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

by Ramachandra Guha

  The standard history of Kerala communism is subtitled ‘a study in political adaptation’ (to bourgeois democracy). Reformism in agriculture was one manifestation of this; a second, which must surely have confused the cadres more, was the encouragement of private enterprise. The party’s manifesto had threatened the nationalization of plantations, many of them foreign-owned. After the election this was quietly abandoned. Then, within its first few months in office, the Kerala government invited India’s largest capitalist house, the Birlas, to setup a rayon factory in Mavoor. The entrepreneurs were assured subsidized supplies of bamboo – to be gifted to the Birlas at one rupee per tonne, when the prevailing market price was perhaps a thousand times as much. This project constituted, on the capitalist’s side, a breaking of ranks, for the Indian industrial class detested the communists. Their hope was that the central government would be likewise exercised by the Red menace; that ‘Home Minister Pant and his New Delhi group [of Congress politicians] comes down on the Kerala Communists with a heavy hand and knocks them out of office’.18 The pragmatic Birlas, however, were responding to the fact that the CPI controlled trade unions in important industrial centres outside Kerala. To start a plant here was to buy peace here – as well as elsewhere. As one columnist archly commented, it was hard to believe that the clan’s patriarch, Ghanshyamdas Birla, had succumbed to the ‘superlative charm of Chief Minister Namboodiripad’; it was more likely that he was ‘getting ready for a Communist triumph in Bengal, where his interests are concentrated’.19

  In office, as in opposition, the communists attracted a wide range of interested comment, this ranging from the warmly approbatory to the viciously hostile. There were those who wrote of an emerging new dawn, in terms reminiscent of the opening pages of George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, with its sincere salute to the soul of man under socialism. On the first anniversary of the assumption of office by EMS’s government, a journalist went to a tea shop where

  the central figure was the boy serving tea. Most of the discussions were based on rumours. But the boy was always sure of his facts as retailed by ‘Janayugam’, the Communist daily. It was a delight to watch this lad of sixteen arguing with a school-teacher on the wrong side of forty, a NGO (non-gazetted officer)in his twenties and the others in the presence of his boss, the tea-shop owner, and at the same time performing his own duties uninterrupted by the discussion. This can happen only in Kerala.20

  On the other side, there was talk of Red terror, with a Kerala newspaper writing in apocalyptic mode of a class war to the finish, with the state taking the side of the lower orders:

  If there is a conflict arising between labourers and company managements woe betide the company managements, the police will side with the labour.

  If a jenmi [landlord] is so ill-advised as to pick a quarrel with his agricultural labourers, woe unto the jenmi. The police will know what to do . . .

  If a howling mass besiege a college or a bishop’s palace, it will be termed as a popular, peaceful and constitutional agitation of aggrieved students . . .21

  VI

  In the winter of 1957/8 the Hungarian writer George Mikes travelled through India. As a refugee from communism – by then settled comfortably in London –he found ‘the Kerala affair’ most intriguing. ‘What is a democratic Central Government to do with a Communist state?’ he asked. ‘What would the American administration do if California or Wisconsin suddenly – and I admit, somewhat unexpectedly – turned Communist? And again, how is a Communist government itself to behave with democratic overlords sitting on its neck?’22

  One cannot say how an American president would have behaved in a similar situation – would he have sent in the Marines? – but in India the prime minister of the day was inclined to wait and watch. For the land reforms proposed by EMS’s government were merely those promised by Congress governments. And the personal integrity of the Kerala ministers was not absent in the best of the Congress Party, such as Jawaharlal Nehru.

  More controversial by far were the educational initiatives of the Kerala government. In the summer of 1957 it introduced an Educational Bill aimed at correcting the abuses in privately owned schools and colleges. These were the norm in Kerala, with schools managed by the Church, the Nair Service Society and the SNDP. The bill sought to enhance the status of teachers by checking the powers of the management to hire and fire at will, by setting norms for recruitment, and by prescribing salaries and humane working conditions. It also gave the state the powers to take over schools that did not abide by the bill’s provisions.23

  The opposition to the bill was led by the Church, whose own powers – moral as well as material -depended crucially on its control of educational institutions. The clergy was deeply anti-communist, a sentiment it managed successfully to instil in its flock. In the 1957 election, for example, the CPI had won only 3 out of 18 seats in Kottayam District, the Syrian Christian heartland.24

  As it happened, the minister of education, Joseph Mundaserry, had spent decades teaching in a Catholic college in Trichur. He knew the corruptions of the system, and his bill was in some respects a brave attempt to correct them. However, his government sought to go further than modernize the management; it wanted also to introduce changes in the curriculum. New textbooks were prepared which sought subtly – and not so subtly – to present history through communist lenses. The lenses used by Christian pedagogues were ground to a very different specification. Consider these alternative versions of the Russian Revolution, in circulation in the schools of Kerala in these years:

  New version: A republican Government was established under George Lavoff, a member of the Royal Family. It failed to secure popular support and proved incapable of ending the war or of effecting social and economic reforms. At this time, Lenin arrived in Russia and this gave impetus to the Russian people. A new Government with Lenin as President was evolved. First, Lenin made the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Germany. Then land and other capital goods were nationalised. All agricultural land was taken away from the landlords and divided among the peasants. All factories became the property of the State. The privileges of the clergy and the nobility were abolished. Mines, railways and banks were taken over by the Government. And thus to the astonishment of all, a new world, based upon Socialism, took shape in Russia and the dreams of Karl Marx were realized in this way.

  Old version: Lenin established a Workers’ Government. But the first election showed that the Bolsheviks had no majority. However, to maintain themselves in power, they dissolved the Duma on the ground that it was reactionary. Local Soviets who did not support the Bolsheviks were also disbanded. Private schools were forbidden and education was taken over by the State. Voting right was denied to the nobility and the clergy. Communism encourages violence, and does not believe in an omnipotent God. The Communists forget that man has a soul. It is a one-party Government that prevails in Communist Russia. There is neither freedom of opinion nor of religion. Many other defects in the System may also strike the eye of an observantcritic.25

  Here were two alternative visions of the kind of society Kerala should become; masquerading as two alternative readings of the Russian Revolution. One can see how the Christian version would enrage the Communists, and vice versa. In any event, the textbook row added fuel to an already well-burning fire. For by this time the Christians opposing the bill had been joined by the Nairs, the other community that loomed large in the economic life of Kerala. Where the Christians had always supported the Congress, the Nairs were split down the middle; about half of them had voted for the communists, the other half against. However, since the Nair Service Society also ran schools and colleges, the new bill helped tilt them against the communists and into a somewhat opportunistic alliance with theChristians.26

  More opportunistic still was the local Congress Party. Defeated in the election, it saw in the resentment against the Educational Bill a chance to regain power. Its leaders proposed an anti-communist popular front, an idea attractive to ‘the re
actionary Catholic Church, landlords, planters and the other disgruntled elements’, but a seeming betrayal of the socialistic philosophy of its leaders at the centre.27 Through the latter part of 1958 there were a series of strikes and protest marches in Kerala. In one incident in Trichur the police fired on a crowd of Congress Party members, killing six.28

  Feeling besieged, E. M. S. Namboodiripad was compelled to state his case through the pages of the country’s most popular English-language weekly. Their ‘opponents were scandalised’, he said, because his government sometimes sought to act against the landlords, even if it did so strictly within the framework of the constitution. A Congress leader answered back, writing in the same columns about the growing ‘lawlessness and insecurity in Kerala’ , caused by the tendency of communists to raise themselves above the law while acting vindictively against those who did not agree withthem.29 After the Supreme Court rejected an appeal in February 1959, the Kerala Education Bill received the assent of the president of India. In the same month Mrs Indira Gandhi was elected president of the Indian National Congress. She was the first woman to hold the post since Nellie Sen Gupta in 1933. Asked whether her domestic duties would suffer, Mrs Gandhi answered with asperity: ‘My household work takes ten minutes only.’30

  At this time the Congress was ‘speaking with three voices: the members in Kerala active in violent agitation, the central leadership permitting such activity without approving of it, and Nehru disapproving of it but taking no action to curb it’.31 Meanwhile the agitation intensified with the entry of the Nair doyen Mannath Padmanabhan. A founder of the Nair Service Society, long active in its schools and colleges, Mannath was an austere, dhoti-clad man who spoke only Malayalam. It was said that he had turned against the communists when they refused permission for him to start an engineering college in Palghat. Now he intended to dispatch ‘these Communists, bag and baggage, not merely from Kerala, but from India and driv[e] them to their fatherland – Russia’. When an interviewer asked whether his age was not against him (he was eighty), Mannath reminded them of Bhishma Pitamah, the octogenarian warrior who had led the Pandavas into their own dharma yuddh,or holy war.32

  The clash in Kerala is perhaps best understood in terms of the political theorist W. H. Morris-Jones’s characterization of the three ‘idioms’ of Indian politics. The first of these idioms was the ‘modern’, basing itself on universal ideas of freedom and justice, and expressed in Parliament, the law courts, and the English-language press. The second was the ‘traditional’, which emphasized primordial loyalties, the interests of one’s caste or religion.

  In its first phase the Education Bill controversy was, like so much else in modern India, simply a clash between the modern and traditional idioms of politics. But Mannath Padmanabhan brought with him yet a third idiom: the ‘saintly’ . Morris-Jones himself saw this idiom as operating ‘at the margin’ of Indian politics – as in the social work of Vinoba Bhave. Mannath, however, brought this idiom into a direct engagement with the other two – as,long before, and to even more spectacular effect, had Mahatma Gandhi. The people of Kerala followed him in part for the same reasons that the people of India had followed Gandhi; namely, that his personal integrity was unimpeachable, and that he had never sought or held political office.33

  Mannath’s arrival gave a huge boost to the movement, which soon contained, in the patriarch’s words, ‘everyone in Kerala who is not a Communist’. On 1 May 1959 a conference of community organizations met at Changanacherry to form a Vimochana Samara Samiti, or Liberation Committee, under Mannath’s leadership. Over the next month its members carried their message into schools and colleges, churches and temples, into the homes of fisherfolk, peasants, merchants and workers.

  By early June thousands of volunteers were ready to court arrest. Now commenced a series of hartals, or shut-down strikes, leading to the closure of schools, hospitals, public offices and factories. Large processions were taken out, often headed by Mannath, who – belying his saintly pretensions –allowed himself to be carried on a white horse with a silk umbrella held over him. Nair youths with swords walked menacingly in front of him.

  The communists ‘replied with organized brutality’. By one estimate there were 248 lathi-charges by police; also many bullets fired, leaving at least twenty dead and many more wounded, children and women among them. Each lathi-charge served only to swell further the ranks of the protesters. Some 150,000 protesters were jailed; a quarter of these were women.34

  VII

  It is hard to say who found the situation more distasteful – E. M. S. Namboodiripad, as the head of a ‘people’s government’ which was now ordering daily lathi-charges and incarcerating thousands of ordinary folk; or Jawaharlal Nehru, the constitutional democrat who watched as his party took to the streets to dislodge a lawfully elected government. In Nehru’s case the agony was compounded by the fact that he largely approved of the agrarian and educational policies of the Kerala government.35

  Buoyed by the success of the agitation, Congress politicians in Kerala were pressing for the centre to invoke Article 356 of the constitution, whereby the president could dismiss a state government on account of a breakdown in law and order. The article had been used four times in the past, usually to call mid-term elections when a ruling party had lost its majority on account of a split or defections.

  To see the situation for himself, Nehru visited Kerala in the last week of June 1959. He was alarmed at the ‘thick walls of group hatred’; the two sides, he thought, were almost like two hostile countries at war.36 But he remained reluctant to ask the president to dismiss EMS’s government. His hesitancy was not shared by his daughter Indira, who thought the action was long overdue: ‘When Kerala is virtually on fire’ , said Mrs Gandhi in a speech in Delhi, ‘it becomes the centre’s duty to go to the aid of the people; the misrule of the communist rulers of the state has created a situation which is unparalleled in the history of our country. Such a situation does not brook legal quibbling.’37

  Mannath and his warriors were now preparing for a final showdown. The Muslim League had joined the struggle, lending it more legitimacy still. Through the month of July there were daily marches, with the protesters provoking the police into violence. In one particularly gruesome incident the police entered a fishing hamlet and fired on bystanders, killing a pregnant woman and two others near her.38

  The Vimochana Samara Samiti had declared 9 August ‘Zero Day’, when 50,000 volunteers, representing all classes and communities, would descend on Trivandrum to paralyse the administration. On 26 July groups started marching on the capital from all parts of the state, gathering momentum and men along the way. ‘The hour was approaching when the Communists must choose between massacre and defeat.’39 A letter from the state governor, pleading with the centre to intervene, strengthened the hand of the Congress president, Indira Gandhi. Her prime minister (and father) finally succumbed, writing to Namboodiripad on 30 July that an order of dismissal was on the way, since ‘it is no longer possible to allow matters to deteriorate, leading to continuing conflicts and human suffering. We have felt that, even from the point of view of your government, it is better for Central intervention to take place now’.40

  Six months later Kerala went to the polls again. The Congress, allied with the Socialist Party and the Muslim League, asked the voter to choose between ‘democracy and communism’. Nehru led a band of stalwarts in a campaign which featured posters of Flory Mata, the pregnant fisherwoman shot by the police during the ‘liberation struggle’. A record 84 per cent of the adult population turned out to vote. In a House of 127 the communists won only 26 seats. The Congress won 60; their allies a further 31.41 The results appeared to vindicate the dismissal of Namboodiripad’s government. But, as Sarvepalli Gopal points out, that decision had ‘tarnished Nehru’s reputation for ethical behaviour in politics and, from a long-term view, weakened his position’.42

  VIII

  Recall that in the early years of Independence, circa 194
7-9, the Congress had faced challenges from the extremism of left and right. The communist, claiming that this was a false freedom, had launched a bloody revolution against the nascent Indian state. On the other side, the RSS was mobilizing the forces of reaction in an attempt to create a Hindu Pakistan. The centre had held, and the Congress had successfully tamed these threats; by drafting a democratic constitution, winning a democratic election and putting in place the rudiments of a modern pluralist state.

  Now, a decade later, the Congress was once more under attack from the far edges of the political spectrum. The left’s challenge this time was democratic, and hence potentially more dangerous. For if EMS’s government was to bring about social reform successfully, by redistributing land to the poor and creating schools for all, it might create a domino effect, that is, the victory of non-Congress parties in other states of the Union.