by John Keay
The credit for this is rightly given to the vision, energy and political skills of the Westernised intellectual in the long coat and tight cotton leggings that was Jawaharlal Nehru. Pakistan had lost both Jinnah and Liaquat in its first five years. India, too, had lost Gandhi and then Sardar Patel (to natural causes in 1950). Nehru alone remained. An unassailable symbol of the freedom struggle, he came to embody the Indian nation’s ambitious transformation. Unlike Jinnah, from both instinct and study he knew the sort of country he wanted, and insisted that it was this ‘idea of India’ that would prevail. The mahatma and the sardar were widely mourned, but their deaths had simplified matters by removing two focal figures whose visions had often conflicted with Nehru’s. Gandhi’s utopian dream of a self-sufficient village-based economy had led him to suggest dispensing with all instruments of state power and disbanding even the Congress Party. Conversely, Patel had had little patience with particularist sensibilities, and seemed to favour an India that was authoritarian, conservative and unapologetically Hindu, in fact not far removed from that promoted by the ultra-nationalists of the Mahasabha and Jana Sangh. Neither man was without disciples; their legacies would linger on; but they would have to contend within Nehru’s vision of a centralised, egalitarian, secular and socialist republic.
These properties were enshrined in the Indian Constitution, which Ramachandra Guha, in his own chapter entitled ‘Ideas of India’, reckons ‘probably the longest in the world’.18 Drafted by numerous committees, and debated at length in a Constituent Assembly that was no more representative than that in Pakistan, the Constitution’s 395 articles and eight schedules passed into law on 26 January 1950. Nehru’s championship, Patel’s negotiating skills and the well-drilled Congress majority in the Assembly had ensured a smooth passage. The Indian Union had become the Republic of India, and the princely states had been swept under its multi-coloured carpet.
In a land with little in the way of indigenous constitutional precedents such an elaborate document was both a novelty and a source of pride. It was not, though, without inconsistency. ‘Democracy in India is only a top dressing on an Indian soil, which is essentially undemocratic,’ warned Dr B.R. Ambedkar, the leader of India’s Dalits (then known as Untouchables or Harijans), who was also the legal brain that had undertaken much of the Constitution’s actual drafting.19 Drawing on the constitutions of Western Europe and North America, it guaranteed equal rights to every individual – but this in a society that traditionally discounted individualism and was about as unequal as could be.
Other contradictions followed from this. Khilnani notes two. One was a ‘tension over citizenship’. All Indians were equal in theory, but because in practice so many were victims of the rankest discrimination, a special schedule stipulated affirmative action for the most disadvantaged castes and communities. This was entirely laudable, yet by reserving a quota of educational places and public service jobs exclusively for, say, Dalits, the Constitution empowered an entire community rather than its individual members. To qualify, therefore, communities were well advised to stress their solidarity, which led to fierce inter-community competition and block votes being traded for promises of ‘scheduled status’. ‘The Constitution, and the politics it sanctioned, thus reinforced community identities rather than sustaining a sense of common citizenship based on individual rights.’20
The other ‘line of tension’ noted by Khilnani was that between the powers awarded to the central government and those awarded to the provincial, or now ‘state’, governments. Naturally, certain specified subjects were reserved to each: defence, for instance, was the responsibility of the centre and sales taxes of the states. A few areas, like education, agriculture and land redistribution, were shared, the centre having directive powers but the states being responsible for implementation; this led to the well-founded suspicion that land-owning interests might piously uphold redistributive measures in Parliament confident in the knowledge that they would be diluted or deferred at the state level.
But more so than in other federal constitutions, the authority of the centre was to be paramount. Tucked away as Article 365, the central government reserved to itself in the person of the republic’s President the right to suspend any state government on the advice of its Governor, himself a central appointee. This decidedly authoritarian provision, though appropriate enough to the British raj that had formulated it, would be much resented when invoked to browbeat or topple democratically mandated state governments that declined to toe the central government’s line. In practice federalism seemed more a sop to regional sentiment than a brake on the exercise of central authority.
Arming the state with more powers than seemed strictly necessary was thought essential if the redress of inequalities and the radical reform of the economy were not to be stalled. It was no less vital in terms of containing dissent and promoting the integration of what was surely the world’s most excessively compartmentalised nation. Such was the agglomeration of different religions, castes, tribes, cultures, language groups and colonial enclaves that many international observers doubted the feasibility of an Indian nation. The franchise gave all a say; but to very few did it give a taste of power. The recalcitrant and the disenchanted would readily resort to force, and the government would respond in kind. More political strife was experienced, and far more lives lost, in Nehru’s India than in Ayub’s Pakistan. Integration was not for the faint-hearted.
In the case of religion, divisive rivalries were supposed to have been blunted by Nehru’s insistence on ‘secularism’. The state was not anti-religion, but doctrinally neutral. Sikhs, Muslims, animists, Christians, Parsees, Jews, etc. were to enjoy the same religious freedoms as the over 80 per cent of the population who considered themselves Hindus. But with Hindus and Muslims on both sides of the Bengal border massacring one another even as the Constitution came into force in 1950, and with the Kashmir issue still far from resolved, many non-Muslims demanded a more partisan attitude from their leaders. Parties like the (Hindu) Jan Sangh and the (Sikh) Akali Dal would pander to such sentiments and show scant respect for the secular sensibilities of Nehru’s Congress. From Kashmir to Kerala, Bengal to Gujarat, outbreaks of so-called ‘communal’ violence would be a constant.
Dealing with the princely states was less controversial. If Sardar Patel’s greatest service had been that of securing their accession, his last had been that of integrating them. Riding roughshod over previous pledges about non-interference in the states’ internal affairs, he pressured all but the largest states (e.g. Hyderabad and Jammu and Kashmir) into forming confederations. Such confederations were then either incorporated into India’s existing provinces/states or – as in the case of Rajasthan – made provinces/states in their own right. Either way, any notion of the princes continuing to exercise their sovereign rights as per Mountbatten’s reassurances was summarily dismissed.
Even shorter shrift was given to non-princely opponents of national integration. Glorying in the nation’s diversity – New Delhi’s default position whenever separatists reared their heads – assumed a uniform acquiescence by all of India’s peoples. The British raj had been characterised by gradations in rule that took account of local circumstance, historical happenstance and imperial convenience. Such inconsistency was anathema in a modern nation state. When in 1947 Gandhi had told a deputation from the Naga peoples of the far north-east that, if they preferred to be independent, ‘no one can force you [to be part of India]’, they had taken him at his word. But Nehru and Patel would have none of it. The Nagas’ demands were ‘absurd’, according to Nehru; their mist-shrouded hills were as much part of Mother India as neighbouring Assam. In recognition of their distinctive ethnicity (Mongoloid), social configuration (clan-based) and confessional allegiance (largely Christian), the most the Nagas could hope for was a degree of preferential autonomy within the Indian republic.
This, however, was unacceptable to those in the Naga National Council who were already pledged to secure full indep
endence. Though they had taken no part in India’s long freedom struggle, many Nagas were quite prepared to die in their own. Incidents of violence quickly multiplied, much of the Naga country became a no-go area, and by 1954 the longest-running of all India’s ‘forgotten wars’ was under way. It went largely unreported in the rest of India, and was little noticed outside. International goodwill towards the subcontinent’s newly enfranchised millions discouraged scrutiny of an obscure conflict in its remotest extremity. Meanwhile, Indians tended to dismiss the Nagas as feather-wearing primitives with a propensity for headhunting and heavy drinking. They were, in short, ‘tribals’, just like the various adivasi (or ‘aboriginal’) peoples who eked out a slash-and-burn existence in the less favoured margins of Bihar, Orissa and peninsular India. The Constitution afforded to these other ‘tribals’ various safeguards and integrational incentives, to which they responded by forming political parties and participating in the electoral process. Eventually some would win federal status for areas in which they were concentrated, like Jharkhand and Chattisgarh.
The Nagas, though suspect on account of their nostalgia for British rule and their attachment to the American-run Baptist missions, could have had a similar deal. In fact in the early 1960s they got one: Nehru responded to approaches from a moderate section of the Naga National Council by declaring ‘Nagaland’ the latest and smallest of India’s constituent states. But it made little difference. Against the elusive ‘insurgents’ New Delhi had already seen fit to deploy ‘one regiment of mountain artillery, seventeen battalions of infantry and fifty platoons of Assam Rifles’.21 Villages had been burned and atrocities committed by both sides. Meanwhile Angami Zapu Phizo, the Nagas’ inspirational but intractable leader, had escaped into East Pakistan. From there he travelled to London, and finally won some press coverage for what he called ‘the racial extermination’ to which his ‘Christian nation’ was being subjected. A ceasefire in 1964 was at last followed by peace talks. Phizo seemed willing to settle for the sovereignty and qualified independence claimed by nearby Bhutan and Sikkim. Delhi would have none of it. By 1966 the killing, burning and abductions had resumed.
Naga intransigence was sustained by a sense of ethnic, confessional and social distinction. Language was not a major bone of contention, partly because many Nagas had been schooled by the Baptist missionaries and spoke English. But elsewhere language – and the role, if any, to be awarded to English – was highly divisive. The Constitution was itself a battlefield. It recognised sixteen major languages in India and acknowledged several hundred others; but since many of the concepts it aired could not easily be expressed in any of them, it was actually written in English. This was regretted. English was not considered an Indian language and was tainted with imperialist associations. As in Pakistan, administrative convenience plus the need for democratic transparency demanded that there be one officially sanctioned national language; and patriotic sentiment demanded that it be an Indian one.
Nehru favoured Hindustani. As a hybrid of Hindi and Urdu it was confessionally neutral and widely understood in the north, although it was the first language of few and was not richly endowed with abstract nouns. Hindi itself had no subtler a vocabulary, but its deficiencies could be rectified. The philologists got to work, and soon Nehru was complaining that All India Radio had introduced so many Sanskritic neologisms that he couldn’t recognise reports of his own speeches. Hindi was nevertheless spoken by more Indians than any other language. The ‘Hindi belt’ stretched right across northern and central India, from Rajasthan to Bengal. It was therefore the obvious choice as the official link language, and the Constitution did indeed say as much. But not unequivocally. There was first to be an official inquiry and a fifteen-year moratorium while Hindi won wider acceptance and refined its vocabulary of legal, constitutional and scientific terms. And during this switchover period English might continue to be used as an alternative official language.
This reprieve owed as much to politics as to linguistics. In the non-Hindi-speaking south, the elevation of Hindi was encountering intense hostility. Hindi and most other north Indian languages derive from Sanskrit; but in what would emerge as the southern states of Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh, the languages (respectively Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada and Telugu) were of Dravidian origin. With their own scripts and grammatical structures, they differed as much from Hindi as did Japanese. Those who spoke them would thus be at a major disadvantage when Hindi became the language of government, administration and higher education. Ready access to qualifications, government service and public sector jobs, plus a sense of privileged identity, awaited the chosen language group; ‘hard study, perpetual disparagement and a marginalised heritage would be the lot of the unchosen. Careers were at stake, vast communities affected.’22
The south’s preference was for English. It was already more widely used there than in the north and, as an alien tongue, posed a lesser threat to the primacy of the native languages. ‘Hindi never; English ever’ became the popular chant as Tamils took to the streets. Delhi’s committee of inquiry upheld the decision in favour of Hindi, so further offending the south; but Nehru pledged that English would be retained for as long as the south insisted, so greatly upsetting the north. As the fifteen-year deadline of 1965 approached, feelings ran high. Hindi-speakers, championed by the Jana Sangh and other parties, defaced English signs, burnt vehicles with numberplates in English and terrorised tourist cities like Varanasi (Benares). It was worse in the south. There the Dravida Munnetra Kazagham (DMK), a Dravidian party that was pledged to all things Tamil, happily added the language issue to its secessionist portfolio of grievances. Strikes crippled the Congress-led administration. From books to billboards and timetables, everything in Hindi was torched. When Tamil youths, four of them students, publicly torched themselves, the scenario closely resembled that of the 1952 language riots in East Bengal. The police opened fire; over sixty were killed.
With the death of Nehru in May 1964 it would be left to his successors to quell the troubles and reappraise the policy. In 1967 what Guha calls ‘a virtual indefinite policy of bilingualism’ was adopted. Hindi was confirmed as India’s official language, but English was to be retained as an ‘associate official language’ for as long as the non-Hindi-speaking states cared to exercise a veto over its phasing out. In respect of education the package was presented as a ‘three-language formula’: schools were to teach a regional language (say, Tamil), the official language (Hindi), plus one other (almost invariably English). Thus was calm restored at the cost of a formula that bore rather heavily on young minds.
Happily, though, childhood dedication would be vindicated. As Nehru had foreseen, the retention of English would bequeath to India a new generation of educated English-speakers well placed to cash in on the intellectual and scientific advances of an increasingly anglophone world. In the turn-of-century silicon economies, attracting inward talent, no less than outsourcing helplines, swept Indians into the global economy. English made all things possible, easing the path of emigrating Indians and reassuring incoming tourists. The literary heights were there to be stormed and the multinational corporations to be wooed. Midnight’s business-class offspring would owe a rarely acknowledged debt to the ‘Tamil martyrs’ and the linguistic fudging of Nehru’s ‘wasted years’.
*
While the Nehru government agonised over the official language, another language-related issue of equally explosive potential had somewhat confusingly interposed itself. The provinces of British India had developed from the so-called presidencies of Madras, Bombay and Calcutta. Often they embraced more than one main language group, and just as often their geographical boundaries bisected language groups. Congress, on the other hand, had long since opted to base its regional organisation on the country’s linguistic divisions. This proclaimed respect for local cultures, made them easier to mobilise and, come Independence, would facilitate the imposition of this linguistic geography on the political geography of t
he British. Thus, for example, instead of a vast polyglot Bombay province, there might be two smaller states corresponding to its main ethno-linguistic components, notably Gujarati-speakers in the north and Marathi-speakers in the south. (Sind, now in Pakistan, had been detached from Bombay on the grounds of both religion and language in the 1930s.)
There was no question that this linguistic ‘states reorganisation’ would be implemented. All parties were in favour. It was just a question of when. Nehru was in no hurry. After the upheavals of Independence, a wholesale reorganisation of the country’s constituent states could hardly be considered a high priority; nor, in the fallout from Partition, could the creation of a host of new and potentially disruptive regional entities. He therefore temporised; the Constitution ignored the question and Congress consigned its consideration to a committee. This, by endorsing both the principle and the need for patience, merely fired up linguistic nationalists throughout the country. In the north, Sikhs demanded the division of India’s slice of the Punjab into Punjabi-speaking and Hindi-speaking states; it was no coincidence that the former would for once give the Sikhs a narrow majority. In the west, both Gujarati- and Marathi-speakers laid voluble claim not just to their majority areas but to Bombay itself. And in the south, speakers of all four Dravidian languages sallied forth in support of their prospective states, with none mobilising more energetically than the speakers of Telugu.
Second only to Hindi in numerical terms, Telugu-speakers were divided between Hyderabad state and the northern part of Madras province. Their identity was thus imperilled and their voting strength split by the Tamil majority in Madras and by minorities speaking Urdu and other languages in Hyderabad. A Telugu state, which was to be named Andhra after an ancient Telugu dynasty, would rectify this. And its champions were not prepared to wait. Backed by parties ranging from the Mahasabha to the Communists, Telugu leaders organised strikes and fasts and rattled even Congress by enticing defectors from its ranks. The final straw came in 1952 when the fifty-eight-day fast of a Telugu-speaking Gandhian called Potti Sriramulu ended in his death. Incensed supporters brought the state to a standstill and clashed with police. Several were killed, government buildings were attacked, trains and buses halted. Though painfully aware that conceding one linguistic state would only encourage other demands, Nehru capitulated. A Telugu-speaking Andhra Pradesh came into being in October 1953.