Their successes in Hyderabad had encouraged the communists to think of a countrywide peasant revolution. Telengana, they hoped, would be the beginning of a Red India. The party unveiled its new line at a secret conference held in Calcutta in February 1948. The mood was set by a speaker who said that the ‘heroic people of Telengana’ had shown the way ‘to freedom and real democracy’; they were the ‘real future of India and Pakistan’. If only the communist cadres could ‘create this spirit of revolution among the masses, among the toiling people, we shall find reaction collapsing like a house of cards’.32
At the Calcutta meeting, the party elected a new general secretary, with P. C. Joshi giving way to B. T. Ranadive. By character, Ranadive was solemn and studious, unlike the playful and likeable Joshi. (Both, notably, were upper-caste Hindus – as was typical of communist leaders of the day.)33
Joshi was a friend of Nehru who urged ‘loyal opposition’ to the ruling Congress Party. He argued that after the murder of Gandhi the survival of free India was at stake. He supervised the production of a party pamphlet whose title proclaimed, We Shall Defend the Nehru Government (against the forces of Hindu revivalism). Ranadive, however, was a hardliner who believed that India was controlled by a bourgeois government that was beholden to the imperialists. Now, in a complete about-turn, the party described Nehru as a lackey of American imperialism. The pamphlet printed by the former general secretary was pulped. Joshi himself was demoted to a status of an ordinary member and a whole series of charges were levelled against him. He was dubbed a reformist who had encouraged the growth of ‘anti-revolutionary’ tendencies in the party.34
The new line of the Communist Party of India held that Nehru’s government had joined the Anglo-American alliance in an ‘irreconcilable conflict’ with the ‘democratic camp’ led by the Soviet Union. The scattered disillusionment with the Congress was taken by B. T. Ranadive as a sign of a ‘mounting revolutionary upsurge’. From his underground hideout he called for a general strike and peasant uprisings across the country. Communist circulars urged their cadres to ‘fraternize with the revolutionary labourers in the factories and the students in the streets’, and to ‘turn your guns and bayonets and fire upon the Congress fascists’. The ultimate aim was to ‘destroy the murderous Congress government’.35
Ranadive and his men took heart from the victory of the communists in China. In September 1949, shortly after Mao Zedong had come to power, Ranadive wrote him a letter of congratulation, saying that ‘the toiling masses of India feel jubilant over this great victory. They know it hastens their own liberation. They are inspired by it to fight more determinedly and courageously their battle for ending the present regime [in India] and establishing the rule of People’s Democracy.’36 The Indian communists were also egged on by Russian theoreticians, who believed that ‘the political regime established in India is similar in many respects to the anti-popular, reactionary regime which existed in Kuomintang China’.37 The Soviet embassy in Delhi itself had a large staff, such that (in the words of a senior civil servant) the Indian ‘communist movement [was] receiving first-class direction on the spot’.38
The communists had declared war on the Indian state. The government responded with all the force at its command. As many as 50,000 party men and sympathizers were arrested and detained. In Hyderabad the police arrested important leaders of communist dalams, although Ravi Narayan Reddy, ‘the father of the Communist movement in Deccan, [was] still at large’. The military governor, J. N. Chaudhuri, launched a propaganda war against the communists. Telugu pamphlets dropped on the villages announced that the Nizam’s private Crown lands would be distributed to the peasantry. Theatrical companies touring the villages presented the government case through drama and pantomime. In one play, Chaudhuri was portrayed as a Hindu deity; the communists, as demons.39
The propaganda and the repression had its effect. The membership of the party dropped from 89,000 in 1948 to a mere 20,000 two years later. The government’s counter-offensive had exposed the ‘lack of popular empathy it experienced for its unbridled revolutionism’. It appears the party had grossly underestimated the hold of the Congress over the Indian people.40
Even as the communists were losing their influence, a band of extremists was gathering strength on the right. This was the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. After the murder of Mahatma Gandhi in January 1948, the RSS was banned by the government. Although not directly involved in the assassination, the organization had been active in the Punjab violence, and had much support among disaffected refugees. Their worldview was akin to Nathuram Godse’s, and it was widely rumoured that RSS men had privately celebrated his killing of the Mahatma. Writing to the Punjab government two weeks after Gandhi’s death, Nehru said that ‘we have had enough suffering already in India because of the activities of the R.S.S. and like groups . . . These people have the blood of Mahatma Gandhi on their hands, and pious disclaimers and disassociation now have no meaning.’41
So the RSS was banned, and its cadres arrested. However, after a year the government decided to make the organization legal once more. Its head, M. S. Golwalkar, had now agreed to ask his men to profess loyalty to the Constitution of India and the national flag, and to restrict the Sangh’s activities ‘to the cultural sphere abjuring violence or secrecy’. The RSS chief promised the home minister, Vallabhbhai Patel, that ‘while rendering help to the people in distress, we have laid our emphasis on promoting peace in the country’. Patel himself had mixed feelings about the RSS. While deploring their anti-Muslim rhetoric he admired their dedication and discipline. In lifting the ban on the Sangh, he advised them ‘that the only way for them is to reform the Congress from within, if they think the Congress is going on the wrong path’.42
After the RSS was made legal, Golwalkar made a ‘triumphal’ speaking tour across the country, drawing ‘mammoth crowds’. The Sangh, wrote one observer, ‘has emerged from its recent ordeal with a mass support that other parties, not excluding the Congress, might well envy and guard against, while it is yet time, unless they wish to see the country delivered to a Hindu irredentism that will lead it to certain disaster’. The RSS was the Hindu answer to the Muslim League, ‘imbued with aggressively communal ideas, and with the determination that there must be no compromise with the ideal of a pure and predominant Hindu culture in Bharat-Varsh’.43
Like the communist B. T. Ranadive, Golwalkar was an upper-caste Maharashtrian. Both men were relatively young – in their early forties – and both commanded the loyalty of hundreds of cadres a good deal younger than themselves. The RSS and the communists likewise drew upon the energy and idealism of youth, and upon its fanaticism too. In the early years of Indian independence, these two groups were the most motivated opponents of the ruling Congress Party.
At the helm of the Congress was the Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. In confronting the radicals of left and right, Nehru faced two major handicaps. First, he was a moderate, and the middle ground is generally not conducive to the kind of stirring rhetoric that compels men to act. Second, he and his colleagues were far older than their political rivals. In 1949 Nehru himself was sixty, an age at which a Hindu male is supposed to retire from the workaday world and take sanyas.
Nehru saw the RSS as the greater of the two threats. Others in his government, notably Vallabhbhai Patel, disagreed. Intriguingly, M. S. Golwalkar had written to Patel offering help in battling the common enemy – the communists. ‘If we utilize the power of your government and the cultural strength of our organization’, he wrote, ‘we will be able to get rid of the [Red] menace very soon.’44 This idea of a joint front appealed to Patel; indeed, it may have been one reason he contemplated absorbing the RSS within the Congress.
In the event, members of the RSS were not admitted into the Congress. But Golwalkar remained at large, free to propagate his views to those who chose to hear them. In the first week of November 1949, the RSS chief addressed a crowd of 100,000 in Bombay’s Shivaji Park. A reporter in attendance
described him as ‘a man of medium height with a sunken chest, long uncut and unkempt hair and a flowing beard’. He looked for all the world like a harmless Hindu ascetic, except that ‘the black piercing eyes deep in the sockets gave the [RSS] Chief the typical look of a black magician about to pull out a blood-curdling trick.’ Before he spoke, Golwalkar was presented with garlands by clubs specializing in body-building and the martial arts. The speech itself ‘waxed hot’ on the virtues of Hindu culture. As the reporter put it: ‘He had a cure-all for the ills of the nation: Make Golwalkar the Führer of All India’.45
A week later Jawaharlal Nehru came to speak in Bombay. The venue was the same as for Golwalkar: Shivaji Park, that oasis of green grass in the heart of the densely packed, middle-class, chiefly Marathi-speaking housing colonies of central Bombay. Nehru used the same microphone as Golwalkar, this supplied by the Motwane Chicago Telephone and Radio Company. But his message was emphatically different, for he spoke of the need to maintain social peace within India as well as peace between warring nations abroad.
Nehru’s talk was delivered on his sixtieth birthday, 14 November 1949. He could not have wished for a better present: the abundant affection of his countrymen. The prime minister was due to arrive in Bombay at 4.30 p.m. An hour before his plane landed at Santa Cruz airport, ‘people started closing their shops and stopped working so that they might be able to see Pandit Nehru. They jammed the sidewalks and the streets long before the open maroon car carrying Panditji sped by. As he passed by a tumultuous waving and rejoicing was noticed.’
An hour later, after a wash and a change, Nehru arrived at Shivaji Park. Here, ‘a record crowd [had] stampeded the vast maidan grounds to hear him. More than six lakhs [600,000] assembled that memorable evening. There was one seething mass of humanity; men, women and children who had come . . . to hear him for they still had faith in his leadership and ability to show the way in these hard and trying times ahead of us.’46
A hundred thousand people had come to hear Golwalkar espouse the idea of a Hindu theocratic state for India. But in this Maharashtrian stronghold, six times as many came to cheer the prime minister’s defence of democracy against absolutism, and secularism against Hindu chauvinism. In this contest between competing ideas of India, Jawaharlal Nehru was winning hands down; for the time being, at any rate.
VII
Like the integration of the princely states, the rehabilitation of refugees was a political problem unprecedented in nature and scope. The migrants into India from Pakistan, wrote one of their number, were ‘like the fallen autumn leaves in the wind or bits of stray newspaper flying hither and thither in the blown dust’. For ‘those who have come away safe in limb and mind are without any bearings and without any roots’.47
The refugees who came into India after Independence numbered close to 8 million. This was greater than the populations of small European countries such as Austria and Norway, and as many as lived in the colossal continent of Australia. These people were resettled with time, cash, effort and, not least, idealism.
There was indeed much heroism and grandeur in the building of a new India. There were also errors and mistakes, loose ends that remained untied. There was pain and suffering in the extinguishing of the princely order, and there was pain and suffering in the resettlement of the refugees. Yet both tasks were, in the end, accomplished.
Notably, the actors in this complicated and tortuous process were all Indian. This, at least on the British side, was completely unanticipated. A former governor of Bengal had written in 1947 of how
The end of British political control in India will not mean the departure of the British, as individuals, from India. It will not be possible for many years ahead for India to do without a large number of British individuals in government service. They will remain under contract to the Government of India and to the governments of the Provinces and States in a wide range of administrative, legal, medical, police and professional and technical appointments. It will be many years before India will be able to fill, from amongst her own sons, all the many senior positions under the government that the administration of her 400 million people makes necessary.48
In the event, that help was not asked for, nor was it needed. Admittedly, the rulers had left behind a set of functioning institutions: the civil service and the police, the judiciary and the railways, among others. At Independence, the government of India invited British members of the ICS to stay on; with but the odd exception, they all left for home, along with their colleagues in the other services. Thus it came to be that the heroes remembered in these pages were all Indians – whether politicians like Nehru and Patel, bureaucrats like Tarlok Singh and V. P. Menon, or social workers like Kamaladevi Chattopadhyaya and Mridula Sarabhai. So too were the countless others who were unnamed then and continue to be unknown now: the officials who took in and acted upon applications for land allotment, the officials who built the houses and ran the hospitals and schools, the officials who sat in courts and secretariats. Also overwhelmingly Indian were the social workers who cajoled, consoled and cared for the refugees.
An American architect who worked in India in the early years of Independence has written with feeling of the calibre and idealism of those around him. ‘The number and kinds of people I’ve seen,’ wrote Albert Mayer, ‘their ability, outlook, energy, and devotion; the tingling atmosphere of plans and expectation and uncertainty; and yet the calm and self-possession – what it adds up to is being present at the birth of a nation.’49
In the history of nation-building only the Soviet experiment bears comparison with the Indian. There too, a sense of unity had to be forged between many diverse ethnic groups, religions, linguistic communities and social classes. The scale – geographic as well as demographic – was comparably massive. The raw material the state had to work with was equally unpropitious: a people divided by faith and riven by debt and disease.
India after the Second World War was much like the Soviet Union after the First. A nation was being built out of its fragments. In this case, however, the process was unaided by the extermination of class enemies or the creation of gulags.
6
Ideas of India
In Governance is realised all the forms of renunciation; in Governance is united all the sacraments; in Governance is combined all knowledge; in Governance is centred all the Worlds.
The Mahabharata
Constitutional morality is not a natural sentiment. It has to be cultivated. We must realize that our people have yet to learn it. Democracy in India is only a top-dressing on an Indian soil, which is essentially undemocratic.
B. R. AMBEDKAR
I
WITH 395 ARTICLES AND 12 schedules the constitution of India is probably the longest in the world. Coming into effect in January 1950, it was framed over a period of three years, between December 1946 and December 1949. During this time its drafts were discussed clause by clause in the Constituent Assembly of India. In all, the Assembly held eleven sessions, whose sittings consumed 165 days. In between the sessions the work of revising and refining the drafts was carried out by various committees and sub-committees.
The proceedings of the Constituent Assembly of India were printed in eleven bulky volumes. These volumes – some of which exceed 1,000 pages – are testimony to the loquaciousness of Indians, but also to their insight, intelligence, passion and sense of humour. These volumes are a little-known treasure-trove, invaluable to the historian, but also a potential source of enlightenment to the interested citizen. In them we find many competing ideas of the nation, of what language it should speak, what political and economic systems it should follow, what moral values it should uphold or disavow.
II
From the early 1930s the Congress had insisted that Indians would frame their own constitution. In 1946 Lord Wavell finally gave in to the demand. The members of the Assembly were chosen on the basis of that year’s provincial elections. However, the Muslim League chose to boycott the early sittin
gs, making it effectively a one-party forum.
The first meeting of the Constituent Assembly was held on 9 December 1946. A sense of anticipation was in the air. The leading Congress members, such as Nehru and Patel, sat on the front benches. But to demonstrate that it was not merely a Congress Party show, known opponents such as Sarat Bose of Bengal were given seats alongside them. A nationalist newspaper noted that ‘nine women members were present, adding colour’ to a scene dominated by Gandhi caps and Nehru jackets.1
Apart from the members sent by the provinces of British India, the Constituent Assembly also had representatives of the princely states, sent as these states joined the Union one by one. Eighty-two per cent of Assembly members were also members of the Congress. However, since the party was itself a broad church they held a wide range of views. Some were atheists and secularists, others ‘technically members of the Congress but spiritually members of the RSS and the Hindu Mahasabha’.2 Some were socialists in their economic philosophy, others defenders of the rights of landlords. Aside from the diversity within it, the Congress also nominated independent members of different caste and religious groups and ensured the representation of women. It particularly sought out experts in the law. In the event ‘there was hardly any shade of public opinion not represented in the Assembly’.3
This expansion of the social base of the Assembly was in part an answer to British criticism. Winston Churchill in particular had poured scorn on the idea of a Constituent Assembly dominated by ‘one major community in India’, the caste Hindus. In his view the Congress was not a truly representative party, but rather a mouthpiece of ‘actively organised and engineered minorities who, having seized upon power by force, or fraud or chicanery, go forward and use that power in the name of vast masses with whom they have long since lost all effective connection’.4
India After Gandhi Revised and Updated Edition Page 15