The United States was a land made by successive waves of immigrants, who had perforce to learn English to speak to one another. The USSR, on the other hand, was a political formation constituted of many linguistic communities. In that respect it was closer to the Republic of India than the US. The Soviet promotion of Russian led eventually to the growth of subnationalist sentiments and the creation of many independent nations. In India, on the other hand, exactly the reverse has happened – that is, the sustenance of linguistic pluralism has worked to tame and domesticate secessionist tendencies.
A comparison with neighbouring countries might be helpful here. In 1956, the year the states of India were reorganized on the basis of language, the Parliament of Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) introduced an Act recognizing Sinhala as the sole official language of the country. The intention was to make Sinhala the medium of instruction in all state schools and colleges, in public examinations and in the courts. Potentially the hardest hit were the Tamil-speaking minority who lived in the north of the island, and whose feelings were eloquently expressed by their representatives in Parliament. ‘When you deny me my language’, said one Tamil MP, ‘you deny me everything’. ‘You are hoping for a divided Ceylon’, warned another, adding: ‘Do not fear, I assure you [that you] will have a divided Ceylon’. A left-wing member, himself Sinhala-speaking, predicted that if the government did not change its mind and insisted on the act being passed, ‘two torn little bleeding states might yet arise out of one little state’.8
In 1971, two torn medium-sized states arose out of one large-sized one. The country being divided was Pakistan, rather than Sri Lanka, but the cause for the division was, in fact, language. For the founders of Pakistan likewise believed that their state had to be based on a single language as well as a single religion. In his first speech in the capital of East Pakistan, Dhaka, Mohammed Ali Jinnah warned his audience that they would have to take to Urdu sooner rather than later. ‘Let me make it very clear to you’, said Jinnah to his Bengali audience, ‘that the State Language of Pakistan is going to be Urdu and no other language. Anyone who tries to mislead you is really the enemy of Pakistan. Without one State language, no nation can remain tied up solidly together and function.’9
In the 1950s, bloody riots broke out when the Pakistan government tried to force Urdu on recalcitrant students. The sentiment of being discriminated against on the grounds of language persisted, and ultimately resulted in the formation of the independent state of Bangladesh.
Pakistan was created on the basis of religion, but divided on the basis of language. And for more than two decades a bloody civil war raged in Sri Lanka, the disputants divided somewhat by territory and faith but most of all by language. The lesson from these cases might well be: ‘One language, two nations’. Had Hindi been imposed on the whole of India the lesson might well have been: ‘One language, twenty-two nations’.
III
Indian nationalism has not been based on a shared language, religion, or ethnic identity. Perhaps one should then invoke the presence of a common enemy, namely, European colonialism. The problem here is the methods used to achieve India’s freedom. The historian Michael Howard claims that ‘no Nation, in the true sense of the word, . . . could be born without war . . . no self-conscious community could establish itself as a new and independent actor on the world scene without an armed conflict or the threat of one’.10 Once again, India must count as an exception. Certainly, it was the movement against British rule that first united men and women from different parts of the subcontinent in a common and shared endeavour. However, their (eventually successful) movement for political freedom largely eschewed armed struggle in favour of non-violent resistance. India emerged as a nation on the world stage without an armed conflict between oppressed and oppressor.
Gandhi and company have been widely praised for preferring peaceful protest to violent revolution. However, they should be equally commended for having the wisdom to retain, after the British left India, such aspects of the colonial legacy as might prove useful in the new nation.
The colonialists were often chastised by the nationalists for promoting democracy at home while denying it in the colonies. When the British finally left, it was expected that the Indians would embrace metropolitan traditions such as parliamentary democracy and Cabinet government. More surprising perhaps was their endorsement and retention of a quintessentially colonial tradition – the civil service.
The key men in British India were the members of the Indian Civil Service (ICS). In the countryside they kept the peace and collected the taxes, while in the Secretariat they oversaw policy and generally kept the machinery of state well-oiled. Although there was the odd rotten egg, these were mostly men of integrity and ability.11 A majority were British, but there were also a fair number of Indians in the civil service.
When independence came, the new government had to decide what to do with the Indian members of the ICS. Nationalists who had been jailed by them argued that they should be dismissed or at least put in their place. The home minister, Vallabhbhai Patel, however, felt that they should be allowed to retain their pay and perquisites, and in fact be placed in positions of greater authority. In October 1949 a furious debate broke out on the subject in the Constituent Assembly of India. Some members complained that the ICS men still had the ‘mentality [of rulers] lingering in them’. They had apparently ‘not changed their manners’, ‘not reconciled themselves to the new situation’. ‘They do not feel that they are part and parcel of this country’, insisted one nationalist.
Now Vallabhbhai Patel had himself been jailed many times by ICS men. But this experience had only confirmed his admiration for them. He knew that without them the Pax Brittanica would, simply, have been inconceivable. And he understood that the complex machinery of a modern, independent nation-state needed such officers too. As he reminded the members of the Assembly, the new constitution could only be worked ‘by a ring of Service which will keep the country intact’. He testified to the ability of the ICS men, but also to their sense of service. As Patel put it, the officers had ‘served very ably, very loyally the then Government and later the present Government’. Patel was clear that ‘these people are the instruments [of national unity]. Remove them and I see nothing but a picture of chaos all over the country’.12
In those first, difficult years of Indian freedom, the ICS men vindicated Vallabhbhai Patel’s trust in them. They helped integrate the princely states, resettle the refugees, and plan and oversee the first general elections. Other tasks assigned to them were more humdrum but equally consequential – such as maintaining law and order in the districts, working with ministers in the Secretariat, and supervising famine relief. In 1950, Patel inaugurated a new cadre modelled on the ICS but with a name untainted by the colonial experience. This was the Indian Administrative Service, or IAS.
As of this writing there are some 5,500 IAS officers in the employment of the government of India. The IAS is complemented, as in British days, by other ‘all India’ services, among them the police, forest, revenue and customs services. These serve as an essential link between the centre and the states. Officers are assigned to a particular state; they spend half or more of their service career in that province, the rest in the centre. To the older duties of tax collection and the maintenance of law and order have been added a whole range of new responsibilities. Conducting elections is one; the supervising of development programmes another. In the course of his career an average IAS officer would acquire at least a passing familiarity with such different and divergent subjects as criminal jurisprudence, irrigation management, soil and water conservation and primary health care.13
It was an ICS man, Sukumar Sen, who laid the groundwork for elections in India, and it has been IAS men who have kept the machinery going. The chief election commissioners in the states are drawn from the service. Junior officers supervise polls in their districts; those in the middle rungs serve as election observers, reporting on violations of proce
dure. More generally, the civil services serve as a bridge between state and society. In the course of their work, these administrators meet thousands of members of the public, drawn from all walks of life. Living and working in a democracy, they are obliged to pay close attention to what people think and demand. In this respect, their job is probably even harder than that of their predecessors in the ICS.
However, in recent years IAS officers have become excessively subservient to the ministers they work with. The autonomy of the civil services, once so zealously guarded, has been undermined by unprincipled alliances between individual politicians and individual IAS officers furthering personal agendas, including taking illegal commissions on government projects. The IAS’s hegemony on top jobs in government has also impeded the entry of qualified professionals. In the complex, fast-changing world of the twenty-first century, India needs experts rather than generalists to head government departments and regulatory institutions. It is past time for civil service reform; that said, the IAS and the allied services have played a crucial role in maintaining the unity of an often-divided country.
A colonial institution that has played an equally critical role is the Indian army. Its reputation took a battering after the China war of 1962, before it redeemed itself through its performance in successive wars with Pakistan. The blows inflicted by Tamil insurgents in Sri Lanka in 1987–8 dented the army somewhat, but then self-respect was restored by the successful ousting of the Kargil intruders a decade later. While its reputation as a fighting force has gone up and down, as an agency for maintaining order in peacetime the Indian army has usually commanded the highest respect. In times of communal rioting, the mere appearance of soldiers in uniform is usually enough to make the rioteers flee. And in times of natural disaster they bring succour to the suffering. When there is a flood, famine, cyclone or earthquake, it is the army which is often first on the scene, and always the most efficient and reliable actor around.
The Indian army is a professional and non-sectarian body. It is also apolitical. Almost from the first moments of independence, Jawaharlal Nehru made it clear to the army top brass that in matters of state – both large and small – they had to subordinate themselves to the elected politicians. At the time of the transfer of power the army was still headed by a British general, who had ordered that the public be kept away from a flag-hoisting ceremony to be held on the day after Independence. As prime minister, Nehru rescinded the order, and wrote to the general as follows:
While I am desirous of paying attention to the views and susceptibilities of our senior officers, British and Indian, it seems to me that there is a grave misunderstanding about the matter. In any policy that is to be pursued, in the army or otherwise, the views of the government of India and the policy they lay down must prevail. If any person is unable to lay down that policy, he has no place in the Indian army, or in the Indian structure of government. I think this should be made perfectly clear at this stage.14
A year later, it was Vallabhbhai Patel’s turn to put a British general in his place. When the government decided to move against the Nizam, the commander-in-chief, General Roy Bucher, warned that sending troops into Hyderabad might provoke Pakistan to attack Amritsar. Patel told Bucher that if he opposed the Hyderabad action he was free to resign. The general backed down, and sent the troops as ordered.15
Shortly afterwards Bucher retired, to be succeeded by the first Indian C-in-C, General K. M. Cariappa. At the beginning of his tenure Cariappa restricted himself to military matters, but as he grew into the job he began to offer his views on such questions as India’s preferred model of economic development. In October 1952, Nehru wrote advising him to give fewer press conferences, and at any rate to stick to safe subjects. He also enclosed a letter from one of his Cabinet colleagues, which complained that Cariappa was ‘giving so many speeches and holding so many Press Conferences all over the country’, giving the impression that he was ‘playing the role of a political or semi-political leader’.16
The message seems to have gone home, for when Cariappa demitted office in January 1953, in his farewell speech he ‘exhorted soldiers to give a wide berth to politics’. The army’s job, he said, was not ‘to meddle in politics but to give unstinted loyalty to the elected government’.17 Nehru knew, however, that the general was something of a loose cannon, who could not be completely trusted to follow his own advice. Within three months of his retirement, Cariappa was appointed high commissioner to Australia. The general was not entirely pleased, for, as he told the prime minister, ‘by going away from home to the other end of the world for whatever period you want me in Australia, I shall be depriving myself of being in continuous and constant touch with the people’. Nehru consoled the general that as a sportsman himself he was superbly qualified to represent India to a sporting nation. But the real intention, clearly, was to send him as far away from the people as possible.18
As the first Indian to head the army, General Cariappa carried a certain cachet. However, by the time he came back from Australia, Cariappa was a forgotten man. Nehru’s foresight was confirmed, however, by the statements the general made from time to time. In 1958 he visited Pakistan, where army officers who had served with him in undivided India had just effected a coup. Cariappa publicly praised them, saying that it was ‘the chaotic internal situation which forced these two patriotic generals to plan together to impose Martial Law in the country to save their homeland from utter ruination’.19 Ten years later, he sent an article to the Indian Express, which argued that the chaotic internal situation in West Bengal demanded that President’s Rule be imposed for a minimum of five years. The recommendation was in violation of the letter and spirit of the constitution. Fortunately, the piece was returned by the editor, who pointed out to the general that ‘it would be embarrassing in the circumstances both to you and to us to publish this article’.20
The pattern set in those early years has persisted into the present. As Lieutenant General J. S. Aurora notes, Nehru ‘laid down some very good norms’, which ensured that ‘politics in the army has been almost absent’. ‘The army is not a political animal in any terms’, remarks Aurora, and the officers especially ‘must be the most apolitical people on earth!’21 Aurora himself became a national hero after overseeing the liberation of Bangladesh, but neither he nor other officers have sought to convert glory won on the battlefield into political advantage.
To be sure, after retirement some senior army officers have served as ambassadors and governors. A few have entered party politics, with two serving as ministers in BJP-led governments. Further, in conflict-ridden zones such as Kashmir and the North-east, the army has sometimes forced its will on the civilian administration, most notably with regard to the AFSPA, whose withdrawal it will not countenance even when violence and terror have subsided. These exceptions notwithstanding, the Indian army has on the whole stayed away from politics, in contrast to Pakistan, where the military has actively intervened in the political process, deposing elected governments and supplanting them with martial law administrations.22
IV
The army, like the civil services, is a colonial institution that has successfully adapted itself to a democratic republic. The same may be said about the English language. In British times the intelligentsia and professional classes communicated with one another in English. So did the nationalist élite. Patel, Bose, Nehru, Gandhi and Ambedkar all spoke and wrote in their native tongue, and also in English. To reach out to regions other than one’s own, its use was indispensable. Thus a pan-Indian, anti-British consciousness was created, in good part, by thinkers and activists writing in the English language.
After Independence, among the most articulate advocates for English was C. Rajagopalachari. The colonial rulers, he wrote, had ‘for certain accidental reasons, causes and purposes . . . left behind [in India] a vast body of the English language’. But now it had come there was no need for it to go away. For English ‘is ours. We need not send it back to Britain alon
g with Englishmen’. He humorously added that, according to Indian tradition, it was a Hindu goddess, Saraswati, who had given birth to all the languages of the world. Thus English ‘belonged to us by origin, the originator being Sarawati, and also by acquisition’.23
On the other hand, there were some influential nationalists who believed that English must be thrown out of India with the British. They included the RSS leader M. S. Golwalkar and the socialist ideologue Ram Manohar Lohia. They put pressure on Nehru’s government to replace English with Hindi as the language of inter-provincial communication. The pressure was resisted. Visiting India in 1961, the Canadian writer George Woodcock found that despite India’s strangeness, its ‘immense variety of custom, landscape and physical types’, this was ‘a foreign setting in which one’s language was always understood by someone nearby, and in which to speak with an English accent meant that one was seen as a kind of cousin bred out of the odd, temporary marriage of two peoples into which love and hate entered with equal intensity’.24
After Nehru’s death the efforts to extinguish English were renewed. Despite pleas from the southern states, on 26 January 1965 Hindi became the sole, official language of inter-provincial communication. As we have seen, this provoked protests so intense and furious that the order was withdrawn within a fortnight. Thus English continued as the language of the central government, of the superior courts and of higher education.
India After Gandhi Revised and Updated Edition Page 96