further the interests of his caste, not to mention his personal fortunes.
In 1963–4, defence expenditure doubled as a result of the China affair,
and the process of planning was directly affected by this reallocation of
resources. With the Third Five-Year Plan going badly, and food shortages
appearing, the issue of Congress’s internal corruption was beginning to be
raised more loudly than ever before.
Symptomatic of Nehru’s loss of power was the passing of the 1963
Official Language Act – Hindi was to be the sole official language of India,
although allegedly it would not be imposed on any states. The promotion
of Hindi had of course long been a central theme of Hindu nationalists
and fundamentalists. But the potentially sectarian implications of this
went against Nehruvian political tenets. Nehru provided an extremely
obfuscating defence of Hindi in Parliament, attempting to downplay the
sectarian aspects of the proposed legislation: if India had had only two or
three languages, all of them could have been national languages; but the
Constitution recognised fourteen languages. Hindi was the only possible
‘link language’,^28 but it had to ‘grow into’ one; meanwhile, English would
have to continue to be the link language. He now claimed that Urdu was
‘about 75–80% Hindi’.^29 He nonetheless said that regional languages also
had to develop, and he defended the continuance of English for official
purposes in some form, even removing the earlier clause that after 1965
no further use of English would be made for official purposes.
But now a major problem was beginning to emerge. Nehru had
been central to the Congress’s legitimacy in Indian politics. From out-
side the Congress, it had always been easier to focus criticism on the
lesser lights in the Congress rather than on Nehru himself. Within the
Congress, Nehru was usually above criticism, both due to his reputation
and his personal integrity, which no one questioned, even when they
might question his judgement. In this respect he had been a worthy
successor to Gandhi. Now, undermining Nehru was in many respects a
suicidal strategy for the Congress, exposing to clear public light what from
its point of view best remained hidden: the Congress was a party of
mediocrity, corruption and intrigue, with a leader who had, with almost
Olympian disdain, not paid enough attention to these mere details as he
spoke instead of high principles and moral standards.252 HIGH NEHRUVIANISM AND ITS DECLINE, c. 1955–63