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.
The national archives of India, have hundreds of yellowing records about aviation in this period, which I studied. From its inception in the early 1900s, access to flight, both domestically and internationally has gotten progressively more democratic. However, when governments attempted to facilitate air travel only for a few, arbitarily—as Nehru did in the 1950s—it ironically often had the opposite effect. The historical record shows that both access to fly and the right to fly abroad were gained by individual attempts to combat state control. The record also sheds light on how centralised control and lack of emphasis on meeting technical requirements are the main threats to these rights.
Before there were pilots and passengers, there were airmen, airwomen and airships. With the introduction of powered aircraft in the early twentieth century, the skies too became a medium of movement. To fly, to be part of the air in those machines, was a privilege, a claim to the loftier. It was claimed imperially first by the Indian princes, who had both the wealth and the interest to purchase these early flying machines. As early as 1911, in Hyderabad, Pierre de Caters, a Belgian adventurer and aviator, made flying exhibition shows the rage. This was a good stand at making money too. The Times later described Nizam Mir Osman Ali Khan, the ruler of Hyderabad, as the wealthiest man in the world, and thus an ideal client for Caters. Most of Caters flights were joy rides, for the elite of Hyderabad a century ago, who were willing to pay vast sums for the thrill of being in the air.
But why just ride an airplane when you can buy one? In 1911, the maharaja of Kapurthala, a small princely state in present day Punjab, was the first to enquire about these flying machines. He went on to buy a Farman biplane, built by a British company. Other princes in Alwar, Jodhpur, Bikaner, Patiala, Bharatpur and Hyderabad followed. Many constructed aerodromes—often just a large open field—and then hired European pilots to fly them.
Others learnt to fly themselves. To fly was to embody a heavenly, divine air, a marker of regality in a deeply feudal and colonial society. The prestige of flying was often advertised to other princes too. In 1921, when the chamber of princes—an assembly representing the princes of various states—was inaugurated in New Delhi, the maharaja of Mandla flew overhead as casually as others travelled in their regal royal train carriages. Aerodromes mushroomed across the princely territories during the following decades, with dots on the map steadily growing in Badhal, Bharatpur, Bhopal, Bundi, Cochin, Jaipur, Jodhpur, Kalka, Morvi, Hyderabad and Travancore.
From the inception of aviation in India, indignation among rulers and their subjects arose over the perceived violation of the “sovereignty of air”—the idea that the air above is as inviolable as the land below. Indian princes were long assured of their internal territorial sovereignty by the British.
During my research at the archives of India, I came across several records documenting the unease of these machines flying over princely lands. Archival records show that the maharaja of Jaipur complained that the “faces of women in the palace” would now be easily visible to pilots flying overhead. Another prince protested when a Swedish pilot aerially photographed a fortress. This was seen as an aerial violation of their privacy, a matter taken up seriously by the princes. The matter was settled in 1931 with the British framing rules which “admitted that the sovereignty of the rulers of states over their territories embraces the air space over those territories.” They, however, maintained that for security purposes British naval or military forces would be free to fly over and land in the territories of the state.
Elsewhere, clamour arose about how the airspace above sacred sites were sacred as well, violated by planes flying overhead. Across religions, Parsis, Sikhs, Muslims and Hindus shot off angry letters over the aerial violation of sacred sites, an attitude which seems to have gently broken down after aviation became more abundant and practical. But not before a Parsi gentleman wrote a detective novel about the outrage amongst the Parsis when a small aircraft photographed a tower of silence—a site where Zoroastrians dispose of the dead—in Bombay.
Others thought they could profit of it. Archival records reveal that in 1935, in the Delhi Legislative Assembly, enquiries were made about creating an aerial route to the Hindu pilgrimage site in the village of Badrinath, present day Uttarakhand. The request fell on deaf ears though. An aerial route to the site only opened in 1974 with the inaugural of an airport in Dehradun.
In the 1930s and 1940s, air-mindedness took root outside of the princely states too. The British—whose aviators and aviatrices flew across India in international air races from Paris and Saigon—encouraged civil aviation in colonial India. This was primarily done by setting up flying clubs and supporting Indian students to study aviation in Great Britain. The princes were the first to jump at this opportunity, with the maharaja of Jodhpur even going on to graduate from the Royal Air Force College in Cranwell in 1926. He became the first Indian prince to be awarded a pilot’s licence.
Archival records hint at a rich history, marked by all sorts of players, from air exhibitions to those offering aerial rides. In 1934, India Air Pagaents Lts, a private air display company, arrived in India to give a series of exhibitions at various centres in British India and the Indian states. As a demonstration of the growing interest, there were several subsidised flying clubs in British India such as the Delhi Flying Club and the Karachi Aero Club. There were also flying clubs in Karachi, Madras, Lahore, Jodhpur and Bengal, and the ponderously named Dum Dum Northern India Flying Club. The only unsubisided one was the Kathiawar Flying Club which was funded by a group of Indian financiers keen to give joyrides and pressed with the urgent need to transport newspapers between Bombay and Kathiawar, in present-day Gujarat.
There were eight private airlines by the 1930s. Capitalists like the Tatas, Birlas and Dalmias, and princely states like those of Hyderabad and Darbhanga, owned private commercial airlines. Those controlled by private firms include Orient Airways, Kalinga Airways, Jamair, Himalayan Aviation, Deccan Airways and Ambica Airlines—these airplanes largely carried the wealthy: businessmen, travellers and other fliers who could afford the prices.
Aviation, and the freedom it offered, came to at least one prince’s aid quite literally in 1947. The Nawab of Junagadh, a tiny princely state in present-day Gujarat landlocked by India, who had declared his intention to accede to Pakistan, had a special plane chartered. In the clamour in deciding whether to accede to India or Pakistan that year, others also thought of turning to airfleets. The Nizam of Hyderabad—who wanted to create a sovereign state—asked Christopher Courtney, the British air chief marshall, about the creation of a modern air force for Hyderabad. The Nawab of Bhopal, who was a close ally of Muhammad Ali Jinnah and Muslim League, but later reluctantly acceded to India, enquired about the purchase of Mistri Airlines. Both these ideas were nipped in the bud, with Patel’s speedy flights across the country.
Nehru’s altered the aerial landscape—he first opened, then closed the skies that had aided the INC in establishing a subcontinental presence. Following the second world war, British India’s director of civil aviation, FC Tymms, had recommended that not more than four private players should fly in the country, to ensure efficient and economic operations. In 1946, Nehru’s interim government rejected this, allowing private companies to mushroom in the country. By the time independence from British colonial rule was declared, there were 11 operators.
In 1950, an Air Transport Inquiry Committee was set up, headed by GS Rajadhyaksha, a high court judge. The committee recommendations pointed to Tymms’ conclusion—India had too many operators, amounting to wasteful competition and increased costs. So far under the ministry of communications, headed by Jagjivan Ram, air transport had lumbered on. Jaipal Singh Munda, a member of parliament made public several concerns he had about the competency of the ministry to manage aviation.
Munda, a highly decorated academic and Adivasi leader, was the president of the Delhi Flying Club. In a discussion in the Lok Sabha, he questioned the efficiency and employability these flying clubs were producing in 1952. He pointed out that 196 pilots completed their course in 1952 with no clear employment in sight. Munda also questioned the rationale of spending crores for the construction of a training centre for aviators in Allahabad without a clear vision of what role they were being trained for. He argued that if aviation were brought under the ministry of defence, it would have more technical leadership that it was then lacking. He was right. Under communications, aviation was treated alongside matters with different priorities, such as postal communications.
The following year, the government passed the Indian Air Corporation Act, ending the debate. With the act, aviation was controlled by the central government, ending the aerial chaos caused by the 11 private airlines. The airlines were nationalised, creating in their place the state’s national domestic airlines, Indian Airlines and Air India International, to fly internationally. Records at the directorate general of civil aviation in Delhi show that nationalising aviation meant taking on the messy task of organising an inherited fleet of 99 aircraft including 74 Dakotas, 12 Vikings and 3 Skymasters and reshuffling personnel of more that 7,000 Indians of varying ranks and salaries. The task included shaping new air-routes, closing and opening airports and framing new guidelines. And yet, there was an oblique reminder of the rich aviation inheritance from the Indian princes: the mascot of Air India was a smiling and obsequious maharaja.
To soothe the disgruntled JRD Tata—an aviation pioneer who owned one of the 11 private airlines—Nehru appointed him as the chairperson of Air India. Under Tata’s leadership, the luxury of flying on Air India was reinforced, demonstrated in the lush interiors, the cocktail bars and the earliest idea of inflight entertainment. Air India’s Maharaja Lounges and the Emperor fleet of Boeing 747s, branded as “Your Palace in the Sky,” were distinguished by the ashtrays designed by the artist Salvador Dali, by minute attention to detail over the temperature of the bacon and eggs served for breakfast, by Indian flight attendants draped in saris and lehengas, unmindful of the inconvenience. The price of flying rose parallelly. In staunch contrast to Nehru’s other attempts at democratising services, his decisions served to complicate the growth of airlines and cloister its benefits in the hands of a narrow elite.
Even if exorbitant costs were ignored, Indian nationals, at the time of independence, had no legal right to fly abroad. It would take another decade before the passport, a documented invented in the late nineteenth century, would travel from being a luxury of the few to the right of the many. To fly abroad meant first applying for a passport, which meant being at the mercy of the discretion of a passport officer. Starting from 1950, however, petitioners demanded an end to this arbitrariness in the issuance of passports. A foreign trip was an exalted affair. Not only for the terrific costs involved but because of the arbitrary power government’s exercised over the issuance of passports. In the first decade of independence, this obscurity was frustrating. Several people, from students who wanted to study in the United States, to those who found better jobs in Germany, found their plans crushed by a fickle flick of a pen. Several petitioned the court.
Under the Constitution of India, the only reference to movement under Article 19—which enshrines the right to the freedom of expression. Its subsection (d) grants citizens the freedom to move freely throughout the territory of India. Since the writing of the Constitution was deeply influenced by the events of the Partition—which centred questions about territories, movement and migration—this is a carefully thought out provision. The centrality of the partition is visible in Article 6, which allows migrants from Pakistan to return, through any means—air, rail, sea or on foot.
In The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia, the historian Vazira Zamindar narrates how air travel was a means of transport during the Partition, but was accessible to only a few. “Many were such that they could not afford airfare and after the announcement there was not even enough time to come by rail,” she notes. “And those who could afford the plane could not come because they couldn’t book the seat in time.” Much of the legal confusion around passports in India stems from the initial confusion of a legal framework that had to manage the mass migration during Partition.
The confusion, and often disregard, with which the Indian government approached the issuance of passports are illustrated best with an exchange in Parliament, in 1952. Sarangadhar Das, a socialist politician, demanded information on the case of an individual who received his passport after an enormous delay—two months after he was supposed to fly abroad. Nehru, in his capacity as the minister of external affairs, tersely said “he should congratulate himself that he got it at all.” Nehru added, “I am really surprised at this question … am I supposed to go into individual cases? Of individual conduct or misconduct … into the life history of every individual? I ask if any Government so far has been so generous in issuing passports than this Government, barring none in the world?” To Nehru’s government, it still remained a matter of generosity, and not as we see it now, a right.
A few years later, though, the United States clearly established passports as a right. In the 1958 case, Kent vs Dulles, the court denied the “unbridled discretion” of the secretary of state, to withhold a passport from a citizen for any substantive reason. In a case involving an American citizen with communist sympathies, the court held that the right to travel is a part of the “liberty” of which a citizen cannot be deprived.
At the time, India had no clear legislation on the regulation of passports. Independent India drew upon the Passport (Entry into India) Act of 1920—a brief colonial era piece of legislation which merely stated that passports will be issued by the central government—to frame the Passport Rules of 1950. Both the act and the rules derived from it dealt primarily with entry into the country, not of the right to exit. Despite this, legal records show that, many people were still entering India without passports—a discovery made in courts a few years from the issue of the rules.
Many of those entering were citizens of India who had left during Partition and were still trying to figure out their lives. Abdul Rahim Ismail Rahimtoola, an Indian citizen, left for Karachi in 1954 and entered India the next year without a passport. Once arrested, he argued in the Bombay High Court that the Passport Act itself was ultra vires to the Constitution and did not apply to Indians. He also argued that following the “freedom of movement” guaranteed under Article 19, the courts could not, in fact, “remove” him from the country. The court, though, was unconvinced and pointed out that the word “persons” in the Passport Act included Indians. Rahimtoola submitted a petition that this was a constitutional matter and appealed for it to be heard by the Supreme Court. The court declined to entertain this and his conviction was upheld, and for that moment, the freedom of movement as a fundamental right was deferred.
The knocks on the Supreme Court’s doors from angry passport applicants, though, were becoming louder. In 1965, Francis Manjooran, a young graduate in medicine, was all set to leave for the United States to study medicine. He discovered, though, that his passport was rejected. This was the first case where the courts extensively explored the links between a passport as a legal right and the right to freedom of locomotion. The Kerala High Court observed that there is no statute governing the issue of a passport or a refusal thereof. “In the light of all that is stated above, I think it should be held that the right to travel, except to the extent provided in Article 19(1)(d) of the Constitution, is within the ambit of the expression ‘personal liberty’ as used in Article 21 of the Constitution and that as a passport is essential for the enjoyment of that right, the denial of a passport amounts to a deprivation of that right,” it noted. “It is true that Article 21 permits a deprivation by procedure established by law. The hurdle in the path of the Union of India is the absence of any such procedure.”
In defense, the government of India argued that by virtue of being a doctor, Manjooran was “unworthy” of a passport, because he was worthy to the country. This perverse logic meant that doctors leaving the country were obliged to sign an affidavit stating that they would return in five years’ time due to their worthiness. The arbitrariness of the passport office extended then to weighing useful members of society and by virtue of that, denying them the right to leave the country. This unreasonable classification which discriminated against qualified doctors led the court to issue directions to grant the passport within two months. But no legislative changes followed to aid other passport applicants.
The next major judgement regarding passports came in 1967. Satwant Singh Sawhney was an importer and exporter of automobile parts. Unlike Manjooran, Sawhney was asked to hand over his passport because of allegations of financial irregularities by the Export and Import Council. He was represented by noted jurist Soli Sorabjee when he moved the Supreme Court, arguing that the actions against him were a violation of Articles 14 and 21—which establishes the right to life and personal liberty. The then additional solicitor general, Niren de, who went on to India’s attorney general, thought otherwise—that it is only a facility provided by the government and no person has a right to it. The presiding judge, Subba Rao, ruled that the right to fly abroad was indeed part of Article 21.
Following the Sawhney judgement, the Passport Act of 1967 was passed, with a clear outline of the grounds on which a passport can be declined: engaging in activities detrimental to the sovereignty and integrity of the country, amongst others. The meaning of flying translated from Indian princes flying for pleasure to the fundamental right of a citizen to fly out of the country. The right to fly was no longer a discretion of ministry of external affairs. In a judgement regarding passports ten years later, the Supreme Court ruled that primary legislation must be “fair, just and reasonable, not fanciful, oppressive or arbitrary.” In the verbose judgement, the court also observed that, “travel makes liberty worthwhile … life is a terrestrial opportunity for unfolding personality, rising to a higher scale, moving to fresh woods and reaching out to reality, which makes our earthly journey a true fulfilment, not a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury signifying nothing, but a fine frenzy rolling between heaven and earth.”
However, this enshrined right seems to be facing challenges as the Indian state enters a second era of centralisation. In March 2021, Mehbooba Mufti, the former chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir moved the Jammu and Kashmir High Court after she was denied a passport. Her petition largely argued the same thing as Sawhney, that her right to a passport is a central aspect of Article 21.
In 2017, Prime Minister Narendra Modi inaugurated the Ude Desh Ka Aam Nagrik—fly, the common citizen of the country—scheme, acronymised to UDAN, which means flight in Hindi. “Earlier aviation was considered to be the domain of a select few. That has changed now,” Modi said on 27 April 2017, as he flagged of a plane in Shimla, the first under the new scheme. “The lives of the middle class are being transformed and their aspirations are increasing. Given the right chance they can do wonders.” The UDAN scheme is meant to encourage regional air connectivity, particularly between Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities in India and forms one of the first major components of the National Civil Aviation Policy which was released a year earlier.
However, Modi’s promise largely faces the same complications Munda pointed out in 1952—the lack of qualified personnel to fly fleets this large. According to the National Civil Aviation Policy, the incremental human resource requirement of the civil aviation sector by 2025 would be around 3.3 lakh people. It notes that “although there are a large number of private institutions in the country providing aviation education and training, it is unclear if they can manage the numbers required by the burgeoning ambitions of central planning.”
Other qualifications also pose roadblocks to expansion of this size—after obtaining a commercial pilot licence, it is also mandatory for pilots to get type-rated before getting employed in an airline. Type-rating is a licensing agency’s certification of an airplane pilot to fly a certain aircraft type that requires additional training beyond the scope of the initial license and aircraft class training. Type rating can often cost upwards of 25 lakh rupees and remains unaffordable to many trained pilots. The NCAP itself specifies that there are nearly 8,000 pilots in India holding a commercial pilot license but unable to find any regular employment, largely because they lack type-rating. Alongside pilots, others too need extensive training, such as air craft technicians, cabin crew, ground handling staff, administrative staff and sales staff.
Any attempt to put more people in the air needs to be mindful that it needs more people on ground—staff, personnel, engineers and pilots. Failing this, leaders, like Nehru, will only leave behind them a fascination with aviation and a space in their posthumous imagination, not concrete change. Nehru’s own will illustrates this space between vaulting national ambitions built on a fascination with flight, and the complex realities that exist on the ground. He willed his ashes to be scattered “high up from an aeroplane … so that they might mingle with the dust and soil of India and become an indistinguishable part of India.” That they did—but not before denying others the right to fly freely out of the country.