Indian independence · CHAPTER 15 ·
India under Nehru
Chapter 15 of Indian Independence & Partition, 1857–1964: “Building the Republic”
India’s constitution, drafted under B. R. Ambedkar, came into force on 26 January 1950, giving every adult the vote and abolishing untouchability. In the first general election of 1951–52 about 173 million voters were registered and Congress won 364 of 489 seats, while language movements pressed for new states.
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The map above is the world of India, May 1964 — Nehru’s India.
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SHORT EXPLANATION
Freedom from British rule left India with a practical question: how would some 360 million people govern themselves? Most were poor and unable to read. The constitution that took effect on 26 January 1950 answered by making them citizens of a republic. A constitution sets out the rules of government and the rights citizens can claim. Under B. R. Ambedkar, a lawyer born into a Dalit, or “untouchable”, caste, the drafting committee gave every adult the vote and abolished untouchability—the custom that excluded millions from temples, wells and schools as polluting, much as segregation laws once excluded Black Americans. India also became a federation, with states governing their own affairs under a national government, much like the United States.
The first election in 1951–52 brought 173 million registered voters into the largest such exercise the world had yet seen. Congress, which had led the freedom movement, won under Jawaharlal Nehru, prime minister since 1947. Nehru wanted India to develop without surrendering either democracy or freedom of action abroad. Five-Year Plans directed state investment into dams and steel, rather like a company’s five-year business plan. Non-alignment kept India outside both blocs in the Cold War, the rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union, much as a neutral country stays out of a feud.
The federation’s most difficult internal question was where to draw its states. Telugu speakers wanted a state of their own, and Potti Sriramulu died fasting for it in 1952. Nehru conceded Andhra; in 1956 states were redrawn largely along language lines, shown in pale on the map. A government afraid that regional demands would break the union had found a way to accommodate them within it.
India obtained the last French enclaves by negotiation in 1954. Portugal refused to talk, and India took Goa by force in 1961. A different frontier proved harder to secure: in 1962 China defeated India in a short war over Aksai Chin, a high, almost empty plateau between Kashmir and Tibet, and the hills north of Assam. At Nehru’s death in May 1964, Aksai Chin remained in Chinese hands, Kashmir was unresolved and poverty was widespread. Independence had given India a working democracy and a federation that held; prosperity and secure borders remained unfinished aims.
The full story
The leaders of independent India had claimed to speak for a whole people. The constitution that took effect on 26 January 1950 put that claim to a demanding test: it gave every adult over twenty-one a vote, although most Indians could not read. Its drafting committee was chaired by B. R. Ambedkar, a Dalit from a caste Hindu custom had branded “untouchable”. The constitution made India a republic of citizens, established rights enforceable in court, abolished untouchability in Article 17, and reserved parliamentary seats for the lowest castes and tribal peoples, much like a modern quota. As the country’s supreme law, it set both the powers of government and the claims citizens could make against it.
Voting on this scale required an election people could actually use. Between 25 October 1951 and 21 February 1952, about 173 million registered voters chose a parliament at some 196,000 polling booths. Each candidate had a separate ballot box marked with a party symbol, allowing voters unable to read to make their choice. Congress won 364 of 489 seats with 45 per cent of the vote. The electorate whom outsiders had thought unready for democracy had taken part in running one.
The next great test concerned the boundaries inside India. Nehru feared that states organized by language would encourage the divisions that had torn the country apart in 1947. Telugu speakers in Madras state nevertheless wanted a state of their own. Potti Sriramulu fasted for 58 days and died on 15 December 1952; riots spread through the Telugu districts. Four days after his death Nehru announced Andhra, created in October 1953.
Andhra made the wider question unavoidable. The States Reorganisation Act, effective from 1 November 1956, created 14 states drawn largely by language, much as Quebec is defined by French, and six union territories governed directly from Delhi, as Washington, D.C. is run by the federal government. Their internal borders appear as pale lines on the map. In 1947 competing identities had been answered with partition. This time the government changed the union’s internal map to make room for regional identities, and the union survived.
Nehru sought independence of action in economic policy and foreign affairs as well. The Second Five-Year Plan (1956–61) directed public investment toward heavy industry. Steel plants at Bhilai, Rourkela and Durgapur were built with help from the Soviet Union, West Germany and Britain respectively: non-alignment let India receive assistance from both sides of the Cold War. Elsewhere, the government used force to end European rule. Portugal refused to negotiate over Goa, and in December 1961 some 45,000 Indian troops took it in two days.
Relations with China exposed the limits of India’s freedom to choose its own course. China had built a road across the disputed Aksai Chin plateau. In the east it rejected the McMahon Line, the Himalayan boundary a British official and Tibetan delegates had agreed in 1914. India pushed small posts into disputed ground from late 1961; China attacked on 20 October 1962. The arrows show its advance before the ceasefire of 21 November. By Nehru’s death in May 1964, literacy had risen from 18 to 28 per cent in a decade, yet hunger, caste and Kashmir remained. The republic had secured political freedom; making it improve daily life was still a long task.
FULL EXPLANATION
How the first election was made possible
An election begins before a ballot is cast. Someone must decide who belongs on the roll, and in India that work began amid Partition’s refugee crisis, before the constitution existed. In How India Became Democratic (2017), Ornit Shani traces the Constituent Assembly Secretariat’s effort to compile a roll of every adult from November 1947. Citizens’ groups and refugees wrote to demand inclusion, taking part in the construction of the electorate itself. The roll also exposed a conflict between the new idea of an individual voter and established ways of identifying women. About 2.8 million women were registered only as someone’s wife or mother. Officials struck off their entries when names of their own could not be recorded. The decision shows both the difficulty of making every adult an individual voter and the seriousness with which officials applied that principle. Chief Election Commissioner Sukumar Sen, a civil servant trained in mathematics, organized voting in 68 phases over four months. Polling began in the snowbound valleys of Himachal Pradesh in October 1951. Ramachandra Guha has called the election the biggest gamble in history. Its success depended partly on preparation as exacting as an engineering project: democracy had to be built from the electoral roll upward.
Why Nehru feared linguistic states, and why they held
Congress had once embraced language as an organizing principle. In 1920 it rearranged its own provincial committees by language and promised linguistic provinces. After Partition, Nehru saw a different danger in the same loyalties. In 1949 a committee of Nehru, Vallabhbhai Patel and Pattabhi Sitaramayya advised delay, fearing that loyalty to a language might compete with loyalty to the nation. The subsequent movements showed how difficult postponement would be. Telugu speakers campaigned for Andhra. The Samyukta Maharashtra movement demanded a Marathi state with Bombay as its capital; police fired on its protests, and the movement remembers 106 dead. A campaign for a Punjabi-speaking state followed. Did conceding these demands weaken the union, as Nehru feared? Political scientists including Paul Brass argue that it strengthened it: regional elites gained a stake in the federation and could pursue their interests through state politics. Critics point out that minorities remained inside the new states and that disputes over places such as Belgaum and Chandigarh endured. The history since 1956 nevertheless suggests that accommodation made India more governable. A federation in which a person can be both Tamil and Indian gives regional loyalty a place within the country.
Who started the war of 1962?
Responsibility for the 1962 war remains contested, and an important piece of evidence remains out of public reach: India has never officially released its own inquiry, the Henderson Brooks–Bhagat report of 1963. In India’s China War (1970), journalist Neville Maxwell argued that India provoked the conflict. He held that India would not negotiate over a border it had defined on its own and that, from December 1961, its Forward Policy pushed small posts into territory held by China. On his account, Beijing had little choice but to strike. Later historians, including Srinath Raghavan in War and Peace in Modern India (2010), accept that the Forward Policy was reckless and India’s army unready. They give a different account of the decision for war. Nehru’s diplomacy, they argue, was more flexible than Maxwell allowed, while China’s response reflected its own calculations as well as the Tibetan revolt of 1959 and the Dalai Lama’s flight to India. An Indian policy could increase the danger of war without settling what choices Beijing had. The military losses are not in dispute: 1,383 Indian soldiers were killed and nearly 4,000 captured, against 722 Chinese dead. Defence Minister V. K. Krishna Menon was forced out of the cabinet in November. The defeat ended the belief that non-alignment alone could keep India safe, and within months the republic began rebuilding its army.
Key places on the map
On this day
Why it happened
Partition’s legacy: a state that feared its own divisions. Partition shaped the constitution’s balance of power. The founders had seen political mobilization around identity help break the country in 1947, and feared another fragmentation. They gave the central government authority to redraw states and take over a state government in an emergency. A strong centre had already demonstrated its reach: Vallabhbhai Patel and V. P. Menon integrated more than 550 princely states by 1949. The republic would be a federation, but one whose national government had substantial means to hold it together.
Universal suffrage as a deliberate gamble. The change in the electorate was as striking as the change in government. The Act of 1935, under which Congress first governed in 1937, gave the vote to about 35 million people selected by property and education. The Constituent Assembly rejected such tests and enfranchised every adult at once. A movement that claimed to represent all Indians had reason to let all of them choose their government. This made India the first large and poor country to attempt democracy on such a scale before literacy or prosperity had arrived.
The language movements. Congress had promised linguistic provinces since 1920, and the demand did not disappear with independence. Telugu, Marathi, Kannada and Malayalam speakers lived across boundaries inherited from old provinces and princely states; Telugu districts, for example, were divided between Madras and Hyderabad. Their speakers pressed for the promised states through petitions and elections, and eventually through Potti Sriramulu’s fast. The central government wanted to postpone the question, but its own earlier promise and the strength of the movements kept it alive.
Cold War choices and the border with China. Nehru’s ambition to remain independent of both Cold War blocs depended in part on friendly relations with China. The Panchsheel agreement of April 1954 set out five principles of peaceful coexistence and accepted Tibet as part of China. India left the boundary unraised, assuming that the 1914 McMahon Line in the east and its own maps in the west would stand. That assumption came under pressure when Indian patrols found China’s road across Aksai Chin in 1957–58, the Dalai Lama fled to India in 1959, and India’s Forward Policy placed small army posts in disputed territory in 1961. Each government regarded the land as its own, so each could see the other’s movements as aggression.
THE TURNING POINT
Madras, 15 December 1952. Nehru had delayed linguistic states for five years when Potti Sriramulu, a former follower of Gandhi, used a fast unto death to press for Andhra. Sriramulu’s death brought riots, and within four days Nehru conceded the demand. Within four years the wider internal map had been redrawn. The decision mattered beyond Andhra: the republic had accepted that a regional identity could be accommodated within India rather than treated simply as a threat to it. That choice shaped Indian federalism and is the main reason the language boundaries on this map have mostly held.
What it changed
A democracy that held. Elections had to become a habit before the first one could count as the beginning of a durable democracy. India held its second and third general elections on time in 1957 and 1962, and power passed peacefully to Lal Bahadur Shastri after Nehru’s death. Kerala tested another aspect of the system. In 1957 it elected a Communist government, among the first anywhere to take office through a free election. The centre accepted it until dismissing it in 1959, revealing the reach of Delhi’s constitutional powers. As many other newly decolonized states moved toward one-party or military rule, India’s democratic survival became its most cited achievement.
The unfinished revolution of caste and gender. The republic could change the law more quickly than it changed social relations. The constitution abolished untouchability, while the Hindu Code laws of 1955–56 gave Hindu women rights to divorce and inherit. Ambedkar had resigned from Nehru’s cabinet in 1951 when the Hindu Code Bill stalled. In October 1956 he left Hinduism and converted to Buddhism at Nagpur with several hundred thousand followers. His warning remained a challenge to the republic’s achievement: political democracy needed social democracy beneath it if it was to survive.
A planned economy and its limits. The planners gave India steel mills, dams and research institutes, and industry grew quickly from a low base. These were foundations for an industrial state, but they did not feed the country at the same pace. National income grew only about 3.5 to 4 per cent a year and farming lagged behind. By the early 1960s India depended on American wheat supplied under PL-480, a United States law selling surplus grain to poorer countries. The droughts of 1965–66 would make food an emergency for the next government. Most Indians lived in villages, where change was much slower than the growth of the industrial base.
Borders still in dispute. The internal reorganization left India with a more settled map inside the union than at its edges. China held Aksai Chin after the 1962 war, about 38,000 square kilometres claimed by India; the boundary has never been agreed. Kashmir remained divided along the 1949 ceasefire line, and India and Pakistan fought again little more than a year after Nehru’s death. The contrast with 1857 is striking: then the edges were secure while the interior was in revolt; the map Nehru left in 1964 had a settled interior and disputed frontiers.
DISCUSSION QUESTION — By 1964, had independence delivered what the national movement had promised?
The movement made more than one promise, and by 1964 their fortunes had diverged. Self-government had taken substantial form: India had a constitution, universal suffrage, an independent judiciary and three general elections held on time. Its federation had absorbed the princely states and redrawn its internal boundaries by language without breaking. Foreign rule had also receded from the subcontinent: by 1961 the French and Portuguese enclaves were gone. Other promises were harder to fulfill. Mass poverty persisted, incomes rose slowly and food shortages threatened in the 1960s; literacy reached only 28 per cent by 1961. Social equality had a place in law that it did not yet have in daily life, a gap made visible by Ambedkar’s conversion in 1956. The hope of secure surroundings also went unfulfilled: Kashmir remained disputed and China defeated India in 1962. Historians weigh the record differently. There is a strong case for calling democracy the rarer achievement, since prosperity could still come later while lost freedoms are seldom recovered. Independence gave Indians a state through which to pursue the remaining promises; their fulfillment would demand work over the following decades.
An interesting fact
The violet mark on an Indian voter’s finger has a practical purpose: it helps prevent a second vote. Chemists at the National Physical Laboratory in Delhi developed the ink, first used in the general election of 1962. Its silver nitrate darkens on contact with skin and light and resists washing for days. Mysore Paints and Varnish has been its sole manufacturer ever since. The Maharaja of Mysore founded the company in 1937 as a lac and paint works; it now supplies millions of small bottles for each national election and has supplied elections in many other countries.
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