My Father, page 8
The Verma government in USR got to rule for only eleven months, because during this period the states department successfully merged all the princely states of Rajputana to form the present-day state of Rajasthan. But, as historians including my father have documented in detail, the Verma government accomplished in its eleven months more than what other governments subsequently did even in a full five-year term. The secretariat was set up and various departments established. The integration of services of as many as ten component states was completed within three months, to the satisfaction of all involved. Levies collected by jagirdars on various occasions, such as birth, marriage, death and festivals, were abolished. And, most importantly, the government put an effective end to the tyranny of the feudal lords. The weekly paper my father had edited had promised the people that if the Praja Mandal came to power, it would put an end to this repressive system. Verma successfully delivered on that.
When Verma went to Delhi to get the states department on board on the subject of ending the feudal system, the latter expressed concern that the step might create a law-and-order problem and undermine its ongoing efforts to unify the Rajputana states into a single state. Verma argued that the freedom movement and abolition of the princely order had greatly weakened the feudal lords, so this was the right time to strike. He personally assured Patel that he would carry out the entire operation peacefully without a single shot having to be fired. He returned to Udaipur only after Patel had blessed the project.
Upon his return, Verma issued two ordinances. The first transferred all revenue, executive and judicial powers from the jagirdars to the government. The second prohibited jagirdars from evicting tenants of any category from the land they tilled. With one exception, there was no resistance to the implementation of the two ordinances. In the solitary case of disturbance, police brought the situation under control within a few hours. For the millions of citizens of USR who had suffered the tyranny of jagirdars for centuries, Verma proved to be a true prophet.
During the eleven months that the Verma government ruled USR, the states department kept up the pressure on the remaining viable states – Jaipur, Jodhpur and Bikaner – to either merge into neighbouring provinces or with other Rajputana states to form a greater Rajasthan state. By early January 1949, all three states had been forced into submission. The states department granted two concessions to Maharaja Man Singh of Jaipur, namely, that Jaipur will be the capital of the new state and that he will be appointed its rajpramukh.
On 14 January 1949, Patel went to Udaipur with his daughter to convey the message to the USR government. My father was a member of the Verma-led delegation that received Patel. Later, at a public meeting in Sajjan Niwas garden in Udaipur, Patel announced that the rulers of Jaipur, Bikaner and Jodhpur had agreed to merge their states into Rajasthan.
On 30 March 1949, Patel inaugurated ‘greater Rajasthan’ in Jaipur, which became the capital of the state. Man Singh of Jaipur was appointed the rajpramukh, the Maharana of Mewar as the maharajpramukh and Hiralal Shastri, a prominent leader of the Jaipur Praja Mandal, as the chief minister. Verma chose to stay out of the government. Following Independence, members of the Praja Mandals in the princely states had been formally inducted into the Congress. Accordingly, Verma became an influential member of the Rajasthan Pradesh Congress Committee, playing the role of kingmaker in the following decade. He also served as a member of the lower house of Parliament.
Hiralal Shastri appointed Bhure Lal Baya to his cabinet. Baya, in turn, appointed my father as his private secretary. The two came together by plane from Udaipur to Jaipur on the morning of 7 April 1949, where Baya took his oath of office the same day. After staying in a temporary accommodation for six weeks, my father was allotted a residence on the first floor of a house named Bhagwat Bhawan on Mirza Ismail Road, more commonly known by its abbreviated name, M.I. Road. This is the house in which my brother Ashok was born on 22 August 1950, and I on 2 October 1952. We lived in this house till 1957. I still have a clear memory of it. On a visit to Jaipur some years ago, I went to M.I. Road and found that structurally, the house looked hardly any different from outside than when we lived there. The only noticeable change was that the house looked a lot more run-down than during our days there. Hardly any effort seemed to have been made to give it a facelift.
In contrast to the house, M.I. Road had undergone a drastic change in look and feel since the days we lived there. From the veranda of our home on the first floor, we were able to observe the traffic on the road. I remember sitting there and counting the cars going in either direction at the age of four or five. It would take quite a while before the count would cross one hundred. Today, traffic congestion on the road is so severe that even under one-way traffic rule, it can move only at a snail’s pace. For pedestrians, crossing the road from one side to the other is nothing less than an adventure.
Sometime in 1957, we left the house on M.I. Road to live in another rented house in nearby C-Scheme area. Then, in 1959, we moved to what became the ‘permanent’ residence of the family. Located on Moti Doongari Road, or M.D. Road for short, this is the house my father built. He named it ‘Rajniketan’ after his father’s first name. Since 1959, members of the family staying in Jaipur have always lived in this house. My father and mother lived there till their passing away in 2006 and 2015, respectively. Currently, it is home to my two brothers, Ravi and Ashok, and their families, as also my sister Kamala, who chose to remain single.
Among all the decisions my father made in his life, the one to join the government of the state of Rajasthan would turn out to be the most unwise, and he would come to regret it. When he joined the Verma government of USR in 1948, he was still only twenty-seven years old and a rising star within the Mewar Praja Mandal. He stood a fair chance of emerging as one of the key figures among the second-generation of leaders of Rajasthan. But his rise would soon be capped within the bureaucracy of the new state. To be sure, he would remain highly influential, contributing handsomely to the betterment of the state and its people, but this would be largely due to his individual ability, determination and desire to work in the public interest rather than exult in the positions he would hold. Much greater personal success would come to him after his retirement, when he would launch an entirely new career as a writer and historian. In that incarnation, he would leave one of the best historical accounts of the contribution of Rajasthan to the national freedom movement and the post-Independence history of Rajasthan.
In contrast to my father, two of his contemporaries in the Mewar Praja Mandal, Shiv Charan Mathur and Niranjan Nath Acharya, who chose to resign their positions in the government after the dissolution of the Verma government and return to politics, later emerged as major figures in state politics. Both of them went on to serve as ministers in various state governments for many years. Mathur eventually rose all the way to the top to occupy the office of chief minister, and Acharya got to serve as speaker of the Rajasthan state legislative assembly.
Keen to keep tight control over the evolution of the state under the new administration, the states department of the central government appointed two Indian Civil Service (ICS) officers as advisers to the state government, and a third as chief secretary. No decisions by the chief minister, ministers or the cabinet could be implemented without the concurrence of the advisers. Unlike Verma, who was a man of conviction and therefore had refused to accept a similar constraint on his decision-making powers by the states department, Shastri was too weak, personally as well as politically, to resist it. He lacked the political support of the Rajasthan Pradesh Congress Committee (RPCC) and got its formal endorsement only under pressure from Patel. As such, he owed his position to Patel and could not say no to him or to the states department.
Shastri lasted one year and nine months as chief minister and ended his tenure in ignominy, with few notable accomplishments to his credit. At home, he lacked the support of the RPCC. Then, by September 1950, he also lost the support of Sardar Patel at the Centre. It so happened that in the elections for the president of the All India Congress Committee on 29 August 1950, the contest was between Purushottam Das Tandon and J.B. Kripalani, who were backed by Patel and Nehru, respectively. Shastri made the mistake of supporting Nehru’s candidate. Not only did Nehru’s candidate lose but Patel, infuriated by Shastri’s support of him, decided to sack him. Though Patel himself died in December 1950 before implementing the decision, Nehru, who inherited the charge of the states department, remained committed to his decision and advised Shastri to resign his position immediately.
At this juncture, an astrologer advised Shastri that he would survive as chief minister provided he avoided submitting his resignation for a week. Taking the advice seriously, Shastri went into hiding. But that did not change his fortunes. The central government eventually tracked him down in Indore, where he was staying with a friend. It sent him a message asking him to either resign within twenty-four hours or face dismissal. Shastri complied, sending in his resignation on 5 January 1951.
In parallel, another astrologer story played out with my father’s minister, Baya. While Shastri was in hiding, a gentleman brought an astrologer to Baya’s house. The astrologer studied the minister’s horoscope and proceeded to predict that he would soon be offered Sardar Patel’s job in the central government. While my father, who was present at the scene, was amused, the minister fell for the prediction. He was convinced that Shastri would eventually come out on top and keep his position as chief minister. From there, he thought there could be a path to his ascendency to Patel’s position. Pleased, he asked my father to offer the astrologer a suitable amount in baksheesh. Knowing that the minister was not especially liberal in money matters, my father offered the astrologer a sum of Rs 21. But that left the minister flustered. He immediately called his son to bring a sum of Rs 101 from his mother and give it to the astrologer. The astrologer blessed the minister and happily walked out with what was a handsome sum in those days, especially for making a prediction that had no chance of coming true.
Throughout Shastri’s rule, it was the advisers and the chief secretary who effectively wielded power in the state. They showed a general disdain for the political class, including ministers and officers such as my father who had come from public life. Secretaries, brought in mostly from the Centre by the advisers, also took orders from the latter, ignoring their ministers.
Baya, for whom my father worked, was an independent-minded and assertive minister. Therefore, he inevitably came into conflict with the advisers and the chief secretary. Because the work of the secretariat was conducted in English and Baya lacked working knowledge of it, he relied on my father to study the files and brief him. Though all his decisions were his own, his reliance on my father for the briefs led the advisers and the chief secretary to conclude that my father was the one instructing and instigating him. The advisers therefore came to see my father as the ‘villain of peace’, and later penalized him for it.
Of course, being young and idealistic, perhaps my father did not help his own case either. Beginning in the mid 1940s, after he joined the Mewar Praja Mandal, he had taken to wearing a dhoti (loincloth), kurta and the famous Gandhi cap, all made of the khadi cloth that Mahatma Gandhi had encouraged. He continued that practice even after joining the government. A couple of his colleagues had been doing the same. This was noticed by one of the advisers, who sent the message that the dress, especially the Gandhi cap, was identified with a particular political party. Therefore, people like my father would be well advised to switch to politically neutral attire. My father and his colleagues ignored the message and continued to wear the cap and the rest of their khadi outfit. That could not have pleased the adviser.
The axe fell on my father when the advisers got down to the task of integrating the services of the covenanting states into the new set-up. Article XVI of the Covenant, signed by the princely states of Rajputana and the Government of India to create the state of Rajasthan, guaranteed ‘the continuation in service of the members of the public services on conditions not less advantageous than those on which they were serving in the covenanting state concerned’. But the advisers entirely ignored this guarantee.
Rather than integrate the services, the advisers took recourse to open recruitment. They laid down neither the criteria for judging the suitability of candidates for the positions to be filled nor the rules for fixing inter-se seniority. The result was that tehsildars and secretariat officers with no field experience were appointed to the Rajasthan Administrative Service on the one hand, and well-qualified officers of covenanting states were left out on the other. Some stenographers, clerks and superintendents were appointed to the newly constituted Rajasthan Secretariat Services in preference to a number of assistant secretaries and undersecretaries of the covenanting states. In one case, a chief engineer of a covenanting unit was downgraded to the post of assistant engineer, while his own subordinates were appointed as executive engineer and superintending engineer.
Perhaps the most disconcerting feature of the integration from my father’s viewpoint was that those who had been close to the former rulers of the covenanting states were placed in senior positions, regardless of their academic qualifications, experience or seniority. In contrast, those who had been active in or even sympathetic to the national movement were downgraded or outright rejected. Unsurprisingly, in an unusually personal note in his widely read 1988 book, State Politics in India, he wrote, ‘All these things troubled me a lot. I came to the reluctant conclusion that my decision to continue in service was wrong, as it was right when I had joined it in the Former Rajasthan (USR). I had, however, no more will to resign and face wilderness. So I continued in Government service for another twenty-five years to witness the functioning of the Rajasthan Government from close quarters.’8
Though my father does not say anything further on the matter, I have no doubt that the key factor behind his lacking the will to resign and return to politics, as Mathur and Acharya had done earlier, was that he was now a father of four children. Their future very much depended on his choice between staying with the Government of Rajasthan and returning to politics. Since politics is a 24x7 profession, a return to it would surely have had an adverse impact on his ability to groom and nurture his children during their formative years. Most likely, we would have faired poorly in our lives, as did the children of most of my father’s contemporaries in politics.
No contemporary of my father who chose politics can today boast of having fathered a son who distinguished himself in the private sector as an engineer, two children who were honoured with the Padma Shri and Padma Bhushan, and a daughter who won an award from the President of India for her services as a teacher. Though he did not live to celebrate these accomplishments, it can perhaps be said, in hindsight, that his decision to remain with the Government of Rajasthan was the right one after all!
During approximately four years following the exit of Hiralal Shastri on 5 January 1951, the office of chief minister changed hands as many times. Jay Narayan Vyas, the founder of Jodhpur Praja Mandal and later the prime minister of Jodhpur state, occupied the office for three of the four years over two separate stints. An ICS officer named C.S. Venkatachar, who served for three months immediately following Shastri and Tikaram Paliwal, who served for nine months between the two terms of Vyas, filled the remaining year.
During these four years, my father served as private secretary to two ministers, Balwant Singh Mehta during the first term of Vyas, and Bholenath during his second term. In both cases, it was upon the insistence of the ministers that he agreed to join them. In the case of Mehta, a common friend came with the offer to my father’s home. Father expressed serious reservations on the grounds that his former boss, Baya, had belonged to the opposite political camp of Mehta’s. But the friend was unmoved, stating that the minister was convinced that my father was the right choice for the job. In the case of Bholenath, my father had not known him previously at all. But the minister was insistent on him.
Because both ministers had great respect for my father’s knowledge, experience and judgement, they actively sought his advice on all important issues with which their ministries dealt. That gave my father a chance to effectively contribute to the betterment of the state. On the personal front, when working with Bholenath, he could resume his studies, taking evening classes at Maharaja College in Jaipur. He managed to complete both his BA and LLB degrees during this period. The knowledge of law he had acquired while working for the Mewar government and subsequently for USR and the state of Rajasthan came in handy in his study of law. He topped his LLB examination at the university and won high praise from the advocate general and the principal of the Law College of the time, Rai Bahadur S.K. Hajela. He was also awarded a gold medal for his performance, currently in possession of Ravi.
Remarkably, soon after my birth on 2 October 1952, my father got a vasectomy done. In this respect, he was well ahead of his time. In those days, few underwent the operation in a place like Jaipur. Indeed, Jaipur had no more than one or two doctors who performed it. Father had begun to appreciate the importance of family planning for India relatively early and took it upon himself to exert pressure on relatives and those working under him, who had two or three children already, to undergo a vasectomy.
In his first term, Vyas had the state Congress fully and firmly behind him. This was due in no small measure to the fact that he worked closely with the members of his cabinet and consulted the leadership of the RPCC on a regular basis. But when the first general elections took place in the country in March 1952, he lost his own seat in the legislative assembly. This led to the selection of his outgoing deputy chief minister, Tikaram Paliwal, as interim chief minister. The loss of his seat greatly weakened Vyas’s hand vis-à-vis the RPCC leadership. To add to the problem, when he returned as chief minister the second time after winning a by-election in November 1952, his working style changed for the worse. He began relying heavily on his chief secretary, an ICS officer, to the neglect of his ministerial colleagues and other senior Congress party leaders, including the RPCC president and Verma. That, in the end, proved his undoing. Within a year, tensions between him and some members of his cabinet escalated to the point that he felt compelled to seek a vote of confidence within the Congress Legislative Party. The vote took place in November 1954, and much to his disappointment he lost to the rival group led by Mohan Lal Sukhadia.
