India After Gandhi (132 page)

The older American model of assimilation was called ‘the melting-pot’. Individual groups poured all their flavours into the pot, then drank asingle, uniform – or uniformly tasting – drink. Now it appears that the society, and nation, are coming to resemble a ‘salad bowl’, with each group starkly standing out, different and distinctive in how it looks and behaves.

Huntingdon himself is less than enthusiastic about the idea of the salad bowl. For him, America has long been, and must always be, a ‘society with a single pervasive national culture’. He observes that Americans identify most strongly with that culture when the nation is under threat. War leads not merely to national consolidation, but also
to cultural unity. The original American Creed was forged as a consequence of the wars against the Native Americans, the English colonists and the Southern States. The events of 9/11 once more brought patriotism and national solidarity to the fore. Concerned that these energies will dissipate, Huntingdon urges a more thoroughgoing return to the creed that, in his view, was responsible for ‘the unity and strength of my country’.
⁴¹

Interestingly, Huntingdon’s views find an echo in recent statements by the prime minister of Australia, John Howard. That country too has been subject to successive waves of immigration, mostly or wholly European to begin with, but more recently of a markedly Asian character. Howard rejects the possibility of a plurality of cultures co-existing in Australia. ‘You ve got to have a dominant culture’, he says, adding, ‘Ours is Anglo-Saxon – our language, our literature, our institutions.’
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The Huntingdon–Howard line of reasoning is, of course, quite familiar to students of Indian history. It has been made in India by political ideologues such as M. S. Golwalkar and by political parties such as the Jana Sangh and the BJP. They have argued that India has ‘got to have a dominant culture’, and that this culture is ‘Hindu’. As it happened, those views were not endorsed by the founders of the Indian nation, by those who wrote the Indian Constitution and led the first few governments of independent India. Thus India became a salad-bowl nation rather than a melting-pot one.

And it has stayed that way. It has sustained a diversity of religions and languages, precisely the diversities that the likes of Howard and Huntingdon deem inimical to national survival and national solidarity. It has resisted the pressures to go in the other direction, to follow Israel and Pakistan by favouring citizens who follow a certain faith or speak a particular language.

The most eloquent tribute to the idea of India that I have come across rests in some unpublished letters of the biologist J. B. S. Haldane. In his native Britain, Haldane was a figure of considerable fame and some notoriety. In 1956, already past sixty, he decided to leave his post in University College London and take up residence in Calcutta. He joined the Indian Statistical Institute, became an Indian citizen, wore Indian
clothes and ate Indian food. He also travelled energetically around the country, engaging with its scientists but also with the citizenry at large.
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Five years after Haldane had moved to India, an American science writer described him in print as a ‘citizen of the world’. Haldane replied:

No doubt I am in some sense a citizen of the world. But I believe with Thomas Jefferson that one of the chief duties of a citizen is to be a nuisance to the government of his state. As there is no world state, I cannot do this . . . On the other hand I can be, and am, a nuisance to the government of India, which has the merit of permitting a good deal of criticism, though it reacts to it rather slowly. I also happen to be proud of being a citizen of India, which is a lot more diverse than Europe, let alone the USA, USSR, or China, and thus a better model for a possible world organisation. It may of course break up, but it is a wonderful experiment. So I want to be labelled as a citizen of India.
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On another occasion Haldane described India as ‘the closest approximation to the Free World’. An American friend protested, saying his impression was that ‘India has its fair share of scoundrels and a tremendous amount of poor unthinking and disgustingly subservient individuals who are not attractive’.
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To this Haldane responded:

Perhaps one is freer to be as coundrel in India than elsewhere. So one was in the USA in the days of people like Jay Gould, when (in my opinion) there was more internal freedom in the USA than there is today. The ‘disgusting subservience’ of the others has its limits. The people of Calcutta riot, upset trams, and refuse to obey police regulations, in a manner which would have delighted Jefferson. I don’t think their activities are very efficient, but that is not the question at issue.
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Forty years down the line, what Haldane called a ‘wonderful experiment’ might be counted as a success, a modest success. Poverty persists in some (admittedly broad) pockets, yet one can now be certain that India will not go the way of sub-Saharan Africa and witness widespread famine. Secessionist movements are active here and there, but there is no longer any fear that India will follow the former Yugoslavia and break up into a dozen fratricidal parts. The powers of the state are sometimes grossly abused, but no one seriously thinks that India will emulate neighbouring Pakistan, where the chief of army staff is generally also head of government.

As a modern nation, India is simply
sui generic
. It stands on its own, different and distinct from the alternative political models on offer – be these Anglo-Saxon liberalism, French republicanism, atheistic communism, or Islamic theocracy. Back in 1971, at the time of the Bangladesh crisis, when India found itself simultaneously at odds with communist China, Islamic Pakistan and America, an Indian diplomat captured his country’s uniqueness in this way:

India is regarded warily in the West because she is against the concept of Imperialism and because she ‘invented’ the ‘Third World’.

India is looked on with suspicion in the ‘Third World’ because of her (subversive) sentiments for democracy, human rights, etc.; the Muslim world is wrathful because of our secularism.

The Communist countries regard India as insolent – and potentially dangerous – because we have rejected Communism as the prime condition for Progress.

We are, of course, on the side of God. But is God on our side?
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The writer whose lines open this book, the nineteenth-century poet Ghalib, thought that God was indeed on the side of India. All around him were conflict and privation, but doomsday had not yet come. ‘Why does not the Last Trumpet sound? asked Ghalib of a sage in the holy city of Benares. ‘Who holds the reins of the Final Catastrophe?’ This was the answer he got:

The hoary old man of lucent ken

Pointed towards Kashi and gently smiled.

‘The Architect’, he said, ‘is fond of this edifice

Because of which there is colour in life; He

Would not like it to perish and fall’.

Ghalib and his interlocutor were speaking then of India, the civilization. Speaking now of India, the nation-state, one must insist that its future lies not in the hands of God but in the mundane works of men. So long as the constitution is not amended beyond recognition, so long as elections are held regularly and fairly and the ethos of secularism broadly prevails, so long as citizens can speak and write in the language of their choosing, so long as there is an integrated market and a moderately efficient civil service and army, and – lest I forget – so long as Hindi films are watched and their songs sung, India will survive.

In close to five decades as a citizen of India I have had plenty of opportunity to discover that this is sometimes the most exasperating country in the world. However, it was only while working on its modern history that I found that it was at all times the most interesting. It was my friend Peter Straus who set me off on the journey, by suggesting that I write a book on independent India. And it was the selfless tribe of archivists and librarians who made the journey an adventure rich in thrills and unexpected discoveries.

The greatest thanks are owed to the staff of the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, that capacious repository of private papers, periodicals, microfilms and books about modern India. For weeks on end I had as my kindly companions Shri Jeevan ChandandShri Rautela of the Manuscripts Division, who brought file after file up from alarge, dark corridor into the sunny reading room where Iworked. Outside, in the Main Section, the library staff were unfailingly courteous. In sourcing manuscripts, I also received much help from the Library’s Deputy Director, Dr N. Balakrishnan, and his sterling assistant Deepa Bhatnagar.

Next in order of importance is that other – and more famous – public repository, the British Library in London. My base here was the old India Office Library and Records, which – while I worked there – was called the ‘Oriental and India Office Collections’ (it now functions under the label of ‘Asian and African Studies’. By any name it remains a happy place to work in, with its brisk and efficient staff, its close links to other collections, and – not least – the serendipitous meetings it allows with scholars from around the world.

Among the other libraries and archives where I collected material for this book are those maintained by the National Archives of India, New Delhi; the Centre for South Asian Studies, Cambridge; the University of California, Berkeley; Stanford University; Cornell University; the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; the University of Georgia, Athens; Friends House, Euston; the India International Centre, New Delhi; the National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh; the Imperial War Museum, London; Oslo University; the Madras Institute of Development Studies, Chennai; Tata Steel, Jamshedpur; and the Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration, Mussoorie. A special thanks is owed to the Centre for Education and Documentation in Bangalore, from whose fabulously comprehensive collection of news clippings Ihave extensively drawn.

Aside from private papers and periodicals,t his book also draws on other books old and new, as well as pamphlets. Not many of these could I find in libraries (at least not the libraries in my home town, Bangalore, which is a great centre of science but not, alas, of the humanities).The bulk were bought from bookshops known and unrecognized. Iam grateful, in particular, to the Premier Bookshop, Bangalore; the Select Bookshop, Bangalore; Prabhu Booksellers, Gurgaon; the New and Secondhand Bookshop, Mumbai; and Manohar Booksellers, New Delhi. As handy and helpful were the unnamed pavement stalls in Mumbai’s Flora Fountain and Delhi’s Daryaganj – from whom and where, over the past two decades and more, I have obtained so much of the material for my work as a historian.

The photographs that I have used here come principally from four collections: those maintained by the Press Information Bureau, the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, and the
Hindu
and
Ananda Bazaar Patrika
group of newspapers. I thank these institutions for their assistance, and my wife Sujata for advice on the final selection.

For help of various kinds, I would like to thank Chinmayi Arun; Kanti Bajpai; Suhas Baliga; Rukmini Banerji; Nupur Basu; Millicent Bennett; Stanley Brandes; Vijay Chandru; Shruti Debi; Kanak Mani Dixit; Zafar Futehally; Amitav Ghosh; my parents S. R. D. and Visalakshi Guha; Supriya Guha; Wajahat Habibullah; Rajen Harshe; Radhika Herz-berger; Trevor Horwood; Shreyas Jayasimha; Robin Jeffrey; Bhagwan Josh; Nasreen Munni Kabir; Devesh Kapur; Mukul Kesavan; Soumya Keshavan; Nayanjot Lahiri; Nirmala Lakshman; Edward Luce; Lucy Luck; Raghu Menon; Mary Mount; Rajdeep Mukherjee; Rudrangshu Mukherjee; Anil Nauriya; Nandan Nilekani; Mohandas Pai; Sriram Pan-chu; Prashant Panjiar; Shekhar Pathak; Srinath Raghavan; Nitya Ramak-rishnan; Ramesh Ramanathan; Jairam Ramesh; my nephew Karthik Ramkumar; Mahesh Rangarajan; Anuradha Roy; Tirthankar Roy; John Ryle; P. Sainath; Sanjeev Saith; Rajdeep Sardesai; Jalpa Rajesh Shah; Rajbhushan Shinde; K. Sivaramakrishnan; Arvind Subramanian; R. Sudarshan; Nandini Sundar; M. V. Swaroop; Shikha Trivedy; Siddharth Vara-darajan; A. R. Venkatachalapathy; Rajendra Vora; Amy Waldman; and Francis Wheen.

Some friends deserve special mention, for their long-term help in matters professional and personal. These good souls are Rukun Advani, André Béteille, Keshav Desiraju, Gopal Gandhi, David Gilmour, Ian Jack, Sanjeev Jain, and Sunil Khilnani. André and David also provided detailed comments on a draft of the book. And I was kept going by the memory of my friend Krishna Raj, editor for thirty-five years of the
Economic and Political Weekly,
the journal whose own life is so closely bound up with the life of the Republic – as the notes to this book testify.

I thank, for their support, encouragement, criticism and chastisement, my editors, Richard Milner of Macmillan and Dan Halpern of Ecco/HarperCollins. I promise to be less tardy with the books that might follow! In fact, without my agent Gill Coleridge even this one would not have been finished. On more than one occasion I have been tempted to take an extended holiday, or drop the book altogether. Each time it was Gill who brought me back, showing me the ways in which it might be continued and, in the end, completed.

My greatest debt, as expressed in the dedication, is to the always interesting and occasionally exasperating Indians with whom I am privileged to share a home.

Prologue: Unnatural Nation