India After Gandhi (3 page)

The press nowadays – broadsheet and tabloid, pink and white, Indian and Western –is chock full of stories of India’s economic success, this reckoned to be so much at odds with its past history of poverty and deprivation. However, the real success story of modern India lies not in the domain of economics butin that of politics. The saluting of India’s ‘software boom’ might be premature. We do not yet know whether this will lead to amore general prosperity among the masses. But that India is still a single nation after sixty testing years of independence, and that it is still largely democratic – these are facts that should compel our deeper attention. A recent statistical analysis of the relationship between democracy and development in 135 countries found that ‘the odds against democracy in India were extremely high’. Given its low levels of income and literacy, and its high levels of social conflict, India was ‘predicted as [a] dictatorship during the entire period’ of the study (1950–90). Since, in fact, it was a democracy practically the entire period studied, there was only one way to characterize India, namely as ‘a major outlier’.
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To explain this anomaly, this paradox, one needs perhaps to abandon the methods of statistical social science – in which India will always be the exception to the rule – in favour of the more primitive techniques of the narrative historian. The forces that divide India are many. This book pays due attention to them. But there are also forces that have kept India together, that have helped transcend or contain the cleavages of class and culture, that – so far, at least – have nullified those many predictions that India would not stay united and not stay democratic. These moderating influences are far less visible; it is one aim of this book to make them more so. I think it premature now to identify them; they will become clearer as the narrative proceeds. Suffice it to say that they have included individuals as well as institutions.

V

‘[The] period of Indian history since 1947’, writes the political theorist Sunil Khilnani, ‘might be seen as the adventure of apolitical idea: democracy.’ Viewed thus, independent India appears as the ‘third moment in the great democratic experiment launched at the end of the eighteenth century by the American and French revolutions’. Each of these experiments ‘released immense energies; each raised towering expectations; and each has suffered tragic disappointments’. While the Indian experiment is the youngest, says Khilnani, ‘its outcome may well turn out to be the most significant of them all, partly because of its sheer human scale, and partly because of its location, a substantial bridgehead of effervescent liberty on the Asian continent’.
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As an Indian, I would like to think that democracy in India will turn out to be ‘more significant’ than comparable experiments in the West. As a historian, I know only that it is much less studied. There are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of books on the French and American revolutions: biographies of their leaders famous and obscure, studies of the social background of those who participated in them, assessments of their deepening or degradation in the decades and centuries that followed. By contrast, the works by historians on any aspect of Indian democracy can be counted on the fingers of one hand – or, if one is more open-minded, two.

The educationist Krishna Kumar writes that ‘for Indian children history itself comes to an end with Partition and Independence. As a constituent of social studies, and later on as a subject in its own right, history runs right out of content in 1947 . . . All that has happened during the last 55 years may filter through them easly civics syllabus, popular cinema and television; history as formally constituted knowledge of the past does not cover it.’
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If, for Indian children, history comes to an end with Independence and Partition, this is because Indian adults have mandated it that way. In the academy, the discipline of history deals with the past, while the disciplines of political science and sociology deal with the present. This is a conventional and in many ways logical division. The difficulty is that in the
Indian
academy the past is defined as a single, immovable date: 15 August 1947. Thus, when the clock struck midnight and India became independent, history ended, and political science and sociology began.

In the decades since 1947, the present has moved on. Political scientists studied the first general election of 1952, and then the next one held five years later. Social anthropologists wrote accounts of Indian villages in the 1950s, and then some more in the 1960s. The past, however, has stayed fixed. By training and temperament, historians have restricted themselves to the period before Independence. A vast literature grew – and is still growing – on the social, cultural, political and economic consequences of British colonialism. A even more vast literature grew – and it too is still growing – on the forms, functions, causes and consequences of the opposition to colonial rule. Leading that opposition was the social reformer, spiritualist, prophet and political agitator Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi.

Gandhi was, and remains, greatly admired by some and cordially detested by others. Much the same could be said of the monumental edifice he opposed, the British Raj. The British finally left India in August 1947; Gandhi was assassinated by a fellow Indian a bare five and a half months later. That the demise of the Raj was followed so quickly by the death of its most celebrated opponent has had a determining influence on the writing of history. One cannot say whether, if Gandhi had lived on much longer, historians would have shown greater interest in the history of free India. As it turned out, by custom and convention Indian history is seen as ‘ending’ on 15 August 1947 – although biographers of the Mahatma are allowed a six-month extension. Thus many fine, as well as controversial, books have been written on the last intense, conflict-filled years of British India. That great institution, the British Raj, and that great individual, Mahatma Gandhi, continue to be of absorbing interest to historians. But the history of
independent
India has remained a field mostly untilled. If history is ‘formally constituted knowledge of the past’, then for the period since 1947 this knowledge practically does not exist.

And yet, as this book shows, the first years of freedom were as full of dramatic interest as the last years of the Raj. The British had formally handed over power, but authority had to be created anew. Partition had not put an end to Hindu–Muslim conflict, nor Independence to class and caste tension. Large areas of the map were still under the control of the Maharajas; these had to be brought into the Indian Union by persuasion or coercion. Amidst the wreckage of a decaying empire a new nation was being born – and built.

Of his recent history of postwar Europe, Tony Judt writes that ‘a
book of this kind rests, in the first instance, on the shoulders of other books'. He notes that ‘for the brief sixty-year period of Europe’s history since the end of the Second World War – indeed, for this period above all – the secondary literature in English is inexhaustible’.
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The situation in India is all too different. Here the gaps in our knowledge are colossal. The Republic of India is a union of twenty-eight states, some larger than France. Yet not even the bigger or more important of these states have had their histories written. In the 1950s and 60s India pioneered a new approach to foreign policy, and to economic policy and planning as well. Authoritative or even adequate accounts of these experiments remain to be written. India has produced entrepreneurs of great vision and dynamism – but the stories of the institutions they built and the wealth they created are mostly unwritten. Again, there are no proper biographies of some of the key figures in our modern history: such as Sheikh Abdullah or Master Tara Singh or M. G. Ramachandran, ‘provincial’ leaders each of whose province is the size of a large European country.

Unlike a history of postwar Europe, a history of postwar India cannot simply rest on the shoulders of other books on more specialized subjects. In matters great and small it must fill in the blanks using materials picked up by the author. My first mentor, a very wise old civil servant named C. S. Venkatachar, once told me that every work of history is ‘interim’, to be amplified, amended, contested, and overthrown by works written in its wake. Despite the range of subjects it covers, this book cannot hope to have treated any of them comprehensively. Individual readers will have their own particular grouses; some might complain, for instance, that I have not said enough here about tribals, others that I should have written even more pages on Kashmir.

My own hopes for this book are best expressed in the words of Marc Bloch, writing about another country in another time:

I could liken myself to an explorer making a rapid survey of the horizon before plunging into thickets from which the wider view is no longer possible. The gaps in my account are naturally enormous. I have done my best not to conceal any deficiencies, whether in the state of our knowledge in general or in my own documentation . . . When the time comes for my own work to be superseded by studies of deeper penetration, I shall feel well rewarded if confrontation with my false conjectures has made history learn the truth about herself.
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VI

The great Cambridge historian F. W. Maitland liked to remind his students that ‘what is now in the past was once in the future’. There could be no better maxim for the historian, and especially the historian of the recent past, who addresses an audience with very decided views on the subjects about which he presumes to inform them. An American historian of the Vietnam War is read by those who have mostly made up their minds on whether the war was just or not. A French historian of the student movement of 1968 knows that his readers shall have forceful, if mutually contradictory, opinions about that particular upsurge.

Those who write contemporary history know that the reader is not a passive vessel to receive the text placed before him or her. The reader is also a citizen, a
critical
citizen
, with individual political and ideological preferences. These preferences direct and dictate the reader’s view of the past, and of leaders and lawmakers most particularly. We live with the consequences of decisions taken by modern politicians, and often presume that an alternate politician – someone modelled on oneself – would have taken better or wiser decisions.

The furtherback we go in time, the less of a problem this is. Historians of the eighteenth century seek to interpret and understand that time, and so, following them, do their readers. A biographer of Jefferson or Napoleon can count on more
trusting
readers – they do not presume to know the things those men did, or wish they should have done them differently. Here, the reader is usually happy to be led and guided by the expert. But the biographer of John F. Kennedy or Charles de Gaulle is not so fortunate. Some, perhaps many, potential readers already know the ‘truth’ about these men, and are less willing to hear alternative versions of it, even if they are backed up by copious footnotes.

Contemporary historians thus face a challenge from their readers which their more backward-looking colleagues avoid. But there is also a second, and perhaps less commonly acknowledged, challenge. This is that
the historian too is a citizen
. The scholar who chooses to write on the Vietnam War already has strong views on the topic. The scholar who writes on the American Civil War would have less strong views, and one who writes on the Revolutionary War weaker views still. For
the historian as well as the citizen,
the closer one gets to the present, the more judgement alone tends to become.

In writing this book I have tried to keep Maitland’s maxim always in front of me. I have been driven by curiosity rather than certainty, by the wish to understand rather than the desire to pass judgement. I have sought to privilege primary sources over retrospective readings, thus to interpret an event of, say, 1957 in terms of what was known in 1957 rather than in 2007. This book is, in the first instance, simply an attempt to tell the modern history of one-sixth of humankind. It is an account, as well as analysis, of the major characters, controversies, themes and processes in independent India. However, the manner of the story’s telling has been driven by two fundamental ambitions: to pay proper respect to the social and political diversity of India, and to unravel the puzzle that has for so long confronted scholar and citizen, foreigner as well as native – namely, why is there an India at all?

The disappearance of the British Raj in India is at present, and must for along time be, simply inconceivable. That it should be replaced by a native Government or Governments is the wildest of wild dreams . . . As soon as the last British soldier sailed from Bombay or Karachi, India would become the battlefield of antagonistic racial and religious forces . . . [and] the peaceful and progressive civilisation, which Great Britain has slowly but surely brought into India, would shrivel up in a night.

J. E. W
ELLDON
, former Bishop of Calcutta, 1915

I have no doubt that if British governments had been prepared to grant in 1900 what they refused in 1900 but granted in 1920; or to grant in 1920 what they refused in 1920 but granted in 1940; or to grant in 1940 what they refused in 1940 but granted in 1947 – then nine-tenths of the misery, hatred, and violence, the imprisonings and terrorism, the murders, flogging, shootings, assassinations, even the racial massacres would have been avoided; the transference of power might well have been accomplished peacefully, even possibly without Partition.