India

ANYONE who witnessed India’s mourning after the death of Nehru was forcibly reminded of how much his people owed him. Perhaps no colony faced independence with greater problems, and probably few nations have coped so successfully. The massacres and migrations that accompanied the division of the subcontinent into India and Pakistan left scars that are still visible; only a little over a year ago there was fresh communal trouble in divided Bengal, with Hindus being murdered on the Pakistan side while Muslims were slaughtered in Calcutta. Hunger, poverty, and disease are the lot of many new nations, but only China has had to deal with them on the Indian scale. Above all, there was the danger that the British-imposed unity might be shattered again by linguistic separatism.

India fortunately had greater advantages than most in its attempt to tackle these problems on democratic lines: a national mass party — the Congress Party—with the prestige of having won independence; a crack civil service; a solid economic infrastructure; and the unifying bond of English. But most important, India had in Nehru a leader who was able to focus the aspirations of his countrymen and persuade them of the need for patient sacrifice over the long haul of economic development.

Nehru’s pre-eminence among his colleagues was unquestioned. One of his ministers described him as a banyan tree under which many things took shelter but under which nothing grew.

1 his supremacy aroused doubts. Would India fall apart when he died? After Nehru, who? (or, more significant, After Nehru, what?) became a popular guessing game both in India and abroad. But the banyan analogy was not completely accurate; one plant did grow, the tender shoot of Indian self-confidence. In Delhi in January, 1964, just after Nehru’s stroke, “who” was still a puzzlement — although Shastri was clearly the front runner—but most Indians were no longer worried about “what.” There was a feeling that the Indian body politic was now strong enough to stand on its own without the crutch of Nehru.

Five months later when Nehru died, the selfconfidence persisted, encouraged by the smoothness with which the succession was managed by party boss Kamaraj so as to avoid a disruptive open struggle for the leadership. Premier Shastri seemed visibly less diffident than before Nehru’s death. A tiny, self-deprecating man, with the quick birdlike walk of a person who all his life has had to keep up with bigger men, Shastri had no illusions about the difficulty of following in Nehru’s footsteps. But in all humility he seemed sure he could handle his troubled inheritance.

Clearly, Shastri would not rule alone, like Nehru, but as one of a group of four or five leaders whose major common characteristic was their Indianness. Unlike the widely traveled, cosmopolitan Nehru, Shastri had never been outside India’s borders except on a single visit to neighboring Nepal. Unlike the Cambridge-educated Nehru, Shastri attended Hindi-speaking schools for patriotic reasons. And unlike the aristocratic Nehru, Shastri is of relatively humble origins.

The economy out of kilter

Perhaps it was his personal acquaintance with the poverty of the great mass of Indians that led Shastri at his first press conference as Premier to cite rising prices as the major issue before the new government. In some sections of the foreign press he was derided for pinpointing so minor a question. But within a few weeks the prices of food were shooting up as supplies of grain and sugar dwindled. With many cities perilously short of reserves, Shastri’s prediction had developed into his government’s first big crisis.

No one who has visited India, however briefly, can be in any doubt about the appalling poverty. But it is important to get the food crisis and indeed the whole economic situation in perspective. With per capita income averaging §6 a month, the vast majority of India’s 450 million are undernourished, able to work at perhaps 50 percent efficiency. Infant mortality takes 142 of every 1000 babies born as compared with 25 in the United States. In the villages, apathy and traditional religious and social values hinder government efforts to initiate progress. And for those peasants who break away and seek their fortunes in the towns, there are few jobs and no accommodations.

In Bombay, with more than four million inhabitants, over a quarter of a million people live in shantytowns where one room in an unventilated mud-walled house rents at up to S3 a month, and where to get such a room may require a S20 premium. Few can afford it without resort to the moneylenders. But the slum dwellers actually are the lucky ones, for they have roofs over their heads. Attempts to pull down slums have resulted in riots. Another 300,000 migrants into Bombay live literally on the streets: some for days, in transit between jobs; others for weeks or months. Poverty in the villages may be greater, but on the streets of Bombay the last shreds of human dignity seem stripped away.

If one visits India often, the picture is even more depressing because change is slow and rarely visible. And yet, although the raising of living standards to an acceptable level will take decades, India’s economic position is by no means as desperate as it seems. National income has grown at the respectable rate of 3.5 percent per annum during the fifteen years of planned economic development. Such a rate could sustain the national investment program, though it would not leave much room for raising per capita consumption levels over the next few years.

However, die considerable extra outlay in defense since the SinoIndian border war of late 1962 and the government’s failure to build up adequate stocks of food grains had thrown the economy out of kilter. Additional defense spending amounting to over a billion dollars put more money in some pockets, but with food and consumer goods in short supply, prices rose.

Crisis in wheat

Food production has stagnated during recent years. But although the population is rising by about nine million a year, wheat from the United States and other grain imports should have kept the situation in balance. However, practically all stocks were sold, with the result that wheat prices continued to drop, thus discouraging the Indian wheat growers from increasing production. In fact, wheat output declined 20 percent in two years.

When shortages became felt, foodgrain prices started rising —50 percent over the course of 1964 in some regions — and hoarding began. Wholesalers and retailers were investigated by the police, and some shops were attacked by angry crowds. When shipments of wheat from the United States increased to 600,000 tons a month in late 1964, the government pumped grain into fair-price shops, which supplied seventy million people.

As prices rose, wheat growers marketed less of their product, both to wait for still higher prices and to consume more themselves. It was at this level that serious hoarding took place, serious because although each peasant family kept back very little, the total was vast. The amount of wheat arriving on the market in the spring and summer of 1964 was down one third compared with 1963. One of the hardest hit areas was in eastern Uttar Pradesh. In one fairly large town the authorities had supplies left for only a few days and were desperately awaiting imported wheat from Bombay. Yet in a nearby village, the peasants appeared to be eating well by Indian standards, and admitted having three months of grain stored up.

Today the food situation seems to be on the upturn. A bumper harvest of rice — the main grain crop — has been announced, and wheat output is also expected to show a marked increase. Prices should be declining steadily by the middle of the year. Perhaps the most hopeful aspect is the fact that now for the first time India has, in C. Subramaniam, a Food Minister with a thorough understanding of both the problems and possible solutions.

Food prices are being examined with a view to giving the grower a remunerative return and protecting the consumer from exploitation, and regulatory measures have been introduced to control trade. Bank advances against food grains and other agricultural commodities are being limited to curtail speculative hoarding. The government is not attempting to initiate complete state trading but is stocking up for the next crisis. It remains to be seen whether the stresses and strains of Indian politics will allow Subramaniam the time and opportunity to see his program through.

The language squabble

The worst of the food crisis was hardly over when the Shastri government was faced with the language issue, potentially even more disruptive. India is a nation of nations, with thirteen major languages, forty-seven other important languages, and many dialects and tribal tongues, each spoken by over 100,000 people — a total of 179 languages and 544 dialects. Within this complex pattern, two major and distinct language families predominate: the Indo-European languages in north and central India, and the Dravidian group of four languages in the south.

For centuries Sanskrit was the lingua franca of the priestly and intellectual classes. As the repository of classical Hindu culture, it is the one language which a majority of educated Indians might agree on as the sole official language were it not wildly impracticable. Although Sanskrit is enshrined as a national language in the constitution, only 555 people claimed to speak it in the 1951 census.

With the arrival of successive waves of Muslim conquerors from West Asia from the thirteenth century onward, Persian gradually replaced Sanskrit, to be replaced in turn by English, as the common medium of higher education, government, the judiciary, and panIndian intellectual life. Indeed, it was by using the English language that Indian nationalists from all over the country were able to unite in the Congress Party against British rule. But in the heat of the independence struggle, few Indians were prepared to contemplate the continuance of English as the official language.

“The highest development of the Indian mind must be possible without a knowledge of English,” Gandhi said. “To get rid of the infatuation for English is one of the essentials of swaraj [self-rule].”

Hindi was selected as India’s future official language because it was spoken by the largest segment of the population. Today more I than 150 million people, a third of all Indians, claim it as their mother tongue, with millions more under-! standing its bazaar versions. At the same time, the Congress Party resolved that all encouragement should be given to the other major languages, most of which had taken a new lease on life with the adoption of English literary forms.

However, as independence approached and anti-British feeling died down, many non-Hindi speakers had second thoughts about using Hindi as the official language, and the constitutional clause legalizing it was passed by only one vote. Faced with a heavy administrative burden, the central government was reluctant to split up the old British provinces, but popular pressure forced a redrawing of boundaries on linguistic lines, thus giving a fillip to regionalism.

By 1959 anti-Hindi feeling was strong enough to force Nehru to assure non-Hindi speakers that English would continue as an associate language as long as they wanted it. Two years ago an act was passed to the effect that even after January 26, 1965 (the target date for the dropping of English as one of the two official languages), English “may continue to be used” in addition to Hindi “for all the official purposes of the Union for which it was being used immediately before that day” and for the transaction of business in parliament. But “may” was not considered strong enough, and on the eve of the changeover, rioting started in the southern state of Madras.

Within three weeks, over fifty rioters had been killed in police firing, two police inspectors had been burned by an infuriated mob, and four people had burned themselves Saigon-style in protest against “Hindi imperialism.” Over a thousand people were arrested, and much damage was done to federal property - railway trains, post oihces, anything which smacked of the Hindi-speaking north.

No hatred of English

The Chief Minister of Madras admitted that his ad ministration had been taken by surprise at the degree of violence. He accused the southern nationalist party, the DM K, and the pro-Peiping wing of the Communist Party of inciting the students who spearheaded the agitation. Student leaders and the head of the DMK said that they had not coordinated in any way, and both assigned much of the blame to police brutality, which aroused the passions of the general public. All sides blamed ‘‘antisocial elements” for intensifying the unrest.

The true story probably embraces aspects of all these versions. The student leaders at a secret rendezvous —they feared arrest ■ refused to accept the blame lor violence. But there is some evidence to back Chief Minister Bhaktavatsalam’s assertion that students had held up cars and demanded money for buying gasoline to use for arson.

T he vital question is why the students went on the streets. For many it was a ease of jobs. If Hindi were to replace English as the sole official language at the center (English or regional languages are used in the states), Hindi speakers would have an advantage in obtaining federal employment; if English were retained, all Indians would operate under an equal handicap. Since Madras sends many more clerks to Delhi than docs any other state, this is an important bread-andbutter issue.

Many Madrasi Tamil speakers - 28 million out of the state’s 33 million — proudly regard their own language with its long history and rich literature as immensely superior to parvenu Hindi and resent the idea of having to learn it. ‘They point out that Hindi does not have the vocabulary to deal with the modern world, and that the government might find far better use for the vast sums it is spending on laboriously devising a Hindi scientific vocabulary and then translating English texts.

Most striking in the students’ attitude was their nonchalance about using a foreign language. Too young to have been involved in the independence struggle, they had no hatred of English as the symbol of oppression.

The government backs down

In response to the riots, the Shastri government has decided to amend the language act of 1963 to read, “English shall continue to be used” in addition to Hindi. T he Madrasi have not succeeded in having the constitution revised to make English the sole oilicial language, but this may be the foot in the door.

Tn weathering this crisis the Shastri government has made many good decisions, as it has, indeed, on a number of issues: the food shortage, and relations with Ceylon and with the Naga rebels. Its decision not to manufacture nuclear weapons after the Chinese atomic explosion, despite strong pressure within ihe Congress Party, can legitimately be described as courageous.

Most Indians admire Shastri’s patent good intentions and wish him well, but some complain about bis style of leadership. Even when he does the right thing, his preference for seeking the maximum consensus gives him the appearance of vacillation. Insiders privately accuse him of indecisiveness. People demand action, and though action is sometimes impossible, Shastri does not have the Nehru aura to say so and carry it off. Phis has led to a widespread pessimism in contrast to the self-confidence which was prevalent a year ago.

And yet, barring a catastrophe such as a full-scale Chinese invasion, Shastri should remain in office for some time because he is still the northerner most acceptable to the non-Hindi politicians who put him in power. More important, India has survived crises more serious, even over language, than those which Shastri has had to confront.