India After Gandhi - pg. 239

In the Provisional Parliament, orthodox members claimed that the Hindu laws had stayed unchanged from time immemorial. "The rules of conduct and duties of men in our country are determined by the Vedas," said Ramnarayan Singh. Despite the challenges down the ages -- posed by Buddhism, Islam, and Christianity -- "the Vedic religion did not perish ... [the] Vedic religion is still there." But now, "we have Pandit Nehru's administration whose representative Dr. Ambedkar wants to abrogate with a single stroke all those rules which have existed since the beginning of the world."

India After Gandhi - pg. 189

Some want to revive the tradition of Shivaji and to hoist the Bhagwa Jhanda in Samyukta Maharashtra; others wish to extend the economic empire of the Bombay and Ahmedabad millionaires all over Maha-Gujarat. Provincial prejudices, rivalries and jealousies are being revived on all sides and everyone seems anxious to separate from, rahter than untie with the others. The Assamese want this bit of land cut off from Bengal, the Bengalis want a slice of Bihar, the Telugus are discontented in Orissa, the Tamilian minority wants to cut itself off from Travancore.

-- The left-wing writer K. A. Abbas, in January 1951

India After Gandhi - pg. 149

One way of telling the story of the election campaign is through newspaper headlines. These make interesting reading, not least because the issues they express have remained at the forefront of Indian election ever since. "MINISTERS FACE STIFF OPPOSITION" read a headline in Uttar Pardesh. "CASTE RIVALRIES WEAKEN BIHAR CONGRESS" read another. From the north-eastern region came this telling line: "AUTONOMY DEMAND IN MANIPUR." From Gauhati came this one: "CONGRESS PROSPECTS IN ASSAM: IMPORTANCE OF MUSLIM AND TRIBAL VOTE." Gwalior offered "DISCONTENT AMONG CONGRESSMEN: LIST OF NOMINEES CREATES WIDER SPLIT." A headline in Calcutta ran: "W. BENGAL CONGRESS CHIEF BOOED AT MEETING" (the hecklers being refugees from East Pakistan), "NO HOPES FOR FREE AND FAIR ELECTION," started a story dateined Lucknow: this being the verdict of J. B. Kripalani, who claimed that state officials would rig the polls in favour of the ruling party. And the city of Bombay offered, at three different moments in the campaign these quite timeless headlines: "CONGRESS BANKS ON MUSLIM SUPPORT";  "CONGRESS APATHY TOWARDS SCHEDULED CASTES: CHARGES REITERAITED BY DR. AMBEDKAR"; and "FOURTEEN HURT IN CITY ELECTION CLASH." But there was also the occasional headline that was of its time but emphatically not of ours -- notably one in The Searchlight  of Patna which claimed: 'PEACEFUL VOTING HOPED [FOR] IN BHAR."

India After Gandhi - pg. 126

On his return to India, Jaipal did not, as his sponsors no doubt hoped, preach the gospels, but came to invent a kind of gospel of his own. This held that the tribals were the "original inhabitants" of the subcontinent -- hence the term adibasi or adivasi, which means precisely that. 

India After Gandhi - pg. 115

In Governance are realised all forms of renunciation; in Governance are united all sacraments; in Governance are combined all knowledge; in Governance are centred all the Worlds.

-- The Mahabharata

Constitutional morality is not a natural sentiment. It has to be cultivated. We must realize that our people have yet to learn it. Democracy in India is only a to-dressing on an Indian soil, which is essentially undemocratic.

-- B. R. Ambedkar

India After Gandhi - pg. 108

By May 1948 some 12,500 women had been found and restored to their families. Ironically, and tragically,  many of the women did not want to be rescued, for after their seizure they had made some kind of peace with their new surroundings. Now, as they were being reclaimed, these women were deeply unsure about how their original families would receive them. They had been "defiled" and, in a further complication, many were pregnant. These women knew that even if they were acepted, their children -- born out of a union with the "enemy" -- would never be. Often, the police and their accomplices had to use force to take the women away. "You could not save us then," said the women; "what right have you to comple us now?" 

India After Gandhi - pg. 91

"Through the pages of SWATANTRA I wish to send my message of frateternity to the people of the south. Far back in the annals of India the south and north met in the land of Kashmir. The great Shankaracharya came to Kashmir to spread his dynamic philosophy but here he was defeated in argument by a PAnditani. This gave rise to the peculiar philosophy of Kashmir -- Shaivism. A memorial to the great Shankaracharya in Kashmir stands prominent on the top of the Shankaracharya Hill in Srinagar. It is a temple containing the Murti of Shiva. 

More recently it was given to a southerner to take the case of Kashmir to the United Nations and, as the whole of India knows, with the doggedness and  tenacity that  is  so usual to the southerner, he defended Kashmir. 

We in Kashmir expect that we shall continue to receive support and sympathy from the people of the south and that some day when we describe the extent of our country we shall use the phrase "from Kashmir to Cape Comorin.""

-- Sheikh Abdullah

writing in a Tamil Newspaper.

India After Gandhi - pg. 54

The larger native states had their own railroad, currency, and stamps, vanities allowed them by the Crown. Few had any modern industry; fewer still had modern forms of education. A British observer wrote in the early twentieth century that, taken as a whole, the states were "sinks of reaction and incompetence and unrestrained autoccratic power sometimes exercised by vicious and deranged ." This roughly, was also the view of the  main nationalist party, the Congress.

India After Gandhi - pg. 47

This leprous daybreak, dawn night's fangs have manged --
This is not that long-looked-for break of day,
Not that clear dawn in quest of which those comrades
Set out, believing that in heaven's wide void
Somewhere must be the stars' last halting-place,
Somewhere the verge of night's slow-washing tide,
Somewhere the anchorage for the ship of heartache

India After Gandhi - pg. 41

It was India's historic destiny that many historic races and cultures should flow to her, finding a home in her hospitable sooil, and that many a caravan should find rest here ... Tleven hundred yeaars of common history [of Islam and Hinduismm] have enriched India with our common achievements. Our languaages, our poetry, our literature, our cculture, our art, our dress, our manners and customs, the unnumerable happenings of our daily life, everything bears the stamp of our joint endeavour ... These thousand years of our joint life [have] moulded us into a common naitonality ... Whether we like it or not, we have now become an Indian nation, united and indivisible. No fantasy or artificial scheming to separate and divide can break this unity.

MAULANA ABUL KALAM AZAD, CONGRESS Presidential Address, 1940

India After Gandhi - pg. 36

India had withheld Pakistan's share of the "sterling balance" that the British owed jointly to the two dominions, a debt incurred on account of Indian contributions to the Second World War. This amounted to 550 million rupees, a fair sum.

India After Gandhi - pg. 31

The clinical even-handedness of the violence was described by the Punjab correspondent of the respected Madras-based weekly, Swatantra. He wrote of seeing

an empty refugee special steaming into Ferozepur Station late one afternoon. The driver was incoherent with terror, the guard was lying dead in his van, and the stoker was missing. I walked down the platform -- all but two bogies [carriages] were bespattered with blood inside and out; three dead bodies lay in pools of bloood in a third class carriage. An armed Muslim mob had stopped the train between Lahore and Ferozepur and done this neat job of butchery in broad daylight.

There is another sight I am not likely to easily forget. A five-mile long caravan of Muslim refugees crawling at a snail's pace into Pakistan over the Sutlej Bridge. Bulock-carts piled high with pitiful chattels, cattle being driven alongside. Women with babies in their arms and wwretched little tin-trunks on their heads. Twenty thoussand men, women and children trekking into the promised land -- not because it is the promised land, but because bands of Hindus and Sikhs in Faridkot Staate and the interior of Ferozepur district had hacked hundreds of Muslims to death and maade life impossible for the rest.

India After Gandhi - pg. 20

The resolution to mark the last Sunday of January as Independence Day was passed in the city of Lahore, where the Congress was holding its annual session. It was here that Jawaharlal Nehru was chosen president of the Congress, in confirmation of his rapidly rising status within the Indian national movement. 

India After Gandhi - pg. 5

Three months later, speaking at Albert Hall on "Our Duty To India" -- with his hinsman the duke of Marlborough presiding -- Churchill argued that "to abandon India to the rule of the Brahmans [who in his opinion dominated the Congress party] would be an act of cruel and wicked negligence." If the Britissh left, he predicted, then the entire gamut of public services creaated by them -- the judicical, medical, railway, and public works departments -- would perish, and India would "fall back quite rapidly through the centuries into the barbarism and privations of the Middle Ages." 

India After Gandhi - Opening

Prologue

UNNATURAL NATION

BECAUSE THEY ARE SO MANY, and so various, the people of India are also divided. They appear to have always been so. In the spring of 1827, the poet of Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib set out on a journey from Delhi to Calcutta. Six months later he reached the holy Hindu city of Banaras. Here he wrote a poem called "Chirag-i-Dair", with these timeless lines: