Nehru

by Shashi Tharoor

  Nehru’s prison diary reveals how he closely followed political events in the outside world — the Peshawar disturbances in April, which showed that an overwhelmingly Muslim population had heeded the call to rise against the British (and featured a remarkable incident in which Hindu soldiers laid down their weapons rather than use them against their Muslim compatriots), episodes of police firing in Calcutta, Madras, and Karachi (three corners of the subcontinent), and the arrest of Mahatma Gandhi on May 5, which confirmed that the British and the Indians were now embarked on a “full-blooded war to the bitter end.” Then, on June 30, a new prisoner was brought into his jail: Motilal Nehru. Though the father was clearly ailing and would soon be released on grounds of ill health, by July the two were caught up in political negotiations with the British, the Liberal Sapru acting as a willfully self-deluding mediator. At Sapru’s urging the Nehrus were transported in a special train to meet the Mahatma at his prison, Yeravda Central Jail, in August to discuss (despite Jawaharlal’s obvious obduracy) the terms of a possible settlement with the British government. In these negotiations it was Jawaharlal’s uncompromising view that prevailed. The British secretary of state for India wrote of his unhappiness at “Gandhi’s deference to Jawaharlal and Jawaharlal’s pride … which depressed me, because it did not show the spirit of a beaten man.”

  Indeed Jawaharlal was anything but beaten. His six-month sentence ended on October 11; within eight days he was back in jail. Resuming his interrupted presidency of the Congress, he had defiantly called for renewed civil disobedience:

  It is clear that India, big as it is, is not big enough to contain both the Indian people and the British Government. One of the two has to go and there can be little doubt as to which. … [W]e are in deadly earnest, we have burnt our boats … and there is no going back for us.

  In his case there was a “going back” — to prison, this time for sedition and for a much longer term of two years’ rigorous imprisonment, with an additional five months if he did not pay his five-hundred-rupee fine, which of course he had no intention of doing.

  During his brief period of liberty (memorialized, typically, in a pamphlet he authored called The Eight-Day Interlude) Jawaharlal had visited his ailing father at the hill station of Mussoorie. Motilal, who had taken over his jailed son’s presidency as Jawaharlal’s nominated replacement when Mahatma Gandhi was arrested, called for Indians to celebrate his son’s forty-first birthday as “Jawahar Day.” The occasion was marked by anti-British demonstrations around the country (and in Colombo) involving more than twenty million demonstrators; twenty people lost their lives to police bullets and another fifteen hundred were wounded. Recording the events in his prison diary, Jawaharlal allowed his exhilaration to outweigh his sadness. It seemed as if battle had truly been joined.

  “If Jawahar lives for ten years,” Motilal wrote to a nephew in 1928, “he will change the face of India.” But he added: “Such men do not usually live long; they are consumed by the fire within them.” The father’s fears proved unfounded; Jawaharlal had another thirty-six years to live. Instead it was Motilal whom destiny had chosen for a rapid demise. The years of political agitation and imprisonment had taken a devastating toll on the formerly sybaritic lawyer; his chronic asthma was now a daily trial, there was fibrosis in his lungs and a tumor in his chest. When, in January 1931, he came to see his son in prison on the one family visit permitted Jawaharlal every fortnight, Motilal could barely speak; even his mind seemed to wander. It was clear to the son that only his father’s indomitable will was keeping him going.

  On January 26 Jawaharlal was released by the British to go to his father’s deathbed. Early on February 6, after a restless and tormented night, the end came. In the son’s words: “his face grew calm and the sense of struggle vanished from it.” Motilal’s last words on earth were to Mahatma Gandhi, in praise of the Garhwalis, the Hindu troops who had refused to fire on the Muslim Khudai Khidmatgar protestors in Peshawar the previous year. It was entirely appropriate that his last living thought should have been for Hindu-Muslim unity in India. The old Khilafat campaigner Muhammad Ali had once declared that the only Hindus trusted by all Muslims were Gandhi and the two Nehrus. Now there was only one Nehru left; Jawaharlal would have to shoulder Motilal’s share of the anticommunal burden.

  Motilal’s influence on his son, and by extension on the fortunes of India, cannot be underestimated. (Motilal’s love of India, Mahatma Gandhi once said, was derived from his love of Jawaharlal, and not the other way around.) It was Motilal’s liberal and rationalist temperament that gave Jawaharlal his scientific inclinations and his agnosticism; the Motilal who defied Hindu orthodoxy by traveling abroad was the progenitor of the Jawaharlal who had little time for the priesthood or the self-appointed guardians of any faith. Motilal’s abhorrence of bigotry, his contempt for the Hindu communalists who mirrored the Muslim League with their sectarian Hindu Mahasabha, found echoes in his son. Jawaharlal was ideologically the more radical — Motilal would never have called himself a socialist — but he imbibed from his father’s sturdy moderation a capacity for compromise that enabled him repeatedly to find common ground with his party’s old guard. Above all it was Motilal’s unshakable faith in his son’s greatness that gave Jawaharlal the aura of self-confidence that marks so many of the major figures of history. His father saw a man of destiny in Jawaharlal well before anyone else could spot any but the most modest qualities in his son. Motilal’s formidable will, and his hands-on mentoring, had helped bring Jawaharlal to this point. Now he was on his own.

  In turn Jawaharlal sought to instill in his only child something comparable to what Motilal had done for his only son. He had written sporadically to the young Indira since she was five, but during his imprisonment in 1930 he consciously sought to make up for his absence as a father by educating her through his letters. Jawaharlal’s wide and eclectic reading, his notes, and his own remarkable mind had to compensate for the lack of a shelf of reference books, as he embarked on a series of letters intended to outline for Indira his vision of the history of humankind. Raleigh and Condorcet had written comparable works during their incarcerations, but there was no Indian precedent for this extraordinary endeavor. Starting with the roots of ancient Indian civilization in Mohenjodaro, taking in ancient Greece and Rome, and traveling through China and the Arab world before coming to the triumph of European imperialism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the letters are a remarkable testament to Jawaharlal Nehru’s intellect and his sense of humanity. Written over three years in jail without research assistance of any kind and published in one volume under the title Glimpses of World History, the letters transcended their stated purpose to stand for something rarely seen in the political world — the revelation of the insights into human history that inspired the worldview of an uncommon statesman.

  The letters were too much for the poorly educated Indira; she read them sporadically if at all, and it soon became clear that they were meant for a larger audience than the daughter to whom they were addressed. On New Year’s Day 1931 her mother was arrested for leading a women’s demonstration; typically the news of Kamala’s arrest (and especially of her defiant statement as she was carted off to jail, saying, “I am happy beyond measure and proud to follow in the footsteps of my husband”) delighted Jawaharlal, who completely overlooked the fact that it would leave a thirteen-year-old at home without either parent at a time when the larger family was consumed with the condition of her dying grandfather. Motilal’s letters to his son were full of practical advice, paternal love and pride, friendly reassurance (and some political observations); Jawaharlal’s cerebral ones to his daughter were completely removed from the quotidian concerns of her lonely life. If Motilal left his stamp on Jawaharlal by being a fully engaged and even overdirective father, Jawaharlal’s influence on Indira would be marked by his disengagement from her needs.

  While Motilal lay dying, however, the British sought compromise. They had convened a Round Table
Conference while the Congress leaders were in jail and realized it was an exercise in futility; for a second round to succeed in bringing peace to the country, they had to treat with Gandhi and his followers. The Labour government of Ramsay MacDonald released the prisoners (as it happened, on January 26) and suggested the terms of a compromise leading to fundamental constitutional reforms. Jawaharlal was deeply suspicious about the offer (“the British Government are past masters in the art of political chicanery and fraud, and we are babes at their game”) and urged its rejection. He did not accept the notion that Labourites were more sympathetic to India: “Almost every Englishman, however advanced he may be politically, is a bit of an imperialist in matters relating to India.” But, shell-shocked by his father’s painful descent into death, he proved unable to rally the other party leaders or to persuade the Mahatma to see it his way. Negotiations with the viceroy were entrusted to Gandhi (who, on being told that Lord Irwin always prayed to God before making any major decision, once remarked, “what a pity God gives him such bad advice”). In London, the bombastic imperialist Winston Churchill growled his dismay at the “nauseating” sight of “a seditious Middle Temple lawyer … striding half-naked up the steps of the Viceregal palace … to parley on equal terms with the representative of the King-Emperor.” (Churchill rather undermined his impact by describing the Mahatma in the same statement as a “fakir of a type well known in the East.” On Indian subjects his racism usually got the better of his judgment: a fakir is a religious Muslim mendicant and the Gandhian “type” was hardly well known except for the Mahatma himself.)

  But this time the reactionaries in London would not be allowed by the British government to scuttle compromise in New Delhi. In talks that riveted the national and world press, Gandhi met with the viceroy between February 17 and March 4 and, after eight sessions adding up to over twenty-four hours of intense give-and-take, signed an agreement that would become known to history as the Gandhi-Irwin Pact. Under the pact, to Jawaharlal’s dismay, the Mahatma agreed to take part in a second Round Table Conference in London in exchange for the release of political prisoners and for permission to picket and protest nonviolently. Jawaharlal thought these terms were humiliating and — still mourning the loss of his father — hurtfully told Gandhi that had Motilal been alive he would have negotiated a better deal. But the die was cast. The Mahatma threatened to retire from politics if his agreement was repudiated by the Congress.

  As so often happened, Jawaharlal gave in and actually proposed the resolution at the Karachi Congress in March 1931 ratifying Gandhi’s terms. He made no secret of his objections but, unlike in 1929, did not even offer to resign, urging all Congressmen to put aside their differences and follow the directions of the party’s Working Committee. The British had feared he might split the party and lead a radical group into continued civil disobedience, but (as when they thought he was a Communist) they had failed to understand Motilal Nehru’s son. “We cannot afford to get excited in politics,” Jawaharlal advised a young party worker in 1931. “We must preserve our balance and not rush into any action without proper consideration… . [We must not] lose the benefit of collective action and of [a united] organization.”

  Once again, Jawaharlal chose to bide his time. He had lost a father, but in the Mahatma he had a father figure whom he could not betray. If Gandhi thought his pact and a Round Table Conference were tactically the right means to the ultimate end of Indian freedom, Jawaharlal was prepared to swallow his objections, however profound his disagreement. In any case, the nation was with the Mahatma, and Gandhi did not disagree with him over the eventual goal. When the viceroy and the Mahatma toasted their pact over a cup of tea, Gandhi mischievously produced some contraband salt from under his shawl. “I will put some of this salt into my tea,” he announced, “to remind us of the famous Boston Tea-Party.” The viceroy was gracious enough to laugh, but neither man needed reminding that, in less than a decade after that event, the American colonists were free of their British rulers.

  5

  “In Office but Not in Power”:

  1931–1937

  In concluding the Gandhi-Irwin Pact the viceroy disregarded one of the Mahatma’s pleas, that the lives of the young revolutionary Bhagat Singh and his companions, who had been arrested for throwing bombs into the Legislative Assembly, be spared. Less than three weeks after the agreement, on March 23, the patriots were hanged; angry demonstrators blamed Gandhi’s pact with the British for their deaths. Jawaharlal himself declared that “the corpse of Bhagat Singh shall stand between us and England.” But Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, who had succeeded him as Congress president, aided the Mahatma in steering the party’s Karachi session toward moderation. Nehru’s major contribution at Karachi was the formulation of a “minimum program” for the Congress, which guaranteed Indians freedom of expression and assembly, equality before the law, universal adult franchise, and a secular state, as well as a number of less easily realizable social and economic rights. The resolution embodying these freedoms passed after some resistance from the right wing, and went on to constitute the nucleus of the Constitution that free India would give itself nearly two decades later.

  After a break holidaying in Ceylon with Kamala and Indira for seven weeks, an all-too-rare gesture of attention to his neglected family, Jawaharlal returned to political action. Seeing the unrest amongst the U.P. peasantry, long oppressed by their British-imposed land-lords, or taluqdars, he decided to launch a campaign against the payment of rent. He was careful not to do this as a form of class warfare, instead couching his appeals in anti-British terms, since the government clearly had the capacity to provide relief to the tenant farmers but chose not to do so. Ordered by the government to discontinue his public speaking in favor of the “no-rent” campaign, Jawaharlal refused. He was arrested on December 26, 1931 and, early in the New Year, sentenced to the usual two years’ rigorous imprisonment and a five-hundred-rupee fine. (Once again he refused to pay the fine, and the authorities seized a car registered in Indira’s name, which they subsequently auctioned off for three times the amount of the fine.)

  The struggle was already requiring him to draw upon inner resources he had not known he possessed. His sister Vijayalakshmi Pandit would never forget Jawaharlal’s imprisonment this time:

  We were permitted to go and say good-bye. He was his usual self, full of assurances … and humorous messages to the younger members of the family. As we walked away, I turned back for a last look. He stood against the sun which was setting in a great orange ball behind his head. He held the bars on either side and the face, so recently full of mirth, was serene and withdrawn, and there was infinite compassion in the eyes, which no longer saw us. He was already deep in his own contemplation.

  Mahatma Gandhi was at sea, literally and metaphorically, at the time of Jawaharlal’s arrest. He was returning from the second Round Table Conference, which had proved as infructuous as the first, when the news reached him on board his ship from London. The Conservatives had returned to power in Britain and London was no longer enthused by Irwin’s conciliatory approach. Irwin’s successor, the disagreeable Tory grandee Lord Willingdon, did not consider it part of a viceroy’s brief to mollify law-breaking Indians; indeed he saw himself as “a sort of Mussolini in India.” Under Willingdon the British adopted a general policy of political repression, banning the Congress, seizing its properties, confiscating its assets, destroying its records, and prohibiting political activity. The press was censored and thousands of “subversives” were jailed, among them Jawaharlal, seen as a potential Indian Lenin. He spent most of the next four years in prison, with only two brief spells of freedom.

  During the first of these stints behind bars, beginning just after Christmas 1931, his health suffered; unexplained fevers, tooth ailments, and a bout of pleurisy laid him low, and he was unable to maintain his regular exercise. (Later, he mastered yoga and wrote of “standing on his head” in his prison cell.) Conditions were abominable, with bedbugs, mosquitoe
s, flies, wasps, and even bats his constant companions. The fortnightly visits from his relatives were so closely monitored, and his visitors so badly treated, that he placed a self-imposed ban on them rather than see his family insulted — but not seeing his family only heightened his anxiety about their welfare. (The Mahatma finally persuaded him to end this self-denial after eight months.) In April 1932 his mother was badly beaten about the head and severely injured when a demonstration she was participating in was lathi-charged by the police. “The mother of a brave son is also some-what like him,” she wrote, but Jawaharlal’s despondency was great — a chronically ill wife, a neglected daughter, and now a widowed mother who had nearly died at the hands of the police, in addition to his two sisters also being jailed, all weighed on him. There is a photograph of him in prison at this time, nearly bald, attired in a white dhoti (full-length waistcloth) and kurta (loose-fitting shirt) with a black khadi (homespun) waistcoat buttoned above the navel. He is posing for the camera with his hands behind his back, but there is no hiding the grim pallor of his countenance, the downturned cast of his mouth, the hollowness of the determined expression he has put on. This is a man living in the depths. A year before, he had been dancing around the flagpole in Lahore.

  His only consolation in prison lay in his continued writing of the letters to Indira on world history — letters that he was not, for a while, allowed to send her. They reveal Jawaharlal’s vision of human progress, advancing through periods of inhumanity and suffering but teleologically moving onward toward better lives for the world’s ordinary people. The Marxian idea that control of the means of production is the key to political dominance, and that history is essentially a tale of class conflict, strongly informs his analysis. But his British liberal education also shows through, as does his syncretic view of Indian nationalism. Jawaharlal was certainly aware that his letters would find a larger public, and in writing about India as well as the world he was careful to articulate views consistent with his political objectives. There is great praise for the Indian epics the Ramayana and the Mahabharata (in particular the Bhagavad Gita), but as works of literature rather than as sacred texts; and he is careful to write about Islam with respect, describing even the depredations of the eleventh-century invader Mahmud of Ghazni as nothing more than the deeds of a warrior of those times rather than as evidence of what Hindu chauvinists were portraying as Muslim barbarism. In these letters there clearly emerge the fundamental convictions of the young statesman: his secularism, his socialism (underscored by the seeming collapse of capitalism with the global depression then at its worst), his detestation of strongmen (linked to the rise of fascism in Europe, which he believed only communism could defeat), and his faith in a “scientific” approach to human history.