X
Mahatma Gandhi had once expressed his desire to see an Untouchable woman installed as the first president of India. That did not happen, but some compensation was at hand when an Untouchable man, Dr B. R. Ambedkar, was asked to serve as the chairman of the Drafting Committee of the Constituent Assembly.
On 25 November 1949, the day before the Assembly wound up its proceedings, Ambedkar made a moving speech summing up their work.60 He thanked his fellow members of the Drafting Committee, thanked their support staff, and thanked a party of which he had been a lifelong opponent. Without the quiet work in and out of the House by the Congress bosses, he would not have been able to render order out of chaos. ‘It is because of the discipline of the Congress Party that the Drafting Committee was able to pilot the Constitution in the Assembly with the sure knowledge as to the fate of each article and each amendment.’
In a concession to patriotic nostalgia, Ambedkar then allowed that some form of democracy was not unknown in ancient India. ‘There was a time when India was studded with republics.’ Characteristically he invoked the Buddhists, who had furthered the democratic ideal in their Bhikshu Sanghas, which applied rules akin to those of Parliamentary Procedure – votes, motions, resolutions, censures and whips.
Ambedkar also assured the House that the federalism of the constitution in no way denied states’ rights. It was mistaken, he said, to think that there was ‘too much centralization and that the States have been reduced to Municipalities’. The constitution had partitioned legislative and executive authority, but the Centre could not on its own alter the boundary of this partition. In his words, ‘the Centre and the States are co-equal in this matter’.
Ambedkar ended his speech with three warnings about the future. The first concerned the place of popular protest in a democracy. There was no place for bloody revolution, of course, but in his view there was no room for Gandhian methods either. ‘We must abandon the method of civil disobedience, non-cooperation and satyagraha [popular protest]’. Under an autocratic regime, there might be some justification for them, but not now, when constitutional methods of redress were available. Satyagraha and the like, said Ambedkar, were ‘nothing but the grammar of anarchy and the sooner they are abandoned, the better for us’.
The second warning concerned the unthinking submission to charismatic authority. Ambedkar quoted John Stuart Mill, who cautioned citizens not ‘to lay their liberties at the feet of even a great man, or to trust him with powers which enable him to subvert their institutions’. This warning was even more pertinent here than in England, for
in India, Bhakti or what may be called the path of devotion or hero-worship, plays a part in its politics unequalled in magnitude by the part it plays in the politics of any other country in the world. Bhakti in religion may be the road to the salvation of a soul. But in politics, Bhakti or hero-worship is a sure road to degradation and to eventual dictatorship.
Ambedkar’s final warning was to urge Indians not to be content with what he called ‘mere political democracy’. India had got rid of alien rule, but it was still riven by inequality and hierarchy. Thus, once the country formally became a republic on 26 January 1950, it was
going to enter a life of contradictions. In politics we will have equality and in social and economic life we will have inequality. In politics we will be recognizing the principle of one man one vote and one vote one value. In our social and economic life, we shall, by reason of our social and economic structure, continue to deny the principle of one man one value. How long shall we continue to live this life of contradictions? How long shall we continue to deny equality in our social and economic life? If we continue to deny it for long, we will do so only by putting our political democracy in peril.
XI
Eight months before the Constituent Assembly of India was convened a new constitution had been presented for approval to the Japanese Parliament, the Diet. However, this document had been almost wholly written by a group of foreigners. In early February 1946 twenty-four individuals – all Americans, and sixteen of them military officials – met in a converted ballroom in Tokyo. Here they sat for a week before coming up with a constitution they thought the Japanese should adopt. This was then presented as a fait accompli to the local political leadership, who were allowed to ‘Japanize’ the draft by translating it into the local tongue. The draft was also discussed in Parliament, but every amendment, even the most cosmetic, had to be approved beforehand by the American authorities.
The historian of this curious exercise writes that ‘no modern nation ever has rested on a more alien constitution’.61 The contrast with the Indian case could not be more striking. One constitution was written in the utmost secrecy; the other drafted and discussed in the full glare of the press. One was finalized at breakneck speed and written by foreigners. The other was written wholly by natives and emerged from several years of reflection and debate. In fairness, though, one should admit that, despite their different provenances, both constitutions were, in essence, liberal humanist credos. One could equally say of the Indian document what the American supervisor said of the Japanese draft, namely, that ‘it constitutes a sharp swing from the extreme right in political thinking – yet yields nothing to the radical concept of the extreme left’.62
Granville Austin has claimed that the framing of the Indian Constitution was ‘perhaps the greatest political venture since that originated in Philadelphia in 1787’. The outlining of a set of national ideals, and of an institutional mechanism to work towards them, was ‘a gigantic step for a people previously committed largely to irrational means of achieving other-worldly goals’. For this, as the title of the last section of Austin’s book proclaims, ‘the credit goes to the Indians’.63
Part Two
Nehru’s India
7
The Biggest Gamble in History
We are little men serving great causes, but because the cause is great, something of that greatness falls upon us also.
JAWAHARLAL NEHRU, 1946
India means only two things to us – famines and Nehru.
American journalist, 1951
I
IN THE FIRST YEARS of freedom, the ruling Congress Party faced threats from without, and within. As rebels against the Raj the nationalists had been sacrificing idealists, but as governors they came rather to enjoy the fruits of office. As a veteran Madras journalist put it, ‘in the post-Gandhian war for power the first casualty is decency’.1 Time magazine commented that after independence was achieved, the Congress ‘found itself without a unifying purpose. It grew fat and lazy, today harbors many time-serving office-holders [and] not a few black-marketeers’.2 An influential Bombay weekly remarked that ‘from West Bengal to Uttar Pradesh, along the Gangetic Valley, the Congress is split. The old glamour of the premier political organization is fading, factions are becoming more acute and the party’s unpopularity is increasing.’3
There were party factions at the district level, as well as at the provincial level. However, the most portentous of the cleavages was between the two biggest stalwarts, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru and Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel. These two men, prime minister and deputy prime minister respectively, had major differences in the first months following Independence. Gandhi’s death made them come together again. But in 1949 and 1950 the differences resurfaced.
In character and personality Nehru and Patel were certainly a study in contrast. The prime minister was a Brahmin from an upper-class background whose father had also been a prominent figure in the nationalist movement. His deputy, on the other hand, was from a farming caste, and a descendant of a sepoy mutineer of 1857. Nehru loved good food and wine, appreciated fine art and literature and had travelled widely abroad. Patel was a non-smoker, vegetarian, teetotaller, and, on the whole, ‘a hard task master with little time for play’. He got up at 4 a.m., attended to his correspondence for an hour and then went for a walk through the dimly lit streets of New Delhi. Besides, ‘a grave exterior and
a cold and cynical physiognomy [made] the Sardar a really tough personality’. In the words of the New York Times, he was ‘leather tough’.
There were also similarities. Both Nehru and Patel had a daughter as their housekeeper, companion and chief confidante. Both were politicians of a conspicuous integrity. And both were fierce patriots. But their ideas did not always mesh. As one observer rather delicately put it, ‘the opposition of the Sardar to the leftist elements in the country is one of the major problems of political adjustment facing India’. He meant here that Patel was friendly with capitalists while Nehru believed in state control of the economy; that Patel was more inclined to support the West in the emerging Cold War; and that Patel was more forgiving of Hindu extremism and harsher on Pakistan.4
In late 1949 Nehru and Patel had a major disagreement. In the New Year, India would transform itself from a ‘dominion’, where the British monarch was head of state, to a full-fledged republic. Nehru thought that when the governor generalship became a presidency, the incumbent, C. Rajagopalachari, should retain the job. ‘Rajaji’ was an urbane scholar with whom the prime minister then got along very well. Patel, however, preferred Rajendra Prasad, who was close to him but who also had wider acceptance within the Congress Party. Nehru had assured Rajaji that he would be president, but much to his annoyance, and embarrassment, Patel got the Congress rank-and-file to put Prasad’s name forward instead.5
The original date of Indian independence, 26 January, was chosen as the first Republic Day. The new head of state, Rajendra Prasad, took the salute in what was to become an annual and ever more spectacular parade. Three thousand men of the armed forces marched before the president. The artillery fired a thirty-one-gun salute while Liberator planes of the Indian air force flew overhead. Gandhi’s India was announcing itself as a sovereign nation-state.6
Round one had gone to Patel. A few months later commenced round two, the battle for the presidency of the Indian National Congress. For this post Patel had put forward Purushottamdas Tandon, a veteran of the Congress from the United Provinces, indeed, from the prime minister’s own home town of Allahabad. Tandon and Nehru were personal friends, but hardly ideological bedfellows, for the presidential candidate was ‘a bearded, venerable orthodox Hindu . . . who admirably represented the extreme communalist wing of the [Congress] party’. He was, in sum, ‘a personification of political and social anachronisms’, an ‘anti-Muslim and pro-caste Hindu’ who stood for ‘the resurrection of a dead culture and a long extinct system of society’.7
Nehru had previously criticized Tandon for his desire to impose Hindi on regions of India which did not know the language. He was particularly upset when his fellow Allahabadi addressed a conference of refugees and spoke of revenge against Pakistan. India, believed Nehru, needed the healing touch, a policy of reconciliation between Hindus and Muslims. The election of Tandon as the president of the premier political party, the prime minister’s own party, would send all the wrong signals.
When the election for the Congress presidency was held in August 1950 Tandon won comfortably. Nehru now wrote to Rajagopalachari that the result was ‘the clearest of indications that Tandon’s election is considered more important than my presence in the Govt or the Congress . . . All my instincts tell me that I have completely exhausted my utility both in the Congress and Govt’. The next day he wrote again to Rajaji, saying, ‘I am feeling tired out – physically and mentally. I do not think I can function with any satisfaction to myself in future.’8
Rajaji now tried to work out a compromise between the two factions. Patel was amenable, suggesting a joint statement under both their names, where he and Nehru would proclaim their adherence to certain fundamentals of Congress policy. The prime minister, however, decided to go it alone. After two weeks of contemplation he had decided to exchange resignation for truculence. On 13 September 1950 he issued a statement to the press deploring the fact that ‘communalist and reactionary forces have openly expressed their joy’ at Tandon’s victory. He was distressed, he said, that the ‘spirit of communalism and revivalism has gradually invaded the Congress, and sometimes affects Government policy’. But, unlike Pakistan, India was a secular state. ‘We have to treat our minorities in exactly the same way as we treat the majority,’ insisted Nehru. ‘Indeed, fair treatment is not enough; we have to make them feel that they are so treated.’ Now, ‘in view of the prevailing confusion and the threat of false doctrine, it has become essential that the Congress should declare its policy in this matter in the clearest and most unambiguous terms.’9
Nehru felt that it was the responsibility of the Congress and the government to make the Muslims in India feel secure. Patel, on the other hand, was inclined to place the responsibility on the minorities themselves. He had once told Nehru that the ‘Muslims citizens in India have a responsibility to remove the doubts and misgivings entertained by a large section of the people about their loyalty founded largely on their past association with the demand for Pakistan and the unfortunate activities of some of them.’10
On the minorities question, as on other matters of philosophy and policy, Nehru and Patel would never completely see eye to eye. Now, however, in the aftermath of the bitter contest for the Congress presidency, the older man did not press the point. For Patel knew that the destruction of their party might very well mean the destruction of India. He thus told Congress members who visited him to ‘do what Jawaharlal says’ and to ‘pay no attention to this controversy’. On 2 October, while inaugurating a women’s centre in Indore, he used the occasion of Gandhi’s birth anniversary to affirm his loyalty to the prime minister. He described himself in his speech as merely one of the many non-violent soldiers in Gandhi’s army. Now that the Mahatma was gone, ‘Jawaharlal Nehru is our leader’, said Patel. ‘Bapu [Gandhi] appointed him as his successor and had even proclaimed him as such. It is the duty of all Bapu’s soldiers to carry out his bequest . . . I am not a disloyal soldier.’11
Such is the evidence placed before us by Patel’s biographer, Rajmohan Gandhi. It confirms in fact what Nehru’s biographer (Sarvepalli Gopal) had expressed in feeling: that what forestalled ‘an open rupture [between the two men] was mutual regard and Patel’s stoic decency’.12 Patel remembered his promise to Gandhi to work along with Jawaharlal. And by the time of the controversy over the Congress presidency he was also a very sick man. It was from his bed that he sent a congratulatory handwritten letter to Nehru on his birthday, 14 November. A week later, when the prime minister visited him at his home, Patel said: ‘I want to talk to you alone when I get a little strength . . . I have a feeling that you are losing confidence in me.’ ‘I have been losing confidence in myself,’ answered Nehru.13
Three weeks later Patel was dead. It fell to the prime minister to draft the Cabinet Resolution mourning his passing. Nehru singled out his devotion to a ‘united and strong India’, and his ‘genius’ in solving the complicated problem of the princely states. To Nehru, Patel was both comrade and rival; but to their compatriots he was ‘an unmatched warrior in the cause of freedom, a lover of India, a great servant of the people and a statesman of genius and mighty achievement’.14
II
Vallabhbhai Patel’s death in December 1950 removed the one Congress politician who was of equal standing to Nehru. No longer were there two power centres within India’s ruling party. However, the prime minister still had to contend with two somewhat lesser rivals; the president of the Congress, Purushottamdas Tandon, and the president of the republic, Rajendra Prasad. Nehru’s biographer says of Prasad that he was ‘prominent in the ranks of medievalism’.15 That judgement is perhaps excessively harsh on a patriot who had sacrificed much in the cause of Indian freedom. Nonetheless, it was clear that the prime minister and the president differed on some crucial subjects, such as the place of religion in public life.
These differences came to a head in the spring of 1951 when the president was asked to inaugurate the newly restored Somnath temple in Gujarat. Once fabled fo
r its wealth, Somnath had been raided several times by Muslim chiefs, including the notorious eleventh-century marauder Mahmud of Ghazni. Each time the temple was razed it was rebuilt. Then the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb ordered its total destruction. It lay in ruins for two and a half centuries until Sardar Patel himself visited it in September 1947 and promised help in its reconstruction. Patel’s colleague K. M. Munshi then took charge of the rebuilding.16
When the president of India chose to dignify the temple’s consecration with his presence, Nehru was appalled. He wrote to Prasad advising him not to participate in the ‘spectacular opening of the Somnath temple [which] . . . unfortunately has a number of implications. Personally, I thought that this was no time to lay stress on large-scale building operations at Somnath. This could have been done gradually and more effectively later. However, this has been done. [Still] I feel that it would be better if you did not preside over this function.’17
Prasad disregarded the advice and went to Somnath. To his credit, however, his speech there stressed the Gandhian ideal of inter-faith harmony. True, he nostalgically evoked a Golden Age when the gold in India’s temples symbolized great wealth and prosperity. The lesson from Somnath’s later history, however, was that ‘religious intolerance only foments hatred and immoral conduct’. By the same token, the lesson of its reconstruction was not to ‘open old wounds, which have healed to some extent over the centuries’, but rather to ‘help each caste and community to obtain full freedom’. Calling for ‘complete religious tolerance’, the president urged his audience to ‘try to understand the great essence of religion’, namely, ‘that it is not compulsory to follow a single path to realize Truth and God’. For ‘just as all the rivers mingle together in the vast ocean, similarly different religions help men to reach God’.18
One does not know whether Nehru read the speech. In any case, he would have preferred Prasad not to go at all. The prime minister thought that public officials should never publicly associate with faiths and shrines. The president, on the other hand, believed that it should be equally and publicly respectful of all. Although he was a Hindu, said Prasad at Somnath, ‘I respect all religions and on occasion visit a church, a mosque, a dargah and a gurdwara’.
India After Gandhi Revised and Updated Edition Page 18