Brief Overview of Indian Political History — Part 1: PM Nehru (& PM Shastri) Years 1947–1966
CITIZEN ZERO PUBLIC CORRESPONDENCE 2023.01.26: E-mail Notes to Mrs. Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, The General-Secretary of Indian National Congress Party.
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Editorial Note: These Citizen Zero e-mail correspondences below were exchanged with the current General-Secretary of Indian National Congress, Shri. Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, in 2023. On the ocassion of India's 74th Republic Day on the 26th January, they are being published here on the substack platform for free public-domain access. Mera Bharath Mahan! Jai Hind! Vande Mataram! •
[Part 1 of Note To General-Secretary of Indian National Congress]
<20230103>
Sir/Madam:
The very first time since I was eligible for adult-suffrage at eighteen years of age (changed from twenty-one, in the 61st Amendment of 1988,) I was registered into the electoral roll, and a few years after in 2004, during my final term studying Engineering at the university, I had a chance to vote in our Indian election. I was, as I recall, brimming with excitement at the prospect of voting in a secret ballot, and getting my finger inked as we do here. At that time, I got to vote in both the State Legislative Elections for Karnataka and the Indian Parliamentary elections being held the same time that year. As I try to recall now, somewhat vaguely, that the last couple of national elections prior to that time was held after the previous government at the Center had been dissolved on account of withdrawal of support from its coalition partners, and on this ocassion it was on account of calling for an early election within the next 6 months. Though I tend to think that nearly all dissolution of parliament by an incumbent majority, or its coalition, or party-defections for that matter, is to capitalize on some polls and popularity indicators for the advantage of affording an early election, and that the public posturing on some national security emergency or the 'lack of confidence' in the matter of issue-based support from coalition partners scheming new alliances, both indicate a woeful state of affairs in our democratic practices, and that perhaps our politicians do not value their time in the present term as much as surviving into a future term nor respect the expectations of the peoples' mandate, and that those high hopes of striving for the ideal of 'carpe diem' as espoused by the framers of our Constitution, that our legislators may never lose an opportunity to 'seize the day' of labour 'beneath the sun' in rendering their service to the Republic, as no different from any of its ordinary citizens labouring in their jobs for the progress of our economy, seems to have been lost in the shameful aggrandizement of power, and in reducing the object of Democracy to merely the process of elections, electioneering, and voting.
The hopelessness and disenchantment inflicted on our peoples, through such callous opportunism of our politicians as elected representatives, especially on the youth of our nation, has for many years been indicated in the sub-par voter turn-outs, especially in the cities? Something, if I may quote paraphrazing a line from a 90s movie– "It's a lousy feeling being this way, the way we were colonized by a bunch of British bozos. We couldn't even find a decent culture to wish to be colonized by. Now, we are ruled by these effete brats and corrupt scoundrels, and not all this rare new fresh air in the whole wide world is going to make an effin' difference!"
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<20230107> Decades and years before I was born my grandfather Shri. Javaregowda Lingaiah had been a Labour Union Rights activist and Freedom-Fighter in the Indian Independence Movement when he had joined the Mysore Congress around 1938, and had served imprisonment during the 1942 Quit India Movement, and for the 1947 Mysore Palace Satyagraha. While, in the post-Independence years from 1950-58, he was elected for two terms as a Bangalore City Corporator for the Congress and later in the opposition, and for many years after was Press Secretary for the Bangalore City Congress, being actively involved in all manner of party organization, and finally in 1971-72 was elected Mayor of Bangalore City. For years after I was born, I recall 'thatha' my grandfather always dressed in white Khadi shirt and 'lungi/panchi' (like long kilts I guess), and that nearly everyday he'd receive guests at home for tea, of those who I suppose had been his former colleagues and party workers, and they'd have long discussions over the present state of matters in the party and the government. On the walls of the main foyer of the house that he built where I grew up, were framed photos from those of his political years, on the occassions of meeting with the President, Governor, Chief Minister, and two of our Prime Ministers too, and portraits of the Mahatma, Panditji, and of his Labour Rights political-mentor Shri. Bhashyam Iyengar, and many others of his heroes from those years. There were some awards in brass and silver on display he had received for his role in the Indian Freedom Movement, and for his work with the party organization of the Mysore/Karnataka and Bangalore City Congress. He had have a couple of friends who nearly visited him daily, riding over to our home in their bicycles, and having tea with him and reading the newspaper, and going on walks with him in the park. At nights, my mother who was a Government-Pleader Civil Rights Lawyer would go over to him to discuss her cases and happenings in the High Courts and the City Corporation. About once or twice a year, we would drive over with our grandfather to visit the village he had grown up, and meet with old family relations there, and to see over the primary/middle school he had built for those village children, something that was very dear to his heart being as it was that my grandfather had left school when he was 9 or 10 years old to work in the fields with his father, and at 14 years had migrated to Bangalore to work in the cotton mills in 1931. Though my grandfather had absolutely dissuaded any of his own children, all of who were born in the 1950s, from entering politics later, he had prided in being able to give them all education upto college, and in goading them towards professional careers as a Lawyer, a Doctor, a Professor, a Veterinarian, and an Engineer who became an Army Captain & later a Businessman, and he had helped so many other people from all walks of life showing genuine concern and never ever any discrimination towards their entreaties in their job-applications or public-petitions where his endorsements/recommendations were valued and respected, and we, as his grandchildren, were in awe and adoration of this Noblest Man, Kind King and the only true Gandhian we knew in our lives, and though he would on occassion ask us what we had learnt of Indian History in school and we hadn't known what to say, he was for most part just glad happy to let us be there growing up before his eyes having an 'Eternal Summer' holiday. And so, these are the images that floods my mind, and of what I remember having grown up in a Congress political family.
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<20230104> I suppose, given this political heritage that has gone into my upbringing, it is a matter of some shame or carelessness that I never took an active interest in the knowing or understanding of Indian Political & Parliamentary History– neither that first time when I voted while as a university-student, nor on the two other occassions during the State elections of 2018 and General Elections of 2019. While the years in between when I was living in America, I remained somewhat indisposed to its happenings here in India, and not ever seriously did I pause to consider the centuries of history and struggles of our people and our nation that had transpired to make these moments when we vote such an ordinary matter-of-fact in our time, and of this privilege and responsibility that had been bestowed upon us as Citizens of India. Therefore now, as I enter into my 40s, in reflecting upon what matters I have held paramount exercizing my vote on those 3 separate occassions, goads me to writing this explanatory note, and a hopeful reference for the future.
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[20230111, 20230113] It is worthwhile thus to take some stock of those 200 or more years of British colonial legacy between 1750-1947, that had ingrained itself into the Indian Economy, and the caution it may serve when history repeats, morphing itself, knowingly or unbeknownst to us.
“By 1901, the land-revenue tax and salt tax constituted 53% and 16% of the total tax revenue of the British-India Government, and by 1940 over 70% of the land was owned by zamindars, landlords and moneylenders,” whose main duty was the collecting of this land-revenue-tax from landless/tenant-farmers for their British administrators, “charging exorbitant rent & compounding interests-debts amounting to nearly 20% of India's national income at the time,” allowing very little or no investments in seeds, fertilizers, land-reuse, and farm-technology, while with extensive sharecropping and land fragmentation agricultural output was marginalized, and often being forced to grow commercial / cash crops instead of food-crops as a means to pay their taxes;
These British agricultural policies in India resulted in widespread famines in 18th-20th centuries, especially in 1943, when a considerable amount of foodgrains from India was shipped to the British WWII supplies abroad, which resulted in an 'Indian Holocaust' of some 3 million deaths from starvation and disease in the provinces of Bengal, Orissa, Bihar, and other parts of the fertile Gangetic plains ironically;
Additionally, the British-India Health Services were so dismal, “Malaria affecting 1/4th of the Indian population, along with occurence of Cholera, Dysentry, Small-Pox, and Plague, that the average Indian Life Expectancy by 1941 was only about 32-years;”
“Only 25% of the men and about 8% of the women in our population had any kind of educational access, and were considered literate,” and less than a a few hundreds/thousands graduated per year as doctors, engineers, and professionals to serve the needs of the masses;
In Industry, British-manufactured products were sold under Free-Trade obligations in India, while the few goods manufactured in India were subjected to Trade-Tariffs everywhere, so much so that India's main exports were raw materials of jute, cotton, tobacco, foods, “constituting about 5-10% of the national income and this too being transferred to British banks, while India's domestic imports included nearly 65% from goods manufactured abroad;”
[20230113] “Since 1880s the Indian Rupee was undermined to favour British Industry”, and later for Britain's war-effort (as might have been stated in the 1919 essay by British economist Keynes on 'How To Pay For War?'). That, “after 1890 nearly 50% of income of the Central Government of British-India went to the financing of the Britain's Army,” with Indian Soldiers being generally deployed in faraway colonies abroad and kept deliberately misinformed of the developments of the Indian Freedom struggle movements;
Considerable financing went into the Indian Civil Service, whose administrators were enamoured by the prestige of their jobs, staying loyal to the British vice-regal and governor's offices, endowed with arbitrary judicial and law-enforcement powers, and were obstructionist to the work of Indian-elected provincial legislative assembly bodies between 1919-1935 whose lawmaking was already limited to token subjects and largely revoked under war-powers, and while property-possession requirement meant only 3% to 15% of the Indian populace was enfranchised to vote;
The Indian Railway-Network heralded as one of the hallmark achievements of the British colonial legacy was “to mainly facilitate transport of raw materials from the interior of the country to shipping ports by-passing needs of any factory-establishments within the country,” and additionally the growth of Coal, Steel and Heavy Machinery factories that accompanied railway industralization elsewhere was prevented in India except when the need arose for increasing capacity for war-time productions;
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"That it was finally between 1914-1947, owing to the two World Wars and The Great Depression, a small but India-owned industrial capital, gradually and innovatively, over the decades were finally able to capture nearly 75% of the market share for industrial products including banking, finance and insurance from European entreprises in India", breaking thus the foreign monopoly over India's national resources, and they became household brand names among industry and consumers, both Indian and world over.
That it is the tireless work of the 1934-35 Congress Working Committee and its Provincial Legislatives of 1937, and the National Planning Commision before their arrests in 1942, up until the duration of WWII, and later, of the uncompromising hard-fought demands by the Congress leaders against the usual double-dealing of British Viceregal proposals, of 1940-42 and in the follow-up British Cabinet Mission Plan of 1946; that it was those efforts that would lay the democratic republican foundations of the Constituent Assembly of Free India in 1947.
In consideration of what a daunting task of restoration and progress befell our national leaders after Independence, it dawns on one as no small feat for the incipient Indian democracy, the ways of which was yet to be realized among other nations of post-colonial West-Asia, Africa, Latin America, and including of the Soviet Union nations;
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[20230110, 20230113] With the occassion of Independence of India from Britain on August 15th 1947, however, came the bloody chilling aftermath of the Partition of India and Pakistan, that left over a staggering “500,000 people dead” across the borders and riots that spread to cities, having perpetuated unspeakable de-humanizing violences upon each other, and of destructions worth millions of rupees on both sides, and that such utter madness unfolded in those mere 2-3 months should never let our Peoples forget how such wanton Cruelty and Brutality in our Human Nature could exist amidst such joyous celebrations of our Patriotism and Independence, but that we may always spare a moment to remember our Common Humanity over centuries and the Love of Peace between our two Nations. May we also remember Bapuji Gandhiji with his tireless pleas of Ahimsa and of the great Penances he undertook for our Peoples' redemption. Indeed, such was one of the main tasks of our interim Indian government then until 1951, first with “the rehabilitation of millions of West Pakistan refugees into the regions of Punjab, Haryana, Himachal, UP, Delhi, Sindh, Rajasthan, and later the stream of refugees from East Pakistan (Bangladesh) into West Bengal, Assam, and Tripura that would continue till the 1971-72 war.” This reconciliation also involved at the time a grant of hundreds of millions of rupees for property destructions, generosity in the sharing of water of our common rivers, and in particular the 1950 Nehru-Liaqat Pact by the two Prime Ministers for the protection of religious minorities who had remained on both sides nevertheless.
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The other main task of the post-Independence era was undertook by Mr. Sardar Patel, the 'Ironman of India' who within in a year after 1947, went about the real 'Herculean Labour' of the unification effort for the consolidation of the States of the Indian Union from some 500? British-provinces and “56 Indian princely-states (covering 40% of Indian territory).” <20230115> Notably, at this time, with the British-Provinces already demarcated between India, West Pakistan & East Pakistan (East Bengal), the princely-States of Hyderabad, Junagadh, and Kashmir, (being as these were Hindu-majority regions administered by Muslim-princes while Kashmir was a Muslim-majority region administered by a Hindu-prince), were the only three who had resisted signing the Accession to the Indian Union, where India had called for plebiscites and won in two of those princely-states enclaved within Indian territory, and then the Indian army had secured those regions later. Whereas in the northern border lands of Kashmir, a militia from Pakistani had entered and were advancing onwards, and it was only then the princely-ruler at the Srinagar capital had acceded to the Indian Union, and at that point the Indian army entered to secure the region and push back the invading forces. That when the matter was brought before the United Nations Security Council, a mutual ceasefire was declared by end of 1948, and in 1951 with India calling for a plebiscite under UN supervision (and again in 1954), and with Pakistan refusing to withdraw its occupying militia-army, this stalemate had resulted in the creation of the Line-Of-Control (LOC) as the official border between Pakistan and India in Kashmir.
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[20230113] It was from these beginnings, the Constituent Assembly of India nominated the Drafting Committee headed by Dr. BR Ambedkar to consolidate and produce a draft Constitution for public and legislative discussions, whose main provisions included Preamble, Fundamental Rights, Directive Principles of State Policy, Bicameral Parliamentary System, de jure President, Union of States, Hierarchical Judiciary, etc. and in November 26th 1949 the Constitution of India was finally Adopted, Enacted and Given Unto Ourselves as the People of India. <20230107> And, on the following January 26th 1950, India declared Herself to the World as a Sovereign, (Secular, Socialist) Democratic Republic (inclusive of the 42nd Amendment of 1976).
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<20230107> Our nation held its first elections then over four-months from 1951-52 for an electorate of over a 170 million people, “who had then celebrated the occassion in festive clothing and fine jewellery,” with an official voter turnout of around 46%, and increasing thereafter in future elections. It was also an election where nearly 40% of Indian Women were already eligible to vote in the practice of Universal Adult Franchise, that in essense was the belief that "though poor, propertyless, and uneducated, the peoples would assert their power through vote, and sooner or later, be able to bring about a social order responsive to their needs", instead of, for instance, "the path of bloody revolution against Feudalism and Capitalism by peasants and workers, as seen in Russia (1917) and China (1925-49)". Such an achievement in Women's Suffrage from comparative democracies had required over a century-and-a-half (?) to take place after the American Declaration of Independence in 1776, and another 50 years or so thereafter before all its African-American people were allowed to vote definitively. I quote these factoids because while those numbers themselves indicate a staggering achievement in itself, and of the broadest liberal egalitarian view held by our leaders and our freedom-fighters for India, but the fact that this process has continued unmitigated thus far is a testimony to the work carried out by India's Election Commission, an organization created in 1950 within the Constitution to function independent of any political influence, and who have largely over the years garnered many successes and approbation from international/UN free-election observers. (Though with our nation's 17-18th Parliamentary elections last held in 2019 for an electorate nearing a billion-people, any report of massive voter dis-enfranchizement from electoral rolls when verified is both a matter of concern from the point-of-view of logistics and ensuring fair-play).
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<20230103> I suppose it may also be instructive to our mass political consciousness to look back through the decades of our various governments in power, and our electoral processes through the party systems while with its changes wrought through division of a party or arrival of new parties. It appears that somewhere along the way, at some point after Independence in 1947, the stability and uniformity of the early decades from having a dominant national party in power gave way to what we now have these days, a certain 'compromise of a composite structure' in the national parliament emerging from the multiplicity of dominant state parties that may be attributed partially/primarily to the linguistic reorganization of states initiated for administrative efficiency and highest-development of all of India's national languages, (a philosophy advocated in 1919 itself by Gandhiji in the effort to the mobilize the Congress movement to a national movement and effect the reorganization of its regional branches on local language basis). This process being enacted in the parliament mainly from States Reorganization Act of 1956, and the integration of Tribal Lands into North-East States from 1971-77 and into the new Central India States from 2000-2002.
[20230113] And thus, after those decades to the present era, where we have arrived now with some 30 States (and 7 Union Territories?) achieving the stability and autonomy of a kind of 'Federal Statehood' within the Indian Union.
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<20230107> Like the elections in 1952, later in 1957 and 1962, Shri. Jawahar Lal Nehru, “who was known to have personally campaigned over a stretch of 40,000 kms addressing some one-tenth of India's population” and educating them on the democratic electoral process that had begun in our lands, would emerge as India's 1st Prime Minister (1947-1951, 1952-57, 1957-62, 1962-64), and his party, the Indian National Congress would emerge as the single largest-party with an overwhelming parliamentary-majority to be able to carry on with little friction from any combined Non-Congress opposition, “who would only garner about 25-28% of the seats then in those national elections, and between 30-40% in the state assemblies in those elections.” But those were idealistic times, when the opposition parties then were said to have a lot more in common with the Congress in espousing secular democratic egalitarian values, and who had also been part of the freedom struggle movement together and separately, and they made their voices regularly heard in the new parliamentary process.
The Congress Party was known to have both Leftist and Rightist flanks in their organization, and these either broke away or merged back from Leftist Parties as the Socialist Party, the Kisan Praja Party, and the Communist Party (whose bases were predominant in West Bengal and Kerala, and they too had broken away into a separate party favouring the Chinese Revolution.) Among the Rightist Party supporting a laissez-faire economic development, opposing centralized planning, and essentially secular was the Swatantra Party (headed by the titular last 'governor-general of India', Shri. C Rajagopalachari till his passing in 1967). While the religious-Communalists parties were the Bharatiya Jan Sangh, Hindu Mahasabha, Ram Parishad Party?, etc. who espoused Hindu-fanaticism and anti-Muslim propoganda, who were rather outgrowths of Rashtriya Svayam Sevaks (RSS), a supposedly non-governmental voluntary social organization in many states, (who had remained in the fringes after some of their cadres had orchestrated the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi on January 30th 1948). But there were also among these groups a fringe of religious Muslim-parties such as the Muslim League, etc. who were largely theocratic in their outlook.
But few, if any of these other parties of the time had a national following to the scale and momentum built up by Congress through the pre-Independence years, and no less because for the reasons that it had continue to strive to represent the secular pluralistic aspirations of a free and united India, and had managed to inspire such idealism in the mass popularity it received from the peoples of our Nation. While both the Left and the Right flanks within the Congress were commited to the values of Secularity and Civil Liberties in the Indian Democratic system, the main difference between them was in determining a Socialist-centric or a Capitalist-centric trajectory for the new Indian Economy then. It was known then that Shri. Sardar Vallabhai Patel, as the Home-Minister of India till his passing in 1950, who along with a strong capitalistic view of the economy had defended the administrative structures of the Indian Civil Services from being dismantled, and had championed the cause of Right to Property as a a Fundamental Right. Yet, despite their differences on these matters, the 'Great Sardar' was a staunch secularist, and had remained an inseparable friend and ally of Prime Minister Nehru who had held a view of a Bureaucracy-free, Socialist Welfare-State for India.
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<20230108> Prime Minister Nehru's socialistic program in the 1950s was primarily achieved through setting up of National Planning-Commissions, and its idealistic pursuit of the Five-year Plans.
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<20230108, 20230112> During these years of the 3 National Plans, Agriculture Land Reforms were initiated to eliminate British-instituted Zamindari revenue-collecting landlordism towards creating Co-operative Society farming through small-land holding peasant-proprietorship, community-development works, large infrastructures for irrigation, energy, agri-research.
While agriculture and land-reforms being subjects of the State-list, the Central Government could not get directly involved in its implementation other than with forms of incentivization. Understandably, this was a major consideration for the Nehru Administration, being as it was that India faced acute food-shortage and famine-situations in the 1960s, and was dependent on international food-aid especially of USA's wheat supply through the PL480 program, while at the same time resisting its geopolitical pressures on India's international stance against the Korean War (1950-52), and later against the Vietnam War (1964-75) as well, and thus, it was Russian and Chinese food-aid that came to our rescue in those hard-times. “Nearly half of the budget of the 1st Five-Year Plan went into the procurement of foreign foodgrains. Though India faced this difficulty meeting domestic demands for foodgrains those years, its Agricultural Productivity Growth Rate of 3% was 7.5 times greater than the previous 50 years under British Colonial rule, and in fact holds comparable to Imperial Japan's own agricultural growth-rate between 1878-1912.”
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[20230112] From the point of view of India's Industrialization, Socialistic-planning meant then the delineation of Public Sector enterprises such as defence, public-utilities, and some heavy industry, and Private Sector for consumer-goods and some capital-goods such as metals, machinery, chemicals, which especially after the Second-Plan was prioritized through Mahalanobis Matrix of progressive import-substitution developed by the eponymous Indian economist. Though there was some consensus among our industrialists-capitalists and our nationalist leaders that recognized the need of a mixed-economy in India, the resistance was against the enlargement of the public-sector through any planned nationalization, and against functioning through the rigour of the Industrial Development and Regulations Act of 1951 which laid down stringent foreign-exchange/import controls and government licensing-quotas that was aimed to prevent private resource concentration and monopoly, and for protection of small and medium industries. Yet, this approach in the period of these 3 five-year plans had resulted in comparatively fast “industrial growth rate of 7.1%, whereby by mid-1970s India would meet 90% of its capital-goods requirements from its indigenous manufacturing of Textiles, Rubber, Petroleum, Plastics, Chemicals, Metals, Electrical & non-Electrical Machinery, and Transport equipment, etc., as compared to pre-Independence era where the same amount was being imported.” Additionally, “the dependence of foreign-aid & foreign private-investment into the 1960s was kept as low as 1/6th of pre-1947 era.” These are some of the "reasons why India determining its own rate of capital-formation could maintain an independent foreign policy withstanding any neocolonial pressures from advanced nations at the time."
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<20230108, 20230112> To Prime Minister Nehru's credit India's Industrial Plans succeeded in the creation of 3 major Steel Plants within the Second Plan; with the construction of many Dam-projects for Hydro-electricity; with massive increases to the tune of several hundred percentage-points in development of infrastructures for roads, railways, electrifications, hospitals, schools, colleges, etc. <20230112> Likewise thus, “the GDP for this overall economy from 1951-65 under these 3 five-year plans grew at 4% per annum, which is comparatively higher than Imperial Japan's expansionist decades of 1878-1912, and 4 times higher than during the previous 50 years of British Colonial rule of India.”
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[20230112] The main element of PM Nehru's socialist plan was in the approach to equalize regional economic inequalities across different states with his Industrial Policy Resolution of 1956, and the National Integration Council of 1961, and this meant a greater central assistance through grants and loans to majority backward states, often whose sizes and populations gave them proportionally the largest political leverage in the Indian Union despite being economically backward. But that was still only a marginal amount of capital being distributed to be able to effect a more productive result among them at a time when India's average national growth-rate of 3.5% was being contributed by overall agricultural-output and largely by the 5-7 higher industrialized states. Barring an exception or two, most Indian States have had abundant natural resources and labour availability, but it was directly related to the persistence of other socio-cultural factors such as lack of education/ health services/ womens rights, childhood malnutrition, caste, gender and religious discriminations, feudalism, landlordism, administrative inefficiency, corruption, agricultural-technology investments, some industrial-infrastructures, etc. as when most of these happened to be State Subjects in the Constitution, and the Central policy directives could not be made as effective with only its funding assistance. While Indian Constitution guaranteed the Right to Migration and Movement to any part of India, at the time of 1950s-70s the large Public-Sector meant middle-class office jobs would still be held by locals having a provincial language advantage, and blue-collar jobs would open up to migrants benefitting both states but in unequal ways.
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[20230115] Some of the other elements of PM Nehru's socialist implementations towards building an egalitarian society as envisioned in the Directive Principles of our Constitution, included instituting the Anti-Untouchability-Law of 1955; enacting certain Affirmative-Action Reservations for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes in Educational institutions & Governmental jobs.
<20230107> Also, somewhat contentiously during Prime Minister Nehru's Administration in 1950s, that may have led to the alienation and opposition of the Rightist parties, was the reforms he had initiated through “the enactment of the Hindu Family Law in 4 separate Acts of parliament, through which he instituted changes for monogamy, raising age of consent and marriage, rights for divorce, inheritance, and property for women, including education rights and other civil-liberties, etc. While at the same time failed to initiate similar changes covering followers of other religions.” Particularly this approach to similarly codify and normalize Muslim Family Law within the Indian Constitution over the decades had often been met with opposition by religious Muslims in India, and hence such legislations were abandoned by various Congress Governments over time. It is interesting to note that this Segregation of Civil Code Law for Hindus and Muslims and other religious representations in India was first carried out by the British Indian Civil Service in the 18th-19th century, and had been brought over ad-hoc by the Framers of our Constitution with aims for reformation in the post-Independence era, and it is known that Dr. BR Ambedkar himself had resigned from the Constituent Assembly in 1950 for the very reason that the interim Government was delaying this implementation of reforms pertaining to religious code in Indian Civil Law.
[20230113] Again, it is PM Nehru who responded to the countrywide agitations against the hegemonic enforcement of Hindi over non-Hindi states by enacting the Official Languages Act of 1963 (further fortified by PM Indira Gandhi in 1967), retaining thus English as the associate/co-official language of communications of the Governments of India and Her States.
[20230112, 20230115] PM Nehru also introduced Community Development Program for Indian villages between 1952-1963 employing Block Development Officers and Gram-Sevaks to bringing about improvement in agriculture development, food-production, schooling, health-services, transport infrastructures, etc. but the framework became bureaucratized and corrupt instead of galvanizing self-reliance among the rural populace, and so for empowering democratic self-government and rural-administration of village-units (grams), its clusters at the block-level (taluk?) and district-level (zilla), the system was transformed into de-centralized 3-level Panchayat-Raj & Co-Operative Systems in 1959 and incorporated into the Indian Constitution.
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[20230108, 20230115] The other major area of interest for Prime Minister Nehru was towards implementing availability of Universal Basic Education for India's Children till the age of 14 in their mother-tongues & state languages. But again Education being subject of the State-list, the Central Government could not get directly involved other than incentivizing with large grants for primary, secondary, and high-school. Even the implementation of the Free and Compulsory Education as required by the constitution had to be delayed from 1961 to 1966 and beyond. Though "school enrollment between 1951 to 1961 doubled for boys and tripled for girls in India", the education infrastructure and faculty availability in rural schools was dismal, and dropouts there were frequent due to the prevalence of child-labour, forced-marriages, migrations, etc. In 1963 PM Nehru urged writing to the Chief Ministers "to remedy this basic ills in poor education standards even if it meant a reduction in funding Industrial growth". Though India's rate of illiteracy was reduced from 85% in 1951, the process was gradual and uneven across states, and would overall hover around 52% when surveyed in 1992.
[20230108, 20230115] However, with regards to students graduating with undergraduate and post-gradate degrees “the yearly total doubled from 300,000 in 1947 to 1964, with women making up 22% of those numbers.” Likewise, in the field of Technical Education, Prime Minister Nehru was responsible for setting up the series of Indian Institutes of Technology in 1952, along the lines of America's MIT model apparently, at Kharagpur, Bombay, Madras, Delhi, Kanpur. Additionally, PM Nehru was instrumental in setting up the National Physical Laboratory in 1947 and extending it to 17 other such national laboratories for scientific and industrial research by the 1960s; As an early adherent of the benefits of nuclear-energy, PM Nehru had even met the great Dr. Albert Einstein (in America?). He created India's Atomic Energy Commision under Dr. Homi Baba in 1948 and its permanent Department in 1954, and even went on to set up Asia's first nuclear-reactor plant in Trombay-Bombay (“that however went critical in 1956”); PM Nehru was also responsible for setting up the Indian National Committee for Space Research (INCOSPAR) in 1962, and a rocket-launching facility (TERLS) at Thumba.
So significant were some of these steps taken then during Prime Minister Nehru's Era, it was surveyed that "at the time of dissolution of the USSR in 1990, India was known to have the second largest number of scientific/technical manpower in the world!"
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[20230108] The decline of Congress dominance, was most marked in 1962 when in some 9 out of the 16 States? the Congress was forced to form coalitions governments or had to remain in the opposition, while earlier in the state of Kerala the first democratically elected Communist government of the world was formed, but one that would, however, also become the first state subjected to President's rule upon Prime Minister Nehru's highly autocratic intervention in 1959.
One of the reasons, as pointed by Prime Minister Nehru himself, for this gradual decline of Congress Party was the result of him instituting a separation of roles of Party Organization from the Government Operations in 1950, and that apparently had led to many of its members hankering after Parliamentary and Cabinet positions, with a gradual exodus of dissidents to other Leftist & State Parties, and causing counter swelling in the ranks of rich bourgeoisie in the party. “This organizational capacity of the party had been critical to carry the message of government policy to the People, and likewise appraise government leadership with the real problems being faced by the masses, and as also a check on any bureaucratic excesses and malpractices in the states,” therefore its decline was known to have had a visible affect on the election results.
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<20230108> One of the lasting legacies of Mr. Nehru's leadership was the prominent role he helped India play in Internationalism at the time between 1950-60s when Asian/African countries broke free of the yoke of British/European colonialism. With the hindsight of comparative peace and sovereignty seen in South Asia from post-WWII to the 21st century, Mr. Nehru has be credited for the boldness and farsightedness of the Non-Aligned Movement of India, and its memberships with Egypt, Yugoslavia, Indonesia, and others to protect the newly liberated Asian African region and the Indian Ocean from the pernicious encroachment of Neo-colonial manouvering of the USA/USSR Cold-War superpower geopolitics.
The activism of this policy in those decades, can be seen with the success of the Asian Relations Conferences and UNSC diplomacy for ensuring Indonesia's independence against Dutch re-occupation;
In India's UN Peacekeeping record helping to restore Congolese sovereignty from Belgium and USA sponsored guerrilla wars for plunder of its mineral resources, and in the Egyptian Suez Canal Crisis fomented by British and French aid supporting an Israeli invasion;
In mooting a call for Korean Unification at the UN, and India's UN Security Council opposition to USA's arms-race escalation and involvement in the Korean War that followed, and later leading its post-war repatriation efforts;
With India's recognition of the arrival of the Communist China's Peoples' Republic from its popular revolution whereas the USA/European powers were scrambling to restore the previous repressive Nationalist regime of China forced out to operating from Formosa (Taiwan);
With India's opposition of USA weaponizing French Indochine occupation, and rallying for the unity of Asian Nations in support for Vietnam's sovereignty, and for the unification of Vietnamese people through the Paris Peace Accord;
But with regards to the invasion of Hungary, PM Nehru while criticizing the USSR military aggression abstained from a UN vote and revoked India's ambassador from Budapest.
Though one of the fall-outs for India out of this neutral policy was USA then increasing its strategic military funding of Pakistan from 1954, (and well into the 21st century,) that had emboldened their army-led incursions across the LOC into Kashmir Valley, which on at least 3 occassions had led to wars in 1965, (1972, 1999). Whereas India under PM Nehru then, in order to maintain a more independent foreign policy than any foreign 'Balance-of-Power' impositions would source its military equipment from an assortment of nations as France, UK, Sweden, Germany, Japan, US, and with Russia (USSR) becoming its largest military supplier following those wars with Pakistan.
But Prime Minister Nehru being a passionate opponent of militarism and global wars, had intentionally kept a relatively smaller military budget within the 5-year Plans for independent India. It may well be for these specific policy reasons for India's lack of military preparedness, logistics, and intelligence in the brief but damaging India-China war of 1962 in the North-East sector, with its invasion of parts of Arunachal Pradesh (and Assam?), who later unilaterally withdrew their forces, and peace was maintained over the Tawang border for the next 50 years or so.
[20230115] Despite the Panch-Sheel agreement or the Five Principles of Peaceful Co-Existence, while India accepting China's position on Tibet, signed between PM Nehru and PM Chou En-Lai in 1954, (also as adopted into the 1972 Shanghai Communique by USA and China), the actual Chinese provocation may have been attributed to a confluence of other reasons at the time– “One, that in 1959 India had bravely, and quite rightly so, offered asylum to the Fourteenth Dalai Lama and the Tibetans, when at the time even the USA/Western nations did not readily interfere; Two, in 1960 Soviet Russia had signed major military deals with India, and Sino-Soviet relations in 1959-62 had deteriorated over their border disputes, and on perceiving threats by Soviet pressures to prevent Chinese Nuclear Weapons program; Three, from stronger relationships that were emerging between India and Afro-Asian Nations through NAM; four, USA's emerging 'One China' policy? internationally recognizing Formosa (Taiwan) and denying mainland China's seat on the UN Security Council, which India had ironically supported from 1950 itself.”
Anyhow, this showdown with China had affected Prime Minister Nehru in very personal way at the time, for he had always been, from his writings and opinions, a great admirer of the Chinese Civilization, of its ties with the Indian Civilization from ancient millennia, and of their vitality in building the future together, but the war had shook that optimism and faith in him, and he had fallen ill at the time, and later died in office in June of 1964.
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<20230108> In about a week after the passing of Shri. Pandit Jawahar Lal Nehru, veteran freedom-fighter Shri. Lal Bahadur Shastri was nominated and unanimously chosen as the 2nd (3rd) Prime Minister of India (1964-1966) by unopposed vote in the Congress Party. (The position of Acting Prime Minister in those few interim days was held by the Home Minister Shri. Gulzari Lal Nanda, and is therefore by some accounts technically counted as the 2nd Prime Minister of India.) The formal vote had been called for through the Party Syndicate of Congress leaders from different States gathered during PM Nehru's time itself as a move to reinforce the Congress organizational structure that had gradually weakened over the decade from defections and parliamentary exclusiveness. To conventional knowledge, and as from his autobiographies, and from other of his biographers, Prime Minister Nehru had never espoused an attitude or affinity for any kind of nepotism or dynastic succession, though Ms. Vijaylakshmi Pandit a veteran freedom-fighter and sister of Shri. Jawaharlal Nehru, represented India as its UN ambassador. (That, in the way of an anecdote, is reminiscent of Ms. Eleanor Roosevelt's role as America's UN Ambassador, and of Mr. Franklin Delano Roosevelt as the longest serving American President, in addition to being the creator of the 'New Deal', one of the landmark socialist programs in America of that era.) Yet, there is another suggestive anecdotal instance before Independence of India, where Pandit Nehru marvelling at his own rise and popularity in the Indian National Congress, had published an anonymous letter to a newspaper editorial warning against the danger of a political climate that tended to Caesarize any one person within a democratic republic. So, while it was known that his daughter Indira Priyadarshini worked closely with him in all matters of the Prime Minister's Office, she had not held any elected office or cabinet position in her father's time. It is, in fact, Prime Minister Shastri who had nominated Ms. Indira Gandhi to the cabinet post of Information and Broadcast minister in his administration.
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<20230108> Prime Minister Shastri too, however, had died while in office after leading for only about 19 months, a time during which Pakistan with its heavily US-funded military establishment, and with apparent encouragement from the Chinese, had decided to test and intimidate this new Indian leadership, and Mr. Shastri had responded authorizing the Indian Army to boldly rebuff the 1965 Pakistan-army incursion in Kashmir, and if needed to advance all the way to Lahore?Partly due to sanctions by USA/UK, and the terrible economic difficulties being faced by both countries at the time, a ceasefire was called within a month, and in the following Tashkent resolution of 1966, in obtaining military aid and guarantees from USSR, the Indian army came to relinquish whatever captured Pakistani territory that had served them access into the Kashmir Valley then.
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<20230108> It is in 1966, (while the same 'Acting' Prime Minister Nanda held brief office), with only a year to go for the 4th National Parliamentary election, that young Shri. Indira Nehru Gandhi defeated the apparently recalcitrant stalwart Congressman Shri. Moraji Desai, in the run-off party-parliamentary vote by a comfortable margin, and was crowned the 3rd (4th) Prime-Minister of India (1966, 1967-1971, 1971-1976, 1980-1984?).
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[End of Part 1 of Note To General-Secretary of Indian National Congress]
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Online References: To be added…