Dewan Chaman Lall: From Trade Unions to the Indian Union,1946–1966

Abstract

This article is about the afterlife of Dewan Chaman Lall’s interwar internationalism. Exploring the trajectory of his public career from 1946, it shows how Lall, an Oxford-educated trade unionist, and an ally of India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, took a nationalist turn in his later political interventions on/after (a) Partition of British India, (b) the dispute on the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir, and (c) on the government of India’s worsening border relations with the People’s Republic of China. Simultaneously, his understandings on issues like press freedom/official secrets, evacuee property exchange/sale, Sikh linguistic autonomy and labour/capital equation turned status quo-ist. By putting together his contributions on these national questions and juxtaposing them vis-à-vis his earlier avatar, this article also signifies the shift that took place in the perspectives of those who, like Lall, hitherto enveloped by empire, emerged in nation-statehood post-1945.

Introduction

Dewan Chaman Lall (1892–1973), poet-legislator, and trade unionist in late-colonial India, was a diplomat, and state interlocutor in independent India. This latter period of his public life throws up interesting vignettes of the passage from society to state for, arguably, an entire political generation of the interwar (1919–1939) years. It is this transition from pursuing a simpler anti-imperial impulse to personifying complex national interests, which is under focus in this tracing of Chaman Lall’s public life post-1945 that connects its general themes and particular experiences by using the mode of ‘life history’. These stand apart from both those like Minoo Masani (1905–1998), who was a communist in 1931, a Congress Socialist in 1934, Indian ambassador to Brazil in 1948–1949, and a liberal by 1959 (Shah, 2001, pp. 1–32), and Jayaprakash Narayan (1902–1979), who remained an internationalist social-democrat throughout, whether inside/outside of party-politics (Prasad & Prasad, 2021).

Belonging to a prosperous family from Shahpur, western Punjab, Chaman Lall was born on 30 October 1892. His father Dewan Bahadur Daulat Rai sent him to Oxford, where Lall took a BA in Jurisprudence at Jesus College and followed it up with Bar-at-Law at Middle Temple London. Lall worked as an editor of Coterie (a London quarterly of art, prose, and poetry), before becoming an assistant editor/chief leader writer of Bombay Chronicle. In October 1920, he was among the founder-members of the All-India Trade Union Congress (AITUC). Subsequently, he founded/presided over several trade unions of posts & telegraph, press and railway workers (Reed, 1950, p. 706), and served as the Indian delegate at International Labour Organization conferences, as an adviser (1925, 1955), representative (1928, 1932) and leader of delegation (1946).

It has been noted that trade union development in South Asia saw two types of leaders, who emerged either through ‘local authority based on native traditions’, or through Western ‘political, administrative, and ideological framework’ (Lichtblau, 1954, p. 93). Chaman Lall is a good example of both kinds, as he was also active in the legislative adjunct of the Indian National Congress, Swaraj Party (est. 1923). He was an elected member of the central assembly from Punjab (1924–1931, 1945), visited Canada in a parliamentary delegation (1928), participated in the Royal Commission on Labour (1929), entered the Punjab assembly (1937–1939), and subsequently the Indian Constituent Assembly (1946–1948).

In 1948, Chaman Lall was sent as India’s first ambassador to Turkey. Having become a member of the All-India Congress Committee in 1938, he had also headed a government delegation on food to Argentina in 1946, and upon his return from Turkey, Lall became a long-standing member and an avid committeeman of the Rajya Sabha (1952–1970). Chaman Lall died on 11 November 1973, having lived a rich and varied life, aspects of whose cumulative experience provide useful overviews of broad phenomena, that is, the workings of social groups, political institutions, and cultural imperatives. His epitaph could be the following words from his younger poetic self: ‘You have sung your last song; you have played your last tune; you have danced your steps too soon. It is not easy when great moments are so few: Beyond the gate of the sun, I shall not seek you’ ² .

These words, from Lall’s 1919 poem Departure were of a kind that saw a review of Coterie pronounce him as part of a poetic current, alongside Conrad Aiken (1889–1973, America’s poet laureate 1950–1952). However, Lall’s politics in New Delhi evolved in a world away from London, where one of Lall’s poems was titled The Man who was Afraid. It went as follows: ‘I have heard the mad rush of years, without hope or fears…I thought I would take a walk…When the sands are dry, the tide far away…Life is but a gay misnomer…if, in the end, it is not well’ ³ . This personal evolution in public comprises both ‘individual and shared identities and the ways these develop over time in different contexts…and the webs of connection within which people live and work…across national boundaries’ (Brown, 2009, p. 588).

This article takes its cue from these words and looks at Lall’s public life, drawing from his private papers, after ‘the mad rush’ of years, to ask where went the tide of interwar years, in a historical-chronological method that is ‘of necessity less theoretical and more personal’ (Arklay et al., 2006, p. 15). In terms of the scholarly apparatus, this story can be situated between the frames of communist internationalism of the 1920s–1930s, the non-aligned internationalism of the 1950s–1960s (Chatterjee, 2016), and the Indian nationalists’ attempts in-between at an anti-imperialist internationalism (Bhagavan, 2017). This ‘anticolonial Asianism’ had emerged in India from 1905 (Stolte & Fischer-Tiné, 2012), before it got joined with communist internationalism from 1917 (Raza et al., 2014), which would evolve ‘in the project of the “third world” during the Bandung era of non-alignment’ (Goswami, 2012, p. 1485). Dewan Chaman Lall’s life-arc provides another prism with which to view this shading of internationalism into nationalism, upon access to political power, and generates more evidence of its ambiguities.

Mad Rush of Years

While at Oxford, Chaman Lall had ‘earned himself a history sheet at Scotland Yard [for] mixing in communist circles’ (Maclean, 2015, p. ii), but back in India, in the November to December 1923 elections, he won one of the only nine (out of 71) seats of the Swarajists in the Unionist Party-dominated Punjab (Bakshi, 1989, p. 21). Chaman Lall’s choice to enter the legislative assembly rendered him on revolutionary margins and, while appointed as a ‘fraternal delegate’ to British trade unions in 1925 ⁴ , he resisted the affiliation of the AITUC to the League against Imperialism (1927), because—to him—‘the latter was a “communist manoeuvre”’ (Gopal, 1972, p. 157). Consequently, he, along with fellow trade unionist N. M. Joshi, would be dismissed by the Indian communist M. N. Roy, as ‘nationalist leaders’ (Windmiller, 1959/2011, p. 94) and in late 1929, they would walk out of the AITUC. Simultaneously, as a member of the Punjab assembly, Lall had a ringside view of the celebrated episode of Bhagat Singh’s and Batukeshwar Dutt’s bomb-throwing in 1929 and the motion on their hanging two years later (Noorani, 2001, p. 79). Lall initially ‘claimed that the CID was behind [their] bombing…an elaborate ruse to create sufficient fear [for] the Public Safety Bill’ (Maclean, 2011, p. 1067). Perhaps that is why, during the subsequent Meerut conspiracy case (1929–1933), ‘most of the accused [from Punjab] refused to have him’ defend them (Gopal, 1972, p. 377).

In that ‘strange medley’ of interwar India, Dewan Chaman Lall was being tarred by The Times of India for ‘preaching socialism’ in Sindh, while he was terming the left trade unions in Bombay as a ‘skeleton in a glass case labelled “Moscow”’ ⁵ . In 1929, a Royal Commission on Labour was appointed and Chaman Lall and Joshi were among the Indian members on it (Karnik, 1972). In the commission’s deliberations, they were in a minority on the major themes: from suggesting a 48-hour week to raising the minimum age of employment in factories to 13 years, from showing special regard for the irregular hours of railway workers to having 14 years as the minimum age of employment on docks, and from the appointment of a weekly wage-tribunal and old-age provision to drawing a compensatory scheme for seamen (Panesar et al., 2017). But their representations had effect, given that of the 24 labour laws passed over 1932–1937, 19 were in-line with the commission’s recommendations (Crouch, 1966, p. 72).

From this experience emerged Lall’s 1932 milestone text Coolie: The Story of Labour and Capital in India, which has been described as ‘a mixture of reportage, a participant observer’s report…and historical reflections…’ (Bhattacharya, 2006, p. 8). Indeed, Mulk Raj Anand’s 1936 novel of the same name has been called a ‘supplement to Lall’s part-activist polemic/part-sociological-tract’ (Perera, 2014, p. 28). During this period of Gandhian civil disobedience movement (1930–1932), Lall did not resign from the legislature, on not having taken ‘the Congress pledge’ (Gopal, 1973, pp. 276–77), and his ‘first experience of jail’, at the age of 50, would not come until Gandhi’s Quit India movement (Gopal, 1980, p. 214). In 1937, Lall became a member of the Punjab Unemployment Committee and this cooperation with the Unionist ministry crossed his wires with the Congress; when Lall complained about ‘reaction and corruption in Punjab’, Nehru asked him, ‘why then do you give a certificate to [them]?’ (Gopal, 1976, p. 184). In mid-1946, when strikes across the country became a common cause of concern to the British-ruled centre and the Congress-ministered provinces, Vallabhbhai Patel wondered ‘why Dewan Chamanlal threatens strike with 48 hours’ notice?’ (Das, 1972, p. 270).

Away from this political field, it is Chaman Lall’s personal friendship with Mohammad Ali Jinnah, which is the stuff of legend (Bolitho, 2006, pp. 79, 85). Till 1937, Lall attempted to bring about rapprochement between Jinnah and the Congress (Gopal, 1976, pp. 180–81). However, by late-1946, this friendship was not immune to considering Jinnah’s ‘frustration…a spanner’ in the works of the transfer of power ⁶ , with the choice in front of the former being to ‘either stop or quit’ ⁷ . In the 1945–1946 Punjab provincial elections, the ‘Hindu Mahasabha-ite Gokul Chand Narang withdrew from the contest’ in Lall’s favour (Nair, 2011, p. 68), and in May 1947, Lall was among those MLAs, who claimed that with the ‘inflated’ 1941 census figures, the Muslim minority in Punjab were ‘actually in majority’, and demanded an equitable division, with Lall stressing that the ‘Sikh community has no other home’ (Bali, 1949, pp. 55–56, 93).

Layers of Loss

Within a week of Partition, as communal violence flared up, Chaman Lall was stressing that Sikh leaders like Master Tara Singh should ‘visit the disturbed areas…’, and ‘the [Rashtriya Swayamsevak] Sangh…should be told to desist’ ⁸ . For now, they were all on the same side and he too feared a ‘holocaust’ unless there was a ‘transfer of population’ in the province (Shankar, 1977, p. 465). Lall knew that New Delhi would ‘be able to get better results by dealing’ with community leaders like Singh and Mumtaz Daulatana (Chief Minister, West Punjab, 1951–1953) and held that ‘the best way of handling’ a leader was ‘to appeal to his good nature alone’ (Gopal, 2002, p. 279). Focussing next on the neighbouring Jammu and Kashmir state’s standstill agreement with Pakistan in August 1947, Chaman Lall emphasized urgency in making Kashmir ‘join the Indian P&T’ (Das, 1971, p. 36), as this departmental union was crucial in paving the way for the contentious accession to follow from late-October (Raghavan, 2010, pp. 101–48).

In September 1947, Ramesh Chander, one of Lall’s comrades from Lahore, secretary of the Tongawallah’s Union there, who was ‘disenchanted with [the CPI] because of their wartime support for the Muslim League’, furnished him the ‘scheme to invade Kashmir’ that fed into New Delhi’s early intelligence, as Lall passed it to Nehru on 4 October (Singh, 1992, p. 59). According to this letter, the premier of Pakistan’s Frontier Province had asked the political agents in the tribal areas to arrange for entry into the state, while it claimed that ‘the British Government will…lend helping hand…because they fear Russia’, and concluded that ‘2000 tribesmen…have already left for Kashmir’ ⁹ . It thus contained the template of New Delhi’s case vis-à-vis Karachi and London, and Chaman Lall, who would write a book The Kashmir Story, would be among those sent abroad to present it. His involvement in Kashmir had been initiated first by his friendship with the Kashmiri nationalist Sheikh Abdullah, from their Lahore days, and was fed later by his friendship with Nehru. In June 1946, Lall had been one of those members of Nehru’s party who were allowed into Srinagar ‘as lawyers’ to represent Abdullah (Gopal, 1982, pp. 385, 395).

By 1948, when he departed for Turkey as India’s ambassador, voicing his ‘ongoing layers of loss’ post-Partition (Mallot, 2012, p. 185) as president of a Refugee Protection Society, Lall personified the society’s ‘inbuilt paradox’ as a ‘wealthy refugee—with social prestige [and] political influence…’ (Kaur, 2009, p. 442). This paradox would persist and, as late as 1961, Lall would be pursuing ‘the question of proprietary rights…in Delhi’ (Palat, 2017, p. 377). This included his own allotment of 152.9 acres of land in Jagadhari. This land was split across four blocks, due to a re-allotment done for another group of evacuees, but Lall wanted his entire allotment in one village in one block and pursued the case in custodian offices from Ambala to New Delhi via Jalandhar. He got a decision in his favour in 1954, which was upheld in the Supreme Court in 1961 ¹⁰ .

Lall was also appointed on a Press Laws Enquiry Committee whose work spanned across August 1947. In his member’s note, he warned against both ‘big business…affecting public opinion’ as well as India’s dependence on foreign agencies for information regarding world events. Accordingly, Lall suggested a Soviet-style national news agency and an American style regular declaration of interest, followed by legislative action to prevent monopolies. Lall’s third concern was the ‘inadequate’ British-era ‘law of defamation and libel [for] the growing menace…of a mushroom press’ ¹¹ . These were examples of a ‘global-local linkage’ on press freedom and the right to information in post-1947 India and current research has shown that Press Law Enquiry Committee deeming the Official Secrets Act as ‘necessary to protect national interests’, with Lall not being among the two members who objected to applying it ‘across the board’. These were journalists S. A. Brelvi of Bombay Chronicle and K. Srinivasan of The Hindu from Madras (Jha, 2019, p. 35).

Nehru Doctrine

As an envoy, it was certainly true of Chaman Lall, like ‘most of the early recruits’ into the Indian foreign service, that he ‘had come for Nehru’; equally, like many such ‘envoys picked from public life’, Lall served ‘only one term’, as ‘they were so bad’ (Nayudu, 2020, pp. 108, 111). In Ankara, typical of Nehruvian foreign policy personnel being a projection of his syncretic India, he was joined by Dr Ansari and Mr Singh. Together, they presented the ‘territorial turn’ in Indian foreign policy over ‘contested lands’ (Abraham, 2014, pp. xiv–xvii). Lall’s Anglo-American interlocuters, interested in ‘the upsurge of Communist activity in Asia’ ¹² , were urging him to warn New Delhi that, checked in western Europe, Moscow may well shift its focus there.

A recent collection of essays on India and the Cold War, delineates the symbolism around Indian advocacy of decolonization, disarmament, and association without alliance in that period (Bhagavan, 2019). In April 1949 though, came the decision made by New Delhi to continue in the British Commonwealth and Oliver Franks, the British ambassador in Washington (1948–1952), called it rather hyperbolically as the ‘most important step that man will take in the immediate future’, adding that ‘in Nehru, the world will find a new leader’ ¹³ . This exaggerated praise had something to do with the disillusionment that Franks & co. had with General Chiang Kai-shek in China, and it was rather different from Nehruvian diplomacy, one of whose initiatives were the Asian Conferences of 1947–1949. They represented a ‘transitional moment’ in which their ‘decolonial vision’ of ‘internationalism with supra-state actors’ remained distinct from a forthcoming ‘postcolonial vision’ of ‘inter-nationalism of nation-state’ (Thakur, 2019, pp. 675–676). Meanwhile, with the first India-Pakistan conflict seeing a ceasefire in January 1949 that divided Kashmir, the western capitals were momentarily relieved, for did not ‘Nehru see from a world point of view while Chiang saw very largely only from a party point of view’? ¹⁴

Jawaharlal Nehru certainly did but not from the (western) world’s point of view. When ‘the Chinese Ambassador to Turkey approached Chaman Lall [for] mediation between Kuomintang and the Communists…’, New Delhi felt that ‘it would be unwise’ (Gopal, 1990, p. 470). As the latest analysis of India-China equations and Anglo-American calculations argues, Nehru’s vision clashed with that of Washington’s, as he discouraged other newly-independent nation-states from joining US-led anti-communist pacts. He did not see Moscow as a threat and thought that this attitude could bring India and China closer (Frankel, 2020). To Chaman Lall, this ‘Nehru Doctrine’ was effective, given the context of the country’s ‘bankrupt inheritance’ ¹⁵ .

In turn, the West did not look upon the Kashmir issue from India’s point of view, given their imperatives of decolonization and the Cold War within which it evolved (Ankit, 2016), something to which Chaman Lall remained alive. In January 1950, he sent government officials three cuttings from the Lahori newspaper, the Civil & Military Gazette, as ‘evidence of the propaganda, since [his] departure from Turkey [about] Kashmir’ ¹⁶ . Lall claimed that New Delhi’s position had hitherto been seen by Ankara favourably, but for the emerging pact-politics of the Cold War. Chaman Lall’s brief diplomatic career thus reflects the tension between the ‘two conflicting discourses of internationalism in the Asian arena of the 1950s…global citizenship [and] state sovereignty’ (Amrith, 2005, p. 557). This dichotomy continued as the Cold War privileged ‘interstate relations’, and as the anti-imperialist mix separated into inter-national moulds (Louro, 2018). By the time of the Bandung Conference (1955) of 29 Asian and African states, their solidarity was already ‘in tension with political practices over ‘national development’ (Weber & Winanti, 2016, p. 403).

Mood of Reconciliation’

Much before then, New Delhi was facing difficulties in its relationship with Srinagar, where Sheikh Abdullah, Prime Minister of Jammu and Kashmir (1947–1953), was articulating aspirations for Kashmiri self-determination (Snedden, 2021, pp. 186–229). Together, they had produced a special constitutional arrangement, article 370, for keeping Kashmir with India (Noorani, 2011). In the lead-up to Abdullah’s falling out with Nehru and his arrest in August 1953, Chaman Lall critiqued his friend, when a report appeared in the Indian press of a speech delivered by Abdullah in April 1952. Months after Abdullah’s preventive arrest (Para, 2019), the Indian parliament would approve extending the preventive detention act until the end of 1954, with Chaman Lall moving the resolution for its ‘ample justification’ ¹⁷ .

Calling it ‘a crime against India to add to the burdens [of] Jawaharlal Nehru’, Lall wrote that ‘hitting out at the [Indian] press…may be construed as attacks against the government’ ¹⁸ . Picking out a reported sentence of Abdullah saying that ‘Kashmiris had no intention of backing out, but if the other side so desired it might’, Lall wrote that ‘“the other side” can only mean [New Delhi]’. Abdullah had also referred to an ‘economic blockade’ and Lall noted that ‘this again can mean…intimidation’. Lastly, there was a ‘pointed reference to the future decision of the [Kashmiri] Constituent Assembly’, which appeared to Lall as ‘wholly unnecessary’. There was more, for Abdullah had reportedly lashed out at ‘Indian aid attached with strings…’, and Lall suggested to him to make it ‘clear that there is no controversy between you and India’.

By now, Lall had entered the Rajya Sabha, as he could not agree on a directly electable seat in East Punjab amidst the competitive nomination ‘mess’ in the Congress, before the first general election (Gopal, 1995, p. 365). While this exercise represented the distance that the country had covered from Partition, there had not been similar movement on one major matter. This was the lack of agreement between India and Pakistan on evacuee property (Raghavan, 2020, pp. 73–98). In April 1951, Lall gave an emotive speech on ‘the uprooted, destroyed fate of the Punjabee nation’ (Tan & Kudaisya, 2000, p. 125), and in the summer of 1952, New Delhi decided to sell some properties belonging to Muslim evacuees from India to gauge the price of similar assets. Lall considered this ‘detrimental to national interest’ because it ‘would result in the confiscation of property left behind in West Pakistan, which was much greater’ (Gopal, 1996, pp. 467–68). Nehru agreed with Lall thus far but not in what followed, as Lall proposed a private delegation ‘of 2–3 of us’ to be sent to Pakistan to discuss this matter. The Prime Minister’s preferred courses were either individual arbitrations or the International Court of Justice, options that concerned his officials, while their choice of a bilateral tribunal was unacceptable to Karachi. For Nehru, beneath these preferences lay ‘the reactions of the great majority of displaced persons. It [was] not enough for a few well-to-do…to give their opinion’, whereas Lall stressed that ‘advantage should be taken of Pakistan’s willingness to permit private sales and exchanges as…India would get much more’ (Gopal, 1996, p. 468).

An unconvinced Prime Minister channelled Lall’s energies towards East Africa, where Jomo Kenyatta was facing charges of conspiracy. The Kenyan African Union invited Lall for the trial that took place in December 1952 and Nehru sent him ‘in his private capacity’ (Gopal, 1997a, p. 13), in a defence team that included D. N. Pritt, the British lawyer and Labour MP. Here, Lall personified one of ‘the lives of Cold War Afro-Asianism’ in a transnational interaction that blurred the lines between state and non-state projects (Stolte & Lewis, 2022). Upon his arrival at Nairobi, Lall was reportedly ‘treated with great discourtesy by the passport officer’ and, having met Kenyatta, he ‘organised meetings…’ (Gopal, 1997b, pp. 496, 499–500). Upon his return, Lall called Kenyatta’s trial ‘most unfair’ and warned of a ‘colour war’ there ¹⁹ . Subsequently, some African leaders as well as Indian parliamentarians wished to hold an all-African conference in New Delhi, but Nehru agreed only to ‘2–3 representative African leaders [to] come to India’ (Gopal, 1997a, pp. 546–547). When Lall and others went ahead and ‘formed an Indo-African Association’, the Prime Minister reminded them that ‘ministers [must] function with greater circumspection’ (Gopal, 1998, p. 382). Nevertheless, this episode was another representation of ‘an evolution of India’s internationalism from anti-colonialist thought to…a policy for India’s international relations’ (Nayudu, 2022, p. 29).

In 1956, Education Minister Abul Kalam Azad sought Chaman Lall’s inclusion in the union council of ministers ‘as a condition for agreeing to Krishna Menon’s entry into the cabinet’, only to have ‘the file containing…shady deals of Chaman Lall in foodgrains…in Turkey and Argentina’ to be sent to him (Mathai, 1978, p. 166). Two years later, when corruption claims against the Punjab Chief Minister Partap Singh Kairon were probed, it was revealed that one of these was that Kairon ‘had advanced several lakhs of rupees to the Panchsheel Co-operative Society, on the recommendation of Chaman Lall’ ²⁰ , and the society had turned out to be bogus. Instead, Lall continued in several parliamentary committees through the 1950s–1960s, including one on Hotel Standards and Rates. When he suggested creating a special fund for the development of India’s hotel industry along European lines and a new ministry on social welfare for hotel tourism, Nehru could not see how the latter came under the former (Mukherjee & Mukherjee, 2011, p. 236).

Outside the parliament, Lall remained involved in East Punjab politics. During the state reorganization exercise of 1953–1956 (Kudaisya, 2014), the Sikh community had got a ‘regional formula’ that sought to balance the Punjabi/Hindi interests, instead of full-fledged statehood, and Lall attempted to make ‘the people of the Punjab understand’ (Prasad et al., 2004, p. 266). The person who used to threaten strikes at 48-hours’ notice in 1946 had mellowed and, in 1958, he sought to manage the strike of 13000 village accountants across Punjab by a symbolic meeting with the Prime Minister (Mukherjee & Mukherjee, 2010a, p. 524). He now preferred a ‘mood of reconciliation’ ²¹ , and advised the federation of posts & telegraph unions and the East Punjab Railwaymen Union accordingly. When the Prime Minister announced his desire to retire, it was Lall who moved the party resolution on 1 May 1958 that refused to ‘contemplate’ this announcement (Mukherjee & Mukherjee, 2010b, p. 505). As for his former comrades, when in 1958, a Communist MP’s bill proposed to ban private donations to party funds, Lall lampooned it by saying that the communist objection was only ‘because they did not get a share in the loot’ ²² .

Attacks on India

The Sino-Indian border war of October to November 1962, a landmark conflict around their unresolved frontiers that blighted their relations and boosted those of China-Pakistan (Das & Luthi, 2016), was also a moment of reckoning for the Indian left. Chaman Lall had attended the tenth session of the World Council of Peace at Stockholm in May 1959 and, afterwards, written ruefully to Nehru about ‘Chinese impertinence’ (Palat, 2013, pp. 205–06). In March 1961, given his efforts to have the Council meet in New Delhi including its delegates from China, it was asked directly if Chaman Lall was still a ‘fellow-traveller?’ (Palat, 2016, p. 413).

In May 1962, when Lall sought Nehru’s sponsorship of the World Congress for General Disarmament and Peace, an initiative of the Ghanian President Kwame Nkrumah, the Prime Minister downplayed it ‘as [an] instrument in the Cold War’ (Palat, 2018a, pp. 445–46). Next month, he sought Nehru’s sanction for 125 people for an expenses-paid Peace Congress in Moscow, justifying this large number thus: ‘200 [are] going from Japan [and] Italy, if [we] are to make a mark and support our own foreign policy…’ Nehru though had long ceased to be ‘attracted to these propaganda gatherings’ (Palat, 2018b, pp. 578, 798). Six months later, like others, Lall too was grasping for any ‘slight shift of emphasis in our favour’ from Moscow, vis-à-vis China. T. N. Kaul, India’s ambassador at Kremlin, assured him in early-November 1962 that while the Soviet Union’s sympathies were with India, they could not take a ‘public stand’, as he hoped that his countrymen will keep their ‘heads’ cool’ ²³ . A month later when premier Nikita Khrushchev’s speech at the Supreme Soviet included a reference to ‘the Sino-Indian conflict’, Kaul urged Lall to help channel public ‘enthusiasm’ ²⁴ .

A sense of the shock of India’s debacle in its border war with China can be gained from Chaman Lall’s suggestion of a small car project for defence purposes, coming from his French friends at Renault. When Lall was informed that this project was not within the socialist plan, he retorted: ‘as if the 5-year plan is a sacred one and cannot be altered to suit the national deed’ (Palat, 2019a, pp. 170, 333). Lall also suggested sending delegations to the Peace Council, and a disappointed Nehru replied that ‘messages from Peace Councils in other countries…are in support of the Chinese’ (Palat, 2019b, pp. 336–337). In April 1963, Lall and others tried ‘to hold a conference for non-alignment’ with ‘purely national’ intentions, leaving a tired Prime Minister ‘rather doubtful’ (Palat, 2019a, pp. 122, 547), and when, in February 1964, a parliamentary resolution was moved to end the use of emergency provisions in India, in-place since the China war, Chaman Lall rhetorically asked, ‘have the attacks on India ended? ²⁵ ’ In-between, in August 1963, he introduced a bill to define treason and describe punishments for it ²⁶ , both of whose scope were so wide that a fellow parliamentarian later termed it a bill of ‘tyranny’ ²⁷ , a scathing turn of phrase on someone who used to rhyme imperial mandates with ‘bandits’ ²⁸ .

Jawaharlal Nehru died on 27 May 1964 and his successor, Lal Bahadur Shastri, suffered a heart attack within weeks into his premiership, leading Chaman Lall to request him to ‘regulate work’ by repeating his suggestion to Nehru of making ‘use of MPs on a larger scale’ (Palat, 2018a, p. 211). Lall wished that all delegations going abroad should have MPs as ‘even under the British, some of the Heads of Missions…were chosen from…some of us’, and now, naturally, he wished to ‘utilise national elements’ ²⁹ . In other ways too, the former protestor had become productive, by insisting upon a 3-shift system in factories, and combating propaganda against the political price of American wheat coming into India under the infamous Public Law 480 (Engerman, 2018). Lall urged upon Shastri another draconian ordinance ‘to fix wholesale prices at 10% above the producer’s price and 7%–10% for the retailer’, followed by ‘requisition of shops and selling goods [for] a small profit’ ³⁰ .

Lall’s forays at the world stage were now about combating China’s presence, and when, at the third Afro-Asian solidarity conference (Nairobi) in 1963, the text of the UAR resolution on India-China conflict was reportedly re-drafted behind his delegation’s back, Lall had strong words for China’s ‘bribery and blackmail’ that had ‘double-crossed’ India ³¹ . At the World Peace Council in 1964, it was also about asserting India’s ability to settle its dispute with China, whenever the Council attributed this to international efforts. When he realized that the Soviet representatives had ‘a directive’ from Kremlin ‘to play down the Sino-Indian dispute’, Lall reminded them that ‘China…had come into Indian territory and were in possession of 12, 000 square miles’ ³² . The Soviet delegation, which included author Ilya Ehrenberg, informed Lall privately that ‘their policy towards India…remained unchanged’ ³³ .

The occasion to test this promise came as early as 1965, when India and Pakistan engaged in a two-part conflict in Kutch and Kashmir (Bajwa, 2013), during which Lall urged Shastri that ‘the country should be put on a war footing’. ³⁴ In August 1965, when news came that India might cross the 1949 Ceasefire Line in Kashmir and the 1947 Radcliffe Line in Punjab, he welcomed these reports. ³⁵ After the Soviet-inspired Tashkent summit in January 1966, which brought the diplomatic curtain down on this military stalemate, honouring Lal Bahadur Shastri who had tragically died there, Chaman Lall said that Pakistan had ‘refused to sign [Nehru’s] no-war declaration pact because [it] believed that India could be invaded’, and the greatest monument to Shastri was that ‘he won the war with Pakistan and also won the peace’ ³⁶ .

Conclusion

The period after 1945 has been termed as one of ‘world-historical opening’, when ‘a range of solutions to…colonial emancipation [was] pursued amidst…anti-colonial nationalism, European neo-colonialism, American globalism, and UN internationalism’ (Lewis & Stolte, 2019, p. 4). The above snapshots from the life of Dewan Chaman Lall can be situated in these folds of public history of a time when political issues were often entangled with intellectual and moral dilemmas. Alongside, if, as it has been argued, it was the appeal of communism in areas like India that it allowed ‘the educated…a key role in the transformation of a “colonial” agrarian society into an industrial one’ (Lichtblau, 1954, p. 89), then again Lall’s career symbolizes it. Indeed, such ‘careers are a valuable source for the historian-not in the biographer’s sense of “what did my subject achieve in his lifetime?” but…as a window into the networks and systems in which those individuals worked’ (Brown, 2009, p. 590).

Although never a directly-elected legislator in independent India, Lall’s overlaps between his trade unionism, ambassadorship, and Rajya Sabha membership, also take in refugee/evacuee class interests and party squabbles over ticket distribution in East Punjab politics. Lall’s trade union leadership served as an entry point into nationalist politics, and a steppingstone to state positions (Lichtblau, 1954, p. 99), from where he saw colonial state continuities persist in post-colonial scenarios. He came down from Oxford as Gandhian nationalism was rising and moved amidst it into the new channels of limited power in the provincial politics of the 1920s and 1930s thereby being ready, at independence, for the new diplomatic service and national legislature.

Second, as post-independence inter-nationalism across Asia became covered by, if not entirely constituting, the Cold Wars (Luthi, 2020), this article has tracked the nationalist tide within Lall’s internationalism, alongside the domestic shifts in his political pre-occupations that the achievement of a partitioned independence brought. His imperial world of education and experiences went into the changing sociopolitical frames of the independent nation in which he functioned with that ‘mixture of motives with which [people] act in a world in which public duty rarely coincides with personal gain…’ (Broomfield, 1971, p. 74) This also made for a policy equivocation in the ideological Cold War arena when the stakes became less global and more local-territorial. This sketch of the public life of Chaman Lall via his private papers, reflects this ambivalence, which in turn represents the analytical thread tying this slice-of-life-history with the shifting politics of Third World Nationalism.