When British rule of south Asia ended in 1947, a patchwork of 565 princely states representing about 40 percent of the region’s land area remained out of India and Pakistan’s fold. The fledgling Indian state had less than three years to incorporate this vast region into a unitary post-colonial nation while simultaneously managing the brutality of partition, ensuring the handing over of governance from British and writing a constitution. Without the use of aviation it would have been impossible for the civil servant VP Menon and the first deputy prime minister, Vallabhbhai Patel, to get instruments of accession signed by nearly every princely state. Jawaharlal Nehru, Patel and Menon, flew the length of the sub-continent countless times, negotiating feverishly with the British in Shimla and in princely states as far flung as Travancore and Jammu and Kashmir, knitting together the state territorially, at a speed permissible only by air.
Nehru’s preference for aviation survived the heady initial years of the republic. During the first general elections held in 1951, Nehru travelled more than 18,000 miles by air, covering the country along with rail, road and boat rides in nine weeks. Nehru’s penchant for flying across the country came up in parliamentary discussion. In 1952, VG Deshpande, the general secretary of the Akhil Bharatiya Hindu Mahasabha, asked, “Why was an aeroplane of the Government of India placed at the Prime Minister’s disposal, in which he travelled all over the country? … I know how ministers misused their power.” Nehru declined to comment.
Nehru’s, often uncompromising, fascination with flying might not have yielded the best results for the Indian polity at large. Unlike the access to most rights, which saw progressive growth following decolonisation, the access to flight saw a further restriction in the Nehru years. In British India, despite flight being largely monopolised by a narrow elite, strides were often made towards further democratisation. A broader historiography of Indian aviation might help illustrate this.
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