India After Gandhi summary

The new, INC-dominated Indian government reflected the remarkable nature of this new nation. Its new cabinet consisted of men and women from five different religions – Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, Sikhism and Christianity. They came from all parts of India.

The spiritual “Father of the Nation” was, of course, Mahatma Gandhi. All the speeches and parades conducted on Independence Day, celebrated in the capital of New Delhi, began with an invocation to him.

It’s impossible to attribute blame for partition to one party or person, but actions instigated by the British, INC and Indian Muslim politicians resulted in the bloodiest period in modern Indian history.

The British were ultimately responsible for deciding to partition India, and had helped by setting Muslim and Hindu communities against each other. For example, in British-organized municipal elections during the last decades of the Raj, Muslims could only vote for other Muslims, and Hindus for Hindus.

Jammu and Kashmir was ruled by Hindu Prince Hari Singh. Pre-partition, it had a slight Muslim majority, but the post-partition refugee crisis caused the balance to tip toward a Hindu majority.

Still, the region’s mountainous, isolated populace seemed destined for relative peace after partition, and its prince wished it to remain a neutral, Switzerland-like state.

Non-Muslim refugees were trickling into what would become India even before independence. But after August 15, 1947 a staggering wave of eight million refugees descended upon the new republic.

The partition of Punjab, for example, resulted in hundreds of thousands of non-Muslim west Punjabis settling on the Indian side of the border. Refugee camps were set up everywhere, with the largest at Kurukshetra, a plain north of Delhi, containing 300,000 refugees.

British administrators in India had always argued that democracy couldn’t work in India. Post-independence commentators continued to predict the country would partition itself further and descend into chaos. But the general election that took place in 1952 proved otherwise.

Many problems stood in the way of a successful election, particularly the fact that 85 percent of the electorate couldn’t read or write. So an ingenious system was devised – ballots would signify parties by symbols such as elephants or huts instead of party names. Novel advertising methods were also used, such as the INC having “Vote Congress!” painted on the sides of stray cows.

With a successful election in the bag, Nehru now had the backing of the nation to set about implementing radical policies that changed the face of Indian society – and its economy.

In the country’s first Five-Year Plan for 1951-1956, agricultural reform was at the top of the agenda. After all, 60 percent of India’s GDP at independence was based on agriculture. Massive dams were constructed, and land reform bills were enacted to redistribute land more evenly among the peasantry.

While the INC swept the 1957 national elections, regional opposition led to a number of changes in state governments, such as in the southern state of Kerala, where the Communist Party of India won.

The communists immediately went about implementing fast-paced radical reforms in land ownership and education. These caused massive opposition protests organized by landowners and religious groups whose power was directly threatened.

Nehru died on May 27th, 1964, after seventeen years as prime minister. The search for a successor to lead the INC – and India – began right away. Eventually, Nehru’s daughter, Indira Gandhi, was chosen to continue where her father had left off.

Although politically inexperienced, she was a known figure to both India and the world. Additionally, it was hoped she could bring India together after the double tragedy of the loss against China and her father’s death.

In 1971, another election took place that defined India’s destiny – the Pakistani general election. In it, East Pakistani nationalists under the umbrella of the pro-Bengali Awami League won virtually all of the East Pakistani seats. This surprised the West Pakistani leadership so much that they decided to cancel the results of the election.

East Pakistan’s Bengali-speaking majority was furious, and in January began a nationwide general strike. They had felt discriminated against by their Urdu-speaking West Pakistani rulers for decades, and this was the final straw. A massacre of Bengali students by Pakistani soldiers on March 25th marked what became known as the Bangladesh Liberation War.

In 1971, Mrs. Gandhi had been reelected to the lower house of the Indian parliament. Immediately after, however, a socialist politician who had contested her seat accused her of breaching spending limits during the election campaign. This ended up going to court, where the plaintiff hoped to nullify Mrs. Gandhi’s election as an MP.

On June 12, 1975, the Allahabad High Court ruled against her. This nullified her election, pending appeal to the Indian Supreme Court.

One result of Mrs. Gandhi’s brief dictatorship was something that had never happened before in Indian post-independence politics: there arose a united political opposition against the INC. On January 19, 1977, a day after opposition party leaders were released from prison, they formed a new political force – the Janata Party.

And in the March 1977 election, the game was up for Mrs. Gandhi. Another first took place in India: the INC was voted out of office.

The first tragedy to strike Mrs. Gandhi was the death of her son and anointed successor, Sanjay Gandhi, in an airplane accident in June 1980. This led to the entry of her son Rajiv into Indian politics for the first time.

Secondly, in the Sikh-dominated state of Punjab, Sikh separatists were demanding autonomy and increased federalism. But Gandhi was having none of it. Violence ensued, with a number of high-profile assassinations by Sikh extremists.

Changes in religious identity weren’t the only thing happening in 1980s India. Rajiv Gandhi decided to reverse decades of state control over the economy in order to placate the rising middle classes, who numbered about 100 million by the mid-1980s.

Government controls, the INC now said, had been responsible for all the corruption and inefficiency of the past. So taxes were reduced across the board, and tariffs lifted. Middle-class income boomed, as did the real estate and manufacturing sectors, the latter growing at a record 8.9 percent annually in the second half of the 1980s.

Kashmiri kidnappings were not the only unexpected item on the new government’s plate. The Ayodhya controversy was picking up speed, with Hindu nationalists starting a huge march on the mosque on September 25, 1990 to demand its destruction and replacement with a temple.

Government security forces attempted to stop the march, arresting up to 150,000 participants. In response, the BJP Hindu nationalist party refused to continue supporting the government. This forced new elections to be called for 1991.

While religious tensions were still running high in some parts of the country, India’s flashpoint region of Jammu and Kashmir was finally experiencing relative peace. For the first time in thirty years, local elections were held in 2003. Tourists even began flocking to the beautiful, mountainous region. Violent incidents were on the decline, from 3,505 recorded in 2002 to fewer than 2,000 in 2005.

Finally, for the first time since partition, India and Pakistan decided it was time to bring the Kashmiri dispute to an end. Two buses were authorized to cross a new “Peace Bridge” traversing the Line of Control between the two nations, carrying families that had been torn apart by the conflict.