Chapter 142: Public Good vs Private Property

Palam Airfield, New Delhi

8 September 1950

The York came down out of a low, rain-washed sky and rolled to a stop at the far end of the apron. The monsoon had not yet let go of Delhi. The tarmac steamed, and the windsock hung wet and heavy against its pole.

Sardar Patel was waiting at the foot of the stairs, which Ram had not expected. He stood without a cane, a little straighter than he had in April, with his shawl pulled up against the damp and the physician hovering at a respectful distance behind him.

"You are walking without it," Ram said, taking his hand.

"Dr. Roy gave me leave for ten minutes. I have used four of them waiting for you." Patel’s eyes moved over the party and rested on Nehru. "Jawaharlal, you look as though you have been talking to a poet."

"To two, Vallabhbhai. One was in bed."

"And the dates?"

Ram laughed and reached into his case. He drew out a small tin box wrapped in brown paper and string, bought in the Tehran bazaar the morning they left. "Dates from Bam, Sardar-ji. The dealer swore on his mother that they were the best in Persia. He may have been exaggerating, but I did not have the means to dispute it."

Patel took the box and weighed it in his palm like a man judging a melon. "For the blood," he said, with great dignity, and handed it to the physician, who accepted it as one accepts a live grenade.

Aurangzeb Road

That evening

They gave Patel the whole account in his sitting-room, over a supper of boiled vegetables that he ate with exemplary patience. The rain had started again. It drummed on the verandah roof and ran in sheets from the eaves, and a single lamp lit the three faces and the small table with its tin of dates.

Ram spoke for forty minutes. He described the Shah’s wary courtesy at the Golestan banquet and the verse from the Rigveda that had made an old Persian scholar rise to his feet. He described the bed in the old city, the tears of Mossadegh, and the Company’s polite refusal to discuss anything it had not already decided. He described the fires.

"Four hundred million cubic feet a day," he said. "Burning. Forty years of it. It will take no more than a stroke of the pen to turn it into cooking gas for ten million kitchens, if the pen is held by someone who is permitted to hold it."

"And is he?"

"Not yet." Ram turned his cup in its saucer. "I did not ask for the gas in Tehran, Vallabhbhai. I asked for three million tons of crude a year, which Lord Strathalmond is glad to sell. I asked for a joint survey of a pipeline, which he declined, for now. I asked about the contract, as a shareholder, and was told the Company does not discuss it. Everything else was left unsaid. If the Majlis and the Company settle their quarrel, we can buy the gas openly and honestly. If they do not, it is not ours to touch."

"And if the quarrel ends in fire?"

"Then Abadan stops, and with it a good part of what we burn in our own lamps. So, we must have a second leg to stand on." Ram sketched it in the air with two fingers. "A state exploration commission to look for our own oil. A refining and marketing company spun off from Burmah, with its head office in Bombay. A national corporation to build refineries that can take any crude in the world, and to run the gas and the pipelines when they come. And a bond, to give the people a share in it."

Patel listened with his chin on his knuckles. When Ram finished, he said, "You will have a fight."

"With whom?"

"With whoever it is this time." He glanced at Nehru. "Jawaharlal, did he frighten the Persians?"

"He moved them, Vallabhbhai, which is different. And he did a thing I did not expect. He refused to promise Mossadegh anything." Nehru said it with the air of a man who had not quite forgiven it. "I would have promised, and that we may have well lost a friend because we decided not to."

Patel closed his eyes briefly. "Does the house have news from the front?"

"Cariappa reports that nothing has changed," Ram said. "The line holds. The Punjab roads are choked, and Pakistan has not yet gone to Lake Success. Mullick expects it any week."

"Then we have a little time." Patel opened the tin, took one date, and ate it slowly. "It is very good," he admitted. "Do not tell Dr. Roy."

The Lok Sabha

18 September 1950

The House was full by half past ten. The monsoon light came through the clerestory in long, grey bars, and the ceiling fans turned over rows of white caps and dark turbans. In the gallery, a delegation from the Madras chamber of commerce shared a bench with three correspondents and a young Standard-Vacuum engineer who had been told to sit very still.

Ram rose at eleven and spoke for twenty-five minutes. He presented four measures in order, and he did not raise his voice.

First, the Oil and Natural Gas Commission, a body of geologists and engineers with a charter and a budget, to explore the Cambay basin, the Bombay shelf, Assam, the Krishna-Godavari delta, and the Burmese coast, wherever the British had never troubled to look. Second, the Indian Oil Corporation, to build and operate refineries, pipelines, and the terminals that would serve them. Third, the separation of Bharat Petroleum from Burmah Oil, with its head office moved to Bombay, and a joint venture with Standard-Vacuum at Visakhapatnam. Fourth, the Urja Bonds.

The first three went through without a single dissent. It was a short debate, and a curiously affectionate one. Savarkar rose to say that he had been asking for a national oil company since 1936 and was delighted to find the Prime Minister had been listening. Dr. Ambedkar, seated with his arms folded in the second row, said nothing at all and raised his hand with the rest.

The bond was another matter.

Ram Manohar Lohia opened for the Socialists. He was a big, restless man of forty, with a thick moustache, and he spoke with the energy of someone who had been waiting a long time to be asked.

"Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister asks the poor of India to lend their savings to the State. I ask him a simple question. Where is the wealth of India? It is not in the village. It is not in the peasant’s hut. It is in the temples. It is in the business houses."

A rustle ran along the benches.

"In the Padmanabhaswamy temple at Trivandrum, in the Venkateswara temple at Tirupati, in a hundred others from Kashi to Madurai, there are vaults of gold and jewels accumulated over a thousand years. It lies there, idle, in the dark. It builds no road, feeds no child, and lights no village. And we are told that the cultivator of Bihar must lend his twenty-five rupees. Let the Government, with due respect for the faith of our people, borrow from the gods before it borrows from their worshippers."

Acharya Narendra Dev rose to second him, quiet and exact. Dr. Ambedkar came to his feet next. When he spoke, the House fell silent.

"I will add only this," Ambedkar said. His voice was low, and every word carried to the gallery. "For two thousand years, the temples of this country were closed to my people. We were not permitted to enter the courtyard, to draw water from the temple tank, or to touch the stone of the threshold. And all that time, the wealth in their vaults was being accumulated by the labour of men like my grandfather, who paid for it with their sweat and were turned away at the gate. I do not say it is a simple question. I say it would be a bitter irony if the Republic asked the poor to lend, and left the gods to keep what the poor had given them."

There was a deep murmur of agreement from the Socialist and Scheduled Caste benches, and from some on the Congress side as well.

Ram let it settle. Then he stood.

"Dr. Ambedkar’s grief is real, and I will not insult it by pretending otherwise. I will answer him and Dr. Lohia in order, and I beg the House to follow me.

"Dr. Lohia asks why the Government does not borrow from the temples. I will ask him in return: why only the temples?" He did not look at Lohia, but at the benches behind him. "If the argument is secularism, that the State may not honour a faith by leaving its treasures untouched, then it applies with equal force to the great mosque at Jama Masjid, to the waqf lands of a dozen princely houses, to the Catholic cathedrals of Goa and Cochin, to the gurdwaras of Amritsar with their gold-plated dome.

"Will Dr. Lohia propose to melt the Golden Temple? Will Dr. Ambedkar ask the Bishop of Bombay to hand over the cathedral plate? If so, let it be said plainly. If not, then the proposal is not secularism. It is a quarrel with one faith, wearing the robes of principle."

A sharp murmur ran through the House, and Lohia half rose. Ram turned to him with courtesy.

"Dr. Lohia will tell me that he meant no such thing. I believe him. But it is how it will be read in every village in Travancore, and I do not want the Republic’s first great loan to be remembered as the day we robbed the gods."

Lohia sat down slowly. He did not look angry. He looked like a man who had been about to say something and had not yet decided what.

"Suppose, then, the argument is public good," Ram went on. "That wealth lying idle must be put to use for the nation. It is a respectable argument. But where does it stop? The cultivator in Bihar has a house and a plot, and the Government can use both for the public good. The merchant in Surat has a safe full of gold, and so does the widow in Madurai who has put her wedding jewels aside for her daughter’s marriage. Is it also idle?

"If a majority of this House may decide tomorrow that the vaults of the temples are national property, what shall stop a majority from deciding the day after that your house and mine are national property? I do not say the Government of India would do such a thing. I say that a principle once admitted does not ask permission before it is used."

"The temple is not a private house, Prime Minister," Ambedkar said, without rising.

"The temple is a trust, Dr. Ambedkar, and a trust is a form of ownership. It belongs to its beneficiaries according to the terms on which it was created. A donor who gave a crown to a deity gave it for a purpose, and the law protects that purpose. If we say that a trust may be seized when the State is in need, we say it of every trust in India. The orphanage endowment. The mosque’s waqf. The scholarship fund of a school. I would not wish to be the minister who explained that to the widow."

There was scattered laughter, and it seemed to ease the House. Ram let it pass and spoke more quietly.

"I will now say what the bond is for. I ask the House to understand that it is not for the money."

A pause. Shroff, on the Treasury Bench, took off his spectacles and listened.

"Twenty-five crores is a small sum. The Government can raise it by other means, and I will confess to the House that it would be easier. But there is a harder question behind it. Our people have never learned to lend. For two hundred years, the savings of the poor were taken from them by the moneylender at forty per cent, by the revenue man at the point of a stick, by the bank that failed at Lahore. They put their gold in the ground or on their wives’ arms. They do not trust paper, and they are right not to.

"I want them to learn. First to lend, to the Republic, in small sums, with the right to take it back. Then to see how the money is used: the post office will post the accounts, every quarter, on a board at the village gate. Then, in a few years, to own. A man who has lent twenty-five rupees for a refinery will, when the refinery sells shares, buy a share. He will have learned that a rupee given to the Republic can come back with a little more. And he will begin to ask questions of the people who spend it."

"He will ask questions," Narendra Dev said drily, "of a government that tells him what to ask."

"He will, Acharya-ji, which is why I propose a broadcast." Ram turned a page. "Every evening, for fifteen minutes, All India Radio will carry a programme on money. What a bond is. What interest means. What happens if a bank fails and why the post office will not. How to read a village account. How a man may borrow without becoming a slave. Plainly, in his own language, from someone he can follow. If we are going to ask the people to join the economy, we are bound to teach them how it works. A man cannot choose what he has never been shown."

Shroff, who had gone rather pink, bent his head to hide it.

"Dr. Ambedkar," Ram said, "I come at last to the grief you spoke of, because I did not want to leave it to the end as if it were a lesser thing. You are right. For two thousand years, the temples of this country were closed to your people, and what was closed was held by men who took the offerings of the poor. It is a sin, and I have said so in this House before.

"But a wrong is not mended by seizing the property of its heirs. It is mended by opening the door. Let me say what the Government proposes. At present, a number of the larger temples in the south and west are under State supervision. The Collector appoints the trustees, approves the accounts, and holds the keys. It is a relic of the Raj, which took them in the last century and called it protection. I propose to end it."

There was a stir. Savarkar leaned forward.

"Within a year, the Government will return the management of every such temple to a trust of its own, elected by its own worshippers, on three conditions. First, that the temple be open to every Hindu without distinction, and that a man’s birth be no bar at any gate. Second, that no trace of untouchability or caste discrimination be permitted within its walls, on pain of the criminal laws that have already been enacted in the constitution and are being enforced. Third, that the accounts be audited by a public auditor and published, so that the wealth of the gods is no longer a secret.

"If a temple trust chooses to lend its idle funds to the Republic in the Urja Bond, as any individual or business may, it will be welcome, and it will earn what any lender earns. If it chooses not to, it will keep its gold in peace. It will be a free temple in a free republic, and it will no longer have a Collector at the door."

A long silence followed. Then, from the Mahasabha benches, someone began to thump his desk, and another took it up, and then a good part of the House.

Ambedkar sat for a moment with his hands folded. When he rose, he looked tired, and not unkind.

"Prime Minister," he said. "You have answered me better than I expected. I will say this. If the doors are truly opened, I will not oppose you on the temples. I will oppose you on the bond, because I do not believe the poor will trust it, and I believe they will be made to. But I will not say you have not listened."

"That is all I have ever asked, Doctor."

The division was called at six. It was closer than anyone had expected: a hundred and ninety-four to a hundred and seventy-eight. Lohia voted against. Narendra Dev, to the surprise of his colleagues, abstained. Ambedkar voted against, and walked out of the chamber without looking back.

In the gallery, a Standard-Vacuum engineer who had not understood a word of the Hindi leaned across to his neighbour and whispered, "What happened?"

"He won," the Madras merchant said. "By sixteen votes. It is a great deal closer than he would have liked."

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