THE INDIAN SCENE
(December
15, 1951-March 15, 1952)
By
Prof. D. GURUMURTI, M.A., Ph.D.
The
quarter under review covers events of such great variety and importance that a
mere chronological survey will scarcely bring out their significance. It is
hence proposed to group them into the following: 1. nation-building activities,
2. election tours, results and inquests upon them, 3. international contacts,
4. notable events and utterances.
While
the public mind has been preoccupied by the election tours and the election
results during this quarter, the Central Government, under the inspiring
leadership of the great national figure of Pandit Nehru, has been quietly and
steadily pushing on with schemes of vital importance for the building of New
India. The two words which are the key to the outlook of our national
leadership are courage and vision. These two words have
characterised every action and are the guiding motives of all effort. The
launching of the JAla Pushpa, the eighth Indian-built ship, at
Visakhapatnam on 15th December by the Central Minister of Works pushing a
switch at Bombay, was accompanied by the announcement of the Government’s
intention to take over the management of the Ship-building Yard. This has been
given effect to in the first week of March by the constitution of the
Hindusthan Ship-building Yard. Another step of importance was the signing of an
agreement with Burma Shell Company to start, an oil refinery near Bombay with
an invested capital of twenty crores and a total capacity of one and a half
million tons per year. This follows the earlier agreement with the Standard
Vacuum Oil Company of New York concluded on 30th Nov. 1951. This will be
followed by a third agreement with Caltex Company to start a refinery on the East
Coast of India.
The inauguration by the Prime Minister on 10th of
January of the Kandla Port marks a great step in the expansion of India’s trade
and commerce. Ever since the loss of the Karachi port as consequence of
partition, a major port to relieve the congestion of Bombay and Cochin had been
keenly felt. Further the large hinterland of Madhya Bharat and Rajasthan
required an outlet to the sea for their commercial expansion. The building of
Kandla as a major port will restore the ancient importance of Saurashtra and
Gujarat. Pandit Nehru took the first step in the organisation of a welfare
state, and the development of a social security scheme by opening the
Employees’ State Insurance Corporation at Kanpur on 24th February. Dr. Katial,
the Director of the Corporation, has pointed out that though this scheme covers
only the workers of Delhi and Kanpur in the first instance, the ultimate aim is
to extend the benefit to the twenty-five lakhs of workers in the whole country.
Limited resources and organisational difficulties which have confined the
scheme to a small area are expected to be overcome in due course to enable the
widening of the scope of the scheme.
The most important event of nation-building during the quarter was the opening of the National Fertiliser Factory at Sindri by the Prime Minister. Pandit Nehru took two days off his preoccupation at Delhi to tout round and inspected the Chittaranjan Locomotive Works, the Damodar Valley Project under construction, and on the 3rd March opened the Fertiliser Factory. He described it as the symbol of the New India of our dreams. As he looked out on the vast iron city, its twenty three crore project all complete, and as he touched a switch and the life-giving ammonium sulphate moved out, his imagination was stirred with the vision of self-sufficiency in food and he very legitimately exclaimed that if no other effort of the National Government of the last five years had fructified, this single achievement would be more than sufficient justification of their efforts at nation-building. The Chittaranjan Locomotive Works, the Damodar Valley Dams and the Sindri Fertiliser Factory constitute three of the major achievements of the National Government and are an eloquent testimony to the courage and vision of the Nehru Government and a triumphant proof of international co-operation. On 4th March the Prime Minister laid the foundation of an Institute of Technology near Khargpur. It is meant to be on the model of the world-famous Massachusets Institute of Technology and will be the first among a chain of such institutes to be established in different parts of the country. The Indo-U. S. Agreement signed in New Delhi on 4th March is mainly designed to advance community projects in Uttar Pradesh. American financial and technical aid have been promised to train rural units to develop self-reliance and active reconstruction on a planned basis. Unlike the townships of Faridabad, Nilokheri and Gandhidam, which are the outcome of Government capital, the community projects will develop rural resources and direct them to achieve rapid progress. The proposal to start a rural Agricultural University in Izatnagar, Barielly, U. P., will strive to bring scientific knowledge and the fruits of research to the workers of the soil. The million-watt generator for production of neutrons ordered by the Institute of Fundamental Research is expected to arrive in Bombay very soon and will be utilised along with the rare compounds to be produced by the Monazite Factory at Alwaye, Travancore, to advance power resources in India. The Central Minister for Works inaugurated on 10th March the first Penicillin Factory near Poona. It is expected to go into production by the end of next year. Being one of the four drugs which are used in the cure of ninety per cent of the ailments of humanity, the local manufacture of Penicillin will save a good quantity of much-needed foreign exchange for the purchase of capital goods from abroad.
This
quarter has witnessed the great churning of the mass consciousness by the
General Elections. The results have completely belied the anticipations of
pessimists, who, obsessed by the illiteracy of ninety per cent of the
electorate, had expected a failure of the colossal experiment of adult
franchise on a scale unheard of in human history. The touchstone of the
people’s will has, with unerring precision, thrown out the
wielders of power in the States where, by their misdeeds, they had failed to
serve the interests of the many, while in certain other
States it has returned to power with absolute majorities the tried servants of
the country, as also in the Central Government of the Union. Pandit Nehru in a
record-breaking campaign of electioneering in his capacity as President of the
Congress, came into exhilarating contact with twenty-five millions of the
electorate. He felt a new vigour and vitality pulsating among the masses, which
he had occasions to doubt during his four and a half years of preoccupation
with onerous official duties, and the consequent lack of touch with the popular
mind. He discovered that the great national organisation required to be
remoulded into a strong instrument by attracting fresh and vital people. Some
of the electioneering efforts of the ruling princes in Orissa, Rajasthan and other
States made him doubt how far they were loyal to the purposes of the
Constitution. He found some of the party affiliations for election purposes
were marriages of convenience and that the down and outs of Indian politics
were coming together under some new banner, indisciplined and unable to
understand the problems facing the country, only intent on
seeking personal ends. Sri Jai Prakash Narain also referred to the coalition
with Communists by certain other parties on 25th February at Madras and described
it as the embrace of death and warned them against the extra-territorial
loyalty of the Communist Party. The failure of the Congress to secure
majorities in Madras, Travancore-Cochin, Pepsu, Orissa, and Rajasthan and the
bare majority in Hyderabad has had a very salutary effect and given rise to a
good deal of heart-searching by the Congress Working Committee and the various
Pradesh Congress executives. The defeat at the poles six leading Madras
ministers and tour prominent Madras representatives in the House of the People,
and a number of prominent leaders in Travancore-Cochin has called for apologia
from the Chief Minister of Madras, himself one of the victims of popular
disfavour.
The
big landslide against the Congress in Andhradesa has hit the headlines. The
Tamilnad Congress President called for resignation of all committees and
offered his own. The Andhra Pradesh Committee Executive actually submitted
resignations en masse. The Secretary of the Andhra Pradesh Committee has
submitted a very accurate analysis of the causes of Congress failure in Madras
State which merits careful study; the main points are lack of cooperation
between the ministerialists and the Congress Committees, the hardship and
severity inflicted by the administration on the less well-to-do ryots and
cultivators by their procurement of food-grains which savoured of intimidation
and coercion while the better placed landlords with influence escaped the
attention of procurement officials, the attributing of food and cloth scarcity
to the bungling by the Congress administration by rival political parties, by
the Communists freely promising five acres and a cow to every peasant family,
and above all the preoccupation by the rank and file of Congressmen with their
own interests to the extent of utter lack of contact with the masses. To this
must be added utter failure of the intellectuals to stand by the Congress. The
debit side of the Government’s failures was over-emphasised and the credit side
was obscured. It was freely ventilated that a brown bureaucracy of the white
cap and khadi clothes had just replaced the white bureaucracy of the hat and
the boot, with no substantial change in the lot of the common man. The shrewd
business community of Bombay and Bengal realised the need for a stable
Government; but not the impoverished and over-worked middle class, nor the
hard-pressed agrarian population of the non-industrial states.
Pandit
Nehru at two meetings of the Working Committee of the Congress held in February
and March, and in his circular to the Pradesh Committees, has pointed out the
need for elimination of casteism, the need to make the Congress Committees give
up the preoccupation with electoral work, the need to form strong basic units
of twenty or thirty Congress workers in each group area, the need to attract
fresh and vital workers to live in the midst of the people. Pandit Nehru is now
fully seized of the vital problem of the intractability of the human material
and the urgency to tackle it from both the individual and environmental lines
of approach. The General Elections have shown us the real defects of the
Congress organisation. That a good proportion of power-grabbers have been
shaken off is all to the good; but care has to be taken not to allow the virus
to grow again.
The
problem of Madras State and the possibility of a stable Government have been
entrusted to the deft handling of the great servant of the people Sri Sri
Prakasa who has just taken charge of the State as Governor on March I2th.
The
Commonwealth Universities’ Executive Council, whose Chairman is the
Vice-Chancellor of Madras University, tourcd the chief centres of education in
the middle of January. At a banquet given in their honour Dr. A. L. Mudaliar,
the Madras Vice-Chancellor, made a remarkable statement: “It is one of the
paradoxes of the time that society has to fear only the educated man.” Few
utterances are so frank and pregnant with meaning, and a whole commentary on
higher education in India is compressed in the remark. The International
Industries Fair at Bombay, the visit of the Turkish Press Delegation and the
International Films Exhibition have contributed to a wider appreciation of the
latest trends in culture and industry. The Films Exhibition organised by the
Department of Information of the Central Government has proved a striking
success. This moving exhibition covered Bombay, Madras, Calcutta and New Delhi.
The open air theatre with its giant screen of twenty four feet by eighteen
feet, seating four thousand auditors to witness the films on the Ferozesha
Kotla ground in the capital, enabled several thousands to see and enjoy some of
the best achievements of the art of film making.
Prominent among the visitors to the country in the quarter under review have been Mr. Eugene R. Black, President of International Bank, and Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt. Mr. Black in his first-hand appraisal has done a great service by his praise of the Five Year Plan, a plan none too kindly received by the indigenous industrialists. Mrs. Roosevelt has functioned as the un-official ambassador for a better understanding of India by America, and her return to her own great country promises to clear a few of the remaining mists of misinterpretation of India which are rampant there.
Mr.
Munshi’s convocation address to the Allahabad University on 15th December
cpntains valuable suggestions. His emphasis on cultural values such as study of
classical literature, life and message of great and noble men, study of Indian
and universal history and repeated recital of eternal messages like the Gita is
invaluable
advice to a modern generation with its craze for sciences and neglect of the
humanities.
Sri
Jai Prakash Narain in an address to the Presidency College at Madras made a
valuable suggestion to the students to organise Workers’ Camps based on
voluntary labour. The Maharajah of Bhavnagar, the retiring Governor of Madras,
the record of whose services and that of the Maharani to the social life of the
State are unexcelled, made a remarkable pronouncement on his last public
engagement presiding over the Ramakrishna Students’ Home anniversary on March
10. He said: “Now and then in human history an uncommon being found his way to
this planet from other spheres. He brought with him to this world some of the
glory, some of the power, and the radiance of other regions. He shared the
lives of those about him, entered into their joys and sorrows, but his purpose
transcended their little individual lives, for his purpose was to serve the
glory of man as man, of all mankind as mankind, and of all men as the living
vessels of the spirit of God. Such a being was Sri Ramakrishna. His mission was
the noblest of human aspirations–service to the highest by service to the
lowest. We cannot measure our gratitude to those who follow in his footsteps
and who keep up the object of his mission–the torch of service.”
At
the moment the fall in prices and the famine in Rayalaseema are prominent in
the public mind. The new Governor of Madras has toured the area of scarcity,
and relief is being rendered out of the one lakh of Rupees placed at his
disposal by the Prime Minister, and the Relief Funds started under official and
non-official auspices.