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

by Ramachandra Guha

  Through the summer of 1964 this peace mission travelled through the territory, meeting members of the state government as well as of the ‘Federal Republic of Nagaland’. A ceasefire agreement was signed by both sides; it came into effect on 6 September, signalled by the pealing of church bells. Two weeks later the first round of talks began between the government of India and the rebels.7

  From Kohima, Jayaprakash Narayan wrote to a friend that, although the situation was still unpredictable, ‘the strongest desire of almost every Naga at the present time seems to be for a lasting peace. The Naga people are dreading nothing more than the resumption of hostilities’. Then he added, less optimistically: ‘However, it has to be said that as far as the talks between the Government of India and the underground leaders are concerned, very little progress so far has been made.8

  The records of the talks between the government and the rebels do reveal a fundamental incommensurability of positions. The NNC leader, Isak Swu, began by saying that ‘today we are here as two nations – Nagas and Indians, side by side’. The foreign secretary, Y. D. Gundevia, answered that ‘we are not living as two nations side by side. History tells us that Nagaland was a part and parcel of India.’ Between these two opposed positions, B. P. Chaliha and Jayaprakash Narayan tried valiantly to locate common ground.Chaliha praised the Nagas as ‘a people of rare and high qualities’ , and hoped that ‘both parties will find a way to remove the gulf’ between them. Narayan argued that ‘compromise is possible because we think that both sides have part of the truth. If one were 100 per cent right, or 100 per cent wrong, there could be no question of compromise.’9

  The demand for Naga independence presented a powerful challenge to the idea of India. Another somewhat different challenge was presented by the testing of a nuclear device by China in October 1964. Immediately there were calls for India to develop an atom bomb of its own. On 24 October the director of India’s Atomic Energy Commission, Dr Homi J. Bhabha, gave a talk on All-India Radio on the nuclear question. He spoke of the need for universal nuclear disarmament, yet hinted that, pending that eventuality, India might develop a nuclear deterrent of its own. There was no means of successfully stopping a nuclear thrust in mid-flight, said Dr Bhabha, adding: ‘The only defence against such an attack appears to be a capability and threat of retaliation.’ Further, ‘atomic weapons give a state possessing them in adequate numbers a deterrent power against attack from a much stronger state’. Later in his talk, Dr Bhabha examined the cost of constructing an atomic stockpile. By his calculations, fifty bombs would cost about Rs100 million, an expenditure that was ‘small compared with the military budgets of many countries’.10

  The scientist’s talk was grist to the mill of those politicians – mostly from the Jana Sangh – who had long advocated that India test its own atom bombs. The MP from Dewas, Hukum Chandra Kachwai, moved a resolution in the Lok Sabha to this effect. In an eloquent speech he identified China as India’s main dushman (enemy). ‘Whatever weapons the enemy possesses, we must possess them too’, he thundered. Evoking memories of the war of 1962, he said that the nation should not rest until it had reclaimed every inch of land lost to or stolen by China. The possession of an atomic stockpile would, he argued, also increase India s prestige in the wider world.

  A lively debate ensued, with some members endorsing Kachwai, others opposing him in the name of India s reputation as a force for peace. In hisown intervention the prime minister claimed that the promoters of the bomb had misread Dr Bhabha’s intentions. The scientist was calling for disarmament, while the production costs referred to the United States, whose developed atomic infrastructure made the manufacture of additional bombs possible at little expense. In India, the costs would be prohibitive, said Shastri; in any case, to manufacture these deadly weapons would be to depart from the tradition of Gandhi and Nehru. Notably, the prime minister spoke not in narrow nationalistic terms but from the perspective of the human race. These bombs, he said, were a threat to the survival of the world, an affront to humanity (manushyata) as a whole.

  Shastri’s speech was somewhat defensive, and certainly less stirring than that of the chief speaker on the other side. But the large Congress majority in the House ensured that the resolution asking India to go the nuclear route was comfortably defeated.11

  III

  India’s Republic Day, 26 January, is annually celebrated in New Delhi by a government-sponsored march down Rajpath (formerly Kingsway), with gaily decorated floats representing the different states competing with tanks and mounted submarines for attention. In 1965, Republic Day was to be more than a symbolic show of national pride – it would also signal a substantial affirmation of national unity. Back in 1949 the Constituent Assembly had chosen Hindi as the official language of the Union of India. The constitution which ratified this came into operation on 26 January 1950. However, there would be a fifteen-year ‘grace period’, when English was to be used along with Hindi in communication between the centre and the states. Now this period was ending; henceforth, Hindi would prevail.

  Southern politicians had long been worried about the change. In 1956 the Academy of Tamil Culture passed a resolution urging that ‘English should continue to be the official language of the Union and the language for communication between the Union and the State Governments and between one State Government and another’. The signatories included C. N. Annadurai, E. V. Ramaswami ‘Periyar’, and C. Rajagopalachari. The organization of the campaign was chiefly the work of the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK), which organized many protest meetings against the imposition of Hindi.12

  In the wake of the China war the DMK had dropped its secessionist plank. It no longer wanted a separate country; but it did want to protect the culture and language of the Tamil people. The DMK’s acknowledged leader was C. N. Annadurai. Known universally as ‘Anna’ (or elder brother), he was a gifted orator who had done much to build his party into a credible force in the state. In Anna s opinion Hindi was merely a regional language like any other. It had no ‘special merit’; in fact, it was less developed than other Indian tongues, less suited to a time of rapid advances in science and technology. To the argument that more Indians spoke Hindi than any other language, Anna sarcastically answered: ‘If we had to accept the principle of numerical superiority while selecting our national bird, the choice would have fallen not on the peacock but on the common crow.’13

  Jawaharlal Nehru had been sensitive to the sentiments of the south; sentiments shared by the east and north-east as well. In 1963 he piloted the passing of an Official Languages Act, which provided that from 1965 English ‘may’ still be used along with Hindi in official communication. That caveat proved problematic; for while Nehru clarified that ‘may’ meant ‘shall’, other Congress politicians thought it actually meant ‘may not’.14

  As 26 January 1965 approached, the opponents of Hindi geared up for action. Ten days before Republic Day, Annadurai wrote to Shastri saying that his party would observe the day of the changeover as a ‘day of mourning’. But he added an interesting rider in the form of a request to postpone the day of imposition by a week. Then the DMK could enthusiastically join the rest of the nation in celebrating Republic Day.

  Shastri and his government stood by the decision to make Hindi official on 26 January. In response, the DMK launched a statewide campaign of protest. In numerous villages bonfires were made to burn effigies of the Hindi demoness. Hindi books and the relevant pages of the constitution were also burnt. In railway stations and post offices, Hindi signs were removed or blackened over. In towns across the state there were fierce and sometimes deadly battles between the police and angry students.15

  The protests were usually collective: strikes and processions; bandhs, hartals and dharnas.The headlines in the Hindu newspaper tell part of the story:

  TOTAL HARTAL IN COIMBATORE

  ADVOCATES ABSTAIN FROM WORK

  STUDENTS FAST IN BATCHES

  PEACEFUL STRIKE IN MADURAI

  LAT
HI-CHARGE IN VILLUPURAM

  TEAR-GAS USED IN UTHAMAPALTAM

  There was one form of protest that was individual, and disturbingly so: the taking of one’s life. On Republic Day itself, two men set themselves on fire in Madras. One left a letter saying he wanted to sacrifice himself at the altar of Tamil. Three days later a twenty-year-old man in Tiruchi poisoned himself with insecticide. He too left a note saying his suicide was in the cause of Tamil. These ‘martyrdoms’, in turn, sparked dozens more strikes and boycotts.

  There is a vivid account of the revolt by a police officer asked to quell it. When a party of constables entered the town of Tiruppur, they found that the rioting was over but crowds still hung around, curious or sullen. Police lorries and jeeps lay burnt and smouldering on the streets and in the taluk office compound. The police station was in a shambles, a spare transmitter overturned, all the glass broken and the verandah fence torn down. Injured constables were resting inside and the inspector lay on his back with a stomach injury. Dead bodies of rioters were strewn about, one on the station steps, another on a street behind. A third, shot clean through the navel, lay on a river bank close by, an abusive crowd behind it still being held at bay by a rifle party.

  The ‘real mistake’, writes this officer, was in ‘the failure to appreciate the depth of feeling’ evoked by the imposition of Hindi. What some in New Delhi saw as ‘an exhibition of mere parochial fanaticism’ was in fact ‘a local nationalist movement’.16

  The intensity of the anti-Hindi protests alarmed the central government. Soon it became clear that the ruling Congress Party was split down the middle on the issue. On the last day of January a group of prominent Congress Party members met in Bangalore to issue an appeal to ‘the Hindi-loving people not to try to force Hindi on the people of non-Hindi areas’. The hustling of Hindi in haste, they said, would imperil the unity of the country.

  The signatories to this appeal included S. Nijalingappa (Chief Minister of Mysore), Atulya Ghosh (the boss of the Bengal Congress), Sanjiva Reddy (a senior Union minister), and K. Kamaraj (the Congress president). On the same day, they were answered by the high-ranking Congress leader Morarji Desai. Speaking to the press in Tirupati, Desai claimed that by learning Hindi the Tamil people would only increase their influence within India as a whole. The Congress leaders in Madras, he said, should ‘convince the people of their mistake [in opposingHindi] and get them around’. Desai regretted that Hindi had not been made official in the 1950s, before the protests against it had crystallized. Only Hindi could be the link language in India, for the alternative, English, ‘is not our language’. ‘No regional sentiments’, insisted Desai, ‘should come in the way of this move of the Government to forge the integration of the country further’.17

  The prime minister, Lal Bahadur Shastri, was now placed in the hot seat. His heart was with the Hindi zealots; his head, however, urged him to listen to other voices. On 11 February the resignation of two Union ministers from Madras forced his hand. The same evening the prime minister went on All-India Radio to convey his ‘deep sense of distress and shock’ at the ‘tragic events’. To remove any ‘misapprehension’ and ‘misunderstanding’, he said he would fully honour Nehru’s assurance that English would be used as long as the people wanted. Then he made four assurances of his own:

  First, every state would have complete and unfettered freedom to continue to transact its own business in the language of its own choice, which may be the regional language or English.

  Secondly, communications from one state to another would be either in English or accompanied by an authentic English translation.

  Thirdly, the non-Hindi states would be free to correspond with the central government in English and no change would be made in this arrangement without the consent of the non-Hindi states.

  Fourthly, in the transaction of business at the central level English would continue to be used.

  Later, Shastri added a crucial fifth assurance – that the All-India Civil Services Examination would continue to be conducted in English rather than (as the Hindiwallahs wanted) in Hindi alone.18

  A week after the prime minister spoke on the radio there was a long and very heated discussion in Parliament on the riots in the Tamil country. Proponents of Hindi insisted that those who opposed the language were against the constitution and in effect anti-national; they also claimed that by giving in to violence the government would encourage more outbreaks of violence. Tamil members answered that they had ‘already sacrificed enough for the Hindi demon’. They were supported by two stalwarts from Bengal – Hiren Mukherjee from the left, who accused the Hindi zealots of a ‘contemptuous disregard’ for those who did not speak their language, and N. C. Chatterjee from the right, who pointed out that ‘the greatest integrating force today is the juridical and the legal unity of India’, this enabled by the fact that the Supreme Court and the High Courts functioned in English. The Anglo-Indian member, Frank Anthony, deplored the ‘increasing intolerance, increasing obscurantism, increasing chauvinism of those who purport to speak on behalf of Hindi’. J. B. Kripalani, speaking in a lighter vein, thought that the Hindi chauvinists had no hope at all. Even Indian babies, he noted, now ‘do not say: Amma or Appa, but mummy and papa. We talk to our dogs also in English.’ Kripalani remarked that ‘Mr Anthony is very unnecessarily excited about the fate of his mother tongue. In England it [English] may disappear, [but] in India it will not disappear.19

  The parallels with the language question of the 1950s are uncanny. Then, too, a popular social movement led the prime minister of the day to reconsider both the stated official position and his own preferences. Nehru opposed linguistic states; Shastri believed Hindi should be the sole official language of the Union. But when protest spilled out into the streets, and when protesters were willing to offer their lives – Potti Sriramulu in 1953, a dozen Tamil young men in 1965 – the prime minister was forced to reconsider. Strikingly, in each case the Congress rank and file seemed to side with the opposition rather than with their own government. As withNehru, Shastri’s change of heart was occasioned as much by considerations of preserving party unity as by the unity of the nation itself.

  IV

  From south India, let us move back to that old trouble spot in the north, Kashmir. In March 1965 Sheikh Abdullah set out on a pilgrimage to Mecca. He took the long route, via London, where one of his sons was based. The Sheikh had been told by Shastri, via Sudhir Ghosh – a Rajya Sabha MP and a one-time associate of Mahatma Gandhi – that the best he could hope for was an autonomous Valley within the Indian Union. Ghosh thought the Lion of Kashmir was coming around to the idea, if slowly. He wrote to Horace Alexander, a Quaker and an old friend of India, asking him to keep a watch on Abdullah in London; the solution being charted for Kashmir would ‘be ruined if, under pressure from over-zealous British newspaper men, Sheikh Abdullah makes a few unwise statements in London . . . A few wrong remarks will give those elements in the Congress Party who are anxious to push their knives into Sheikh the necessary handle to upset the possibility of any settlement.’ 20

  Abdullah seems not to have said anything indiscreet in the United Kingdom. He proceeded to Mecca and stopped in Algiers on his way home. There he did something far worse than speak carelessly to a British journalist; he met with the Chinese prime minister, Chou En-lai, who also happened to be in the Algerian capital. The content of their conversations was not disclosed, but it was enough that he had supped with the enemy. It was assumed that (as in 1953, when he met Adlai Stevenson) Sheikh Abdullah had discussed the possibility of an independent Kashmir. Back then it took four months for the Sheikh to be jailed. Now he was placed under arrest as he got off the plane at New Delhi s Palam Airport. He was taken to a government bungalow in the capital and, a little later, transported across the country to the southern hill town of Kodaikanal. Here he was given a charming cottage, with fine views of hills not nearly as grand as those in Kashmir, but forbidden to travel outside municipal limits or meet visitors without
official permission.

  The news of the Sheikh’s arrest was greeted with loud cheers in both Houses of Parliament. He was seen as having betrayed India not just by talking to a Chinese leader, but by doing so while the other foe, Pakistan, was nibbling away at the borders. For while Abdullah was on pilgrimage a conflict broke out over the Rann of Kutch, a salt marsh claimed both by Pakistan and India. In the first week of April troops exchanged fire in the Rann. The Pakistanis used their American tanks to shell enemy positions – successfully, for the Indians had to withdraw some forty miles to dry land. Angry telegrams were exchanged before the two sides agreed to international arbitration under British auspices.21

  One person dismayed by the rise of jingoism was Horace Alexander. He wrote to Mrs Indira Gandhi and received a reply putting the inflamed sentiments in perspective. ‘What Sheikh Sahib does not realize’, said Mrs Gandhi, ‘is that with the Chinese invasion and the latest moves in and by Pakistan, the position of Kashmir has completely changed.’ For the frontiers of the state touched China and the USSR as well as India and Pakistan. And ‘in the present world situation, an independent Kashmir would become a hot-bed of intrigue and, apart from the countries mentioned above, would also attract espionage and other activities from the USA and UK.’22

  Abdullah’s arrest and the clash in Kutch had put an idea into the head of the Pakistani president, Ayub Khan. This was to foment an insurrection in the Indian part of Kashmir, leading either to a war ending with the state being annexed to Pakistan, or in international arbitration with the same result. In the late summer of 1965 the Pakistan army began planning ‘Operation Gibraltar’, named for a famous Moorish military victory in medieval Spain. Kashmiri militants were trained in the use of small arms, with their units named after legendary warriors of the Islamic past –Suleiman, Salahuddin, and so on. 23