NO CONFIDENCE

PICTURE SPEAK

HUNGRY HORIZON: The famine of 1966 made India a basket case

India seemed on the point of peril. With failed monsoon for two successive years 1965 and 1966, India saw a severe drop in food production, and an unprecedented increase in foodgrain supply from the US. US President Lyndon Johnson put wheat supplies on a short tether. He refused to commit food aid until an agreement to adopt the green revolution package was signed between the two countries. On the fiscal front, foreign aid, which was hitherto a key factor in preventing devaluation of the rupee, was finally cut off and India was told that it had to liberalise its restrictions on trade before foreign aid would again materialise. India had never looked so vulnerable and Indira Gandhi, who was made the prime minister at 48 by the Congress syndicate led by K. Kamaraj (described once as a cross between Sonny Liston and The Walrus), appeared unequal to the task her father and Lal Bahadur Shastri had handled so well.

FIRST CUT

Reita Faria (right) became the first Indian to win the Miss World title. By winning the crown, she led the way for her successors. After her year-long tenure, she turned down modelling and film assignments and instead concentrated on medical studies in Ireland, where she still lives with husband David Powell.

DID YOU KNOW

Homi Jehangir Bhabha, considered the father of India’s nuclear weapons programme, died when Air India’s Boeing 707 Kanchenjunga crashed in a snowstorm at Mont Blanc on January 24.

“AN INNOCUOUS PERSON FOR PRIME MINISTER.”

So said a Delhi journal Thought, in 1966. When the Congress Parliamentary Party voted to choose a prime minister, this “mere chokri” (chit of a girl), as Morarji Desai called Indira Gandhi, defeated him by 255 votes to 169. The new prime minister was faced not just with an economy dependent on the US’s “ship-to-mouth” approach but vicious personal attacks in Parliament and a lack of confidence within the party. Even an Alabama newspaper did not spare her when she met US President Johnson during her world tour in 1966. Its headline? ‘New Indian Leader Comes Begging’.

MIZO FRONT MAN
Laldenga

Mizoram had been dissatisfied with its lot in the Indian Union since a famine hit the state in 1959. A Mizo National Famine Front was formed, which then became Mizo National Front. It asked for a separate state and then a country. Laldenga, an accountant by training, launched a movement in 1966 to claim independence. After years of violence, in 1986, there was an accord. Mizoram became a full Indian state and Laldenga its interim chief minister.

OF STARS AND STORIES

Bengali superstar Uttam Kumar played an insecure version of himself on a day’s journey from Calcutta to Delhi by train, as a charming Sharmila Tagore (despite the glasses) quizzed him about his life in Satyajit Ray’s Nayak. He was shown to be in a foul mood as the morning papers were filled with his being involved in an altercation and his latest film was slated to become his first flop. The film explored the psychology of the star and his admirers. She destroyed her notes because she felt journalists—yes, even they—should respect the privacy of stars.

ELSEWHERE...

The Indonesian and Malayan governments declared that the war over the future of the island of Borneo was over.

Temples of Abu Simble moved to make way for Aswan Dam.

Mao Zedong’s (below) Cultural Revolution began in China which witnessed a revolutionary upsurge by Chinese students and workers against the bureaucrats of the Chinese Communist Party. The revolution continued until Mao died in 1976.

Rs 7.50 the exchange rate of Indian rupee. Earlier pegged at Rs 4.76 to the US dollar, it was devalued for the first time in 1966.

117 people died when a Bombay-to-New York Air India flight crashed at Mont Blanc.

1967: INDIA AT 60

THE SORRY STATE

PICTURE SPEAK

THE RISING: The movement’s initial epicentre was West Bengal

REWIND

As a land dispute broke out between peasants, led by Kanu Sanyal, a middle class radical, and landlords in Naxalbari, West Bengal, the area gave its name to a whole movement and indeed became a shorthand for revolution. It had an offshoot in Andhra Pradesh, where Maoist revolutionaries fought in Telengana and Srikakulam. In Srikakulam, the movement was headed by Vempatapu Satyanarayana and in Telengana by Tarimala Nagi Reddy. In West Bengal, the CPM, which had stoked the Naxalbari fire, eventually came to be at loggerheads with the Naxalites who formed a new party, CPI (Marxist-Leninist). The protests, said historian Ramachandra Guha, had their roots in the inequitable agrarian structure of northern Bengal. “But they may not have taken the form they did, had the cpm not joined the government.” The party reacted in an authoritarian way by putting Sanyal in jail while other rebels took refuge in the jungle.

FIRST CUT

The first non-Congress ministry came to power in West Bengal as Ajoy Kumar Mukherjee was sworn in as chief minister of a United Front-Left Front alliance.

The first Boeing 707-337C aircraft arrived in Bombay. This non-stop flight covered 4,931 miles between London and Bombay in seven hours and 54 minutes setting a new speed record for any Boeing.

DID YOU KNOW

Tamil Nadu, India’s sixth most populous state, was formed in 1967. The DMK routed the Congress Party in the 1967 elections and took control of the state, with C.N. Annadurai as its first chief minister.

Nose Dive

Indira Gandhi broke her nose when irate people threw stones at her during an election rally near Bhubaneswar, Orissa, in 1967. Hurt by the injury, she jokingly wrote to her friend Dorothy Norman: “Ever since plastic surgery was heard of, I have been wanting to get something done to my nose...I thought the only way it could be done without the usual hoo-ha was first to have some slight accident which would enable me to have it put right.”

PANDIT AND POLYMATH
P.N. Haksar

He was the man responsible for giving an ideological tint to Indira Gandhi’s political struggle for autonomy. An Indian Foreign Service officer, he was deputy high commissioner in London when the prime minister asked him to join her secretariat. He became the first of the all-powerful PM’s men, along with diplomat T.N. Kaul, economist P.N. Dhar, politician D.P. Dhar and security analyst R.N. Kao—they were collectively known as the Panch Pandava. As Katherine Frank wrote in her biography, “from 1967 to 1973, he was probably the most influential person in the government”. Backed by his socialist agenda, she was able to distance herself from the Syndicate by taking the moral high ground.

NEVILLE MAXWELL in his series of articles India’s Disintegrating Democracy
“The great experiment of developing India within a democratic framework has failed.”

MERA BHARAT MANOJ

The Bharat image was successfully carved on celluloid when Manoj Kumar starred in the desh ki dharti film Upkaar. Kumar began a career of playing Mr Bharat roles while Pran, the great villain, finally let go of his evil ways, playing the crippled soldier Malang Baba. The movie celebrated Shastri’s jai jawan, jai kisan rhetoric. The film was a huge hit and made Kumar the authority on Bollywood patriotism.

ELSEWHERE...

Israel launched a pre-emptive strike against the three Arab states in 1967. Israeli forces captured the Sinai Peninsula, Gaza Strip, West Bank of the Jordan River, Old City of Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights.

In the United States, the first space deaths occurred on Apollo 1 when command pilot “Gus” Grissom, senior pilot Ed White, and pilot Roger Chaffee died in a fire during a ground test.

The US signed a space treaty with Russia. More than 60 nations signed a treaty banning the orbiting of nuclear weapons.

25 years passed since the Quit India Movement.

30 Indians in Venezuela died from a measles epidemic that hit Yanomani villages at least one year before researchers administered the Edmonston B vaccine.

Index