India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy by Ramachandra Guha
As it happened, there was also a new challenge from the right. This came from C. Rajagopalachari, ‘Rajaji’, the veteran Congress politician who had previously served as governor of Bengal, governor general of India and Union home minister. In 1952 the Congress asked Rajaji to take over as chief minister of Madras province. He stayed in that post until April 1954, when his party indicated that they wanted the powerful backward-caste leader K. Kamaraj to replace him. Now Rajaji settled down in a small house to spend his days, he said, reading and writing. (He was an accomplished short-story writer in his native Tamil, and had also written masterful versions of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata.)
However, philosophy and literature proved inadequate substitutes for public affairs. Thus Rajaji was moved to comment from time to time on the nuclear arms race between Russia and America, with regard to which he took a line not dissimilar to Nehru’s. Then, when the second five-year plan committed the government of India to a socialist model of economics, he began commenting on domestic affairs too. Here, however, he came to be increasingly at odds with the prime minister.
The differences were in part political. Rajaji felt that the Congress had become complacent in the absence of a strong opposition. In October 1956 he made public his belief that there should be an opposition group within the Congress, without which – so he feared – the party ‘would simply degenerate into a hunting ground for every kind of ambition and self-seeking’.43 The proposal was rejected; so the veteran turned to promoting an opposition outside the Congress instead. In May 1958 he published an article with the provocative title ‘Wanted: Independent Thinking’. This argued that ‘probably the main cause for the collapse of independent thinking’ in India was ‘the long reign of popular favourites without any significant opposition’. However, a healthy democracy required ‘an opposition that thinks differently and does not just want more of the same, a group of vigorously thinking citizens which aims at the general welfare, and not one that in order to get more votes from the so-called have-nots, offers more to them than the party in power has given, an opposition that appeals to reason . . .’44
The differences between Nehru and Rajaji were also economic. Rajaji worried that the second five-year plan would lead to an excessive centralization of state power. He was disturbed by the massive increases in taxation, conceived in the interests of the public sector, but which might only serve to ‘discourage and deject citizens and wither the private sector’. In his view, the plan must ‘be conceived as a supplement to rather than a substitute for the market economy’.45
In May 1959, and touching eighty, Rajaji launched a new political party, the Swatantra Party. This party focused its criticisms on the ‘personality cult’ around the prime minister, and on the economic policies of the ruling Congress. Its founding statement asked for a ‘proper decentralized distribution of industry’ through the nurturing of ‘competitive enterprise’ and, in agriculture, for the encouragement of the ‘self-employed peasant proprietor who stands for initiative and freedom’. It rejected the ‘techniques of so-called socialism’ and the ‘bringing into being of “Statism”.’46
A democracy run by a single party automatically becomes a tyranny; such was Rajaji’s rationale for starting Swatantra. For ‘the Congress Party has so far run without a true Opposition. It has run with accelerators and no brakes.’47 This party started by an octogenarian quickly gathered momentum. Those who joined up included captains of industry, naturally, but also peasant leaders worried by Congress threats to promote ‘co-operative farming’. Although conventionally described as ‘conservative’, the party was in fact a curious amalgam of free-market liberals and agrarian leaders seeking an alternative to the Congress.48
Congress cheerleaders dismissed Swatantra as a party of ‘right reaction’. The prime minister himself affected an airy disdain. When asked at a press conference about Rajaji’s newparty, he merely joked, ‘He likes the Old Testament. I like the NewTestament.’49
IX
The challenges posed by the communists on the left and the Swatantra Party on the right were compounded by serious accusations of financial malfeasance against the government in New Delhi. In September 1957 questions were raised in Parliament about the propriety of large investments made by the state-owned Life Insurance Corporation of India (LIC) in a private firm in Kanpur owned by an industrialist named Haridas Mundhra. When the finance minister, T. T. Krishnamachari, gave an equivocal reply, dissident Congress MPs began to ask sharper questions. Prominent in the debate was the prime minister’s estranged son-in-law, Feroze Gandhi. He claimed that the Mundhra shares had been bought to boost their price well above their true market value. He wondered how ‘the Life Insurance Corporation became a willing party to this questionable transaction with the mystery man of India’s business underworld’ . There was, Feroze Gandhi concluded, ‘a conspiracy to beguile the [state-owned] Corporation of its funds’.50
Bowing to the criticism, the government announced a Commission of Inquiry into the affair. In fact there were two separate and successive enquiries, each headed by an eminent judge. Their findings were not complimentary to the Congress government. The LIC had a publicly stated ‘blue-chip’ policy, which committed it to investing money only in firms of high reputation and sound management. The Mundhra companies were neither; yet the Corporation had seen fit to make its largest ever investment in its stock. The officials quizzed by the judges could not satisfactorily explain their decision; nor could their minister.
The proceedings of these Commissions were held in Delhi and Bombay, and kept open to the public. They attracted great attention, most of it critical. People flocked to the hearings, there to see the minister and his officials fumble under questioning or contradict one another. The final reports of the judges were damning, and exacted a price: both the minister and his secretary were forced to demit office.51
The judicial probe into the LIC investment in the Mundhra companies, wrote the Hindustan Times, ‘had the effect of an overall political shake-up, the like of which has not been experienced since Independence’. What ‘looked like a molehill when the issue was first ventilated in Parliament’, had ‘assumed the proportion of a mountain’.52 Known initially as the Mundhra Affair, it was soon promoted to become the Mundhra Scandal. Until it erupted, the ministers of Nehru’s government were widely held to be fond of power, yet above financial impropriety. A halo of Gandhian austerity still hung around them. The Mundhra Affair made the first serious dent in this image. It was a dent as deep, and as damaging, as those made by political parties of left or right.
15
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THE EXPERIENCE OF DEFEAT
A divided India augurs ill not only for the Indian people but also for all Asia and world peace.
AUNG SAN,Burmese nationalist leader, June 1947
I
ON THE LAST DAY of March 1959 the Dalai Lama crossed the McMahon Line into the territory of the Republic of India. For years the Tibetan god-king had sat uncomfortably on his throne in Lhasa’s Potala Palace, while the Chinese tightened their hold on his country. One contemporary source claimed that there were half a million Chinese troops in Tibet. In their wake had come perhaps ten times as many Han settlers.1
This was certainly an over-estimate. Even so, there were far too many Chinese for the Tibetans’ liking. In 1958 the Khampas of eastern Tibet launched an armed uprising against the occupiers. After some initial successes, the revolt was putdown by the Chinese. The reprisals which followed threatened to touch the Dalai Lama himself. When New Delhi agreed to grant him political asylum, he fled Lhasa under cover of darkness and with a small group of carefully chosen escorts.
The Dalai Lama spent his first night on Indian soil at the Buddhist monastery at Tawang. Then he made his way down to the plains, to the Assam town of Tezpur, where Indian officials ‘debriefed’ him. Three weeks later he was taken to New Delhi to meet the prime minister himself.
The conversation began with the Dalai Lama tell
The Dalai Lama told Nehru that any reforms in Tibet should be undertaken by the Tibetans in keeping with their religion and traditions. The Chinese way would leave them ‘a people without their souls’. His own hope now was to bring about Tibet’s independence with Indian help. His old tutor Heinrich Harrer (author of the classic Seven Years in Tibet) was also encouraging him to canvass support in the West.
In reply, Nehru told his visitor that India could not start a war with China for Tibet’s freedom. Indeed, ‘the whole world cannot bring freedom to Tibet unless the whole fabric of the Chinese state is destroyed’. Were he to go to the West, Nehru told the Dalai Lama, he would ‘look like a piece of merchandise’. The Americans or Europeans had no real sympathy with his people or his cause: ‘all they want is to exploit Tibet in their cold war with the Soviet Union’.
An ‘independence or nothing’ attitude, Nehru felt, would get the Tibetans nowhere. They must keep the door open for a negotiated settlement with the Chinese. India could help here, but only after it had mended its own broken fences with Peking. As he put it, ‘at the moment our relations with China are bad. We have to recover the lost ground. By threats to China or condemnation of China we do not recover such ground.’2
II
By the time of the Dalai Lama’s flight, Indian relations with China were very bad indeed. In the summer of 1957 the Ladakhi lama and parliamentarian Kushak Bakula had visited Tibet and noticed evidence of intensive road building towards Sinkiang. Then, in July 1958, an official magazine named China Pictorial, published in Peking, printed a map that showed large parts of NEFA and Ladakh as Chinese territory. On 21 August a counsellor in the Chinese embassy was called to the Indian Foreign Office, where a deputy secretary handed over a note of protest about the map. The correspondence became more concerned as the correspondents grew more elevated, and the stakesgrew higher too.3 On 18 October the foreign secretary wrote to the Chinese ambassador protesting about the section of the Sinkiang-Tibet highway that passed ‘across the eastern part of the Ladakh region of the Jammu and Kashmir State, which is part of India’.4 And by the end of 1958 the prime ministers of the two nations, Jawaharlal Nehru and Chou En-lai, were writing to each other in an exchange that was to carry on for the next few years, this marked at first by pain and bewilderment, but in the end by anger and resentment.
The letters between Nehru and Chou remain a key source for understanding the border dispute. They may have been drafted by officials, but we can be sure that they were carefully checked by their signatories for tone as well as content. These were two politicians deeply interested in history. Both were imbued with – one might say carried by – a sense of mission, by the desire to take their long-subjected countries to a place of the first rank in the modern world.
In the hierarchy of contemporary Chinese nationalism, Chou En-lai occupied second place to Mao. In most matters he, like some 800 million others, deferred to the will, not to say whim, of the Great Helmsman. But when it came to foreign policy he was given a free hand. Among the top Chinese leadership, only he had lived and studied in the West. Coming of age, intellectually speaking, in Paris, Chou spoke French fluently and also had some English. He affected a cosmopolitan manner; when asked what had been the impact of the French Revolution, he answered, ‘It is too early to tell.’
As Stuart Schram writes, by the time of the Bandung Conference of 1955 Chou En-lai had made his mark as ‘an urbane and skilful diplomat’, appearing ‘side by side with Nehru as one of the two principal representatives of the non-European world, divided by ideology, but united by the fact that they were Asian’.5
In 1955 Chou and Nehru might have been divided only by political ideology. By 1958 they were divided also by national interest. In December of that year the Indian prime minister wrote the first of a long series of letters to Chou. Nehru began by expressing admiration for China’s economic progress before turning, gingerly and gently, to the question of the border. When they met in 1956, recalled Nehru, the Chinese leader had indicated that he thought the McMahon Line was a legacy of British imperialism, but ‘because of the friendly relations’ between China and India, his government would, after consulting with the local Tibetan authorities, give it recognition. Chou had then confirmed Nehru’s impression that ‘there was no major boundary dispute between China and India’ . But now came this map in China Pictorial, whose borderline ‘went right across Indian territory’.
A month later Chou En-lai replied, stating that ‘historically no treaty or agreement on the Sino-Indian boundary has ever been concluded’. The McMahon Line was ‘a product of the British policy of aggression against the Tibet Region of China’. Juridically speaking, ‘it cannot be considered legal’. The Indians had protested about a road in an area which, in Chou’s opinion, ‘has always been under Chinese jurisdiction. ‘All this shows that [contrary to Nehru’s claim] border disputes do exist between China and India’. That was the context in which the China Pictorial map should be viewed. Chou suggested that both sides temporarily maintain the status quo, pending a final ‘friendly settlement’ on the border question.
On 22 March 1959 Nehru wrote back. He was ‘somewhat surprised’ to hear that the frontier between India and the ‘Tibet Region of China’ was not accepted by Peking, for it had the sanction of several specific agreements. These included those forged between Kashmir and Lhasa in 1842 and, in the east, the McMahon Line agreed upon in 1913-14. Besides, there were clear natural features, watersheds and mountain tops, that defined the borders between the two countries. There might be gaps here and there, but, said Nehru, for ‘much the larger part of our boundary with China, there is sufficient authority based on geography, tradition as well as treaties for the boundary as shown in our published maps’. The letter ended with the hope that ‘an early understanding in this matter will be reached’.
Before Chou En-lai could reply, the Dalai Lama fled to India. This greatly complicated matters, as the Chinese were deeply resentful of the popular welcome given him by large sections of the Indian public. For this they blamed New Delhi. Had not the granting of an audience by Nehru himself given an unfortunate legitimacy to the Tibetan leader? Peking’s position was that the Tibetan revolt, far from being a popular uprising, was the product of ‘fugitive upper-class reactionaries’ aided by the ‘American imperialists’ and the ‘Chiang Kai-shek clique’. Sections of the Chinese media went so far as to claim that the Indian town of Kalimpong was the ‘commanding centre of the revolt’, that the Delhi government was being influenced by ‘imperialist propaganda and intrigues’ and that ‘Sino-Indian friendship was being destroyed from the Indian side’.6
There was some propaganda activity by Tibetan refugees in Kalimpong, the import of which was, however, greatly exaggerated by the Chinese. In fact, much louder protests had emanated from Indian sources, in particular the politician turned social worker Jayaprakash Narayan. ‘JP’ was a fervent advocate for Tibetan independence, a cause also supported by other, less disinterested elements in Indian politics, such as the Jana Sangh, which wanted New Delhi openly to ally with the United States in the Cold War and seek its assistance in ‘liberating’ Tibet.7 But, as the foreign secretary assured the Chinese ambassador a month after the Dalai Lama’s flight into exile, ‘India has had and has no desire to interfere in internal happenings in Tibet’. The exiled leader ‘will be accorded respectful treatment in India, but he is not expected to carry out any political activities from this country’. This was the government’s position, from which some Indians would naturally dissent. For, as the foreign secretary pointed out, ‘the
This was not a nuance Peking could easily understand. For, at least in public, there could not be any criticism of the government’s policies within China. The difference between these two political systems – call them ‘totalitarianism’ and ‘democracy’ – was most strikingly reflected in an exchange about an incident that took place in Bombay on 20 April. According to the Chinese version – communicated to New Delhi by Peking in a letter dated 27 April – a group of protesters raised slogans and made speeches which
branded China’s putting down of the rebellion in her own territory, the Tibetan Region, as [an] imperialist action and made all sorts of slanders. What is more serious is that they pasted up a portrait of Mao Tse-tung, Chairman of the People’s Republic of China, on the wall of the Chinese Consulate-General and carried out wanton insult by throwing tomatoes and rotten eggs at it. While these ruffians were insulting the portrait, the Indian policemen stood by without interfering with them, and pulled off the encircling spectators for the correspondents to take photographs . . .
This incident in Bombay constituted, in Peking’s view, ‘a huge insult to the head of state of the People’s Republic of China and the respected and beloved leader of the Chinese people’. It was an insult which ‘the masses of the six hundred and fifty million Chinese people absolutely cannot tolerate’. If the matter was ‘not reasonably settled’, said the complaint, in case ‘the reply from the Indian Government is not satisfactory’, the ‘Chinese side will never come to a stop without a satisfactory settlement of the matter, that is to say, never stop even for one hundred years’.