India after gandhi

I started reading this more recently, right after the Independence day celebrations to know more about my great country. All that we’ve studied in the history textbooks has also been as if history came to an end with the 1947 Independence story, but there is much more color, and dimention to this:

The educationist Krishna Kumar writes that ‘for Indian children history itself comes to an end with Partition and Independence. As a constituent of social studies, and later on as a subject in its own right, history runs right out of content in 1947 … All that has happened during the last 55 years may filter through them easly civics syllabus, popular cinema and television; history as formally constituted knowledge of the past does not cover it.’13 If, for Indian children, history comes to an end with Independence and Partition, this is because Indian adults have mandated it that way. In the academy, the discipline of history deals with the past, while the disciplines of political science and sociology deal with the present.

Usually we talk about race, gender, and religion while talking about groups. In India, it’s also a bit more complicated as the caste-wise prejudices still remain:

These conflicts run along many axes, among which we may – for the moment – single out four as pre-eminent. First, there is cast, a principal identity for many Indians, defining whom they might marry, associate with and fight against. ‘Caste’ is a Portuguese word that conflates two Indian words: jati, the endogamous group one is born into, and varna, the place that group occupies in the system of social stratification mandated by Hindu scripture. There are four varnas, with the former ‘Untouchables’ constituting afifth (and lowest) strata. Into these varnas fit the 3,000 and more jatis, each challenging those, in the same region, that are ranked above it, and being in turn challenged by those below.

Would never forget this quote by Nehru, at the stroke of the midnight hour…

The star turn, however, was that of the first prime minister of free India, Jawaharlal Nehru. His speech was rich in emotion and rhetoric, and has been widely quoted since. ‘At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom,’ said Nehru.5 This was ‘a moment which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance’.

The partition was quite a challenge for the Sikhs, as they had their holy city (Amritsar) on the East (India), and the birthplace of the founder of their religion in the west (Pakistan)..

Forced to choose, the Sikhs would come down on the side of the Hindus. But they were in no mood to choose at all. For there were substantial communities of Sikh farmers in both parts of the province. At the turn of the century, Sikhs from eastern Punjab had been asked by the British to settle areas in the west, newly served by irrigation. In a matter of a few decades they had built prosperous settlements in these ‘canal colonies’. Why now should they leave them? Their holy city, Amritsar, lay in the east, but Nankana Saheb (the birthplace of the founder of their religion) lay in the west. Why should they not enjoy free access to both places?

How Menon had to massage various rules in the fiefdoms after Independence to join with India as one country..

P. Menon with the substance. In his book, Menon describes in some detail the tortuous negotiations with the rulers. The process of give and take involved much massaging of egos: one ruler claimed descent from Lord Rama, another from Sri Krishna, while a third said his lineage was immortal, as it had been blessed by the Sikh Gurus.

While Ambedkar had led the drafting of the Indian constitution, it was the individual, not the village that was chosen as the unit..

Ultimately it was the individual, rather than the village, that was chosen as the unit. In other respects, too, the constitution was to look towards Euro-American rather than Indian precedents. The American presidential system was considered and rejected, as was the Swiss method of directly electing Cabinet ministers. Several members argued for proportional representation, but this was never taken very seriously. Another former British colony, Ireland, had adopted PR, but when the constitutional adviser, B. N. Rau, visited Dublin, Eamon de Valera himself told him that he wished the Irish had adopted the British ‘first-past-the-post’ system of elections and the British cabinet system. This, he felt, made for a strong government. In India, where the number of competing interest groups was immeasurably larger, it made even more sense to follow the British model.

Once we gained independence, Ambedkar had suggested to withdraw from means of protest such as satyagraha which were unconstitutional, and could be considered as a means of anarchy.. especially when the citizens had constitutional means to make their protest visible..

Ambedkar also assured the House that the federalism of the constitution in no way denied states’ rights. It was mistaken, he said, to think that there was ‘too much centralization and that the States have been reduced to Municipalities’. The constitution had partitioned legislative and executive authority, but the Centre could not on its own alter the boundary of this partition. In his words, ‘the Centre and the States are co-equal in this matter . Ambedkar ended his speech with three warnings about the future. The first concerned the place of popular protest in a democracy. There was no place for bloody revolution, of course, but in his view there was no room for Gandhian methods either. ‘We must abandon the method of civil disobedience, non-cooperation and satyagraha popular protest’. Under an autocratic regime, there might be some justification for them, but not now, when constitutional methods of redress were available. Satyagraha and the like, said Ambedkar, were ‘nothing but the grammar of anarchy and the sooner they are abandoned, the better for us’

How India planned to divide the responsibilities between the union, state, and in some cases, both:

The constitution provided for three areas of responsibility: union, state and concurrent. The subjects in the first list were the preserve of the central government while those in the second list were vested with the states. As for the third list, here centre and state shared responsibility. However, many more items were placed under exclusive central control than in other federations, and more placed on the concurrent list too than desired by the provinces. The centre also had control of minerals and key industries. And Article 356 gave it the powerto takeovera state administration on the recommendation of the governor.

When the Election Commision was tasked with the act of marketing the universal right to vote, and to call every Indian to come to a polling both and cast their vote, cinemas, radios and documentaries were used to communicate the importance of this act:

Throughout 1951 the Election Commission used the media of film and radio to educate the public about this novel exercise in democracy. A documentary on the franchise and its functions, and the duties of the electorate, was shown in more than 3,000 cinemas. Many more Indians were reached via All-India Radio, which broadcast numerous programmes on the constitution, the purpose of adult franchise, the preparation of electoral rolls and the process of voting.

On the Tungabhadra dam..

In the book, there is a particularly fine description of the construction of the Tungabhadra dam. When finished, the dam would embody 32 million cubic feet of masonry; these laid at the rate of 40,000 cubic feet a day, every day for five years. The sheer scale could properly be conveyed only by means of analogy. ‘Imagine the masonry in Tungabhadra Dam’, wrote Hart, ‘being laid as a highway, 20 feet wide, 6 inches thick. It would extend from Luck now to Calcutta, or from Bombay to Madras.’37 Without question the most prestigious of all these schemes was the Bhakra–Nangal project in northern India. Again, its scale is best narrated in numbers. At 680 feet, the Bhakra dam was the second highest in the world; only the Grand Coulee Dam, on the Colorado river, was higher.