In 1958, it not only refused to negotiate a settlement of the border dispute, but engaged in military provocations, ultimately leaving the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) no other option. In 1962, the PLA, after defeating the Indian Army in “India’s China War,” and with India still refusing to negotiate, unilaterally declared a cease-fire and withdrew to 20 km north of the McMahon Line (even though China then considered that line illegal), and in Ladakh too, to where they were stationed before the start of hostilities. As Neville Maxwell put it:54
The Chinese withdrawal to their original lines after a victory in the field was the first time in recorded history that a great power has not exploited military success by demanding more.
This really exposed the myth of Chinese aggression; in Maxwell’s view, all China wanted (and wants) was a negotiated settlement that would guarantee stability at its borders. But Nehru just stuck to the old colonial claims, that Aksai Chin was part of the Ladakh region of India for centuries, and so on. In the face of defeat, however, his hegemonic position in the Indian establishment suffered a jolt; in the non-aligned movement too, there was a loss of face. Nehru passed away on May 27, 1964, and the man who succeeded him as prime minister, Lal Bahadur Shastri, died of a heart attack less than two years after he took office. In the contest for the office of the prime minister that followed, with the backing of the Congress President K. Kamaraj, Mrs. Gandhi took office on January 24, 1966.
Soon thereafter, on March 1, 1966, the Mizo National Front (MNF) in India’s Northeast, formed in October 1961 under the leadership of Laldenga, rose in revolt and made a declaration of independence. The MNF had been seeking the integration of the Mizo people and the liberation of their homeland, the then Mizo Hills district of Assam, from India. The Indian government retaliated with vicious air raids. On March 2, the government of India invoked the Assam Disturbed Areas Act, 1955, and the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, 1958, designating the Mizo Hills as a “Disturbed Area.” On March 4, Indian Air Force (IAF) fighter jets strafed Aizawl, the main town, using machine guns, following this up the next day with an extensive airstrike that went on for five hours. As a Mizo Hills MLA in the Assam Legislative Assembly was to remark in the House: “The use of air force for taking Aizawl was excessive because you cannot pinpoint from the air who is loyal and who is not loyal, who is an MNF and who is somebody pledging allegiance to the Mizo Union, the ruling party in the Mizo district.”55 But the government of India even went to the extent of denying that the aerial bombing of Aizawl on March 4 and 5, 1966, had taken place, let alone apologizing to the Mizo people for this inhuman act. This was the first time that the government of India resorted to air strikes on its own civilian population. Mrs. Gandhi could not have made a more callous beginning as prime minister.
With the “colonial” deeply embedded in the so-called post-colonial, one should refrain from holding Mrs. Gandhi as prime minister individually responsible for such inhumanity. Indeed, in May 1975, again when Mrs. Gandhi was the prime minister, the Indian state “annexed” the Himalayan Kingdom of Sikkim, which was a British dependency and had become a protectorate under India in 1950. The official claim has been that this was a “voluntary” merger, but in all likelihood it was the result of New Delhi taking opportunistic advantage of a “mobilization” of the majority community of Sikkimese of Nepalese origin under a “feudal” Sikkimese leader of Lepcha origin who was implacably opposed to the Chogyal (Sikkim’s traditional ruler).56 All her pomposity and bluster notwithstanding, Mrs. Gandhi was really a captive of the colonial deep in the marrow of the “post-colonial” regime she was heading.
GREEN REVOLUTION—BYPASSING LAND REFORM
In the economy, the balance of payments was particularly strained with increasing food imports adding to the hard currency strain from the huge military hardware imports that were already underway over the previous couple of years. The international trade account was already stressed by the huge imports of plant and equipment and spares thereof that the second and third five-year plans had entailed. Under “advice” from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the rupee underwent a huge devaluation in 1966, further exacerbating inflationary and industrial recessionary tendencies.
The land reform was expected to lead to significant growth of agricultural output, but it was now being realized in establishment circles that, beyond a point, such reform was not politically feasible in India. The landlords, especially the large ones, were, after all, an important constituent of the political establishment. The agrarian class structure, even after the land reform of the 1950s and 60s, was still outmoded, a serious impediment to the modernization of agriculture and to rapid rural development. Nevertheless, with the abolition of the intermediary tenures of the Zamindari era—what historians have called “subinfeudation”57—this on payment of compensation, about 20 million erstwhile tenants became landowners. However, most of them were not genuine cultivators tilling the land. They lived off the labor of the actual tillers, either their tenants-at-will or their hired laborers. Indeed, many such tenants-at-will, those who came from the lower castes, may have gotten evicted. Vast areas of wasteland were vested in the state. However, the large “home farms,” the workable core of the estates of the Zamindars, cultivated by tenants-at-will, remained intact, with no measures even to limit their sizes. As Elizabeth Whitcombe puts it, what was left with the Zamindars was “a tenth of the Zamindari, but [with] ten times more income” after the adoption of green-revolution techniques, and with “their brothers and sons in the civil service and industry, the army and the police sending regular remittances to swell the family accounts in pre-Mutiny fashion.…”58
As regards the reform of tenancy, despite progressive guidelines laid down in the five-year plans, and some states enacting laws laying down the maximum permissible rate of rent, security of tenure, and so on, rents continued to remain at “semi-feudal” levels, insecurity of tenure persisted, and, in many cases, tenants were evicted on the plea of “personal cultivation” by the landowners. Moreover, tenancies were “‘pushed underground and converted into work contracts…. (M)ost of the leases, particularly crop-sharing arrangements, [were] oral and informal…. (T)he objective of ensuring fair rent and security of tenure … [remained] unattained in large parts of the country. [Indeed,] (h)ighly exploitative tenancy in the form of crop-sharing still … [prevailed] in large parts of the country.’”59
Land ceiling laws were enacted by the states by 1961, but “(a)ll the laws provided for a large number of exemptions.… (A)ll prudent landowners took steps in good time to distribute the surplus land among their relatives, friends and dependents, and in some cases they arranged paper transactions to show distribution among fictitious persons…. Only about one million hectares of land could be declared surplus … [which worked] out to be less than one percent of the total arable land in the country…. [Consolidation of fragmented holdings] often helped the landowner in getting rid of his tenants.”
… “Thus the overall assessment [was] … that programmes of land reform adopted since Independence had failed to bring about the required changes in the agrarian structure.”60 Moreover, the close interrelation between the agrarian class structure and the Hindu caste hierarchy remained intact, albeit, with some positional changes. The ranks of landowners, formerly invariably upper-caste, were now composed of some of the former tenants, middle and backward castes. The cultivators were from the ranks of the middle and backward castes, while the landless laborers were from the lowest castes, mostly Dalits. All the tall talk of “land to the tiller” was hogwash.61 If really meant, it would have connoted giving ownership rights to the poor peasants (tenants at the subsistence level) and landless laborers, and not permitting those who did not till the land with their own personal labor to own it. This would have then resulted in the transfer of ownership of land from the upper-caste landowners, who are averse to manual labor, to the real tillers of the soil.62
There was thus no basis to assume that a genuine land reform could be carried out without class struggle and the winning of that struggle by the exploited and the oppressed.63 Overall, the post-1956 official land reforms led merely to a partial amalgamation of the old rural landowning classes-castes into a new, broader stratum of rich landowners,