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A vulnerable minority even more numerous than the Muslims were the women of India.
Hansa Mehta
Renuka Roy
You are responsible for our being unfit today. We were suppressed for thousands of years. You engaged in your service to serve your own ends and suppressed us to such an extent that neither our minds nor our bodies and nor even our hearts work, nor are we able to march forward.
People who do not know Hindustani have no right to stay in India. People who are present in this House to fashion a constitution for India and do not know Hindustani are not worthy to be members of this Assembly. They had better leave.
Untouchable man, Dr B. R. Ambedkar, was asked to serve as the chairman of the Drafting Committee of the Constituent Assembly.
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.
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.
‘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
176 million Indians aged twenty-one or more, of whom about 85 per cent could not read or write. Each one had to be identified, named and registered. The registration of voters was merely the first step. For how did one design party symbols, ballot papers and ballot boxes for a mostly unlettered electorate? Then, sites for polling stations had to be identified, and honest and efficient polling officers recruited.
His own feelings are best captured in a letter he wrote to one who with both delicacy and truth can be referred to as his closest lady friend, Edwina Mountbatten:
tahsil of Chini in Himachal Pradesh. Here resided the first Indians to cast votes in a general election, a group of Buddhists.
As critics of the Congress were quick to point out, the first-past-the-post system had produced a far from representative result. More than 50 per cent of the electorate had voted for non-Congress candidates or parties.
whaaa?
on 29 January, Moon wrote to his father that ‘a future and more enlightened age will view with astonishment the absurd farce of recording the votes of millions of illiterate people’.
Sukumar Sen.
‘Mr Dulles wanted pacts . . . Pakistan wanted money and arms.’
American military aid to Pakistan ran to about $80 million a year. The US also encouraged the Pakistanis to join the anti-Soviet military alliances in central and Southeast Asia known as CENTO and SEATO.
‘I do not think that there are many examples in history of a succession of wrong policies being followed by a country as by the United States in the Far East during the past five or six years. They have taken one wrong step after another . . . They think that they can solve any problem with money and arms. They forget the human element. They forget the nationalistic urges of people. They forget the strong resentment of people in Asia against impositions.’
In February 1956 Birla visited the United States again on a bridge-building mission. He asked Nehru for advice, and got a sermon.
while the Americans were loath to ask their European allies to disband their empires in Asia and Africa, the Russians spoke frequently about the evils of racialism and colonialism.
Asian Relations Conference in 1947.
Afro-Asian conference, held in the Indonesian city of Bandung in 1955.
in late October, the British, in collusion with the French and the Israelis, undertook a military invasion of Egypt.
V. K. Krishna Menon,
The prime minister, concluded Myrdal, ‘knew Menon’s shortcomings but kept listening to him because of his brilliance. Menon was the only genuine intellectual foil Nehru had in the government’, the only man with whom he could discuss Marx and Mill, Dickens and Dostoevsky.
Kuomintang leader Chiang Kai-shek,
K. M. Pannikar.
Pannikar was the official representative of his government. What he said and believed would carry considerable weight. And here he was representing one of history’s most ruthless dictators as a dreamy, soft, poetic kind of chap.
Chinese irredentism and Communist imperialism are different from the expansionism or imperialism of the Western Powers. The former has a cloak of ideology which makes it ten times more dangerous. In the guise of ideological expansion lies concealed racial, national or historical claims.
In a wide-ranging agreement signed in April 1954, India officially recognized Tibet as being part of China. The joint declaration outlined five principles of peaceful co-existence (panch sheel), which included mutual non-aggression and mutual respect for each other’s territorial integrity.70
Between this and the border lay some 50,000 square miles of densely forested territory, inhabited by many self-contained and self-administered tribes, each too small to form a separate state, each too remote to be subservient to any existing one. Some of the tribes were Buddhist, and there was also an old Buddhist monastery at Tawang. This paid tribute to Tibetan authorities and was ‘ecclesiastically subject’ to Lhasa.
one colonial official argued, it was necessary to get this ‘undoubtedly Tibetan territory’ into British India, ‘as otherwise Tibet and Assam will adjoin each other and, if Tibet should again come under Chinese control, it will be a dangerous position for us’.
‘a living language is a throbbing, vital thing, ever changing, ever growing and mirroring the people who speak and write it’.
Rajagopalachari.
Potti Sriramulu
Between 1881 and 1941 the population of British India rose from 257 to 389 million. But (or hence) the per capita availability of food grains declined from an already low level of 200 kilograms per person per year to a mere 150.
cesses on their peasants such as motorana (to pay for the zamindar’s new car) and hathiana (to pay for his elephants).2 The landlord was prone to treat his animals and his vehicles far better than he did his labourers.
Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis, a Cambridge-trained physicist and statistician who was steeped in Sanskrit philosophy and Bengali literature – in sum, ‘an awesome polyglot, the kind of man for whom Nehru was guaranteed to fall’.16
Assured irrigation and chemical fertilizers increased agricultural productivity. But they could not solve what was a fundamental problem of rural India: inequality in access to land.
Vinoba Bhave.
Milton Friedman.
The free-market critique; the human capital critique; the ecological critique – these make for fascinating reading today. But at the time these notes of dissent were scattered, and they were politically weak.
‘Whenever I see these great engineering works’, wrote Jawaharlal Nehru, ‘I feel excited and exhilarated. They are visible symbols of building up the new India and of providing life and sustenance to our people’.
Article 44 of the Constitution of India reads: ‘The State shall endeavour to secure for the citizens a uniform civil code throughout the territory of India.’
the freedom to propagate and practise one’s religion.
its aim was to ‘codify the rules of Hindu Law which are scattered in innumerable decisions of the High Courts and of the Privy Council, [and] which form a bewildering motley to the common man and give rise to constant litigation’.
A doughty opponent of the bill was the Constituent Assembly’s own president, Rajendra Prasad.
Religion, he said, ‘is the noblest light, inspiration and support of men, and the State’s highest duty is to protect it’.
‘If the wife is a habitual drunkard, a confirmed invalid, a cunning, a barren or a spendthrift woman, if she is bitter-tongued, if she has got only daughters and no son, if she hates her husband, [then] the husband can marry a second wife even while the first is living.’
The main thrust was to make caste irrelevant to Hindus with regard to marriage and adoption, to outlaw polygamy, to allow divorce and dissolution of marriage on certain specified grounds and to greatly increase a woman’s share of her husband’s and her father’s property.
