India After Gandhi (24 page)

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 greatman, 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 apart 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 inequality and hierarchy. Thus, once the country formally became a republic on 26 January 1950, it was

going to enter a life of contradictions. 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. Howlong 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.

Eight months before the Constituent Assembly of India was convened a new constitution had been presented for approval to the Japanese Parliament, the Diet. However, this document had been almost wholly written by a group of foreigners. In early February 1946 twenty-four individuals – all Americans, and sixteen of them military officials – met in a converted ballroom in Tokyo. Here they sat for a week before coming up with a constitution they thought the Japanese should adopt. This was then presented as a
fait accompli
to the local political leadership, who were allowed to ‘Japanize’ the draft by translating it into the local tongue. The draft was also discussed in Parliament, but every amendment, even the most cosmetic, had to be approved beforehand by the American authorities.

The historian of this curious exercise writes that ‘no modern nation ever has rested on amore alien constitution’.
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The contrast with the Indian case could not be more striking. One constitution was written in the utmost secrecy; the other drafted and discussed in the full glare of the press. One was finalized at breakneck speed and written by foreigners. The other was written wholly by natives and emerged from several years of reflection and debate. In fairness, though, one should admit that, despite their different provenances, both constitutions were,
in essence, liberal humanist credos. One could equally say of the Indian document what the American supervisor said of the Japanese draft, namely, that ‘it constitutes a sharp swing from the extreme right in political thinking – yet yields nothing to the radical concept of the extreme left’.
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Granville Austin has claimed that the framing of the Indian Constitution was ‘perhaps the greatest political venture since that originated in Philadelphia in 1787’. The outlining of a set of national ideals, and of an institutional mechanism to work towards them, was ‘a gigantic step for a people previously committed largely to irrational means of achieving other-worldly goals’. For this, as the title of the last section of Austin’s book proclaims, ‘the credit goes to the Indians’.
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We are little men serving great causes, but because the cause is great, something of that greatness falls upon us also.

J
AWAHARLAL
N
EHRU
, 1946

India means only two things to us – famines and Nehru.

American journalist, 1951

I
N THE FIRST YEARS
of freedom, the ruling Congress Party faced threats from without, and within. As rebels against the Raj the nationalists had been sacrificing idealists, but as governors they came rather to enjoy the fruits of office.As a veteran Madras journalist put it, ‘in the post-Gandhian war for power the first casualty is decency’.
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Time
magazine commented that after independence was achieved, the Congress ‘found itself without a unifying purpose. It grew fat and lazy, today harbors many time-serving office-holders [and] not a few black-marketeers’.
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An influential Bombay weekly remarked that ‘from West Bengal to Uttar Pradesh, along the Gangetic Valley, the Congress is split. The old glamour of the premier political organization is fading, factions are becoming more acute and the party’s unpopularity is increasing.’
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There were party factions at the district level, as well as at the provincial level. However, the most portentous of the cleavages was between the two biggest stalwarts, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru and Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel. These two men, prime minister and deputy prime minister respectively, had major differences in the first months following Independence. Gandhi’s death made them come to gether again. But in 1949 and 1950 the differences resurfaced.

In character and personality Nehru and Patel were certainly a study in contrast. The prime minister was a Brahmin from an upper-class background whose father had also been a prominent figure in the nationalist movement. His deputy, on the other hand, was from a farming caste, and a descendant of a sepoy mutineer of 1857. Nehru loved good food and wine, appreciated fine art and literature and had travelled widely abroad. Patel was anon-smoker, vegetarian, teetotaller, and, on the whole, ‘a hard task master with little time for play’. He got up at 4 a.m., attended to his correspondence for an hour and then went for a walk through the dimly lit streets of New Delhi. Besides, ‘a grave exterior and a cold and cynical physiognomy [made] the Sardar areally tough personality’. In the words of the
New York
Times,hewas ‘leather tough’.

There were also similarities. Both Nehru and Patel had a daughter as their housekeeper, companion and chief confidante. Both were politicians of a conspicuous integrity. And both were fierce patriots. But their ideas did not always mesh. As one observer rather delicately put it, ‘the opposition of the Sardar to the leftist elements in the country is one of the major problems of political adjustment facing India’. He meant here that Patel was friendly with capitalists while Nehru believed in state control of the economy; that Patel was more inclined to support the West in the emerging Cold War; and that Patel was more forgiving of Hindu extremism and harsher on Pakistan.
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In late 1949 Nehru and Patel had a major disagreement. In the New Year, India would transform itself froma ‘dominion’, where the British monarch was head of state, to a full-fledged republic. Nehru thought that when the governor generalship became a presidency, the incumbent, C. Rajagopalachari, should retain the job. ‘Rajaji’ was an urbanes cholar with whom the prime minister then got along very well. Patel, however, preferred Rajendra Prasad, who was close to him but who also had wider acceptance within the Congress Party. Nehru had assured Rajaji that he would be president, but much to his annoyance, and embarrassment, Patel got the Congress rank-and-file to put Prasad’s name forward instead.
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The original date of Indian independence, 26 January, was chosen as the first Republic Day. The new head of state, Rajendra Prasad, took the salute in what was to become an annual and ever more spectacular parade. Three thousand men of the armed forces marched before the president. The artillery fired a thirty-one-gun salute while Liberator
planes of the Indian air force flew overhead. Gandhi’s India was announcing itself as a sovereign nation-state.
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Round one had gone to Patel. A few months later commenced round two, the battle for the presidency of the Indian National Congress. For this post Patel had put forward Purushottamdas Tandon, a veteran of the Congress from the United Provinces, indeed, from the prime minister’s own home town of Allahabad. Tandon and Nehru were personal friends, but hardly ideological bedfellows, for the presidential candidate was ‘a bearded, venerable orthodox Hindu . . . who admirably represented the extreme communalist wing of the [Congress] party’. He was, in sum, ‘a personification of political and social anachronisms’, an ‘anti-Muslim and pro-caste Hindu who stood for ‘the resurrection of a dead culture and along extinct system of society’.
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Nehru had previously criticized Tandon for his desire to impose Hindi on regions of India which did not know the language. He was particularly upset when his fellow Allahabadi addressed a conference of refugees and spoke of revenge against Pakistan. India, believed Nehru, needed the healing touch, a policy of reconciliation between Hindus and Muslims. The election of Tandon as the president of the premier political party, the prime minister sown party, would send all the wrong signals.

When the election for the Congress presidency was held in August 1950 Tandon won comfortably. Nehru now wrote to Rajagopalachari that the result was ‘the clearest of indications that Tandon’s election is considered more important than my presence in the Govt or the Congress . . . All my instincts tell me that Ihave completely exhausted my utility both in the Congress and Govt’. The next day he wrote again to Rajaji, saying, ‘I am feeling tired out – physically and mentally. Ido not think I can function with any satisfaction to myself in future.’
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Rajaji now tried to work out a compromise between the two factions. Patel was amenable, suggesting a joint statement under both their names, where he and Nehru would proclaim their adherence to certain fundamentals of Congress policy. The prime minister, however, decided to go it alone. After two weeks of contemplation he had decided to exchange resignation for truculence. On 13 September 1950 he issued a statement to the press deploring the fact that ‘communalist and reactionary forces have openly expressed their joy at Tandon’s victory. He was distressed, he said, that the ‘spirit of communalism and revivalism has gradually invaded the Congress, and sometimes affects Government policy’. But, unlike Pakistan, India was a secular state. ‘We
have to treat our minorities in exactly the same way as we treat the majority’, insisted Nehru. ‘Indeed, fair treatment is not enough; we have to make them feel that they are so treated. Now, ‘in view of the prevailing confusion and the threat of false doctrine, it has become essential that the Congress should declare its policy in this matter in the clearest and most unambiguous terms.’
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Nehru felt that it was the responsibility of the Congress and the government to make the Muslims in India feel secure. Patel, on the other hand, was inclined to place the responsibility on the minorities themselves. He had once told Nehru that the ‘Muslims citizens in India have a responsibility to remove the doubts and misgivings entertained by a large section of the people about their loyalty founded largely on their past association with the demand for Pakistan and the unfortunate activities of some of them.’
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On the minorities question, as on other matters of philosophy and policy, Nehru and Patel would never completely see eye to eye. Now, however, in the aftermath of the bitter contest for the Congress presidency, the older man did not press the point. For Patel knew that the destruction of their party might very well mean the destruction of India. He thus told Congress members who visited him to ‘do what Jawaharlal says’ and to ‘pay no attention to this controversy’. On 2 October, while inaugurating a women’s centre in Indore, he used the occasion of Gandhi’s birth anniversary to affirm his loyalty to the prime minister. He described himself in his speech as merely one of the many non-violent soldiers in Gandhi’s army. Now that the Mahatma was gone, ‘Jawaharlal Nehru is our leader, said Patel. ‘Bapu [Gandhi] appointed him as his successor and had even proclaimed him as such. It is the duty of all Bapu’s soldiers to carry out his bequest . . . I am not a disloyal soldier.’
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Such is the evidence placed before us by Patel’s biographer, Rajmohan Gandhi. It confirms in fact what Nehru’s biographer (Sarvepalli Gopal) had expressed in feeling: that what forestalled ‘an open rupture [between the two men] was mutual regard and Patel’s stoic decency’.
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Patel remembered his promise to Gandhi to work along with Jawaharlal. And by the time of the controversy over the Congress presidency he was also a very sick man. It was from his bed that he sent a congratulatory handwritten letter to Nehru on his birthday, 14 November. A week later, when the prime minister visited him at his home, Patel said: ‘I want totalk to you alone when I get a little strength . . . I have a feeling
that you are losing confidence in me.’ ‘I have been losing confidence in myself, answered Nehru.
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Three weeks later Patel was dead. It fell to the prime minister to draft the Cabinet Resolution mourning his passing. Nehru singled out his devotion to a ‘united and strong India’, and his ‘genius in solving the complicated problem of the princely states. To Nehru, Patel was both comrade and rival; butto their compatriots he was ‘an unmatched warrior in the cause of freedom, a lover of India, a great servant of the people and a statesman of genius and mighty achievement’.
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