India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy

by Ramachandra Guha

In Strachey’s view, the differences between the countries of Europe were much smaller than those between the ‘countries’ of India. ‘Scotland is more like Spain than Bengal is like the Punjab.’ In India the diversities of race, language and religion were far greater. Unlike in Europe, these ‘countries’ were not nations; they did not have a distinct political or social identity. This, Strachey told his Cambridge audience, ‘is the first and most essential thing to learn about India – that there is not, and never was an India, or even any country of India possessing, according to any European ideas, any sort of unity, physical, political, social or religious’.

‘Caste’ is a Portuguese word that conflates two Indian words: jati, the endogamous group one is born into, and varna, the place that group occupies in the system of social stratification mandated by Hindu scripture.

Every year after 1930, Congress-minded Indians celebrated 26 January as Independence Day. However, when the British finally left the subcontinent, they chose to hand over power on 15 August 1947. This date was selected by the Viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, as it was the second anniversary of the Japanese surrender to the Allied Forces in the Second World War.

The task of partitioning Bengal and the Punjab was entrusted to a British judge named Sir Cyril Radcliffe.

However, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh was actively sceptical of this viewpoint. Its sarsanghchalak, or head, was a lean, bearded science graduate named M. S. Golwalkar. Golwalkar was strongly opposed to the idea of a secular state that would not discriminate on the basis of religion. In the India of his conception, The non-Hindu people of Hindustan must either adopt Hindu culture and language, must learn and respect and hold in reverence the Hindu religion, must entertain no idea but of those of glorification of the Hindu race and culture . . . in a word they must cease to be foreigners, or may stay in the country, wholly subordinated to the Hindu nation, claiming nothing, deserving no privileges, far less any preferential treatment – not even citizens’ rights.33

Why could not the unity of Punjab, or of India, be saved? There have been three rather different answers on offer. The first blames the Congress leadership for underestimating Jinnah and the Muslims. The second blames Jinnah for pursuing his goal of a separate country regardless of human consequences. The third holds the British responsible, claiming that they promoted a divide between Hindus and Muslims to perpetuate their rule.

The call for Pakistan was first made formally by the Muslim League in March 1940.

As it turned out, the most appropriate epitaph on the last days of the Raj was provided by the Punjab official who told a young social worker from Oxford: ‘You British believe in fair play. You have left India in the same condition of chaos as you found it.’20

In many cases the treaties also transferred valuable areas from the Indian states to the British. It was no accident that, except for the states comprising Kathiawar and two chiefdoms in the south, no Indian state had a coastline. The political dependence was made more acute by economic dependence, with the states relying on British India for raw materials, industrial goods, and employment opportunities.

Mountbatten began by telling the princes that the Indian Independence Act had released ‘the States from all their obligations to the Crown’. They were now technically independent, or, put another way, rudderless, on their own. The old links were broken, but ‘if nothing can be put in its place, only chaos can result’ – a chaos that ‘will hit the States first’. He advised them to forge relations with the new nation closest to them.

Patel and Menon took more than one leaf out of the British book. They played ‘divide-and-rule’, bringing some princes on side early, unsettling the rest. They played on the childlike vanities of the maharajas, allowing them to retain their titles and sometimes giving them new ones. (Thus several maharajas were appointed governors of provinces.) But, like the British in the eighteenth century, they kept their eye firmly on the main chance: material advantage. For, as Patel told the officials of the states ministry, ‘we do not want their women and their jewellery – we want their land’.

From the Indian point of view, said Nehru to the maharaja, it is of the most vital importance that Kashmir should remain within the Indian Union . . . But however much we may want this, it cannot be done ultimately except through the goodwill of the mass of the population. Even if military forces held Kashmir for a while, a later consequence might be a strong reaction against this. Essentially, therefore, this is a problem of psychological approach to the mass of the people and of making them feel they will be benefited by being in the Indian Union. If the average Muslim feels that he has no safe or secure place in the Union, then obviously he will look elsewhere. Our basic policy must keep this in view, or else we fail.46

Kashmir is the one great problem that may cause the downfall of India and Pakistan (Henry Grady, United States Ambassador to India, January 1948). So long as the dispute over Kashmir continues it is a serious drain on the military, economic and, above all, on the spiritual strength of these two great countries (General A. G. L. McNaughton, UN mediator, February 1950). So vital seems its possession for economic and political security to Pakistan that her whole foreign and defence policy has largely revolved around the Kashmir dispute . . . Far more than the Punjab massacres, which, though horrible, were short lived, it is the Kashmir dispute which has poisoned every aspect of Indo-Pakistan relations (Richard Symonds, British social worker and author, 1950). Kashmir is one situation you could never localize if it should flare up. It would influence the whole Muslim world. [It is] potentially the most dangerous in the world (Ralph Bunche, senior UN official, February 1953).

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

Moral vision, political skill, legal acumen: these were all brought together in the framing of the Indian Constitution. This was a coming together of what Granville Austin has called the ‘national’ and ‘social’ revolutions respectively.11 The national revolution focused on democracy and liberty – which the experience of colonial rule had denied to all Indians – whereas the social revolution focused on emancipation and equality, which tradition

Addressing his upper-caste colleagues, Khandekar insisted that 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. This is the position. You have reduced us to such a position and then you say that we are not fit and that we have not secured the requisite marks. How can we secure them?40

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 ...

It was, above all, the Soviet economic system which most appealed to Nehru. As a progressive intellectual of his time, he thought state ownership more just than private property, state planning more efficient than the market. His Glimpses of World History contains an admiring account of the Soviet five-year plans. Yet at no time was he attracted by the Bolshevik model of armed revolution or by the one-party state. His training under Gandhi predisposed him towards non-violence, and his exposure to Western liberalism made him an enthusiast for electoral democracy and a free press.

That was Nehru’s view in 1937, but by 1947 he was having other thoughts. The country had just been divided on the basis of religion: would not dividing it further on the basis of language merely encourage the break-up of the Union? Why not keep intact the existing administrative units, such as Madras, which had within it communities of Tamil, Malayalam, Telugu, Kannada, Urdu and Konkani speakers, and Bombay, whose peoples spoke Marathi, Gujarati, Urdu, Sindhi, Gondi and other tongues? Would not such multilingual and multicultural states provide an exemplary training in harmonious living? In any case, should not the new nation unite on the secular ideals of peace, stability and economic development, rather than revive primordial identities of caste and language?

While tenants did not have security of tenure, agricultural labourers had no land to till in the first place. Inequalities in the agrarian economy could be very sharp indeed. The forms of exploitation were manifold and highly innovative. Thus, apart from land tax, zamindars (landowners) in the United Provinces levied an array of additional 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. Two weeks before Independence a progressive weekly from Madras ran a story about distress in rural Malabar. This profiled a large landlord who owned seven elephants, for which he needed some 25,000 kilograms of paddy. His own tenants, meanwhile, were given three days’ ration for the whole week.3

In 1944 a group of leading industrialists issued what they called A Plan of Economic Development for India (more commonly known as the Bombay Plan).

Now largely forgotten, the Bombay Plan gives the lie to the claim that Jawaharlal Nehru imposed a model of centralized economic development on an unwilling capitalist class.

In the summer of 1951 the Planning Commission issued a draft of the first five-year plan. This focused on agriculture, the sector hardest hit by Partition. Besides increasing food production, the other major emphases of the plan were on the development of transport and communications, and the provision of social services.

Mahalanobis was, among other things, the man who brought modern statistics to India. In 1931 he set up the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI) in Calcutta.

These travels and talks finally bore fruit in a long paper presented to the Planning Commission in March 1954. Here Mahalanobis outlined eight objectives for the second five-year plan. The first of these was ‘to attain a rapid growth of the national economy by increasing the scope and importance of the public sector and in this way to advance to a socialistic pattern of society’; the second, ‘to develop basic heavy industries for the manufacture of producer goods to strengthen the foundation of economic independence’. Other (and we may presume lesser) objectives included the production of consumer goods by both the factory and household sector, the increasing of agricultural productivity and the provision of better housing, health and education facilities.

Nehru was determined to effect changes in the laws of his fellow Hindus, yet prepared to wait before dealing likewise with the Muslims. The aftermath of Partition had left the Muslims who remained in India vulnerable and confused. At this stage, to tamper with what they considered hallowed tradition – the word of Allah himself – would make them even less secure. Thus, when he was asked in Parliament why he had not brought in a uniform civil code immediately, Nehru answered that, while such a code had his ‘extreme sympathy’, he did not think that ‘at the present moment the time is ripe in India for me to try to push it through. I want to prepare the ground for it and this kind of thing is one method of preparing the ground.’

Sheikh Abdullah’s opening speech in the Constituent Assembly ran for a full ninety minutes. Reading from a printed English text, the Sheikh discussed, one by one, the options before the people of Kashmir. The first was to join Pakistan, that ‘landlord-ridden’ and ‘feudal’ theocracy. The second was to join India, with whom the state had a ‘kinship of ideals’ and whose government had ‘never tried to interfere in our internal autonomy’. Admittedly, ‘certain tendencies have been asserting themselves in India which may in the future convert it into a religious State wherein the interests of the Muslims will be jeopardized’. On the other hand, ‘the continued accession of Kashmir to India’ would promote harmony between Hindus and Muslims, and marginalize the communalists. ‘Gandhiji was not wrong’, argued the Sheikh, ‘when he uttered words before his death which [I] paraphrase: “I lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help”.’

Jaipal Singh was, of course, a tribal himself, one of several million such whose homes lay in the hilly and forest belt that ran right across the heart of peninsular India. Known as ‘adivasis’ (original inhabitants), the central Indian tribals were somewhat different from those that dwelt in the north-east. Like them, they were chiefly subsistence agriculturists who depended heavily on the forests for sustenance. Like them, they had no caste system and were organized in clans; like them, they manifested far less gender inequality than in supposedly more ‘advanced’ parts of the country. However, unlike the Nagas and their neighbours, the tribes of central India had long-standing relations with Hindu peasant society. They exchanged goods and services, sometimes worshipped the same Gods and had historically been part of the same kingdoms.