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

by Ramachandra Guha

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’.

‘for Indian children history itself comes to an end with Partition and Independence.

If, for Indian children, history comes to an end with Independence and Partition, this is because Indian adults have mandated it that way. In the academy, the discipline of history deals with the past, while the disciplines of political science and sociology deal with the present. This is a conventional and in many ways logical division. The difficulty is that in the Indian academy the past is defined as a single, immovable date: 15 August 1947. Thus, when the clock struck midnight and India became independent, history ended, and political science and sociology began.

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. He had no prior knowledge of India (this was deemed an advantage). However, he was given only five weeks to decide upon the lines he would draw in both east and west. It was, to put it mildly, a very difficult job. He had, in the words of W. H. Auden, to partition a land ‘between two people fanatically at odds / with their different diets and incompatible gods’, with ‘the maps at his disposal . . . out of date’, and ‘the Census Returns almost certainly incorrect’.15

Gandhi could not reconcile, in life, Hindu with Muslim, but he did reconcile, through his death, Jawaharlal Nehru with Vallabhbhai Patel. It was a patch-up of rather considerable consequence for the new and very fragile nation.

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.2

Mountbatten dealt with the symbolism of the princes’ integration with India; V. P. Menon with the substance. In his book, Menon describes in some detail the tortuous negotiations with the rulers. The process of give and take involved much massaging of egos: one ruler claimed descent from Lord Rama, another from Sri Krishna, while a third said his lineage was immortal, as it had been blessed by the Sikh Gurus.

In a letter to Maharaja Hari Singh, the Indian prime minister outlined the various forms a settlement could take. There could be a plebiscite for the whole state, to decide which dominion it would join. Or the state could survive as an independent entity, with its defence guaranteed by both India and Pakistan. A third option was of a partition, with Jammu going to India and the rest of the state to Pakistan. A fourth option had Jammu and the Valley staying with India, with Poonch and beyond being ceded to Pakistan. Nehru himself inclined to this last alternative. He saw that in Poonch ‘the majority of the population is likely to be against the Indian Union’. But he was loath to give up the vale of Kashmir, a National Conference stronghold whose population seemed to be inclined towards India.

This letter of Nehru’s is much less well known than it should be. Excluded (for whatever reason) from his own Selected Works, it lies buried in the correspondence of Vallabhbhai Patel, to whom he had sent a copy. It shows that, contrary to received wisdom, the Indian prime minister was quite prepared to compromise on Kashmir. Indeed, the four options he outlined in December 1947 remain the four options being debated today.

Unquestionably the main victims of Partition were women: Hindu, Sikh, and Muslim. As the respected Sindhi Congress politician Choitram Gidwani put it, ‘in no war have the women suffered so much’. Women were killed, maimed, violated and abandoned. After Independence the brothels of Delhi and Bombay came to be filled with refugee women, who had been thrown out by their families after what someone else had done to them – against their will.25

The Constitution of India had to adjudicate among thousands of competing claims and demands. The task was made no easier by the turmoil of the times. The Assembly met between 1946 and 1949, against a backdrop of food scarcity, religious riots, refugee resettlement, class war and feudal intransigence. As one historian of the process has put it, ‘Fundamental Rights were to be framed amidst the carnage of Fundamental Wrongs’.6

A strong centre was an absolute imperative in these ‘times of stress and strain’. Only a strong centre would ‘be in a position to think and plan for the well-being of the country as a whole’.28

The home minister, Sardar Patel, was deeply unsympathetic to this demand. Separate electorates had in the past led to the division of the country. ‘Those who want that kind of thing have a place in Pakistan, not here,’ thundered Patel to a burst of applause. ‘Here, we are building a nation and we are laying the foundations of One Nation, and those who choose to divide again and sow the seeds of disruption will have no place, no quarter, here, and I must say that plainly enough.’33

It was ‘absolutely meaningless’ now to have reservation on the basis of religion, said the begum. Separate electorates were ‘a self-destructive weapon which separates the minorities from the majority for all time’. For the interests of the Muslims in a secular democracy were ‘absolutely identical’ with those of other citizens.34

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.

Nehru had an unusual capacity – unusual among politicians, at any rate – to view both sides of the question. He could see the imperfections of the process even while being committed to it.

These were: (1) the fabulous Indians, the maharajas and magicians coupled with equally exotic animals such as tigers and elephants; (2) the mystical Indians, a people who were ‘deep, contemplative, tranquil, profound . . .’; (3) the benighted Indians, who worshipped animals and many-headed gods, living in a country that was even more heathen than China; and (4) the pathetic Indians, plagued by poverty and crippled by disease – ‘children with fly-encircled eyes, with swollen stomachs, children dying in the streets, rivers choked with bodies . . .’ Of these images perhaps the last two predominated.

As one NPC report put it, planned development upheld the principle of ‘service before profit’. There were large areas of the economy where the private sector could not be trusted, where the aims of planning could be realized only ‘if the matter is handled as a collective Public Enterprise’.

Shivrajvati Nehru noted that, while male politicians talked grandly of economic and political reform, they were not willing to make a single change in the sphere of social life and custom.

Another member of the Congress Party put it more eloquently. Women must have the right to choose (and discard) their husbands, he said, because ‘we [Indians] were fighting for freedom. After liberating our country, our motherland, it is our responsibility to liberate our mothers, our sisters, and our wives. That will be the greatest culmination of the freedom that we have attained.’34

In the same month Mrs Indira Gandhi was elected president of the Indian National Congress. She was the first woman to hold the post since Nellie Sen Gupta in 1933. Asked whether her domestic duties would suffer, Mrs Gandhi answered with asperity: ‘My household work takes ten minutes only.’30

However, a healthy democracy required ‘an opposition that thinks differently and does not just want more of the same, a group of vigorously thinking citizens which aims at the general welfare, and not one that in order to get more votes from the so-called have-nots, offers more to them than the party in power has given, an opposition that appeals to reason . . .’

The burgeoning genre of Untouchable autobiographies also shows the 1950s to be a time of flux. Caste prejudice and caste discrimination were rampant, but no longer were they accepted so passively. There was an incipient stirring which became manifest in social protest and was aided by the new avenues of social mobility.35

But affirmative action also brought with it a new kind of stigma. Intended to end caste discrimination, it fixed the beneficiaries ever more firmly in their own, original caste. There was suspicion and resentment among the upper castes, and sometimes a tendency among the beneficiaries to look down upon, or even forget, their fellows. As one scholar somewhat cynically wrote, reservation had created ‘a mass of self-engrossed people who are quickly and easily satisfied with the small gains they can win for themselves’.41

The progress made in abolishing untouchability or in assuring equal rights to all citizens was uneven, and – by the standards of understandably impatient reformers – very slow. Yet more progress had probably been made in the first seventeen years of Indian independence than in the previous seventeen hundred.

Apart from capitalists worried about their profits, the prevailing lawlessness also disturbed the chief minister of West Bengal. He saw it as the handiwork of the CPM, whose ministerial portfolios included Land and Labour – where the trouble raged – and Home – where it could be controlled but wasn’t. So in protest against the protests that old Gandhian Ajoy Mukherjee decided to organize a satyagraha of his own. He toured the districts, delivering speeches that railed against the CPM for promoting social discord. Then, on 1 December, he began a seventy-two-hour fast in a very public place – the Curzon Park in south Calcutta. In the rich history of Indian satyagrahas, this must surely be counted as the most bizarre: a chief minister fasting against his own government’s failure to keep the peace.

The man lying in a gutter prizes nothing more than the notion pumped into him that he is superior to the sanitary inspector. That the rich had been humbled looked like the assurance that the poor would be honoured. The instant ‘poverty-removal’ slogan was an economic absurdity. Psychologically and politically, for that reason, it was however a decisive asset in a community at war with reason and rationality.5

Independent India presented itself as a mixed economy, partaking of both socialism and capitalism. But, argued Bhagwati, it had failed on both counts. It had grown too slowly to qualify as a ‘capitalist’ economy, and by its failure to eradicate illiteracy or reduce inequalities had forfeited any claims to being ‘socialist’.

A mere four months before the emergency was declared, the Indian Express had paid tribute ‘to the resilience and maturity of Indian democracy’, of how it allowed ‘even the most serious differences [to] be harmonised and reconciliations effected’. The paper could now eat its words. Indian democracy, circa 1975, could reconcile the Valley of Kashmir to the Union of India, but not Indira Gandhi with Jayaprakash Narayan.

In April 1976 Kripalani dared the government to print the names of those it had put in jail. Then he fell seriously ill. He was taken to hospital, where all manner of tubes and wires were put into him. When a friend came visiting he had a fresh complaint: ‘I have no Constitution – all that is left are Amendments’.

If India had ‘relapsed into traditional Asian autocracy’, said the paper, the blame must be shared between ‘Empress Indira’ and her father, who had fostered ‘heavy industrialization and nationalized bureaucracies upon the Indian entrepreneur, Soviet style, in the name of “socialism”. To make his “socialism” work his daughter has merely added the complementary Soviet-style political dictatorship.’

It takes a distinguished foreign observer to remind us that, beyond the fighting and squabbling, the Janata government made a notable contribution to Indian democracy. This, in the words of Granville Austin, was its ‘remarkable success in repairing the Constitution from the Emergency’s depredations, in reviving open parliamentary practice through its consultative style when repairing the Constitution, and in restoring the judiciary’s independence’.

Two somewhat contradictory trends were apparent in the India of the late 1970s. On the one hand there was an increasing fragmentation of the polity, as manifest in the rapid turnover of governments. With ever fewer exceptions, politicians and parties had abandoned ideology for expediency, and principle for profit. On the other hand there were new forms of social assertion among historically subordinated groups such as low castes, women and unorganized workers. There was now, for the first time, an active civil liberties movement. The press, which during the emergency had mostly been cowed without a fight, had become livelier than ever before.

The Janata Party had thoroughly discredited itself. As a reporter covering the elections found, while Indira Gandhi had a ‘tarnished image’, her opponents were ‘all tarnish and no image’.

‘Notwithstanding the fact that by converting the House of God into a battlefield, all the principles and precepts of the ten Sikh gurus were thrown overboard’, remarks R. S. Brar, ‘it must be admitted that the tenacity with which the militants held their ground, the stubborn valour with which they fought the battle, and the high degree of confidence displayed by them merits praise and recognition.’63 It is impossible not to sympathize with the writer of these words, whose own job was, without question, the most difficult ever assigned to an Indian army commander in peacetime or in war.

The Golden Temple is ten minutes’ walk from Jallianawala Bagh where, in April 1919, a British brigadier ordered his troops to fire on a crowd of unarmed Indians. More than 400 people died in the firing. The incident occupies a hallowed place in nationalist myth and memory; the collective outrage it provoked was skilfully used by Mahatma Gandhi to launch a countrywide campaign against colonial rule. Operation Bluestar differed in intent – it was directed at armed rebels, rather than a peaceable gathering – but its consequences were not dissimilar.

Faced with a comparable situation in 1985–6, Rajiv Gandhi already had the support of 400 MPs. A reform of Muslim personal law to enhance the rights of women was comfortably within reach. So, even, was a gender-sensitive common civil code (as asked for by the constitution). What was lacking was a prime minister consistently committed to social reform. For as a high official in Rajiv Gandhi’s government was to recall later, ‘in the handling of the aftermath of the Shah Bano case the young P[rime] M[inister] was suddenly overwhelmed by the political system’. His initiatives in the Punjab and Assam had shown boldness and independence, but here, after first supporting the reformists, he had given way to the conservatives for fear of losing the Muslim vote. And so, ‘Rajiv Gandhi the statesman started transforming himself into a politician’.24

Their dealings with big money led to a profound change in the lifestyle of Indian politicians. Once known for their austerity and simplicity, they now lived in houses that were large and expensively furnished. Driving flashy cars and dining in five-star hotels, these were, indeed, the ‘new maharajas’. The ‘distance between Gandhi (Mahatma) and Gandhi (Rajiv)’, remarked one observer, ‘is a vast traverse in political ethic. The dhoti is out, so is the walking stick, wooden sandals and travelling in third-class railway compartments. Gucci shoes, Cartier sunglasses, bullet-proof vests, Mercedes Benz cars and state helicopters are in. Indian politics no longer smells of sweat, nor is it particularly clean and odourless – it reeks of aftershave.’

The language of the mob was only the language of public opinion cleansed of hypocrisy and restraint. HANNAH ARENDT

The current resurgence of identity politics, or the politics of caste and community, is but an expression of the primacy of the group over the individual. It does not augur well for liberal democracy in India. ANDRÉ BÉTEILLE, sociologist,

In several speeches on the stump, the Democratic challenger John Kerry stoked fears of more American jobs being shipped east if President Bush were re-elected. If he was chosen by the voters, promised Kerry, he would reinstate a protectionist regime to save American jobs from being ‘Bangalored’. This too was another first; the first time that a Presidential candidate had singled out an Indian city by name as a threat to American interests.

When everything associated with homosexuality is treated as bent, queer, repugnant, the whole gay and lesbian community is marked with deviance and perversity. They are subject to extensive prejudice because of what they are or what they are perceived to be, not because of what they do. The result is that a significant group of the population is, because of its sexual non-conformity, persecuted, marginalised and turned on itself’.

One byproduct of the political dominance of the Congress was that it helped keep the country together in those first, fraught, fractious decades of Independence. Thus, as Kothari remarked, ‘because the Congress managed to be in power continuously and there was no united or effective threat to its authority, the country’s political process gained incomparable advantages of continuity and unity’.76

The BJP is today India’s sole national party, with a major presence in a majority of the states of the Union. It is to national politics now what the Congress once was.

Few people contemplating Indira Gandhi’s funeral in 1984 would have predicted that ten years later India would remain a unity but the Soviet Union would be a memory. ROBIN JEFFREY, 2000

More recently, the rise of Islamic fundamentalism across the globe, and especially in neighbouring Pakistan and Bangladesh, has given further fuel to Hindu fundamentalists. India is not yet a Hindu Pakistan but, for the foreseeable future, those who wish to make it so will be present and active in the country. In times of stability, or when the political leadership is firm, they will be marginal or on the defensive. In times of change, or when the political leadership is irresolute, they will be influential and assertive.

Pakistan was created on the basis of religion, but divided on the basis of language.

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.

But, as Gopal also writes, English ‘may be described as the only non-regional language in India. It is a link language in a more than administrative sense, in that it counters blinkered provincialism’.25