How the yoke was to be lifted, though, remained un-clear. The British had suggested that Indians were only capable of obstructive opposition but could not come up with any constitutional proposals of their own. Responding to the challenge, the Congress set up a committee in 1928 under Motilal Nehru to propose a Constitution for free India. The resulting document, known to the public as the Nehru Report, had a wide degree of backing from various sections of Indian opinion for a democratic Indian Dominion within the British Empire. But Jinnah opposed it bitterly, denouncing it as a “Hindu report” even as most of his fellow Muslim League leaders endorsed the document. Jinnah’s anger was principally due to Motilal’s rejection of separate electorates for different religious groups, a point he had discussed with Jinnah’s close aide M. C. Chagla while Jinnah was absent in Europe. Motilal had been willing to agree upon separate electorates, but it was Chagla, a liberal Muslim (and later a distinguished jurist, diplomat, and cabinet minister in free India), who had pointed out that such a provision would undermine national unity and had no place in the constitution of a free India. Jinnah’s opposition destroyed the prospects of the Motilal Nehru Report forming the basis of a structure of governance for a united and independent India (and precipitated a permanent break between Jinnah and the brilliant and broad-minded Chagla). Ironically, Motilal’s own son had felt that, in its willingness to settle for Dominion status, it did not go far enough in the direction of full independence. Motilal, elected president of the Congress Party at its Calcutta session in 1928, did not mind: “Jawahar would not be my son if he did not stick to his guns.”
And yet his guns were never quite primed to be fired. “It is obvious,” Jawaharlal wrote to a leftist Muslim friend in September 1928, “that the Congress contains at least two if not more groups which have nothing in common between them and the sooner they break apart the better.” But he did nothing to bring about such a break, conscious as he undoubtedly was that any rupture would find his own father and his mentor, the Mahatma, on the opposite side of the ideological divide. With Jawaharlal Nehru, principle would always be tempered by loyalty, conviction moderated by custom. (His great contemporary and rival Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose spoke dismissively of Nehru’s “sentimental politics.”) Jawaharlal was always willing to express a radical view — twice that year coming close to arrest for his utterances alone — but the ardent revolutionary in him invariably gave way to the conciliator, seeking common ground with those he admired and whom he would not, indeed could not, betray. To that extent he was Motilal’s son: his father had told him bluntly that “pure idealism divorced from realities has no place in politics.”
That common ground was found not on the issue of principle but on that of timing. Jawaharlal and Gandhi both found it possible to agree on the Nehru Report as the Congress Party’s immediate demand; if the British government did not implement its demands within two years, the Mahatma declared, the Congress would shift to its long-term goal of full independence. Jawaharlal thought two years too long, and the Mahatma obligingly cut the deadline back to one year. The younger Nehru accepted the compromise but, to reaffirm his principles, stayed away from the session of the Congress that adopted it. Gandhi praised him publicly for swallowing his dissatisfaction: “a high-souled man as he is, he does not want to create unnecessary bitterness… . He would not be Jawaharlal if he did not strike out for himself an absolutely unique and original line in pursuance of his path. He considers nobody, not even his father…[only] his duty to his own country.”
Since neither man seriously believed that the British government would adopt the Nehru Report within anything like a year, Jawaharlal spent 1929 as the party’s general secretary preparing himself for the confrontation he was sure would follow. At Gandhi’s urging, he traveled throughout the country organizing and reviving the local units of the party. Unimpressed by the far from businesslike way in which they conducted their work, he poured a great deal of energy (and much of his own money, which was hardly plentiful) into the party organization. He paid particular attention to creating teams of volunteers, who in turn were to raise the consciousness of workers and peasants about the coming struggle for freedom. Jawaharlal was also president, though not a very active one, of the All-India Trade Union Congress, seeking to rally organized labor to the nationalist cause. The British government regarded his activities with growing concern; the Home Secretary wrote to his subordinates in the provinces that “[t]here is a tendency for the political and the Communist revolutionaries to join hands, and Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, an extreme nationalist who is at the same time genuinely attracted by some of the Communist doctrines, stands at about the meeting point.”
Seeking to drive a wedge between the Communists and the nationalists, the British prosecuted thirty-one Communist leaders at Meerut in April 1929, and the Congress chose to defend them. The trial dragged on for three and a half years. It was widely expected that Jawaharlal himself would be arrested and prosecuted on the same grounds, but though some of his statements were cited, and a forged letter attributed to the Indian Communist M. N. Roy was produced which purported to describe Jawaharlal as a “liaison agent” with the Soviets, the British concluded they did not have enough credible evidence to support the charge that he was a Communist. In fact the Communist leader Muzaffar Ahmed privately thought of Jawaharlal as a “timid reformist.” Indian and foreign Communists saw him as one who uttered Communist slogans but took no steps to achieve them; his rhetoric, they argued, aimed not at revolution but at “getting support from the proletariat” for his nationalist goals. Yet the threat of arrest did have one positive result. It prompted Jawaharlal to give up smoking in preparation for jail, a decision with long-term benefits for his health (though subsequent lapses were not unknown).
In the meantime Gandhi began preparing the ground for a political earthquake: he wanted Motilal to be succeeded as president of the Congress Party by his son. Jawaharlal was reluctant, pleading with the Mahatma that his “personal inclination always is not to be shack-led down to any office. I prefer to be free and to have the time to act according to my own inclinations.” He was also conscious that he would not be the genuinely democratic choice of the party; any support he got, he argued, would largely be aimed at keeping others out. But Gandhi would not be deterred. He cajoled and cudgeled Jawaharlal into submission, overcoming the objections even of Motilal himself, who feared that imposing his son on the party would not be fair either to the party or to Jawaharlal. (Ironically, it was Motilal who had first suggested to the Mahatma that “the need of the hour is the head of Gandhi and the voice of Jawahar.”) Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, fifteen years older than Jawaharlal and a doughty organizer who was already being thought of as the “Iron Man” of the Congress, had more support than Nehru for the top job. But though the All-India Congress Committee (AICC) was not enthusiastic about Gandhi’s announcement that Jawaharlal would lead it, the party could not repudiate the Mahatma. On September 29, 1929, two months before his fortieth birthday, Jawaharlal Nehru was elected to preside over the Congress at its December session in Lahore.
Though his father’s presumptuous notation on that old postcard to Harrow had come true, the election of Jawaharlal as Congress president was hardly the great triumph it has since been portrayed as being. The only one who really sought it was Gandhi, who saw great symbolic value in passing the torch to the embodiment of a new generation — but who simultaneously declared that Jawaharlal was such a faithful acolyte of his that his being president was just as good as the Mahatma himself holding the job. The shrewd Mahatma had no doubt calculated that if he did not publicly co-opt Jawaharlal into the party establishment at the expense of the conservative Patel, the younger Nehru could drift away into active radicalism. Those party elders who reluctantly voted for him did so not out of any great love for Jawaharlal but out of regard for Gandhi; many hoped that the presidency would rein in the younger man’s tendency to hotheadedness, keeping the proponents of “full independence” within the Congress tent. Jaw
aharlal’s leftist and “Extremist” allies, though, expected him to use his position to lead the party away from what they saw as the temporizing of the Nehru Report into a full-throated battle for freedom from British rule. Jawaharlal himself, aware of these contrary pulls, accepted the honor with unfeigned diffidence. He wrote to a close friend that it would not be easy in his new assignment “to avoid losing all my cheerfulness and light-heartedness.” The perceptive nationalist poet Sarojini Naidu, whose daughter Padmaja was to become an intimate of Nehru’s, wrote to Jawaharlal: “I wonder if in the whole of India there [is] a prouder heart than your father’s or a heavier heart than yours.”
And yet there was no doubt about Jawaharlal’s potential as a leader. The Congress politician Y. B. Chavan recounted meeting Jawaharlal at a public gathering around 1929, when he was fifteen and Nehru forty. The impact of the leader on the crowd was inspirational: “The younger ones among us swore by the vigor of his intellect, the freshness of his outlook, and the radiance of his youth; the older folk nodded to one another, wondering at the wise head he carried on his young shoulders; and admiring women agreed with both.”
The country was at a crossroads: the Simon Commission’s visit had been a disaster; the Nehru Report was looking increasingly like a dead letter; Hindu-Muslim relations had declined from the peak of amity at the beginning of the decade; the cracks in the Congress Party could barely be papered over; and young men were turning to violence. In April 1929 the now legendary Bhagat Singh threw bombs into the Legislative Assembly, expressing the hope that the explosions would “make the deaf hear” (he was hanged for his pains, but in 2002 the popular Indian film industry of Bollywood would release not one but five competing films about his courage and daring). It was widely expected that, with Jawaharlal in the chair and the Mahatma’s one-year deadline having expired, the Congress would push for full independence (purna swaraj) at its Lahore session in December 1929. Looking for ways to head off the impending crisis, the British viceroy, Lord Irwin, announced on October 31, 1929 that His Majesty’s Government would convene, at a date to be determined, a Round Table Conference of all the Indian parties to discuss the country’s future. Irwin’s declaration included, almost as an afterthought, the admission that “the natural issue of India’s constitutional progress … is the attainment of Dominion Status.” This might have been treated seriously by a Congress still formally committed to the Nehru Report, but Irwin’s words created such an outcry from the blimps and the reactionaries in the British Parliament that it vitiated whatever appreciation such an announcement might have elicited from Indian opinion-makers. Irwin himself, scalded by the outrage back home, backpedaled swiftly away from any suggestion that Dominion status was imminent. Gandhi initially responded favorably to the announcement, prompting Jawaharlal to offer his resignation from his party positions; but when the British refused to honor the four provisos the Congress had put forward for its support, the danger of a split in the Congress ranks receded. The singularly unimaginative Irwin did not even offer to release political prisoners, a gesture that would have met one of Gandhi’s conditions and helped win the Mahatma’s cooperation.
That ended the last hope of compromise on the issue with the Indian National Congress. Two days before the Congress session, Irwin met with Gandhi and Motilal from the Congress, along with Jinnah, representing the Muslim League, and the Liberals Sapru and V. J. Patel, to urge a more measured pace for change. On a day when a terrorist bomb had exploded under the viceroy’s railway carriage, the other three were amenable to seeing things Irwin’s way; the Congress leaders were not. The meeting marked the irretrievable breakdown between the Congress and those Indians who were still prepared to work within the British framework. Motilal and the Mahatma traveled to and from the meeting in one vehicle, the three others in a different car. They no longer agreed either on the destination or on how to get there.
On December 25, 1929 the citizens of Lahore greeted the Christmas holiday by turning out in large numbers to hail the new young president of the Congress as he trotted down the narrow thoroughfares on a white steed, resplendent in a long black sherwani coat, waving as women sprinkled him with rose petals from the windows. Motilal saw the adulation from his perch on a balcony in the Anarkali marketplace, and was inspired to quote Persian poetry to the effect that the son had surpassed the father. Contemporary accounts describe the excitement now generated by the ascension of the forty-year-old Jawaharlal Nehru to the leadership of the party. Gone were memories of the reluctance with which the party had chosen him; instead his call for purna swaraj was unanimously passed, and on the night of December 29 the new president raised the flag of a free India. It was saffron, white, and green, its three horizontal stripes capturing three colors that were sacred to, and touched the hearts of, India’s major communities (and which stood, respectively, for courage, unity, and fertility, among other virtues). In the middle was a spinning wheel, proclaiming the country’s attachment to self-reliance. Jawaharlal made a stirring speech about the flag standing for all Indians, whether Hindu or Muslim; and as the stars twinkled in an ink-black sky, men and women, President Nehru himself among them, danced with childlike jubilation around the flagpole. It was midnight, but few doubted that a new dawn had broken over India.
“The love for the idea of India,” wrote a British conservative in Lahore, “is one of the finest, and also one of the most incalculable, forces in the country.” Mahatma Gandhi, who just a year earlier had thought that Jawaharlal had been too hasty in his advocacy of full independence at the Madras session, embraced the new spirit. He proposed that Indians in every village or town across the land observe “Independence Day” on January 26 by taking a pledge to end exploitation, restore liberty, break the chains of their slavery, and resolve to defend themselves without the help of the Raj. “We hold it to be a crime against man and God to submit any longer to [British] rule,” declared the pledge. “It is the inalienable right of the Indian people, as of any other people, to have freedom and to enjoy the fruits of their toil.” For the next seventeen years, this pledge would be repeated throughout India. January 26 ceased to be “Independence Day” when freedom eventually came at midnight on August 15, 1947; but twenty years after the initial pledge, an independent India would adopt its republican Constitution on January 26, 1950, so that this day of national emotional significance could continue to be celebrated as “Republic Day.”
Jawaharlal Nehru’s Congress was, to use a contemporary idiom, pushing the envelope as far as it would go, but still the British did not crack down. While Mahatma Gandhi began to prepare for a campaign of civil disobedience to give effect to the independence pledge, Jawaharlal turned his attention to two vital domestic political issues. First, he took on the Communists, denouncing their attempts to infiltrate the Congress as the work of British agents, and condemning their capture of the League against Imperialism and for National Independence, from whose Executive Committee he offered to resign. (He was expelled from it as a “left reformist” in 1931.) Then he addressed the concerns of Muslim Congressmen who feared that Gandhian civil disobedience would simply lead to communal rioting as had been seen in the mid-1920s. Where the Mahatma seemed to believe that the risk could be ignored, Nehru made specific commitments to offer various protections to the minorities. He wanted the Muslim population behind the Congress’s campaign.
Then Mahatma Gandhi embarked on the first act of willful lawbreaking that would capture the imagination of the country and the world. To defy a British tax on salt, he led thousands of followers on a 241-mile march from his Sabarmati ashram to the Gujarat seacoast at Dandi, surrounded by the cameras and notebooks of enthralled reporters, and broke the law by letting a raised fistful of seawater evaporate in his hand, leaving an illegal residue of untaxed salt in his palm. Jawaharlal later wrote of the indelible sight of the Mahatma “marching, staff in hand, to Dandi… . He was the pilgrim on his quest for truth, quiet, peaceful, determined and fearless.” Salt was a commodity every p
oor Indian needed to consume; by drawing attention to the British salt monopoly, the Mahatma demonstrated the iniquity of imperialism far more effectively than a thousand other protests might have done. “Today the pilgrim marches onwards on his long trek,” Jawaharlal wrote at his most poetic. “The fire of a great resolve is in him. … And love of truth that scorches and love of freedom that inspires. And none that pass him can escape the spell, and men of common clay feel the spark of life.”
As the march progressed, with the government unable to arrest Gandhi until he had actually broken the law, Jawaharlal and other party leaders galvanized popular support for the cause in a nation already transfixed by the media’s reporting of the frail Mahatma’s political pilgrimage. In a gesture rich with symbolism, Gandhi chose April 6, the anniversary of the Amritsar Massacre, to break the law. The moment the Mahatma held his handful of salt up to the cameras, Jawaharlal led the nation in echoing his act of defiance by collecting salt from the sea and from salt-bearing rocks, in selling contraband salt and in courting arrest for doing so. “Will you be mere lookers-on in this glorious struggle?” he demanded of Indian youth. “What shall it profit you to get your empty degrees and your mess of pottage if the millions starve and your motherland continues in bondage? Who lives if India dies? Who dies if India lives?” His wife, Kamala, despite her frailty, and his sister Krishna (“Betty”) joined him in Allahabad’s first batch of satyagrahis. On April 14 he was finally taken into custody. “Great Day!” he wrote in his diary as he was thrown into solitary confinement for six months.
But conditions were more severe than in his previous stint in jail — he was, for instance, only allowed to write and receive one letter a week, and was denied daily news-papers — and he did not help matters by refusing special privileges offered to him, such as sweets from his home and the use of a manual fan (punkah) operated by a pair of prison servants. Exercise was, however, possible, as was weaving, spinning, and, of course, reading. He devoured Bukharin, Bertrand Russell, and Spengler, read Maurois and Rolland in French, and even threw in Lloyd George’s speeches and Shakespeare’s sonnets. He was allowed to take notes, though he rarely needed to consult them; once he had finished a book it found a place in his mental reference library.
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