Walsh J.E. A Brief History of India

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A BRIEF HISTORY OF INDIA

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tons in 1950 to 82 million tons in 1960, in the same period the Indian

population grew from 361 to 439 million people. As population growth

negated most of the increased food production, India was forced to

import more food. Total food imports rose from 4.8 million tons in

1950 to 10.4 million tons in 1960. During 1965–68, as severe droughts

increased scarcity and drove food prices higher, India was forced to

import more than 11 percent of the food grains its people consumed,

much of it from the United States.

Nonalignment

Rather than commit India to the United States or the Union of Soviet

Socialist Republics (USSR) at the start of the cold war. Nehru advanced

a plan for “nonalignment” at a 1955 Indonesian meeting of Asian and

African nations. He envisioned a coalition of “third world” countries,

newly emerging from colonization and with India at its head, whose

members would pledge themselves to peaceful coexistence and mutual

territorial respect. A year earlier India and China had signed a treaty

that Nehru hoped would be the model for such relations; the treaty

recognized Tibet as part of China and pledged the two countries to

respect each other’s territorial integrity. “Hindi-Chini Bhai Bhai” (India

and China are brothers) was the slogan in India when it was signed.

The treaty, however, did not determine the actual boundary between

the two countries, in part because much of the 2,640-mile-long border

was remote and unmapped. Between 1955 and 1959 the Chinese made

repeated military incursions into territories claimed by India. In 1959

India granted political asylum to Tibet’s Buddhist religious leader, the

Dalai Lama. In fall 1962, after repeated talks had failed to resolve the

boundary disputes, Nehru ordered the Indian army to take back the ter-

ritories held by China. The Chinese easily defeated India’s army. They

took and kept the Karakoram Pass in the north, a route to Tibet that lay

through Indian Kashmir, and marched into Assam virtually unimpeded

before withdrawing on their own in November.

In May 1964, after a year of serious illness, Nehru died of heart dis-

ease. On the international scene his nonaligned policy was in tatters,

damaged by India’s invasion and seizure of Portuguese Goa in 1961 and

then destroyed by the Sino-Indian War of 1962. The defeat of India’s

army by the Chinese had also badly damaged his prestige at home. In

India evidence was mounting that the three ﬁ ve-year plans had failed

to remake the Indian economy. It was a sad ending to the career of a

dedicated freedom ﬁ ghter and statesman.

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CONSTRUCTING THE NATION

Lal Bahadur Shastri

Lal Bahadur Shastri (1904–66), a former Gandhian and political mod-

erate from the United Provinces, had served in Nehru’s place during

the prime minister’s last illness. In 1964, on Nehru’s death, Shastri was

elected head of the Congress Party and became prime minister. Shastri’s

brief tenure in ofﬁ ce (1964–66) was marred by an escalating food cri-

sis as poor monsoons produced increasing food shortages and prices

soared. His government also faced South India protests against a gov-

ernment plan to make Hindi the ofﬁ cial language of India; his govern-

ment ended the protest by resolving that each province could use three

languages: English (as an associate language), a regional language, and

Hindi. Finally, a three-week war with Pakistan in September 1965 over

India’s refusal to conduct a plebiscite in Kashmir saw Indian troops

victoriously driving back Pakistani forces almost to Pakistan’s capital at

Lahore. A 1966 truce, mediated by the USSR at a meeting in Tashkent,

returned Kashmir to the status quo before the ﬁ ghting started.

Indira Gandhi

Prime Minister Shastri died suddenly of a heart attack in January 1966

just at the conclusion of the Tashkent meetings. The “Syndicate,” the

nickname for the four Congress bosses from different states who had

controlled the Congress Party since Nehru’s last years, chose Jawaharlal

Nehru’s only child, Indira Gandhi (1917–84), to be the next prime

minister. At the time Indira Gandhi was a 48-year-old widow with

two sons. Her husband, Feroze Shah Gandhi, who was not related

to Mohandas Gandhi, had died suddenly in 1960. Indira Gandhi had

spent much of her adult life, even while her husband was alive, as her

father’s hostess and housekeeper. In January, the Syndicate bosses chose

her over Morarji Desai (1896–1995), the irascible 69-year-old leader of

Congress’s right wing, because of her family connections and because

they believed they could more easily bend her to their will.

The Green Revolution

Indira Gandhi came to power in 1966 as successive monsoon fail-

ures and severe droughts brought sections of the country to near

famine conditions. To gain food aid from the United States and the

International Monetary Fund (IMF) she had to agree to devalue the

rupee and to loosen government restrictions on foreign investment.

Dependence on foreign grain and foreign aid limited her government’s

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ability to plan long term, and for three years (1966–69) the ﬁ ve-year

plans were abandoned, and budgets were only year to year. Even

after 1969 the ambitious centralized planning of the Nehru years was

largely abandoned.

By the mid 1960s new strains of wheat (and later rice) had been

developed in Mexico and the Philippines that when used with intensive

irrigation, chemical fertilizers, and pesticides produced much higher

crop yields. Beginning in 1965 these new strains of wheat were used in

northern India from the Punjab and Haryana to western Uttar Pradesh.

Over the next four years India used loans from the IMF and the United

States to fund an intensive program of investment in new agricultural

technologies. Crops increased dramatically, particularly in the Punjab,

and by 1970 India was growing ﬁ ve times as much wheat as in 1960. By

the 1970s Indian food production had made the country a net exporter

of agricultural products. In the 1980s new strains of high-yield rice

were introduced into India, doubling production of that crop.

A WOMAN IN OFFICE

or more than 15 years Indira Gandhi was India’s prime minister,

holding her country’s highest political ofﬁ ce at a time when many

village women were still not allowed to read or write. Gandhi was made

prime minister by Congress Party bosses (the so-called Syndicate) who

believed that, as a woman, she would be pliable and easily managed.

Syndicate bosses soon learned otherwise. Gandhi also learned, as she

matured as a politician, how to use her age and gender to advantage

with Indian voters, presenting herself, on occasion, as a compassionate,

self-sacriﬁ cing mother struggling to maintain peace within a fractious

extended family. As she told one crowd during the 1967 election,

Your burdens are comparatively light, because your families are

limited and viable. But my burden is manifold because crores [tens

of millions] of my family members are poverty stricken and I have

to look after them. Since they belong to different castes and creeds,

they sometimes ﬁ ght among themselves, and I have to intervene

especially to look after the weaker members of my family, so that

the stronger ones do not take advantage of them.

Source: Frank, Katherine. Indira: The Life of Indira Nehru Gandhi (Boston:

Houghton Mifﬂ in, 2002), p. 303.

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CONSTRUCTING THE NATION

The “Green Revolution,” as the switch to high-yielding crops was

called, made Punjabi farmers the wealthiest in the nation. By the 1970s

Punjab’s peasant families earned twice as much as peasant households in

other parts of India. The increase in Indian food production was dramatic.

Nevertheless, the Green Revolution had some disadvantages. It increased

Indian dependence on chemical fertilizer dramatically and made farmers

rely on strains of wheat and rice that later showed themselves to be more

susceptible to disease and drought. Nor could Green Revolution innova-

tions be used throughout India; only regions where landholdings were

relatively large and peasants prosperous enough to invest in new tech-

nologies could use the new crops. Finally, the overall beneﬁ ts for Indians

consumers were somewhat undercut by continuing population increases,

which used up much of the greater availability of food.

Indira Gandhi Moves Left

Despite the Syndicate’s belief that she would defer to their advice and

leadership, Gandhi quickly emerged as a powerful and independent

politician. In the election of 1967, held as India’s food crisis worsened,

Congress retained its majority by its smallest margin ever: 20 seats. It lost

seats to opposition parties on the right—the free-market Swatantra Party

and the Hindu communalist Jana Sangh—and on the left—communist

parties in West Bengal and Kerala. In Madras an anti-Brahman party, the

Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (Party for the Progress of Dravidam, or

Food Production Growth, 1950–2000

1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000

Food grain production

(in millions of tons) 50.8 82.0 108.4 129.6 176.4 201.6

Food grain imports

(in millions of tons) 4.8 10.4 7.5 .8 0.3 –

Food grain reserves

(in millions of tons) – 2.0 – 15.5 20.8 40.0

Population

(in millions) 361.0 439.0 548.0 683.0 846.0 1,000.0

Source: INSA (2001, 215).

Note that the 2001 census report summarizing population growth over past censuses

reported the population (in millions) for the year 1991 at 843.

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DMK), took power. In the new (1966) state of the Punjab, the Sikh party

Akali Dal took control. In Uttar Pradesh (formerly the United Provinces),

Chaudhuri Charan Singh withdrew from Congress, formed a new peas-

ant-oriented party, and became chief minister of the state.

To regain political popularity and against the advice and wishes of

Syndicate leaders, Gandhi moved to the left. Between 1967 and 1973

she gathered around her a “Kashmiri maﬁ a.” These new advisers were

leftist in their political convictions, often from Kashmiri Brahman

backgrounds and, as former supporters of her father, saw her as his suc-

cessor (Frank 2002, 312). Chief among these was her private secretary

and longtime friend, Parmeshwar Narain (P. N.) Haksar. With Haksar’s

help, Gandhi proposed an ambitious economic plan that included land

reform and ceilings on personal income, property, and corporate prof-

its. In 1969 she nationalized 14 of the country’s private banks—among

them the Bank of India—an immensely popular move in rural areas

where private banks had long refused to open branches. In 1970 she

used a presidential order to abolish the privy purses awarded to former

THE END OF THE PRINCES

n 1970 there were 278 princes in India collecting annual tax-free

privy purses ranging from $25 to $350,000 but totaling altogether

more than $6 million. Indira Gandhi’s ﬁ rst attempt at ending the

princes’ purses passed the Lok Sabha but was defeated by one vote

in the Rajya Sabha, Parliament’s upper house. She then used a presi-

dential proclamation to strip the princes of their purses, privileges,

and titles. In 1971 the courts declared the proclamation illegal, but

by then Gandhi controlled Parliament. She had the Lok Sabha amend

the Indian Constitution to give the lower house the power to alter

the fundamental rights granted to citizens under the constitution and

to exclude such alterations from judicial review. The Lok Sabha then

passed another constitutional amendment, the 26th, abolishing the

princes’ privy purses and their privileges.

Like Gandhi’s nationalization of the private banks, the abolition of

the privy purses was enormously popular and enhanced her standing

with left-wing groups but carried little political risk. Neither princes

nor bank owners commanded sufﬁ cient political constituencies to act

against her.

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CONSTRUCTING THE NATION

Indian princes at independence. When state ministers opposed her

proposals for land reforms, Gandhi called for elections.

By the elections of 1971 Gandhi had been expelled from the old

Congress Party, which split into the Congress (O), led by Morarji Desai,

and her own Congress (R). (The R stood for “requisitioned.” Gandhi

had inaugurated her branch of Congress by sending around a requisi-

tion asking her supporters to meet. The O in Desai’s Congress stood for

“organization”—the assumption being that the Syndicate controlled

the original regional Congress organization.) Gandhi ran for elections

under her own party against the old Congress bosses. Her platform

consisted of a leftist program of goals and economic reforms. One cam-

paign slogan was “Garibi hatao” (Abolish poverty) (Frank 2002, 325).

Her election speeches called for slum clearance, the building of better

dwellings for slum residents, and the settlement of landless laborers

on their own property. Her campaign was a spectacular success, giving

Gandhi’s Congress (R) Party 325 seats in the Lok Sabha and an over-

whelming two-thirds majority of the popular vote.

Bangladesh and the 1971 Indo-Pak War

By 1970 Pakistan had discovered that religion alone was not sufﬁ cient

to hold together two regions 1,000 miles apart with opposing economic

interests, different languages, and distinct cultural traditions. East

Pakistan had 60 percent of the country’s population but found itself

dominated economically and politically by West Pakistan. These con-

ﬂ icts came to a head in 1970 when the East Pakistani leader Mujibur

Rahman (1920–75) and his political party won Pakistan’s ﬁ rst parlia-

mentary election but was not allowed by Pakistan’s president, Agha

Mohammad Yahya Khan (1917–80), to form a government. President

Yahya Khan imposed martial law on East Pakistan, so on March 25,

1971, Sheikh Mujib, as he was called, declared independence for East

Pakistan, present-day Bangladesh (Bengal country). West Pakistani

troops entered East Pakistan and burned, looted, and murdered its

citizens in cities, university centers, and bazaars across the province.

Sheikh Mujib was arrested and jailed. By December 1971, 10 million

East Pakistanis had ﬂ ed across the border into India.

The U.S. government under President Richard Nixon supported West

Pakistan. To gain support against the United States, Prime Minister

Gandhi broke India’s tradition of nonalignment to sign a 20-year treaty

with the USSR in which each country agreed to aid the other in case

of attack. At the same time India covertly supported the Bangladeshi

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uprising with funds, training, and equipment. In retaliation Pakistan

declared war on India in December, bombing Indian airﬁ elds in the

west. The Indian army entered East Pakistan, completely overwhelming

the Pakistani army, which surrendered in mid-December 1971. India

then declared a cease-ﬁ re, and Bangladesh was declared an independent

country. Gandhi’s military victory over Pakistan was wildly popular in

India. In the 1972 state assembly elections the Congress (R) Party won

70 percent of the seats; her party was now incontestably dominant in

both the center and the states.

The Emergency

Gandhi’s political fortunes reached their zenith in the 1971 elections.

The years following 1972 brought economic disasters and with them

political crisis. Three years of monsoon failures (1972–74) again

brought food shortages, rising food prices, and near famine to many

Indian regions. The Arab-Israeli war of 1973 raised the cost of oil-based

chemical fertilizers and, with it, the price of Indian foods. Inﬂ ation

reached 20 percent per year. The government imposed curbs on salaries

and incomes and cut expenditures. Strikes became commonplace, and

factories closed throughout the country. In 1974 Gandhi received an

emergency loan from the IMF but only on condition that the govern-

ment retreat from its aggressive economic policies and curtail govern-

ment expenditures even further. Not only had Gandhi not abolished

poverty in her years in power; under her government economic condi-

tions had worsened for virtually all classes of Indian citizens.

Even before the crises of 1972–76, Gandhi had wanted absolute loy-

alty from the members of her central government and from Congress

(R) ministries in regional states. Over the years since 1967 she had

abandoned internal party democracy, ﬁ lling party positions by appoint-

ment from above rather than by elections. She had undercut her party’s

grassroots organization by systematically replacing regional Congress

state leaders who had their own independent local networks with

people loyal to and dependent only on her. She created a pyramid-

like decision-making structure both in Congress and the government

to ensure that all matters, even if regional, would be decided in New

Delhi. A provision from the 1935 Government of India Act allowed the

central government to take over a state under emergency conditions.

By 1972 Gandhi was routinely using this provision to proclaim “presi-

dent’s rule” in any state that opposed her. By 1976, as one observer

noted at the time, all dissent, whether outside Congress or within, was

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CONSTRUCTING THE NATION

interpreted as “anti-party, anti-national, and traitorous, or even foreign-

inspired” (Kochanek 2002, 100).

Gandhi’s centralization of Congress worked against her in several

ways. It made her programs more difﬁ cult to implement at state and

local levels because her appointees there had only weak local support.

Centralization also put government patronage and licensing regulations

directly into the hands of Gandhi’s close associates, making her gov-

ernment more vulnerable to corruption. Government corruption was

among the main complaints against her government; Gandhi’s younger

son, Sanjay (1946–80), was among those most frequently rumored to

Indira Gandhi distributes food, 1966, scooping rice into containers for distribution to children

at a food distribution center in Calcutta (now Kolkata). Repeated food shortages (1966,

1972–76) marked the ﬁ rst decade of Gandhi’s tenure in ofﬁ ce. During the decade from

1966 to 1976, Gandhi learned how to present herself politically to the Indian electorate

through the image/metaphor of a mother feeding her nation/children. She adopted slogans

and programs aimed at ameliorating the lives of the poorest Indians (“Garibi hatao”—

Abolish poverty). Even during the Emergency of 1975–77, Gandhi’s government took actions

aimed at curbing the abuses of rural landlords, black-market operators, and smugglers. But

after her return to power in 1980, she abandoned this earlier agenda and instead used

appeals to communalism and religion to keep herself in power.

(Library of Congress)

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be using government inﬂ uence and connections to obtain quasi-legal

loans and land deals.

Opposition to Gandhi and her government in 1973–74 crystal-

lized around food shortages, rising prices, and corruption. Not even

the detonation of an underground nuclear device on May 18, 1974,

which made India the world’s sixth nuclear power, could distract the

Indian public from escalating inﬂ ation, strikes, and protests. In Bihar,

Jayaprakash (J. P.) Narayan (1902–79), a Gandhian and founder of the

Socialist Party, came out of retirement to take over a growing protest

movement and invite peasants to join in protests against ofﬁ cial cor-

ruption and Gandhi’s authoritarian rule. In Gujarat students rioted

over the 30 percent annual inﬂ ation rate and government corruption.

A massive strike of railway workers paralyzed the nation for 20 days

in mid-1974, ending only after the government jailed 30,000–40,000

striking workers. By 1975 Narayan’s movement had become national

as he and Morarji Desai brought protesters together with opposition

parties—among them Congress (O), the Jan Sangh, and the Swatantra

Party—to form the Janata Morcha (People’s Front).

In June 1975 the Allahabad High Court in Uttar Pradesh found

Gandhi guilty (on a technicality) of corrupt elections practices in the

1971 elections; the court invalidated her election to Parliament and

barred her from ofﬁ ce for six years. In New Delhi as Sanjay Gandhi

tried to organize rallies in his mother’s defense, the Janata Morcha held

a mass rally at which Narayan urged the police and the army to join

in a national satyagraha against government corruption. “We intend to

overthrow her,” Gandhi’s old enemy Desai had told an interviewer some

days before, “to force her to resign. For good. The lady won’t survive

this movement of ours” (Frank 2002, 374).

Faced with the imminent loss of both her ofﬁ ce and her political

career, Gandhi had the president of India issue an ofﬁ cial proclamation

“that a grave emergency exists whereby the security of India is threat-

ened by internal disturbances” (Jayakar 1993, 199). Using Article 352

of the Indian Constitution, which authorized the government to sus-

pend civil rights and take all necessary steps to preserve order, Gandhi

declared a national emergency on June 25, 1975. She jailed her oppo-

nents and took complete control of the government. Narayan, Desai,

600 opposition members of Parliament, and tens of thousands of local

party workers were detained without trial. Censorship laws closed all

news outlets. Parliament, now composed only of Gandhi’s supporters,

nulliﬁ ed the election charges against her, and Gandhi postponed sched-

uled parliamentary and state legislative elections indeﬁ nitely.

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The Emergency, as it is referred to, lasted until January 1977. Gandhi

banned the Hindu nationalist RSS group—which had provided strong

local support for the Janata movement—along with a range of communal-

ist and terrorist groups. The Maintenance of Internal Security Act (MISA)

and the Prevention of Smuggling Activities Act gave the government broad

powers to arrest and detain individuals. Strikes were banned, bureaucrats

were ordered to work harder, black-market operators and smugglers

were jailed, tax evaders were arrested, and in rural areas the power of the

wealthiest landlords was curbed. Industrial production grew an average of

8 percent per year. “She stood between Chaos and Order,” declared one of

many Emergency posters (Wolpert 2009, 419). Between 1975 and 1977,

stringent government policies (with help from a good monsoon) brought

the prices of essential commodities down to 1971 levels.

During the Emergency Sanjay Gandhi, the prime minister’s younger

son, became her closest adviser and an active political ﬁ gure. A col-

lege dropout with a reputation for using threats, smears, and organized

violence in his business dealings, Sanjay Gandhi resurrected the Youth

Congress (now made up, according to one contemporary, of “dropouts,

drifters, and roughnecks”) to help implement his plans (Malhotra 1989,

177). He pursued what his supporters called urban beautiﬁ cation and

family planning among the poorest Indians in urban slums and rural

villages. Under his program the bustees (slums), small shacks, and store-

fronts of the poor—the very Muslims, minorities, and low-caste voters

who had been his mother’s strongest supporters—were bulldozed in

urban cities such as New Delhi, Calcutta, and Varanasi and their tenants

forced to move elsewhere. In the Turkaman Gate section of Old Delhi the

destruction of 150,000 shacks and the forcible relocation of 70,000 slum

dwellers caused riots that put the area under a 24-hour curfew. Sanjay

Gandhi’s family planning initiatives were equally harsh. Government

workers were given sterilization quotas to meet in order to collect their

salaries. Vasectomy tents were set up in cities, and sterilization vans

roamed the countryside. Over two years more than 10 million steriliza-

tions were performed, many, according to rumors, under compulsion.

Janata Government

In January 1977 Prime Minister Gandhi suddenly announced that new

elections for Parliament would be held in two months. She ordered

well-known political prisoners released and suspended press censor-

ship. Narayan and Desai reformed the Janata coalition to ﬁ ght in the

election. Shortly before the voting began, Jagjivan Ram, an Untouchable

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