India: A History. Revised and Updated (96 page)

Yet East Bengal was far from being a liability. Thanks to its jute crop, its export earnings were Pakistan’s only source of foreign exchange and so a crucial ingredient in the whole country’s development. Its labour force was equally preponderant, dwarfing that of Pakistan’s Panjab which was the next most populous province. In fact East Bengal’s population of some 40 million in 1947 was not only greater than that of any of the north-western provinces but exceeded their combined aggregate. Economic and electoral logic therefore argued strongly for a Pakistan tilted towards the east; Bengalis rather than Panjabis should be calling the shots. But other considerations – historical profile, strategic priorities, Islamic contiguity, military recruitment and the social preferences of the League’s leadership – dictated an irresistible bias to the west. The east might provide the motive power for the new nation but it was the west that would decide its direction. The 1940 ‘Pakistan resolution’ had been passed there, the 1947 transfer of power had been conducted there, and without question the federal capital of Pakistan had to be located there.

Lahore, the Mughal city that had been the capital of the undivided Panjab, would have been the obvious choice. Unfortunately the new Indian frontier passed within an hour’s drive of it. For security reasons therefore, Karachi was preferred, and in this then sleepy port-capital of Sind, using a variety of requisitioned venues and makeshift accommodations, the new government set up shop. Tin sheds did duty for the airy offices of the Delhi secretariat; for want of desks, clerks spread their files on packing cases and, in the absence of pins, state papers were held together with thorns. Quite senior figures put up in the railway station. The arrangements were supposed to be temporary, but the acres of Panjabi scrubland that would eventually host a gleaming new capital were still being grazed by goats. Not till the 1960s would a custom-built Islamabad, conveniently sited beside the garrison city of Rawalpindi, rise from the firing ranges and be ready to receive its bureaucratic flock.

The physical proximity of civil and military establishments would be deliberate. For though otherwise so comprehensively disadvantaged in the division of the spoils, Karachi had been better served than New Delhi in one crucial respect. Crudely put, while the new India had inherited all the trappings for a state, Pakistan had inherited the vital ingredient for an army. Like everything else, the erstwhile British Indian army had been apportioned between the two successor states. Of its weaponry, munitions, transport and stores, a miserly 17.5 per cent was earmarked for Pakistan and not all of this materialised; re-equipping would be a top priority for Karachi. But manpower was a different matter. The Muslim component – and so Pakistan’s – of undivided India’s armed forces was put at a hefty 30 per cent.

This was because in the Panjab and neighbouring parts of the NWFP the new state embraced what had been the main reservoir of British recruitment ever since the 1857 Great Rebellion. Here traditions of loyal service were deeply embedded as were military expectations of preferential treatment from the organs of state. Recruits had been drawn from the same clans and hereditary networks for generations; military remittances sustained whole villages; military service opened opportunities for advancement and for acquiring skills (in truck maintenance for example) that were in civilian demand; and pensioners had often been rewarded with access to land in the highly productive canal colonies. Some of the beneficiaries had been Sikhs, who had since opted for the new India. But most were Muslims. They included many from East Panjab who, once they were accommodated on lands vacated by non-Muslims in West Panjab, exhibited such robust attachment to their new homeland that comparisons would be drawn with other settler communities, Afrikaner, for instance, or Israeli. Whether incomers or natives, it was this
mainly Panjabi-speaking constituency that furnished Pakistan with the corps of a disciplined and privileged soldiery. Politicians in Karachi no less than landowners in Lahore and jute growers in Bengal saw the army as representing the vanguard of the new state, a guarantee of stability and the nation’s oustanding attribute of statehood. So did its generals.

GROUND RULES

Nothing in the acrimony occasioned by the division of undivided India’s spoils necessarily launched the successor states on opposed trajectories. On the contrary, by each freely enrolling as a dominion within the British Commonwealth, they seemed to signal a willingness to collaborate. Commonwealth membership was meant to promote understanding and parallel development. Ideally it secured a future in both countries for liberal values, representative government and mutual non-aggression, not to mention British exports and Indo-Pakistani co-operation in matters of imperial defence and communications. Likewise Pakistan’s inbuilt contradictions – its physical division, demographic imbalance, political fragility and ambivalence about the role of Islam – argued as much for cohabitation as for confrontation. Communications, for instance, between the east and west of Pakistan depended on Indian goodwill for both an air corridor and overland transit rights. Even Pakistan’s military potential could be seen as a stabilising factor, since only with a formidable army would it be able to defend the vulnerable north-west frontier that was as much the new India’s as its own.

Yet all this turned out to be wishful thinking. The fear and loathing engendered by the horrors of Partition could not be laid to rest. They easily negated the platitudes of the Commonwealth charter and trumped even Nehru’s lofty commitment to non-interference in the affairs of other nations. By 1948 ‘Mahatma’ Gandhi was almost alone in rising above the Pakistan paranoia that gripped India. In January that year he undertook a protest-cum-fast aimed at forcing Delhi to honour its financial obligations to Karachi and to afford protection to Muslims in India. His demands enraged not only the millions who had just fled Muslim atrocities in Pakistan but most of his Congress colleagues. A few days later he was assassinated. Nathuram Godse, the Brahmin who fired the shots, had once been involved with the RSS, an allegedly ultra-Hindu and paramilitary organisation, descriptions that they deny. But Godse had also been a Gandhian disciple and seems to have been acting not as the witless pawn of ‘Hindu nationalist’ hotheads (whose cause would suffer by his action) but as a sincere, if deluded, patriot. As he explained
at his trial, only the death of ‘Gandhiji’ would silence counsels of ‘Muslim appeasement’ and so ‘save the nation from the inroads of Pakistan’. Naturally his action was universally condemned and he himself executed. But his point was not lost. The RSS and its allies were soon exonerated, Muslims in India continued to be treated with suspicion or worse, and Delhi was more paranoid than ever about the ‘inroads of Pakistan’.

Equally hostile sentiments were being aired in Pakistan. While in East Bengal Hindus suffered discrimination and dispossession, in Karachi the hand of an irredentist India was discerned behind every outbreak of dissent from the Afghan frontier to the Chittagong Hill Tracts (near Burma). In Pakistan, as in India, the hostility was exacerbated by the ongoing Kashmir crisis; and in Pakistan, because of that catalogue of internal contradictions, it had a bearing on the protracted business of state-building. All these factors would combine to render the political process there highly vulnerable to intervention. In an age of global competition between the Soviet bloc and the Western powers, this combination of pressure points would propel Pakistan in a direction wildly at variance with that of India.

Initially both nations applied themselves to making good the most glaring deficiencies of colonial rule. Constitutions must be drafted and elections on a universal franchise held. The social needs of the poor must be addressed, caste and gender discrimination ended, land more equitably distributed and health and education facilities provided for all. To stem the haemorrhage of scarce foreign exchange and lay the foundations of a productive modern economy, development plans for industry, agriculture and infrastructure needed careful formulation. And to ensure the implementation of all these things, the authority of the central government vis-à-vis the provinces must be stressed and the leadership’s grip on power consolidated. In both countries the agenda was almost identical. But not the results. For, while Delhi delivered, Karachi dithered. It took Pakistan nine years to draft a constitution, which was then promptly suspended. And the first national election on a universal suffrage had to wait until 1970.

By then India was gearing up for its fifth election. Each of them had been comfortably the world’s largest exercise in democratic selection; and despite the mind-boggling logistics (2 million ballot boxes, a quarter of a million polling booths, several hundred parties etc), all had been conducted with efficiency and impartiality. Instances of voters being intimidated, booths captured and boxes lost or tampered with were widely reported; bloc-voting by village, caste, clan or sect was standard. But blatant malpractice did not go unpunished; in 1970-1, for using government facilities for electioneering
purposes, even the prime minister would be disqualified. The results, overall, were accounted highly creditable. Those diehards, like Winston Churchill, who had scoffed at the idea of a largely illiterate electorate exercising its vote responsibly had got it wrong. Since each candidate’s political party was pictorially identified on the ballot paper by a symbol – such as cart, cow, plough, lamp – even the unlettered could position their mark with confidence. Fair elections and gender-free suffrage, far from being the exclusive prerogatives of ‘advanced’ nations, were shown to be practical in larger, less privileged societies and just as productive of representative governments. The world’s other elected governments took heart. With each Indian election, the conviction grew that what was loosely termed ‘democracy’ might be a universal panacea, a long-sought penicillin in the war against ideological infections, whether communist or confessional.

After three years of consultation and debate India’s new constitution, ‘probably the longest in the world’, was rolled out in 1949 and officially adopted on 26 January (henceforth ‘Republic Day’) 1950. Like most of the proposals and revisions still being endlessly entertained by the constitution-makers in Pakistan, it favoured a Westminster style of government with first-past-the-post elections, an upper and lower house (the latter directly elected), a council of ministers, an inner cabinet, an independent judiciary and so on. But these arrangements were cast within a federal framework, as in the USA, which acknowledged the independent authority of the constituent provinces. Now known in India as ‘states’, the erstwhile provinces were also to elect assemblies. Each state/province assembly would appoint a state government, to which were reserved local revenue-raising powers (sales and liquor taxes, for example), a share of central revenues and a range of responsibilities (‘states’ subjects’). They also had a say in the so-called ‘concurrent subjects’, responsibility for which was shared with the central government. But in laying down these rules the constitution borrowed from the Government of India Act of 1935, and most notably from that Act’s imperial – that is, authoritarian – safeguards. Thus there were various ways by which the central government could influence or overrule state governments, including their dismissal and temporary suspension through the imposition of ‘President’s Rule’ (when the governor of a state, an appointee of the central government, took over on behalf of the president as head of state).

In sum, a federal (or provincial) structure was retained, but it was one heavily weighted in favour of the centre. For progressives like Nehru and Patel this was essential. In the run-up to Independence nothing had alarmed them more than proposals that, in order to preserve the integrity of pre-Partition India, would have limited the role of the central government to
such things as foreign affairs, defence and some umpiring responsibilities for communications and the currency. Indeed the risk of a weak centre being held to ransom by its semi-sovereign provinces/states had soon appeared worse than the dangers inherent in the two-nation theory; for in the long run it too would jeopardise the integrity of the nation and, more immediately, would frustrate all hopes of pushing through the radical reforms that Nehru believed essential. More than anything else it had been this consideration that had reconciled him to Partition. Better, in other words, to head a governable entity minus Pakistan than an ungovernable one that included Pakistan. Obligingly, Karachi’s excruciating contortions over its own constitution seemed to be proving Nehru’s point. The ground rules of the centre-state relationship in India still left ample room for disagreement; but so long as Nehru lived and so long as Congress enjoyed a handsome majority in most of the state capitals as well as in New Delhi, stresses could be largely contained within the party.

In the first two decades of independence the substance of the Indian constitution proved less divisive than the language in which it was written. This was English, a foreign tongue with imperialist connotations. National pride demanded the adoption, at least for official purposes, of an indigenous language; so did notions of transparency; and there was no shortage of contenders. The constitution recognised sixteen major languages and acknowledged several hundred others. But therein lay the problem: which to choose and on what basis? Nehru favoured Hindustani, an innocuous amalgam of Hindi, the language of north India’s Hindus, and Urdu, that of its Muslims. It was easily mastered, widely understood, confessionally neutral, though not much spoken. On the other hand Hindi-speakers, who outnumbered any other language group and included much of the Congress leadership, strongly urged the claims of their own tongue. Meanwhile speakers of the Dravidian languages in the south (Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam) objected to both Hindi and Hindustani as Sanskrit-based and so more alien to them than English, whose retention they therefore favoured.