INDIA: Ten Years After

One hundred years ago next month, a small force of intrepid Englishmen stormed into the sprawling Red Fort of Old Delhi and thereby broke the back of what the British still call the Indian Mutiny. (Some Indians now call it the “First War of Independence.”) Last week, as the Republic of India celebrated its tenth Independence Day, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru spoke to his people from the Red Fort’s symbolic ramparts. Said he: “We have completed one journey of freedom. The second is just to begin. We have to understand that we may stumble and fall. When a people march forward, they are bound to stumble. But we have gone forward in this way.”

Nehru spoke the simple truth. Out of the bloody communal riots which racked India in August 1947 has emerged a vast secular state in which 320 million Hindus and 40 million Moslems live in relative peace. Against all the predictions of the Blimps, and the warning of Winston Churchill that power was being turned over to “men of straw.” Indian democracy has survived to hold the world’s two largest free elections; and against the immensity of its problems, even to have survived was triumph.

Fees & Famine. Yet India’s tenth anniversary was celebrated amid what the Times of India calls “an accelerating volume of discontent.” Less than two hours after the Prime Minister’s Delhi speech, 2,000 students, angered by a 50% increase in their tuition fees, ran riot in the pink, princely city of Jaipur, breaking shop windows and setting fires as they went. In subtropical Assam thousands boycotted the Independence Day celebrations in their wrath over a government announcement that a new refinery to process Assamese oil might be built outside Assam.

More serious still was the fact that in many parts of India famine was abroad and inflation mounting. And in their efforts to ease India’s economic woes and weaknesses, the nation’s planners had brought forth a second five-year plan so overambitious that it was rapidly exhausting India’s sterling balance in London. Already, Finance Minister T. T. Krishnamachari told Parliament last week, the government has been obliged to lower the legal minimum sterling backing for India’s currency from $840 million to $630 million.

Failing Magic. The heart of the difficulty was that independence had unleashed popular desires that outran the nation’s capabilities. And out of the frustration came a steady pressure for the quicker techniques of totalitarianism. Kerala State on the Malabar Coast has already elected a Communist administration; a Communist-Socialist coalition rules the city of Bombay. Fortnight ago, faced with a nationwide strike of postal and telegraph workers that might spread to 400,000 government employees, Nehru himself rushed through Parliament a bill outlawing strikes in “essential industries.”

Characteristically, Nehru accompanied this strong-handed tactic with a promise to give the workers a retroactive pay raise if study showed that one was justified. More and more, Nehru’s once irresistible prestige works its magic only if he concedes his opponents what they want.

Among the Indian masses the Prime Minister’s popularity is probably as strong as ever, but in recent months India’s intellectuals, inside and outside the Congress Party, have for the first time begun publicly to question the wisdom of his policies. Even Nehru’s critics were shocked when the angry postal and telegraph workers turned up in front of Parliament bearing signs that read DOWN WITH NEHRU’S DICTATORSHIP. But the fact is, declared the Times of India last week, that ten years after independence, India is being dragged down by “a tiredness of leadership.”