Meanwhile in Delhi, as March rolled into April, communal strife in Bengal continued to occupy much of the distressed prime minister’s attention,7 as it would do over the first half of 1950. He was particularly irritated by Sardar Patel’s private insistence on a ‘well-considered, firm and determined’8 approach vis-à-vis Bengal and Pakistan during cabinet meetings and parleys with MPs, an attitude he believed was providing cover for those who wanted a clash with Pakistan—not least his critics in the RSS and the Hindu Mahasabha. Hectored by his opponents, pilloried by the press9 and seemingly undermined by his deputy, Nehru felt besieged from all sides. Not content with the censorship orders against the Organiser and the other steps the home ministry had taken to control the situation, he berated the home minister:
I think we have taken up far too lenient an attitude towards those in India who encourage this communal feeling of hatred and violence. The Hindu Mahasabha talks about Akhand Bharat, which is a direct incentive to conflict . . . The belief that retaliation is a suitable method to deal with Pakistan, or what happens in Pakistan, is growing. That is the surest way to ruin for India and Pakistan.10
Patel, who on this matter had self-confessedly submitted to Nehru’s approach despite his own misgivings, was taken aback. ‘Our action has been circumscribed only by the provisions of the law as interpreted by our legal advisors and the High Courts,’ he responded. ‘We put thousands in jail and adopted a policy of release only after we were continuously attacked on the score of maintaining civil liberties.’11 He pointedly and icily reminded the prime minister:
We are now faced with a Constitution which guarantees fundamental rights—right of association, right of free movement, free expression and personal liberty—which further circumscribe the action we can take. That means that for every executive action there must be legal justification. If within these limits you feel that our policy towards communal organizations has been lenient, steps can certainly be taken in the manner you may suggest.12
Coming from Nehru’s oldest and closest colleague, a man known to be forthright and unequivocal, the insinuation was stark and damning. Did Patel believe Nehru to be unaware of constitutional limits on executive power? Or did he consider the prime minister to be willing to discard them if they impeded his will? There is no certain answer. Whether he privately suspected him of not respecting constitutional boundaries will have to remain a matter for debate and conjecture. The impression that Patel was chiding his leader for trying to circumvent constitutional constraints and disregard fundamental rights is, however, impossible to escape. Astute politician that he was, Patel clearly had insights into Nehru’s thinking, insights which informed the advice he gave the prime minister. He may have been no champion of personal freedom—once even going to the extent of branding the Constitution’s fundamental rights provisions a result of ‘idealistic exuberance’13—but the home minister was plainly wary of trifling with the Constitution.
Just what Nehru had in mind, or was prepared to countenance, we may never completely know. But Patel’s sardonic attempt to educate his leader on the essential foundations of the constitutional order could only imply one thing: that the prime minister was irked by constitutional restraints and willing to disregard them in pursuit of his political goals. With its wry tone, its allusions to extra-constitutional action, and its derisive presumption of Nehru’s ignorance of even the most basic tenets of constitutional legality, Patel’s acerbic reply provided the earliest indication that all was not well between the prime minister and the Constitution to which he had recently pledged allegiance.
Nehru himself gave an inkling of his opinions on the subject a few weeks later while replying to Pakistani complaints about the West Bengal press14 when he tried to reassure the Pakistani government that every effort was being made to rein the fourth estate in. ‘I entirely agree with you that some of the newspapers in West Bengal still continue to write in a way which I consider undesirable,’ he confessed to Pakistani foreign minister Zafarullah Khan, ‘ . . . [But we] have to face the difficulty that in view of our new Constitution, the courts do not approve of many kinds of action that used to be taken previously against the press.’15
It was an ominous confession, demonstrating his impatience with constitutional constraints and seemingly confirming Patel’s private suspicions. How Nehru would face this difficulty, only time would tell. In the middle of this sparring over free speech and constitutional limits on executive action, as the government chafed at restrictions on its power and faced action in the Supreme Court, zamindari abolition and land reform legislation was introduced in the Uttar Pradesh and Bihar legislative assemblies, setting the stage for a titanic clash between the state and landed magnates.
Battle royale I
‘If the amendment moved by the honourable member is accepted, it would only prolong the period of indefiniteness with regard to land reform,’ declared Revenue Minister Hukam Singh on the floor of the legislative assembly on 1 April 1950, arguing that it was the government’s intention to pass zamindari abolition legislation as soon as possible.16 From the Opposition benches, Raja Virendra Shahi of the Democratic Party had moved an amendment to the UP Zamindari and Land Reforms Bill requiring that the assessment of compensation should be known to zamindars before their estates were vested in the state. The amendment was defeated. With the first election then proposed for November, the UP government was keen to have the legislation passed and the process of land reform begun before they went to the public—an aim they shared with their counterparts in Bihar, and the Congress party in general.
Yet, the approaches of the UP and Bihar governments could hardly have been more different. In UP, following the report of a Zamindari Abolition Committee, Chief Minister Govind Ballabh Pant and Revenue Minister Hukam Singh had come up with a comprehensive plan to acquire zamindari estates in a relatively balanced manner and provide for reconstruction in its aftermath. Running to a mammoth 344 clauses, the land reform legislation included uniform compensation levels and rehabilitation grants for smaller zamindars, in order to pre-empt legal challenges and achieve a relatively balanced compromise arrangement that would respect the right to property enshrined in the Constitution. They were confident of closing all legal loopholes and peacefully dismantling the old aristocratic order.
On the other hand, in Bihar, the crucible of social reform, where the state had already taken over the management of several large estates, the Land Reform Bill, at just over forty clauses, was not even a quarter of that length. With its staggered scale of compensation where rates decreased arbitrarily with the amount of land a zamindar owned, it was also obviously on slippery constitutional ground. Having stolen a march over UP, however, Bihar’s Revenue Minister K.B. Sahay—a committed anti-zamindar activist and a chief ministerial aspirant—was eager to deliver the coup de grâce to the feudal order and cement his place in history.
Debate began in the UP Legislative Assembly in typically rambunctious fashion, with Congress and Socialist Party members castigating zamindar members for employing dilatory tactics by making long speeches and drawing out the already detailed clause-by-clause debate.17 Progress was slow as each clause became a matter of contention, not just with the Opposition, which discussed every single line threadbare and often tabled multiple amendments, but also with its socialist supporters who frequently felt that the terms being offered to the feudal order were too benign. The assembly voted on every single clause and every single amendment, often after prolonged and heated debate. If that wasn’t trouble enough, there was even a small group of Congress rebels who sporadically broke ranks with the party when votes were taken.
Within a week, Congress legislators were so fed up of the protracted deliberations that they proposed limiting discussion on Opposition amendments to ten minutes each.18 Nevertheless, despite all their efforts, the Opposition continued to fight for every inch, every point was assiduously discussed and progress on the bill was excruciatingly slow, so much so that a major newspaper wa
s to later describe it as ‘moving like a cumbersome machine, at a pace mocking in its slowness at the urgency of the problem’.19 As April wore on, frustrated Congress members, worried by the possibility of being unable to complete the task at hand in the current session, began to demand that a time limit be set for the discussion of this bill. Over several days of tempestuous arguments over the government proposal to set a time limit of thirty days for the debate—ironically reported as a ‘battle royal’ by the press20—the government, with support from the Speaker,21 successfully managed to pass a resolution on 25 April limiting the debate to forty days.22
Predictably, the manner, quantum and mode of payment of compensation came to be the most important issue under discussion. Over the month of May, Socialist attempts to prevent any compensation from being paid to landlords provoked intense debate but were voted down by conservative Congressmen combining with Opposition legislators to vote against Socialist-sponsored amendments.23 Zamindars’ attempts at gaining higher levels of compensation were also decisively voted down, often with Congress ministers repeatedly rebuking their opponents for tabling amendments as a method of delaying the inevitable.24 With government coffers mostly empty and contributions to the newly created Zamindari Abolition Fund trickling in at levels much below expectation, compensation methods emerged as a major source of anxiety for the government and the Congress leadership.25
Outside the assembly, the government set up a Zamindari Abolition Publicity Board under the chairmanship of Chaudhary Charan Singh (the future prime minister who almost single-handedly dismantled Congress supremacy in UP) to rally public support for the measure and encourage farmers to contribute to the Zamindari Abolition Fund and acquire land rights by paying ten times their annual rent to the government. Charan Singh and other senior ministers toured the countryside extensively, rousing people to make the zamindari abolition programme a success.26 ‘Landlordism in every form will soon end in UP and zamindars would be compensated,’ he imperiously decreed at one of his earliest meetings, ‘but the government was completely free to decide the nature and time of compensation.’27 ‘Money or no money, bhumidar28 or no bhumidar, the zamindari system will go lock, stock and barrel,’ other state leaders proclaimed at another.29
The Congress high command directed all its Provincial Congress Committees to launch extensive public campaigns ‘to educate the peasants of the country’ about their zamindari abolition and land reform programme.30 As commanded, the party threw its considerable organizational weight behind its flagship social policy—the pivot for their project of reforming and remaking the Indian social and economic order—and the effort to take it to the people. Congress political figures, often accompanied by bureaucrats and government functionaries, held thousands of public meetings across the northern states. In one such meeting in Meerut, for example, District Congress Committee president Raghubir Singh, accompanied by the deputy land reforms commissioner and the district magistrate, called on the public for support, declaring the ‘abolition of zamindari a revolution as big as the attainment of independence’.31 The pattern was replicated across the length and breadth of the Gangetic plain, and in Uttar Pradesh alone, nearly 35,000 such public meetings were held over the course of the official drive for the Zamindari Abolition Fund in May and June.32
In contrast, in neighbouring Bihar, where the government was already facing legal action by zamindars and the new Land Reform Bill ran up to a rather spartan forty-three clauses, the assembly moved at a brisk pace. The Bill, which had already gone through a Select Committee by February, was ripe for passing. By the middle of April, over twenty clauses of the bill had been passed, including controversial clauses on the assessment of compensation.33 Within the next week, another eight clauses were passed, including the contentious Clause 24 relating to the rate of compensation, which would range ‘between three times of the net income exceeding Rs one lakh and 20 times of the net income exceeding Rs 500’.34 Three more days of debate, and by 23 April the Hindustan Times was able to triumphantly report that the Bihar Land Reforms Act had been passed by the assembly and would soon be sent to the president for his assent.35
Even as major landed magnates alleged that the scale of compensation was unconstitutional, that payment in non-negotiable bonds was no compensation at all and that major litigation was almost sure to follow,36 the Bihar government and Congress party figures were convinced that they had won this round and believed that a presidential assent would soon be forthcoming. The jubilant, expectant feeling was contagious. Shamed by the seeming urgency being shown by their counterparts in Bihar, the UP Legislative Assembly, in an attempt to catch up, even passed forty-two clauses of their own land reform bill without discussion one fine day in May, causing Opposition members to stage a walkout in protest.37
In this manner, as May wound to a close, the mood within the Uttar Pradesh and Bihar governments, and indeed the Congress organization, remained upbeat and optimistic. Landlord members in the state assemblies were too few to offer any significant resistance, even when supported by Congress rebels. There was near-unanimous consensus among front-line politicians, and reluctant but obvious acceptance of the inevitability of zamindari abolition within the ranks of the zamindars. There might have been setbacks in the Supreme Court, unconstitutional attempts to silence critics might have been shut down and critics might have had a field day in the press, but zamindari abolition and land redistribution, the primary social policy that they were going to take to the people and usher in a socio-economic revolution, was about to become reality.
The Congress position in the countryside was to become unassailable and the landed aristocrats and feudal magnates—the most potent sources of future political resistance—were to be largely swept aside. With the Land Reforms Bill in Bihar passed, and the land reform bill in UP making slow but steady progress, there was little to stand in the way of this vision. The scale and method of compensation were supposedly the only bone of contention remaining. Or so the establishment presumed, convinced that the righteousness of its cause justified the use of all legal and extralegal means. It would not be long until it was proved spectacularly wrong.
The penny dropped on 6 June 1950, when the Patna High Court decided the suit that had been instituted by Maharaja Kameshwar Singh,38 pricking this bubble of optimism and certainty. In the first judgment of its kind, the court held the Bihar Management of Estates and Tenures Act to be an unconstitutional law, and hence illegal and ultra vires of the state legislature.39 Observing that the drastic and far-reaching restrictions placed on the power of the proprietors to deal with their property with no corresponding compensation left them practically without any rights over their own property, the court held the law to be void ab initio—both before and after the creation of the Constitution.40
The decision came as a bombshell, leaving the Bihar government and its Congress leaders shocked and rattled. The judgment reiterated the judiciary’s commitment to fundamental rights, especially the right to property, and pitted the Constitution directly against the government’s stated policy. It threw open the entire question of land reform and the modus operandi for achieving it, unlocking an avenue for potential resistance and effectively putting the government’s plans of presenting the country with a fait accompli into jeopardy. The atmosphere of expectant certainty dissipated. And as politicians, zamindars and legal experts pondered possible consequences, confusion and apprehension radiated outward through the country.
Confusion descends
On 2 June, the Allahabad High Court delivered a tongue-lashing to the Uttar Pradesh government, taking inspiration from the Supreme Court verdicts of the preceding two months. ‘It is the right of every citizen in a democratic state to spread disaffection against a particular party Government,’ the court categorically informed the provincial government as it ordered the release of one Ahmad Ali, who had been detained in Agra jail for campaigning against the government and distributing pamphlets spreading disaffection against the Co
ngress. ‘The right is, of course, subject to the condition that disaffection should not be spread as to result in violence and there should be really no incitement to the use of violence or other illegitimate courses,’ it clarified.41 Since there was no incitement to violence or other illegal acts, there was no case, the court reiterated to the prosecution counsels, politely advising them to adhere to the Constitution.42 It was a harbinger of things to come. The court’s admonition was but a thinly veiled warning about the strident position of the judiciary when it came to fundamental rights. The government would have done well to heed its advice.
Further away, in Delhi, June began on a portentous note for the Congress with the resignation of John Matthai,43 finance minister in the Nehru cabinet. After S.P. Mookerji (minister of industries and supplies) and K.C. Neogy (minister of relief and rehabilitation), who had resigned in protest against the Nehru–Liaquat Pact in April, this was the third such resignation to rock the government. A distinguished economist and professor, Matthai had repeatedly clashed with Nehru over the creation of a Planning Commission, the tendency of the prime minister to disregard the authority of the Standing Finance Committee and throw government expenditure into disarray, and most importantly, his grave misgivings about the government’s ‘soft policy’ towards Pakistan and the communal situation in Bengal, which he described as a ‘policy of appeasement’ that threatened to barter away vital national interests.44 Turning his back on the government, he accused the prime minister of undermining the functioning of cabinet responsibility with his undue authoritarianism.45
Matthai, as the newspapers pertinently observed, was neither a Congressman nor a Hindu, and not even a politician.46 He was an academically gifted, non-political outsider who had been brought in for his professional expertise. His dramatic resignation and his open denunciation of Nehru thus greatly encouraged the claim (and rumoured reports) that the prime minister wished to have in the Cabinet only those ministers who were wholehearted supporters of the Nehru–Liaquat Pact and the government’s broader Pakistan policy.47 The Times of India unabashedly reported ‘the view that Dr. John Matthai’s resignation was demanded by the Prime Minister as a step towards the appeasement of Pakistan’ on its front page.48 Coming close on the heels of legal defeats in the Supreme Court, the failure of ham-handed attempts to curtail criticism of the government’s policies, and the resignations of Mookerji and Neogy, Matthai’s resignation seriously dented the government’s reputation.49
Sixteen Stormy Days Page 5