India After Gandhi

by Ramachandra Guha

26

  Owen Lattimore, ‘India–Tibet–China: Starting Principle for Frontier Demarcation’, Economic Weekly, annual issue, January 1960. Steven Hoffman explains that Chou’s ‘barter’ offer could not be acceptable to India because’it was being asked to accept the clandestine and forceful seizure of parts of its territory [in the west], in return for a worthless assurance that another part of the frontier [in the east] would not be menaced’ (India and the China Crisis,pp. 86–7).

  27

  ‘Pragmatist’, ‘The Political Economy of Defence’, Economic Weekly, annual issue, January 1960.

  28

  Presidential address of Pitambar Das, reproduced in Girja Kumar and V. K. Arora, eds, Documents on Indian Affairs, 1960 (Bombay: Asia Publishing House, 1965), pp. 22f.

  29

  See Gyanvati Darbar, Portrait of a President: Letters of Dr Rajendra Prasad, vol. 2 (New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1976), pp. 85–6.

  30

  Unless otherwise stated, this and the following paragraphs are based on reports and comments in the Indian Express, various issues of 10 March to 27 April 1960.

  31

  Kumar and Arora, Documents, pp. 493–4. The signatories to this letter included J. Kripalani, M. R. Masani, A. B. Vajpayee, and N. G. Goray.

  32

  The Current, 27 April 1960.

  33

  ‘Record of Talks between Prime Minister of India and Prime Minister of China, 20th to 25th April 1960’, in Subject File 24, P. N. Haksar Papers, First and Second Instalments, NMML. The transcripts of the talks run to over a hundred foolscap pages.

  34

  Copies of the transcripts of Chou En-lai’s talks with Desai, Pant, Radhakrishnan and other leaders are in Subject File26, P. N. Haksar Papers, First and Second Instalments, NMML. Desai was right in spirit if not in substance, for it was Karl Marx who sought asylum in the UK, whereas Lenin lived in exile in that other bourgeois nation, Switzerland.

  35

  This paragraph is based on Margaret W. Fisher, Leo E. Rose and Robert A. Huttenback, Himalayan Battleground: Sino-Indian Rivalry in Ladakh (London: Pall Mall Press, 1963), esp. chapter 11.

  36

  The transcripts of the talks are reproduced in Appendix XI of Parshotam Mehra, Negotiating with the Chinese, 1846–1987 (New Delhi: Reliance Publishing House, 1989).

  37

  Interview in Look magazine, 18 October 1960, reproduced in Edgar Snow, The Other Side of the River: Red China Today (New York: Random House, 1963), pp. 762–3.

  38

  Baldev Raj Nayar, Minority Politics in the Punjab (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), esp. pp. 248–60;the Current, 16 August and 23 August 1961; correspondence between Nehru, Rajaji and Tara Singh in Subject File 82, C Rajagopalachari Papers, Fourth Instalment, NMML.

  39

  Nehru to Jayaprakash Narayan, 10 October 1961, Brahmanand Papers, NMML.

  40

  See E. N. Mangat Rai, Commitment My Style (Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1973), chapter 10. Mangat Rai was Kairon’s chief secretary for five of his eight years in power.

  41

  The Current, 9 December 1959, 6 January 1960 and 14 September 1963.

  42

  A. G. Noorani, Ministers’ Misconduct (Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1973), p. 42.

  43

  Nirmal Nibedon, Nagaland: The Night of the Guerillas (New Delhi: Lancer, 1983), pp. 88–90.

  44

  A. Z. Phizo, The Fate of the Naga People: An Appeal to the World (London: privately published, July 1960).

  45

  See, for example, the clippings in the W. G. Archer Papers, Mss Eur F236, OIOC.

  46

  Anon., The Naga Problem (New Delhi: Ministry of External Affairs, 1960). As many as 2,000 copies of this pamphlet were printed.

  47

  This memorandum is reproduced in Kumar and Arora, Documents, pp. 91–5.

  48

  Ibid., pp. 101–5.

  49

  Clipping from The Times, 21 September 1962, in Mss Eur F158/239, OIOC.

  50

  Daniel Thorner, ‘Ploughing the Plan Under: Ford Team Report on Food “Crisis”’, Economic Weekly, special issue, July 1959.

  51

  See Report of Non-Official Enquiry Commission on Cachar (Calcutta: N. Chatterjee, 1961); L. P. Singh, Portrait of Lal Bahadur Shastri: A Quintessential Gandhian (New Delhi: Ravi Dayal, 1996), chapter 3.

  52

  The Current, 8 March 1961.

  53

  Selig S. Harrison, India: The Most Dangerous Decades (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960).

  54

  See Grover Smith, ed., Letters of Aldous Huxley (London: Chatto and Windus, 1969), pp. 926–7.

  55

  Arthur Cook, ‘Nehru’, Daily Mail, 20 February 1962.

  56

  For details, see WPs IV, V and VI, passim.

  57

  Lok Sabha Debates, 11 April 1961.

  58

  Ibid., 17 August and 28 November 1961, 14 August 1962.

  59

  Ibid., 5 December 1961.

  60

  P. D. Gaitonde, The Liberation of Goa: A Participant’s View of History (London: C. Hurst and Co., 1987), chapter 18; Illustrated Weekly of India, special issue, 18 February 1962; D. R. Mankekar, The Goa Action (Bombay: The Popular Book Depot, 1962).

  61

  See clippings and papers in File8, Box XVI.18, Richard B. Russell Papers, University of Georgia, Athens; File29, Penderel Moon Papers, OIOC (Mss Eur F230/29).

  62

  New York Times, 18 and 19 December 1961. There is also a suggestion that sections within the Indian army welcomed the Goan adventure as a victory easily won. It was, recalled one officer, ‘light relief from the gloom and foreboding of the general strategic scene’ along the borders with China. See Maj. Gen. D. K. Palit, Musings and Memories, vol. 2 (New Delhi: Lancer, 2004), pp. 411–12.

  63

  My account of the election is based on Aloo J. Dastur, Menon versus Kripalani: North Bombay Election, 1962 (Bombay: University of Bombay, 1967), supplemented by Norman D. Palmer, ‘The 1962 Election in North Bombay’, Pacific Affairs, vol. 30, no. 1, spring 1963. Cf. also A. D. Gorwala, Krishna Menon: Danger to India (Bombay: privately published, January 1962). The Hindi ditty was supplied by Nitya Ramakrishnan.

  64

  ‘Seminarist’, ‘Issues in the Election’, Seminar, July 1962.

  65

  K. P. Subramania Menon, ‘The Ramifications’, and General K. S. Thimayya, ‘Adequate “Insurance”’, both in Seminar, July 1962. That, even in retirement, Thimayya was seriously worried about the Chinese threat is also indicated by a book that he once owned and which is now in my possession; written by a retired major, it provides a historical conspectus of the NEFA region that had become so central to the border conflict. My copy of the book – Major Sitaram Johri, Where India, China and Burma Meet (Calcutta: Thacker, Spink and Co., 1962) has ‘K.S. Thimayya, 9 Feb. 62’ written on its flyleaf; I found it in a second-hand store in Bangalore, once the general’s home town, and now mine.

  66

  As the spark that fuelled the Chinese invasion, the Thag La conflict has been widely written about. My account is based on, among other sources, Brigadier J. P. Dalvi, Himalayan Blunder (Delhi: Hind Pocket Books, 1970), chapters 7, 9–12; Maxwell, India’s China War, pp. 357 ff.; Hoffman, India and the China Crisis, pp. 130ff.

  67

  Hoffman, India and the China Crisis, p. 149.

  68

  Dalvi, Himalayan Blunder, pp. 262–3.

  69

  New York Times, 21 October 1962.

  70

  New York Times, 24 October 1962.

  71

  Dalvi, Himalayan Blunder, pp. 80–1.

  72

  Chou to Nehru, 24 October and 4 November 1962, Nehru to Chou, 27 October and 14 November 1962, printed with enclosures in WP VIII, pp. 1–17.

  73

  John Kenneth Galb
raith, Ambassador’s Journal (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1969), p. 385.

  74

  New York Times, 28 and 30 October 1962.

  75

  Lok Sabha Debates, 8–14 November 1962. In his closing speech Nehru deplored the series of attacks on Chinese shopkeepers in New Delhi, which ‘brutalizes us and gives us a bad name’. Like his mentor, Gandhi, he knew how easily nationalism could shade into jingoism. To take revenge on innocent shopkeepers was deeply wrong-headed, for ‘we should always distinguish between governmental action and the people as a whole’.

  76

  The Walong battle is vividly described in G. S. Bhargava, The Battle for NEFA (Bombay: Allied Publishers, 1964), chapter 5.

  77

  Hoffman, India and the China Crisis, pp. 180–1.

  78

  Maxwell, India’s China War, pp. 398ff. In his memoirs, Kaul argues that Se La was a well-positioned and well-fortified garrison that could have held out for a week or more; he blames its fall and the flight of the troops on the failure of nerve of the man in charge, Major General A. S. Pathania. See Kaul, The Untold Story, pp. 413ff.

  79

  As recalled in B. G. Verghese, ‘Unfinished Business in the North-East’, Mainstream, 15 June 2002.

  80

  A. M. Rosenthal, ‘War Fever in India’, New York Times, 3 November 1962.

  81

  D. R. Mankekar, The Guilty Men of 1962 (Bombay: Tulsi Shah Enterprises, 1968), pp. 88–90.

  82

  Woodman, Himalayan Frontiers, p. 293.

  83

  Maxwell, India’s China War, p. 465.

  84

  Palit, War in High Himalaya, pp. 225, 231.

  85

  As quoted in Snow, Other Side of the River, pp. 761–2 (emphases added).

  86

  Allen Ginsberg, Indian Journals: March 1962–May 1963 (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1970), p. 50.

  16. PPEACE IN OUR TIME

  1

  John Kenneth Galbraith, Ambassador’s Journal (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1969), pp. 405–12.

  2

  Robert Sherrod, ‘Nehru: The Great Awakening’, Saturday Evening Post,19 January 1963.

  3

  Galbraith to Kennedy, 29 January 1963, copy in Dean Rusk Papers, University of Georgia, Athens. Perhaps it was the economist in Galbraith that provoked him to identify China rather than Russia as the greater long-term threat to American interests.

  4

  Cf.Richard Parker, John Kenneth Galbraith: HisLife, His Politics, His Economics (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), p. 400.

  5

  See clippings in Files 9 and 10, Box XVI.18, Richard B. Russell Papers, University of Georgia, Athens. The rest of this section is likewise based on material containec in these files.

  6

  There was also a letter, too crazy to quote in the text perhaps, which urged a cheaper method of disposing of the Chinese threat than arming the Indians. S. B. Crowe of Sanford, Florida, recommended that the Americans drop boxes of atomic waste, each with an explosive charge, on the Chinese side of the Himalaya The Reds would be told of this, so that they would ‘stay out of Tibet and India’. However, ‘if Mao wishes to conduct an experiment in genetics and send 150 million through this radiation hazard, it would be an interesting experiment’. Estimating that this would save the American taxpayer ‘about a billion dollars’, M: Crowe signed off as follows: ‘Yours for more economy in Government. The barre isn’t bottomless, in spite of Mr Keynes and his theories.’

  7

  ‘Transcript of Prime Minister’s Press Conference held on June 15, 1963, in New Delhi’, issued by Press Information Bureau, Government of India, copy in Subject File189, P. N. Haksar Papers, Third Instalment, NMML. Cf. also The Statesman, une 1963.

  8

  See Stanley Kochanek, The Congress Party of India: The Dynamics of One-Party Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), pp. 79ff.

  9

  Ibid., pp. 78–80.

  10

  H. V. Kamath, Last Days of Jawaharlal Nehru (Calcutta: Jayashree Prakashan, 1977), pp. 1–2.

  11

  Wells Hangen, After Nehru, Who? (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1963).

  12

  These quotes are from an article by Tom Stacey, originally published in the Sunday Times of London and reprinted under a different title in the Current, 1 January 1964.

  13

  Indira Gandhi to Mridula Sarabhai, 4 September 1963, Reel 57, Mridula Sarabhai Papers, on microfilm, NMML.

  14

  Cf. Kanji Dwarkadas to Lord Scarborough, 16 January 1964, Mss Eur F253/53 (Lord Lumley Papers), OIOC.

  15

  For the different ways in which the creation of the state was received, see P. N. Luthra, Nagaland: From a District to a State (Shillong: Directorate of Information and Public Relations, 1974), pp. 1–16; A. Lanunungsang Ao, From Phizo to Muivah: The Naga NationalQuestion in North-east India (New Delhi: Mittal Publications), pp. 81–2.

  16

  The Current, 4 January 1964.

  17

  Cf. report in the Current, 20 April 1963.

  18

  C. P. Srivastava, Lal Bahadur Shastri: A Lifeof Truth in Politics (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 71–4; Rajeshwar Prasad, Days with Lal Bahadur Shastri: Glimpses from the Last Seven Years (New Delhi: Allied Publishers, 1991), pp. 27–9.

  19

  Mountbatten’s conversations with Nehru are reported in the correspondence contained in Subject File 52, T. T. Krishnamachari Papers, NMML.

  20

  Aparna Basu, Mridula Sarabhai:Rebel with a Cause (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996), chapter 9, ‘Kashmir’; Hindustan Times (hereafter HT), 9 April 1964.

  21

  Dawn, 18 November 1960.

  22

  Nehru to Vijayalakshmi Pandit, 3 October 1953, Vijayalakshmi Pandit Papers, NMML.

  23

  Nehru to Tikaram Paliwal, 17 July 1955, in SWJN2, vol. 29, pp. 452–3.

  24

  These paragraphs on Abdullah’s release and his triumphant return to the Valley are based principally on the HT, issues of 6–24 April 1964.

  25

  See letters and papers in Subject File 28 ‘Indo-Pakistan Conciliation Group’, Brahmanand Papers, NMML.

  26

  Jayaprakash Narayan, ‘Our Great Opportunity in Kashmir’, HT, 20 April 1964.

  27

  C. Rajagopalachari, ‘Am I Wrong?’, Swarajya, 25 April 1964.

  28

  See report in HT, 23 April 1964. In the rest of this section, quotes not given specific attributions come from this newspaper.

  29

  Telegram dated 29 April 1964, in Subject File 92, C. Rajagopalachari Papers, Fourth Instalment, NMML.

  30

  Letter of 29 April 1964, ibid. As some other letters in this file show, most Swatantra Party members opposed Masani and Rajaji in their support of the Nehru-Abdullah talks. K. M. Munshi said that the Sheikh should be put back in jail. Dahyabhai Patel (son of Vallabhbhai Patel) said that the only solution to the Kashmir problem was to settle the Valley with Hindu refugees from East Pakistan.

  31

  Abdullah to Minoo Masani, 16 April 1964, ibid.

  32

  Shastri to Rajaji, 4 May 1964, ibid.

  33

  ‘Kashmir – Talk with Sheikh Abdullah on 8th May, 1964 at PM’s House’, Subject File 4, Y. D. Gundevia Papers, NMML.

  34

  Shiva Raoto Rajaji, 10 May 1964; Rajajito Shiva Rao, 12 May 1964; both in Subject File 92, C. Rajagopalachari Papers, Fourth Instalment, NMML.

  35

  HT, 23 May 1964.

  36

  Y. D. Gundevia to V. K. T. Chari (Attorney-General, Madras), 13 May 1964, Subject File 4, Y. D. Gundevia Papers, NMML. The confederal solution to the Kashmir problem was apparently first proposed by the journalist Arthur Moore as early as January 1948. Moore believed that ‘India, Pakistan and Kashmir should become
a federated commonwealth state, with common foreign affairs, common defence, and such finance as concerned these subjects, but otherwise all three to be self-governing States’. He spoke about it to Mahatma Gandhi before he died, and later also appears to have broached the topic with the prime minister. Moore also wrote about the idea in a volume of tributes to Nehru on his 70th birthday, where he called this the ‘greatest test for Nehru’s statesmanship’ . . . [for] there will never be satisfactory relations between India and Pakistan till the Kashmir issue is settled’. See Arthur Moore, ‘My Friend’s Son’, in Rafiq Zakaria, ed., A Study of Nehru (1959; 2nd edn Bombay: The Times of India Press, 1960), esp. pp. 175–6. It seems very likely, considering where it appeared, that Nehru had read Moore’s article.

  37

  Letter of 20 May 1964, in Subject File 92, C. Rajagopalachari Papers, Fourth Instalment, NMML. With in Parliament, Masani was one of the fiercest critics of the prime minister. But, like his mentor Rajaji, he saw that in progress on Kashmir lay the future of the subcontinent. On this subject at least he was willing to bat for Nehru.

  38

  HT, 25 May 1964. Unless otherwise indicated, the rest of this section is based on HT, 25–30 May 1964.

  39

  Dawn, quoted in HT, 27 May 1964 (emphasis added).

  40

  Walter Crocker, Nehru: A Contemporary’s Estimate (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), p. 178.

  41

  In his magisterial three-volume biography of Nehru S. Gopal gives the matter three paragraphs; Nehru’s most recent biographer, Judith Brown, allows it one. Recent works on the Kashmir dispute, as for instance by Schonfield, Bose and Ganguly, do not mention these events at all.

  42

  Romesh Thapar, ‘Behind the Abdullah Headlines’, Economic Weekly, 30 May 1964.

  43

  V. K. T. Chari to Y. D. Gundevia, 16 May 1964, in Subject File 4, Y. D. Gundevia Papers, NMML.

  44

  HT, 26 May 1964.

  45

  Quoted in HT, 29 May 1964.

  17. MINDING THE MINORITIES

  1

  Austin’s diary entry of 28 May 1968 was published thirty years later in The Hindu, 29 May 1994.

  2

  See correspondence between H. S. Suhrawardy, Chaudhary Khaliquzzaman, Jawaharlal Nehru, M. A. Jinnah and M. K. Gandhi, reproduced in A. G. Noorani, ed., The Muslims of India: A Documentary Record (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 40–52. See also Chaudhry Khaliquzzaman, Pathway to Pakistan (Lahore: Longmans, Green and Co., 1961).