India After Gandhi (70 page)

In fact, one of Shastri’s first acts as prime minister was to increase budget allocations to agriculture. He was deeply concerned about the shortfalls in food production in recent years. The rate of increase of food grain had just about kept pace with the growth of population. If the rains failed, panic set in, with merchants hoarding grain and the state desperate to move stocks from surplus to deficit areas. There had been a drought in 1964, and another in 1965. Seeking along-term solution, Shastri appointed C. Subramaniam to head the Ministry of Food and Agriculture. Born in 1910 into a family of farmers, Subramaniam had degrees in science and the law, and practised as an advocate before
joining the freedom struggle. He had been a member of the Constituent Assembly, and was a widely admired minister in Madras before he joined the Union Cabinet. Subramaniam was known to be intelligent and a go-getter, which is why Nehru had placed him in charge of the prestigious Ministry of Steel and Mines. To shift him from Steel to Agriculture signalled a major change indeed.
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Subramaniam took to his new job with vigour. He focused on the reorganization of agricultural science, improving the pay and working conditions of scientists and protecting them from bureaucratic interference. The Indian Council for Agricultural Research, previously a somewhat somnolent body, acquired a new life and identity. Besides reviving the ICAR, Subramaniam also encouraged the states to set up agricultural universities, whose research focused on crops particular to that region. He began experimental farms, and set up a Seed Corporation of India to produce, in bulk, the quality seeds that would be needed for the proposed programmes of agricultural intensification.

Two of Subramaniam s key aides were, like him, from the Tamil country. One was the able secretary of agriculture, B. Sivaraman; the other was the scientist M. S. Swaminathan, who was directing the research teams adapting Mexican wheat to Indian conditions. It was around this crop that the new strategy revolved. Notably, while wheat is grown principally in the north of the country, these three architects of India s agricultural policy were all from the (very deep) south.
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Meanwhile, Subramaniam prevailed upon the United States to provide food aid till such time as the Indians were able to augment their own production. He met with and impressed the American president, Lyndon Johnson, and forged a close partnership with the US secretary of agriculture, Orville Freeman. In December 1965 Subramaniam and Freeman signed an agreement in Rome whereby India committed itself to a substantial increase in investment in agriculture, to a reform of the rural credit system, and to an expansion of fertilizer production and consumption. In return, the Americans provided a series of soft loans and agreed to keep wheat supplies going to tide over the shortages at the Indian end.
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While Subramaniam was signing what was informally called ‘The Treaty of Rome’, his prime minister was preparing to go to Moscow to sign a treaty of his own. This was with his Pakistani counterpart, Ayub Khan. After the war had ended, the Soviets offered their help in working out a peace settlement. In the first week of January 1966 Shastri and
Ayub met in Tashkent, with the Soviet prime ministerAlexei Kosygin as the chief mediator. After a week of hard bargaining the two sides agreed to give up what they most prized – international arbitration of the Kashmir dispute for Pakistan, the retention of key posts captured during the war (such as the Haji Pir pass) for India. The ‘Tashkent Agreement’ mandated the withdrawal of forces to the positions they held before 5 August 1965, the orderly transfer of prisoners of war, the resumption of diplomatic relations and the disavowal of force to settle future disputes.
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The agreement was signed on the afternoon of 10 January 1966. That night Shastri died in his sleep of a heart attack. On the 11th his body was flown to New Delhi on a Soviet aircraft. The next morning the body was placed on a gun carriage and taken in procession to the banks of the Jamuna, to be cremated not far from where Gandhi and Nehru had been.
Life
magazine made the event a cover story – as they had done with the death of Shastri’s predecessor twenty months before. There were vivid pictures of the million-strong crowd, come to honour a man ‘with whom many [Indians] felt a closer affinity than with Nehru’. What Shastri gave India, said
Life
, ‘was mainly a mood – a new steeliness and sense of national unity’. The Chinese war had brought the country to a state of near collapse, but this time, when war came, ‘everything worked – the trains ran, the army held fast, there was no communal rioting. The old moral pretentiousness, the disillusion and drift, the fear and dismay were gone.’
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This was a handsome tribute, but more notable perhaps were the compliments paid by those predisposed by ties of kin to see Shastri as an interloper. In the first months of the new prime minister’s tenure, Mrs Indira Gandhi had complained that he was departing from herfather’s legacy. Within a year she was constrained to admit that ‘Mr Shastri is, I think, feeling stronger now and surer of himself’.
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Then there was Vijayalakshmi Pandit, who was even more fanatically devoted to her brother’s memory. In July 1964 she thought that the morale of the government of India was at ‘an unbelievably low level’ – and ‘there is now no Jawaharlal Nehru to stand up and restore confidence in the minds of the people’. On Shastri’s death, however, she felt ‘very sad’, for ‘he had begun to grow and we all thought he would put India on the right road’.
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The condescension was characteristic, but when we consider who was writing this and when, this must be considered very high praise indeed.

Lal Bahadur Shastri may perhaps be seen as being in relation to
Jawaharlal Nehru as Harry Truman was to Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Nehru and FDR both came from upper-class backgrounds, enjoyed long periods in power, undertook fundamental changes in their society and nation and were greatly venerated for doing so. Shastri, like Truman, was a small town boy of modest background, whose lack of charisma concealed a firm will and independence of mind. As with Truman, his background had endowed him with a keen practical sense, this in contrast to the more consciously intellectual – not to say ideological – style of his predecessor. Where the comparison breaks down is with regard to length of service. Whereas Truman had a full seven years as president of the United States, Shastri died less than two years after being sworn in as prime minister of India.

On Shastri’s death, Gulzarilal Nanda was once more sworn in as interim prime minister, and once more Kamaraj went in search of a permanent successor. Once more, Morarji Desai threw his hat in the ring. Once more, Kamaraj rejected him in favour of a more widely acceptable candidate.

The person whom the Congress president had in mind to succeed Shastri was Mrs Indira Gandhi. She was young – having just turned forty-eight – attractive, known to world leaders, and the daughter of the best-loved of Indians. To soothe a nation hit by two quick losses, she seemed the most obvious choice. True, Mrs Gandhi had little administrative experience, but this time the Congress ‘Syndicate’ would ensure that hers would be a properly ‘collective’ leadership.

The chief ministers consulted by Kamaraj quickly endorsed Mrs Gandhi’s name. So far, so good – except that Morarji Desai decided he would contest for the leadership. So New Delhi now ‘became the cockpit of concerted canvassing, large-scale lobbying, and hectic horse-trading’. Mrs Gandhi and Morarji Desai met with major leaders, while their seconds stalked the rankand file.
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In terms of experience as well as ability Desai should have been the favourite. Jawaharlal Nehru had once written of him that there ‘were very few people whom I respect so much for their rectitude, ability, efficiency and fairness as Morarji Desai’.
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It is doubtful whether he would have written about his own daughter in quite that fashion –
certainly, he had no hope that Indira Gandhi would ever succeed him as prime minister. However, the words I have quoted are from a private letter; neither Desai nor his supporters were privy to it. Even if they had been, it is unlikely that it would have helped. With Kamaraj and the Syndicate so solidly backing Mrs Gandhi, and others in the Congress Party having their own reservations regarding Desai, Nehru’s daughter commanded majority support in the Congress Parliamentary Party. When that body voted to choose a prime minister on 19 January 1966, she won by 355 votes to 169. Kamaraj had ‘lined up the State satraps behind Mrs Gandhi’, wrote one Delhi journal somewhat cynically, because ‘the State leaders would accept only an innocuous person for Prime Minister at the Centre’.
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Mrs Gandhi was the second woman to be elected to lead a free nation (Sirimavo Bandaranaike of Ceylon having been the first); and the second member of her own family to become prime minister of India. Her first months in office were, if anything, as troubled as her father’s. Nothing much happened in February, but in March a major revolt broke out in the Mizo hills. A tribal district bordering East Pakistan, these jagged hills were home to a population of a mere 300,000 people. But, as in Nagaland, among them were some motivated young men determined to carve out a homeland of their own.

The origins of the Mizo conflict go back to a famine in 1959, when a massive flowering of bamboo led to an explosion in the population of rats. These devoured the grain in the fields and in village warehouses, causing a scarcity of food for humans. A Mizo National Famine Front was formed, which found the state’s response wanting. The first ‘F’ was then dropped, leading to the creation of the Mizo National Front (MNF). This asked first for a separate state within the Indian Union and then for a separate country itself.

The leader of the MNF was a one-time accountant named Laldenga. Deeply affected by the famine, he sought succour in books – the detective stories of Peter Cheyney to begin with, graduating in time to the works of Winston Churchill and primers on guerrilla warfare. In the winter of 1963/4 Laldenga made contact with the military government of East Pakistan, who promised him guns and money, and a base from
which to mount attacks. The arms so obtained were cached in forests along the border.
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After years of patient planning, during which he recruited many young Mizos and trained them in the use of modern weaponry, Laldenga launched an uprising on the last day of February 1966. Groups of MNF soldiers attacked government offices and installations, looted banks, and disrupted communications. Roads were blocked to prevent the army moving troops into the area. In early March the MNF announced that the territory had seceded from the Indian Union and was now an ‘independent’ republic.
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The MNF captured one main town, Lungleh, and pressed hard on the district capital, Aizawl. The Indian response was to call in the army, and also the air force. Lungleh was strafed to force the rebels out, this the first time air power had been used by the Indian state against its own citizens. As in Nagaland, the rebels took refuge in the jungle, visiting the villages by night. After a fortnight caught up in the fierce fighting, a Welsh missionary working in the area managed to smuggle out this report to a friend in England:

On Saturday morning we packed as many of our things as we could into trunks . . . and packed [a bag] to carry to go to Durlang through the jungle . . . Five minutes before we were due to start an aeroplane came overhead machine gunning . . . They were not firing at random, but trying to aim at the rebels’ position as it were . . . We were there all day and the men were digging a trench, and we sheltered in it every time the jets came over firing. Pakhlira saw his house go up in flames. We prepared a meal of rice in a small house, but decided that it wasn’t safe to sleep there and we all slept out in a terrace in the jungle where there was a sheltering bank. Not much sleep. We rose in the night and saw the whole Dawrupi go into flames from the furthest end to the Republic Road. They say that it was an effort by Laldenga’s followers to burn the Assam Rifles out of the town.

The letter vividly captures the frightening position of ordinary Mizos caught in the cross-fire between the insurgents and the state. It goes on to speak, in more reflective vein, of how the conflict

will be a very serious setback for the country . . . The government had to send in an army such as this so as to put a stop to this thing
from the beginning in case it turns out to be like the country of the Nagas. We can only hope that the rebels will surrender so that things can get back to normal as soon as possible, but education will be in a complete mess for some time. The Matric[ulation] Exam is supposed to start next week. Avery great responsibility rests on the shoulders [of rebel leaders] like Laldenga and Sakhlawliana for reducing the country to this sad condition . . .
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Far from surrendering, the rebels fought on, the conflict running for the rest of the year and into the next. Meanwhile, in Nagaland, the Peace Mission had collapsed. In the last week of February 1966 Jayaprakash Narayan resigned from the mission, saying that he had lost the confidence of the Nagas. ‘JP’ had told the underground that in the aftermath of the IndoPakistan war they should drop their demand for independence, and settle for autonomy within the Indian Union instead. In the federal system, foreign affairs and defence were in the hands of the centre, but the things that most mattered – education, health, economic development, culture – were in the control of the states. So JP advised Phizo’s men to shed their arms and contest elections, thus to take over the administration by peaceful means.
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