country. The new leader was paralyzed and India was melting dow
n.

  India Turns Left

  Indira had little in common with other Congress bosses and was desperate to carve out some independence for herself. This is when an old family friend - PN Haksar - turned up. Haksar, like Nehru and Indira, was also a Kashmiri Pandit who settled in Allahabad. He was also a lawyer and a colleague of VK Menon (Nehru's close confidante and India's former Defense Minister). Indira trusted Haksar's views, given his close similarity to her father, and made him the Principal Secretary.

  Like Nehru, Haksar had a deep mistrust towards businessmen and merchants. Some people attributed this to the traditional Brahminical antipathy towards men of money. The Hindu caste system divided people into four categories: Brahmins (priests and scholars), Kshatriyas (kings and warriors), Vaishyas (merchants and businessmen), and Shudras (farmers and laborers). Brahmins often cherished the socialist movement due to a religious antipathy towards materialism, a professional antipathy towards anything not to do with "scholarliness", and a cultural antipathy towards commerce.

  Although such caste stereotypes are conveniently put forth by casual commentators, this observation is incorrect as equal numbers of Brahmins supported capitalism too.

  Morarji Desai grew up with the merchants of Bombay and had much more respect towards entrepreneurs and men of business. Desai wanted India to keep a safe distance from the communist ventures of the Soviet Union and build a better ecosystem for business. He was joined by the veteran freedom fighter, Rajaji, who created the Swatantra party to champion the cause of free enterprise.