Chapter 130: Pressure

The Banyan at Sarapali

18 March 1950

By the third week of March, Sarapali had changed. There were now two hundred men under the banyan, four tents, and a cookhouse that fed eighty a day. A second line of red stakes had appeared beside the surveyors’, planted not by engineers but by villagers, along what they called the swatantra bhumi, the free land. The District Magistrate had sent a polite notice requiring the removal of the stakes, which was read aloud in the camp and greeted with laughter.

Panda’s committee had grown to fourteen. They were mostly teachers, clerks, and two young union men from the Sambalpur textile mill, and they were poor and honest and very short of money. They had one mimeograph machine, which broke down every third day, and a handful of pamphlets that Panda wrote himself.

On the nineteenth, a delegation arrived from the Resettlement Authority, led by Bhattacharya, with two clerks and an interpreter. They had brought plans of the first resettlement colony, a neat grid of plots on high ground twelve miles from the river, with a school, a dispensary, a temple, and a market, drawn in clean ink on cream paper. Bhattacharya laid them on the ground under the banyan.

"This is Hirakud Nagar," he said. "Ten thousand houses in the first phase. Each family will receive one and a half acres of irrigated land in the command area, a brick house with a tile roof, and a certificate of title. The houses are being built now. Some are finished. You may visit them."

Panda studied the drawings for a long time. "It is a very fine colony, Babu."

"Thank you."

"It has no river."

"There is a canal."

"My grandfather’s ashes are in the river," Panda said. "I do not think a canal will hold them."

Bhattacharya did not answer at once. He was twenty-nine, and honest, and he had sat up three nights over the cost estimates, and he understood very well what the man had said.

"I have no answer to that," he said at last. "I am sorry. I think you are right, and I think it will be done anyway."

"Then you are a better man than your masters."

"I am only a smaller one," Bhattacharya said, and rolled up the plans.

That night, in the tent, Panda wrote in his notebook: They are not villains. That is what makes it hard. He looked at it for a while and did not cross it out.

Hirakud

26 March 1950

At seven in the morning, the sun was already hot on the ridge. A column of army trucks and three jeeps of the Orissa Armed Police stopped at the edge of the red-stake line, two hundred yards from the banyan. The officer in charge, a tall, lean Superintendent named Mohanty, got down from the lead jeep and walked forward alone with his cap under his arm.

Panda met him halfway. Behind him, in a loose crescent across the field, stood perhaps eight hundred villagers and organisers: farmers with their families, women with children, old men with sticks.

"Mr. Panda. I have a notice from the District Magistrate under Section 144. This assembly is unlawful. I am required to ask you to disperse."

"It is a peaceful meeting, Superintendent."

"I am sure it is."

"We have a right to assemble."

"You have. You do not have a right to obstruct a lawful survey." Mohanty’s voice was courteous and tired. He had been a police officer for nineteen years and had no wish to be here. "I have orders to clear the survey line. I would prefer to do it without trouble. I will give you an hour. After that, I shall have to use the force at my disposal."

"We have nowhere else to go."

"You have the resettlement colony."

"It is not our land."

"No," Mohanty said. "I understand that." He put on his cap. "One hour, Mr. Panda."

Panda walked back to the crescent. A woman at the front held a baby, and he saw that her hand was shaking.

At seven-forty, a stone landed on the roof of the third jeep.

It was a small stone, not thrown with great force. Nobody saw who threw it. Mohanty turned sharply, and before he could speak, a second stone followed, then a third, then a clatter of them. A voice at the back of the crowd screamed in Oriya that the police were going to shoot.

"Stand firm!" Mohanty shouted. "Constables, hold your ground! Do not advance!"

But the crowd had broken. A dozen men pushed to the front with iron rods, bright new rods that had not come from any village forge. Panda saw them go past him, young, well fed, in good boots, with the set faces of men who had been told what to do. He shouted at them to stop. He might as well have shouted at the river.

The first rod struck a constable across the shoulder, and the man went down. A second smashed the windscreen of a jeep. A hatchet flashed, and a constable cried out and clutched his arm. A third rod caught Constable Brajabandhu Das across the jaw, and he fell in the dust with blood in his mouth. The police line wavered. Behind it, a young constable named Raghunath Naik, twenty years old and in his third week of service, had been hit in the face with a brick. He lifted his rifle and fired once into the air.

The sound split the morning. Women screamed, men fell back, and for a moment the whole field held its breath. Then the strangers with the rods charged again, and Mohanty, looking at the wreckage of his line, gave the order he had hoped never to give.

"Lathi charge! Clear the field! Non-lethal force only! Aim for the legs!"

It lasted twenty minutes. The Armed Police advanced in a tight line, batons rising and falling. The crowd gave way before them, running for the river, the trees, the huts. The strangers with the rods fought to the end. Two were arrested, and four escaped. By eight the field was empty, strewn with sandals, broken sticks, and a child’s red cloth.

Thirty-one villagers were hospitalised, mostly with broken arms and legs. Eleven policemen were injured, two seriously. One villager, an old man named Dhruba Behera, who had stood with his hands folded in front of the banyan and refused to move, died of a head wound in the hospital that evening. Nobody could say who had struck him. He had been in the front of a charge that had been going on around him with batons, rods, and thrown stones, and a dozen men on both sides could have done it.

Panda was arrested in his own tent at nine, with his hands still bleeding from where he had tried to hold back the crowd. He did not resist. When they led him past the banyan, he stopped and looked at the ground where Behera had fallen, and the constable beside him, a decent man, did not hurry him.

"It was not supposed to happen like that," Panda said.

"No, babu," the constable said. "It never is."

South Block, New Delhi

26 March 1950, evening

The first telegram reached Ram at four, the second at five, and by six the room was full. Patel sat very upright, his face set hard but his eyes clear and watchful. Nehru stood at the window with one hand pressed to his forehead. Savarkar, who had been sent for, said nothing at all.

"Eleven injured policemen and thirty-one civilians," Mullick said, reading from a sheet. "One civilian dead, an old farmer of seventy-one. Fifty-eight arrests, including the local leader, a former teacher named Panda. The Superintendent’s report says the disturbance was started by outsiders with iron rods. I have asked for the rods."

"Outsiders," Nehru said, without turning.

"The Superintendent says so, Prime Minister. His men saw at least a dozen. Two were arrested, and neither is from Sambalpur."

"A man is dead," Nehru said. "An old man."

"Yes."

"The press will say we are shooting peasants."

"It was a lathi charge, Jawaharlal, not a volley," Patel said, in his slow, grating voice. "No one fired on the crowd. A constable fired once into the air when his face was broken by a brick. Eleven of my policemen are in hospital. I am sorry for the old man. I am sorry for every man hurt. But I will not have it said in this room that the police committed murder."

"No one has said that."

"Someone will. The Statesman will lead with the old man. The Hindu with the policemen. Reuters has a photograph of a boy with his arm in a sling." Patel set his cane. "I will say now, so that it is on record, that if the inquiry finds a particular constable struck the blow, I shall still not try him. A man who goes into a mob of eight hundred with a baton, being stoned and beaten with iron, does his duty. If another man dies in the crush, that is the crowd’s doing, and the men who brought the rods."

"The man is still dead," Nehru said quietly.

"And it is a tragedy, and the family will be paid." Patel’s voice was not unkind. "But I will not make a scapegoat of a boy of twenty to feel better about it."

Ram had not spoken. He sat at the head of the table with a blank sheet before him, on which he had written one word and underlined it twice. Outsiders.

"Mullick," he said at last.

"Prime Minister."

"I want the two prisoners questioned by someone you trust. I want the rods traced, and the surviving organisers interviewed, gently, not as prisoners. Ask the schoolteacher Panda what he saw. I think he has been used, and I think he knows it."

"I will go myself."

"Take Kao as well."

Mullick’s face did not change, but there was a pause just long enough to register. "Prime Minister, the Intelligence Bureau has an officer in Cuttack. Kao’s wing has no jurisdiction on domestic soil."

"Kao’s wing is a charter and six officers, Mullick. I do not intend it to have jurisdiction. I intend it to have eyes. If this is what I think it is, there is a trail that leaves India."

"Then it is a matter for the Bureau, which will pass it to the external service when the trail crosses the border."

"It will pass to him now." Ram’s voice stayed even. "Cooperate."

Mullick bowed, a very small movement, and said nothing more.

"We will express our sorrow publicly and truthfully at the death of Dhruba Behera," Ram went on. "The Resettlement Authority will pay his family five thousand rupees and a house in the first colony. The survey resumes under army protection. And the Republic does not make war on its own peasants."

"And the dam?" Savarkar asked.

"The dam proceeds."

Nehru turned from the window. His face was grey. "Ram. It proceeds over the body of an old man."

"It proceeds because forty thousand lives will be lost to floods in the next ten years if it does not. I am sorry for the old man, Jawaharlal. I did not choose between a dam and a life. I chose between one number of lives and another."

"That is an arithmetician’s answer."

"It is. But we cannot stop the dam, and so it will go ahead."

Nobody spoke. Outside, a train whistle sounded from the railyards. Patel drew the thermos toward him and drank, with a faint grimace, and put it down.

"The dal-water is vile," he said, to no one in particular, and the room let out a breath.

The Cuttack High Court

3 April 1950

Sudhir Ghosh filed the petition on the third of April. It ran to eighty-four pages, the work of six lawyers over a fortnight, and asked the High Court of Orissa for a writ restraining the Government from proceeding with the Hirakud acquisition, on the ground that the Land Acquisition (Public Works) Act violated the fundamental rights of the petitioners under the Constitution.

The Court heard the matter for three days. The Advocate-General for Orissa, a heavy, courteous man named Rath, answered with calm precision: the Act was a valid exercise of legislative power, the Constitution permitted acquisition for public purposes on payment of compensation, and the petitioners had shown no instance of unlawful action by any officer. On the sixth, Justice Narasimham dismissed the petition in a twenty-minute oral judgment.

"The petitioners’ remedy, if any, lies in a claim for enhanced compensation after the acquisition has taken effect, as the Constitution expressly provides. The Court is not satisfied that any ground has been made out for a stay of public works of this magnitude."

Ghosh took it with a quiet bow. In the corridor afterwards, a pleasant young Englishman in a linen suit, who had been in the gallery all three days, fell into step beside him.

"We expected that, Mr. Ghosh."

"Naturally."

"The Supreme Court is another matter. I understand the Bench takes a keen interest in its own dignity."

"You think so?"

"I think that eight learned judges who have just been told, in a Constitution drafted by the Executive, that their authority over certain cases may be exercised only after the fact, will be more sympathetic to your argument than a High Court judge in Cuttack." The young man lifted his hat. "Merely an observation. My name is Laidlaw. I represent a body of Anglo-Indian gentlemen who are anxious about the rule of law. I should be glad to introduce you to one or two of them."

Delhi, the Bar Library

10 April 1950

The English letters began to arrive that week.

Sir Alladi Krishnaswami Iyer received one on the tenth, in an envelope with a London postmark and an Inner Temple crest. It came from a retired Lord Justice who had sat with him on a Privy Council appeal in 1938, and it was warm, discursive, and careful. The old judge hoped his friend was well. He hoped the new Constitution was working.

He had read in The Times that the Indian Government was proposing certain measures on land acquisition, and it troubled him. He had always thought of the Indian judiciary as the finest legacy of British rule, and he would be saddened to see it diminished. He enclosed a short memorandum on the principle of judicial review.

Sir Alladi read it twice and set it aside with a sigh. He had no suspicion that the letter was anything but what it appeared. It was not a lie. It was the sincere opinion of a sincere man, who had been, two weeks earlier, to lunch at a club on St. James’s Street with a Colonel Hargreaves, and had mentioned his old friend in Madras.

In Bombay, M.C. Chagla received a similar letter. In Allahabad, Sir Iqbal Ahmad received an invitation to give the Lent lecture at Grey’s Inn. In the Supreme Court itself, Justice Mahajan, a Punjabi of dry temper who had been called at the Middle Temple, opened a long and affectionate note from a former tutor who wrote that he followed the Indian courts with pride, and hoped they would not be required to bear burdens unsuited to their tradition.

Nobody was bribed. Nobody was recruited. A hundred and fifty honest old men, in London and in Delhi, who had known each other for a generation, simply began to say the same thing, in the same voice, at the same moment.

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