Midnight's Descendants
Page 18
The clamour for further adjustments elsewhere was met by the setting up of a States’ Reorganisation Committee. Reporting in 1955, this recommended various changes: the remaining three language groups in the south were to be given their own states – Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Kerala – and several changes were made to the Hindi-belt states. But the Sikh demand in the Punjab was put on hold, and a suggestion that an inland Marathi-speaking state be carved from Bombay, leaving the rest of the state bilingual, satisfied no one. There the report was met with massive riots and more deaths, as were several attempts to revise it. The trouble rumbled on till 1960. By then the electoral consequences of alienating such an important Congress stronghold had become as apparent as the discontent. Once again it was time to bow to popular pressure and the constraints of the ballot box. Bombay was divided into Gujarat and Maharashtra, the former being augmented with the addition of the princely states of Saurashtra (Junagadh among them) and the latter being awarded the prize of metropolitan Bombay. Once again pragmatism had come to the rescue of principle.
In retrospect, the linguistic reorganisation would be reckoned a success. Far from encouraging separatist tendencies it removed a major source of conflict and ‘resulted in rationalising the political map of India without weakening its unity’.23 But in the state capitals it did encourage a more assertive federalism. The fourteen linguistically constituted states of 1960 would soon double in number as more groups adopted similar tactics. State governments would grow more confident in taking on the central government; and by the 1980s state parties based on particular language or caste groups would be well enough represented in the Delhi Parliament to be critical components in the coalitions that increasingly held power at the national level.
*
If Tamil Nadu had led the agitation against Hindi as the official language and Andhra the demand for the linguistic reorganisation of the states, it was another southern state, Kerala, that posed the nearest thing to an ideological challenge. More to the international community’s surprise than India’s, in 1957 Kerala’s voters returned to the state assembly the world’s first-ever freely elected Communist government. At the same elections (state and national elections were being held simultaneously) the Communist Party won twenty-seven seats in the Lok Sabha, the national Parliament’s lower house, so consolidating its nationwide position as the largest opposition party. These gains were thought highly significant at the time. The Cold War was at its height; the Hungarian uprising had just been ruthlessly suppressed and Maoist China was gearing up for its ‘great leap forward’. In the previous months China’s Zhou Enlai had twice been to India, while Russia’s Bulganin and Khrushchev had just been rapturously fêted during a state visit.
Nehru himself, though critical of Stalinist methods, greatly admired the social and industrial achievements of the Soviet bloc. To emulate them, he personally chaired the influential National Planning Commission which in 1956 rolled out the second and most ambitious of India’s Five-Year Plans. Modelled on Soviet practice, this committed the government to a socialist pattern of development that prioritised the creation of an industrial base and insisted that strategic industries must be under state ownership. Manufacturing capacity backed by a revamped infrastructure would also reduce the country’s dependence on imports, so reinforcing political sovereignty with the steel mesh of economic self-sufficiency. Expectations duly soared. Economists were consulted and foreign experts, many of them from Eastern Europe, abandoned their wives to the tropical sun and the hotel poolside as they fanned out across the country. Technical appraisals were drawn up for everything from engineering colleges to steel mills and hydro-electric dams.
‘India in the 1950s fell in love with the idea of concrete,’ as Khilnani puts it. Liquid mix was apparently poured at the rate of ten tons a minute, sixteen hours a day for three years, just for the Bhakra-Nangal dam on the Beas river. Producing more coal, more power, more fertiliser, more steel sheet and tube became a national obsession. The front pages were an inky blur of production graphs and statistics, while what remained of the day’s heavily rationed newsprint seemed reserved for government tenders. Research institutes and technical colleges proliferated. Between 1950 and 1965 the number of students studying engineering and technology at diploma or degree level shot up by 750 per cent. In every railway compartment there lurked an inquisitive M.Sc. Industry, science and technology were hailed as the new temples of progress, with proficiency in English as the key to admittance. ‘That India can even think of participating in the globalisation process in today’s [1999’s] world of high technology,’ declares a standard text, ‘… is largely due to the spadework done since Independence, particularly the great emphasis laid on human resource development in the sphere of science and technology.’24 Intended to provide India with the wherewithal for instant Soviet-style lift-off as one of Asia’s industrial giants, this massive investment would take three decades to manifest a return, and then in the form of a joyful embrace of global capitalism.
But none of this was enough for the Communists of Kerala. With no industry to speak of, only glaring inequalities and high unemployment, Keralans were more concerned about workers’ rights, agricultural incentives and the promised redistribution of landholdings. Unfortunately it was these that were being starved of funding and commitment by the planners’ preference for rapid industrialisation. Thus the Communist Party of India, though lately a champion of armed insurrection and still suspected of taking its orders from Moscow, could honestly agree to work within the Constitution. The reforms it desired to enact were already national policy; they just weren’t being effectively enforced. Kerala would show the way.
To win power in a state with a mind-boggling mix of castes and religions, the Party needed first to cultivate its own constituency. This it did with conspicuous success by becoming the mouthpiece and tool of the Ezhava caste. Originally tappers of the toddy palm, on which Kerala’s connoisseurs depend for their hooch, the low-caste Ezhavas were no exception to the state’s high rate of literacy. They were readily politicised. ‘The Christians tend to vote for Congress,’ reported Taya Zinkin on one of several visits, ‘the Muslims usually vote for the (Indian) Muslim League, the [Ezhava] Toddy tappers are the heart of the Communist Party, and the [upper-caste] Nairs are split …’25
There was nothing exceptional in all this. Its assertive castes and large Christian and Muslim minorities made Kerala something of a maverick state, but the affiliation of political parties with particular communities was standard practice. It was how democracy in India (and sporadically Pakistan) worked. Electoral politics were played out on a board whose counters represented entire communities. A party’s job was simply to advance the interests of the community that had endorsed it – or forfeit that community’s support. Communists, no less than Congress, had to play by these rules. As events would demonstrate, it was not India’s susceptibility to Communist ideology that was being tested in Kerala, but the subordination of ideological principle to the exigencies of Indian electoral practice.
The Communist Party’s 1957 victory was followed by a brief honeymoon. Death sentences were commuted, cases against political sympathisers were dismissed and a modest land reform was introduced to give tenants security of tenure. But the state’s large tea and coffee plantations were not nationalised, nor was private enterprise penalised. The new government showed a marked respect for the Constitution, with E.M.S. Namboodiripad, its diminutive Chief Minister (a Stalinist with ‘a dash of Khrushchevian common sense’), doing nothing to incur New Delhi’s wrath. The criticism, muted at first but soon deafening, came from opposition parties within the state; and it focused less on policy than on moves they would themselves expect to take when in power, namely advancing issues dear to their main supporters.
Of these, the most critical touched on the matter of education. Far more children, both male and female, attended school in Kerala than in any other state. Indeed, so great was the consequent appetite for reading mater
ial that some 140 Malayalam newspaper titles were published daily to assuage it. Many of the schools were denominational, and naturally they served to induct children into the traditions of their particular communities. The Nair Service Society was no different in this respect from the Catholic Church or the Muslim educational foundations. All received state grants, appointed and dismissed their own teachers and, within the constraints of national policy, chose their own curricula. Unwisely, the Communist government sought to change this by introducing an Education Bill. The Bill, which was supposed to improve the security of teaching jobs, would oblige schools to select their teachers from a list drawn up by the Public Service Commission; and such a list must, of course, conform to constitutional principle, with at least half its named teachers being drawn from those Backward Castes entitled to preferential public service access.
That meant prestigious jobs for the toddy-tapping Ezhavas and, through them, a chance to insinuate Communist-written textbooks. But as Zinkin put it, ‘non-Toddy Tapper parents in Kerala did not want Toddy Tapper Communists to teach their children’.26 On this most sensitive issue, Christians and Muslims of every persuasion, plus most Hindus who were not of Scheduled Caste status, were as one. The government had foolishly stumbled on the single issue around which all its opponents could unite.
Throughout 1958 the tension mounted. While in Pakistan the parliamentary brickbats were flying and Generals Mirza and Ayub Khan were readying themselves for ‘The Revolution’, in Kerala the revolutionaries were already on the run. The state’s Congress Party led the charge, cynically savaging the Communist government for implementing reforms approved by Congress’s own national leadership. Strikes were orchestrated and demonstrations held. In one such protest the demoralised police shot dead six Congress Party members, so adding misuse of power to an anti-Communist charge sheet that already included corruption, incompetence, maladministration and intimidation.
Meanwhile the Supreme Court in Delhi was considering an appeal that had been lodged against the Education Bill as unconstitutional. The appeal was rejected; the Bill became law in early 1959. This brought forth Mannathu Padmanabhan, a Nair leader and revered disciple of the Mahatma whose eighty-one years had been spent in exemplary service to the community. Stomping the state in the best Gandhian tradition, the untouchable Padmanabhan (he was actually a Brahmin) urged mass civil disobedience and ensured that the schools remained closed for business. Pickets blocked the roads and strikers shut down all manner of public buildings; massive protest marches demanded the government’s resignation. When the police broke up the demonstrations, more died and the gaols overflowed.
Were the government to resign, it would mean another election; and against a united opposition, the Communists could only lose – lose office and lose face. Accordingly, in an unlikely move for a party dedicated to overthrowing the bourgeois Congress, they turned to New Delhi. Nehru had been partly responsible for legalising the Communist Party. He had just entertained the Soviet leadership, and was known to disapprove of the tactics employed by the Kerala Congress Party. He was now invited to visit Kerala and did so in June 1959, so pre-empting a massive march on Trivandrum, the capital. But he could neither persuade the Communists to resign nor convince himself to recommend their dismissal. In a taste of things to come, it was his daughter Indira, the then President of the Congress Party, who made his mind up for him. The big march had been rescheduled for early August. Even as it converged on Trivandrum, word came that the government had been dismissed and the assembly dissolved under Article 365. President’s rule, administered by a directly appointed Governor, would take over until such time as new elections could be held.
In early 1960, the new elections duly returned to power the Congress-led coalition of non-Communist parties. But it was not the end of the road for Communism in Kerala. Though split by the rift between Moscow and Beijing, the Communists would be back in power after the following election, and thereafter Communist coalitions would continue to alternate with Congress coalitions indefinitely. The Party’s Secretary had complained in 1957 that ‘Communism within a democratic constitution is like capitalism without private enterprise.’ But it was not the democratic provisions of the Constitution that were the Party’s biggest problem. Rather was it the Constitution’s interventionist provisions, plus the community-based peculiarities of Indian electoral practice. The Communists had learned their lesson. ‘Twenty-eight months of rule in Kerala has made them a party like any other,’ concluded Taya Zinkin.27
Taming ideological tigers was as integral to the process of nation-building as accommodating South Asia’s many ethnic, linguistic and confessional separatisms. In general India was far more successful at this than its neighbours. Sri Lanka would be crippled by both ethno-linguistic and ideological challenges. So would Nepal. And Pakistan’s failure to assuage mainly regional dissent, most notably in Bengal, would prove fatal. But India too had its failures.
When in 1967 the Communist Party (Marxist) came to power in a United Front coalition in West Bengal, many feared the worst. They need not have worried. West Bengal’s Communists took to electoral politics as readily as Kerala’s. For the next thirty years, under the frequent leadership of the CPM’s charismatic Jyoti Basu, the most volatile of India’s states enjoyed a consistency of redistributive radicalism, if not much stability. But it came at a price. Just as the CPM had splintered from the CPI (Communist Party of India) over the latter’s allegiance to Moscow, so a CPM-L (Communist Party Marxist-Leninist) had splintered from the CPM over its willingness to accept office. Instead, the CPM-L tore a leaf out of Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book and withdrew from democratic politics to concentrate on grassroots revolution.
The Party’s baptism of blood came in Naxalbari, in the north of the state: lands were grabbed, landlords were beheaded and the police retaliated. Now known as ‘Maoists’ or ‘Naxalites’, the revolutionaries found support wherever social iniquities were most acute. Although eventually contained in West Bengal, the movement thrived in other deprived areas and, come the end of the century, would resurface with a vengeance. Vast tracts of Andhra Pradesh, Chattisgarh and Orissa (including Dandakaranya) became no-go areas for the security forces. Meanwhile, just across the border from Naxalbari, a Maoist sister movement would bring the troubled kingdom of Nepal to its knees.
5
Reality Check
Breaking records became a competitive obsession in the 1950s and ’60s. In 1961 the Russian Yuri Gagarin was the first man into space, and eight years after that the Americans Armstrong and Aldrin first walked on the moon. But The Guinness Book of Records, issued annually from 1955 and itself a publication that broke all records, featured a photograph of an earlier record-breaking feat that set the standard. Against a cobalt sky it showed a hooded figure in heroic pose scaling a hump of snow while brandishing aloft an ice-axe tied with flags. Unrecognisable behind snow goggles and oxygen mask, this was Tenzing Norgay, a resident of Darjeeling in West Bengal. Along with the New Zealander Edmund Hillary (who took the photo), on 29 May 1953 Tenzing became the first man to bestride the top of the world. The achievement had no political relevance, which made it all the more psychologically uplifting. India had something to crow about.
The conquest of Everest was as proudly claimed by Nehru’s India as it was by the expedition’s British organisers. From Tenzing’s ice-axe there fluttered, between the ensigns of Britain, Nepal and the UN, a just-visible Indian tricolour; and much as in the United Kingdom the feat was taken as a benediction on the coronation of Elizabeth II, so in the Republic of India it was seen as complementing what empire diehards like Winston Churchill had pooh-poohed as impossible – the successful conduct of an all-India general election. In 1952, on a universal franchise, a creditable 60 per cent of the 176 million Indians entitled to vote had gone to the polls, setting a world record. With another ‘world first’ coming so soon after, independent India was standing tall.
Yet it could have been very different. Prior
to Partition, Tenzing Norgay had been living in Chitral, a princely state in the skirts of the Hindu Kush on Pakistan’s side of the border between the Northern Areas and Afghanistan. Of the maybe seven million non-Muslims who had opted to leave Pakistan and make the dangerous journey into India, Tenzing had been one; otherwise it might have been Pakistan that was celebrating in 1953.
India, however, was not alone in claiming Tenzing’s feat as its own. The mountain itself, though named and trigonometrically measured by surveyors operating from the Indian foothills, stands far beyond the Indian frontier – not to mention above it. It is in fact in the Great Himalaya range that constitutes the borderland between Nepal and Tibet. But the mountains here being over a hundred kilometres deep and the watershed by no means corresponding to the main range, it was as yet unclear in whose territory Everest actually stood. The Chinese said Tibet’s, and so China’s; the Nepalis said Nepal’s. Everest was thus of interest to others; and so, in the same straddling way, was Tenzing. As a Sherpa who was supposedly born in Tibet, he could be regarded as Tibetan, and hence an adoptive Chinese. And following a childhood spent mainly in Nepal, that country too laid claim to his achievement. Moreover, it was from Nepal that the successful 1953 expedition had been launched; it relied heavily on Nepali support and porters and could not have been undertaken without Katmandu’s permission.