(a) PRASAD FIRST PRESIDENT
An important aspect of the post-independence scene was the clash of ideals and personalities that marked the initial three years—and determined to a large extent the events in the first two decades. Gandhi’s assassination in January 1948 brought Nehru and Patel together and on Nehru’s sixtieth birthday on 14th November one saw heartwarming evidence of their reunion. Patel praised Nehru for leading the nation safely out of the crisis that faced India during the year and enhancing its prestige abroad. Nehru responded by describing Patel as a tower of strength. He said he did not know what would have happened to India had Patel not been present to advise and act firmly. But by the time the new Constitution came into force on 26th January, 1950, the situation on the Congress front had deteriorated. I wrote in my annual review: “There is no doubt that the Congress is split in two main camps. Perhaps the path of wisdom lies in acknowledging that and allowing a strong opposition to grow so that democracy may have a chance of healthy development.”
At our daily conferences, Devadas and I often exchanged notes on the state of the two “power blocs” in the Nehru Cabinet. His regular contact with C.R., his father-in-law and the GovernorGeneral, kept him in touch with the doings in the Nehru camp, while my daily contact with Patel and G. D. Birla enabled me to gather gossip in the opposite camp. Devadas and I agreed on two points: there was a retreat from the Gandhian path one way or other; it was clear that in the economic and social spheres Nehru took the Marxist line and Patel the Gandhian. On the other hand, in foreign affairs Nehru pursued the Gandhian ideology while Patel believed in the Curzonian concept of Indian security and the maintenance of a firm hold on Nepal and Tibet.
The relations between Nehru and Patel got noticeably strained over the choice of the first President of the Republic of India. Nehru had by then come to lean on C.R. and, therefore, decided to bestow
on him the signal honour. In fact, he even persuaded Prasad to let C.R. be the President, to the great chagrin of the former’s supporters. Saddened by this news, Prasad’s sponsors repaired to Patel for advice knowing that the Iron Man himself favoured their candidate in preference to C.R. Laughingly, Patel told them in my presence with his typical dry humour: “But the bridegroom has fled. How can the barat (wedding party) move?” When the sponsors pleaded that some way must be found, it was decided to force Nehru’s hands in favour of Prasad and against C.R. when the matter was formally taken up.
A meeting of the party was called by Nehru for formal approval of his choice. He spoke at length about C.R.’s virtues, especially his quality as a window on foreign lands and the profound impression he had made on foreign dignitaries and Ambassadors. However, one backbencher after another denounced C.R. for resigning from the party when the Quit India movement was launched by Gandhi in 1942 and for giving the demand for Pakistan respectability by his “sporting offer” to Jinnah. In vain did Nehru plead for C.R. Finally, to save the leader’s face, the party left the decision to Nehru and Patel in the light of the feelings expressed at the meeting. The party’s will prevailed and, much to Nehru’s annoyance, Prasad was elected President.
Devadas had the particularly delicate task of maintaining a balance between his pro-Nehru father-in-law and pro-Patel proprietors, the Birlas. But the fact that we exchanged notes enabled us to steer clear of the political shoals. The situation changed when Nehru failed to get C.R. elected President and, about this time, I found C.R. rather critical of Government in private conversation. The rift at the top was widening and a delicate question that arose was how our paper should serve the national cause by exposing the happenings behind the scenes without damaging the cause we stood for, namely Congress policies and programmes.
I offered to write a weekly column in the Hindustan Times on the understanding that it would be published under my pen-name Insaf and that I would have the columnist’s freedom to write what I felt without inhibitions imposed by our editorial policy. My idea, I added, was to apply the Gandhian yardstick to the Government’s acts of omission or commission. I added that to dissent and to debunk was the key role of a columnist in a democracy. So was my Political Diary born. (Some years later the brilliant correspondent of the New York Times in New Delhi, Abe Rosenthal, wrote me a letter saying that if I would produce the column twice weekly it would greatly help foreign correspondents in analysing and interpreting India.)
Hardly had the Diary appeared for a few weeks than Azad sent me word that he would like me to meet him. Azad came straight to the point. Nehru and he felt that the Diary was “inspired by Patel and Birla.” I asked him whether he or Nehru really felt that way. He replied: “You know the woman who has been carrying tales to Nehru.” I told Azad that Nehru was not usually accessible to newsmen and gave time more readily to foreign correspondents than to Indian. As a rule, I checked all the information I gathered about Nehru with Kidwai, whom I met frequently, and also with the P.M.’s top civilian aides, who were my personal friends. Anyway, I su gg es ted that Nehru or he should give me a weekly appointment and that I would check facts directly with him before writing my column. Azad welcomed my suggestion and I added that I found my normal practice more rewarding, namely seeking an interview with the Prime Minister periodically and making momentary contacts in the lobby to get his reactions on matters of topical interest. I had found Nehru very courteous and stimulating on such occasions.
A day later Azad sent for me and said he had talked with Nehru and that they had agreed that I should meet Azad every Sunday. I expressed happiness at this decision because I had had a close understanding with Azad since 1924, when he presided over a special Congress session in Delhi. Thus the Sunday morning meeting over coffee became a habit and one that proved most stimulating and rewarding. We would discuss politics and personalities without inhibition. Azad would tell me in confidence all that happened in the Cabinet and the Working Committee meetings and I would keep him up to date on happenings elsewhere at home and abroad. The last of these meetings took place four days before his death.
(b) THE IRON MAN PASSES
The conflict between the Nehruites and the Patelites came to a head in August 1950 when Kidwai secured Nehru’s support for his proposal to put up Kripalani for the Congress presidentship as against Tandon for the party’s annual session at Nasik. Within a fortnight of this decision, Kidwai arranged the publication of a letter declaring that Nehru would refuse to serve on the Working Committee if Tandon was elected. Patel backed Tandon and Kripalani was defeated in the most exciting contest since Subhas Bose clashed with Gandhi. Tandon retaliated by refusing to appoint Kidwai to the Working Committee. Kidwai, in turn, organised a Democratic Front which came to be known as the “KK (Kidwai
Kripalani) Group.” Tan don considered the creation of a group within the party to be wrong. But he found it difficult to take disciplinary action against the Front because of Nehru’s sympathy for the policies it stood for. This development marked the beginning of splinter groups in the ruling party.
A crisis was caused by Nehru’s resignation of the membership of the Congress Working Committee formed by Tandon. The Kidwai group had made Nehru resign from the Committee by telling him that the “reactionaries” in the party would use him to win the elections and then throw him overboard. Tandon told me he did not want the Congress to split on a personal issue at a time when so much needed to be done. He would not cross swords with Nehru but would make way for him by resigning his office of Congress President. Tandon knew he had the full backing of Patel. His decision to step down was, therefore, not only graceful but highly patriotic.
The man who emerged quietly to a place of prominence out of the drama of Nehru-Tandon differences was the Police Minister in U.P., Lai Bahadur Shastri. He was a trusted lieutenant of Tandon and he figured behind the scenes in avoiding an open clash between them. Nehru sensed in Shastri the qualities of an unostentatious and solid worker with a genius for compromise. Before long Nehru drafted Shastri to the Centre particularly to help him in organising the party for its first battle of the hustings in the general election of J952
Not long afterwards, the situation across the northern border took a turn for the worse, resulting in what was perhaps the last clash between Patel and Nehru in the Cabinet. Red China invaded Tibet and Nepal was in the grip of internal turmoil. It was well known that Patel and Prasad differed from Nehru on Tibet. They had urged him to ensure that Tibet continued as an independent buffer between China and India. Now their fears had proved correct. Nehru felt upset because Peking had disregarded his counsel. Patel, whose heart ailment had become more marked, declared emphatically that India’s relations with China should be readjusted. Azad told me that though his head was with the Sardar, he had supported Nehru.
Delhi’s trouble across the border stemmed mainly from a Himalayan blunder committed by the Government in describing China’s position vis-a-vis Tibet in its first communication with the Chinese Communist Government. Britain had recognised Chinese “suzerainty” over Tibet. But Delhi’s communication unfortunately employed the word “sovereignty” for suzerainty. The Chinese Government took full advantage of the mistake and when India
Clash of Personalities 305
raised the question of Tibet’s invasion, Peking assured that it respected Tibetan autonomy. It further stated that it would not press for religious, political and social changes in Tibet and that it was aware that it would take Tibet and its people at least twentyfive years to emerge from their cocoon of feudalism. Many in Delhi considered the assurance to be an eyewash. But there was little that could be done.
At the last talk I had with him, a few days before his death in Bombay on 15th December, 1950, Patel showed me a letter dated 7th November, 1950, he had written to Nehru. (The letter was published by K. M. Munshi in Bhavan’s Journal in its issue of 26th February, 1967; because of its historic importance its text is given as Appendix II.) After I finished reading it he said: “I have loved Nehru but he has not reciprocated. I have been eating my heart out because I have not been able to make him see the dangers ahead. China wants to establish its hegemony over South-East Asia. We cannot shut our eyes to this because imperialism is appearing in a new garb. He does not realise that people work only when they have the employment motive or the profit motive. He is being misled by his courtiers. I have grave apprehensions about the future.”
Patel’s death plunged the nation into grief. Prasad flew to Bombay to attend the funeral, overruling Nehru’s objection; the President refused to regard the Prime Minister’s advice binding on him in this matter. Nehru took the stand that it would be a bad precedent for the Head of the Union attending the funeral of a Minister. Prasad felt that Nehru was trying to denigrate the stature of Patel. Tributes to the Iron Man came from far and near. Pakistan’s Prime Minister, Liaquat Ali succinctly stated: “Sardar Patel always said what he meant and meant it.” All were agreed on one thing: While Gandhi was the architect of India’s freedom, Sardar was the architect of India’s unity.
Chapter g
FIRST GENERAL ELECTION
(a) NEHRU PARTY BOSS
With Patel gone and Prasad elevated to presidentship, Nehru became all-powerful and felt free to shape domestic policies. He had learned two lessons from his brushes with Patel and Tandon. He must have as Home Minister and Defence Minister only those unquestionably loyal to him and as Congress Party President one subservient to his will. As the country was getting ready for its first general election in 1952, he simultaneously took overall command of the Congress Party to personally fashion the poll strategy and choose the new rulers. The Congress dominated the political scene, despite the decision of Kripalani and some others to break away and form the Kisan Majdoor Praja (Peasants and Workers) Party. There was hardly any organised challenge worth the name. The Communist Party had limited appeal and the Jana Sangh (Peoples Party) started by Shyama Prasad Mookerji following his resignation from the Nehru Ministry, was newly founded.
Two decisions taken about this time influenced the elections significantly although they were not inspired by this motive. Nehru did not think it proper to travel for his election campaign in the aeroplane he used for official purposes as Prime Minister. At the same time, neither he nor the Congress Party could afford to charter a plane for the purpose. An obliging Auditor-General salved Nehru’s conscience by devising a convenient formula. The Prime Minister’s life, he said, must be secured against all risks, and this could be assured best if he travelled by air. Air transport would avoid the need for the large security staff required if he travelled by rail. Since it was the nation’s responsibility to see to his security the nation must pay for it.
So a rule was framed that Nehru would pay the Government only the normal fare chargeable by civil airlines for transporting a passenger. The fares of the security staff accompanying him would be paid from Government funds, and any Congressman accompanying Nehru would pay his own way. Thus, by contributing a bare
fraction of the total expenses, Nehru was able to acquire a mobility which multiplied a hundredfold his effectiveness as a campaigner and vote-catcher. As Prime Minister, Nehru received top priority in all communication media, particularly the Press and the Government-controlled radio. Day after day, Nehru’s picture and speeches would crowd out anything said by his rivals and the opposing political parties.
Another decision, too, helped this process considerably. Nehru did not like the presence of policemen in uniform at his meetings. But here again, the Civil Servants round him proved very resourceful— and obliging. The official who devised a compromise which was acceptable to Nehru and at the same time ensured his safety described it to me thus: “Nehru in the beginning showed great annoyance at having policemen round him. Once he said that he wanted all policemen to be withdrawn. They must not be seen anywhere when he went about his business. The Principal Private Secretary and the Cabinet Secretary held consultations. They knew how to tackle Nehru. Next day they met him and said: ‘We have found a solution. We have decided that the Prime Minister’s security is not the Prime Minister’s business and that we will have to make adequate arrangements whether the Prime Minister likes it or not.’ We promised him, however, that whatever arrangements we would make, the policemen would not be visible. Nehru was quite satisfied with that solution.”
The extensive security arrangements for Nehru wherever he went were a sort of advance notice to the locality of a momentous event, and when this was followed by the announcement that Nehru was coming crowds would gather in thousands from far and near. Nehru, too, profited from these devices personally. The large crowds that collected to hear him made all other Congressmen feel that he was their biggest vote-getter and they, therefore, willingly submitted to his authority.
There was a great rush for Congress tickets because of the general feeling that “even a lamp post carrying the Congress ticket will win.” As was natural, many candidates made allegations of corruption, immorality and blackmarketing against their rivals. A committee was appointed to screen applications and its slogan was: “Let us give Nehru the 500 men he wants and five years—and leave the rest to him.” Gandhi’s wishes that deserving men from various professions and spheres of activity be inducted into public life was quietly forgotten.
The Congress won the general election, and that gave birth to a new phase in India’s political life, namely the emergence on top of
courtiers, sycophants and hangers-on. When I asked Azad to comment on this development, he said: “We are still feudal, but what has distressed me is that many good persons have been denied tickets because the trusted courtiers had labelled them as antiNehru.”
(b) INTO ELECTORAL BATTLE
I, too, had personal experience of the din and dust of the electoral battle by standing for Parliament (House of the People) from New Delhi. Three factors were mainly responsible for my decision. First, at the back of my mind was the wish expressed by Vithalbhai Patel in Vienna in the thirties that I should seek election to India’s Parliament after freedom. Secondly, my friends among the refugees felt I would best represent their views because of the keen interest taken by me in their welfare following partition. Thirdly, my visit to the U.S. in 1950 showed that a large number of public men had practised journalism in their early life. Also contributing to some extent was the fact that I was one of the oldest residents of New Delhi (from 1919 onwards) and among the pioneer builders of a home in the federal capital.
Patel welcomed my intention to stand for Parliament when I mentioned it to him. I, thereupon, proceeded to canvas the support of the leading citizens of New Delhi and of a large number of inarticulate government officials who had twice helped me to get elected to the Municipal Committee of Simla in the late twenties. Everyone that I met welcomed the idea of having a non-party man to represent the cosmopolitan capital in Parliament. I drew up a manifesto and several leading citizens endorsed it. But Patel’s death was a damper and altered the situation.
Meanwhile, Nehru and Kripalani fell out. Kripalani and his wife, Sucheta, left the Congress Party. Sucheta, who had done much political and social work as the wife of the then Congress Party President and had played a notable role in refugee relief, announced that she would stand as a K.M.P.P. candidate from New Delhi. Nehru could not tolerate the idea of Kripalani challenging him in his own stronghold and retorted by nominating one of his woman relatives as the Congress candidate. I selected a bicycle—the commoner’s transport—as my election symbol. But the K.M.P.P. seized on this symbol to project me as representing the Birlas since they owned a well-known cycle factory. Such propaganda was, however, in the game and I was not unduly worried.
The fight had now become triangular and my friends thought I
stood a good chance. In fact, as a top Congress leader told me later, the local bosses too were worried, but what I had not reckoned with happened. Nehru threw himself personally into the campaign, addressing a record number of meetings in any one constituency. I lost but the votes polled for me made all the difference between success and defeat for the Congress candidate. Sucheta won and Nehru’s cousin lost. The campaign cost me much, but I had no regrets. Indeed, I gained invaluable experience of the working of a crucial aspect of our parliamentary democracy. I realised that a candidate could not depend solely on his own resources. The backing of a party machine and propaganda were essential to fight parliamentary elections.
Chapter 10
PLANNED DEVELOPMENT
(a) POWER BEFORE FOOD
To Nehru must go the credit of bringing economic planning within the realm of practicability. There can be no two opinions that planning over the last two decades or so has benefited the national economy and brought India a long way towards the modern age. At the same time, however, first things have not been done first. In the days of the British rule, the national budget was just a gamble on the monsoon. The severe drought in 1967 and the consequent food crisis showed that twenty years after freedom, the national economy was still dependent mainly on the monsoon—because the vast underground water resources had remained largely untapped.
Following independence, Nehru talked boldly about becoming self-sufficient in food in two years. But both he and his colleagues failed to fathom the magnitude of the food problem. A Fabian and an admirer of Lenin, Nehru thought more in terms of electricity, the symbol of industrialisation, than of food and agriculture. The gigantic river valley projects were basically intended to generate power. Irrigation was incidental. Water was denied to farmers because the electrical engineers did not want to reduce the power load. Where water was made available, the rates initially demanded from the agriculturists were often exorbitant. India could have
31 o The Nehru Era
built up buffer stocks of food, but a false sense of confidence made New Delhi reject offers from Washington of food grain supplies to build up a stockpile.
The food portfolio in the Indian Cabinet proved a graveyard of political reputations, with the exception of Rafi Ahmed Kidwai, who had luck and the monsoon gods on his side. Moreover, he understood well the psychology of the trader, small bania and the wholesaler. I recall seeing big headlines one morning in the newspapers announcing the Government’s decision to import a large quantity of rice. When I saw Kidwai a day later I said to him: “You told me that we have enough rice now.” He smiled and replied: “Yes, that is so, but this news is the only language that our bania understands.” Kidwai was right. The report had its impact and rice prices came down. The emphasis, however, was mainly on food procurement and very little on agriculture.
It was only years later that C. Subramaniam brought a sense of realism to the portfolio by introducing science and technology in the production of food and helping India to move towards an agricultural breakthrough. Most Indian farmers, including those totally illiterate in the general sense of the term, are today receptive to the idea of using quality seed, fertilisers and insecticides. However, he was unable to get the Government to evolve a clear policy on fertilisers and push forward vigorously. Some twelve years ago, Government’s agricultural advisers strongly urged the use of synthetic fertilisers for stepping up food output. But the Planning Commission successfully resisted the proposal. It preferred to go by the advice of a South-Indian expert that green manure and compost would do the job cheaper and more effectively.
(b) T.T.K. AND STEEL
A major achievement in the post-independence period has been the growth of the steel industry, which at once provides an interesting and rewarding study of Government at work. Indian steel in 1947 was the cheapest in the world and there was a demand on all sides that the capacity for steel making be rapidly expanded. But nobody conceived of plants with a capacity exceeding half a million to one million tons. George Woods came to India as the World Bank’s special adviser on steel after two American and one British consultancy firms had visited the country to draw up a blueprint for the development of the steel industry. He advised expansion of the existing private sector plants and Government loans were given to Tatas and the Indian Iron and Steel Company.
Planned Development 311
When T. T. Krishnamachari became Minister for Commerce and Industry in 1951, he recast the nation’s steel policy with imagination and, in due course, planned and established three steel mills in the public sector with a total capacity of six million ingot tons yearly. The Government first sounded Britain and West Germany in connection with this programme and both countries expressed their willingness to collaborate in achieving it. Then came the Soviet Union with an offer to set up a plant. The common belief that the Russians made the first offer and the British and Germans came in as a result of this is not true. What, however, is true is that the Russians clinched the agreement on Bhilai more speedily. There is also no doubt that Soviet economic aid acted as a spur to the U.S., Britain and the other Western countries. As Khruschev told Manubhai Shah, Minister of Industry during his visit to India: “We have little to spare. However, we will help you rob the robber. Every rouble we give you will bring you five dollars!”
The story of the projected steel plant at Bokaro throws interesting light on U.S.—Soviet rivalry in winning friends among the developing nations through economic aid. New Delhi had received a hint from Moscow that the Soviet Government was ready to put up a plant at Bokaro, which lies in the coal belt of south-eastern Bihar and forms a part of the area under the Damodar Valley Authority, a body established on the lines of the Tennessee Valley Authority. Nehru and other members of the Cabinet were, however, keen on persuading the U.S. Government to underwrite this project, partly because they wanted to give the Americans a feeling of participation in the development of the industry and partly because they wished to acquire modern steel technology.
At this point, the different approaches of the Americans and the Russians to propositions of this nature became evident. The Russians as usual, did not ask too many questions. They said “yes” and offered to go ahead with a project. But the Americans, as usual, wanted first to go into the entire economics of the Bokaro scheme, the availability of raw materials, the potential market, construction schedules and other details. Bokaro had been included in the Third Five-Year Plan and was supposed to go into production by 1966. Indian officials calculated that it would take the Americans two to three years to investigate the feasibility of the project, and they would therefore never be able to complete the plant in time, whereas the Russians could.
Accordingly, the Russian proposal was put up to the Cabinet for approval. Meanwhile, a cable arrived from the Indian Embassy in Washington saying that the Kennedy Administration was sympa
thetic to India and should be given a chance to help in the Bokaro project. The Russian offer was pigeonholed and negotiations started anew with the Americans. They took about two years to prepare a preliminary report and then started talking about giving the plant’s management freedom to fix its own prices and stipulated that Americans should manage the plant for the first ten years.
A fresh snag developed when New Delhi discovered that Kennedy’s chances of getting the concurrence of the U.S. Congress for the venture were doubtful because of his slender majority. Therefore, to spare him embarrassment, it was decided to withdraw the request for aid and turn once more to the Russians. At first, Moscow showed pique because New Delhi had shelved its proposal unceremoniously and gone to the rival American camp. But political considerations later prevailed and the Russians agreed to collaborate.
I took a special interest in finding out how the public sector steel plants were working soon after they were installed. The Minister for Steel at the time was Swaran Singh and I accompanied him on a tour of the three plants at Rourkela, Durgapur and Bhilai. It was obvious that the British and the German experts were stand offish in their social relations but were keen to train Indians in the techniques in which they were understudying them. The Russians, on the other hand, made a special effort to talk to their Indian colleagues in Hindi and also lived in the same manner as they— creating a good impression at the social level.
Conditions had changed, however, when I visited Bhilai later to spend a brief vacation with my second son Vikrama Jit, a member of an all-India service for managing State enterprises. The Russian Chief Engineer, who had spent five years in Bhilai and spoke English told me frankly in an informal chat following a dinner at the house of the General Manager, Indarjit Singh, that the labour welfare laws and the attitude of the workers stood in the way of getting the best results. The rivalry between the trade unions created tension between the management and the workers. While young Indian technicians were very keen to learn and were proving an asset, the worker’s attitude was not good. He felt that public enterprises would not make good unless productivity became the main objective. As matters stood, there were too many surplus hands in the plant and nobody was getting rid of them. (I heard an echo of this in Moscow in 1967, when I was told by various Russians I met that the public sector could prove itself only if the anti-work and anti-productivity attitude of the workers was eliminated.)
(c) NON-CONVERTIBLE RUPEE TRADE
Was T.T.K. guilty of frittering away India’s sterling balances? The truth is that he looked far ahead and realised that India could build up its industrial base only if it produced plentiful steel cement and soda ash. He sanctioned the import of capital goods for two reasons: to introduce the competitive element into production and thereby improve Indian manufactures and to create a demand for certain types of goods so that the industries which produced them would expand or new ones develop. These were national objectives, wellconceived and well-executed, and as a policy, unexceptionable. But trouble arose because of T.T.K.’s weakness in tending to view his action and policy decision in terms of its effects on the fortunes of individual business houses, some his favourites and some not so. The first foreign exchange crisis was thus not the result of T.T.K.’s alleged prodigality but of the ambitious programmes of industrialisation.
Morarji Desai, who took over Commerce and Industry when T.T.K. moved to Finance, brought with him a breath of fresh air by looking at proposals in terms of policy and fair play. His handling of this portfolio created great confidence in business circles and led to a boom in the share markets. Unfortunately, he, like T.T.K., paid insufficient attention to developing domestic sources of industrial raw materials—a lapse which continued after Desai switched over to Finance and for which the country is still paying heavily.
A development of far-reaching consequence occurred when trade on the basis of payment in non-convertible rupees was initiated with the Socialist bloc in Europe. I gathered that K. B. Lall (now the Commerce Secretary) after consultations with the Secretaries of various departments at the Centre on the desirability of negotiating pacts with these countries on this basis, went to Moscow for talks. The first reaction of the Russians was hostile; but Lall did not give up. He requested the Indian Ambassador, K. P. S. Menon, to pursue the matter and convince the Russians that one way of enlarging trade between the two countries was to adopt the system he had suggested. From Moscow, Lall went to Berlin, where he found the East Germans eager to establish trade relations with India. On his own initiative, he signed an agreement providing for payment for imports from East Germany in non-convertible rupees.
He then went on to Warsaw and negotiated a similar agreement, but before he signed it he received a message from New Delhi saying
the deal was unacceptable. This was followed by a cable from Nehru himself, giving arguments against signing but adding that Lall was free to act as he thought fit. Politics was at play here. Nehru favoured diversifying India’s foreign trade and a larger exchange of goods with the Socialist countries, but apparently there was some roadblock at the secretarial level. Lall did not wish to go openly against his colleagues in the Civil Service and so, in spite of Nehru showing him the green light, he spoke to some of the Secretaries concerned on the phone from Warsaw and told them he would not sign the agreement with the Poles.
Meanwhile, a message came from Menon in Moscow that the Russians were prepared to sign a non-convertible rupee agreement. Lall explained his difficulty to Menon because of the opposition of his colleagues in Delhi. Menon said he would sign the pact and take the full responsibility for it. But that would not have solved Lall’s problem, because no matter who signed, his colleagues would pin the responsibility on him. He, therefore, exchanged letters with the Russians stipulating that the five-year agreement could be revised or revoked in the light of its working for a few months. Before Lall reached India, the Press had splashed the agreement as a five-year deal.
When the first pact on trade in rupees was signed, Morarji Desai as Finance Minister expressed his disapproval on the ground that the Russians and their East European allies could use the Indian currency they accumulated to finance their agents and propaganda machine in this country. (Charges that this had happened have been heard frequently since the third general election.) But the results have proved beneficial. The rupee trade has helped India in her foreign exchange crisis and, at the same time, led to a big increase in her business with the Socialist bloc.
The Russians always insisted on inserting a clause in their trade agreements with India to the effect that the rupee would be valued on the basis of parity with gold. But as private Indian traders made export contracts with the Russians, the Indian Government did not insist on a similar condition on its side. When it was suggested that this be done, the Government’s financial brains objected on the plea that this might cast doubts on the stability of the rupee. How mistaken this policy was came to light when the rupee was devalued in June, 1966. The Commerce Minister at the time, Manubhai Shah, had to fly posthaste to Moscow to persuade the Russians to add forty-seven per cent to the prices of Indian exports although India would have to pay fifty-seven per cent more for imports from Russia. This was the best he could get the Russians to agree to.
Planned Development
3i5
(d) THE SILENT REVOLUTION
One day m 1955, Nehru suggested that Indian newspapermen were too urban-minded and that insufficient attention had been paid to the silent revolution in the countryside, the result of the community development programme and the agricultural extension service which now embraced the entire country. He was right, and wishing to meet his challenge I planned a tour of 8,000 miles by road covering eight states. I persuaded my wife to join me since I was anxious to know the outlook of the rural folk to family planning and village women would be willing to share their inner feelings only with a motherly person. The tour began in December and after every week of travelling we returned to Delhi for a week to rest and attend to noimal chores. I wrote twelve articles on the basis of my observations which were published in the Hindustan Dimes with the title: “Ram Rajya in Action.”
The idea of community development had been sold to Nehru by Chester Bowles, U.S. Ambassador, and it embraced not only the development of the countryside but also the creation of small towns as centres of rural, cultural and commercial life. By and large the programme failed to achieve practical results, and no attempt was made to develop the agro-towns Bowles had proposed. There was no doubt, however, that it planted in the head of the villager a desire to improve his methods of cultivation and living conditions. In a way, this also helped them to vote intelligently, conscious of what they should ask for and work for.
My wife gathered much valuable information in her talks with village women. Almost all of them, whether in villages up north or in the heart of the undeveloped areas in the central region, gave the same answer when asked about family planning. They wanted fewer children; they all said their husbands were unconcerned about the matter and would not use or pay for contraceptives. In fact, they confided that mating could never be planned in the way they lived. They suggested they should be supplied with pills which they could keep in their head covers for instant use. So I wrote, the villagers’ hope and salvation was the pill. Family planning would not encounter resistance in the village, I later told Nehru, who felt immensely pleased.
We were struck by the fact that one village had been wholly reconstructed and that this project had provided employment to about 600 hands for two years. I suggested that all the villages of India be rebuilt in twenty-five years and linked by road. No foreign
aid was needed for this work, and what was more, it would enable workers in towns to live in villages nearby and cycle to and from their work places. The countryside would be enriched and the multiplication of slums in towns checked. Each villager would not only own a house but would also let out a portion to workers in towns. I wrote that in my view, this was the only genuine answer to the evils of urbanisation and the problem of providing urban amenities to the countryside. (Perhaps the official planners will turn their attention to this question now that the leverage in elections is held by the farmer.)
(e) f.i.c.c.i.
One of the most interesting phenomena on the economic front since independence is the eclipse of the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry. Under the British, the Federation was the economic wing of the Congress. Business leaders supported the freedom movement with money and moral backing and the Congress leaders supported the business community in the legislatures. In fact, the comments of the Federation on the Central Budget were awaited by Congress and other legislators to decide what line to take in the general discussion on it. F.I.C.C.I. also had a powerful lobby in the Central Assembly and successive Finance Members invariably consulted it before initiating action on important matters for fear that the Opposition would otherwise charge them with acting arbitrarily and promoting British business interests.
The situation changed radically after independence. On coming out of Almora Jail in 1945, Nehru addressed a meeting at Ranikhet in which he declared: “Blackmarketeers and profiteers have flourished at the cost of the nation. All such persons will be hanged from the nearest lamp post when the Congress comes to power and the country becomes independent.” The Congress Party adopted this declaration as one of its key talking points after independence. Although it has not succeeded in punishing such men or stopping these evils, the Congress has by this attitude put itself and the business community in opposite camps. The role of the business community since independence has therefore been defensive.
What mainly derailed businessmen politically was the action the Government took against firms suspected of evading taxes. Liaquat Ali had proposed a commission of inquiry and drawn up a list of about 150 business houses under suspicion. This action paralysed business leaders and most of them never recovered from the shock. Sardar Patel told me that businessmen offered to settle their dues
collectively by depositing Rs. 500 million in the exchequer. This would have enabled them to bring out their black money and use it legitimately. Patel favoured the deal because he wanted business to play its full role in activating the country’s economy. But Nehru, for reasons of ideology, would not listen to him. The result was that
not only did black market money not come out but it kept multiplying.
Perhaps the most objective view of the business community on the economic and political health of our nation was given to me by a self-made leading industrialist of Bombay, K. G. Mahindra, who headed India’s Purchasing Mission in the U.S. during World War II, and took keen interest in national affairs. Writing to me on 15th July’ i 9 ^ 3 j he stated that the lapses in the economic determinants have become acute, and unless a drastic revision of the instruments of policy is made, there may rapidly be drift to chaos.” He added: “I feel it is becoming more relevant that the execution of policy should be left to technocrats. Social and economic objectives have been spelt out in great detail, but failure is writ large on the methods and procedures followed in implementing that policy. But who would listen? The P.M. is strongly entrenched in the party’s forums; likewise in the affections of the people. It is, therefore, a personal decision alone which could bring about healthy changes. If he shies away from a drastic proposed revolutionary change, one may have to wait until events and circumstances force his hands. I do not otherwise see any other light.”
Chapter 11
INDIA AND THE BIG POWERS
(a) SUCCESSION OF VISITORS
The five years between the first and second general elections saw marked activity on the international front. The Big Powers made moves and counter moves to woo (or, whenever necessary, to browbeat) India. A succession of dignitaries visited India. Some came to understand how this country, without military or industrial strength, had come to acquire a powerful voice in world affairs. Others came to seek Nehru’s views and to check their own assessment of
events. Nehru, for his part, forged ahead with his policy of nonalignment. He actively sought the friendship of China and Russia and played a leading role in bringing Afro-Asian nations together at Bandung.
America’s relations with India were not very happy when John Foster Dulles visited India in May 1953. Henry Grady as the first U.S. Ambassador had helped to lay the foundations of economic and technical co-operation between the two countries. But Loy Henderson, who succeeded, caused a setback when his wife made contact with Sheikh Abdullah and dabbled in Kashmir’s affairs. Chester Bowles came next and applied the healing touch. He made Indians feel that the U.S. was really their friend. However, the Bowles left after a stay of one and a half years. George Allen, who followed, caused eyebrows to raise when, speaking at the presentation of credentials, he referred to himself as “directing the activities” of the U.S. in India.
On the eve of the visit of Dulles, a balloon was sent up. It was said that India could have a Monroe Doctrine which would embrace Burma and Thailand as a protection against Communist expansionism. New Delhi reacted adversely to the suggestion, to Washington’s disappointment. India did not want to establish her hegemony over South-East Asia. About the same time, New Delhi received another report according to which a military pact was to be signed between Turkey, Iran and Pakistan underwritten by the U.S. Dulles tried to use this to bring India into his scheme of encircling Russia. However, Nehru made it clear that he would consider such a pact as unfriendly as, according to him, its sole purpose was to arm Pakistan, a “pact friend,” to enable it to try conclusions with India.
Richard Nixon followed in December. He met C.R. in Madras. Allen introduced me to Nixon and, after meeting him, I wrote: “Extremist Republicans think that they can kick the world into shape with their dollar-studded boots.” Nixon was told by me about India’s objection to the U.S. military pact with Pakistan and that “Kashmir will have to be put into cold storage, since Pakistan’s sole object in seeking military aid and economic aid was to prepare herself better to try military conclusions with India.” The American attitude to Pakistan, I gathered from Nixon, was: “Here is a little chap who is prepared to stand up and fight this Moscow bully. Shall we not applaud him and give him all the help and encouragement we can?” Nixon did not accept the theory that Pakistan would not fight Communist Russia but would attack democratic India.
The day after Nixon’s arrival in Delhi the first Indo-Soviet trade
agreement was signed. This was a rebuff to Washington. It meant that the U S. would lose India and Asia if it followed a policy of divide and rule and tried to build up feudal Pakistan against democratic India.
Canada’s Prime Minister, Louis St. Laurent, came in February : 954 an d received a warm welcome. He made it clear soon after arrival that “North America does not mean the United States. Canada attaches great importance to India’s role in world affairs ” I renewed contact with him and said: “Please tell Washington that by isolating India it will weaken the democratic forces.” “Be assured,” he responded. “They take from us what they will not take from anyone else.”
Tito came in December and was the first head of state to visit ndia. He travelled like a monarch and the ceremonial platform in New Delhi was found inadequate for the purpose. No protocol was possible, for nothing had been rehearsed. Tito was then isolated and Nehru had attained the status of a world leader. The two found much in common in their outlook and views and the friendship struck between them became a force in global politics. Anxious to develop relations with India, Tito had earlier sent a high-power delegation headed by Vice-President Colakovic. During Tito’s visit, Yugoslavia agreed to enter into a trade agreement with India on the basis of payment in rupees.
A ten-week visit to Europe in the summer of 1954, accompanied by my wife and my third son, Satya Jit, then a fighter pilot in the Indian Air Force, enabled me to study the European outlook on India. Nehru, I discovered, was considered pro-Communist and anti-U.S. Some Europeans, especially the French, showed a sneaking admiration for Nehru as the man who had ticked off the Americans. They added: “We cannot afford to differ with America.”
The only statesman in Europe who appreciated Nehru’s constructive role was Chancellor Adenauer. He told me that Nehru alone was in a position to create confidence between Russia and America. He felt that German reunification and the future of Berlin were tied up with the cold war. It was only when both sides accepted coexistence that tension would relax. India and Nehru, he said, were a great factor for peace. I rather got the impression that being a Catholic, he was not particularly keen to welcome reunion with the predominantly Protestant East Germany until West Germany had consolidated itself.
I also visited London and Cairo before returning home. It was interesting to find the British take the view that “once again, Germany had won the war.” She had rebuilt her economic strength
320 The Nehru Era
with American aid and was now leaving Britain behind in several spheres, especially shipbuilding. In Cairo, I had a talk lasting over two hours with Nasser, whose enthusiastic friendship for India and regard for Nehru was most heartwarming. He candidly recognised that Israel had come to stay but felt there was a genuine fear that with the backing of the Jewish wealth Israel might become a danger to the security of the Arabs.
(b) NEHRU GOES TO PEKING
At this stage, the country was thrilled with the news that Nehru would visit Peking in response to a pressing invitation by Chou En-lai, who broke journey in New Delhi in June 1954 on his way back from the Geneva Conference on Indo-China. Since Chou had gone to the Geneva Conference in a Chinese-owned Dakota, Nehru decided to fly to Peking in an Indian Dakota. But before he left, Nehru was rattled by a report from Korea that the Chinese had told our representative there that India had not shed her slavery because even the Army commands were given in English. So, Nehru ordered the commands to be given in Hindi. Tyagi was then the Minister of Defence Organisation. With his army background and sound knowledge of popular Hindi, he undertook the task and did it competently and expeditiously.
Azad mentioned to me at our Sunday meeting over coffee that Peking was making great preparations to receive Nehru as the leader of 360 million people. But he had told Nehru to find answers to two questions: Is China Communist first and Asian next? Will it guarantee the safety of the smaller Asian states ?
Nehru’s trip to China was marked by an enthusiastic welcome wherever he went. But Nehru was not deceived by this show of goodwill. He told me that for all their Communism the Chinese had not changed their traditional outlook. Their country was still the Middle Kingdom. He sensed in the protocol observed during his visit that he was treated as a visitor from an important state which paid tribute to China. That had put him on his guard. The Chinese, he added, talked little and depended on poetic allusions to drive their point home politely. “Time is on our side. They will take long to be a strong, industrial power,” was Nehru’s consoling conclusion.
Writing on 2nd November, 1954, I said: “Small nations would want India to develop strength to maintain the balance of power in Asia, meaning that India should hold China to her word.” The way newspaper reports portrayed the trip, showing Nehru had been idolised, swelled India’s pride and strengthened the “Hindi-Chini
bhai bhai (Indians and Chinese are brothers) psychology. I contributed my bit to this atmosphere by writing that the Chinese had made Nehru feel a world figure, whereas the U.S. had treated him only as Prime Minister of India in their “motorcade protocol.”
Nehru told officers of the External Affairs Ministry that the Chinese were proud of being Chinese and that one language had given them national cohesion. He tried to speak to the officers in Hindi, but desisted when he met with a chilling response.
After getting Nehru’s impressions and talking to Ministry officials, I wrote that “unless India is industrially strong and politically and socially well-knit she cannot maintain the balance of power in Asia and the Middle East. Political life will not progress unless there are 300,000 Nehrus to work at all levels; collective leadership is the way to strengthen a people’s government.”
We had a feeling of deflation when we found that the New York Times, in listing the fifty most important events in 1954., omitted Nehru s visit to China and Tito’s to India and gave credit to Britain for the Geneva agreement on Indo-China. Indeed, India did not figure at all in The Times of London, which published 237 items of global interest. Even the fact that Mrs. Pandit was the first woman diplomat at the Court of St. James’s was not mentioned.
The year ended with another blow. Peking republished old maps showing large chunks of Indian territory as Chinese. When New Delhi protested, Peking replied that the maps had not yet been revised.
(c) INDIA AND RUSSIA
The greatest factor in India’s foreign relations and internal development has been her close ties with the Soviet Union. Their origin and growth were largely the handiwork of Nehru and Khrushchev. Mrs. Pandit’s appointment as the first Indian Ambassador in Moscow pleased the Russians much as she was Nehru’s sister. She was given a standing ovation at the Bolshoi Theatre. But this feeling did not last long. In her private talks with the American and British Ambassadors, she expressed her personal views and as the Russians had bugged all the diplomatic missions they got to know of this and dropped her altogether.
Radhakrishnan, who followed Mrs. Pandit, was liked initially by the Russians because of his reputation as a philosopher and scholar. He retained his Oxford professorship and shuttled between Moscow and London. Since he kept aloof, Stalin thought well of him and granted him two interviews. This pushed up Radhakrishnan in
I.F.C.N.
Nehru’s estimation. During his tenure, New Delhi’s role in bringing about a cease-fire in Korea and in Indo-China opened Moscow’s eyes to its growing influence. Before these developments, the Russian attitude could be summed up in Vyshinsky’s remark at the U.N. when India moved her resolution on Korea: “At best, you are idealists and dreamers; at worst, you are stooges of the U.S.”
In the early years of independence the Russians persisted in believing that India was bound hand and foot to Britain and was incapable of independent action. They described Gandhi in an official encyclopedia as a reactionary and mountebank who exploited the religious sentiments of superstitious folk. The references to Nehru were also uncomplimentary. Indeed the Kremlin considered Nehru India’s Chiang Kai-shek.
On taking over in Moscow, K. P. S. Menon received a summons to call on Stalin. He cabled Nehru for instruction. He was told to explain India’s stand on Korea. I learned from Nehru that Stalin showed no interest in the explanation. He wanted the fighting to continue, for it suited him to have a direct confrontation between the U.S. and China. On one occasion when Ambassador Menon called on Stalin in his office, the master of the Kremlin did a doodle of wolves fighting. He explained to Menon: “Our peasant is simple and wise. When he sees a wolf, he shoots and kills. He does not give a lecture on morality.” Menon wrote to Nehru telling him that the time had passed when teaching philosophy could be combined with diplomacy.
The climate in Moscow towards India changed considerably after Nehru visited China in 1954 and was well received there, as films and television recordings showed. The Soviet Foreign Office immediately asked our Ambassador to get in touch with Nehru in Peking and ask him to visit Moscow on his way back to New Delhi. Nehru replied that he would visit Moscow separately and not incidentally. This pleased Moscow.
Nehru visited the Soviet Union in June 1955 and the reception he received on arrival in Moscow was unprecedented—something no visiting head of State or Government has received after him. The Russians went all out to fete Nehru. Before his arrival a special study was made of his diets and habit. Nehru travelled in an open car, something unheard of in the Soviet Union, and Bulganin and Khrushchev had to sit or stand with him in it. Thousands of roses were showered on them by the onlookers. The entire Politbureau of the Soviet Communist Party came to dine with Nehru at the Embassy. Proposing a toast, Khruschev said: “Some say Nehru is a Communist. I do not want him to be a Communist. I want Nehru to
be Nehru. So I propose a toast to Nehru.” Before the Prime Minister’s visit only a Deputy Minister attended the 15th August celebrations at the Embassy.
This visit to Russia made the West feel that it would result in relaxing tension. The feeling in India was one of exultation over the triumphant tour of their national hero. Swept along by the wave, Resident Prasad decided to bestow the highest honour, Bharat Ratna (Jewel of India), on the Prime Minister. This caused much surprise in diplomatic circles and among sophisticated Indians. Convention was disregarded and the decoration was awarded at a banquet without a citation. Some felt it was an exhibition of subservience, others thought it was degrading to national pride that a visit to a foreign country, however successful, should be so rewarded.
Prasad s explanation to me was straightforward. He said: ‘ Jawahar is literally a Bharat Ratna. Why not formally make him one ? He has laid the foundation for peace and you will see the visit will prove of historic significance.” (Not long afterwards, Nehru appeared at an official reception wearing the insignia round his neck.)
There was much excitement when it was announced that Bulganin and Khrushchev would return the visit in November. India was the first democratic state B. and K. visited. Nehru took a keen personal interest in giving the Russians a very warm welcome—and in putting India s best foot forward. The names of the main thoroughfares in the capital were changed in a bid to remove the symbols of colonialism. Kingsway was renamed Rajpath and Queensway Janpath. Khrushchev, driving down Rajpath, however, spotted the statue of King George V facing India Gate and asked why this relic was still there. The Chief of Protocol replied that this was “a part of our history,” but Khrushchev was unimpressed. (Queen Elizabeth, who visited India in 1961, was, however, greatly pleased to see her grandfather honoured. The statue was removed by Indira Gandhi in 1968 in response to popular demand.)
Indian protocol placed Bulganin above Khrushchev. This order of precedence annoyed Khrushchev who exhibited his feelings publicly by loudly remarking in Russian when Bulganin spoke at any function: “He is talking nonsense. He does not know the facts.” He would also whisper with embarrassing loudness to his colleague to stop speaking. This experience of having to play second fiddle to a figure-head seems to have taught Khrushchev a political lesson. For, after returning to Moscow he pushed Bulganin out of office and combined in himself the post of Chairman of the Council of Ministers and Secretary of the Communist Party.
B and K got receptions in Delhi and Calcutta exceeding anything before for a foreign visitor. Foreign newsmen called them Government-promoted, but the crowds which assembled at the Ramlila Grounds in New Delhi to see the visitors did not do so at the behest of the Government. There was a quiet dinner for the Russians at Nehru’s house, and according to Azad, Khrushchev said to Nehru: “We want you to be our friends, but we do not want you to give up your old friends. We are like children. We want to be friends, but if we are hated or hit we hit back.” He spoke for only five minutes, but what he said made a deep impact on his hearers.
When they visited Kashmir, Khrushchev was struck by the fact that in looks and dress the Kashmiris resembled the people of Tadzhikistan in Soviet Asia. This gave him a feeling of oneness with the Kashmiris, and in one of his not uncommon emotional outbursts he declared that if the people of Kashmir were ever in trouble all they had to do was to whistle and the Russians would come to their aid. This was interpreted in India and the world beyond as a Soviet pledge to help India militarily if Kashmir was attacked.
Dulles, with his penchant for doing the wrong thing, signed a statement with Portugal’s Foreign Minister acknowledging Goa as part of metropolitan Portugal. Sherman Cooper, who was nearest to Nehru of all the diplomats in New Delhi at the time, felt very embarrassed. He told me that Dulles had reacted unfavourably to Khrushchev’s backing of India on Kashmir and Goa. I replied that “India is not inviting the bear’s hug, but geography places Russia at shouting distance from Delhi and makes Kashmir the connecting door.”
The lessons B and K learned on their tour of India were seen at the twentieth Congress of the C.S.P.U. in Moscow at which Khrushchev said war was not inevitable, that revolution could take place without violence and that coexistence rather than subversion would be the keystone of the party’s international policy. Khrushchev saw to it that the Soviet encyclopedia described Gandhi as a great liberator. The Luxembourg Ambassador congratulated our Ambassador in Moscow on Nehru having transformed the Russian Communists. When B and K went to Geneva to meet Ike, the Russians travelled in an open car while Eisenhower moved in a bullet-proof closed car with helicopters flying overhead for added security.
China did not like the way the Russian leaders had been hailed in India and sent Madam Soong Ching Ling, the widow of Sun Yat Sen, with pledges of Chinese support against attacks on Indian sovereignty.
India and the Big Powers 225
„ In a review of 1955, I described it as “India’s year.” Besides B and K, India had high-ranking State visitors from Yugoslavia, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Burma and Indonesia. I mentioned that while Anthony Eden was personally keen to use India as a bridge with China, the British Press and diplomats were anti-Indian. The U.N. had ceased to be the handmaid of the Anglo-Americans and the Soviet had offered India massive aid for the second plan unasked.
(d) SUEZ CRISIS
Following the Franco—British attack on the Suez, the Soviet Ambassador delivered a letter from Khrushchev to Nehru saying that he was issuing an ultimatum to Britain that unless there was a cease-fire by a stipulated time he would attack that country. The threat was not taken seriously in London but Nehru was upset. He quickly drafted a reply to Khrushchev, observing that a second and bigger war was not the way to stop the first and he feared Khrushchev would precipitate a universal conflagration by his action. The letter was delivered to the Soviet Embassy, which at that time occupied Travancore House.
Around midnight, the British High Commissioner, Malcolm MacDonald, wished to see Nehru. But Nehru was infuriated at what he considered the British Government’s provocative and irresponsible action in attacking Egypt and refused to see MacDonald, turning him over to N. R. Pillai, the Secretary-General for External Affairs. MacDonald handed Pillai a message from London saying that the British troops engaged in the operations had been asked to cease hre. This was a great relief to the Indian Government, because Nehru had convinced himself that a major clash of arms could not be averted. Nehru backed Nasser to the hilt and Nasser, in turn, accepted the formula prepared by Krishna Menon regarding the Suez Canal. But the British rejected it.
Ali Yavar Jung was India’s Ambassador in Cairo at the time of the Suez crisis. His role was to support Nasser in public but restrain him in private. He found the Egyptian President a man of intelligence and common sense; but those around him indulged in bravado and bluff. The question of U.S. economic aid was under consideration. Dulles was very angry with Nasser for recognising China. He also did not like Nasser approaching the Russians for arms. U.S. Congress was against granting much economic aid to the UAR and undertaking the Aswan High Dam project.
Dulles said that Egypt, having pledged its cotton crop to Russia
for armaments, was not in a position to pay interest on U.S. investment on the dam and that Washington had decided to drop the project. At that time, Nehru halted at Cairo on his way to Brioni. Jung mentioned this matter to Nehru, who advised Nasser to avoid hasty or drastic action. Nasser promised to do so, but soon after Nehru reached India he announced nationalisation of the Suez Canal. Jung, who had gone to Beirut on holiday, rushed back to Cairo and told Nasser that this would have grave consequences and that Indian public opinion would not favour this step. Nasser did not agree. That very day Jung received a cable from Nehru asking him to tell Nasser that he had acted hastily and that public opinion in India was likely to be unfriendly. Nasser thought Jung had inspired the message!
Chapter 12
LINGUISTIC STATES
Linguistic states? Have they strengthened national unity or weakened it? These and many other questions repeatedly asked over the past many years may not perhaps have arisen but for the fact that Rajagopalachari’s Ministry in Madras after the first general election was not a happy family. His differences with T. Prakasam, popularly known as Andhra Kesari (Lion of Andhra), accentuated the clash between the Tamils and the Telegu-speaking Andhras. The Andhras now revived their demand that the Madras State, as formed by the British, be carved into two separate Tamil and Teleguspeaking states. This movement got a big fillip when a respected leader, Potti Sriramulu, undertook a fast unto death. Nehru told his Cabinet colleagues he would not be intimidated by these tactics. But when the fasting leader died and the tragedy was followed by widespread riots and destruction, Nehru yielded.
The creation of Andhra State was the signal for a demand for a Kannada-speaking state comprising old Mysore State and including areas then part of erstwhile Bombay and Hyderabad States. Nehru and his Cabinet and the Congress High Command decided to resist all attempts at further division of the states according to language.
However, when Nehru was greeted with black flags at Belgaum he sensed the danger to his position as the idol of the people and announced the formation of a Commission to study the question of reorganisation of states on a linguistic basis under the chairmanship of Fazli Ali, a judge of the Supreme Court. The inquiry created a nationwide ferment. It gave a stimulus to parochial tendencies and created fear among the nationalist-minded that the end-product would be Balkanisation of the country.
When the Fazli Ali Report was published, we expected it to be treated as an award. In fact, Devadas and I decided to make journalistic history by publishing overnight the full text of the voluminous report. Pandit Hriday Nath Kunzru, who was a member of the Commission, had told me that he agreed to join it only aftei extracting a promise from Nehru that its recommendations would be treated as an award. However, this was not to be. Nehru took counsel with Pant and Krishna Menon. Pant advised he should declare that the Government would form its own conclusions, which meant that the report would not be treated as an award. Menon told Nehru to shelve the report by circulating it for the opinion of the State Governments. Everywhere, nationalist-minded Congressmen who were opposed to linguistic states waited for word that the report would be treated as an award. They felt the country could be saved from disintegration if Nehru did this.
Nehru went by Pant’s advice. However, as Pant told me the morning after Nehru had gone on the air to broadcast his decision, Nehru had overtalked in expressing “surprise at some of the recommendations of the commission.” Menon, who knew Nehru’s mind, told me that the Prime Minister had only expressed his true feelings. He did not like the break-up of Hyderabad, which he thought was a model composite state. Pant, on the other hand, welcomed this recommendation, for it would remove Hyderabad as “a focus of Muslim power.” Pant told me he wanted to give a “decent burial” to linguism as an active political force. But Nehru and he were not operating on the same wavelength.
Pant and Azad sensed the dangers in the expectations roused by Nehru’s radio talk. Azad condemned it outright. In the light of my talk with both of them, I wrote on 25th October: “The danger is the High Command may encourage linguism up to a point where various groups begin to think and function as sub-nationalities. Such a situation would transfer the scene of regional tug-of-war to the Centre. It is only composite states that provide a safe base for a composite Union.”
The country was now in the grip of the controversy over the
Fazli Ali report. I wrote that the debate on it in Parliament had revealed “how skin-deep is the loyalty to the Congress ideology when it clashes with a regional outlook or comes in the way of personal ambition.” And, as days passed, the controversy gathered momentum. C.R. asked Nehru to shelve the report for twenty-five years and our paper advised Nehru to “debunk the one language, one state” proposal. The Chief Ministers of Bengal and Bihar offered to amalgamate their states in a bid to check “linguistic madness.” Proposals for the merger of a few other states were also mooted and it was even suggested that the country be carved out into five or six zonal administrative units. But all these remained a pious wish as the Centre did not respond favourably.
Nehru’s own attitude to implementing the recommendations in the report weakened, and when he declared that “no decision is irrevocable in democracy” he gave an opportunity to every linguistic group to get what it wanted if it could amount the necessary political pressure. Encouraged by Nehru’s attitude, the people of Maharashtra gave a keen edge to the controversy over Bombay State. They demanded that the composite state be split into separate states of Maharashtra and Gujarat. But the question arose about the future of Bombay city. I visited Bombay at the suggestion of Pant, and after talking to many prominent citizens I returned to Delhi and informed Pant that the general feeling was that Bombay should remain a composite state with the city as its capital. But if Maharashtra and Gujarat were to be separated, Bombay, which had a majority of non-Maharashtrians, should be made a Union Territory.
Pant agreed with this view and invited me to give my impressions at an informal meeting of the Congress High Command at which Nehru and Azad were present. Everyone agreed with the desire to keep Bombay a composite state and this is what the Nehru Government finally decided despite strong pressure from C. D. Deshmukh, then Finance Minister, who quit the Cabinet in protest. The Congress High Command formulated its views on other aspects of the report of the States Reorganisation Commission but did not stand up to Nehru when he kept modifying them under political pressure.
Krishna Menon told me he advised Nehru not to redraw state boundaries on the basis of language as this would lead to national disintegration. But if Nehru decided to do so, Menon advised him to divide the country into about fifty provinces or counties, as in Britain, with a central government at the apex. Alternatively, Menon suggested the creation of five presidencies. Of interest is Menon’s claim that it was he who first put forward the three-language formula in education to ensure national unity. Under the formula,
Linguistic States 3 2 g
every student is expected to learn his regional mother tongue, Hindi and English; if Hindi is his mother tongue, he learns another modern Indian language in addition.
Menon later told me that he had put forward the theorem that the more administrative power was decentralised the stronger the Centre would be. The Centre should look after defence, external affairs, communications, international trade and currency and leave the rest to the states. The Centre should collect all taxes and distribute them to the states on the basis of population, or the states could collect taxes and give a part of the collections to the Centre. The residuary powers should remain with the Centre. Menon added that he wished he had stood up to Nehru on the numerous occasions when^ this would have helped. To explain his failure to do so, he said. It is an Indian trait that when you respect a man you do not stand up to him. These reactions were given when he was a free man. He had suffered electoral defeat twice for his seat in the Lok Sabha from Bombay in 1957-60. He looked forward to his return to Parliament, if possible, with the help of Leftists in West Bengal or Kerata.
Not long afterwards, C.R. started a campaign against making Hindi the official language. Pant was disturbed because C.R. had been a strong supporter of Hindi and had even incurred unpopularity in the South by making it compulsory in schools. The volte face sounded ominous. He suggested I speak to Azad, who as Education Minister was concerned with the matter and could take it up with Nehru. Azad said at our weekly dialogue that he had already spoken to Nehru and that both of them felt that C.R. was venting his spleen at the polite rejection of the idea that C.R. be used as Government’s envoy at large. Nehru was of the opinion that Radhakrishnan was already fulfilling that role informally.
Nehru, Azad and Pant decided not to yield on the issue of making Hindi the official language. Any concession, as Azad said to me, would have been disastrous against the background of their decision to go in for linguistic states. But an unexpected controversy erupted in the Cabinet in regard to Urdu after the statutory commission on official language provided for under the Constitution had made its report and the parliamentary committee which examined the report had made its recommendations. Pant had deliberated very carefully over the report of the commission and had made four or five different drafts for every contentious paragraph in his anxiety to see that the report was accepted fully by Nehru and the rest of the Cabinet.
Nehru suddenly insisted that Urdu was the language of the people of Delhi and due recognition should be accorded. Pant disagreed and maintained that only six per cent of the Delhiwalas claimed
Urdu as their language. When Nehru retorted that Pant’s statistics were incorrect and suggested a presidential order laying down the official purposes for which Urdu should be used, Pant replied that such an order would create problems in the future, for it would be like the institution of communal electorates. These electorates were justified for the first time as a temporary measure, but they not only became permanent but led to reservations for the Muslims in the services and in other spheres. Ultimately, the principle of communal electorates ended in the country’s partition, Pant said. The use of Urdu could be very easily safeguarded by an executive order based on instructions sent by the Prime Minister to the Chief Ministers of the states concerned.
Although Nehru did not agree with this view, he did not press his own and the idea of a presidential order was dropped and a circular sent out on the subject. But Pant was most unhappy by Nehru’s exhibition of annoyance at the way in which he had handled the matter. Soon thereafter Pant suffered a heart attack. Some thought that the attack was caused by Pant’s verbal bout with Nehru. At any rate, Pant hinted to B. N. Jha, Home Secretary, that it had been caused by the strain of the work on the language issue. Officials who had worked in close co-operation with Pant on the report remarked they had never seen the Minister so visibly upset.
Pant assured me he was not against Urdu. In fact, he was “prepared to give it official recognition in Delhi and U.P. if it could be written in the Devanagari script.” He felt it would be suicidal, however, for the Muslims to keep out of the main current of Hindi and concentrate on Urdu. Since Hindi was the official language of U.P., Bihar and Delhi, it was best for the Muslims to learn it and, if they wished, Urdu too in the same script. But since Arabic, the script in which Urdu was written, was associated with religion, influential Muslim divines insisted on its use instead of Devanagari.
(If the efforts to make Hindi the national link language in practice have failed, the main blame, according to Jha, is that of Nehru and his colleagues. Two big opportunities for doing this presented themselves, the first of which was the Chief Ministers’ Conference in June 1961 attended by all the Union Cabinet Ministers. A note from President Prasad recommending the Devanagari script for all the Indian languages had been circulated and Jha suggested that Jivraj Mehta, the Chief Minister of Gujarat, propose its acceptance at the conference, but Pattom Thanu Pillai from Kerala offered to do it instead. The only dissenting voice was that of Humayun Kabir, the Education Minister, who favoured the Roman script. But the decision on Devanagari was not implemented. The second oppor
tunity came at a Cabinet meeting at which proposals based on the parliamentary committee’s report were put up by Pant. Nehru reacted violently saying: “What is all this nonsense ? It is not possible to have scientific and technological terms in Hindi.” The proposal did not lefer to this subject at all, but Nehru was expressing his dislike of Hindi.) b
Chapter 13
PRESIDENT AND PRIME MINISTER
(a) CONSTANT FRICTION
The Constitution has defined the powers of the President of the Republic as head of State and in relation to the Prime Minister. But the written word is not enough to ensure harmony in thought and deed between the two. Mutual sympathy and understanding and a sense of comradeship are required. Between President Rajendra Prasad and Prime Minister Nehru, who had shared the sufferings and the glory of fighting for freedom under Gandhi, one sensed constant friction. Fortunately, this was not permitted to erupt into the open. The President, for his part, was not sure whether he could successfully make a public issue of their differences. As for Nehru, his concern for the proprieties of public conduct inclined him to a similar course.
Nevertheless, it was no secret to knowledgeable people in Delhi that Nehru looked upon Prasad as a “revivalist.” Nehru’s rift with Prasad began in the mid-thirties, when he, along with Patel, C.R. and Kripalani disowned Nehru’s creed of Socialism. It took a sharp edge when in 1950 Prasad decided to visit Kutch for the ceremonies connected with the reconstruction of the historic Somnath temple, destroyed and looted in tenth century A.D. by Mahmud of Ghazni, a northern invader from across the Khyber Pass. Nehru opposed the visit on the ground that it was not politic for the head of a secular state to associate himself with “religious revivalism” of this kind. Prasad did not agree and pointed to the significance of Somnath as the symbol of national resistance to an invader. “I believe in my religion,” he added, “and I cannot cut myself away from it.” I watched the impressive ceremony in the company of Patel and the
332 The Nehru Era
Jam Saheb of Nawanagar. In his anger at Prasad’s “defiance” of his wishes, Nehru told the Information Ministry not to issue the speech Prasad made at the ceremony as an official handout.
Prasad had legal talents of a high order and would have been a judge of a High Court in the early twenties if he had not joined Gandhi’s movement. He presided over the Constituent Assembly with marked ability, invariably bending his energies towards giving India a sound, workable Constitution. Soon after assuming the presidentship of the Republic, he raised three points of constitutional importance in relation to his powers and those of the State Governors. Prasad said he had power to withhold assent to Bills in his discretion, dismiss a Ministry or Minister and order a general election and as the Supreme Commander of the Defence Forces send for the military chiefs and ask for information about defence matters.
Nehru sought the advice of the Attorney-General, M. C. Setalvad, who held that the President could not withhold assent to Bills but, like a constitutional monarch, he could exert his influence in other ways. Secondly, he could not dismiss a Minister but he could get rid of a Ministry and order elections. The power to hold elections in his own discretion was not according to the letter of the law but could be exercised as a reserve power if the President felt strongly that Parliament did not reflect the political balance in the country. The President could not send for the Service Chiefs but he could send for the Defence Minister and direct him to make inquiries.
Setalvad further held that the President, being a constitutional head, should avoid speeches which ran counter to Government policy and might embarrass the Ministry. Of course, when the Ministry was mismanaging affairs there was some justification for public expressions of presidential disapproval. (Presumably, Radhakrishnan’s Republic Day broadcast in 1967, which Congressmen described as a parting kick, fell within this category. He said: “The feeling should not be encouraged that no change can be brought about, except by violent disorders. We make the prospect of revolution inescapable by acquiescing in such conduct. As dishonesty creeps into every side of public life, we should beware and bring about suitable alterations in our life.”)
Then came the clash over the Hindu Code Bill. Prasad did not oppose the measure but argued that it should not be enacted and his assent sought until the issues involved had been submitted to the verdict of the people. He said he had discussed the Bill threadbare with more than half the M.P.’s and had discovered that the majority of them supported his views. Nehru was riled; he appeared to agree
with Law Minister Ambedkar, who had fathered the Bill, that the President was “reactionary,” but there was nothing he could do in the face of Prasad’s determined stand. When the Bill came before Parliament after the general election, Prasad supported the measure, examined its draft and made no attempt to tone it down.
Nehru resented Prasad s decision to go to Bombay for Patel’s funeral. But he reacted more strongly when late in 1952 Prasad washed the feet of pundits as a token of homage on a visit to Banaras. To Nehru’s angry protest, Prasad’s rejoinder was that even the highest in the land was lowly in the presence of a scholar. As between the two, the general sentiment among Hindus supported the President’s stand. However, all these incidents, coming one after the other, cooled relations between the two to a point where the Piime Minister’s contact with the President got limited to the bare requirements of protocol and propriety and Nehru started leaning more and more towards Radhakrishnan, the then VicePresident.
(b) prasad’s second term
There was high drama behind the scenes before Prasad got his second term as President. Nineteen fifty-six was drawing to a close when suddenly three of my rival columnists, two in Delhi and the third in Calcutta, started advocating out of the blue a case for a South Indian as President. Suspecting some deeper design, I sought from Home Minister Pant his comment on the writings. Pant replied that Nehru did not want Prasad for a second term and had Radhakrishnan in mind for the job. Radhakrishnan himself was getting old as was not interested in a second term as Vice-President. Nehru, he added, had had a word with Prasad but the latter had replied that he was in the hands of the party.
I called on Azad for our usual get-together on Sunday morning and told him about what had appeared in the newspapers and Pant’s comments on it. I asked him his own view and he warmly replied: “Of course, I want Rajenbabu to continue for a second term. But, what is his own feeling? Is Prasad willing to continue?” Azad then suggested that I call on Prasad and find out. When I asked Prasad whether he had agreed to retire or whether he would be available for another term he replied he would be guided in the matter by the wishes of the High Command, meaning that he would go by whatever Nehru and Azad wanted.
I told Azad what Prasad had said to me and it was decided that he should take the earliest opportunity to call on him. Azad did
this a couple of days later and informally obtained his consent for a second term during a walk in the famous Mughal Gardens of the President’s House. I announced this in my next Political Diary which appeared on 18th December, 1956* I n fact, I opened the weekly column with the words: “Dr. Rajendra Prasad has agreed to seek re-election as Union President. This puts an end to speculation on the subject. The Congress High Command, it is said, conveyed its wishes some time ago through Maulana Azad. . . .
The disclosure came as a bombshell to those that were trying to build up Radhakrishnan for Presidentship. A telephone call followed from the Prime Minister’s house. Nehru wanted to see me. When I called Nehru inquired how I had come to say that the High Command had decided on Prasad. I told him frankly that Azad had told me he had spoken to Prasad and that the latter had agreed. “You know Panditji, I see him regularly, every Sunday,” I added. Nehru replied: “Yes, I know,” and I took leave.
The story did not, however, end at that. Now it became a battle of the columnists, my rivals plugging in the view that the High Command had not yet decided finally on the question. Nehru could not take this line in view of Azad’s firm stand and the enthusiastic approval with which leading M.P.’s and other members of the electoral college hailed the disclosure in my Diary. Nehru then called on Prasad and suggested that he could retire after doing half the term and added that Azad had persuaded Radhakrishnan to continue as Vice-President with great difficulty. Prasad replied he would go by his health and might not do the full term. Nehru’s expectations were, however, not fulfilled and Radhakrishnan had to wait five full years before he could occupy Rashtrapati Bhavan as had been promised.
After Prasad was re-elected for the second term, I learnt that Nehru had spared no effort to get Radhakrishnan as President. He had had a private meeting with the Chief Ministers of the four southern states and told them informally that he would prefer a South Indian as President because a North Indian had held the post for a whole term. The Chief Ministers, as one of them confided to me, told Nehru that they were not concerned with regional considerations and were of the view that Prasad should be re-elected if he was available. They also did not accept the view that Prasad had already had “more than one term” in view of his election as President in 1950.
Although Pant enjoyed Nehru’s confidence and was utterly loyal to him, he and Prasad thought alike on national language and culture. Indeed, Prasad often shared with Pant his inner feelings on
matters on which he differed with Nehru. It was my practice to call on Pant twice a week and share morning tea with him. He was happy, he told me at one of these meetings, at the turn of events which had led to another term of presidentship for Prasad. I asked him why Nehru had attempted to dislodge Prasad. Pant replied that a group of “courtiers” had been poisoning Nehru’s mind about the possibility of Prasad staging a coup with the help of the R.S.S. and the Jana Sangh. Nehru wanted both the President and the Vice-President to be “colourless” politically but (like Radhakrishnan) to command respect by their erudition and standing in the community.
(c) THE GAP WIDENS
Nehru seemed to treat every proposal for a presidential tour abroad with reserve, apparently feeling that Prasad did not project the image of a modern secular India. In the first term, he agreed to his visiting only the Hindu Kingdom of Nepal in 1955. Reluctantly, Nehru agreed to Prasad’s visit to Japan in 1958 and thereafter to some South-East Asian countries. The visit was a grand success everywheie. In Japan, at the Emperor’s banquet only vegetarian dishes were served as a symbol of the reverence in which we hold President Prasad.” At lunch in Hanoi on the day of the Indian festival of Holi, to celebrate Spring, Ho Chi-minh suddenly rose, smeared Prasad’s face with gulal (coloured powder) and embraced him warmly, exclaiming: “We do not differentiate: we follow India.” In Ceylon, Prime Minister Bandaranaike told him: “India is our mother country; there can be no dispute between brothers.”
Soon after his return from a visit to India in 1959, Eisenhower sent a pressing invitation to Prasad to visit the U.S. before he laid his office. He had described Prasad in Delhi as “God’s good man” and was keen to take him personally around the country. But between Nehru and the External Affairs Ministry, the proposal was killed. While the Ministry felt the time was not opportune, Nehru went on record to observe: “So many of us have been to America that it does not seem necessary for you to visit the U.S. immediately.” The President replied: “I will choose my own time.” It was not much different when Queen Elizabeth, during her State visit to India in 1961, urged Prasad to visit Britain in return.
Prasad told me that Nehru studiously excluded foreign affairs from the scope of his talks with him, and even discouraged him from serious discussions with foreign dignitaries visiting India. Prasad’s visit to the Soviet Union in i960 demonstrated, however,
336 The Nehru Era
that his presence abroad could benefit India. Prasad avoided talks on foreign policy, but made an intensive and fruitful study of the Soviet educational system, of the country’s agricultural development and of the manner in which the Russians had resolved the problem of a national language. He produced a twenty-page note for the Cabinet on language based on the lessons he had gleaned from his Russian visit.
The President was a man of erudition and had a firm grasp of national problems. He often showed me letters and notes he had written to Nehru on a wide variety of subjects, political, social and economic. He did this because he could not speak freely in Nehru’s presence. He avoided a dialogue. He appeared to suffer from an inferiority, even fear, complex in the presence of Nehru. Whenever I urged him to convert his meetings with Nehru into a dialogue, he would say that would inevitably lead to disagreement and passionate argument.
The note to Nehru on corruption was perhaps the strongest Prasad ever penned. Corruption, he said, “will verily prove a nail in the coffin of the Congress.” Prasad strongly supported C. D. Deshmukh’s proposal for a tribunal or an Ombudsman, directly under the President or as an independent authority to inquire into charges of corruption and maladministration. Nehru did not reply to the note in writing; instead, he complained to Prasad personally about what he called “an unfriendly suggestion.” Prasad told me he was deeply hurt at this misinterpretation of his motives and abjured Nehru to look into the future and see whether such measures were not necessary.
Prasad told me soon after the publication of the report of the States Reorganisation Commission that it should have been accepted as an award and faithfully implemented. But when the report was modified he felt that the State of Bombay could not be preserved for long as a bilingual unit. He was far from happy at the creation of Kerala; he felt it was much too small to exist separately. On Kashmir Prasad was all for the full integration of the state in the Indian Union. In his eyes, the special status accorded to Kashmir was hardly in tune with the realities of the situation.
Prasad was particularly concerned about Centre-states relations. “Do not interfere needlessly with the affairs of the states,” he told the Prime Minister. “Learn to leave them to their own devices.” Of his opposition to the agitation to suppress the Communist regime in Kerala in i960, he made no secret. He said he had tried to dissuade Indira Gandhi, the Congress President, from heading the liberation movement. “Do not act in this way,” he told her. “It will set a bad
President and Prime Minister 337
precedent. Asked later about this admonition, Mrs. Gandhi said she did not remember having had a talk with Prasad on this subject.
Prasad felt very strongly that India’s diplomatic approach to China was riddled with weaknesses and a proneness to wishful thinking. The Hindi—Chini bhai bhai (Indians and Chinese are brothers) honeymoon,” he told me, did not blind him to Peking’s ultimate aims and real feelings towards India. He was greatly upset at the Indian Government’s impassivity when Tibet was occupied by the Chinese Reds. His words of caution to Nehru, he said, had fallen on deaf ears. The Prime Minister had been misled by his Ambassador in Peking, Panikkar. With his eyes moistened, Prasad observed: I hope I am not seeing ghosts and phantoms, but I see the murder of Tibet recoiling on India.”
I recall with interest my talk with the President after Sanjiva Reddy, (now Speaker of Lok Sabha) presiding at the Bhavanagar session of the Congress, suggested that those who had held office for ten years should voluntarily retire. When I asked Prasad for his reaction to this proposal, he remarked: “It is very interesting, I am all for it. But what will Nehru do?” He confided that had Nehru resigned in fact, he would have grown in stature and helped the nation grow in the same manner. (Those close to Nehru, in turn, asked: “What will Prasad do?”)
(d) NEW IDEAS
The President had strong grounds for complaint against the Prime Minister, for he often read of appointments of Ambassadors and Governors in the Press and was officially informed only afterwards. As a result of Prasad’s spirited protest against being overlooked, an order was passed by the Cabinet stipulating that all the papers relating to the appointment of Governors, Ambassadors, the Chairman of the Union Public Service Commission, the Auditor-General, and Secretaries to the Ministries be submitted to him before orders were issued.
Prasad took umbrage at being kept in the dark about the crisis precipitated by the resignation of General Thimayya, the Chief of Army Staff. This, he held, was a violation of his authority as Supreme Commander of the Defence Services. Krishna Menon, reprimanded for the lapse, had to apologise. Later, Prasad remonstrated with Nehru: “You are laying down bad precedents. A President who did not like you could have given you a lot of trouble.” The President was getting new ideas about his constitutional role and powers.
I.F.C.N.
Y
Nehru’s fears seemed to be strengthened when in an address to the Law Institute on the eve of quitting his office, Prasad suggested that legal experts study the presidential powers under the Constitution. Underlying the proposal was the President’s reluctance to equate his position with that of the British monarchy and his anxiety that, as a matter of courtesy, wholesome conventions should be established in this regard.
Prasad told me that Nehru had met him and complained that his remarks at the Law Institute were not calculated to promote the national interest and that he had apparently been misled by K. M. Munshi. Prasad explained that Munshi had no hand in the affair, that the kind of study he had in mind was essential “while we are still a young republic,” and that he could think of no better body than the Law Institute to undertake it. One result of Nehru’s reaction was that Prasad’s speech was not issued to the Press. But the Constitutional issue became alive in 1969 with the possibility of an unstable Centre judging by the trend of the mid-term poll.
Ten months before Prasad retired from the presidentship of the Republic on 13th May, 1962, he fell gravely ill and was moved to a private nursing home. Nehru feared he would not survive and ordered arrangements for a State funeral and for swearing in his temporary successor. While this was being rehearsed, Nehru’s mind was exercised about where Prasad was to be cremated. He did not want the ceremony to be performed next to Rajghat, Gandhi’s cremation ground, but he feared that M.P.s from Bihar, Prasad’s home state, would insist that this site be chosen. He accordingly asked Home Minister Shastri to find a place as far from Rajghat as possible. This was a very delicate mission and had to be performed secretly. Shastri, accompanied by the Chief Commissioner of Delhi, Bhagwan Sahay, was driven by the Deputy Commissioner, Sushital Banerji, along the banks of Jumna, and chose a spot a couple of furlongs from Rajghat for the cremation.
Fortunately, Prasad survived the illness. The spot Shastri selected for the President’s cremation was used to cremate Shastri in 1966 and became known as Vijayghat (Victory Mausoleum). Nehru was cremated on the plot of land adjacent to Rajghat, and is called Shantivan (Abode of Peace).
After his retirement, Prasad was preparing material for a book covering the period of his presidentship. But it could not be completed before death struck him down. He died in Patna on 28th February, 1963, in the special cottage built for him next to Sadaqat Ashram (Abode of Truth) on the banks of the Ganga. The Ashram was his headquarters during the freedom struggle. When the news
came to Delhi, Nehru told Radhakrishnan that he was going to Rajasthan to collect money for the Prime Minister’s Relief Fund and would not be able to attend the former President’s funeral in Patna. He added: “I do not see any reason for you to go.” Radhakrishnan replied: “No, I think I must go and attend the funeral. That respect is due to him and must be paid. I think you should give up your tour and come with me.” But Nehru stuck to his programme.
Chapter 14
ROUND THE WORLD
(a) EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
Early in August 1957, I had just checked out of a hotel in Vienna and my baggage had been put in a car to take me to the airport to catch a flight to Budapest. As I was entering the car, a hotel page rushed out saying there was a long-distance call for me. I went back to the hotel, and to my great surprise I found my eldest son, Inder Jit, at the other end. For an instant I felt shaken, for I guessed there would only be bad news. He apprised me of Devadas Gandhi’s sudden death of heart failure in Bombay. His voice was so distinct that I could hardly believe I was talking to Delhi. I told him the news was too shocking for words and that I would cancel my tour and return home by the fastest route.
It took me six hours to cancel the flight, explain to Hungarian and Russian officials in Vienna why I had to change my plans, and find a seat on a plane to London. I was received there by Gunther Stein, our London correspondent, who took me to his house. I put through a call to Delhi and I gathered that the juniormost assistant editor had been made acting editor, superseding four others. I could not divine the meaning of this development, except that this particular person might have been recommended by C.R. or by T.T.K. as he enjoyed their confidence.
Anyway, speculation was beside the point. It seemed like a palace coup, and I had to sort things out back at home without delay. I decided to fly to Bombay and meet the paper’s proprietor, G. D. Birla. I landed in Bombay and went straight to Birla House, which had always hosted me over the years. I first called on R. D. Birla,
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340
G.D.’s elder brother, and found G.R. having an intimate talk with him. Apparently, he was concerned with financial support for Devadas’s widow and the education of her children. It was probably at this meeting that the Birlas generously agreed to provide free quarters and other perquisites for a decade.
I then proceeded to G.D’s room. He was very cordial, and as was his wont came straight to the point. We had a heart to heart talk. I returned to Delhi, and three days later came a call from Birla House. When I drove there, I was handed a letter of appointment as Editor-in-Chief. The appointment was duly announced in the paper the following morning. I took counsel with the Birlas and decided to resume my tour, for it had been planned very carefully to have a close-up of the two Super Powers and to assess the views in world capitals of developments in India. The series of articles I wrote after the tour were published as a book by the Hindustan Times with the title India and the World with a foreword by President Prasad.
The trip lasted 100 days from August to November and enabled me to see Vienna, Prague, Moscow, Leningrad, Tiflis, Paris, London, New York, Washington, Puerto Rico, Columbus, Chicago, Minneapolis, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Honolulu, Tokyo, Hongkong, Manila and Bangkok. Earlier, for thirty-one days in April and May, I had covered Australia, Malaya, Singapore and Ceylon, and gathered interesting impressions.
As I entered Hotel Australia in Sydney, I found a large world map on the wall of the entrance hall displaying clocks showing the time in Rome, Paris, London and New York. This was proof enough of Australia’s material and spiritual links. The ruling Liberal-Country Party coalition with Menzies at its head was pro-Pakistan, but its Minister for External Affairs, Richard Casey, later GovernorGeneral, was not only sympathetic to India but had the singular distinction among members of the Government of believing that Australia’s future was tied to Asia’s. The Labour Party leader also told me that his party “understands Nehru’s policy and will make friends with Asian countries.”
(b) HARK BACK TO BANDUNG
Premier Bolte of Victoria urged young Australian men and women to “marry young and rear larger families.” Here was a paradox: overpopulated Asia trying to curb births while underpopulated Australia—with some twelve million people spread over more than two million square miles—encouraging them. Asians think, I said at
a gathering, that the Australian continent could hold 1,000 million people. This frightened my audience, for the Australians traditionally sense danger from “the people up north.” I left Australia with the feeling that it was standing at the crossroads and that its empty spaces were a challenge to the conscience of man.
India s relations with Indonesia since independence had undergone some strange changes by 1957. They began with effusive demonstrations of gratitude for India’s help in winning freedom for Indonesia. Sukarno did not make a speech without referring to Gandhi and Nehru. By 1957, Sukarno had begun to dream he was Nehru’s equal, or even his superior as the hero of Bandung. The board outside the Prime Minister’s office in Jakarta read “Pradhan Mantri”—what we call our Prime Minister in India—and I was happy at the living proof of the cultural ties between India and Indonesia. In my talks with Sukarno, however, I sensed a tenseness in his reference to India and the economic stranglehold of the Chinese on his country.
I gathered some interesting details of the happenings at the Bandung Conference, the highwater-mark of relations between India and Indonesia. At it, Sukarno described India as his country’s window on the world.” A member of the Indian delegation wrote the speech with which Sukarno inaugurated the conference. Nehru, playing the role of master of ceremonies, introduced Chou-En-lai on the Afro-Asian stage at Bandung. He made Chou acceptable to Nasser and the other leaders of the emergent world. The Turkish delegate would not, however, attend a banquet to Chou. Nehru had a trunk call put through to Ankara to ensure that he did so. In spite of all these efforts, Chou exhibited displeasure because he felt that Nehru was patronising him. From Bandung, the Chinese made special efforts to cultivate Indonesia and flattered Sukarno lavishly. India’s Ambassadors could not counter this development, and relations between New Delhi and Jakarta deteriorated in direct proportion to the improvement of those between Jakarta and Peking. The seeds of China’s subsequent friendship with Pakistan were also sown at Bandung.
Malaya, I found a nation in the making, Ceylon a nation in ferment and Singapore with a big question mark over its future. The only difference between the pre-independence scene in India and Malaya was that whereas British Civil Servants had treated their exit from India as a scuttling operation, those in Malaya were co-operating heartily in helping the country stand on its own feet. This was under the inspiration of Malcolm MacDonald, the British Commissioner for the area.
A talk with the Prime Minister of Thailand was very revealing. He complained that Nehru had characterised the Thai Government as corrupt and said the country had a “Coca-Cola economy.” Thailand, the Prime Minister explained to me, had a long tradition of independence, and if she had taken shelter under the U.S. umbrella it had done so to safeguard her independence. If Nehru was willing to underwrite their security, the Thais would prefer to be with India since Thai culture was predominantly Indian. When I suggested that a visit by the King and the Prime Minister to India would improve matters, he replied that their very experienced Ambassador in New Delhi had warned them against inviting an insult by undertaking such a visit. They treated their ruler as a demi-god, and he would not go to India unless assured of a cordial welcome.
(c) STATE WITHOUT TENSION
My first visit to Russia gave me a pleasant surprise. The Russians had achieved social and economic equilibrium. Their main thoughts were of better housing and more consumer goods. The first successful test of an intercontinental ballistic missile, news of which came as a flash when I was talking to the Editor-in-Chief of Pravda, seemed to make every Russian feel they had arrived militarily. “We can relax now,” said the Editor. “War is ruled out. Now we join issue in the race in science and technology.” I did not realise the significance of this remark until the first Sputnik went up into space when I was in the U.S. later in the year.
Accidentally, the most rewarding moment I had in Moscow took place at a diplomatic reception at which I was introduced by our Minister to Khrushchev, who recalled having answered my questions at a Press conference in Delhi. “We have a common enemy, sir,” I said. Taken by surprise, he responded: “That is a profound observation.” I added: “We total 700 million.” He advanced his hand and shook mine warmly. I knew then that Khrushchev considered China the real enemy and that the Kremlin’s interest in India was more an insurance against China than a factor in the cold war.
On further inquiry, I found that Moscow and Peking had quarrelled over Outer Mongolia. China wanted to divide the territory, but the Russians would not agree. The Russians sensed the Chinese intentions when they published old maps showing large chunks of Russian territory as their own. I wanted to check on this, and accordingly raised the issue at a dinner my host, the Editor-in-Chief
of Iyvestia, gave me. I told him Nehru had said after his visit to Peking that he had failed to reach Mao’s heart and did not know what Mao was thinking. Nehru had added: “It is not the same with the Russians. You meet them and you know they are like you. But not Mao, and I suppose Chinese generally.” My host’s face lit up when he heard this, and he poured another drink to Indo-Soviet friendship. That was more eloquent than words.
A short stay in Prague made me feel that the Czechs were not quite happy with their fate but realised the need for remaining under the Russian umbrella for security. Their spokesme n complained that India had not shown interest in their offer to supply arms when Defence Organisation Minister Mahavir Tyagi visited Prague. \ ou will need them one day,” they said. The Czechs were even prepared to establish factories for manufacturing arms. India did not take advantage of the offer because Indian military officers were accustomed to British weapons. Nehru too was pro-British in this matter and considered Mountbatten a guide.
My wife joined me in London. My visit to Britain was aimed at discovering whether Britain was interested in the Commonwealth developing and functioning as a positive world force. I met Premier Macmillan at 10 Downing Street and started the conversation by saying that India was looking forward to a visit by the Queen. He said he had not heard from Nehru on this matter. I had met Nehru before I set out on my travels and had asked him about it. He had replied: “I would like to invite her, but I cannot take the risk of some Communist creating trouble. The monarchy is held sacrosanct in Britain and I have to make sure that nothing unpleasant will happen. I suppose it will come about in due course.”
I told Macmillan that Nehru had joined the Commonwealth because he believed it could develop as a force for peace—a cushion between the two giants engaged in the cold war. We in India, I added, thought Britain was falling between two stools, the Commonwealth and the European Common Market. Macmillan replied that the Commonwealth concept would be invested with reality by setting up consultative machinery. I mentioned that I had learned in my talks with British bankers and industrialists that they were willing to invest in India, but the politicians got in the way. Macmillan expressed surprise at this statement and promised to look into the matter.
Hugh Gaitskell, the Leader of the Opposition, was more forthright. He said the Conservatives were “congenitally anti-India” and only Labour could give meaning to the new Commonwealth concept. But I took Macmillan at his word and wrote in my articles on
the tour: “Maybe that in turning to the wider vision of the Commonwealth Mr. Macmillan is trying to assess the chances of the Commonwealth developing into a positive force for peace.”
Many Britons asked me: “After Nehru, what? Why does Nehru moralise? Isn’t your five-year plan over-ambitious?” Somehow, the question of the Commonwealth did not register either with politicians or journalists. I told them that Russia was a union of nations of different races, colour and languages. So was the Commonwealth. Russia was building up the economies of all her component units. She would match the economic strength of the West in ten years. The stock answer I got was that Russia could exploit people and impose sacrifices on them while democratic Britons were engaged in a spending spree.
(d) MEETING WITH IKE
I arrived in the U.S. in September and met President Eisenhower. A problem I had not anticipated was created by the fact that my stay in Washington coincided with the visit of Queen Elizabeth and Eisenhower was not free to receive other visitors. After the Queen left, he had many other urgent matters to attend to, and Governor Sherman Adams had said I should visit San Francisco and fly back after a few days for an interview with the President. This was not possible because my schedule of appointments included one with the Japanese Prime Minister. On the last day of my stay in Washington, I had a flash of inspiration. Sherman Cooper had a pull with Eisenhower and I spoke to him about an interview. He drove straight to the White House and I had my meeting.
Apparently, the appointment was so unexpected that the White House Press corps reported it, and my youngest son, Brahma Jeet, undergoing training in business management in Los Angeles, heard about it in a radio news bulletin. I gave Eisenhower my impressions of the Russian scene. I told him that in my view the Russians were interested in peaceful coexistence, that they would not attempt to subvert non-Communist regimes and were thinking of peaceful competition in science and technology. I told him that the real state of affairs in Russia was not reflected in the U.S. Press. He said that in the U.S. any idea must be sold to the Press and to the Congress. He suggested that I write an article on my Russian impressions for the New York Herald Tribune , which published it on 20th October, 1967.
I was happy that my visit to Washington took place at the same time as that of the Queen because this enabled me to attend the
Round the World ^
National Press Club reception to her. More than a thousand guests
K U ffl Ue< iV iP t0 be mtroduced to her - 1 was the only Indian, and, baffled by my presence, the club president introduced me with these words: lour Majesty, this is one of your subjects.” Prince Philip who was standing nearby, realised the gaffe and tried to make amends by asking: “How are Delhi and Prime Minister Nehru?”
replied: £ A 11 of us are looking forward to Her Majesty’s visit.” Overhearing my remark, the Queen gave a charming smile.
The Russian Sputnik went up and I felt the wave of fear that swept ordinary American citizens. It seemed that the American fortress had become vulnerable even more than to the I.G.B.M. But my talks with General Maxwell Taylor and General Powell at Fort Benning showed that they took the Russian achievement in their stiide. The American striking power, they said to me, was “overwhelming.” The Soviet Foreign Minister, Andrei Gromyko, whom I met m New York in October, tersely remarked that the satellite’s lelease could help to put the brains of some people right.”
The visit to Japan was of the greatest interest because I had worked out in my mind a security arch with Tokyo as a peg at one end and Delhi at the other with Canberra in between. This was not the whole picture so far as India was concerned, for, as I hinted in my talk with Khrushchev, I considered a Delhi—Moscow axis as the continuation of this arch. But in my talks with leading Americans I had emphasised the gravitational pull Tokyo-Canberra-Delhi could provide to counter that of the Communist world.
\\ hen I sent a printed copy of my articles to Hubert Humphrey, then a Senator, he wrote back: “Your views are refreshing and stimulating to me. I wish some other people I know who fly round the world—including our Secretary of State—were as observing and sensitive to what they see and hear as you have been. I was particularly impressed with your description of what you called the gravitational pull’ which the Soviet Union and China are exerting.
I like this phrase, and I remember it from our conversation. I think it expresses a concept which, more often than not, is simply missed in public understanding here in the United States.”
I discovered from my talks with Prime Minister Kishi, Foreign Adinister Fujiyama, our Ambassador in Japan, C. S. Jha and Japanese businessmen and journalists that Indo-Japanese relations had been stabilised as a result of Nehru’s visit, which had preceded mine. Until 1957, there had been no dialogue between Delhi and Tokyo because Nehru treated Japan as a “lackey” of the U.S. Nehru’s visit was the first by a foreign head of government after the
end of the Second World War and it revived among Japanese citizens the memory ofjustice Radhe Binod Pal’s judgment absolving their leaders of war crimes and of Nehru’s double gesture in waiving war reparations and not signing the San Francisco treaty.
Nehru’s talk with Kishi resulted in the Japanese Government instructing its representatives at the U.N. to work in harmony with the Indian representative and in an offer of a yen credit worth fifty million dollars in response to Nehru’s remark that there was no reason why the economies of India and Japan should not be dovetailed. The proposed collaboration at the U.N., however, did not come through. The Japanese representative Matsushima went to Krishna Menon and told him that he had received instructions from Tokyo to collaborate with India. Matsushima said Menon “shooed me off,” remarking that the policies of India and Japan were so different that collaboration was out of the question.
Chapter ij
X-RAYING THE NATION
In the early part of 1958, when India had completed a decade of independence, I invited articles for the editorial page of the Hindustan Times on the political health of the nation. This was more than the annual stocktaking to which Indian newspapers are accustomed. Individuals, each distinguished in his own sphere, analysed social, economic, political and cultural affairs to discover whether India had grown in strength since freedom or had developed symptoms of some serious illness.
The new feature was called “X-raying the Nation” and the response was rewarding. Rajagopalachari provided the curtainraiser. He wrote: “Instead of traditional loyalties and bonds of duty to one another, we have ill-will and unwillingness to co-operate, a feeling that work is tyranny and idleness is happiness. Political emancipation and democracy, instead of cultivating a sense of humility and responsibility, have been allowed to intoxicate majority caste groups with a thirst for power and tyranny and electoral corruption of the unprivileged classes.”
The views expressed by contributors to the series on our economic policies were no less harsh. Of planning, John Matthai said he saw
intractable proof of the growing gulf between resources and targets and the spirit of individual initiative and enterprise “kept in check by ill-conceived fiscal and executive measures.” Matthai went on to say: “The momentum created in the earlier years of independence is subsiding and giving way to a spirit of passive acceptance of the inevitable. We seem to be at the beginning of a period of mental stagnation and lack of purposeful activity. Respect for law is gradually diminishing, and the sense of unity which filled us in the first flush of fulfilled nationalism is disappearing.” r On the psychological plane, Mrs. Lakshmi Menon, Minister of e>tate for External Affairs and a former President of All-India Women’s Conference, wrote with wit and vigour. She exposed the Indian weakness for moral posturing and false thinking, particularly m relation to the rest of the world. Her basic theme was: “We fail to realise that our external influence depends steadily on our internal strength.” Sim remarked ruefully: “Often in our anxiety to go foiwaid by taking long strides to help others, we fail to notice how slippery the ground under our feet is.”
An Old Stager and “a Civil Servant,” both administrators of very high calibre, were at pains to study the administrative machine since the advent of freedom. The former saw a “drift towards administi ative chaos and traced it to the lack of inner discipline and of moral and civic consciousness. The latter’s stress was all on the need for an independent, efficient and fearless Civil Service to buttress a democratic society. The blame for the present state of affairs, he felt, rested with the ruling politicians who did not scruple to abuse the administrative machinery.
In retrospect, this exercise in self-analysis yielded much that was worthwhile. Many of the conclusions are valid even today. Certain evils then dimly foreseen have now assumed frightening proportions. Men endowed with perspicacity saw even further ahead, to the eclipse of the Congress in more than half the states of the Indian Union. Writing in the Hindustan Times of 1st January, 1959, on Where and How We Go?, I observed that “India, having had the advantage of Gandhij i’s leadership and the influence and authority of Nehru and of the Congress Party, has fared better than Pakistan. However, this country, too, is showing historic tensions. Tribalism, by whatever name it may be called—communalism, linguism, regionalism, clanism, casteism—is trying to assert itself against the forces of nationalism. . . . The alternative of nationalism is not tribalism but disintegration followed by totalitarianism, whether of the fascist or communist brand.”
Contrasting the varying attitudes of the U.S., the Soviet Union
and Pakistan to India, I said: “America’s own security and economic prosperity depend, in the long run, on the uplift of the underdeveloped and undeveloped peoples and a political alliance with their governments. Washington is thus prepared to underwrite India’s economic plans and help her with knowhow to enable her to become a reservoir from which the smaller nations of Asia and Africa can draw guidance and help. . . . Moscow is in equally desperate need of partnership with India in stabilising communist economy and polity. It calculates that 400 million Indians, combined with 200 million Russians, would balance 600 million Chinese and prevent the Communist world from going under Peking’s hegemony. . . . Karachi calculates that the Indian leadership is suffering from so many inhibitions and complexes that it will not choose its s:de and cash in on the advantage which the cold war has created for her and that the Pakistanis should keep their powder dry for their opportunity when Mr. Nehru is no more on the scene.”
Discussing the various remedies prescribed for India’s ills, I wrote: “On the political plane there are advocates of the American presidential system as the most suited to Indian conditions, and of a benevolent dictatorship as the system more suited to the Indian genius. The fact is that no remedy is worth considering while the patient refuses to take any medicine. The people of India are as fit as those of any country for democratic self-government, but the Congress rulers have allowed themselves to be mesmerised by the ballot box. Their thinking has been paralysed by fear of the voters’ reaction. . . . The obvious remedy is that a brains trust should make up its mind to rule the country in a purposeful way and tone up the administration to make it perform its legitimate functions. The Centre’s authority, which has been continuously weakened by placing increasing reliance on subedars (provincial Chief Ministers), must be restored and corruption and inefficiency, which have set in because of the lapses of the people at the top, eliminated.”
Next to the Army, the Railways used to be the most disciplined entity in India. Their management by a board comprising experts is subject to the control and direction of the Union Minister for Railways. A very senior official’s experience of how this Ministry was run and how demoralisation had set in illustrates what has happened in other Ministries as well in the past two decades.
The first Railway Minister was John Matthai. He did a remarkable job in two respects. With the backing of Patel, he told the British Chief Commissioner of Railways that his services were no longer required. The Britons in the ICS and other services had left, but those in the railways had stayed on. Matthai thus gave a chance to
X-Raying the Nation g^g
Indian officers to fill posts of responsibility. He had to restore order m no rai way or S an isation after the chaos of partition. The drivers and firemen and mechanics were mostly Muslim and the guards and station staff mostly Hindu. Thus there was a shortage of staff m one sphere and an excess in the other which had to be balanced. There was also the problem of moving tens of thousands of refugees. Matthai s time as Railway Minister was devoted mainly to restoring order and making the railways work like a machine.
One of Matthai’s most striking characteristics was that he was utterly non-communal. People used to write to him describing him as the leader of the Indian Christians and saying they were proud of him and that they expected him to safeguard their interests. Matthai
would tear up such letters and throw them into the wastepaper basket.
Gopalaswamy Ayyangar, who succeeded Matthai, rationalised the railway organisation and divided it into six zones. These zones had to be further split later as the total volume of traffic continued to increase and is now three times what it was in Ayyangar’s time. Then came Lai Bahadur Shastri. He was the first Railway Minister to make a political approach to his duties. Freight constitutes twothirds to three-fourths of railway operations, and the railway staff are freight-oriented in their outlook. Shastri wanted to provide more comforts for the third class passenger. He improved railway platforms, waiting rooms, introduced Janata (people’s) trains and air-conditioned coaches for the third class, and increased the space foi passengers and introduced sleeping berths and fans for the same class.
Shastri s lack of punctuality and odd hours of work created headaches for the railway headquarters staff. He would give ear to the complaints of all and sundry and was inclined to accept their word against that of the higher staff. All this caused demoralisation at the time, but ten years later it was clear that Shastri was only a forerunner of the shape of things to come.
J a gji yan Ram, who succeeded Shastri, destroyed the chain of command in another way. He ordered promotions for Harijan (depressed class) employees out of turn. Officers do not mind reservations for persons belonging to the minorities, but they are disheartened when juniors are promoted above them because they belong to a particular caste or religion. This is what caused trouble in the Punjab after the Montford reforms and started chain reaction of communal riots. Railway employees were now demoralised because an officer could not tell whether a junior would be above him the following year.
Neither Shastri nor Jagjivan Ram really cared to understand railway economics or tried to comprehend operational and other problems. Shastri thought mostly in terms of the third class traveller and low-paid railway employee. Jagjivan Ram spent most of his time trying to give a better deal to members of the depressed classes. This phase of his career cast a shadow on his reputation as an efficient Minister whom successive senior Civil Servants had regarded as a model political boss. Fortunately for the railways, their administration had been built on a firm foundation by Matthai and Ayyangar and it was thus able to withstand the shocks it was subjected to by their successors.
In 1957, there was an outcry that there were transport bottlenecks. This led to massive investment on new lines and rolling stock in the next five years. By 1962, the railways were able to cope with the demands of the increased goods traffic which followed the growth of economic activity. Everything went off well until 1965, when there was a succession of crop failures because of drought.
The Curzonian phrase that the budget is a gamble on the monsoon ceased to apply for a few decades, but its validity was revived because of the increase in population and the need for more food. Our economy is still based on agriculture. The current excess of railways freight capacity is a passing phase. It is better to have the capacity to deal with the inevitable growth in traffic that will follow the rise in production.
S. K. Patil as Railway Minister showed a quick grasp of essentials. He was conversant with railway economics and took quick decisions. The Railway Board functioned efficiently under him. Patil did not always adhere to his brief when speaking in Parliament and even got away with unverified statements because he was a powerful speaker and skilful parliamentarian.
Patil rightly thought that a Minister should not resign because a train was involved in an accident. Shastri resigned ostensibly on this issue, but really because Nehru wanted him to do so to function more effectively as his aide in organising the Congress campaign in the 1957 elections. In fact, this assignment resulted in Shastri becoming Nehru’s confidant in a way and paved the way for Shastri succeeding him as Prime Minister.
Today, the Indian Railways are paying the penalty for breaking the chain of command and putting inferior men in offices of responsibility. This accounts for the series of serious rail accidents which have taken hundreds of lives in the last few years, the cause of which, according to official findings, is “human failure.”
Chapter 16