India After Gandhi (36 page)

In the matter of Bombay, the Maharashtrians were being lectured on the need to ‘work for the unity and safety and good of the country’. But,said the Puné MP bitterly, all these years ‘we have done nothing
else’. Gadgil’s was a moving peroration – and the last line was the best: ‘To ask us to serve the nation is to ask
chandan
[sandalwood] to be fragrant.’
³⁴

The matter now shifted, as Gadgil had warned, from the chamber to the streets. These, as one Bombay weekly warned, were ‘literally seething with an unrest that may possibly erupt into something terrifyingly coercive, making ordered life impossible for some time to come’.
³⁵
The discontent was being stoked by politicians of both left and right. The prominent communist S. A. Dange had thrown his weight behind Samyukta Maharashtra; so had the leading low-caste politician B. R. Ambedkar. With them were the Jana Sangh, and the Socialist Party, who were perhaps the most active of all. Many dissident Congress Party members had also joined, making this a comprehensively representative coalition of angry and disillusioned Maharashtrians.

This capacious inclusiveness was reflected in an amended name: the Samyukta Maharashtra Parishad had become the Samyukta Maharashtra Samiti.
³⁶
‘Parishad’ is best translated as ‘organization’, thus implying the central role of office-bearers; ‘samiti’ as ‘society’, this connoting a more co-operative and participatory endeavour.

Fearing trouble, in the early hours of 16 January the Bombay police swooped down on the leaders and activists of the newly constituted All-Party Action Committee for Samyukta Maharashtra. They made nearly 400 arrests in all. This prompted a call for a general strike on the 18th. That day shops and factories were closed, and buses and trains didn’t run. Processions were made through the streets, burning effigies of Nehru and of the Gujarati-speaking chief minister of Bombay state, Morarji Desai. When a European journalist stopped to take a photograph of Nehru’s portrait smashed and trampled at the roadside, ‘tremendous cheers rose from the balconies and the roofs. “Take it, take it and show the world what we think of Nehru,” they shouted.’
³⁷

Two days earlier, on the afternoon of the 16th, the first clashes between police and protesters had been reported. Mobs went on the rampage, looting shops and offices. For nearly a week the city was brought to a complete standstill and 15,000 policemen were called out to battle the rioters. When the smoke lifted, there were more than a dozen people dead, and property worth billions of rupees destroyed. It had been the worst riot in living memory.
³⁸

Jawaharlal Nehru was deeply shaken by the events in Bombay. The
linguistic question, he wrote to a colleague, ‘is more serious than even the situation created by the Partition and we have to give a positive lead’.
³⁹
Meeting in Amritsar in the third week of January, the All-India Congress Committee deplored the violence by which ‘Bombay and India were disgraced and dishonoured’. Under Nehru’s direction, the party urged its members to discourage forces of ‘disruption, separatism and provincialism’, and instead work for ‘the integration of all parts of this great country’. The Congress chief ministers of Bihar and West Bengal issued a joint statement proposing that their two states be merged into one. This union, they hoped, would quell ‘separatist tendencies’, aid economic progress and, above all, be ‘a significant example of that positive approach to the problem of Indian unity’ that the party bosses had called for.
⁴⁰

Among Nehru’s allies were the home minister, G. B. Pant, and his fellow-in-effigy Morarji Desai. The intention of the protesters, said Desai, was to ‘overturn Government practically and to take possession of the City by force. It was also their purpose in overawing the non-Maharashtrian elements in the City into submission and into agreeing that Bombay City should go to Maharashtra.’

This interpretation was vigorously contested by N. V. Gadgil. He believed the administration had overreacted. Gadgil wrote to both Nehru and Pant of how the firing and
lathi
-charges by the police had been ‘on ascale which will make even the ex-British officials in England blush’. Back in 1919 the British had termed a peaceful meeting in Amritsar’s Jallianawala Bagh a ‘rebellion against the government’, to justify the slaughter by General Dyer. In the same way, Morarji Desai had now exaggerated the protests in Bombay to ‘justify police atrocities’. When ‘the choice was between Morarji and Maharashtra’, wrote Gadgil bitterly, Delhi had chosen Morarji on the grounds that ‘one who shoots is a good administrator’. But the costs to the party were huge. For ‘in Bombay indiscriminate firing by the police and other atrocities have resulted in complete alienation of Maharashtrian people from the Congress and the Government of India’.
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Meanwhile, the resentment smouldered on. The slogan on (almost) every Maharashtrian’s lips was ‘Lathi goli khayenge, phir bhi Bambai layenge’ (We will face sticks and bullets, but get our Bombay in the end).
⁴²
On 26 January, Republic Day, black flags were flown in several working-class districts of Bombay. When Jawaharlal Nehru planned a
visit to the city in February, the Samyukta Maharashtra people organized a petition signed by 100,000 children, to be presented to the prime minister with the slogan ‘Chacha Nehru, Mumbai dya’ (Uncle Nehru, hand over Bombay). Nehru came, but amid tight security; he did not meet the press, let alone the children.
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In June 1956 the annual session of the Congress was to be held in Bombay. Nehru was met with black flags at the airport and all along the route. The atmosphere outside the meeting hall was tense. On the second day of the Congress a crowd threw stones at the members. Several were hurt, prompting a volley of tear-gas shells by the police.

Nehru’s problems were compounded by the now open disaffection among the Maharashtrian section of the Congress Party. The Union’s finance minister C. D. Deshmukh, MP for the coastal district of Kulaba, resigned in protest against the city not being allotted to Maharashtra. Other resignations followed.

Through the summer of 1956 both sides waited anxiously for the centre’s decision on Bombay. While the Cabinet had accepted the other recommendations of the SRC, it was rumoured that both Nehru and the home minister, Pant, were inclined to make Bombay city a separate union territory. In the prevailing climate this was deemed unfeasible. On 1 November the new states based on language came into being. Joining them was a bilingual state of Bombay. The only concession to the protesters was the replacement of Morarji Desai as chief minister by the 41-year-old Maratha Y. B. Chavan.
⁴⁴

The creation of linguistic states was, among other things, a victory of the popular will. Jawaharlal Nehru did not want it, but Potti Sriramulu did. Sriramulu’s fast lasted fifty-eight days, during the first fifty-five of which the prime minister ignored it completely. In this time, according to one journalist, he criss-crossed India, delivering 132 speeches on all topics other than language.
⁴⁵
But once Nehru conceded Andhra, and set up the States Reorganization Commission, it was inevitable that the country as a whole would be reorganized on the basis of language.

The movements for linguistic states revealed an extraordinary depth of popular feeling. For Kannadigas and for Andhras, for Oriyas as for Maharashtrians, language proved a more powerful marker of identity
than caste or religion. This was manifest in their struggles, and in their behaviour when the struggle was won.

One sign of this was official patronage of the arts. Thus great effort, and cash, went into funding books, plays and films written or performed in the official language of the state. Much rubbish was funded as a result, but also much work of worth. In particular, the regional literatures have flourished since linguistic reorganization.

Another manifestation was architecture. To build a new capital, or at least a new legislative assembly, became a
sine qua non
of the new states. In Orissa, for example, two architects were commissioned to design and plan a wide range of government buildings. These, the architects were told, had to ‘represent Orissan culture and workmanship’. The final product made abundant use of indigenous motifs: columns, arches, and sculpted images of gods. The architecture of new Bhubaneshwar, writes its historian, ‘is an architecture which has risen from the native soil, sacred and pure’.
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Amore spectacular exhibition of provincial pride was the new assembly-cum-secretariat of the state of Mysore. This was built opposite the Bangalore High Court, a fine columned building in red which remains perhaps the city’s prettiest structure. However, the Mysore chief minister, Kengal Hanumanthaiya, saw the High Court as a colonial excrescence. He first sought permission to demolish it; when this was denied, he resolved that the new Vidhan Souda would dwarf and tame it. It had to convey an ‘idea of power and dignity, the style being Indian, particularly of Mysore and not purely Western’.

The end product drew eclectically from the architecture of the great kingdoms of the Carnatic plateau. Hanumanthaiya gave very specific instructions to the builders, asking them to copy pillars from a particular room in the Mysore palace, doors from a particular old temple he named. The building as it came up was, as it were, a mighty mishmash. Yet it has served its central purpose, which was to stand, ‘measure for measure, in triumph over the colonial Attara Kacheri [High Court]’, thus to ‘successfully function as a distilled essence of Kannada pride’.
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When it began, the movement for linguistic states generated deep apprehensions among the nationalist elite. They feared it would lead to the Balkanization of India, to the creation of many more Pakistans. ‘Any attempt at redrawing the map of India on the linguistic basis’, wrote the
Times of India
in early February 1952, ‘would only give the long awaited
opportunity to the reactionary forces to come into the open and assert themselves. That will lay an axe at the very root of India’s integrity.
⁴⁸

In retrospect, however, linguistic reorganization seems rather to have consolidated the unity of India. True, the artefacts that have resulted, such as Bangalore’s Vidhan Souda, are not to everybody’s taste. And there have been some serious conflicts between states on the sharing of river waters. However, on the whole the creation of linguistic states has acted as a largely constructive channel for provincial pride. It has proved quite feasible to be peaceably Kannadiga – or Tamil, or Oriya – as well as contentedly Indian.

An early illustration of this was the assembly elections in Andhra in 1955. Three years earlier, the Congress had done disastrously in the region. They were suspect on account of their prevarication on the question of statehood. By contrast, the communists had successfully ridden the bandwagon on
vishal
(greater) Andhra. But in 1955, with Andhra Pradesh firmly established, the Congress won in a landslide. Their main rivals, the communists, were comprehensively routed. Now, wrote one relieved commentator, ‘Andhra Desa will no longer be suspect as the potential Yenan of India’.
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The Andhras would not secede from India, but they did redefine what it means to be Indian. Or at least one Andhra did. Potti Sriramulu is a forgotten man today. This is a pity, for he had amore than minor impact on the history, as well as geography, of his country. For his fast and its aftermath were to spark off a wholesale redrawing of the map of India according to linguistic lines. If Jawaharlal Nehru was the Maker of Modern India, then perhaps Potti Sriramulu should be named its Mercator.

[The Indian people] have to choose whether they will be educated or remain ignorant; whether they will come into closer contact with the outer world and become responsive to its influences, or remain secluded and indifferent; whether they will be organized or disunited, bold or timid, enterprising or passive; an industrial or an agricultural nation, rich or poor; strong and respected or weak and dominated by forward nations. Action, not sentiment, will be the determining factor.

M. V
ISVESWARAYA
, engineer, 1920

The Indian commitment to the semantics of socialism is at least as deep as ours to the semantics of free enterprise . . . Even the most intransigent Indian capitalist may observe on occasion that he is really a socialist at heart.

J. K. G
ALBRAITH
, economist, 1958

M
AHATMA
G
ANDHI LIKED TO
say that ‘India lives in her villages’. At Independence, this was overwhelmingly a country of cultivators and labourers. Nearly three-quarters of the workforce was in agriculture, a sector which also contributed close to 60 per cent of India’s gross domestic product. There was a small but growing industrial sector, which accounted for about 12 per cent of the workforce, and 25 per cent of GDP.

The peasant was the backbone of the Indian nation, and of the Indian economy. There existed enormous variations in agricultural practices across the subcontinent. There was, for instance, a broad division between the wheat regions of the north and west, where
women generally did not participate in cultivation, and the rice regions of the south and east, where women’s work was critical to the raising of seedlings. Large parts of peninsular India grew neither rice nor wheat: here, the chief cereals were an array of drought-resistant millets. Besides grain, peasants grew a wide range of fruit crops, as well as market-oriented produce such as cotton and sugar cane.