India After Gandhi (50 page)

Hidden away from the eyes of the world, unknown even to most Indians, the Naga rebellion was withal a serious headache for the government of India. Otherwise, Nehru’s regime seemed secure and stable. It had been democratically elected, with a comfortable majority, while behind its foreign and domestic policies rested a wide national consensus. Soon, however, other challenges were to arise, these not in the peripheries, but in regions considered to be solidly part of India.

Jawaharlal derives strength from the people. He likes vast crowds. Personal popularity leads him to believe that the people are satisfied with his administration: this conclusion, however, is not always justified.

NARENDRA
DEVA, socialist, 1949

As the years rolled by, the very foundations on which Nehru’s prestige and reputation rested began to weigh him down. At one time, he had a solution to every difficulty; today, he faces a difficulty in every solution.

R. K. L
AXMAN
, cartoonist, 1959

T
HE
YEARS
1757
AND
1857
ARE
much memorialized in Indian history. In the first, the East India Company defeated the ruler of Bengal in the battle of Plassey, thus gaining the British their first bridgehead on the subcontinent. In the second, the British faced, and eventually overcame, the massive popular uprising known to some as the ‘Sepoy Mutiny’ and to others as the ‘First War of Indian Independence’.

Like 1757 and 1857, 1957 was also a year of momentous importance in the history of modern India. For it was in that year that India held its second general election. After the end of the Second World War, dozens of African and Asian nations won freedom from their European colonizers. From their inception, or very soon afterwards, most of these new nations became autocracies ruled by communists, the military or unaffiliated dictators. India was one of the very few exceptions and, because of its size and social complexity, the really remarkable one. Before and after the great gamble of 1952 a series of provincial elections were held,
in which the verdict of the ballot was honoured. Still, for India to certifiably join the league of democracies there had to be a second general election to follow the first. This was held over a period of three weeks in the spring of 1957.

Sukumar Sen still served as chief election commissioner. Though fortuitous, the continuity was important, because the man who had designed the systems could test afresh how well they worked. The evidence suggests that they did so quite well: this general election cost the exchequer Rs45 million less than the previous one. The prudent Sen had safely stored the 3.5 million ballot boxes used the first time round and only half a million additional ones were required.

Before the election, the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting distributed a film called
It Is Your Vote.
Dubbed in thirteen languages, the film – which took ‘scrupulous care . . . to avoid any matter which might be construed as propaganda in favour of any political party’ – was screened in 74,000 cinema halls around the country. Among the viewers were many women who, the chief election commissioner noted, ‘have come to value their franchise greatly’. Ninety-four per cent of adult women were now registered voters.

In all, 193 million Indians were registered to vote; of which slightly less than half actually did. The ballots they marked collectively consumed 197 tonnes of paper. Keeping them in line were 273,762 policemen, aided by 168,281 village
chowkidars
(watchmen).

The Election Commission had recommended that liquor stalls be kept shut on the days of polling, so that ‘no alcoholic beverages might be available to the rowdy elements in the locality’. But there was plenty of colour nonetheless. A candidate in New Delhi insisted on filing his nomination in the name of ‘Lord Jesus Christ’; a voter in Madras refused to exercise his franchise in favour of any person other than ‘Shri Sukumar Sen, Election Commissioner’ . In Orissa a dwarf, only two and a half feet tall, carried a stool with him to the polling booth. Everywhere ballot boxes were found to contain much else besides ballot papers: abusive notes addressed to candidates in one place, photographs of film actors in another. Some boxes were even found to have cash and change, which ‘of course, [was] credited to the Treasury’.
¹

As in 1952, the 1957 election was in essence a referendum on the prime minister and his ruling party. Nehru was, again, the chief ideologue, propagandist and vote-catcher for the Congress. Helping him behind the scenes was his only child, Indira Gandhi. Estranged from her husband Feroze, she and her two sons stayed with her widowed father in his spacious official residence, Teen Murti House.
²
Mrs Gandhi was often the last person the prime minister saw in the evening and the first he saw in the morning. Serving as his official hostess, she met and mixed with the high of this land and of many others. Her health, previously frail, had noticeably improved. Contemporary photographs show her once sickly frame to have filled out; the improvement obvious not just in her appearance, but in her manner as well. A recent biographer has linked this improvement to the new antibiotic drugs then entering the market, which cured the tuberculosis shewas thought to suffer from.
³

What we know of Mrs Gandhi’s medical condition is based on intelligent speculation. However, there is also hard evidence that between the first and second elections she became more of a personality in her own right. In March 1955 she was appointed to the Congress Working Committee to ‘represent the interests of women’. Following this appointment she began touring the country speaking to women about their rights and responsibilities. Her interests were not restricted to her own gender; she presided over meetings held in Bombay to hasten the liberation of Goa from Portuguese rule.

To those who knew her in her pre-political days, Indira Gandhi sometimes affected a disdain for hernew role. ‘
Mera sara samay kumaiti-yon thatha dusron kamon mein lagjata hai’,
she complained to afriend: All my time now goes in committees and suchlike.
⁴
But other evidence suggests that she rather liked it. The man who knew her best of all wrote thus of her energetic participation in the election campaign of 1957:

When voting finished today, large numbers of our Congress workers turned up at Anand Bhawan, including many women. Indu has specially shaken up the women, and even Muslim women came out. Indu has indeed grown and matured very greatly during the
last year, and especially during these elections. She worked with effect all over India, but her special field was Allahabad City and District which she organized like a general preparing for battle. She is quite a heroine in Allahabad now and particularly with the women.
⁵

Back in 1952 the most powerful ideological challenges to Nehru and his Congress Party had come from the Jana Sangh on the right; and from the socialists on the left. Both those parties were now in disarray, caused in part by the departure of their charismatic leaders. S. P. Mookerjee was dead and Jayaprakash Narayan had abandoned politics for social service. Across northern India the Congress was virtually unchallenged. It won 195 seats in the north out of 226 it contested, this dominance contributing handsomely to its overall tally of 371 seats, which gave it a comfortable majority in Parliament.
⁶

Its overall triumph notwithstanding, there were worrying signs for a party that had led the freedom struggle and since guided the Indian state. Outside the Indo-Gangetic plain a variety of challenges were taking shape. In Orissa the Congress was opposed by the Ganatantra Parishad – a grouping of local landlords – which, with the parties of the left, reduced it to a tally of 7 seats out of 20. In Bombay province, once the heartland of Indian nationalism, the Congress won 38 seats out of a total of 66. Most of the others went to the Samyukta Maharashtra Samiti or the Mahagujarat Parishad, each fighting for a separate state. (In what was effectively a plebiscite on the creation of a Marathi-speaking state with Bombay as its capital, the Samyukta Maharashtra Samiti garnered 5.5 million votes to the Congress’s 5.3 million.) These losses were reproduced in the local elections which followed, with the Samiti capturing the municipalities of the great historic cities of Poona and Bombay.

A regional challenge was also brewing in the south. This took the shape of the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (or DMK), a party which grew out of the Dravidian movement started by E. V. Ramaswami Naicker. Known as ‘Periyar’ (great man), Ramaswami was a fervent opponent of the northern domination of Indian politics, culture and religion. He stood for a creation of aseparate nation in south India, to
be called Dravida Nadu. The DMK was started by a group of his former followers, who sought to use the vehicle of parliamentary politics for articulating their secessionist demands. The 1957 election was the first they took part in. Although they won but a handful of seats – these mostly in the assembly polls – their creeping successes were worrying, since the party stood not merely for a new province based on ethnicity or language, but for a separate nation-state altogether.
⁷

It was, however, in the southernmost state of the Union that the Congress’s claim to represent all of India was most gravely undermined. The state was Kerala, where a resurgent Communist Party of India had emerged as a strong popular alternative to the ruling party. In the parliamentary election the CPI won 9 seats out of the 18 fought for (the Congress won only 6). In the assembly polls, which were held at the same time, the communists won 60 seats out of 126, the support of five independents assuring it a slim majority.

The communist victory in the Kerala assembly election was a spectacular affirmation of the possibilities of a path once dismissed by Lenin as ‘parliamentary cretinism’. A town in Italy had recently elected a Red mayor, but here was something qualitatively new; a first chance for communists to govern a full-fledged province of a very large country. With the Cold War threatening to turn hot, what happened in Kerala was of worldwide interest. But it also posed sharp questions for the future of Indian federalism. There had, in the past, been a handful of provincial ministries led by opposition parties or Congress dissidents. What New Delhi now faced was a different matter altogether; a state ruled by a party which was underground till the day before yesterday, which still professed a theoretical allegiance to armed revolution, and whose leaders and cadres were known to have sometimes taken their orders from Moscow.

Located on the south-western tip of India, Kerala is a very beautiful state, with along coastline and high mountains. The monsoon is both early and abundant, the vegetation gorgeously diverse; no part of India is greener. And no part is as culturally diverse. Hindus constitute about 60 per cent of the population; Muslims and Christians, the remaining 40 per cent. Crucially, these minority communities have a very long history indeed. The ‘Syrian’ Christians of Kerala claim to have been
converted by St Thomas in the first century of the Christian era. More recently, Protestant and Catholic missionaries had also enjoyed conspicuous success. The first Muslims were a product of trade with the Arabs, and go back to at least the eighth century. These are the oldest communities of Christians and Muslims in the subcontinent. Like the Hindus of Kerala they spoke the local tongue, Malayalam. However, their relative abundance in the population lent the state a certain distinctiveness, as Table 14.1 indicates.

From the late nineteenth century Kerala had been in a state of social ferment. These changes were being directed by four kinds of actors. First, there were the missionaries who, because of the Christian influence, found it easier to work here than in other parts of British India. Their Churches promoted modern education through a vast, interconnected network of schools and colleges. Second, there were the successive Maharajas of Cochin and (especially) Travancore, more progressive than most of their counterparts, and challenged by the missionaries to open decent schools of their own. Third, there were energetic caste associations, such as the Nair Service Society, which represented the dominant landed caste; and the Sree Narayana Dharma Paripalana, named for Narayana Guru, the legendary leader of the Ezhavas, the caste of toddy-tappers ranked low in the ritual hierarchy. These too ran their educational institutions, as well as societies devoted to welfare and charity. Finally, there were the political parties, which included the Congress, of course, and also the Communist Party of India.
⁸