India After Gandhi

by Ramachandra Guha

  On the night of the 13th, the Indians bombed the house of the governor in Dacca. The same night Niazi received a message from Yahya Khan advising him to lay down arms, as ‘further resistance is not humanly possible’. The general waited a full day before deciding he had no choice but to obey. On the morning of the 15th he met the American consul general, who a greed to convey a message to New Delhi. The next day, the 16th, Lieutenant General J. S. Aurora of the Indian army’s Eastern Command flew into Dacca to accept a signed instrument of surrender.47 That same evening the prime minister made an announcement in the Lok Sabha that ‘Dacca is now the free capital of a free country’. ‘Long Live Indira Gandhi’ shouted the Congress members, while even an opposition MP was heard to say that ‘the name of the prime minister will go down in history as the golden sword of liberation of Bangla Desh’.48 From Parliament Mrs Gandhi went to the studios of All-India Radio, where she announced a unilateral ceasefire on the western front. Twenty-four hours later General Yahya Khan spoke over the radio, saying he had instructed his troops to cease firing as well.49

  The war had lasted a little less than two weeks. The Indians claimed to have lost 42 aircraft against Pakistan’s 86, and 81 tanks against their 226.50 But by far the largest disparity was in the number of prisoners. In the western sector, each side took a few thousand POWs, but in the east the Indians had now to take charge of around 90,000 Pakistani soldiers.

  Less than pleased with the outcome of the war was President Richard Nixon. ‘The Indians are bastards anyway’, he told Henry Kissinger. ‘Pakistan thing makes your heartsick’, he said. ‘For them to be done so by the Indians and after we had warned the bitch.’ Nixon wondered whether, when Mrs Gandhi had visited Washington in November, he had not been ‘too easy on the goddamn woman’ – it seems to have been a mistake to have ‘really slobbered over the old witch’. By this time even Kissinger had been turned off the Indians. He was cross with himself for having underestimated their military strength – ‘The Indians are such poor pilots they can’t even get off the ground,’ he had claimed in October. His hope now was that ‘the liberals are going to look like jerks because the Indian occupation of East Pakistan is going to make the Pakistani one look like child’s play.’51

  As for the American press, Time magazine even-handedly blamed both sides; Yahya’s ‘murderous rampage against rebellious Bengalis’, along with Indira’s launching of ‘full-scale warfare’, had together ‘brought more suffering to the sub-continent’. However, the influential New York Times columnist James (Scotty) Reston took a more partisan line, writing a brooding, almost conspiratorial piece which saw the Soviet Union as the real beneficiary from ‘this squalid tragedy’. Its new ally India would ‘provide access to Moscow’s rising naval power to the Indian Ocean, and abase of political and military operations on China’s southern flank’. ‘The Soviet Union now has the possibility of bases in India’, claimed Reston. He thought this country’s experiment with democracy was in peril, wondering whether ‘India will be able to encourage independence for one faction in Pakistan without encouraging independence for other factions in India itself, including the powerful Communist faction in the Indian state of Kerala’.52

  VI

  The victory over Pakistan unleashed a huge wave of patriotic sentiment. It was hailed as ‘India’s first military victory in centuries’,53 speaking in terms not of India the nation, but of India the land mass and demographic entity. In the first half of the second millennium a succession of foreign armies had come in through the north-west passage to plunder and conquer. Later rulers were Christian rather than Muslim, and came by sea rather than overland. Most recently, there had been that crushing defeat at the hands of the Chinese. For so long used to humiliation and defeat, Indians could at last savour the sweet smell of military success.

  On the other side of the border the view was all too different. After the news came that their troops had surrendered, an Urdu newspaper in Lahore wrote that ‘today the entire nation weeps tears of blood . . . Today the Indian Army has entered Dacca. Today for the first time in 1,000 years Hindus have won a victory over Muslims . . . Today we are prostrate with dejection.’ Within days, however, the Urdu press was seeking consolation from the lessons of history. While the defeat was certainly ‘a breach in the fortress of Islam’, even the great Muhammad of Ghori had lost his first war in the subcontinent. But as another Lahore newspaper reminded its readers, Ghori had come back ‘with renewed determination to unfurl the banner of Islam over the Kafir land of India’.54

  In India, credit for the victory was shared by countless mostly unnamed soldiers and a single specific politician – the prime minister. Mrs Gandhi was admired for standing up to the bullying tactics of the United States, and for so coolly planning the dismemberment of the enemy. Her parliamentary colleagues went overboard in their salutations, but even opposition politicians were now speaking of her as ‘Durga’, the all-conquering goddess of Hindu mythology. The intellectual and professional classes, usually so sceptical of politics and politicians, were also generous in their praise of the prime minister.

  Representative of this mood of all-round admiration was a symposium on the Bangladesh liberation organized by the Gandhi Peace Foundation in New Delhi. This began with the editor of the Times of India, Girilal Jain, speaking of how ‘India’s self-esteem and image in the world have improved considerably as are sult of the revival of the fortunes of the Congress Party under Mrs Indira Gandhi’s leadership’. It continued with the RSS ideologue K. R. Malkani terming 1971 ‘a watershed in the political evolution of India’. With the events of that year, ‘the old image of peace is being replaced by the new one of power. The old image only elicited patronizing smiles; the new image commands attention, and respect.’ Then the diplomat G. L. Mehta claimed that ‘the people have a new sense of self-confidence and not an unreasonable pride over its newly won prestige in the world’. The left-wing journalist Romesh Thapar concurred: the ‘success of the Bangla Desh policy’, he remarked, had given ‘the thinking Indian a sense of achievement and power’. The left-wing jurist V. R. Krishna Iyer saw in the recent events a progressive maturation of Indian leadership: ‘What in Gandhian days was a vague creed was spelt out in Nehru’s time as an activist social philosophy, and became, under Mrs Gandhi’s leadership, a concrete and dynamic programme of governmental action.’55

  Away from India, Mrs Gandhi’s calmness in a crisis was also admired by a woman who had seen some history in her time, the philosopher Hannah Arendt. In early November Arendt met the prime minister at the home of a mutual friend in New York. A month later, with Indian troops advancing on Dacca, she wrote to the novelist Mary McCarthy of how, at that party, she saw Mrs Gandhi, ‘very good-looking, almost beautiful, very charming, flirting with very man in the room, without chichi, and entirely calm – she must have known already that she was going to make war and probably enjoyed it even in a perverse way. The toughness of these women once they have got what they want is really something!’ 56

  VII

  The prime minister, and her party, naturally sought to make political capital of what the soldiers had accomplished. In March 1972 fresh elections were called in thirteen states, some of which had opposition governments; others, uneasy Congress-led coalitions. In all thirteen, the Congress won comfortably. These included such crucial states as Bihar, Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra. As the Jana Sangh leader Atal Behari Vajpayee ruefully remarked, while the opposition had put up 2,700 separate candidates, the ruling party had in effect fielded the same person in every constituency – Indira Gandhi.57

  However, in at least one state the presence and example of the prime minister was not enough. This was West Bengal, where the Congress won only with resort to a mixture of terror, intimidation and fraud. Gangs of hooligans stuffed ballot boxes with the police idly looking on. There was ‘mass-scale rigging’ in Calcutta; as one activist recalled, goondas paid by the Congress told voters assembled outside polling stations that they might as well
go home, since they had already cast all the registered votes.58 Now in alliance with the CPI, the Congress captured 251 out of the 280 seats in the assembly, ending five years of political instability and bringing the state firmly within the ambit of New Delhi.

  Her domestic rule secured, the prime minister turned her attention to a settlement with Pakistan. Yahya Khan had resigned, and Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto stepped in to take his place. Bhutto told the former British prime minister Sir Alec Douglas-Home that he was keen to forge ‘an entirely new relationship with India’, beginning with a summit meeting with Mrs Gandhi. The message was passed on, with the advice that in view of Pakistan’s wounded pride, the invitation should come from India.59

  The Indians were at first apprehensive, given Bhutto’s unpredictability and history of animosity against India. Confidants of the Pakistani president rushed to assure them of his good intentions. The economist Mahbub ul Haq told an Indian counterpart that Bhutto was now ‘in a very chastened and realistic mood’.60 The journalist Mazhar Ali Khan, editor of Dawn, told his fellow ex-communist the Indian Sajjad Zaheer that Bhutto was honestly trying to forget the past. New Delhi should work to strengthen his hand, otherwise the army and the religious right would gang up to remove him, an outcome that would be disastrous for both India and Pakistan.61

  Zaheer and Khan had worked together in pre-Partition days as fellow activists of the Student Federation of India. Now, encouraged by their former fellow-traveller P. N. Haksar, they met in London in the third week of March 1972 to discuss the terms of a possible agreement between their two national leaders. Khan’s suggestions included are turn of all Pakistani POWs in return for its recognition of Bangladesh, troop withdrawal to positions held before the conflict, and a joint declaration of peace. Coming finally to Kashmir, Khan said that the dispute should ‘not be mentioned at all in the declaration as this will open a Pandora’s box’. Zaheer answered that ‘India must get an assurance that there will be no more attack, infiltration, subversion, anti-India propaganda in Kashmir by Pak[istan]’. Khan agreed, but said that this ‘should be demanded by India in practice. He said we should realise that no Government in Pak[istan] can survive if it renounces, outright, its support to Kashmiris’ right of self-determination.’62

  Khan reported on these talks directly to Bhutto, while Zaheer conveyed them via P. N. Haksar to Mrs Gandhi. The Pakistani president was invited for a summit to beheld in the old imperial summer capital of Simla in the last week of June 1972. He came accompanied by his daughter Benazir and a fairly large staff. First the officials met, and then their leaders. The Indians wanted a comprehensive treaty to settle all outstanding problems (including Kashmir); the Pakistanis preferred a piece meal approach. At a private meeting Bhutto told Mrs Gandhi that he could not go back to his people ‘empty-handed’. The Pakistanis bargained hard. The Indians wanted a ‘no-war pact’; they had to settle for a mutual ‘renunciation of force’. The Indians asked for a ‘treaty’; what they finally got was an ‘agreement’. India said that they could wait for a more propitious moment to solve the Kashmir dispute, but asked for an agreement that the ‘line of control shall be respected by both sides’. Bhutto successfully pressed a cave at: ‘Without prejudice to the recognised position of either side’.63

  One of Mrs Gandhi’s key advisers, D. P. Dhar, wanted her to insist on ‘the settlement of the Kashmiri issue as an integral and irreducible content of a settlement with Pakistan’, and to make this a precondition for the repatriation of POWs.64 Dhar was a cent per cent Kashmiri, born and raised in the Valley. The prime minister, Kashmiri by distant origin only, felt less strongly on the subject; she was also more conscious of world opinion, and (as Mazhar Ali Khan had warned) mindful of Bhutto’s precarious position within Pakistan. The agreement they finally signed – shortly after noon on 3 July – spoke only of maintaining the line of control. However, on Indian insistence, a clause was added that the two countries would settle all their differences ‘by peaceful means through bilateral negotiations or by any other peaceful means mutually agreed upon – this, in theory, ruling out either third-party mediation or the stoking of violence in Kashmir.65 However, Bhutto had apparently assured Mrs Gandhi that, once his position was more secure, he would persuade his people to accept conversion of the line of control into the international border.

  The ink had hardly dried on the Simla Agreement when Bhutto reneged on this (admittedly informal) promise. On 14 July he spoke for three hours in the National Assembly of Pakistan, his text covering sixty-nine pages of closely printed foolscap paper. He talked of how he had fought ‘for the concept of one Pakistan from the age of 15’. He blamed Mujib, Yahya, and everyone but himself for the ‘unfortunate and tragic separation of East Pakistan’. Then he came to the topic that still divided Pakistan and India – the future of Jammu and Kashmir. As the victor in war, said Bhutto, ‘India had all the cards in her hands’ – yet he had still forged an equal agreement from an unequal beginning. The Simla accord was a success, he argued, because Pakistan would get back its POWs and land held by Indian forces, and because it did ‘not compromise on the right of self-determination of the people of Jammu and Kashmir’. He offered the ‘solemn commitment of the people of Pakistan, that if tomorrow the people of Kashmir start a freedom movement, if tomorrow Sheikh Abdullah or Maulvi Farooq or others start a people’s movement, we will be with them’.66

  The Indians complained that Bhutto had gone back on his word.67 They should perhaps have thought of how they had themselves felt in the last days of 1962. The Chinese had then inflicted a humiliation on the nation, affecting both leaders and citizens of all shades and stripes. That is also how the Pakistanis felt in 1972, having suffered a comparable defeat at the hands of the Indians. In truth, they felt even worse, for while the Chinese had merely seized some (mostly useless) territory from India, the Indians had, by assisting in the creation of Bangladesh, blown a big hole in the founding ideology of the Pakistani nation. To this there could be only one effective answer – to assist in the separation of Kashmir from India, thus to blow an equally big hole in the founding idea of Indian secularism.

  21

  * * *

  THE RIVALS

  Indira is India, India is Indira.

  D. K. BAROOAH, Congress president, circa 1974

  I

  ON 15 AUGUST 1972 India celebrated the twenty-fifth anniversary of Independence. A special midnight sitting was held in the Lok Sabha where the prime ministerre called the struggle for freedom from the 1857 rebellion to the present, marking the major landmarks along the way. The Indian quest, said Mrs Gandhi, ‘has been friendship with all, submission to none’.1 The next morning she addressed the nation from the ramparts of the Red Fort. ‘India is stronger today than it was twenty-five years ago’, said the prime minister. ‘Our democracy has found roots, our thinking is clear, our goals are determined, our paths are planned to achieve the goals and our unity is more solid today than ever before.’ ‘Nations march ahead’, insisted Mrs Gandhi, ‘not by looking at others but with self-confidence, determination and unity.’2

  It is noteworthy that Mrs Gandhi’s speech did not touch on economics. Since Independence, the Indian economy had grown at a rate of 3–4 per cent per year. The output of the factory sector increased by some 250 per cent, the rise being more marked in heavy industry as compared to consumer goods. A new class of entrepreneurs sprung up, who located units away from the old centres of industry. The state augmented infrastructural facilities: 56 million kilowatt hours of power were generated in 1971 (as against6.6million in 1950), while the extent of surfaced roads more than doubled, and the freight carried by the railways almosttripled.3

  These developments helped rural producers as well as urban ones. Where irrigation was available – through dams or tube wells – farmers increased their production of both cereals and crops such as cotton, chillies and vegetables. Previously isolated villages were now integrated with the outside world. New roads allowed vehicles to take out crops and b
ring in commodities; they also transported villagers to the city and back, exposing them to new ideas. Within the village there was a slow spread of innovations such as the bicycle, the telephone and, above all, the school.4

  These aggregate improvements masked significant regional variations. The Green Revolution had touched less than one-tenth of the districts in rural India. Most areas of farming were still rain-fed. Thus, despite the rise in industrial growth and agricultural production, there was still widespread destitution in the countryside. The year before the prime minister’s anniversary speech, two economists in Poona, V. M. Dandekar and Nilakantha Rath, published a major study entitled, simply, Poverty in India. Drawing on countrywide surveys, this concluded that 40 per cent of the rural population and 50 per cent of the urban population did not enjoy even a ‘minimum level of living’ – defined as a per capita annual expenditure of Rs324 in the villages and Rs489 in the cities. The incidence of poverty had increased over the decade. At the beginning of the 1960s 33 per cent of the rural and 49 per cent of the urban population lived below this ‘poverty line’. In or around 1970, estimated Dandekar and Rath, some 223 million Indians were poor, just over 40 per cent of the total population of about 530 million.

  Other economists made other estimates: some put the percentage of the really poor even higher than Dandekar and Rath, others said it was slightly lower. The economists disputed exactly how many poor people there were in India, but all agreed that there were too many – close to 200 million by even the most conservative reckoning. These studies found that the poor in rural India spent roughly 80 per cent of their income on food and another 10 per cent on fuel, leaving a mere 10 per cent for clothing and otheritems.5