After Nehru: Hindu Nationalism and Politics in Post-Independence India
Clashes between Indian police and Keralan protestors, April 1984
In the history of twentieth-century nationalism, there is a distinct subgroup where religion played a central organising role from the beginning of the movement. The most obvious examples of this case are the post-colonial states of the Indian subcontinent: Pakistan, Bengal, Ceylon and India itself. As we have seen, in Pakistan and Ceylon the practical demographics worked against the perseverance of a purely confessional state and the existence of irreligious (or at least areligious) elites worked towards the establishment of what eventually became thriving, if imperfect, parliamentary democracies. In Bengal, a sadder story took place: caught between two confessional nationalisms, the country descended into polarisation and civil war, resulting in the imposition of a communist dictatorship and the further partition of the country.
India followed a different path from its compatriots. Under the towering figure of Jawaharlal Nehru, a stable parliamentary democracy took shape. The INC, and Nehru himself, dominated the Lok Sabha and attempted to distance itself from the confessional undertow of the Indian independence movement (which had been, in practice, dominated by Hindu confessionalism even as it clung to secularism in theory) without ever being able to tackle this legacy head-on. The Indian Union did not profess explicit religious allegiance but no INC leader proved able to openly combat the pietism that Gandhi had injected into the movement. After the collapse of the Dominion in 1951, Gandhi notionally retired from politics but remained informally involved until his death in 1964, saturating his periodic declarations with Hindu pathos. Until his own death that same year, Nehru’s charisma managed to mask the compromised origins of his state but afterwards matters rapidly degenerated. His successor, V.K. Krishna Menon, ruled the country for the next eight years, injecting a further irrationalist element into the political system through his repeated irredentist claims to regions of the Punjab and support for Hindu separatists in Bengal: mingling blood and faith into a potent cocktail.
When Indira Gandhi took over after Menon’s assassination in 1972, she made more of a show of her secularism but continued, in practice, to toy with confessional appeals when it was expedient. By the 1970s, Indians were now fully aware of the vast economic growth in their neighbours in Pakistan and Ceylon and were eager for the pickings of similar prosperity in their own country. In these conditions, the ground was prepared for the People's Party - who made no secret of it appeal to Hindu nationalism - to enter into its inheritance. Key to this process, too, was the marginalisation of the political left (the largest party of which was the Indian Communist Party), a structural result of the dominance of Hinduism in the national identity.
Of course, it took a series of contingent events to lead to the fall of the INC. It probably began with the manipulation and repression of Christian and Marxist insurgents in the south of the subcontinent, followed by its retribution in Menon’s assassination in 1972, with the ensuing pogrom being quietly applauded by INC figures. The corruption that had ballooned around Nehru and Menon was then generalised under Indira, crystallising the conditions for the People's Party’s victory in the 1976 election. This result was greeted with intense alarm by many of India’s intellectuals but it also illustrated how they (and the Indian state) had failed, in the post-1951 period, to separate state and religion, never mind to develop a systematic critique of Hinduism.
In the end the INC was basically outflanked by a more extreme party which had fewer inhibitions about appealing directly to the theological passions aroused by the original independence movement. The People's Party's success was due not just to the faltering of the first wave of INC office-holders but to Balasaheb Deoras’ and his colleagues’ abilities to articulate openly what had always been latent in the national movement and which the INC had neither acknowledged nor repudiated. To an extent, by the late 1970s, the Janata Party were probably closer to the original Indian independence cause (at least as it had been since the adoption of Swaraj as its rallying cry) than the INC’s quasi-socialist authoritarianism.
One region where this development was particularly alarming was Kerala, where not only was there a significant Christian minority (nearly 30% by 1980 - helped by Hindu and Muslim emmigration in recent decades) but also a noted leftist tradition. A communist government had been elected in 1957, resulting in the INC conniving at religious agitation to overthrow it. The central government contrived to have the Keralan state government overthrown no fewer than five times after that, in each case when the Communist Party won an election and subsequently took things ‘too far.’ Already chafing under this soft repression from New Delhi, the majority of Keralans were horrified when the People's Party won the 1976 election (no People's Party MPs were returned from the state) and this was only compounded when they won a majority again in 1981.
Matters came to a head in December 1983, when the Communist Party won a landslide in the Keralan state elections. As was, by this stage, almost par for the course in Indian politics, New Delhi declared President’s Rule in the state and disestablished the state government in March 1984. In response, E.K. Nayanar, the leader of the Communists, declared a general strike and urged the citizens of Kerala to resist. The first sign that this was going to be a serious step up from the previous routine of passive resistance was when the New Delhi-backed government had to wait five days to find a judge in the state willing to swear them in. On 23 March 1984, things took another step towards a deeper crisis than usual when a unit of Keralan soldiers refused orders to leave barracks and put down a demonstration in Trivandrum.
On 6 April, the Indian army began a military operation to take control of the major population centres and eliminate all political and military opposition, under the cover of suppressing anti-Hindu violence. Before the beginning of the operation, all foreign journalists were systematically hunted down and deported. As well as their military operations, the Indian army also unleashed a wave of anti-Christian and anti-Muslim pogroms that are estimated to have, over the course of nine months, killed between 100,000 and 1,000,000 people and resulted in the rape of between 60,000 and 150,000 women. On 25 April, the University of Kerala was attacked by Indian soldiers, with over 500 students, academics and staff being murdered in cold blood. The sheer violence of the Indian campaign proved to be the final straw and Nayanar proclaimed Keralan independence on the night of 26-27 April.
Keralan forces waged a mass guerilla war against the Indian military, liberating numerous towns in the first months of fighting and carrying out widespread sabotage against Indian naval ships and even successfully stealing Indian Air Force planes to carry out sorties. They received covert help from the Commonwealth, mostly from the Pakistani government and the Five Eyes Agency. By November, the Indian military had been restricted to its barracks after dark and the Keralans controlled the countryside. Amidst a general crisis, Deoras lost a vote of no confidence in his government in September and at the subsequent elections the People's Party lost its majority and a coalition of the INC and numerous small parties returned Indira Gandhi to government in November.
Despite campaigning on taking a harder line on Kerala, Indira’s government quickly changed course and sought a ceasefire. On 16 December, she ordered the remaining Indian units in Kerala to withdraw and signed a declaration recognising Keralan independence the next day. The Commonwealth immediately promoted Kerala’s application to join the UN but this would not be finally accepted until 1988, when China (an ally of India’s) agreed to withdraw its veto.
Prime Ministers of India
- Jawaharlal Nehru; INC; April 1948 - May 1964
- V.K. Krishna Menon; INC; May 1964 - March 1972
- Indira Gandhi; INC; March 1972 - July 1976
- Balasaheb Deoras; People’s Party; July 1976 - November 1984
- Indira Gandhi; INC; November 1984 - October 1988
- L.K. Advani; People’s Party; October 1988 -