India After Gandhi (57 page)

This was reasonably put, but the effect was spoilt by an appendix which cast Phizo as a villain motivated merely by frustration and failure:

Phizo’s mental attitude has been conditioned by a series of frustrations and setbacks. He failed in the Matriculation examination. His attempts to establish himself first in motor-parts business and then as an insurance man did not meet with success. He was attacked by paralysis, which disfigured his face and as a result he acquired a strong complex . . . He has been known to have been suffering from a strong feeling of guilt for having misled his co-tribesmen into a path of hostility and violence, resulting in many deaths and reducing many of them to a state of misery.
⁴⁶

However, between the government of India and the leader of the Naga National Council stood a number of ‘moderate’ Nagas. These had banded together in a Naga Peoples’ Convention which, from 1957 onwards, had begun seeking a peaceful settlement to the problem. The Aos were prominent among these peacemakers, but there were representatives of other tribes too. On 30 July 1960 the Naga Peoples’ Convention presented a memorandum to the prime minister demanding a separate state of Nagaland within the Indian Union. This would have its own governor, chief minister, council of ministers, and legislative assembly, and the Union Parliament would not have the power to interfere with Naga religion, social practices or customary law.
⁴⁷

The demand for a Naga state within India was resisted by the Assamese elite, loath to let go of any part of their province. But with the Naga question now successfully internationalized, Nehru thought it prudent to make the concession. In the first week of August 1960 he announced in Parliament that a state of Nagaland was to be carved out of Assam. The decision to create this, the smallest state of the Union, gave rise to a series of responses that were interesting, varied and yet utterly predictable. The right-wing Jana Sangh saw the creation of Nagaland as ‘an act fraught with explosive possibilities’; it was a concession to terror, ‘tantamount to putting a premium on violence and rebellion’, a wanton encouragement to ‘regionalism and parochialism’
which would endanger ‘the unity and integrity of the country’ . Some other tribes in Assam, the Khasis, the Garos and the Jaintias, resolved to fight for a state of their own, to be called ‘Eastern Frontier’.
⁴⁸

Also predictable was the response of Phizo’s men. Some Naga intellectuals thought that the granting of statehood within India was ‘not only all they can hope to get but all they need to protect their social and political identity’. But how was one to convince the ordinary villager of this? For, as one newspaper noted, the ‘armed rebels can emerge from the jungle any night with arguments that the statehood party are Quislings, and with bullet or bayonet correct any who disagree.’
⁴⁹

After a decade in which it had seemed confidently in control, Jawaharlal Nehru’s government suddenly looked very shaky indeed. There was dissent in the south, in Kerala and Tamil Nadu, and in the border zone, in Punjab and the Naga hills. Meanwhile a Ford Foundation report warned of the ‘stark threat’ of an ‘ominous crisis’ in the agricultural sector. Unless food production was tripled in the next decade, it claimed, there would be mass starvation and famine in India.
⁵⁰

More worrying, at least to Nehru, was the resurgence of communal conflict after a decade of comparative social peace. In June 1960 virulent anti-Bengali riots broke out in Assam. The victims were post-Partition refugees from East Bengal, who were accused of taking jobs from the Assamese and not speaking their language. Thousands of homes were destroyed and many Bengalis killed. Others fled across the border into refugee camps in West Bengal. The home minister, Lal Bahadur Shastri, flew to Assam to forge an uneasy peace which endorsed Assamese as the official state language while permitting the use of Bengali in the district where the migrants were in a majority.
⁵¹

Then, in January 1961, a religious riot broke out in the central Indian city of Jabalpur. A Hindu girl had committed suicide; it was alleged that she took her life because she had been assaulted by two Muslim men. The claim was given lurid publicity by a local Jana Sangh newspaper, whereupon Hindu students went on a rampage through the town, attacking Muslim homes and burning shops. In retaliation a Muslim group torched a Hindu neighbourhood. The rioting continued for days,
spreading also to the countryside. It was the most serious such incident since Partition, its main sufferers being poor Muslims, mostly weavers and
bidi
(cigarette) workers.
⁵²

The troubles on the border with China and the intensification of social conflict within the country gave rise to fresh concerns about the future of democratic India. In 1960 an American scholar published an impressively learned book with a simple title –
India –
but a portentous subtitle:
The Most Dangerous Decades
. The chapter and section titles were also revealing – ‘Will the Union Survive?’ was one, ‘Totalitarian Equilibrium?’ another. The writer was disturbed by the divisions of caste, region, religion and language, and by the rise of Indian communism. There were, he felt, ‘seemingly irresistible compulsions of totalitarian experiments of one sort or another in the nature of the Indian Union’.
⁵³

The following year, 1961, the writer Aldous Huxley visited India after a gap of thirty-five years. He was overwhelmed by what he found, namely, ‘the prospect of overpopulation, underemployment, growing unrest’. ‘India is almost infinitely depressing’, he wrote to a friend, ‘for there seems to be no solution to its problems in any way that any of us [in the West] regard as acceptable.’ Writing to his brother Julian, Huxley expressed the view that ‘when Nehru goes, the government will become a military dictatorship – as in so many of the newly independent states, for the army seems to be the only highly organized centre of power’.
⁵⁴

The verdict of the British intellectual was echoed by the workaday journalist. Visiting India soon after Huxley, a reporter for the London
Daily Mail
thought that ‘until now Nehru alone has been the unifying, cohesive force behind India’s Government and foreign policy’. But after he was gone, ‘the powers of caste and religion, of Rightism and Leftism . . . could eventually split this country from top to bottom and plunge it back 100 years’.
⁵⁵

During 1960 and 1961, as some Indians rioted and others protested, their government continued its correspondence with its Chinese counterpart. No longer were these statesmanlike, or even conducted by statesmen; rather they consisted of notes exchanged by anonymous functionaries accusing the other party of transgressions of one kind or another. A
Chinese note listed fifteen violations of their air space by Indian aircraft; an Indian note listed various incidents of ill-treatment of Indian citizens in Tibet.
⁵⁶

These exchanges, published in successive White Papers by the government of India, led to a renewed call for Krishna Menon’s head. Leading the charge was J. B. Kripalani, the Socialist Party MP from Sitamarhi in Bihar. Scholar, teacher,
khadi
worker and rebel, Kripalani was an authentic hero of the Indian freedom struggle. His moral authority derived in part from the fact that he had come close to Gandhi while aiding him in the Champaran
satyagraha
of 1917, years before Nehru himself made the acquaintance of the Mahatma. Kripalani had also been president of the Congress and, of course, spent many years in jail for his cause.

On 11 April 1961 Kripalani delivered what was described at the time as ‘perhaps the greatest speech that has been made on the floor of that House since Independence’. This was a blistering attack on the defence minister. Under Krishna Menon’s stewardship, said Kripalani, ‘we have lost 12,000 square miles of our territory without striking a single blow’. Army promotions, he claimed, were based not on merit but ‘according to the whims and fancies of the defence minister or what will suit his political and ideological purposes’. Menon had ‘created cliques [and] lowered the morale of our [armed] forces’. In a stinging indictment, Kripalani charged the minister with ‘wasting the money of this poor and starving nation’, with ‘the neglect of the defence of the country’, and with ‘having lent his support to the totalitarian and dictatorial regimes against the will of the people for freedom’.

Kripalani ended his speech with an appeal to the conscience of the members of the ruling party. Recalling how, back in 1940, the Conservative members of the British Parliament had compelled their prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, to resign, he appealed to those ‘Congressmen who were not afraid of the British bullets and bayonets to place the good of the nation above the good of the party’. With this parting shot Kripalani sat down, to vigorous applause from the opposition benches.
⁵⁷

Throughout the second half of 1961 the Indian Parliament witnessed a series of bitter debates about the dispute with China. The prime minister himself was harried and hurt by a group of terriers at his heels. Three in particular nipped hard: Atal Behari Vajpayee of the Jana Sangh, Hem Barua of the Praja Socialist Party and N. G. Ranga of the Swatantra Party. Nehru was accused of turning a blind eye to Chinese ‘occupation’
of Indian territory and of placing himself magisterially above the fray. ‘In regard to border disputes’, said one member, ‘the prime minister has a tendency to act like an umpire in a cricket match rather than as one whose interests are involved’. The criticisms had a personal, polemical, edge. For Nehru also served as foreign minister, and the policy of friendship with China was known to be his particular project. Unaccustomed to such hostility, the prime minister became increasingly irritable, on one occasion going so far as to refer to his critics as ‘childish and infantile’.
⁵⁸

By now, there were elements in his own party who had made known their view that the prime minister should take a stronger line on China. When an opposition member taunted Nehru with regard to his remark that Aksai Chin was barren land, with no grass growing on it, a Congress MP added this telling supplement: ‘No hair grows on my head. Does it mean that the head has no value?’ This was widely viewed as a dig at Nehru who, of course, was completely bald himself.
⁵⁹

In the third week of December 1961 a detachment of the Indian army moved up to the borders of the Portuguese colony of Goa. For a decade now New Delhi had sought, by persuasion and non-violence, to convince Portugal to give up that territory. With those measures failing, Nehru’s government decided to ‘liberate’ Goa by force.

On the morning of 18 December Indian troops entered Goa from three directions: Sawantwadi in the north, Karwar in the south and Belgaum in the east. Meanwhile, aeroplanes dropped leaflets exhorting the Goans to ‘be calm and brave’ and to ‘rejoice in your freedom and strengthen it’. By the evening of the 18th the capital, Panjim, had been encircled. The troops were helped by the locals, who pointed out where the Portuguese had laid mines. The colonists fired a few shots before withdrawing. In the smaller enclaves of Daman and Diu the resistance was somewhat stiffer. In all, some fifteen Indian soldiers lost their lives, and perhaps twice as many Portuguese. Thirty-six hours after the invasion began, the Portuguese governor general signed a document of unconditional surrender.
⁶⁰

The Western press had a field day with this display of ‘Indian hypocrisy’. Exposed for so long to lectures by Nehru and Krishna Menon,
they now hit back by attacking the use of force by a nation that professed ‘non-violence’. The action was also represented as a breach of international law and, more absurdly, as a threat to Christians and Christianity in Goa.
⁶¹
In fact, 61 per cent of Goa was Hindu, while prominent Goan Christians, such as the journalist Frank Moraes and the Archbishop Cardinal Gracias, had an honoured place in Indian public life. There had long been an indigenous freedom movement within Goa and many, perhaps most, Goans welcomed the Indian action. In any case, the Goans were now at liberty to choose their own leaders, something always denied them by the Portuguese.

That Goa was legitimately part of India was not in dispute. That India had waited long enough before acting was also evident. Still, the timing of what was called ‘Operation Vijay’ was open to question. Why did it take place in December 1961 rather than December 1960 or December 1962? Nehru perhaps thought he had waited long enough for the Portuguese to leave; fourteen whole years. And he was under pressure from both left and right on the issue; the Jana Sangh and the communists, in a rare show of agreement, were urging him to use the army to liberate the colony. Still, the suspicion lingered that the precise timing of the invasion was determined by the electoral needs of his colleague Krishna Menon. Before the troops went in, the defence minister inspected them on the border. As the
New York Times
reported, he was here ‘conducting a double campaign : one for the war that was about to commence, the other for the general election that had been scheduled for February 1962.
⁶²

In that election, Krishna Menon would be opposed by his Parliamentary
bête
noire, Acharya Kripalani, who had announced that he would shift from the safe seat of Sitamarhi and take on the defence minister in the constituency he represented, North Bombay. All the opposition parties (the communists excepted) announced that they would support him. A battle of prestige was brewing; since the prime minister had refused to drop Menon from the Cabinet, the opposition now hoped that he would be removed via the ballot box.