ABSTRACT
Tragedy, elsewhere than in Nagaland, was in the making in India. According to Indian official statistics, in the three years from the day of independence to August 1959, Indian troops and police opened fire on their own people on as many as 1,982 occasions, killing 3,784 people, wounding 10,000 and throwing another 50,000 into prison. The number of incidents in which violence was used had continued to mount. Troops were employed to overthrow the communist-led government in Kerala in 1959 and also during the famine riots in West Bengal in August and September of that same year. Eighty people were killed and more than 20,000 arrested. At a conference of state governors held in Delhi a year later, Dr Rajendra Prasad, the first president of India, admitted that in the past 13 years the number of times the police had opened fire surpassed the total during the entire period when the British ruled the country. On the domestic front India's basic problems were in agriculture and peasant indebtedness. Nehru's Congress Party at the time was under great pressure and his own prestige was steadily on the decline.
