'JP Is To Be Blamed For Emergency Too'

New Revelations:

• Nehru defused the political ambitions of General Cariappa, India's first army chief
• India decided to split Pakistan well before the East Pakistan refugee crisis
• India's first home secretary asked all departments to draw up lists of Muslim workers with suspected loyalties
• Criticism by westerners led Indira Gandhi to call off the Emergency

What really strikes the reader about this book is the richness, the variety, the diversity of sources, and the sheer vastness of the subject – a history of post-Independence India, no less…How did you put this stupendous book together?

It took me eight years from start to finish. I think it was the most enjoyable thing I will ever do. Much of the time was spent digging in the archives. I have not listed the primary sources, but I must have seen 70 different collections, many of which have never been seen before. And then pamphlets, and booklets, and newspapers, regional and national…The research was very hard, very laborious, very exciting, because one was turning up interesting new things all the time.

There was also a great intellectual challenge, which was to map out the structure of the book. It took me over two years to work out a chapter scheme. Most works of history are bounded in time and space. You say, I am writing a biography, a study of the decline of the Mughal empire, you know how to structure it. But if you say you are writing a book on the whole of India, the history of India since 1947, a billion people, 500 different communities, 23 languages, how do you do it? From Delhi, from the states, from the perspective of politicians, of peasants and workers? Do you focus on the economy, do you look at social and cultural issues? I have tried to do all of it, and tried to present an integrated, coherent picture. I’ve tried to present a picture of India which is partly from Delhi, partly from the states, partly about high politics, partly about social movements and workers.

Lets talk about some of the things that are new in the book. For instance, the material on General Cariappa’s political ambitions and his relationship with Nehru.

My exploration of this relationship started from the point: why is that in India, unlike in most Asian and African countries, the army has never had a role in politics? Nehru comes through as a visionary here. If you look at how Nehru treated Cariappa, it’s clear Nehru realised it was crucial that a precedent had to be set with the first chief. Cariappa had a tendency to shoot his mouth off, so Nehru thought, let me send him as far away from India as possible. So, he sent him to Australia (as high commissioner). It’s amazing. Cariappa says, "You are sending me so far away", and Nehru replies, "It’s a sporting nation and we need sportsmen like you there." Nehru understood that once he had come back from Australia, and been retired for three years, he would have lost his lustre. It was a very deft move to keep the army out of politics completely, and then later, no one crossed the line… It was all in Cariappa’s papers, none of this was in the public domain.

Among all these primary sources, what were the most valuable? The big discoveries?

The Haksar papers, which no one had seen before, give a very clear sense of Mrs Gandhi’s...well, amorality is too strong a word, of how she used ideology in a totally instrumental way. How she had no clear philosophy of her own, but on the encouragement of Haksar and others, she used a socialist philosophy to separate herself from the Congress old guard and deftly presented herself as progressive in contrast to the conservatives. Again, in the Haksar papers, I discovered that India had decided to split Bangladesh very early. It was not forced upon us by the refugee crisis. It was a deliberate strategy worked through. Another very interesting discovery for me was that our alliance with the Soviet Union was at the request and behest of the Soviets. It is usually thought that because they were a superpower, we were a client, that we went to them. But they wanted us as a bulwark against the Chinese, they approached us for an alliance.

Virtually all my chapters, until I come to the 80s, are based on primary material, new discoveries, new nuggets, new letters, letters never before quoted. One of the big discoveries has also been the richness of the periodical press. The newspapers from the 50s and 60s and magazines such as Current, Swatantra and Economic Weekly were very rich. Very interesting and provocative. For people like Karaka, of Current magazine, to be anti-Nehru in that day and age was quite brave. It shows that we’ve always had a very lively press. It’s somehow assumed that post-Emergency, the press became lively. That’s not the case – my book will show that from very early on, we had a diverse and lively press, and spread out.

There is a chilling letter you’ve reproduced on how Muslim government employees should be dealt with, written by the first Home Secretary of the country. How did you come upon this?

My colleague Prof Nayanjot Lahiri gave me that material – she found it in the course of her research. She is a very fine historian of archaeology, and of the ASI, she found this file, and she knew what I was doing and she gave it to me. One of the great things about historical research is it is collaborative. It was really quite striking. That letter would have been sent to all the other departments; we only have here what the ASI did, in trying to find out the loyalty of its Muslim employees. What the ASI did was bizarre, and I am sure the other departmental files also have this material. So it must have been across (the board), this paranoia about Muslim employees. It is quite frightening.

How important was it in setting the tone for how Muslims went on to be dealt with in the bureaucracy?

One would want to know more. One does not know enough. Was it Patel’s initiative, did Nehru know anything about it? Was it simply a product of the early months of hostility and paranoia, did we become more comfortable later about our Muslims? But chilling is the right word. It is a chilling account of the suspicion of the loyalty of Muslim employees of the government of India. Watchmen in the Taj being sent these nasty letters, go get your son back, your wife back (from Pakistan).

I felt while reading the book, that while you were mining the archives for the past, you were very aware of the present context. For example, from the Constituent Assembly debates, you pick out the fact that the women members of the Assembly were dead against reservation of seats in legislatures for women -- and perhaps that’s because today, they’re crying themselves hoarse for it.

That was very interesting, I did not expect to find it. It’s there, and very forcefully said. I quote four or five different women, saying it very clearly, we don’t want reservation. We have gone a bit quota-mad now. It was recognised in 1947-48 that there was a particular form of discrimination against Dalits which was extreme, and reparation had to be made for that. Women had been very prominent in the national movement, admittedly only a professional class of women, a middle class of women, there were many more women in the Constituent Assembly than in the US Congress or Senate in the 1940s. There were many women visible in the national movement, and they said they could hold their own. Only Dalits were regarded as being worthy of affirmative action – that was the context of the times. A contemporary reader will be very struck by this.

In your Emergency chapter, you say that JP and Indira Gandhi wrote the script for the Emergency together, which suggests a kind of equivalence between their actions.

In a sense. Because Mrs Gandhi had the instruments of state at her command and because she grossly abused them through the Emergency, she would be the greater culprit. But one can’t let JP off the hook either. One placed too much faith in the state, and the other placed too little faith in the state and in representative institutions. One said I am Parliament, I am India, the other said disband Parliament. I’ve tried to provide a psycho-social interpretation of why JP acted the way he did. I’ve talked about the fact that he was growing old, his wife had died, he wanted to recapture the youthful revolutionary impulses that he once had, he felt his mortality was in question and India had to be transformed before he went. I tried to understand why a man who abjured radical politics for 30 years to become a social worker, had become a street agitator. I also quote other mistakes. These are contemporary criticisms – I mention a man called RR Patil, an ICS officer, a friend of JP's, who visits Bihar, studies the movement, and says, the genie is out of the bottle, and you can’t control it. You may have unleashed forces that will destroy institutions. There were other critics, like Acharya Ramamurthi, he talks about the RSS taking over the movement. JP was naïve, he was irresponsible, and of course Indira Gandhi over-reacted.

You’ve been sharper about Indira Gandhi in your other writings. Is that the difference between journalism and history?

This is not an ideological book. I lived through the Emergency, I was a college student in the Emergency, and one of the things that this book has taught me is that you need a generation’s distance to write history. While living through it, you took sides, for or against. But look at it 20 to 25 years later, and with hindsight, and with the sources available to you, you can see the larger context, and you can understand that they were two villains, in a sense. Villain is a strong word, but as I said in the book, the Emergency was a script jointly authored by them.

And a generation’s distance enables you to see that?

While you were living through it, you knew that Indira Gandhi had undermined democracy, that she had introduced dynastic rule, had unleashed savage repression in the countryside in the guise of sterilisation. That you could see. Through distance you can see that while all of this is inexcusable, on the other hand, the JP movement was not so noble and idealistic either.

You strongly suggest that the single biggest reason for Indira Gandhi calling elections in 1977 was western criticism of her and the Emergency. That’s interesting..

Yes, I do argue that. There are other reasons, too, but this is something no one has said before, and I have documented it, from the private letters by Horace Alexander, and public criticism by Fenner Brockway and John Grigg. Horace Alexander taught Indira Gandhi bird-watching. He was a Quaker, an emissary between Gandhi and the Raj. Fenner Brockway was a very important socialist and a very close friend of Nehru. He was fighting for Indian freedom in England through the 20s and 30s and 40s. He wrote important books on Indian freedom. John Grigg was a liberal, very influential liberal, also lobbying there. These are important people, these are friends of India, and you can’t dismiss them as CIA agents. And they are telling Indira Gandhi, you are betraying your father’s legacy. John Grigg says return to the traditions of your father and abandon the orientation of your son. And then newspapers like The Times were also very influential. This was not the Murdoch Times – Bernard Levin’s pieces were very influential. Obviously, until Indira Gandhi’s papers are opened, we don’t absolutely know. There are other speculations, and I give them in the book. But this seems to be very plausible, the way certifiable friends of the Nehru family and of India had focussed their criticisms on how Indira had betrayed her father’s legacy. My sense is that this seems a very likely reason why she called off the Emergency. And one of the most interesting things about her decision, at the personal level, is that she didn’t tell Sanjay -- it came as a shock to him.

Your history stops at 89 – why then in particular?

There is so much you don’t know.. For example, one doesn’t know whether Hindu nationalism has peaked. One doesn’t know whether economic liberalisation will end endemic historic poverty in India. One doesn’t know whether the fragmentation of the polity will continue or whether a national party will bounce back and get 300 seats in Parliament. These are things we don’t know, we are immersed in it, we are judging it. So I say in the book, till ’89, it’s history, after '89, its historically informed journalism. We don’t have the sources.

On the Emergency, I had a lot of material. I had letters, I had underground letters, I used the collection of Haridev Sharma who used to be director of the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, he was a government servant but a supporter of JP, and he maintained an Emergency file. I was the first person to see his collection…I used the JP collection extensively. But most archives follow a 30 year rule, till 77 you have very sources, after that the sources dry up, not just the primary sources, for the recent period you don’t have memoirs and autobiographies and political analyses…all that accumulates slowly. So you don’t have primary sources, you don’t have secondary sources, and above all, you don’t have distance. The historian is also a citizen.

Were there any roadblocks, when it came to sources? Like the reluctance of the Nehru-Gandhi family to make available their letters?

Not for this. There was enough available. Mine is a macro-history, it is a broad sweep. If I was writing a biography of Indira Gandhi, there would be a roadblock, because unlike Nehru, none of her stuff has been published. On Nehru, a lot of the stuff has come out. You can still write a halfway decent book on Nehru even if Sonia Gandhi denies you access. Even on Indira Gandhi, I was lucky to get the Haksar papers, which is closest you get to the Indira Gandhi papers.

But you don’t have that for the second prime-ministership, and consequently, not such a clear picture?

Yes. I know why she split the Congress, I don’t know why she turned religious in 1983, and talked about the unity of the country being represented in herself, and kinds of the things she did leading into Operation Bluestar. It’s virtually speculation, the sources don’t exist. Or they are not open yet. Here and there, there are roadblocks, but for my exercise, which was writing a macro-history, I had enough primary materials, to tell an interesting story. Obviously, it’s not complete in every respect, and my hope is that many books will be written following on my book.

Most historians of modern India end where you began, with 1947.

I am dismayed by our obsession with the Raj. If anything, I hope my book will tell the reader that our history since 1947 is as, or more interesting than our history before 1947. The old themes, Raj and Gandhi and nationalism, and the white man in India, should all be worked out by now. We should be tired of them. The story of independent India is an incredibly exciting, tumultuous wild story.

What excites you most about the post-47 period?

You asked, what is new in the book. Actually, the whole thing is new. All my early chapters, about the princely states, the linguistic states, economic policy, the settlement of refugees, cover areas about which very little is known . We know about how much refugees suffered. But do we know what happened to them, how did they get integrated in different cities, different provinces, where did they spread? For the Indian citizen, the lay reader, I wanted to provide an account of this extraordinary story of why India survives and why it stays united, but for the scholarly community, I would like to encourage younger historians working on the colonial period, to move to the post 47 period. Each of my chapters should be a book, many sections can be books. Something I’ve not dealt with adequately, should be an encouragement, an incitement, even provocation to younger historians. What I’ve tried to do apart from providing an account of Indian political and social history since 1947, is to open up a scene, so that subsequent historians can say…these are the kinds of sources that are available. People think there are no sources for post 47 history. But I’ve used huge numbers of primary sources, and people who go through my footnotes can get a sense of what material is available where, and how to dig deeper, and how to correct what is flawed here and there.

The early chapters on post-47 India are absolutely riveting. The account of the early elections, for example.

There is so much to be written, on princely states, refugees, language, a social history of the elections, or even the place of film and culture in modern India. We don’t know enough about that. Either we have boring academic, jargon ridden analyses or we have Stardust kind of gossip. Film is very important in the Indian imagination, it is very important in uniting India. There are so many areas of our existence as an independent nation that cry out for deeper analysis. And biographies – if you see my footnotes, there are so many interesting characters in my book. Forget Nehru and Indira Gandhi, what about Sheikh Abdullah, JB Kripalani, Rajaji, Tara Singh, the Naga rebel Phizo, none of these guys have had their biographies written and they are all incredibly interesting. My hope is that some of these characters will be studied more seriously.

For 50 years, you show in the book, foreigners have been deeply pessimistic about India, and the survival of Indian democracy. Time and again, they’ve predicted balkanisation, and military rule. Why did they get it so wrong?

India is an unnatural nation. If you look at the canons of political science, to cohere, to survive, to establish itself, a nation needs a binding glue. It can be provided by a single language, a single religion, a single shared history, a common enemy. That’s the history of nationalism. Then there’s the history of democracy. Generally, democracies succeed in affluent, homogenous, societies. Indian nationalism did not have a single glue. It was not Hindu nationalism, India was not a single territory. We had a common enemy, the British, but we won non-violently, and Gandhi’s best friends were white men.

Likewise with democracy, look around the world, democracy has failed in most third world countries. So you can see why people were so pessimistic, why they thought India wouldn’t survive. In the history of the world, there has been no example of a very large, very diverse, very divided society successfully establishing itself as an independent nation and a democracy to boot. It’s a remarkable story.

You say there were moderating influences, not that visible, that held the country together. Did these western commentators miss out on that, because they were looking at us through the prism of their own experience?

I think so. They missed out on it because they didn’t understand the commitment and the imagination and the intelligence of the builders of modern India. On of the important things I say in my book is that we were very lucky in our founders. They planted such a solid tree -- the people who came later could disturb it but they couldn’t destroy it. Gandhi understood that a compact had to be arrived at between Hindus and Muslims. Nehru understood that linguistic sentiments are too strong and I must concede them. Gandhi and Ambedkar between them saw the problem of untouchablity was a unique problem, that it was a form of discrimination and oppression that required legal measures and affirmative action. Patel was also very important. We say that when India became independent it was divided into two, I say it was divided into 500. There were these 500 princely states – and it is an amazing story, how Patel negotiated with them one by one and brought them on board.

What the western observers missed out was that we had this whole generation of remarkable leaders who set about understanding, managing, containing this diversity and providing a coherent vision around which this nation could organise itself and function as a democracy. Not just foreigners, we too underestimate the tireless work done by the founders of Indian democracy.

I am increasingly impatient with the younger generation of politicians and particularly entrepreneurs who say Nehru had an iron hand on the economy and previously there was this "license permit quota raj" and why doesn’t the government get off our back. The fact is today’s economic boom is possible only because Nehru and Patel constructed a united country. If there was no single India, no single market, no democratic functioning, if the state did not enjoy legitimacy, these entrepreneurs could not have functioned. They don’t realise the debt they owe to the people they attack. Today’s economic boom is built on the fact that India is united, India is democratic. When we were freed in 1947, all our emotional, ideological and institutional energies went into keeping it united and keeping it together. The economy had to come later and now they are building on that.

Yes, you have said that in the book -- that the success story of India is political rather than economic.

We don’t know about the economic success story, we don’t know how deep it is. We have done quite well economically, I don’t knock that. Some of our sectors have done very impressively but the real success story is one that defies history, tradition and logic. It is the fact that we are largely united and largely democratic. That is what my book says.

Indians were not saying at the end of the ‘80s, when Rajiv Gandhi died, that India might fall apart, that there might be military rule, but foreigners were, your book says. The Indian model was fairly set by now, but there seems to be a deep misperception even then about what India was about.

Absolutely, yes. And, it is implied in my book rather than made explicit that just as those anticipations of doom were mistaken or exaggerated, the newer anticipations of us by the west are also exaggerated, we have also got to approach this with some moderation.

This is a very profound book, but also extremely entertaining and readable. Is that the way you think history should be written?

It is both a scholarly and a readable book. The analytical and conceptual effort in deciding what chapters to write, that’s not revealed, that’s the hard labour I did. I do like to communicate, I do have a sense of style, I do like to pick up arresting quotations and excerpts from letters. But within this framework of telling a very broadbrush story about the emergence of India as an independent nation, anecdotes are used to illustrate a much larger canvas. I’ve tried to write a book that is scholarly as well as accessible.