When Ambedkar presented the final draft of the document to the Constituent Assembly in November 1948, he was in a confident mood. The depression he had suffered from was lifting—it had been a life of many reverses—and he had recently got married again, to a reputable Saraswat Brahmin. “No constitution is perfect,” he told his listeners, “[but] I feel that it is workable, it is flexible and it is strong enough to hold the country together both in peacetime and in wartime. Indeed, if I may say so, if things go wrong under the new constitution, the reason will not be that we had a bad constitution. What we will have to say is, that Man was vile. Sir, I move.”36
Dr. Ambedkar was making an important point: a constitution is a mechanism, not a solution, and it has to be operated properly if it is to work well. What is notable from this distance is how eloquent, forward-looking and thoughtful these debates were.
India’s Constitution, as Ambedkar said, was not perfect. Man and woman would sometimes be vile. But many of the good things that were to happen in India over the succeeding decades arose from it, and it offered a stability that proved to be lacking in most neighbouring countries. It was a clear, well-intentioned and cleverly thought-out document which balanced liberty and security, shared power and did not rely on the goodwill of any one leader. India was taking a gamble on democracy, on the precept that individuals would no longer rely on the whim of others to represent their interests. In 1966 the former Australian ambassador to India, Walter Crocker, wrote: “If India is not run by dictators, Rightist, or Leftist, or Militarist, she will be run by politicians, more and more drawn from, or conditioned by, the outcastes and the low castes. For this is the majority, and, thanks to the ballot-box, it will be the votes of the majority which will set up and pull down governments … In abolishing the British raj, and in propagating ideas of equality, so hastily and in the way they did, Nehru and the upper-class Indian nationalists of English education abolished themselves.”37
Nehru’s niece, Nayantara Sahgal, had just turned twenty when India became independent. Her mother, Vijayalakshmi Pandit, was shortly to become India’s ambassador to the United States, and Nayantara lived for much of the time in her uncle the prime minister’s house. She remembered the sheer excitement of those days, and the feeling that something new was being created. “We were infected by the sense of at last arriving on the scene to take charge of one’s own affairs,” she told me. “I had been in the U.S.A. during the Second World War, and the shops in India seemed very empty by comparison. All the English shops were winding up, and things like foreign cosmetics and English china were off the shelves by about 1950. The idea was that we didn’t need foreign luxuries, and we would only be able to buy Elizabeth Arden if we went abroad. They wanted to make room for the new Indian products that were going to fill the shelves.
“It was extraordinary to be able to go around Delhi and visit people, and to meet the president in Rashtrapati Bhavan, which had been Viceroy’s House. My family having been rebels, we hadn’t visited these places in Delhi before. Many of the new leaders at that time were living a very austere sort of life. Some people were busy wanting to rename roads and to pull down statues like the one of King George V on Rajpath. My uncle didn’t like that and always said it was an absurd thing to try to wipe out history. In Hyderabad after the police takeover, they wanted to name a street after him. He said no, on no account. I think the leaders were trying to reflect the idealism of what they were hoping to create. It wasn’t an exclusive thing. The Constituent Assembly was composed of all opinions. Everybody had a say in it. We had a sense of trepidation and adventure. When my uncle came to power, he was out to make a new world: he was not about to fit into the imperatives of the old world.”38
Like most victors, the founding mothers and fathers instinctively wrote history in their own image. Mohammad Ali Jinnah’s earlier role in the nationalist movement (Nehru’s father Motilal had said that Jinnah showed the way to Hindu–Muslim unity) was edited out, as were the missteps Congress had made in its dealings with the Muslim League. To justify the shape of free India, Jinnah was presented as a troublemaker who had subverted unity for his own purposes (in a later movie, he was played by Christopher Lee, who had previously been Dracula). With parts of the subcontinent reworked into a Muslim homeland, it became necessary to find a different basis for the new nation, in which religion could not be permitted to define identity: India would not be a Hindu homeland.
As well as other minorities such as Buddhists, Jains and Christians, 35 million Muslims remained in India and needed to be kept safe. Some were even now having their houses stolen under the guise of being homes belonging to migrants who had gone to Pakistan. Vallabhbhai Patel had no doubt that stability was more important than anything else: “the first requirement of any progressive country is internal and external security.”39
In the months immediately following partition, some chief ministers forced Muslims to leave for Pakistan.40 Although there were few religious riots in India in the 1950s, the Muslim community faced suspicion and discrimination, and found it hard to get jobs in public service or the police. In his regular letters to the chief ministers of all the states, Nehru stressed the need for a psychological integration of India’s people. He believed passionately in the idea of non-alignment, that India could fashion a new global role and reputation for itself, outside the rules of the major power blocs. Outdated prejudices had to be abandoned, and the nation needed to see in itself a reflection of modernity. When he heard that a rabid monkey had not been killed in Lucknow because an official was fearful of offending devotees of the monkey deity Hanuman, he fired off a furious letter to the chief ministers: “I think it is little short of scandalous that such a question even should arise in the mind of a District Magistrate when a mad monkey is going about biting hundreds of people. We have to decide whether India is going to be a fit country for human beings to live in or for monkeys or for other animals to take possession of.”41
Although he never made the point explicitly, I believe Nehru’s attitude was conditioned by the trauma he experienced during partition as he toured riot-torn regions and refugee camps, sometimes intervening at personal risk to stop looting and mayhem. He was not averse to clouting miscreants and ordering crowds to be peaceful in a way that would be hard to picture in an unruly country today, in this era of suicide bombings and sequestered leaders. Mohammed Yunus, a Pathan politician from Peshawar in the north-west and the youngest of forty-two children, remembered going to Jamia Millia Islamia university with Nehru when they heard news of a riot. “We drove to the scene, and they were very surprised to see him. We could see there had just been great violence. Pandit Nehru climbed up on to a wall and addressed the crowd. He said, ‘I want to be the prime minister of a country where Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs and Christians can live in harmony. Did we get our freedom so that you could kill each other?’ He was very brave. The riot stopped.”42
Nehru was also left miserable by the murder of his old guide and mentor, Mohandas Gandhi, by a Hindu extremist. Before independence, he had a naïve assumption that sectarian antagonism would end once the imperialists had departed, telling a visiting reporter, “When the British go, there will be no more communal trouble in India.”43 And now millions of citizens were dead or displaced. Should he have responded more cautiously after the Muslim League’s dramatic gains in the provincial elections of 1945–46? If Congress had been more patient, might the horrors of partition have been avoided? During those terrible days, Nehru had the cruellest awakening imaginable to the dangers facing his own dream. Unless free India could be united around a modern, democratic ideal, unless he could hold on to the secular faith that he had tried to propagate, his life’s work would be a failure. He disliked ardent followers of any religious tradition, whether they were Hindu babas, Muslim clerics or Christian missionaries, and he despised unscientific superstition.
In order to achieve social harmony in a battered land where most people followed and took comfort from religion, I
ndian children were taught now that an individual’s primary allegiance should be to the nation rather than to any communal or caste identity. Jains, Jews, Christians, Sikhs, Buddhists, Parsis, Muslims and Hindus were all encouraged to believe in a common purpose. Before the first general election in 1952—at that time the largest example of organized voting ever, with an electorate of 174 million—the election commission did its best to educate the public about the virtues and implications of a universal franchise. The Constitution was drummed into the head of every pupil at school, and children are still given essays with titles like “Why Am I a Patriot?” Textbooks emphasize the importance of being a good citizen. The Class 7 civics textbook has chapters on “Directive Principles of State Policy” and “Citizenship.” The junior citizen is taught that “After years of slavery under the British rule our people became very poor,” and a good citizen “votes for those who, he believes, will run the government properly. He pays his taxes on time. He knows that the interests of the nation are much more important than his own.”44 Indian patriotism, while often strident and self-righteous, contains little jingoism compared to that of many other countries, for dissent is part of the national idea. Although the internal boundaries of India were soon to be redrawn along linguistic lines, increasing regional power, people were told to think of themselves as Indians first. When the French writer André Malraux asked the agnostic Nehru late in life what had been his most difficult task, he replied, “Creating a secular state in a religious country.”
Historical elision was required too: it became necessary to say the Muslim invasions of earlier centuries had been part of a give and take, a contest for political space which had brought new food and music to India, and did not mark any real cleavage with the Hindu majority. It was suggested, pace The Discovery of India, that the country had a unique and admirable ability to absorb hostile external forces, and this should continue. So the formation of India’s extraordinary diversity over many hundreds of years became politicized, and the past was required to be glimpsed through the prism of the present. Nehru’s vision was warming and didactic, but it was not shared by all his colleagues.
Patel, now the deputy prime minister, was openly sectarian in private conversation, and doubtful Pakistan would survive: “The Muslims do not like to work hard. They want to wear fine clothes and sing ghazals. Who will do the hard work in Pakistan?” he asked.45 As far as he was concerned, most Muslims were lower-caste Hindus whose ancestors had been converted centuries before, and for the first time in centuries the Hindus were in the driving seat. His department launched a campaign to drive Muslims out of the civil service if they were deemed sympathetic to Pakistan.46 When Nehru wrote to him condemning some remarks he had made, Patel responded that while he opposed violence against Muslims, the basic cause was Pakistan’s misbehaviour. He wielded the sword of Damocles, saying India’s Muslims had “a responsibility to remove the doubts and misgivings entertained by a large section of the people about their loyalty.”47 But how were they to perform this difficult task? They might (or might not) have been Muslim League supporters, but this did not mean they endorsed the consequences of territorial partition, or were disloyal.
The rupture between the prime minister and his deputy, which to the credit of both men they did their best to resolve before Patel’s death from heart failure in December 1950, was symptomatic of what was to become a running sore in India’s public and intellectual life. Was a particular policy secular or communal? Had a politician made a communal remark, intentionally or otherwise? Bound into the idea of modern India was a belief that the state had a duty to remain neutral in matters of religion. In the aftermath of partition and its massacres, a commitment to secularism—a refusal to set India’s religious communities at each other’s throats—was seen by some as the true mark of the respectable politician. The historian Sanjay Subrahmanyam has observed that the word “secularism” has “a deep meaning and significance in India that many Europeans simply don’t understand. Thus ‘secularism’ has become almost as Indian a word as ‘preponed’ or ‘denting’ (for removing a dent in a car).”48
In parallel to the rise of Congress in the early twentieth century, a new movement sprang up which sought to unify all Hindus under the banner of Hindutva, or Hinduness. This was a cultural rather than a religious definition: one of the movement’s founders, Vinayak Savarkar—who had been sentenced to fifty years’ imprisonment by the British for sedition—said you could be an atheist but still qualify as a Hindu.49 Seeking inspiration, the early proponents of Hindutva were impressed by the racial ideas of the Nazis, which has led historians to connect them, with the advantage of telescopic hindsight, to the crimes of Hitler and the Holocaust. Their movement was in part a political response to the rise of pan-Islamism in India and beyond.50 After the First World War, Mohandas Gandhi had given his backing to the Khilafat movement, which called for the restoration of the recently abolished Islamic Caliphate. This gesture was an opportunistic and finally unsuccessful attempt by Gandhi to gain mass Muslim support. (The demand for the Caliphate would later be taken up by al-Qaeda, which may explain Osama bin Laden’s admiration for Gandhi, who he said brought down the British empire “by boycotting its products and wearing non-Western clothes.”)51 If Muslims were banding together, why should Hindus not do the same? As the pro-Hindu impetus grew, old wounds were prodded. If 70 percent of the population of India—this figure would rise to over 80 percent after partition—were Hindu, why were Hindus not more assertive? Surely they should go back to the wisdom of the rishis, and discover a purer way to live? What had made them so weak that they had suffered centuries of foreign enslavement? Why did they not band together and kick out the whites? Heroes from the distant past were invoked for their cunning and bravery in times of war.
The almost inadvertent end to the first surge of Hindutva came in 1948, when a follower of the movement killed Gandhi. Many of its supporters were imprisoned, and this strand of thinking was excluded from respectable political debate. The Nehruvian secular line, effectively a fudging of history, became the official view in an effort to maintain a unified society. This approach brought benefits, but also stirred a deep resentment among Hindu nationalists, which would bubble up in future years.
In 1996, I visited Gandhi’s ashram in Ahmedabad. It was a sorry, decrepit place, some way from its founding principles. Even before his death Gandhi no longer provided the core ideas of independent India, and the ashram’s neglect seemed unsurprising. In a nearby shop, I noticed a wall chart called “Top Officials of the World.” It was a little out of date, and showed Margaret Thatcher wearing a glam-rock jacket, and Ronald Reagan covered in at least a week’s worth of stubble, thanks to the haphazard printing process. After that, I began to collect Indian wall charts—some of which can still be found in provincial bookshops and stationery stores. The charts in many ways gave a better idea of the principles of the new nation. My favourite was “An Ideal Boy,” which shows wonderfully evocative, stylized cartoons of an exemplary son of India.
The ideal boy is a chubby-thighed little fellow who gets up early, bathes daily, reads attentively at school and goes for a morning walk in a well-manicured garden, wearing shorts. He “brushes up the teeth,” salutes his parents and “takes meals in time,” his mother hovering shyly over his shoulder and popping a roti on to his plate. The ideal boy is paler than most Indians, and has a definitely Hindu look to him, but I doubt the chart was intended to be sectarian. Matching him on the “Bad Habits” wall chart are some less than ideal boys who play with electricity, tease a dog and purchase fly-blown snacks from a street vendor who, inadvertently I guess, bears a precise resemblance to India’s first president, Dr. Rajendra Prasad. They also fly kites in a dangerous fashion, gamble (though with well-combed hair) and “take law in hands” by throwing a cricket ball through a shop window. On another wall chart, illustrating the law of karma, a naughty boy jettisons a banana skin and promptly slips on it.52
The pious sentiment, t
he optimism and strong moral ambition of “An Ideal Boy” arose directly from the nationalist project which began in India in 1950 when the Constitution came into force. Many injunctions which now seem amusing were aimed at people who had no experience of behaviour outside their immediate social context, and needed to be shown the way. They would be guided in the etiquette of railway stations, hospitals or bus stops, or telegraph and postal services. One chart shows “An Individual Family” (mother and father tend a tulsi plant, son and daughter draw water from a well) and “Combined Family” (father sits in a dhoti on a deck chair reading a newspaper, mother squats on the floor combing daughter’s hair, sisters-in-law prepare vegetables quietly, boys do useful deeds). Other charts were aimed at the prevention of disease, in this land where many people were sick and hungry: recommendations included “sleeping on clean bed,” “keep your nails short and clean,” “always breathe through the nose,” “destroy mosquitoes” and “always use latrine.” The last instruction has not always been followed; I once saw a man at a Delhi market pissing against a painted sign which read, in English, “No Person Should Urinate Here.”
The moralizing intentions of “An Ideal Boy” were in their way Nehruvian. Another popular picture shows Chacha Nehru—Uncle Nehru—reading a story to assorted children, who are chosen by their clothing and physiognomy to represent every variety of Indian. His ideas for the future nation were broad. He expected the state to intervene in people’s lives in ways it had never done before in India. Like other postcolonial leaders, he was very ambitious. Nehru’s aspirations ranged from enforcing lasting social change to reforming the holding of agricultural land, from developing an Indian space programme to building giant dams, from the creation of an economic planning commission to the promotion of a foreign policy built on queasy notions of Asian brotherhood. As prime minister, he had a rare ability to take the longer view of the country’s destiny and global status, unconstrained by caste, religion or regional parochialism. This did not prevent him from getting things wrong, but his mistakes were made in the service of a larger idea, grounded in democratic participation.
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