Mail on Sunday
ON 15 August 1947 as the Union Flag was pulled down from Delhi’s Red Fort and the new Indian flag unfurled, Duff Cooper, then British ambassador in Paris, recorded in his diary his pain and sadness. “A grand thing has come to an end and its last day should be one of mourning. Nor do I personally believe that the new regime will bring good to the peoples of India.”
Guha does not mention Cooper in his history of India since independence, but he has many other quotations from prominent Britons, most notably Churchill, which record the firm conviction of the departing British that the new Indian state would fail. Indians could not possible run this huge country without British help.
Certainly in the early years of independent India not many would have given much chance of the new born state reaching 60, which it will in August.
India came to freedom wading through blood and strife. The creation of Pakistan and a partition of the subcontinent saw some two million die and millions more being forced to flee their homes in what was, perhaps, one of the greatest mass migrations in history.
The British had left behind a curious state. A third of India had been ruled not by the British but by Indian princes who enjoyed considerable internal autonomy. In 1947 all these 500 odd princely states were given the right to either accept India or Pakistan or seek independence. Indians had to integrate these princely states and with one glaring exception, Kashmir, which remains a flashpoint between India and Pakistan, this was done much quicker and with a lot less violence then the transformation of the American 13 colonies into the modern United States.
The British may have used the railways to connect India but there was no uniform criminal code all over the country (princely states had their own laws) nor a uniform civil code. Indians could acquire as many wives as they liked. Although free India introduced laws stopping the Hindus from doing so, they could not quite tackle the Muslims on this issue. Also the huge provinces the British had left behind were subdivided into smaller states mostly based on language, and some on tribal and ethnic considerations.
None of this was easy and some of it was marked by a great deal of violence. But given that all this took place while India remained a democracy (it has held regular elections since 1952) says much for the country and is a great contrast to China.
India has also seen economic progress, albeit at a much faster rate since 1991 when the old ideas of socialism began to be discarded. This has created a thriving middle class of some 250 million and last year Indian tourists to the UK outspent Japanese visitors.
But in keeping with the contradictory, maddening, nature of India the story line is not a straight one. Three hundred million Indians still live below the poverty line. And if call centres in Hyderabad take regular calls from the UK, then in the rural areas of the state farmers, unable to pay debts, have been committing suicide.
And Indian democracy is terribly flawed. Politics is mainly a family business, many politicians have criminal records and the whole political system is dreadfully corrupt. Also justice is so slow — cases can take years — that it can often be virtually meaningless.
Guha tells this complex story of India at 60 in a fine narrative style blending in little nuggets of fascinating information, often of great social interest, to make this more than just one fact after another.
His hero is, undoubtedly, Jawaharlal Nehru, the Harrow and Cambridge educated man, often jailed by the British who became India’s first Prime Minister and ruled the country until 1964. He started the institutes of technologies that have given India such a head start in the technological field, made sure democracy took root, and also that the Army did not meddle in politics. Given that, in neighbouring Pakistan the Pakistani generals who had shared a common British military upbringing as the Indians could not be so restrained, it is a tremendous Indian achievement.
Guha’s villain is Nehru’s daughter Indira who, despite winning the Bangladesh war, corrupted much of the political system and also for a time in the mid-70s made India into a dictatorship. During that period even her father’s speeches in favour of liberty were banned. Then suddenly Indira called elections, lost and without a whimper left office. For all the many faults of Indian democracy this remains its finest hour.
Guha cannot explain why Indira Gandhi called elections and speculates that she may have been riled by Bernard Levin’s critical articles in the Times. This seems fanciful although, given the extraordinary way history works in India, he could well be right.
The only curiosity of this otherwise fine book is Guha’s reluctance to talk about the personal life of the Indian rulers. So he cannot even bring himself to say Nehru had an affair with Edwina Mountbatten, wife of Lord Mountbatten, Britain’s last Viceroy in India. An examination of their relationship and the influence Lord Mountbatten had on Nehru’s policies would have been very useful.
‘India After Gandhi’ by Ramachandra Guha, published by Macmillan
© Mihir Bose
