India After Gandhi (74 page)

These stoppages created a ripple in the British press, in part because many of the great Calcutta firms were British owned, in part because this had once been the capital of the Raj. ‘West Bengal expects more lawlessness’ ran one headline; ‘Riot stops opening of West Bengal Assembly’, ran another. The response of many factory owners, Indian as well as European, was to shut down their units. Others shifted their business elsewhere, in a process of capital flight that served to displace Calcutta as the leading centre of Indian industry.
¹⁶

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.
¹⁷

A third axis of conflict was between the CPM and the Naxalites. The latter had now formed a new party, called the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist). In district after district, cadres left the parent party to join the new kid on the block; just as, back in 1963–4, they had left the CPI to join the CPM. The rivalries between the two parties were intense; and very often violent. The leader of the CPI(ML), Charu Mazumdar, urged the elimination of landlords, who were ‘class enemies , as well as of CPM cadres, who were ‘right deviationists’. On its part, the CPM raised a private army (euphemistically termed a ‘volunteer force’) to further their version of the ‘people’s democratic revolution’.
¹⁸

As in British times, it is the reports of the Intelligence Bureau that best capture the contours of political unrest. One IB report listed 137 ‘major cases of lawlessness in West Bengal’; this over a mere six-week
period between 19 March and 4 May 1970. These were classified under different headings. Several pitted two parties against each other: ‘CPM vs CPI’, ‘CPM vs Congress’, ‘CPM vs CPML’. Sometimes the ire was directed against the state:’CPM vs Police Party , for example, or ‘Extremists vs Constables’ , this a reference to an attack on a police station in Malda district in which Naxalites speared a constable to death and looted the armoury. Then there was a case listed as ‘Extremist Students vs Vice Chancellor’, which dealt with an incident in Calcutta’s Jadavpur University, where radical students kept the vice-chancellor captive for several hours before damaging the furniture and scribbling Maoist slogans on the walls of hisoffice.
¹⁹

In the villages, Naxalites had hoped to catalyse unrest by beheading landlords; in the city, they thought that the same could be achieved by random attacks on policemen.Kipling had once called Calcutta the ‘City of Dreadful Night’; now the citizens lived in dread by day as well. The shops began closing in the early afternoon; by dusk the streets were deserted.
²⁰
‘Not a day passes in this turbulent and tortured city’, wrote one reporter, ‘without a few bombs being hurled at police pickets and patrols’. The police, for their part, raided houses and college hostels in search of the extremists. In one raid they seized explosives sufficient to make 3,000 bombs.
²¹

Tamil pride was resurgent in the south; class warfare on the rise in the east. But the Congress consensus was crumbling elsewhere as well. In the state of Orissa the Congress had been routed by a partnership between Swatantra and the party of the local landed elite. Their election campaign had targeted two leading Congress figures, Biju Patnaik and Biren Mitra, for their alleged corruption and opulent lifestyles. It was alleged that, while in power in the state, Patnaik and Mitra hadtaken bribes from businessmen and allotted lucrative government contracts to their friends and relatives.
²²
A popular slogan, a local variant, so to say, of the one shouted in distant Dehradun, was ‘
Biju Biren kauthi/ mada botal jauthi
’ (Where there are liquor bottles, there you will find Biju and Biren). On coming to power, the Swatantra–Jana–Congress alliance immediately constituted a commission of inquiry to look into the corruption of the previous government.
²³

Challenged by parties of left and right, the Congress also found itself bleeding from inside. In most states in northern India it had won slender majorities. These became prey to intrigue, with the formation of factions by ambitious leaders seeking to become chief minister. In the states of Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Haryana and Bihar, Congress governments were formed, only to fall when a group of disgruntled defectors moved across to the other side. In a political lexicon already rich in acronyms a new one entered: ‘SVD’, Samyukta Vidhayak Dal, or the United Legislators Party – as the name suggests, a Rag, Tag and Bobtail outfit, a coalition of legislators left, right and centre, united only by the desire to grab power.

These SVD governments were made up of the Jana Sangh, socialists, Swatantra, local parties and Congress defectors – this last often the key element that made a numerical majority possible. At one level the SVD phenomena signalled the rise of the lower castes, who had benefited from land legislation but been denied the fruits of political power. In the north, these castes included the Jats in Haryana and UP, the Kurmis and Koeris in Bihar, the Lodhs in MP and the Yadavs in all these states. In the south, they included the Marathas in Maharashtra, the Vokkaligas in Mysore, the Vellalas in Madras and the Reddys and Kammas in Andhra Pradesh. These castes occupied an intermediate position in the social hierarchy, below the Brahmins but above the Untouchables. In many areas they were the ‘dominant caste’, numerically significant and well organized. What they lacked was access to state power. The DMK was chiefly fuelled by such castes, as were the socialists who had increased their vote share in the north. Notably, many of the Congress defectors also came from this strata.

At another level, the SVD governments were simply the product of personal ambition. Consider the state of Madhya Pradesh. Here, the Congress’s troubles started before the election, when the Rajmata (queen mother) of Gwalior left the party because she had not been consulted in the choice of candidates. With her son Madhavrao she campaigned energetically against the Congress. An intelligence report claimed the Rajmata spent Rs3 million during the election. Although the Congress came back to power, in the Gwalior region the party was wiped out. Now, claimed the report, the Rajmata was planning to spend more money ‘to subvert the loyalties of some Congress legislators . . . [and] bring about the downfall of the new Congress Ministry’.
²⁴

The chief minister, a canny operator named D. P. Mishra, was quite
prepared for this. He was wooing defectors from other parties himself – as he wrote to the Congress president, he had ‘to open the door for all who wish to join the Party’.
²⁵
Eventually, though, the Rajmata was successful, when the prominent Congress defector Govind Narain Singh got twenty-eight others to leave the party with him. Before the crucial vote in the House, Singh kept his flock sequestered in his home, watching over them with a rifle in case they be kidnapped or otherwise seduced.

Not sure how long their tenure would last, the SVD government had to make every day count. Or every order, rather. Ministers specified a fee for sanctioning or stopping transfers of officials. Thus ‘orders, particularly transfer orders, were issued and cancelled with bewildering rapidity’. Characteristically, the Jana Sangh wanted the Education portfolio, so that ‘they could build up a permanent following through the primary schools’. They eventually got Home, where they maintained the communal peace by keeping their followers in check, yet took great care ‘to see that no key post in any department went to a Muslim’.
²⁶

Despite the defections and the corruptions they engendered, what transpired after the 1967 elections was indeed what E. P. W. da Costa had called it – India’s second non-violent revolution. One could now take a train from New Delhi to Calcutta, a journey of 1,000 miles right through the country’s heartland, and not pass through a single Congress-ruled state.

The late 1960s saw a fresh assertion of regionalist sentiment. Parts of the old Hyderabad state, merged with Andhra Pradesh in 1956, now wanted out. The movement was led by students of the Osmania University, who complained that Andhra was run for the benefit of the coastal elite. The new state they demanded would centre on the neglected inland districts. To be named Telengana, it would have Hyderabad as its capital. Strikes and processions were held, trains stopped and claims advanced of ‘colonization by Andhras’ and ‘police
zulm
’ (terror).
²⁷

Across the country a new state had in fact been created, out of the tribal districts of Assam. The movement here had a long history. An Eastern Indian Tribal Union was formed in 1955 to represent the inhabitants of the Khasi, Jaintia and Garo hills. Five years later it was
renamed the All-Party Hill Leaders Conference (APHLC). In the 1967 elections the Congress was routed in the hills by the APHLC. This, along with the fear of stoking an insurgency on the Naga and Mizo pattern, prompted the centre to create a new province in December 1969. The state was called Meghalaya, meaning abode of the clouds.
²⁸

In Punjab, meanwhile, an existing state was in search of a capital of its own. After the state’s division in 1966, Chandigarh served as the capital of both Punjab and Haryana. The Sikhs believed, with reason, that the city should be reserved to them – indeed, the centre had indicated that it would. Now the Punjabis were urging the government to make good their promise. Through 1968 and 1969 there were popular demonstrations to this effect. In October 1969 the veteran freedom fighter Darshan Singh Pherumal died after a fast aimed at making New Delhi hand over Chandigarh. The prime minister issued an anodyne note of sympathy: she hoped that Pherumal’s death would ‘move the people of Punjab and of Haryana towards bringing their hearts and minds together in an act of great reconciliation’.
²⁹

Just as the Sikhs wanted Chandigarh exclusively for themselves, so, with regard to Bombay, did some Maharashtrians. The city had a new political party, named the Shiv Sena after the great medieval Maratha warrior Shivaji. In some ways this was a continuation of the old Samyukta Maharashtra Samiti – albeit in a more extreme form. Instead of ‘Bombay for Maharashtra the call now was ‘Bombay for Maharashtrians’. The Shiv Sena was the handiwork of a cartoonist named Bal Thackeray, whose main target was south Indians, whom he claimed were taking away jobs from the natives. Thackeray lampooned
dhoti-
clad ‘Madrasis’ in his writings and drawings; while his followers attacked Udupi restaurants and homes of Tamil and Telugu speakers. Another target were the communists, whose control of the city’s textile unions the Shiv Sena sought to undermine by making deals with the management.

Bombay was India’s
urbs prima
; its financial and industrial capital, and the centre of its entertainment industry. In this most cosmopolitan of cities, a nativist agenda proved surprisingly successful, being especially attractive to the educated unemployed. In 1968 the Sena won as many as 42 seats in the Bombay municipal elections, standing second only to the Congress.
³⁰

These calls for greater autonomy in the heartland were accompanied by stirrings in the periphery among groups and leaders who had never
been entirely reconciled to being part of India in the first place. In March 1968 Sheikh Abdullah was freed from house arrest in Kodaikanal and allowed to return to his Valley. This was a year after the 1967 elections which, in Kashmir at any rate, had not really been free and fair: in twenty-two out of seventy-five constituencies the Congress candidate was returned unopposed when his rivals’ nomination papers were rejected.
³¹
Her own advisers now prevailed upon Mrs Gandhi to free Abdullah. Their information was that the Sheikh was ‘gradually adapting himself’ to the fact that the accession of Kashmir to India was irrevocable.
³²

As in 1964, the Lion of Kashmir returned home to a hero’s welcome, driving in an open jeep into the Valley, accepting garlands from the estimated half-million admirers who had lined the roads to greet him. As ever, his statements were amenable to multiple meanings, with him saying at one place that he would discuss ‘all possibilities’ with the Indian government, at another that he would never compromise on the Kashmiri ‘right to self-determination’. To a British newspaper he offered a three-way resolution: Jammu to go to India, ‘Azad’ Kashmir to Pakistan, with the Valley – the real bone of contention – to be put under UN trusteeship for five years, after which it would vote on whether to join India or Pakistan, or be independent. Ambivalent on politics, the Sheikh was, just as characteristically, direct in his defence of secularism. When a dispute between students threatened to escalate into a Hindu-Muslim riot, Abdullah pacified the disputants, then walked the streets of Srinagar urging everyone to calm down. He made his associates take a pledge that they were ‘prepared to shed their blood to protect the life, honour and property of the minorities in Kashmir’.
³³