India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy by Ramachandra Guha
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.4
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.5
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.6
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’.7
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.’8
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.’9
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.’10
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.’11
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’.12 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.13
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
II
Vallabhbhai Patel’s death in December 1950 removed the one Congress politician who was of equal standing to Nehru. No longer were there two power centres within India’s ruling party. However, the prime minister still had to contend with two somewhat lesser rivals; the president of the Congress, Purushottamdas Tandon, and the president of the republic, Rajendra Prasad. Nehru’s biographer says of Prasad that he was ‘prominent in the ranks of medievalism’.15 That judgement is perhaps excessively harsh on a patriot who had sacrificed much in the cause of Indian freedom. Nonetheless, it was clear that the prime minister and the president differed on some crucial subjects, such as the place of religion in public life.
These differences came to a head in the spring of 1951 when the president was asked to inaugurate the newly restored Somnath temple in Gujarat. Once fabled for its wealth, Somnath had been raided several times by Muslim chiefs, including the notorious eleventh-century marauder Mahmud of Ghazni. Each time the temple was razedit was rebuilt. Then the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb ordered its total destruction. It lay in ruinsfor two and a half centuries until Sardar Patel himself visited it in September 1947 and promised help in its reconstruction. Patel’s colleague K. M. Munshi then took charge of the rebuilding.16
When the president of India chose to dignify the temple’s consecration with his presence, Nehru was appalled. He wrote to Prasad advising him not to participate in the ‘spectacular opening of the Somnath temple [which] . . . unfortunately has a number of implications. Personally, I thought that this was no time to lay stress on large-scale building operations at Somnath. This could have been done gradually and more effectively later. However, this has been done. [Still] Ifeel that it would be better if you did not preside over this function.’17
Prasad disregarded the advice and went to Somnath. To his credit, however, his speech there stressed the Gandhian ideal of inter-faith harmony. True, he nostalgically evoked a Golden Age when the gold in India’s temples symbolized great wealth and prosperity. The lesson from Somnath’s later history, however, was that ‘religious intolerance only foments hatred and immoral conduct’. By the same token, the lesson of its reconstruction was not to ‘open old wounds, which have healed to some extent over the centuries’, but rather to ‘help each caste and community to obtain full freedom’. Calling for ‘complete religious tolerance, the president urged his audience to ‘try to understand the great essence of religion’, namely, ‘that it is not compulsory to follow a single path to realize Truth and God’. For ‘just as all the rivers mingle together in the vast ocean, similarly different religions help men to reach God’.18
One does not know whether Nehru read the speech. In any case, he would have preferred Prasad not to go at all. The prime minister thought that public officials should never publicly associate with faiths and shrines. The president, on the other hand, believed that it should be equally and publicly respectful of all. Although he was a Hindu, said Prasadat Somnath, ‘I respect all religions and on occasion visit a church, a mosque, a dargah and a gurdwara’.
Meanwhile, the growing Hindu tint of the Congress had led to the departure of some of its most effervescent leaders. Already in 1948 a group of brilliant young Congress members had left to start the Socialist Party. Now, in June1951, the respected Gandhian J. B. Kripalani left to form his Kisan Majdoor Praja Party (KMPP), which, as its name indicated, stood for the interests of farmers, workers and other toiling people. Like the Socialists, Kripalani claimed that the Congress under Purushottamdas Tandon had become a deeply conservative organization.
As it happened, the formation of the KMPP strengthened Nehru’s hand against Tandon. The Congress, he could now say, had to move away from the reactionary path it had recently adopted and reclaim its democratic and inclusive heritage. In September, when the All-India Congress Committee met in Bangalore, Nehru forced a showdown with Tandon and his supporters. The rank and file of the party was increasingly concerned with the upcoming general election. And, as a southern journalist pointed out, it was clear that the AICC would back the prime minister against Tandon, if only because ‘the Congress President is no vote-getter’. By contrast, ‘Pandit Nehru is unequalled as a vote-catcher. On the eve of the general elections it is the votes that count and Pandit Nehru has a value to the Congress which none else possesses’.19
That indeed, is what happened in Bangalore, where Tandon resigned as president of the Congress, with Nehru being elected in his place. As head of both party and government, ‘Nehru could now wage full war against all communal elements in the country’.20 The first battle in this war would be the general election of 1952.
III
India’s first general election was, among other things, an act of faith. A newly independent country chose to move straight into universal adult suffrage, rather than – as had been the case in the West – at first reserve the right to vote to men of property, with the working class and women excluded from the franchise until much later. India became free in August 1947, and two years later set up an Election Commission. In March 1950 Sukumar Sen was appointed chief election commissioner. The next month the Representation of the People Act was passed in Parliament. While proposing the Act, the prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, expressed the hope that elections would be held as early as the spring of 1951.
Nehru’s haste was understandable, but it was viewed with some alarm by the man who had to make the election possible. It is a pity we know so little about Sukumar Sen. He left no memoirs and few papers either. Born in 1899, he was educated at Presidency College and at London University, where he was awarded a gold medal in mathematics. He joined the Indian Civil Service (ICS) in 1921 and served in various districts and as a judge before being appointed chief secretary of West Bengal, from where he was sent on deputation as chief election commissioner.
It was perhaps the mathematician in Sen which made him ask the prime minister to wait. For no officer of state, certainly no Indian official, has ever had such as tupendous task placed in front of him. Consider, first of all, the size of the electorate: 176 million Indians aged twenty-one or more, of whom about 85 per cent could not read or write. Each one had to be identified, named and registered. The registration of voters was merely the first step. For how did one design party symbols, ballot papers and ballot boxes for a mostly unlettered electorate? Then, sites for polling stations had to be identified, and honest and efficient polling officers recruited. Moreover, concurrent with the general election would be elections to the state assemblies. Working with Sukumar Sen in this regard were the election commissioners of the different provinces, also usually ICS men.
The polls were finally scheduled for the first months of 1952, although some outlying districts would vote earlier. An American observer justly wrote that the mechanics of the election’presenta problem of colossal proportions’.21 Some numbers will help us understand the scale of Sen’s enterprise. At stake were 4,500 seats – about 500 for Parliament, the rest for the provincial assemblies. 224,000 polling booths were constructed, and equipped with 2million steel ballotboxes, to make which 8,200 tonnes ofsteel were consumed; 16,500 clerks were appointed on six-month contracts to type and collate the electoral rolls by constituency;about 380,000 reams of paper wereused for printing the rolls; 56,000 presiding officers were chosen to supervise the voting, these aided by another 280,000 helpers; 224,000 policemen were puton duty to guard against violence and intimidation.
The election and the electorate were spread over an area of more than a million square miles. The terrain was huge, diverse and – for the exercise at hand – sometimes horrendously difficult. In the case of remote hill villages, bridges had to be specially constructed across rivers; in the case of small islands in the Indian Ocean,naval vessels were used to take the rolls to the boo
Where in Western democracies most voters could recognize the parties by name, here pictorial symbols were used to make their task easier. Drawn from daily life, these symbols were easily recognizable: a pair of bullocks for one party, a hut for a second, an elephant for a third, an earthenware lamp for a fourth. A second innovation was the use of multiple ballot boxes. On a single ballot, the (mostly illiterate) Indian elector might make a mistake; thus each party had a ballot box wit hits symbol marked in each polling station, so that voters could simply drop their paper in it. To avoid impersonation, Indian scientists had developed a variety of indelible ink which, applied on the voter’s finger, stayed there for a week. A total of 389,816 phials of this ink were used in the election.22