Here again, Indian events and experiences were being analysed in terms carelessly borrowed from European history. To call the BJP ‘fascist is to diminish the severity and seriousness of the murderous crimes committed by the original fascists in Italy and Germany. Many leaders of the BJP are less than appealing, but to see the party as ‘fascist’ would be both to overestimate its powers and to underestimate the democratic traditions of the Indian people. Notably, the BJP now vigorously promotes linguistic pluralism. No longer are its leaders from the Hindi heartland alone; and it has expanded its influence in the southern states. And it is obliged to pay at least lip service to religious pluralism. One of its general secretaries is a Muslim; even if he is dismissed as a token, the ideology he and his party promote goes by the name of ‘positive secularism’. The qualifier only underlines the larger concession – that even if some BJP leaders privately wish for a theocratic Hindu state, for public consumption they must endorse the secular ideals of the Indian Constitution.
Finally, despite all their best efforts, the BJP was not able to disturb the democratic edifice of the Indian polity. A month after Arundhati Roy delivered her speech, the BJP alliance lost power in a general election that it had called. Its leaders moved out of office and allowed their victors to move in instead. When was the last time a ‘fascist’ regime permitted such an orderly transfer of power?
The holding of the 1977 elections – called by an individual who had proven dictatorial tendencies – and of the 2004 elections – called by a party unreliably committed to democratic procedure – were both testimony to the deep roots that democracy had struck in the soil of India. In this respect, the country was fortunate in the calibre of its founding figures, and in the fact that they lived as long as they did. Few nations have had leaders of such acknowledged intelligence and integrity as Jawaharlal Nehru, Vallabhbhai Patel and B. R. Ambedkar all living and working at the same time. Within a few years of Independence Patel had died and Ambedkar had left office; but by then the one had successfully overseen the political integration of the country and the other the forging of a democratic constitution. As Nehru lived on, he was kept company by outstanding leaders in his own party – K. Kamaraj and Morarji Desai, for instance – and in the opposition, in whose ranks were such men as J. B. Kripalani and C. Rajagopalachari.
Jawaharlal Nehru served three full terms in office, a privilege denied comparable figures in the countries of South Asia, where, for example, Aung San was murdered on the eve of the British departure from Burma, Jinnah died within a few years of Pakistan’s freedom, Mujib within a few years of Bangladesh’s independence and the Nepali democrat B. P. Koirala was allowed only a year as prime minister before being dismissed (and then jailed) by the monarchy. What might those men have done if they had enjoyed power as long as Nehru, and if they had had the kind of supporting cast that he did?21
Of course, there has been a rapid, even alarming, decline in the quality of the men and women who rule India. In a book published in 2003 the political theorist Pratap Bhanu Mehta wrote feelingly of ‘the corruption, mediocrity, indiscipline, venality and lack of moral imagination of the [Indian] political class’. Within the Indian state, he continued, ‘the lines between legality and illegality, order and disorder, state and criminality, have come to be increasingly porous’.22
That said, the distance – intellectual or moral – between Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi, or between B. R. Ambedkar and Mulayam Singh Yadav, is not necessarily greater than between, say, Abraham Lincoln and George W. Bush. It is in the nature of democracies, perhaps, that while visionaries are sometimes necessary to make them, once made they can be managed by mediocrities. In India, the sapling was planted by the nation’s founders, who lived long enough (and worked hard enough) to nurture it to adulthood. Those who came afterwards could disturb and degrade the tree of democracy but, try as they might, could not uproot or destroy it.
IV
Indian nationalism has not been based on a shared language, religion, or ethnic identity. Perhaps one should then invoke the presence of a common enemy, namely European colonialism. The problem here is the methods used to achieve India’s freedom. The historian Michael Howard claims that ‘no Nation, in the true sense of the word ... could be born without war ... no self-conscious community could establish itself as a new and independent actor on the world scene without an armed conflict or the threat of one’.23 Once again, India must count as an exception. Certainly, it was the movement against British rule that first united men and women from different parts of the subcontinent in a common and shared endeavour. However, their (eventually successful) movement for political freedom eschewed violent revolution in favour of non-violent resistance. India emerged as a nation on the world stage without an armed conflict or, indeed, the threat of one.
Gandhi and company have been widely praised for preferring peaceful protest to armed struggle. However, they should be equally commended for having the wisdom to retain, after the British left, such aspects of the colonial legacy as might prove useful in the new nation.
The colonialists were often chastised by the nationalists for promoting democracy at home while denying it in the colonies. When the British finally left, it was expected the Indians would embrace metropolitan traditions such as parliamentary democracy and Cabinet government. More surprising perhaps was their endorsement and retention of a quintessentially colonial tradition – the civil service.
The key men in British India were the members of the Indian Civil Service (ICS). In the countryside they kept the peace and collected the taxes, while in the Secretariat they oversaw policy and generally kept the machinery of state well oiled. Although there was the odd rotten egg, these were mostly men of integrity and ability.24 A majority were British, but there were also a fair number of Indians in the ICS.
When Independence came, the new government had to decide what to do with the Indian civil servants. Nationalists who had been jailed by them argued that they should be dismissed or at least put in their place. The home minister, Vallabhbhai Patel, however, felt that they should be allowed to retain their pay and perquisites, and in fact be placed in positions of greater authority. In October 1949 a furious debate broke out on the subject in the Constituent Assembly of India. Some members complained that the ICS men still had the ‘mentality [of rulers] lingering in them’. They had apparently ‘not changed their manners’, ‘not reconciled themselves to the new situation’. ‘They do not feel that they are part and parcel of this country’, insisted one nationalist.
Vallabhbhai Patel had himself been jailed many times by ICS men, but this experience had only confirmed his admiration for them. He knew that without them the Pax Britannica would simply have been inconceivable. And he understood that the complex machinery of a modern independent nation-state needed such officers even more. As he reminded the members of the assembly, the new constitution could be worked only ‘by a ring of Service which will keep the country intact’. He testified to the ability of the ICS men, but also to their sense of service. As Patel put it, the officers had ‘served very ably, very loyally the then Government and later the present Government’. Patel was clear that ‘these people are the instruments [of national unity]. Remove them and I see nothing but a picture of chaos all over the country.’25
In those first, terribly difficult years of Indian freedom, the ICS men vindicated Vallabhbhai Patel’s trust in them. They helped integrate the princely states, resettle the refugees and plan and oversee the first general election. Other tasks assigned to them were more humdrum but equally consequential – such as maintaining law and order in the districts, working with ministers in the Secretariat and supervising famine relief. In 1947 Patel inaugurated a new cadre modelled on the ICS but with a name untainted by the colonial experience. This was the Indian Administrative Service, or IAS.
In 2008 there are some 5,000 IAS officers in the employment of the government of India. The IAS is complemented, as in British days, by other ‘al
l India’ services, among them the police, forest, revenue and customs services. These serve as an essential link between the centre and the states. Officers are assigned to a particular state; they spend at least half of their service career in that province, the rest in the centre. To the older duties of tax collection and the maintenance of law and order have been added a whole range of new responsibilities. Conducting elections is one; the supervising of development programmes another. In the course of his career an average IAS officer would acquire at least a passing familiarity with such different and divergent subjects as criminal jurisprudence, irrigation management, soil and water conservation and primary health care.
This, like its predecessor, is truly an ‘elite’ cadre. The competition to enter the higher civil services is ferocious. In 1996, 120,712 candidates appeared for the examination, of whom a mere 738 were finally selected. Their intelligence and ability is of a very high order. However, there are complaints of increasing corruption among its members, and of their succumbing too easily to their political masters. Perhaps if the IAS is abolished at one stroke the country will not descend into chaos. But as it stands IAS officers play a vital role in maintaining its unity.26 In times of crisis they tend to rise to the challenge. After the tsunami of 2004, for example, IAS officers in Tamil Nadu were commended for their outstanding work in relief and rehabilitation.
It was an ICS man, Sukumar Sen, who laid the groundwork for elections in India, and it has been IAS men who have kept the machinery going. The chief election commissioners in the states are drawn from the service. Junior officers supervise polls in their districts; those in the middle ranks serve as election observers, reporting on violations of procedure. More generally, the civil services serve as a bridge between state and society. In the course of their work, these administrators meet thousands of members of the public, drawn from all walks of life. Living and working in a democracy, they are obliged to pay close attention to what people think and demand. In this respect, their job is probably even harder than that of their predecessors in the ICS.
A colonial institution that has played an equally vital role is the Indian army. Its reputation took a battering after the China war of 1962, before it redeemed itself through its performance in successive wars with Pakistan. The blows inflicted by Tamil insurgents in Sri Lanka in 1987–8 dented the army somewhat, but then honour was restored by the successful ousting of the Kargil intruders a decade later. While its reputation as a fighting force has gone up and down, as an agency for maintaining order in peacetime the Indian army has usually commanded the highest respect. In times of communal rioting, the mere appearance of soldiers in uniform is usually enough to make the rioters flee. And in times of natural disaster they bring succour to the suffering. When there is a flood, famine, cyclone or earthquake, it is the army which is often first on the scene, and always the most efficient and reliable actor around.
The Indian army is a professional and wholly non-sectarian body. It is also apolitical. Almost from the first moments of Independence, Jawaharlal Nehru made it clear to the army top brass that in matters of state – both large and small – they had to subordinate themselves to the elected politicians. At the time of the transfer of power the army was still headed by a British general, who had ordered that the public be kept away from a flag-hoisting ceremony to be held on the day after Independence. As prime minister, Nehru rescinded the order, and wrote to the general as follows:
While I am desirous of paying attention to the views and susceptibilities of our senior officers, British and Indian, it seems to me that there is a grave misunderstanding about the matter. In any policy that is to be pursued, in the Army or otherwise, the views of the Government of India and the policy they lay down must prevail. If any person is unable to lay down that policy, he has no place in the Indian Army, or in the Indian structure of Government. I think this should be made perfectly clear at this stage.27
A year later it was Vallabhbhai Patel’s turn to put a British general in his place. When the government decided to move against the Nizam, the commander-in-chief, General Roy Bucher, warned that sending troops into Hyderabad might provoke Pakistan to attack Amritsar. Patel told Bucher that if he opposed the Hyderabad action he was free to resign. The general backed down, and sent the troops as ordered.28
Shortly afterwards Bucher retired, to be succeeded by the first Indian C-in-C, General K. M. Cariappa. At the beginning of his tenure Cariappa restricted himself to military matters, but as he grew into the job he began to offer his views on such questions as India’s preferred model of economic development. In October 1952 Nehru wrote advising him to give fewer press conferences, and at any rate to stick to safe subjects. He also enclosed a letter from one of his Cabinet colleagues, which complained that Cariappa was ‘giving so many speeches and holding so many Press Conferences all over the country’, giving the impression that he was ‘playing the role of apolitical or semi-political leader’.29
The message seems to have gone home, for when Cariappa demitted office in January 1953, in his farewell speech he ‘exhorted soldiers to give a wide berth to politics’. The army’s job, he said, was not ‘to meddle in politics but to give unstinted loyalty to the elected Government’.30 Nehru knew, however, that the general was something of a loose cannon, who could not be completely trusted to follow his own advice. Within three months of his retirement Cariappa was appointed high commissioner to Australia. The general was not entirely pleased, for, as he told the prime minister, ‘by going away from home to the other end of the world for whatever period you want me in Australia, I shall be depriving myself of being in continuous and constant touch with the people .Nehru consoled the general that as a sportsman himself he was superbly qualified to represent India to a sporting nation. But the real intention, clearly, was to get him as far away from the people as possible.31
As the first Indian to head the army, Cariappa carried a certain cachet, which lost its lustre with every passing month after he had left office. By the time he came back from Australia Cariappa was a forgotten man. Nehru’s foresight was confirmed, however, by the statements the general made from time to time. In 1958 he visited Pakistan, where army officers who had served with him in undivided India had just effected a coup. Cariappa publicly praised them, saying that it was ‘the chaotic internal situation which forced these two patriotic Generals to plan together to impose Martial Law in the country to save their homeland from utter ruination’.32 Ten years later, he sent an article to the Indian Express, in which he argued that the chaotic internal situation in West Bengal demanded that President’s Rule be imposed for a minimum of five years. The recommendation was in violation of both the letter and the spirit of the constitution. Fortunately, the piece was returned by the editor, who pointed out to the general that ‘it would be embarrassing in the circumstances both to you and to us to publish this article’.33
The pattern set in those early years has persisted into the present. As Lieutenant General J. S. Aurora notes, Nehru ‘laid down some very good norms’, which ensured that ‘politics in the army has been almost absent’. ‘The army is not a political animal in any terms’, remarks Aurora, and the officers especially ‘must be the most apolitical people on earth!’34 It is a striking fact that no army commander has ever fought an election. Aurora himself became a national hero after overseeing the liberation of Bangladesh, but neither he nor other officers have sought to convert glory won on the battlefield into political advantage. If they have taken public office after retirement, it has been at the invitation of the government. Some, like Cariappa, have been sent as ambassadors overseas; others have served as state governors.
The army, like the civil services, is a colonial institution that has been successfully indigenized. The same might be said about the English language. In British times the intelligentsia and professional classes communicated with one another in English. So did the nationalist elite. Patel, Bose, Nehru, Gandhi and Ambedkar all spoke and wrote in their native t
ongue, and also in English. To reach out to regions other than one’s own, its use was indispensable. Thus a pan-Indian, anti-British consciousness was created, in good part by thinkers and activists writing in the English language.
After Independence, among the most articulate advocates for English was C. Rajagopalachari. The colonial rulers, he wrote, had ‘for certain accidental reasons, causes and purposes ... left behind [in India] a vast body of the English language’. But now it had come there was no need for it to go away. For English ‘is ours. We need not send it back to Britain along with Englishmen. He humorously added that, according to Indian tradition, it was a Hindu goddess, Saraswati, who had given birth to all the languages of the world. Thus English ‘belonged to us by origin, the originator being Saraswati, and also by acquisition’.35
On the other hand, there were some very influential nationalists who believed that English must be thrown out of India with the British. In Nehru’s day, fitful attempts were made to replace English with Hindi as the language of inter-provincial communication. But it continued to be in use within and outside government. Visiting India in 1961 the Canadian writer George Woodcock found that, despite India’s strangeness, its ‘immense variety of custom, landscape and physical types’, this was ‘a foreign setting in which one’s language was always understood by someone nearby, and in which to speak with an English accent meant that one was seen as a kind of cousin bred out of the odd, temporary marriage of two peoples into which love and hate entered with equal intensity’.36
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