[0:18]Hello and welcome to this India Today special as India celebrates 70 years of Independence. We're taking you on a very special journey. A journey through the triumphs and the tragedies, the dreams and the disappointments over the last 70 years. The defining moments of India's remarkable journey. And to take us through that is the preeminent chronicler of modern independent India Ramchandra Guha. Appreciate your joining us, Dr. Guha. Your new book, India After Gandhi, is out in a new edition. Thank you for taking us through this journey. Let's start Ram with the first decade, '47 to '57. And the first five years in particular, that was a very exciting but turbulent period. Absolutely, Rajdeep. And it's hard to think of a new nation that was born amidst such difficult, indeed, tragic circumstances. Partition, brutal Hindu-Muslim riots, refugees fleeing from one side of the border to another, the state of the princely states undecided, famine stalking the land. Uh, and no new nation, as I said, was born in such difficult circumstances. And possibly, few new nations have had such a visionary and capable, uh, cohort of leaders to unite a diverse and divided population and give it a democratic constitution. And of course, it starts with Jawaharlal Nehru and his moving, eloquent, still much anthologized speech at the midnight hour. Did he write it himself? Of course. And he may have said it spontaneously. But not just Nehru. I think it's important to recognize the other great figures around him. Patel was his equal in every respect. They had disagreements, but then Gandhiji died, and they submerged those those disagreements and came together to unite, uh, the country, to lead the government. There was Rajagopalachari in Bengal, Governor of Bengal at a time of very horrible communal violence, he provided judicious leadership. There were social workers, Kamala Devi Chattopadhyay, Mridula Sarabhai, Begum Anis Kidwai, who resettled the refugees, who rescued abandoned women. There were outstanding civil servants, uh, who manned the administration, uh, of the state. There were great leaders in other parts of the country. I mean, Gopinath Bordoloi in Assam. I mean, Kamaraj in in Tamil Nadu, BC Roy in Bengal. So, it was a generation of selfless, capable, institution builders. I mean, Nehru and Patel may have been at the top. I mean, they were two towering figures. But there were Ambedkar. I mean, one of the most extraordinary features of those first months is that Ambedkar, who had been a lifelong rival and opponent of the Congress party, who was in the Viceroy's Executive Council when these people were in jail because of the Quit India movement. In a great act of reconciliation, he joined the cabinet because Nehru and Patel and Gandhi knew that despite their past political disagreements, Ambedkar was a colossal legal brain. And they bited him, uh, on board to draft, uh, help draft the constitution. So it's said, uh, you know, it's, uh, it's a combination of, uh, commit the are commit the men and the women, not just one man, but, uh, a cohort of remarkable politicians, statesmen, administrators, social workers who healed the wounds of Partition and brought together unity. Healed the wounds of partition and also the assassination of the Mahatma on the 30th of January, 1948. That event in a sense, could have really unraveled the entire freedom movement.
[3:56]Absolutely. Instead it seemed to strengthen the resolve of many of these leaders. Absolutely. And you know, Gandhiji had anticipated this.
[4:04]He said in 1909, when he was in South Africa, if I am killed, it may bring Hindus and Muslims together. I mean, it was a prophetic statement made almost 40 years before he acted. Once he was murdered, and Nehru had the presence of mind to say immediately on radio, it was a Hindu extremist to kill him. You know, and Hindus recalled that horror, at what they've done, act of patricide, killing your own father, the father of the nation. And there was reconciliation, uh, there was forgiveness. And above all, Nehru and Patel, the two main figures in government, decided whatever the intellectual or personal disagreements, they had to be set aside. And in the memory of their common master, because they were both devoted to Gandhi, they had both been nurtured by Gandhi for 20, 30 years previously, they must come together and work. Patel's role in unification. You know, to get 500 princely states on board, was an extraordinarily difficult task. I mean, no previous, uh, nation ever had to tackle a problem of this kind. One by one to get these princes to exceed, to get them to merge their territory with the Union. I mean, Hyderabad wanted to stay independent. If Hyderabad wanted to stay independent, a cancer through the heart of India, as Patel called it, and had stayed independent, I could not have come from Bengaluru today to have this conversation with you, you know. So, the unification of India was Patel's great contribution, but it was not his only contribution. He also professionalized the civil service. The IAS replaced the ICS, and, uh, transformed itself from an organization of rule to an organization of development and governance.
[5:37]It was Patel who got Ambedkar into the Constituent Assembly. And it was Patel who negotiated with the other Congress members to collaborate with the professional constitutional lawyers who were drafting the constitution. The drafting of the Indian Constitution. You say importantly, was, in a way, an act of reconciliation, bringing together, uh, different figures representing various ideologies on one platform. So in a sense, is it Ambedkar's document, or is it the document of the collective wisdom of the people of the time? Well, it's a document, uh, not of the collective wisdom. It's a document of several people. There were 240 odd members of the Constituent Assembly. The debates are now online. I urge all young Indians to read them. They're really rich debates. I mean, people could argue without abuse or or personalizing issues at that time. So it was not one person's document. It was not a single author document, but nor was it a collective will of 300 million Indians. It was probably a dozen people who played very important roles of among and in those dozen, Ambedkar, Rajendra Prasad, Patel, KM Munshi, Aladi Krishnaswami Iyer, and a great civil servant called BN Rao, whom Ambedkar thanks in his last speech, who was an acknowledged hero of the Indian Constitution, because he was a meticulous draftsmen and he drafted many of the clauses.
[6:58]Two years after the drafting of the Constitution, India decides to have its first general election on the principle of one person, one vote. And many critics called it the greatest gamble in history. The gamble worked. How did it work? Absolutely. And it was a gamble, it was an act of faith, principally on the part of Jawaharlal Nehru. From the late 1920s, he had been convinced that when India became free, we must have universal adult franchise. We're talking about the '20s when women did not have the vote in many Western countries. But Nehru particularly, the Congress party as a whole, Gandhi also, but Nehru particularly was absolutely committed to universal adult franchise. And in many ways that is his greatest achievement. Again, strong opposition. The RSS General and the organizer said, Pandit Nehru will live to regret the day where he decided on universal adult franchise. Now, they are in power because of Pandit Nehru's universal adult franchise. The communists opposed it. The liberals opposed it. Intellectuals said you can't trust poor people with the vote. But I think it was, it was an act of faith.
[8:08]It was a gamble, but it worked because it brought together India in a way, uh, and it still brings together India in a way, in which no other thing. I mean, on election day, all of India is one, all of India is going to vote. We then come to 1956 Ram, and the reorganization of states along linguistic lines. Patel unifies the states in 1947, 1947 and '56. And then in '56, you have the reorganization of states along linguistic lines. And even today it is debated, was that a good step or was that potentially divisive? Well, I don't think there is any debate now. At the time you're right, there was a debate. There was great worry that India had been divided on religious lines, India and Pakistan, and the demand for linguistic states would lead to a further balkanization. And Nehru and Patel were both worried. Uh, but Gandhi had promised the people of the South and the West that they would have linguistic states once India became independent. And you must remember, Rajdeep, that India is a land of many languages and many great literary languages. The history of Tamil is older than the history of Sanskrit. You know, Kannada, Odia, Malayalam, Telugu, are all great classical languages with literary histories of 1000, 1500 years. And language is the fundamental element of human being. You know, it's, you speak a language. It comes before your faith. The child speaks words before she knows which religion she is or which caste she is.
[9:27]And it recognition of this sentiment. Gandhi had promised linguistic states. Nehru and Patel were ambivalent. Then in '52, Potti Sriramulu went on fast, forced their hand, and it was it was really a major popular movement among the Kannadigas, among the Tamils, among your fellow Maharashtrians, among the Gujaratis, among the Odias. And finally, Nehru conceded the principle, he formed the States Reorganization Commission, which mandated the creation of linguistic states. Today, there is no debate. India is united because of linguistic states. Pakistan was divided because Jinnah imposed Urdu on the Bengalis of East Pakistan. Sri Lanka experienced decades of unending and savage civil war because the Sinhala majority imposed their language on the Tamils of the North. And the Tamils of the North were as proud of their language as the Tamils of our Tamils. But, you know, they weren't given the freedom to have a state in their own language, to educate themselves in their own language, to compete on equal terms with the Sinhala speakers. So, I think, though at the time there was a debate, today there is no debate. The, in my view, the two greatest achievements of independent India are first, regular, free and fair elections, and second, uh, linguistic pluralism. You do not have to unite citizens around one language. You can you can unite them around a shared set of values, democracy, equality of all caste, of genders, of economic growth, uh, you know, uh, you can unite them on values, but you don't need to unite them on a single language. Ram, let's now turn to the second decade, 1957 to 1967. Somewhere in this decade, the hopes and the dreams of the midnight speech of Nehru seemed to dissipate, particularly once the Sino-Indian war broke out. Jawaharlal Nehru, the towering figure of this generation, suddenly seemed to be weakened and undermined. Would you agree that this was the decade where disillusionment began to set in with the Sino-Indian war? That's right. And even before the Sino-Indian War, Rajdeep, the first corruption scandal was the Mundhra scandal of 1959, uh, which is in this second decade. Uh, the first misuse of Article 356 was Nehru's government's dismissal of the Kerala Left Front Kerala Government in 1959. So, there had been various kinds of disillusionment. Nehru himself, who had been a great figure, who had contributed enormously to nurturing a democratic ethos in India, became immune to criticism. You know, uh, he was an early victim of what is now an endemic Indian disease, of remarkable people who don't know when to retire. I mean, later people who caught this disease include Ratan Tata, Verghese Kurien, the great Sachin Tendulkar, he stayed on too long. So, Nehru was advised in 1958 to retire and nurture a successor. But he seemed to think he was indispensable. And also, he wasn't listening to the best advice. I mean, when it came to defense, he had a man who was intellectually brilliant, but as a manager and administrator, disastrous, who was Krishna Menon, and who never took the Chinese seriously. Who undermined the morale of the army, who fought with General Thimayya, who was one of the greatest and most capable generals in the history of the Indian army. And this led finally to the China War, we were desperately underprepared, and we were humiliated on the battlefield. So, you know, it's uh, and what happens, of course, uh, there was also the failure of the monsoons and agrarian crisis. So, this is a time when some of the great hopes, uh, were turning sour, uh, across India. But it's a very complex, uh, relationship between India and China. These are two great civilizations. Two civilizations that had recently been colonized by European powers. That after a long struggle for independence, had achieved freedom. The Chinese had to struggle even harder than us because they struggled not only against European imperialism, but against Japanese imperialism. There were newly independent, finding their place in the world and rubbing against each other at the borders. So, some kind of conflict was inevitable as two ancient civilizations finding themselves in the modern world, overcoming colonialism, came into conflict. It was a decade where my home state, Goa was liberated, almost the last corner of India by the Portuguese in December of 1961. Uh, I would have I I see that as a defining moment. I would I would like to make a remark on that. That's very important. And it's a tribute to Indian democracy. The great scholar Benedict Anderson points out that India liberated Goa from Portuguese rule and immediately held an election and it's held elections every five years since. Indonesia liberated East Timor from Portuguese rule and for 40 years never allowed an election in East Timor till East Timor finally got independence from from Indonesia. So, I think that liberation of Goa and the honorable integration of Goa and its conversion from a colony of a most brutal European empire to a self-governing state of India is also a great tribute to the democratic vision of our founders.
[14:35]Jawaharlal Nehru passes away in 1964 and we then have Lal Bahadur Shastri becoming Prime Minister. And there are many who will say Shastri didn't get his due, particularly because it was the period where the agrarian crisis that you alluded to, pushed Shastri into pushing ahead with the Green Revolution idea and the concept of Jai Jawan, Jai Kisan. Do you believe that Lal Bahadur Shastri deserves greater credit, perhaps? He was a very capable, focused Prime Minister, understated. Totally committed to the pluralistic values of the Congress party and of, uh, Nehru and Gandhi. He was a great war leader in the '65 war. And in that war, he made a famous speech at, uh, the Ramlila Maidan in Delhi. On his left was Mir Mushtaq Ahmad, who was President of the Delhi Pradesh Congress. On his right was Frank Anthony, an Anglo-Indian Member of Parliament. And he said in that speech, this is what makes us different from Pakistan. Mir Mushtaq ji is on my left and Frank Anthony is on our right. I mean, we are not a Hindu country. They may be a Muslim country. So, he was a capable Prime Minister, great war leader, and he could delegate. Justice Patel was the greatest Home Minister in the history of independent India. The greatest Agriculture Minister was C. Subramaniam, who whom Shastri trusted with the Agriculture Ministry. And Shastri, Subramaniam, and scientists such as M.S. Swaminathan, who is happily still alive, laid the foundations of the Green Revolution in '64, '65, '66. Shastri tragically died in 1966. So, the fruits of the Green Revolution were only visible in the late '60s and early '70s. And Indira Gandhi mistakenly is given the credit for this. But it was really Shastri and Subramaniam who saved India's economic independence. Ram, we now come to the decade of 1967 to 1977, which many will see as the decade of Indira Gandhi. She was the towering figure politically, who dominated the politics of that decade. And really, her moment of dominance was reflected in 1971 when India liberated Bangladesh. Would it be her finest moment without a shadow of doubt? Absolutely. But before I come to the Bangladesh War, let's briefly talk about the beginning of the decade. 1967, the Congress loses hegemony, does not lose power in Delhi, but loses country-wide hegemony for the first time. The DMK wins in Tamil Nadu. The communists win in Kerala. Through the Northern Belt, there are coalition of caste and socialist parties that defeat the Congress. So, it starts with Indira Gandhi vulnerable, '67. The Goongi Gudiya, she was called. And then she slowly asserts control, gives herself a leftist pro-poor image, which is more tactical than deeply felt from inside. Nationalizes the banks, eliminates the princely order. And then of course, comes the Bangladesh crisis, where we give refuge to 10 million displaced people from Bangladesh, from East Pakistan.
[17:39]We come out firmly against Pakistani, uh, military atrocities in East Pakistan and of course, we win the war. And then she's a great national figure, but rightly so, because I think, it was a moral, it was a just war. If there was a war that was just, it was a war to liberate the Bangladeshis from decades of humiliation, persecution and occupation by the West Pakistanis. So she did provide capable, strong and decisive leadership. Justice Shastri did in '65. And just as Nehru did not do in '62, you know. So, in that sense, Indira Gandhi should not be denied. She should not get sole credit, but she should certainly get substantial credit. Should she also take then the calumny of what happened in 1975 when she chose to suspend the Constitution and declare an emergency in the country. Should she be held guilty as charged? Absolutely, absolutely. She overreacted. There was a popular movement led by Jayaprakash Narayan, uh, that was, you know, uh, countrywide. There were some J.P. was a great man whom I venerate, but he did say some foolish things, uh, during that, uh, the movement, including that the police and the army should disobey the orders of the government, right. But having said that, Indira Gandhi clearly overreacted, uh, the Supreme Court would have overruled the Allahabad High Court judgment, uh, all they wanted was for her to step aside for a few weeks, which she was not prepared to do. And instead of which she, uh, not only promulgated the emergency, but suspended civil liberties, suppressed the press, and arrested all the opposition leaders and humiliated them, you know. Particularly those she did not like, she sent to the worst jails. I mean, especially two Maharanis, for example, who were sent to the most dirty and rat infested jails. Gayatri Devi and Vijaya Raje Scindia. So she was vindictive and vicious, uh, that really showed her dark side. Uh, at the same time, 19 months later, she withdrew the emergency, and that was the only decision of those 19 months in which she did not consult her rowdy son Sanjay. I was about to mention Sanjay Gandhi, because in that particular period, Sanjay Gandhi acquired a larger-than-life image, and he became almost the villain eventually of the times. Do you believe that Indira Gandhi by then was being virtually dictated by her son, and the son had virtually taken over government? No, no, she was running it with his help. He was the number two. He was the extra-constitutional authority, as it were. But Sanjay was certainly more important than all the other cabinet ministers. But as Prime Minister, she bears ultimate responsibility. She indulged her son. Her son was responsible for the worst excesses of emergency, especially forced sterilization and also the destruction of, uh, you know, houses in many parts of of Delhi and Northern India. Harassment of Muslims, and it tried to give one of the first examples of targeting attacks on minorities was by Sanjay Gandhi. But Indira Gandhi must bear the main share of the blame for the emergency.
[20:46]Ram, many would say the period from 1977 to 1987 was one which saw triumph and tragedy. Both coexist very uneasily. Perhaps the most difficult decade, some would say that India had to face. But it started with a great deal of hope, because 1977 saw the lifting of the emergency and the emergence of the first non-Congress government, based, it was said, on people power. Absolutely, Rajdeep. You know, uh, it was inconceivable to someone like me, who was 19 in 1977, that the Congress would ever not rule in New Delhi. It was also inconceivable to someone like me that Bombay would not win the Ranji Trophy. In 1975, Bombay lost the Ranji Trophy. And that meant that the Congress had also had to lose the general election shortly afterwards. So, it started with great hope, but the Janata Party soon disintegrated into squalid faction squabbles. Indira Gandhi came back. Indira Gandhi in her second term was insecure, paranoid, was suspicious, even more suspicious than we in her first term. Uh, there was the uprising in the Punjab. It was very badly handled. Operation Bluestar was, uh, you know, was a shameful act for the Indian army to invade a sacred place of worship and kill people there. And then of course, that was followed by her assassination, which was followed in turn by the horrific pogrom against Sikhs in which the Congress party was directly culpable and responsible. And then of course, in December, you had the Bhopal Gas Tragedy. So, it's a decade, I remember, I was there in my '20s, as a very troubled and difficult decade. I'll come to some of the more troubling parts in a moment, but I thought in, we started the decade with this new Prime Minister, Morarji Desai. Yeah, yeah. Interesting figure, a Gandhian, but a very austere individual in many ways. So, uh, someone who represented in a way a break with the past. But you know, he's an underrated person. His personal eccentricities have overshadowed the fact that he was an outstanding administrator and he was a thoroughgoing Democrat. He said, democracy has been vasectomized by the emergency. And as Prime Minister, working with Shanti Bhushan, who was his Law Minister, a great legal luminary, thankfully still with us. Shanti Bhushan and Morarji Desai undid all the emergency area amendments and restored the basic structure of our constitution. It was also Morarji Desai who got experts into government for the first time. The first scientist who was Agriculture Secretary was M.S. Swaminathan, appointed by Morarji Desai. The first economist, who was Finance Secretary, was Dr. Manmohan Singh, appointed by Morarji Desai. So, he was an underrated figure. He was an outstanding administrator, but he was not a good leader of men.
[23:29]So, his party disintegrated into faction fighting. So, the Janata experiment, virtually ameba-like, uh, broke up within the space of three years. Two and a half years, was it a lack of leadership, or was it that India was not ready as yet for a new non-Congress government? I think both. I think lack of leadership, I think rivalries between Morarji, Charan Singh, and Jagjivan Ram. Uh, the whole dual membership question, where people joined the Janata Party, but remained members of the RSS. But still, it gave the Indian citizenry, and it gave the Indian public a sense that this will not be a one-party state. In Mexico, one party ruled for 70 years. In many African countries, one party ruled ruled rule forever, right. So, I think it's an important milestone in Indian democracy, because it challenged the notion that only one party has the sovereign right to rule in New Delhi. And the man, in a sense, who had brought it together was Jayaprakash Narayan, who was eventually devoured by this revolution that he had created. He was a remarkable figure, and again, not always remembered for the right reasons. Of course, his opposition to the emergency was a great milestone in his career. But he was one of the people who promoted decentralization, Panchayati Raj before anyone else from the 1950s. He bravely struggled for reconciliation in Nagaland with the rebels there. He brought the dacoits on board, got them to give up their arms. And he was a great unacknowledged hero of independent India. Again, he should not be reduced to his opposition to the emergency. He was a multifaceted figure. He was an original political thinker. He had a great capacity to build teams of young people who would carry forward his work.
[25:09]He was a remarkable man. Rajdeep, as we see in this decade, the rise of Mr. Modi and the BJP and the decline in a sense of the Congress, can we say that the Congress is a party today in terminal decline, and the BJP is the new Congress? Very likely, very likely. I mean, one should always be cautious about what predictions one makes. But clearly, the Congress is almost certainly in irrevocable decline. Uh, its state units have totally atrophied. Rahul Gandhi is manifestly incompetent. Even compared to Sonia Gandhi, who was hardworking and industrious and had a political shrewdness, at least in her prime, maybe no longer. Uh, the BJP is in power across much of Northern and Western India. It has vibrant state units. It has people on the grounds. It has boots on the ground. It has a powerful ideology, which I do personally don't agree with, but many people find compelling. The Congress has no ideology at all. It has no counter-narrative to offer. So, the BJP is to Indian politics today, what the Congress was in the '50s and '60s. It is dominant, but not hegemonic. By which I mean, it will face opposition, not only from regional parties, but from civil society, from scholars, from intellectuals, from thinkers who do not subscribe to its brand of majoritarianism. And there will be those who will say Narendra Modi is the Indira Gandhi of our time. In some ways, for example, in his sheer dominance, not only over his party, his government, uh, his manipulation of the airwaves, the Mann Ki Baat. I mean, remember, we used to talk about All India Radio. Right. So the use of Air to project himself. Uh, his, uh, the fact that he can't abide any criticism, which is also true of, uh, was also true of Indira Gandhi. The fact that he trusts only one person, Amit Shah, being to him what Sanjay Gandhi was to Indira Gandhi. Uh, his desire to, uh, you know, even the RBI's autonomy is now fragile. And of course, it is the fact that he lives politics 24/7. He is like Indira Gandhi. And I think that's a warning both to our politicians and possibly even to some of us sportspersons. I'll leave it at that. We've gone through this wonderful journey over the last 70 years. Much that we can celebrate, much that we have to introspect. Dr. Ramchandra Guha, privilege having you talking about India after Gandhi. Thanks, thanks.
