India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy

by Ramachandra Guha

  Thirty thousand votes were sure for Nehru.

  Pause.

  Astir in the audience. A tear on the face of the man or woman sitting on the beach or standing on the shore.Two tears, a sari-end wiping them gently off awoman’s face. She would give her vote to Nehru no matter what anyone else said. Memories of Gandhi came back to the people – the days when Nehru stood beside the Mahatma. Nehru . . . was the man he left to us as his political heir.

  Fifty thousand votes! a hundred thousand! Two hundred thousand!38

  The crowds were moved by Nehru; and he, in turn, was moved by them. His own feelings are best captured in a letter he wrote to one who with both delicacy and truth can be referred to as his closest lady friend, Edwina Mountbatten:

  Wherever I have been, vast multitudes gather at my meetings and I love to compare them, their faces, their dress, their reactions to me and what I say. Scenes from past history of that very part of India rise up before me and my mind becomes a picture gallery of past events. But, more than the past, the present fills my mind and I try to probe into the minds and hearts of these multitudes. Having long been imprisoned in the Secretariat of Delhi, I rather enjoy these fresh contacts with the Indian people . . . The effort to explain in simple language our problems and our difficulties, and to reach the minds of these simple folk is both exhausting and exhilarating.

  As I wander about, the past and the present merge into one another and this merger leads me to think of the future. Time becomes like allowing river in continuous motion with events connected with one another.39

  VI

  One place even Nehru didn’t get to was the tahsil of Chini in Himachal Pradesh. Here resided the first Indians to cast votes in a general election, a group of Buddhists. They voted on 25 October 1951, days before the winter snows shut their valleys from the world. The villagers of Chini owed allegiance to the Panchen Lama in Tibet, and were ruled by rituals administered by local priests. These included gorasang, a religious service to celebrate the completion of a new house; kangur zalmo,a ceremonial visit to the Buddhist library at Kanam; menthako, ‘where men, women, and children climb hills, dance and sing’; and jokhiya chug simig, the interchange of visits between relatives. Now, although they didn’t as yet know it, was added a new ritual, to be performed at five-year intervals: voting in a general election.40

  Polling began in the UK general election on the same day, although there the first voters were not Buddhist peasants in a Himalayan valley but ‘milkmen, charwomen and all-night workers returning home from work’.41 However, in those small islands the results of the election were known the following day – Labour had been swept out of power and Winston Churchill returned as prime minister. In India, the first voters had to wait months, for the rest of the country did not go to the polls until January and February 1952.

  The highest turnout, 80.5 per cent, was recorded in the parliamentary constituency of Kottayam, in present-day Kerala; the lowest, 18.0, was in Shahdol in what is now Madhya Pradesh. For the country as a whole, about 60 per cent of registered voters exercised their franchise, this despite the high level of illiteracy. A scholar from the London School of Economics described how a young woman in Himachal walked several miles with herfrail mother to vote: ‘for a day, at least, she knew she was important’.42 A Bombay-based weekly marvelled at the high turnout in the forest districts ofOrissa, where tribals came to the booths with bows and arrows. One booth in the jungle reported more than 70 per cent voting; but evidently Sukumar Sen had got at least some things wrong, for the neighbouring booth was visited only by an elephant and two panthers.43 The press highlighted the especially aged: a110-year-old man in Madurai who came propped up on either side by a great-grandson, a 95-year-old woman in Ambala, deaf and hunchbacked, who still turned up to vote. There was alsothe90-year-old Muslim in rural Assam who had to return disappointed after being told by the presiding officer that ‘he could not vote for Nehru’. A nonagenarian in rural Maharashtra cast his vote for the Assembly election, but fell down and died before he could do the same for Parliament. And there was a vindication of Indian democracy in the electoral roll of Hyderabad, where among the first who voted was the Nizam himself.

  One place in which there was especially brisk polling was Bombay. Delhi was where the rulers lived, but this island metropolis was India’s financial capital. It was also a very politically aware city. Altogether, 900,000 residents of Bombay, or 70 per cent of the city’s electorate, exercised their democratic right on election day. The workers came in far greater numbers as compared to the fashionable middle class. Thus, reported the Times of India, ‘in the industrial areas voters formed long queues long before the polling stations opened, despite the particularly cold and dewy morning. In contrast to this, at the WIAA Club [in Malabar Hill], which housed two polling stations, it appeared as if people straggled in for a game of tennis or bridge and only incidentally to vote’.

  The day after Bombay went to the polls it was the turn of the Mizo hills. With regard to both culture and geography there could not have been a greater contrast. Bombay had a great density of polling stations: 1,349 in all, packed into just 92 square miles; the Mizo, a tribal area bordering East Pakistan and Burma, required a mere 113 booths spread over more than 8,000 square miles of territory. The people who lived in these hills, said one scribe, ‘have not known any queues hit her to except those in battle arrays’. But they had nonetheless ‘taken a strong fancy’ to the exercise, reaching their booths after walking for days on ‘perilous tracks through wild jungles, camping at night on the way amid song and community dances around the fire’. And so 92,000 Mizos, who ‘have through the centuries decided an issue with their arrows and spears, came forward to give their decision for the first time through the medium of the ballot’.

  An American woman photographer on assignment in Himachal Pradesh was deeply impressed by the commitment shown by the election officials. One official had walked for six days to attend the preparatory workshop organized by the district magistrate; another had ridden four days on a mule. They went back to their distant stations with sewn gunny sacks full of ballot boxes, ballots, party symbols and electoral lists. On election day the photographer chose to watch proceedings at an obscure hill village named Bhuti. Here the polling station was a school-house which had only one door. Since the rules prescribed a different entry and exit, a window had been converted into a door, with improvised steps on either side to allow the elderly and ailing to hop out after voting.44

  At least in this first election, politicians and the public were both (to quote the chief election commissioner) ‘essentially law-abiding and peaceful’. There were only 1,250 election offences reported. These included 817 cases of the ‘impersonation of voters’, 106 attempts to take ballot papers out of a polling station and 100 instances of ‘canvassing within onehundred yards of a polling station’, some of these last offences doubtless committed unknowingly by painted cows.45

  VII

  Polling for the general election ended in the last week of February 1952. When the votes were counted, the Congress had won comfortably. The party secured 364 out of 489 seats in Parliament and 2,247 out of 3,280 seats in the state assemblies. As critics of the Congress were quick to point out, the first-past-the-post system had produced a far from representative result. More than 50 per cent of the electorate had voted for non-Congress candidates or parties. For Parliament as a whole, Congress had polled 45 per cent of the vote and won 74.4 per cent of the seats; the corresponding figures for the states were 42.4 per cent and 68.6 per cent. Even so, twenty-eight Congress ministers had failed to win a seat. These included such men of influence as Jai Narayan Vyas, in Rajasthan, and Morarji Desai, in Bombay. More striking still was the fact that it was a communist, Ravi Narayan Reddy -hewho drank his first glass of whisky during the campaign — who achieved the largest majority, larger even than Jawaharlal Nehru s.

  One of the more notable defeats was that of the Scheduled Caste leader B. R. Ambedkar. Opposing him
in his Bombay constituency was an obscure milkman named Kajrolkar. The gifted Marathi journalist P. K. Atre popularizeda slogan which went:

  Kuthe to Ghatnakar Ambedkar,

  Aani Kuthe ha Lonivikya Kajrolkar?

  which, roughly translated, means:

  Where is the (great) constitution-maker Ambedkar

  And where the (obscure) butter-seller Kajrolkar? 46

  Yet, in the end, the prestige and hold of the Congress, and the fact that Nehru made several speeches in Bombay, carried Kajrolkar to victory. As one wag remarked, even a lamp-post standing on the Congress ticket could have been elected. Or, as apolitical scientist more dispassionately put it, the election was won on ‘Nehru’s personal popularity and his ability to express the aspirations of a newly independent India in a vivid and forceful manner’.47

  On the eve of the polls Sukumar Sen suggested they constituted ‘the biggest experiment in democracy in human history’. A veteran Madras editor was less neutral; he complained that ‘a very large majority [will] exercise votes for the first time: not many know what the vote is, why they should vote, and whom they should vote for; no wonder the whole adventure is rated as the biggest gamble in history’.48 And a recently dispossessed maharaja told a visiting American couple that any constitution that sanctioned universal suffrage in a land of illiterates was ‘crazy’. ‘Imagine the demagoguery, the misinformation, the dishonesty possible’, said the maharaja, adding, ‘The world is far too shaky to permit such an experiment.’49

  Sharing this scepticism was Penderel Moon, a Fellow of All Souls College, and an ex-ICS man who had chosen to stay on in India. In 1941, Moon had spoken to the graduating students of Punjab University about the unsuitability of Western-style democracy to their social context. Now, eleven years later, he was the chief commissioner of the hill state of Manipur, and had to depute election officers and supervise the polling and the counting. As the people of Manipur went to the polls on 29 January, Moon wrote to his father that ‘a future and more enlightened age will view with astonishment the absurd farce of recording the votes of millions of illiterate people’.50

  Just as sceptical as the All Souls man was the Organiser, a weekly published by the revanchist Hindu group, the RSS. This hoped that Jawaharlal Nehru ‘would live to confess the failure of universal adult franchise in India’. It claimed that Mahatma Gandhi had warned against ‘this precipitate dose of democracy’, and that the president, Rajendra Prasad, was ‘sceptical about this leap in the dark’. Yet Nehru, ‘who has all along lived by slogans and stunts, would not listen’.51

  There were times when even Nehru had second thoughts about universal franchise. On 20 December 1951 he took a brief leave of absence from the campaign to address a UNESCO symposium in Delhi. In his speech Nehru accepted that democracy was the best form of government, or self-government, but still wondered whether

  the quality of men who are selected by these modern democratic methods of adult franchise gradually deteriorates because of lack of thinking and the noise of propaganda . . . He [the voter] reacts to sound and to the din, he reacts to repetition and he produces either adictator or a dumb politician who is insensitive. Such a politician can stand all the din in the world and still remain standing on his two feet and, therefore, he gets selected in the end because the others have collapsed because of the din.

  This was a rare confession, based no doubt on his recent experiences on the road. A week later Nehru suggested that it might be better to have direct elections at the lower levels – say within the village and district – and indirect elections for the highest levels. For, as he put it, ‘direct election for such a vast number is a complicated problem and the candidates may never come into touch with the electorate and the whole thing becomes distant’.52

  Nehru had an unusual capacity – unusual among politicians, at any rate – to view both sides of the question. He could see the imperfections of the process even while being committed to it. However, by the time the final results were in, and the Congress had emerged as the unchallenged party of rule, the doubts in Nehru’s own mind had disappeared. ‘My respect for the so-called illiterate voter’, he said, ‘has gone up. Whatever doubts I might have had about adult suffrage in India have been removed completely.’53

  The election itself also comprehensively set to rest the doubts of the newAmerican ambassador to India, Chester Bowles. This representative of the world’s richest democracy assumed his post in Delhi in the autumn of 1951. He confessed that he was ‘appalled at the prospect of a poll of200 million eligible voters, most ofwhom were illiterate villagers’. He ‘feared a fiasco’, even (as the Madras Mail put it), ‘the biggest farce ever staged in the name of democracy anywhere in the world’. But a trip through the country during polling changed his mind. Once, he had thought that poor countries needed a period of rule by a benevolent dictator as preparation for democracy. But the sight of many parties contesting freely, and of Untouchables and Brahmins standing in the same line,persuaded himotherwise. He no longer thought literacy was atest of intelligence, no longer believed that Asia needed a ‘series of Ataturks’ before they would be ready for democracy. Summing up his report on the election, Bowles wrote: ‘In Asia, as in America, I know no grander vision than this, government by the consent of the governed.’54

  A visiting Turkish journalist focused on the content of the election rather than its form. He admired Nehru’s decision not to follow other Asian countries in taking ‘the line of least resistance’ by developing ‘a dictatorship with centralisation of power and intolerance of dissent and criticism’. The prime minister had ‘wisely kept away from such temptations’. Yet the ‘main credit’, according to the Turkish writer, ‘goes to the nation itself; 176,000,000 Indians were left all alone with their conscience in face of the polling box. It was direct and secret voting. They had their choice between theocracy, chauvinism, communal separatism and isolationism on the one side; secularism, national unity, stability, moderation and friendly intercourse with the rest of the world on the other. They showed their maturity in choosing moderation and progress and disapproving of reaction and unrest.’ So impressed was this observer that he took a delegation of his countrymen to meet Sukumar Sen. The chief election commissioner showed them samples of ballot boxes, ballot papers and symbols, as well as the plan of a polling station, so that they could work to resume the interrupted progress of democracy in their own country.55

  In one sense the Turkish journalist was right. There were indeed 176 million heroes; or, at least 107 million – those among the eligible who actually took the trouble to vote. Still, some heroes were more special than others. As the respected Lucknow sociologist D. P. Mukerji pointed out, ‘great credit is due to those who are in charge of this stupendous first experiment in Indian history. Bureaucracy has certainly proved its worth by honestly discharging the duties imposed on it by a honest prime minister.’56

  The juxtaposition is important, and also ironical. For there was a time when Nehru had little but scorn for the bureaucracy. As he put it in his autobiography, ‘few things are more striking today in India than the progressive deterioration, moral and intellectual, of the higher services, more especially the Indian Civil Services. This is most in evidence in the superior officials, but it runs like a thread throughout the services.’57 This was written in 1935, when the objects of his derision had the power to put him and his like in jail. And yet, fifteen years later, Nehru was obliged to place the polls in the hands ofmen he would once have dismissedas imperialist stooges.

  In this respect, the 1952 election was a script jointly authored by historical forces for so long opposed to one another: British colonialism and Indian nationalism. Between them these forces had given this new nation what could be fairly described as a jump-start to democracy.

  8

  * * *

  HOME AND THE WORLD

  Pandit Nehru is at his best when he is not pinned down to matters of detail.

  Economic Weekly, 28 July 1951
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  I

  NOT LONG AFTER THE 1952 election the Indian writer Nirad C. Chaudhuri produced an essay on Jawaharlal Nehru for a popular magazine. The writer was by this time moderately well known, but his subject still towered over both him and everybody else. Nehru’s leadership, remarked Chaudhuri, ‘is the most important moral force behind the unity of India’. He was ‘the leader not of a party, but of the people of India taken collectively, the legitimate successor to Gandhiji’. As he saw it,

  Nehru is keeping together the governmental machine and the people, and without this nexus India would probably have been deprived of stable government in these crucial times. He has not only ensured co-operation between the two, but most probably has also prevented actual conflicts, cultural, economic, and political. Not even Mahatmaji’s leadership, had it continued, would have been quite equal to them.

  If, within the country, Nehru is the indispensable link between the governing middle-classes and the sovereign people, he is no less the bond between India and the world. [He serves as]India’s representative to the great Western democracies, and, I must add, their representative to India. The Western nations certainly look upon him as such and expect him to guarantee India’s support for them, which is why they are so upset when Nehru takes an anti-Western or neutral line. They feel they are being let down by one of themselves.1