5 - 1951

Summary

THIS YEAR WILL ‘TEST US TO THE UTTERMOST …’

The year 1951 is a somewhat overlooked year, sandwiched between the year of the republic and that of electoral democracy, with its overshadowed clearing of decks via, as this section shows, an interplay between pre-existing structures and their succeeding shapes. The first casualty of this was the Hindu Code Bill, which got kicked into the long grass given, as Nehru listed to Ambedkar, ‘strong opposition, governmental reconstruction [and] Patel's death’. A second were those Muslims of West Bengal, who had left before the Delhi Pact for either East Bengal or elsewhere in India and then returned afterwards. They had been promised and, in many cases, received grants of INR 200 by the state government to repair their houses, in lieu of their taken-away land and looted shops. An accompanying central loan for a sum between INR 500 and INR 750 for artisans/traders, like Hindu migrants from East Bengal, was, however, not forthcoming. A related and sensitive issue was with whom to arrange for this delivery, as B. C. Roy mistrusted old Khilafat leaders from Bengal and preferred ‘the Jamiat’. A third casualty was the government's grow-more-food campaign, which was overtaken by more than 5 million tons of import. Its concomitant tragedy was the unsustainable rural rationing and integrated controls, as the deficit had to be ‘spread over the country’. Indeed, it was not just food grains and essential items like sugar, but even the newsprint situation that now needed ‘control’.

Control was also what the prime minister was seeking on the States Ministry now, especially on its treatment of Hyderabad. Receiving a file from it about services there, he found that one of its objectives was the ‘dispersal’ of Muslim officers to other parts of India and to replace them by people from Madras, Bombay and the Central Provinces. Nehru did not forget that New Delhi had entered Hyderabad by ‘military occupation’, and, two years and two months later, it had a ‘civilian occupation’. Outsiders sent there had no ability in any of the languages but had a conqueror's attitude, and the so-called ministry was ‘very communal in the Hindu sense’. What was communal in a regional sense was ‘the demand for more food’ from Bombay, without regard to others.