The Hindu Business Line : From the back pages, unsung heroes

In December 1947, the Mahabharata’s Kurukshetra became a battlefield for a very different kind of war — a war to resettle millions of Sikh refugees who had fled persecution in their traditional homelands in what is now Pakistan. Once prosperous farmers, who had now been reduced to penury, waited for food, clothing, shelter and, of course, land.

A journalist touring the region estimated some 300,000 refugees were getting restless. They had been shown Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse films to take their minds off the horrors they had been through. “Their passion”, wrote V.V. Prasad, quoted in Ramachandra Guha’s fascinating history of post-Independence India, India After Gandhi, “for land appeared to be elemental.”

In retrospect, it defies common sense that the director-general of rehabilitation, charged with feeding the refugees’ hunger for land did not ask for a transfer to some more manageable job. A massive reverse flight of Muslim farmers to the west had left lands for redistribution, to be sure. But the numbers did not add up.

Hindus and Sikhs fleeing the western regions had left behind 2.7 million hectares; Muslims fleeing in the opposite direction left just 1.9 million hectares. The lands in the west were richer and more irrigated, colonised in the late 19th century by the very same farmers now waiting impatiently for land, even inferior land.

Of course, each family had been given four hectares, regardless of what they had left behind, along with loans and inputs to begin cultivation. Then applications were invited for permanent allotments.

Many exaggerated their lost possessions, and some were punished for it, but Guha cites an official saying some 25 per cent claims were inflated. To collect, sift through, verify and act upon these claims, a Rehabilitation Secretariat was set up with some 7,000 officials, all of them living in tents, in a sort of “refugee city of their own,” working with makeshift latrines and lights.

Within 30 days of the invitation some half a million applications had been received. Unblessed with computers or land records, grassroots democracy helped; open assemblies consisting of other migrants verified claims that were read aloud by an official.

Settling the Impossible

The man in charge of the rehabilitation department, Sardar Tarlok Singh still had to wrestle with the impossible. An ICS officer, nothing he had learnt in the London School of Economics would have prepared him for the ‘biggest land resettlement operation in the world’ so soon after the ‘greatest mass migration in history’. So he innovated.

The ‘standard acre’ and the ‘graded cut’ took care of two potentially explosive issues; the differences in soil and fertility and the difference in the lands the farmer-refugees had left behind and the land now available, a discrepancy of a million hectares. Guha cites the case of the single biggest loser, a lady whose inheritance of 11,500 acres in the Sialkot region was compensated by 835 acres.

By November 1949, less than two years after the claims process began, some 250,000 farmers had been allotted land on the basis of Tarlok Singh’s twin concepts. By 1950 the “depopulated countryside was alive once again.”

Many-headed multitude

Twelve months a people that had earned the right to power without understanding its full depth had its first celebration. The first general election of 1951-52 set the pace for the exercise of universal franchise in the only way Indians could have — by innovating.

Guha tells us of the backs of stray cows in Calcutta used as mobile publicity billboards, of emblems “even on statues in New Delhi, defying the dignity” of imperial Viceroys, of the first Indians to vote, a group of Buddhists in Himachal Pradesh that journeyed to the ballot boxes on October 25, 1951 to add a new, five-year ritual to their religious ones.

The highest turnout was in Kerala, the lowest in Madhya Pradesh; but 60 per cent of the registered voters, exercised their right “despite the high level of illiteracy”.

Sukumar Sen, a graduate in mathematics from London University, the first Chief Election Commissioner, was initially sceptical of Nehru’s haste in holding an election as early as 1951. Finally scheduled for early 1952, (barring the snow-covered districts of Himachal Pradesh that voted earlier) Sukumar Sen took count of the task before him.

A voter population of 176 million, mostly young and illiterate, spread over a million square miles on diverse terrain. Then the nitty-gritty; designing party symbols, ballot papers and ballot boxes for the unlettered. Then came identifying sites for polling stations and, most important of all, recruiting honest and efficient polling officers for the general as well as State elections. And then grappling with the social codes that prohibited north Indian women from having a personal name.

Sukumar Sen innovated

In the case of the north Indian women, he railed at this custom, but to no avail; so he gambled. Some 2.6 million women’s names were struck off the rolls in the hope that better sense would prevail the next time around round, and the names could be re-inserted.

And he innovated. For illiterate voters to recognise parties, the pictorial symbol was born; a hand, tree, elephant, lotus. Second, to reduce the margin of error, each party was allotted a box so that a voter needed to simply pick the appropriate drop-box. Then, for the first time, film and All-India radio was used to educate people on the event, with documentaries shown in 3,000 cinemas across the country.

Of the 176 million registered voters, 107 million exercised their franchise in a largely peaceful and corruption-free exercise. Sen, the sceptic, had called it the “biggest experiment in democracy in human history.” After the elections, he showed an admiring group of Turkish delegates the symbols of the experiment he had conducted with his team.

But nothing expressed his passage to faith in that experiment more than his calculated prudence; the second election he also presided over cost less than the first in part because he had preserved most of the ballot boxes.

We, the people

Eight months before the Constituent Assembly was convened to frame the Indian Constitution in 1946, two dozen foreigners, most of them Americans and many army officials, met secretly in a post-War Tokyo hotel. A week later the Diet, was presented with a constitution that the Japanese parliament simply translated.

The Indian Constitution took three years in the framing with its various parts discussed threadbare by more than 300 elected representatives, whose views were more eclectic than their party ideologies, through eleven sessions over 165 days with sub-committees and committees refining drafts in between sessions, with many of the deliberations exposed to the bright lights of the press. No Constitution-in-the-making was as public as this one.

The proceedings of the Constituent Assembly were printed in eleven bulky volumes that bear testimony to “the loquaciousness of Indians and their insight, intelligence and sense of humour.”

And the many visions of India, the political and economic systems, the moral values to live by expressed through submissions by organisations that reflected this multi-headed multitude.

The All-India Varnashrama Swarajya Sangh urged the Constitution be based on ancient Hindu scripts; low-caste organisations demanded representations; so did Central Jewish Board that petitioned for “adequate representation…on all public bodies including legislatures.”

Three hundred members, twelve of them with law degrees, argued, hectored sifted through the many ideas of India and drafted with “moral vision, political skill and legal acumen” till December 1949, for codes to live by. Rightly did the historian Granville Austin recognise that “the credit goes to the Indians,” the unsung heroes of the largest evolving democracy in the world.

(All cited information is from the book India After Gandhi. Picador India 2007.)

More Stories on : Books | People | Politics

Article E-Mail :: Comment :: Syndication :: Printer Friendly Page

Stories in this Section
Revisit the DTAAs

Education and inclusiveness

Nehru’s economic legacy

International taxation has become complex

From the back pages, unsung heroes

Greying population

Employee ‘ownership’